an assortment of bottled-up thoughts

an assortment of bottled-up thoughts are tumbling through my head after a weekend of mad amounts of cooking (on saturday, i made chutney, pickles, raspberry jam, bread, ricotta, lasagne, garlic mushrooms which i picked myself in our forest and a plum cake). i did it all while watching doctor who on netflix (except the walk in the woods to pick mushrooms, i took a break then). i'm not sure i'm fully onboard with the doctor. there are a few too many zombies and crude robots with funny voices for my taste. it leaves it seeming a bit cheesy in a way that becomes tiresome after awhile. so today, while patching up all of husband's work jeans and shorts, i went over to the spinoff - torchwood. i think it's a bit more up my alley. but how great is netflix? what did we do before we had it?

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i'm pondering ways of displaying my minifigure collection. i think i need a new typecase drawer, as i don't want to use the "official" display cases made by lego. i wanted husband to make me a little shelf that goes all the way around the ceiling, but he's not really that keen on the minifigure collection. something about plastic junk we don't need that i tuned out. there are worse things i could collect. shrunken heads, for example. or human teeth. or toenail clippings. it could be much, much worse.

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this morning, a friend on facebook posted this piece on the power of language and the power of appropriating someone else's terminology (e.g. racism) and i found myself thinking about it all day. i've had racism on the brain of late, as i look around at denmark and find it becoming increasingly racist (just check out this proof). i've also been uncomfortable using that term, as i feel it's reserved for the black vs. white discussion and have hesitated to appropriate it more broadly. in the danish context, it's less about skin color and more about general xenophobia - fear of The Other, many of whom are as white as the danes. i've wondered if racism as a term really applies. but when considered in terms of power, oppression and privilege, it is in many ways racism which is on the rise in denmark. and if we don't use that stark terminology to point it out, we contribute to allowing it to happen (remember what happened last century when no one spoke up against a little moustached fellow named hitler?).

i do realize that this isn't what the ambiguously-gendered jamie of the article is saying - s/he's saying that outside of the black-white context, we shouldn't go bandying around the word "racism." but i think we not only should, we need to (tho' i agree with the examples given that it is a misuse of the word on the part of a bunch of whiners who have been slighted by someone). because racism needs to be stopped and it needs to be said, out loud, that it's not ok. 

oh, and i completely disagree with jamie that anyone's mind will ever be changed by a discussion on facebook.

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a month or so ago, i came across a reference to ray bradbury's zen in the art of writing and ordered it from the library. i've not read any bradbury before (perhaps the odd short story back in school), but it is absolutely uncanny how i keep running across him all of a sudden. zen in the art of writing is a marvelous little book and i've got to own it, not just have it from the lbirary, it won't do to be without it. i am already making lists of nouns as he advises and can't wait to see what kind of stories come out when i sit down to use them.

then, on friday, i came across this spoken word piece by corin raymond and who does he refer to but ray bradbury? it's an hour long, but very much worth it. play it in the background while you're cooking or ironing or sewing or painting, it's about listening to it anyway. after listening, i ordered fahrenheit 451 and dandelion wine from the library. how can i have gone this long without reading them?

and then just now, i sat down with infinite perspectives, a book on the history of mapmaking. and who do you think wrote the foreword? ray bradbury. 

this can't be a coincidence. 

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amazing albanian women who have lived as men for their whole lives.