Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 103

FF: Light Monsoons

Weather still topping a hundred, but 101 is better than 106.  And we had almost one tenth of an inch of rain between Sunday and this writing…  Maybe the monsoons will establish after all.

Kel Chills with Chi

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip.  Short story collection.  I really liked several of the stories  very much.  Found myself thinking Knight of the Well could have been a good novel, although it was a perfectly dandy novella.

The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.  (“Mistborn” Book 1.)  Audiobook.

Kamisama Kiss by Julietta Suzuki.  Manga. Volumes 10-15.  Translation is a funny thing…  The Japanese title is Kamisama Hajimemashita, which apparently translates more accurately as “I Became [a] God” – a transformation that is much more likely within polytheistic Shinto tradition.  I can see why the English translators went for something lighter, fluffier, and with a romance element, rather than risking offending potential readers.

The Complete Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Kanata.  Manga.  Tale of a lost kitten told from the kitten’s point of view.  Translators decided to have Chi’s thoughts be in a sort of hypercute babytalk. (Ex. “gweat” rather than “great”).  Nonetheless, this completely won me over.  Chi is a very believable kitten.

In Progress:

The Riddlemaster of Hed by Patricia McKillip.  First book in one of my favorite fantasy series.  Time for a re-read.

Armada by Ernest Cline.  Audiobook.  Just started.

Also:

Research, research, research…

TT: Eating it Cold

JANE:  A couple of years ago, eating ice became a major trend.  I remember reading about it in The Wall Street Journal, which noted that ice-eating aficionados even preferred ice from certain vendors.

A Refreshing Repast

One chain’s ice was so popular that they had to start charging for it, because so many people were coming in and helping themselves to large cups of ice without making a purchase.  Turns out that the fans of their ice were perfectly willing to pay for it by the five or ten pound bag.

ALAN: Now that’s just weird. I’ve never heard of the ice-eating habit. Tell me more.

JANE: Gladly!  At the time, I thought this was pretty funny because, when I was in college, there was an urban legend that chewing ice was an indication of sexual frustration…

ALAN: (Sounding smug). Maybe that’s the reason I’ve never felt any urge to eat ice.

JANE: No comment!

Ice eating reached a peak in 2014, when the “ice eating diet” was the newest dieting fad.  Ice, of course, has no calories.  However, eating ice was supposed to have the added benefit of forcing the body to burn calories, because the ice lowered your body temperature.

ALAN: I’m not convinced by that argument.

JANE: Nor were many other people…  If you’re interested, you can read a variety of studies, including ones where people went to the trouble of estimating how much ice you would need to eat in order to sufficiently influence your body temperature.

Given that you can also damage your teeth by eating ice, it’s hardly worth taking up the habit, even if you might lose a few pounds.

Did you know that ice eating may be an indication of a serious health problem?

ALAN: What could possibly be more serious than sexual frustration?

JANE: I thought you had no familiarity with that…

ALAN: I speak purely in a spirit of scientific curiosity!

JANE: Actually, ice eating has been associated with a condition called iron deficiency anemia.  The reason that people with this condition acquire a craving for chewing ice is unclear but, apparently, there can be a connection.

ALAN: That’s a very odd symptom for something so potentially serious. My mother once told me that in England in the 1950s, nursing mothers could get Guinness on prescription as a dietary supplement to try and combat anemia. I would imagine that made it almost worthwhile to have children…

JANE: Indeed!  I’m not a beer drinker, but I’ve always thought that Guinness has a much richer aroma than many other beers.  Certainly, that makes it a health food.

ALAN: Anyway, getting back to ice – New Zealanders and Australians are very fond of having picnics on the beach during summer. Traditionally picnickers take wickerwork picnic baskets with them on such occasions. However, picnic baskets have no mechanisms for keeping the food and drink cold. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen a traditional wickerwork picnic basket in real life – I only know them from illustrations in books…

Anyway, we have sealed plastic units with a blue liquid inside them which we keep in the freezer. At picnic time, we put them into insulated containers together with the food and drink that we intend to consume during the day. The cheaper containers are generally made of polystyrene; more expensive ones are made from polyurethane plastic.

New Zealanders call these containers “chilly bins” which seems a very sensible and descriptive name to me. However Australians call them “eskis.” (I don’t know the derivation, though perhaps it has something to do with Eskimos.) Do you do this and if so do you have a special name for the things you keep your food and drink in?

JANE: Wicker picnic baskets are still common here, probably because they’re so attractive.

I looked on-line and came to the conclusion that what you call a “chilly bin” is what we’d call a “cooler” – short for “insulated cooler.”  They’ve been around forever and ever.  Originally, coolers were made from metal.  My family had one that was so heavy it took two people to carry when full.  Jim and I still have a (much lighter) metal cooler, as well as several plastic ones.

ALAN: “Cooler” sounds like a very sensible name as well. So that really leaves the oddly named Australian eski out in the cold. So to speak…

JANE: Ouch!  What is it about ice and cold that lends itself to jokes?

ALAN: I think we’re just eavesdropping on the conversations the chattering teeth are having…

Of course you don’t want to pack a huge chilly bin if all you are doing is taking a bottle of wine to a dinner party. I have some flexible cylindrical plastic units with liquid inside. Again, these live in the freezer and, just before we leave the house, I wrap them round the wine bottles to keep the wine cool on the journey.

JANE: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like those here as well.  They do seem like a good idea.

ALAN: I also used to have some sealed plastic “ice cubes” full of light emitting diodes which flashed red, green and blue until their batteries ran out. They didn’t cool anything at all, but they looked hugely effective when you put them in your drinks at parties. However, because they were a completely sealed unit, the batteries could not be replaced, so once the cubes stopped flashing, they had to be thrown away.

JANE: They may not have cooled your drink, but nevertheless I bet they looked very cool!

Another wonderful advance in freezing technology is the wide variety of packs and wraps that make it a lot easier to chill specific body parts.  Unsurprisingly, a long archeological career has not been kind to Jim’s knees.  A few years ago, he found gel-filled wraps that he can freeze and then fasten around his knee.  This is a whole lot more convenient than trying to keep an ice bag balanced.

ALAN: Or a bag of frozen peas. When I broke my ankle a few years ago, the frozen peas proved very effective, though quite awkward to balance.

JANE: And afterwards, you must eat the peas.  You can’t refreeze to use again later.

A few years ago, when I developed a severe case of plantar fasciitis, we discovered that these same wraps are perfect for cooling my feet.  I can rest my feet on them and the frozen gel shapes to the contours of my feet.  Bliss!

ALAN: At the moment it’s the middle of winter here and all this talk about ice is having a bad effect on me. I think I’ll go and huddle in front of a heater with my dog for a while. I’ll talk to you again next week when my fingers have unfrozen themselves.

My Story Challenge

Last week, my writing was centered around a self-imposed story challenge.

Forever Secret

Some years ago, I bought some beads with words printed on them.  I always meant to write something using them.  However, other projects got in the way.  Eventually, the beads ended up forgotten at the bottom of one of my boxes.  Not long ago, while looking for something else entirely, I rediscovered them.  Since I’ve been in experimental writing mode lately, the idea rekindled and caught fire.

First I sorted the beads, then shifted them around into sample sentences.  Immediately, I found a problem.  Although the set had some interesting words, it was remarkably short of articles.  It is almost impossible to write anything vaguely grammatical without “a” and “the.”

Jim suggested we try Michael’s craft store.  There I found another set of word beads, not only on the same scale, but even printed in a similar font.  This set proved to have the articles I lacked, as well as some useful conjunctions and prepositions.

As I re-sorted, I discovered a new, very interesting, problem.  Even with two sets to choose between, there were almost no words that could be used for conflict situations.

“Love” and “peace” appeared repeatedly, but not “hate” or “war.”  “Believe,” “always,” and “forever,” showed up on numerous beads, but not “doubt” or “never.”  “Friend” was very popular, but not any word that could be construed as “Foe.”  “Kiss” and “flirt” were in the assortment, but not “slap” or “shun.”

There was one “not,” but that’s not a lot to build on.

As I’ve written elsewhere, conflict is one of the elements that separates a full story from a descriptive vignette.  Moreover, I was determined that I wouldn’t take the easy way out and write a romance story.  I would write something more demanding.

In addition to the words mentioned above, there were a smattering of nouns, among them princess, sun, star, dancer, girl, boy, secret, song.   The verbs were equally limited: learn, run, sing, and dream, for example.  The verb “to be” was mostly represented by “is” and “am.”  Of course, some words could be used as either noun or verb: love, dream, and flirt immediately came to mind.

Making the challenge even more interesting was that some of the most dynamic words only occurred once: magic, power, pure, wild, true, student, tough.  Since I was resolved to use only those words for which I had beads and only as often as I had beads, this meant I’d need to do some careful placing.

A friend to whom I mentioned my project suggested that I search on-line for more word beads, in that way expanding my available vocabulary.  I agreed that finding more beads would probably be possible.  However, I felt that doing this would transform a story-writing challenge into a bead-finding challenge.  Instead, I sat down with my sorted beads and started shuffling.

I lacked any proper nouns, so decided on a first person narrator.  Homer and Whitman gave me inspiration for using the verb “sing” to mean “tell” or even “celebrate,” and I was off.  Mostly I avoided the temptation to fall into the much easier form of free verse, although I did allow myself two short lines, a total of eight words.  Since I have included free verse within other of my prose pieces, I didn’t think that was cheating.

Punctuation was not included in either of the bead sets.  I considered leaving it out, but decided it was necessary for controlling the flow.  Therefore, I pulled out my Sharpie markers and added commas, periods, and one exclamation point.   I debated whether to capitalize as well, since none of the beads other than “I” contained capital letters, but decided that would change the sense of the beads I’d had to work with.

The end result was a six paragraph, 166 word narrative.  Originally, I’d planned to sew it onto a piece of felt, but the holes in the beads were not evenly drilled.  Instead, I purchased a piece of craft foam and glued down the beads.  As a flourish, I decided to follow in the tradition of medieval scribes and illuminate my manuscript using faux gemstones.

Here, for your amusement, is “forever secret.”  While I’ve preserved the lowercase element, I have not preserved the line breaks, since they were less a part of the composition, more necessitated by “typesetting” considerations.

“forever secret”

I will sing to you of my best friends & me.  she is a divine star princess, always laughing.  he is the crazy cool sky dance.  I am the wishful student of love and dreams.

I am learning to live out of time with my best friends.  together, boy, girl, & I flirt with learning to make special, secret power. it is tough, but I believe.

go!

run to the sun/dance on a secret/love to be wild/sport a beautiful smile.   now give loud sweet singing from the heart, not perfect, but strong & gentle, happy and sad.

when the happy princess lets in starshine, the dancer laughs like crazy & dances a wish, and I sing lovely dreamsongs from out of time.  she, he, & I learn to make dreamtime peaceful & sweetly true.

imagine kissing the great future.  see us being a pretty cool team.  she, he, & I have the best bright dream forever, & now & forever are pure magic.

Hope you enjoyed!

FF: Summer Reading

Weather still topping a hundred!  And I’m still reading.

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Ogapoge Chills with McKillip

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Onion Girl by Charles De Lint. Audiobook.  A gritty, even bitter, tale.  Excellent audiobook reader.

The Forgotten Sisters  (Princess Academy Book 3) by Shannon Hale.  I enjoyed.  However, Miri seems to have an emotional “reset” button in each book.  I’d like her to develop more.

In Progress:

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip.  Short story collection.  Reading before bed.  Gives interesting dreams.

The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.  (“Mistborn” Book 1.)  Audiobook.

Kamisama Kiss by Julietta Suzuki.  Manga.  Neat use of Japanese supernatural elements.

Also:

Still catching up on magazines.

TT: Ice Is Nice!

JANE: So, Alan, I promised you more about ice cubes.  Here you are.

Ice cube making experienced its first revolution when I was a kid.  My first memories of ice cube trays are of cumbersome aluminum things with removable dividers.

Trays Cool

One filled the tray with water, put the divider in, and set it to freeze.  Theoretically, when the water had frozen, you were supposed to pull a lever in the center of the divider and the cubes would pop free.  This rarely happened (often because the water in the tray had expanded while freezing and jammed the lever).  Therefore, one would end up running water over the tray to loosen the ice enough to raise the lever or break the cubes free.

ALAN: That’s right! I remember now. We had those same aluminium trays. Sometimes you had to run so much water over them that the ice you retrieved hardly seemed to be worth the effort.

JANE: Those are the ones!

When the first plastic ice cube trays came in, we adopted them with enthusiasm.  Not only did they stack better than the metal ones had done (that lever often got in the way) but since the plastic was slightly flexible, you could give the tray a twist and the cubes would pop free.  Occasionally, one might need to run a little water over the bottom of the tray to help this along but, even so, it was a vast improvement.

A variation on this sort of tray is what Jim and I use today.

ALAN: That’s what we’ve got as well. Interestingly ours have two different designs. One makes ice in the traditional cubic shape and the other makes triangular ice, a bit like a slice of pie. I much prefer the triangular ice cubes (it sounds silly to call a wedge shape a cube, but that’s how I think of them) because the tray flexes much more easily than the cubical tray does, and so it’s easier to get the ice out. I’m sure that’s because of the differently shaped ice.

Fortunately, both shapes cool the drinks equally well…

JANE: I’ve never seen a tray for the wedge-cube.  I’ll need to look for one.

These days, many Americans don’t use ice cube trays at all.  Instead, they rely on built-in ice cube makers on the front of their refrigerator/freezer units.  These supply both chilled water and ice.  Since the door to the unit doesn’t need to be opened, these devices are considered energy saving.  However, since they are also the part of the unit most likely to break, I’m not sure how cost effective they really are.

Given what you claim is a British aversion to ice, do you guys have automatic ice makers there?

ALAN: I’ve no idea what happens in the UK (remember I haven’t lived there for more than thirty years) but certainly fridges with built in ice makers do exist in New Zealand. They tend to be quite expensive. When we moved to our new house, we bought a new fridge.  We considered getting one with an automatic ice maker, but we couldn’t really justify the extra few hundred dollars so, in the end, we just went for an ordinary fridge-freezer. We have four ice trays in the ice making compartment. Four! Luxury!

JANE: Four is what we typically have in our freezer, too!  Gee, we’re really in sync.

There’s been an amusing new technological development that may threaten the primacy of the built-in ice cube maker – at least for those who like to entertain in style.  This is the silicon ice cube tray.  Have you seen them?

ALAN: I don’t think so. Tell me more.

JANE:  Okay.  These are really very nifty.  (I was going to say “cool,” but feared I’d be accused of punning.)

Instead of being limited to ice cubes in the shape of rectangles, these trays make ice “cubes” in various interesting shapes.  One of the most common is hearts (for Valentine’s Day, romantic dinners, or weddings), but I’ve seen smiley faces, fish, shamrocks, and even shark fins.

ALAN: Ah, those! Yes – we got given one as a present. It makes ice in the shape of Pac-Man sprites. However, we put it away in a drawer and forgot about it because the individual Pac-Man ice shapes were far too small to be useful.

JANE:  I have noticed that many of these “cubes” do seem to be smaller.

Another newly popular trend is for reusable ice cubes.  These are liquid-filled plastic shapes that can be refrozen repeatedly.   Spheres seem to be the most common shape, but I recall seeing a mixed fruit assortment and, I think, stars.

The obvious advantage to these is that they will cool a drink without diluting it.  This makes me wonder – maybe the British aversion is not to ice, but to diluting perfectly good spirits!

ALAN: Well indeed. Why would you want to dilute them? Mind you I’m talking from ignorance here. I seldom drink spirits apart from the very occasional post-prandial brandy. And anybody who chills brandy is a barbarian!

JANE: I do know that single malt whisky is supposed to be slightly diluted, because this releases the “esters,” whatever those are.  Jim puts in a cube or so of ice, but many people simply add a little water.

ALAN: A friend of mine who is a whisky drinker always puts in a few drops of water for that very reason, so I suppose that it must be effective.

We used to have some of those solid shapes, but eventually I threw them away. They were long skinny things which I think were supposed to be used as swizzle sticks, stirring and cooling at one and the same time. But they kept falling through the holes in the freezer trays (our freezer trays are a wire mesh design) and that annoyed me.

JANE: That would annoy me, too!

There’s another trend related to ice I want to tell you about,  but I think I need a tall glass something cold with lots of ice.  How about next time?

Luck of the Dice

Warning… This one is going to wander a lot!  But, in some sense, it’s a direct sequel to last week’s discussion of jinxes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a gamer.  Although I certainly play computer games, my favorite form remains the pen and ink, dice rolling, role-playing games (hereafter RPGs) that I’ve been playing in one form or another since I was a freshman in college.

Random Luck Generators

(My preferred system for those of you who wonder about these things is GURPs, Third Edition, but I’ve played most of the standards.  My preference is for skill-based, not character class-based, systems.)

I’ve played diceless RPGs.  Erick Wujcik, who promoted diceless RPG’s in a role-playing game set in Roger Zelazny’s “Amber” multiverse, was a friend.  I have many fond memories of the times I played diceless games with him.  Heck, I’ve even run a couple, including a memorable one where my husband, Jim, and our friend Walter Jon Williams, played ravens.

But, in the end, I prefer using dice. For one, rolling dice provides an unbiased moderator for action – especially in those critical situations where a character’s life is on the line.  In these circumstances, the dice provide a buffer between the player and the game master.

Let’s face it, it’s never fun to have a treasured character severely injured or even killed, but it’s easier to take when luck simply wasn’t on the player’s side.

But there’s another reason I enjoy using dice in my RPGs.  This may sound crazy, but sometimes Luck seems to manifest through these polyhedral avatars, stepping in to become another character in the game.

For this reason, gamers may be among the most superstitious people in the modern world.  In my gaming group, Tori is known for her above average success rate.  Let me just clarify for all of you who are wondering if  Tori sets her dice or if her dice are in some way worn or deformed; the luck holds even when she’s rolling someone else’s dice.  It holds if she needs to roll high – as for damage – or low, which is what is needed for a success in GURPS.  Therefore, when Tori rolls poorly or – worse – fumbles, the impact vibrates through the story.

Rowan, by contrast, has a much lower than average success rate.  Except for one area…  Ask her to roll for anything to do with attracting romantic attention and her dice will be off the charts.  Her character, Olive, has had more romantic entanglements than the rest of the group combined.  Many of these were not part of my initial story.  People just fall for Olive.  Clearly, Olive is lucky in love, if not elsewhere.

Then there are players who roll right within the normal curve except for one particular skill.  Walter Jon Williams had a character who, if he had to climb, would fall.  Walter kept raising the level of the skill, but it didn’t matter.   Ed would still fall.  Or there’s Dominique’s character, the lady knight, Persephone, who, when combat demands that she roll for a random hit location, will nearly always roll eleven.  Eleven or “The Eleven,” as it has been dubbed by my group, is low on the torso.  Very low, if you get my drift…

Superstition begets more superstition…  Most gamers have far more dice than they would seem to need.  This is not just because dice can be very pretty…  It’s because if a set of dice goes “bad,” it needs to be retired and a new set chosen.  A regular background refrain during a heated battle is something like “Well, that’s it for you.  You’re out!”  Or sometimes, in really desperate situations, “Tori, can I borrow a couple of dice?”

As an aside…  Early in our history of gaming together, Tori gifted me with a pair of her spare dice.  Honored, I added in one of my own hoard, and made the “Tori dice” my dice of choice when gaming.  They do seem to have retained some of their giver’s luck.  Tori has been known to say, in a voice both deep and glum, “Worst gift I ever gave…”

When we were discussing dice and dice luck at our last game – a conversation that evolved out of my WW on jinxes – Cale confessed that when someone in the group’s dice seemed completely out of whack it was “not unknown for them to be subjected to salt purification.”  Salt, you see, has a reputation for neutralizing psychic energy.

(At this point, I should probably mention that my gamers are not the maladjusted troglodyte nerds so beloved of the mass media.  They are lovely, socially adept young adults — or in Jim’s case, older adult – most of whom hold advanced degrees – the majority of which are in the biological sciences, although Rowan is a paralegal who shares my love for Lit, while Cale is a multi-lingual sign language translator.)

During our discussion, my gamers also told me about a new ritual for making dice “behave.”  This is called dice shaming.  “Shaming,” as you may know, has a long tradition as a form of social control.  Remember what poor Hester went through in The Scarlet Letter?  That’s shaming.

Apparently, someone with a sense of humor updated the tradition to apply to dogs who were photographed with a picture of the pillow they’d torn up or the shoe they’d chewed, with said picture posted to the internet.

From there, it wasn’t much of a jump to shaming the dice that had let you down…

So there’s another example of how superstition is alive and well in the twenty-first century!

FF: Hot Weather, Cool Reads

The weather keeps topping a hundred, but I can escape into a good book.

Hot Weather, Long Fur

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Negima! Magister Magi by Ken Akamatsu.  Manga, volumes 24-30.  (I’d read the first 23 of these, then a gap in library holdings caused me to stop.)  Complicated story proves that additional information sometimes complicates matters, rather than simplifying!

In Progress:

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip.  Short story collection.  Reading before bed.  Gives interesting dreams.

Onion Girl by Charles De Lint. Audiobook.  A gritty, even bitter, tale.  Excellent audiobook reader.

The Forgotten Sisters  (Princess Academy Book 3) by Shannon Hale.  Once again, Ms. Hale builds a believable political backdrop for her novel.  More than anything, Miri wants to go home.  But if she doesn’t do what the king demands, she may not have a home to go back to.

Also:

Archeology magazine.  An article on a recently discovered Scythian treasure hoard both delighted and annoyed me – and showed once again how often people don’t see what’s right in front of them because they superimpose their own preconceptions.

TT: Cold as Ice

JANE: Alan, when we were discussing cocktails, when you said “the British don’t do ice,” you reminded me of something that’s always puzzled me.

Would You Like Ice in That?

The British seem to serve a lot of drinks warm that we’d serve either chilled or with ice in them.  What’s this aversion to a nice cold beer?

ALAN: Ah, that old myth… Like all myths, there’s a degree of truth in it, but the whole truth is rather more complex.

Firstly, of course, British room temperature is rather colder than the room temperatures that you are used to, so the beer is not quite as warm as you might expect it to be. But more importantly, the beer that the British drink is very different from the kind of beer that most of the rest of the world drinks.

JANE: If you say so…  What makes British beer so different?

ALAN: It all depends on the strain of yeast that is used to ferment the beer. Essentially there are two major kinds. One sits on the top of the liquid and forms a crust under which the liquid happily ferments. The other sinks to the bottom of the liquid and bubbles away down there until the beer is ready. Top fermenting yeasts tend to produce darker, more full-bodied beers that taste better when served at room temperature. Bottom fermenting yeasts tend to produce lighter beers that taste much better when served chilled. There are exceptions to this general idea, of course, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb.

JANE: Jim tends to like darker beers, precisely because he likes that “full-bodied” element, but I never realized that the type of yeast used was what made for the difference.

So it’s a bit like wine – red wines are best served at room temperature whereas white wines tend to taste better when they’re slightly chilled?

ALAN: That’s a good analogy. And, just like most of the rest of the world, the British are more than happy to agree that at the end of a hot and humid day, there’s nothing quite so refreshing as a nice cold beer. There’s a famous British WWII movie called Ice Cold In Alex. It’s about the fighting in the North African desert. A recurring theme has the protagonists dreaming of returning to base in Alexandria and drinking an ice cold beer or three…

JANE: So what about ice? You said that the British don’t do ice.

ALAN: For most of recorded history, the British have not had access to ice in any great quantity. In the seventeenth century Britain did import a small amount of ice from Scandinavia, and you can still find ice storage houses in some of Britain’s stately homes. It was a hideously expensive luxury and really only available to the upper classes.

I gather that Americans used to harvest ice during the winter (I assume from places like Alaska), and they’d store it in specially designed ice boxes to keep it frozen well into summer. Certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, both America and Canada were exporting ice to Britain, and for a time it was quite fashionable (though still expensive) to have ice in your drinks. Queen Victoria was apparently very enthusiastic about the idea. But that didn’t stop the curmudgeons from grumbling and writing complaining letters to The Times about this new-fangled fashion that was ruining the wine…

JANE: That’s fascinating.  I can certainly see ice as a luxury good.  Maybe you’re being silly when you mention American ice coming from Alaska but, just in case, I’d better clarify.

Prior to the invention of the freezer, Americans did indeed harvest ice, but there was no need to go all the way to Alaska to do so.  A good, clean fresh water pond or lake was usually the source.  The ice was cut out in large chunks (because these take longer to thaw) and stored in buildings appropriately called ice houses.  The buildings were well-insulated and often at least partially underground.  For added insulation, the ice was often covered in sawdust.

ALAN: No, I wasn’t being silly.  I really didn’t know where Americans got their ice. Your ice houses sounds like they have the same design as the ice storage buildings you still sometimes find in the stately homes of old England.

In England, by the mid-twentieth century, fridges had started to become a household item, though they were quite small and the freezer compartment was very tiny. I remember being amazed when I watched imported American TV programmes – the fridges were huge! And they had shelves in the door! How weird…

Originally, there was only room in the freezer compartment of our domestic fridges for one tray of ice (or two if you were lucky) so the supply of ice in a household was always tiny. I remember once being severely told off by my father when I put two ice cubes in my drink. Clearly I was “wasting” ice…

JANE:  Interesting…  I want to come back to the subject of ice cubes, but first…  Has modern technology changed the temperature at which Brits prefer their drinks?

ALAN: Not really.  Ice is now easy to make and also very cheap.   Nevertheless, the British continue to regard it with suspicion. You might get one ice cube in your gin and tonic. You are unlikely to get two.

JANE: Seriously?  Do New Zealanders feel the same away about ice?  How about Australians?  Given the high temperatures in part of Australia, I’d think they’d like their drinks as cold as they can get them.

ALAN: That’s one part of their British heritage that New Zealanders and Australians have not continued with. They both have a very American attitude to ice, and cold drinks are everywhere.

JANE: That matches what I remember from my long-ago visit to New Zealand.

At what temperature do Brits prefer non-alcoholic drinks?  Here in the U.S., chilled water with ice is such a common preference that, unless water conservation is in effect, restaurants serve it even if it isn’t requested.

A very popular drink is iced tea.  Sodas are so often served with ice that one friend of mine who doesn’t like lots of ice in her soda has to specifically request that the ice be left out, and for her to be given a cup of ice on the side instead.

ALAN: In the UK, the water served in a restaurant will generally be at room temperature, perhaps even tepid. Again though, Australians and New Zealanders follow the American habit, thank goodness. There’s something very satisfying about a glass of ice-cold water…

As far as soft drinks go, they are seldom drunk by adults and iced tea is generally thought to be an abomination. Non-alcoholic drinks tend to be fruit juices (though ginger beer and lemon, lime and bitters are also quite popular) and yes, here they are served cold, often with ice. But not in the UK. Remember, the British don’t do ice…

JANE: I shall indeed remember.  It’s enough to make me want to pack an ice cube tray if I ever go to the UK.

And that reminds me.  I need to share the American evolution of the ice cube with you, but I’ll save that for next time!

Jinx!

The other day, Jim and I were performing a delicate procedure.  When he announced we were done, I said, “Done?  You didn’t even tell me when we’d hit the half-way point!”

Heavy Clouds. Maybe Rain?

He said, “It was going so well I didn’t want to say anything.  I think I was afraid I’d jinx us.”

I actually understood…  And then I thought how odd it was that I did.  I mean, would the outcome have changed?   Probably not.  In fact, knowing that we were half done would have made me more, not less, determined to see if we could finish the procedure in one go.

Nonetheless, not talking about something about which one hopes for a good outcome is perhaps the most potent modern superstition there is.

I looked up the word “jinx” before writing this.  Interestingly, my elderly (1947) Shorter Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t even include the word.  My Dictionary of American Slang (1960) did, defining it as “Bad luck; a cause of bad luck; a bad luck omen.”  Online dictionaries weren’t much more helpful.  Even talking about a jinx seems to be a jinx…

Sports is one area where fear of the jinx manifests itself most vividly – and not only among players, but among fans as well.  Don’t believe me?  Next time you’re with a bunch of avid fans of any sort of contest, say “Well, that’s a sure win!”

Almost certainly someone will protest, “Don’t say that!  You’ll jinx them!”

Now, this might make some sense if the speakers were active participants.  Overconfidence certainly can lead to carelessness.  For example, Jim might have subconsciously dreaded that if he told me we were half-way done, I might have ceased to be as attentive as I needed to be.

But that observers should feel their words could influence the outcome…  That defies logic!  Yet even fans of a televised contest will react as if their words, actions, even attire, can affect a win/lose situation .

I’m not much of a sports fan, but I see my own fear of “jinxing” something manifest in regards to weather…   Here in New Mexico, we almost always need rain.  However, if Jim mentions that some nice thunderheads are forming, my likely reaction is “Don’t say anything.  You might scare them off!”

Do I really believe this?  Well, intellectually, of course I don’t.  However, human nature is far from wholly intellectual.  On some level, I guess I must believe that.

But there’s another thing with which I associate the word “jinx.”  Oddly enough, it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the first.

When you were a kid, did you say “Jinx!” when two people said the same thing at the same time?  If so, did you have a reason for doing so?  As I recall, it was mostly for fun, but there was a vague sense that if you said “Jinx!” first, then you were averting some sort of bad luck that, I guess, came from the coincidence.

I wonder if the entire complex of reactions surrounding the concept of the jinx has to do with the fear that drawing attention to something will cause some supernatural force to decide to influence matters so that the desired outcome won’t happen.  That would certainly tie together two otherwise unconnected associations of the word.

Two people saying exactly the same thing at the same moment is an odd occurrence.  This oddity, then, could draw attention of supernatural forces…  Right?

Or not!  Whatever the case, I love these little manifestations that show how superstition still reigns, even in our supposedly modern, intellectually dominated, scientific era.

Now I’m wondering, what other old superstitions still reign supreme.  Black cats crossing your path?  Walking under ladders?  Broken mirrors?

FF: Best Thing About Air Travel

The best thing about air travel is that it gives me a lot of time to read.  That’s why this week’s print list is so long and the audio is not.

They’re Not Using It!

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie.  Audiobook.  Reader has no idea how to do American accents, but otherwise is fine.  Miss Marple looks for trouble – and finds it.  An old favorite.

Nobody’s Princess by Esther Friesner.  Fun read, really picked up after first third.

Kingfisher by Patricia A. McKillip.  The kitchen element grounded an oft-retold legend.  I also like the modern take on knights.

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenstein.  Recommended by my eleven year-old nephew Tim.  I quite enjoyed.

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta.  I loved this book the first time I read it.  If possible, I loved it more the second time.

In Progress:

Negima! Magister Magi by Ken Akamatsu.  Manga.  I’d read the first 23 of these, then a gap in library holdings caused me to stop.  Now I’ve started again.

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip.  Short story collection.  Just started.

Onion Girl by Charles De Lint. Audiobook.  I read this in print when it first came out.  Seeing the audio tempted me into a revisit.  Just started.

Also:

Proofing a manuscript, again…