I haven’t posted a recipe in forever; this one is going up because I originally found it on TikTok, of all places, where it is destined to disappear, and I want to make them again:
Line a pan with aluminum foil; apply a light coat of cooking spray. Melt a stick of butter; to the butter add a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of minced garlic, half a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and a half tablespoon of Italian seasoning. Mix well. Cut a … loaf? batch? Let’s go with batch– cut a batch of King’s Hawaiian dinner rolls in half and put the bottom half in the tray. Use a brush or a spoon and lightly brush the butter over the bottom half.
I used a full pound of honey ham; that was probably a bit too much, insofar as “too much ham” can actually be a thing, and I think you could get away with 3/4 of a pound or so. Fold the slices over and arrange them evenly over the bottom half of the bread. On top of the bread, add a double layer of Swiss cheese; half a pound was about right for us. Put the top layer of the rolls on top of the bread and cheese and evenly distribute the rest of the butter-garlic mixture over the tops of the rolls. Cover the whole shebang with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes; after 15 minutes remove the foil and continue baking for five additional minutes.
Upon removal from the oven, add a liberal coating of Parmesan cheese. Cut and separate.
These were really good; the only thing I’d change is either going with a bit less ham or baking them for a little bit longer, as while everything was plenty warm the cheese in the middle wasn’t completely melted– you can see individual slices in that picture– and I felt like they could be a bit hotter and gooier. The best part was the bread on the bottom which I was expecting to be a bit soggy and toasted up really nicely. We’ll have these again.
I am roughly forty-three and three-quarters years old. For roughly 25 of those years, I have had facial hair, and for the last, oh, 15 months or so it has been long enough to be notable.
Apparently, in all that time, I have not acquired the necessary skills that “let’s trim this mess back by a couple of inches” is something I am actually capable of doing. Believe me, it came as a surprise. I thought that was something I knew how to do! But I do not. I did not intend to do this terrible thing to my face when I began “trimming” my lovely beard earlier today. And it happened anyway. I am very sorry, particularly since the children will not want to discuss anything but my face on Monday.
I am probably going to go ahead and dye it now, because it’s not like I can fuck up any further than I have.
I’ve been sick all week. I spent one damn day at C2E2 and I’ve had a sore throat for a week as a result; I stayed home from work yesterday (and did not get paid for it, as I’m out of sick days) because when I woke up I found myself completely unable to talk. My voice is still not remotely normal today, and I lost it a couple of times at work today, but not quite as bad as yesterday morning. I did not factor being out a day’s pay into the cost of C2E2, and that loss combined with not being able to swallow for a week has pushed the trip well into “not worth it” territory.
As of this afternoon, I have cancelled my one existing convention commitment for the rest of the year; I was going to go to IndyPopCon in July and have reconsidered those plans. I’ve been doing Kokomo-Con every year for three or four years now; I’m not signed up this year and I think I’m going to skip that as well. While I could probably mumble a bit about coronavirus or something like that and, Jesus, I’m absolutely certain I’ll have that the second it hits Indiana, the simple fact is that these cons have gotten very samey over the last few years and, unfortunately, I’ve started to lose interest in pushing books to strangers. I’m not really working on anything at the moment, I haven’t been in a while, and while that will probably change eventually it’s not gonna change soon. I need to hit reset on a lot of things, and stepping away from cons for at least the rest of 2020 seems like a good idea even without a global pandemic fucking things up during an election year. I just don’t need it.
(I have been sick every two weeks, if not more frequently, since August, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if there’s something in my classroom making me sick, or something going on with my immune system that I need to have looked at. I have never, ever been this consistently sick in seventeen years of teaching. Not close.)
(The blog is not going anywhere. The blog is essential to my mental health. I will keep writing here even if literally no one is reading it.)
My Patreon is probably not long for this world either, as I don’t pay enough attention to it to feel good about charging people, and I basically forgot it existed in February and then charged everyone anyway. If I can’t come up with a use for it in March that I’m actually going to stick to I’m going to pack it up at the end of the month. I don’t mind the extra little piece of change that I get from it every month (and it’s a little piece of change; don’t get me wrong) but I’m not going to take it from people if I’m not giving them something useful in return, and right now that’s not happening.
Anyway. I’m okay, don’t worry about it; I just need to do some reassessing and reprioritizing, and the simple fact is it’s been going on for a while now, I’m just admitting it and making it official. I’m gonna lie low for most of the rest of this year. We’ll see what happens in 2021.
Okay, one thing is worth throwing a party over: Mike Bloomberg’s ass is out of the race, which is an unalloyed good thing that we should all be celebrating. But it’s been fascinating to me to watch the exact same people who thought Biden was over and done with after Nevada pivot on a Goddamn dime to declare him the invincible frontrunner after last night. Now, don’t misunderstand: last night was great for Biden, and bad for Sanders. But it’s far from a knockout blow, especially since we don’t know yet what the numbers from California are going to look like and Sanders is going to win California. By how much, and how much of a delegate lead that gets him from the state, we won’t know for a bit. But I suspect Biden’s already-slim lead of less than fifty delegates is going to get cut into a bit, and 45 delegates is not a great cushion, all told.
Warren– and it both pains me and makes me deeply angry to say this– is probably out. She’ll take her time and make the decision on her own, but I don’t think there’s much of a path left for her if she’s not even able to win her own home state. It’s fucked up that America is ignoring this good of a candidate, but I felt the same way about Harris. It’s a primary; I’m used to being disappointed.
The worst news for Bernie, to my mind, is that in all fifteen contests held yesterday he didn’t hit his 2016 level of support in any of them, including his home state of Vermont, and in several of them his support was down by half or more. He lost two states, Oklahoma and Minnesota, that he won in 2016. For someone whose entire rationale for being elected is that he will Motivate The Masses To Take To The Streets … well, not so much, apparently? Bernie lost in 2016 and was getting a lot more votes. I haven’t taken a close look at what states are left, but there was a pretty ironclad rule in 2016 that any state that was less than 85% white was going to go to Clinton. Now, that rule is being broken pretty handily by California right now, and his Hispanic support seems to be up from 2016, so it might not hold as well, but he only won four states yesterday. That’s … not great. But there’s a lot of primary left, and there’s no reason to count anyone out yet. Once California’s delegates come in the count is going to be very close. I don’t see anyone outside of Biden or Bernie having a chance, but those two are effectively tied at the moment.
It is at this point where I remind you that I don’t know shit about politics.
There are lots of people yammering about something called electability, and all of them, including me, are wrong. Electability is not a thing. I took a very close look at the Republican field in both 2012 and 2016 and came to the conclusion that it was rationally impossible for any of them to get the nomination, both times, and somehow both times the Republicans managed to nominate someone anyway.
Either of these people are “electable” if we vote for them. So, as it turns out, is Warren. Bernie and Biden have both been clobbering the Current Occupant by wide margins in head-to-head polls for months, if not for years in Sanders’ case, and I need to remind myself of that every time I look at either of them and my brain tries to tell me that there’s no way that guy gets elected President. I still think Sanders’ path to the White House is the more difficult one, if only because the Democrats have been unwilling to paint him as the baby-eating tax-crazed Communist that the Republicans will, and we all know he doesn’t react to criticism very well, but they’re going to call Biden a socialist too; saying insane bullshit about how insanely leftist our candidates are is kind of their thing regardless of its actual relationship to reality. There aren’t going to be any debates so any talk about who will do better against the shitgibbon in one is pointless. We need to quit worrying about this “electability” nonsense and show up to vote. Everything else will take care of itself.
Initially the idea that publicity companies were sending me free books in return for reviews on this site was really cool. I like books! I have thousands of them, and I read about a hundred of them a year! But the weird thing about that is that despite the fact that I read more than almost everyone (and if you read more than me, awesome, that just means that so do you, not that I’m not accurately describing myself) the stuff that I want to read is actually fairly well-defined. I’m good at picking out stuff I’ll like, which is why my average star rating on Goodreads is so high– it’s not because I have low standards for what makes a good book, it’s that there are so many goddamn books out there that anything likely to be a three-star or less simply never gets picked up.
Unless, of course, it gets mailed to me, and unfortunately with Michael McAuliffe’s No Truth Left to Tell, they’ve now officially sent me the first Free Book If You Review It that I really don’t feel like I have any choice but to pan. This book needed one more hard pass by an editor and probably another entire full draft; it has some massive structural issues and in a lot of ways is telling the wrong story even before you get to things like dialogue and character, and those aren’t great either.
The plot is pretty straightforward even after all that: there are a series of cross burnings over the course of a single night in Lynwood, Louisiana. The first 2/3 of the book follows a multitude of characters– this book employs Game of Thrones-style rotating third person POV characters– as the ringleader of the crimes, but none of the other perpetrators, is caught and sentenced to jail. Then one of the investigators finds out that the Grand Wizard’s confession, while true, was more than a little bit illegal, seeing as how the cop who pulled him over handcuffed him to a chair and let some local gangbangers scare the daylights out of him beforehand. And the last third of the book, including a literal recitation of the title, is one long moral dilemma as everybody fights over whether they should reveal what they know, and they decide to, so the conviction is vacated, and then the guy tries to kill the lead investigator but fails and kills someone else instead and gets run over by the cops after the shooting, and I guess that’s a happy ending, because he’s dead? Sure.
The book wants you to believe the last third, the moral “do I do the Right Thing, and what is the Right Thing” bit is the story– and it is, as the actual investigation and arrest and trial is somehow both 2/3 of the book and perfunctory and rather boring– but it doesn’t get around to starting to talk about it until that 2/3 mark. The pacing is hugely off throughout; the book feels done once the trial is over (except they didn’t catch most of the people responsible) and then there’s this whole other thing at the back. And because the book employs rotating POVs of characters who are, generally, far too similar to one another, it’s not even like you can really feel anyone’s particular journey through the book. Somebody should have caught this and forced a page-one rewrite to focus on the actual story, with one protagonist and not half a dozen, and no one did, and as a result the whole book is a mess.
Other gripes: in general the talk in this book does not resemble human talk, and this is especially true whenever a black person is speaking; Michael McAuliffe appears to have taken his cues on how black people in Louisiana and Washington D.C. talk from repeated views of Airplane! and perhaps a few blues bars scenes from 1980s-era John Hughes movies. Most annoying is his weird affectation for using ‘n at the end of words that end in -ing, but only when black people are speaking, so a black person isn’t “walking”, he’s “walk’n.” Now, I got an ARC, so it’s possible an editor will have caught this and fixed it by final release, but it happened consistently enough that McAuliffe is clearly doing it on purpose, and it’s weird.
I dunno; at some point there are diminishing returns to shitting on a book that is, after all, a debut; I could complain in more detail if I wanted to but there’s no money in it so I’m going to just drop it here. I didn’t hate the book, but it’s a mess and it’s otherwise very very forgettable. I two-starred it on GR because I reserve one-star reviews for books I genuinely loathed; I would never have finished this had it not been sent to me for a review. Avoid, but not, like, angrily.
The one thing I’m fairly certain about tomorrow is that I’m going to go to bed not knowing much, and I suspect a fair amount of what I will know is going to be disappointing. I haven’t seen much polling, and any that I might have seen is probably fairly well invalidated by Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing Biden in the last 24 hours. I was kind of hoping that Biden would announce Kamala Harris as his running mate this weekend; the rumors were flying around (and this would be one thing that would definitely cause me to move toward a full-throated endorsement of him) but nothing has come of it as of yet. I still intend to vote for Warren if it’s still possible when Indiana votes in fucking May, but I suspect by tomorrow the math for her gaining the nomination without convention shenanigans is going to be … ugly. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t think I live in that country. And, honestly, I’d prefer to avoid convention shenanigans one way or another, even if it leads to someone I don’t really want getting the nomination on the first ballot. Hopefully somebody ends up locking up a majority. We’ll have a better idea of who that might be come Wednesday; if any candidate emerges from Super Tuesday with a sizable delegate lead, the Democratic proportional-allocation rules mean that a lead is going to be very difficult to eradicate.
Random, small anecdote, preserved here because sometimes I use my blog as an external memory card: 8th grade boys are not exactly well-known for being accepting when it comes to homosexuality, right? My current building is far ahead of the curve on that particular front for some reason but the f-word is still a go-to insult far more often than I want it to be and regardless of my personal attempts to stamp out its use at least when they’re around me. So I was fascinated last week to watch five or six of my boys during advisory period the other day, all clustered in a corner around one of them and working carefully at … brushing his hair. Like, trading off the brush and everything. I don’t get these kids sometimes; I work really hard at wiping out my own prejudices and internalized homophobia and I gotta admit I’d feel funny just randomly brushing some male friend’s hair. And here there are five or six of them just making a huge production of it, when ordinarily accidentally brushing up against each other is enough to get “You gay!” tossed around.
(No, I don’t think male barbers or hairstylists are gay. But I’m not a barber, and neither are any of these kids. The word “randomly” is kind of important in that sentence.)
We had a good time! Other than having to park a full 27-minute walk away from the venue, that is. That’s a decent length for a walk in the cold, and my watch asked me on the way to and from my car if I was working out or not. No! I’m just trying not to die.
Also, when we got there, there was absolutely no signage that there was a security line or a bag check to go through? Just literally a few thousand people all milling around being confused, because no one knew why they were there but everyone stood in the huge mob because they felt like they ought to?
We had our badges already, and they were already activated, so I literally moved a barrier aside and the three of us went in. Somebody tried to follow us and got sent back, and tried to get security to go get us too, but they didn’t. For some reason I found that hilarious. I didn’t find out until after the show that we’d actually dodged the security line; as I said, no signs at all, just a lot of confused people in a herd. I wouldn’t have jumped out of line if I’d have known that, but … whatever, I guess. I thought it was will call, I swear. 😀
I feel like there were a ton more people at the show than the last time, but more on that in a few minutes. I had goals! Nerd goals! First one: meet Gail Simone and Al Ewing. Well, Al wasn’t at his booth at all on Saturday, which was a bummer. But I met Gail!
So, interesting detail: Gail follows me on Twitter. And the account belongs to Luther, which, remember, isn’t my real name. So the fact that I automatically went into “I’m at a con” mode and told her to sign my graphic novel to Luther took me by surprise. Then I found out she was selling scripts and snapped one of those up too– that issue of Tony Stark: Iron Man contains what might honestly be my favorite single-panel joke in all of comic book history:
Gail’s husband accidentally told me something VERY COOL that might be coming out and I was immediately sworn to silence, but I wasn’t told not to tell you that I know something cool now. Which I do.
Authors! We ended up leaving before Robert Jackson Bennett’s signing, but my wife got Sam Sykes to sign a book, and I got autographs from John Scalzi and S.L. Huang:
By this point, I’d set precedent that books were signed to Luther, so I decided to roll with it. John was nice enough to let me take a picture with him, too:
On the Charizard: the boy put it on the table, and John immediately volunteered to sign it if he wanted, which he declined, not knowing who the hell John was. We only talked for a minute or two but he was very nice– in general, everyone was, unsurprisingly.
Also, I bought stuff:
New leather dice bag! Forgive the vast amounts of cat hair on the piano bench, there; it’s one of Jonesy’s favorite spots and I’m not about to retake the pictures somewhere cleaner.
Leather dice tray! It was either this or a tower, and I went with this instead, because of…
…the super fuckin’ cool obsidian dice I bought, which the salesperson made sure to point out are made of glass, and thus, honestly, are probably not the best choice to make dice out of? The price of the set, plus the box and the tray was frankly ridiculous, but much more reasonable compared to the first set I looked at, which were made of Damascus steel and priced at four hundred dollars. But fuck it: twelfth/third anniversary and we both saved up to buy cool shit at this show and I was ferdamnsure going to buy cool shit.
Oh, and I ran into my friend Verna Vendetta, who I met at Starbase Indy a million years ago:
The only real fail of the show, at least for me, was the sparse number of cosplayer pictures I took. Turns out that 1) it’s way easier to get people to let them photograph you when you’re at a booth, and 2) it really was hugely crowded, so most of the time if I saw somebody I might have tried to get a picture of in other contexts, the ridiculous number of people in between us made stopping to do so practically impossible. So I missed out on, say, the guy in the 12-foot-tall Bumblebee costume, because despite being near him there was no way I was going to get him to stop. So I didn’t get nearly as many pictures as I thought I was going to, but I did get a handful of them:
So, yeah: didn’t get arrested, spent lots of money, met cool people, walked seven miles, Achilles tendons currently really painful. I’ll call that victory! If you’d told me at fifteen that I’d not only eventually attend a nerd convention with a hundred thousand people there but that I’d have my wife and son with me and we’d be doing it on our anniversary, I’d have called you a liar. It’s good to be a geek.
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