Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 125

September 4 (belatedly): hurricane advisories

On September 4 in Pen Pal, there were hurricane advisories on the radio.

We've all heard storm advisories of one sort or another, those computerized voices. It was interesting to read through the text of bunches of them, to see the format and what language was used.

2005: Hurricane Katrina


Here is the warning for Hurricane Katrina at 1 am on August 28, 2005:

ZCZC MIATCPAT2 ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
BULLETIN
HURRICANE KATRINA SPECIAL ADVISORY NUMBER 20
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1 AM CDT...

September 3 in Pen Pal: wading to school

If you live in Mermaid's Hands, sometimes you walk to the mainland across the mudflats, sometimes you take a dinghy, and sometimes you wade. On September 3, Em and her sister waded:

The water was not quite knee high as we waded over. We had our shoes tied together by their laces and slung around our necks so we didn’t have to try to fit them in our backpacks.

In some communities in the Philippines, kids weren't so lucky as to have dinghies for the days when the tide was high--they would swim-wa...

September 2 in Pen Pal: Marginalia

On this day, Kaya took to writing her journal between the lines and in the margins of Trees of Insular Southeast Asia, which is not a pretty guidebook like Trees and Fruits of Southeast Asia but more like Wayside Trees of Malaya, created over decades by a scholar born in 1906:



Here is some marginalia in the copy of Lord Brabourne’s Letters of Jane Austen owned by by Fanny Caroline Lefroy and, later, her sister, Louisa Lefroy Bellas, who, as you can see, made corrections and added information (...

Three soccer heroes prepare to make a descent

EVEN UNTO THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH!

Are we not golden? Are we not heroes? Then pry loose this foolish grill and let us see what awaits us in the depths!

August 30 in Pen Pal: A letter from prison

On August 30, Em's family got a letter from Clear Springs Prison, telling them that Em's brother was in the infirmary.

So, today might be a good day to remember that although the United States is home to only 5 percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the world's prisoners are here.1 Yes, one in every four prisoners in the world is in a US prison. Hence the term "prison industrial complex."

And a sizable percentage of those serving time in state prisons are doing so for nonviolent drug...

The taste of palm oil

Sesame oil, peanut oil, olive oil--they have really distinctive tastes. Sesame oil really tastes like sesame, and peanut oil has a peanut taste, and olive oil doesn't taste like pickled olives, or brined olives, but it tastes the rich and fragrant way it smells.

Palm oil has a really distinctive taste too. When I tasted Flo's Nigerian fried beans, cooked in plenty of palm oil, it was the first time in a long time that I tasted something so completely *new* and *different*.


Nigerian fried beans...

echo warfare

Before dawn the drums were lined up on the curve of the bay, and just before sunrise the drummers began to beat them, so that as the sun appeared, the echo was rippling back from the across the bay and there was not a breath of air that didn't shake with it. The drumming ceased but the echo did not: it waited for the command, and when the word was given, trees on the far shore shattered and houses fell to their knees, and the waters of the bay shrank cringing and then rose up, carrying off th...

August 25 in Pen Pal--and the waters of the moon

Yesterday I neglected to post what happened on August 25 in Pen Pal, so I will tell you today. Kaya's memories took a dark turn:

I won’t write more just now. I don’t like recalling those next hours and days. If I start to, the memories spring to life too real, too vivid.

. . . On a more pleasant note, what is your favorite lunar body of water?

Here is a handy list to choose from. I think I like the Sea of Vapors and the Ocean of Storms. The lakes are also good: there is a Lake of Autumn, and fo...

lava tea and cooking oil

I have two new food treasures: One, from mnfaure (thank you my dear!), is Thé des songes, tea of dreams, which is fragrant and ethereal like dreams, but the look of it--black, with bursts of red and gold--is like the surface of a lava lake, so I think of it as lava tea.



And the other, red as blood, red as hot lava, is this bottle of palm oil!



And with this bottle of palm oil, I'm going to make *even more* of Flo Madubike's recipes. I'm going to start with this one, for fried beans.

August 24 in Pen Pal: a flag

Writing in her journal on August 24, Kaya recalls that what she and her friends hazily remembered from childhood as banners were in fact flags, raised by an abortive separatist movement.

The colors were black, red, and green. The story doesn't say this, but red is for lava, the blood of the world, and black is for the black earth, and green is for everything that springs from it.

Wakanomori got the scanner working again!



This flag is not much like other Southeast Asian flags, which tend to featu...