Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 6

How will you triumph?

This was my microfiction for yesterday (prompt was "by," of all words)

"How will you triumph?" the old man asked the opponents.

"By feats of arms," said the knight.
"By hook or by crook," said the con artist.
"By the grace of God," said the cleric.
"By logic," said the philosopher.
"By luck," said the gambler.
"By sleight of hand," said the stage magician.
"By attrition," said the field marshal.
"By default," said the loan shark.
"By consensus," said the negotiator.
"By acclamation," said the populist.

co...

Uso Kae (鷽替）

Sayuri Sasai is a Japanese artist who draws attractive, informative comics about daily life in Edo Period (1600–1868) Japan and shares them on Instagram.

The other day, she shared about a ceremony that originated in the Edo Period, Uso Kae--Bullfinch exchange. ( Here's a link to the original post , but below are screenshots of the images for those of you who can't access Instagram.)

Uso (Eurasian bullfinch, but in Japan it's the grey-bellied subspecies, with just a touch of rosiness on its throat i...

Frost and ice

It's cold here.

The water in the marsh froze clear--where it's deep, you can see all the growing things, the mud, the bubbles ... the tossed cans... frozen in it. In shallower places, you can see the marsh grass is frozen in it and on it, held down by hoarfrost stitchery.



On the paths in the woods, water in the soil has frozen in the formation known in Japan as 霜柱 (shimo bashira), frost pillars. Sometimes they look like ribbon candy, other times like tiny stalactite formations, and other times, a...

messages everywhere

Today it was the laundry basket's secret code that I felt tempted to decipher:

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It's like writing you see in a dream and then struggle to write down as you wake up.

I went for a walk in the woods on New Year's Day with wakanomori--our destination was a beaver pond. It was late: we had to walk briskly to get there and back before dark. On our way we met an older man coming in the opposite direction. He had a polished, painted walking stick. I admired it, and he said he'd painted it himself--the moo...

Donal Trom y Greg Abbott ... en Leticia Colombia?!

It's been quite a while since I posted twice in one day, but one of my friends in Leticia sent me these, and they were too good not to share.

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seen along the way

Yesterday I was walking to the post office, and I came across one of those plushie reindeer antlers that people put on their cars as a seasonal decoration. It was lying by the side of the road.

"Either the car was a male, shedding late, or a female, shedding very early," I mused. [Reindeer antler facts here ! Learn the truth behind the social media posts!]

Later I passed a small silver glint. A dime.

"Hey! Hey!" the dime called. "You're just going to walk by and leave me here, as if I were a PENN...

The meaning of life for a male anglerfish

sovay linked me to a story from 2012, "Aquatica," by MC Clark, in which a male anglerfish's effort to avoid his own biological drive and the blandishments of a female anglerfish lead to profound conversations. Really gripping story that creates a full, meaningful vision of the anglerfish life cycle--which is one of those life cycles that seems really alien from a mammalian point of view. It's easy to sympathize with the male anglerfish's desire to outrun biological determinism, but it's not mere...

intangible cultural heritage

UNESCO has conferred the status of intangible cultural heritage on casabe, flatbread made from cassava. It was nominated by several countries of the Caribbean including Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras ... but I remember fondly from Leticia, Colombia. ( link .... but I just heard the story on NPR, so later this evening you can go there, too.)

The Ticuna word for casabe is dowü.

Here are some photos of my tutor's mom kindly letting me help with making one. You can make it with grated cassava, wh...

at the supermarket

The cashier was friendly, chatting with people as they came through. The woman ahead of me was buying just icing in a squeezy tube--two tubes of it.

"You decorating cookies? I love decorating cookies!" the cashier said. The customer allowed as to how she had a special recipe for cookies that used cake batter, and yes, she'd be decorating them, and the cashier seemed genuinely thrilled to hear it.

This cashier, she was quite pretty. She wasn't super young--not a high school student or a college-age...

variations in the Anglosphere

The ninja girl has been teaching English in Japanese public schools for ten years now. She's got an American mother (me) and an English father (Wakanomori), and she's lived in both places, though primarily in the United States. It means she's familiar with words and songs and games from both England and the United States... but native English-speaking English teachers in the Japanese schools come from other parts of the Anglosphere as well, and it can make for interesting conversations when they...