Disney and the War

Amy over at Old Fashioned Girl, is doing a neat Disney Tag, and she tagged me. Unfortunately, I have three tags already, which are spinning their wheels, waiting for me to get a fire lit under me and do them, and I am already feeling a trifle guilty about them, so I am not actually going to do the Disney Tag, as she set it up. However, it seems rather rotten to let it go by completely unnoticed, so I am going to share a bit of trivia instead.

During WWII, Walt Disney and Company designed military insignia for Allied Troops. They designed over 1200 different insignia, which would end up featuring nearly every one of their cartoon characters. The designs were immensely popular,and were often adapted for 'nose art' on planes and military vehicles. Two of their best known designs were for the Flying Tigers - the American Volunteer Group who fought with the Chinese against Japan: 

picture from usoonpatrol.org

Eagle Squadron - a group of American pilots who flew with the RAF:

picture from usmilitaryforum.com

The designs were quite diverse and humourous. They could be quite clever and sometimes rather whimsical:

Picture from Air Force Historical Research Agency

Picture from NOAA

Picture from Pin Pics

Donald Duck was a particular favourite with the troops:

Picture from USNI News

Picture from The Comic Journal

Picture from @ issue

There is apparently a whole book on the subject, Disney Dons Dogtags, which is, unfortunately, out of print, and rather dear to own. There are a couple websites which tell a bit more about it here and here; and this blog has lots of pictures, so you should look at it too. 

So, this weekend just past, was the weekend World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow. This is an annual event, in which hundreds of pipe bands from all over, get together and compete, including a large percentage of the very best bands in the world. Generally, this is a one day event - Saturday - but this year, it went over two days, which was rather splendid for those of us who get in to that sort of thing.

For a number of years now, the Grade 1 competitions have been streamed live, and for a number of years, I have made a point of catching at least a part of the competitions. The problem with watching a competition in Scotland in real time in California, is the 8 hour time difference, which means pulling one's self out of bed at around 3 a.m. to be there at the start. Since my regular work schedule includes Saturday, it also means that I usually have to leave before the end. This year, however, I decided that I was going to be completely indulgent. I took a day off from work, kicked my room-mate sister out of the house, and spent two days absolutely wallowing in some of the finest piping I have ever heard - and to make it particularly celebratory, I got into the second tin of haggis in my pantry (yes... there are a plurality of haggis tins in my domicile. You never know when you are going to want a Scottish party.) and took it with the customary neeps, of which I have become particularly fond, and the last wee bit of the Glenfiddich which I had been saving for just such an occasion.

It was an excellent competition. The weather on both days was terrible for this sort of thing, ranging from furious downpours, to wild wind, to bright sunshine. The pipes, with the multiple reeds, react to just about ever change in atmosphere, so that tuning can be rather tricky in those sorts of conditions. For all that, the bands held themselves together with admirable steadiness. The sound was consistently fine, the level of performance so good as to make the listener (in person of myself) quite heady with delight. I quite rapidly stopped trying to rate the bands as they played, and just gave myself over to complete enjoyment of the music. There was one medley, however, that stuck out in particular for me, the one that Inverary and District Pipe Band played on Day 2 of competitions. They had impressed me a bit over the whole weekend, because they are a younger pipe band (both in the sense that there are a lot of young pipers in it, and that the band itself hasn't been around all that long.) but they held their own during the entire competition. And they are a particularly musical band. Medleys are fun to listen too, because they are sort of show-case arrangements; varying time signatures, lots of different tunes, and always, a slow air. It is the slow air part of IDPB's arrangement that got me in particular. They absolutely nailed it, and it was stunning. The whole weekend was worth the bother of getting up so unspeakably early. (The Worlds are one of a tiny handful of things that will actually induce me out of my bed before the accustomed hour.)  And if there is a faint, lingering feeling of sleepiness, it is of no consequence whatsoever... But if I had to choose a highlight It was IDPB. (And seeing one of the instructors from a Piping School I attended, judging the competitions.)

And here, for your enjoyment,  is a video of that medley from a competition earlier in the year:

Ender's Game

Ender's Game is one of those books that I always intended to read, but have never quite managed to actually bring myself to do so. I knew that it was supposed to be quite good. One of my author sisters speaks well of it. I knew that it is considered a classic in the Science Fiction genre. I have actually tried a number of times before now, to read it, but have always given up after the first few chapters. However, Ender's Game is being made into a movie - a movie which is being boycotted because it's author is a staunch proponent of traditional marriage, so this seemed like a good time to give the book another chance, and I managed to get all the way through with it this time, though it was a struggle at first, and the first few chapters are every bit as dreary as I remember them being.

To be fair, I am a pretty hard-sell when it comes to Science Fiction. It is not a genre I feel naturally at home with. It seems a bit sterile to me - the Stars stripped of their magic and mystery, Earth too tame, its creatures too ordinary, so that we have to have alien worlds and alien creatures to replace all the natural mythos that the power and glory of our own home planet once inspired. For all of that, I have read some Science Fiction and enjoyed it. I have a rather soft spot for the original Star Trek. So there was more to my trouble with Ender's Game than a mere dislike of the genre. It was the fact that, for those first few chapters, I cannot connect with the characters or the setting. Indeed, I heartily detested everything about story. I hated the vision of Earth, in the midst one of those oppressive times of peace that seem to show up uncommonly often in futuristic fiction, with population control firmly in place, and the Powers That Be able to implant the population with feeds that allow for remote observation of behaviour. I can't help feeling that if this is the price we have to pay for peace on earth, we'd all be better off with war. And... I actually hated all the characters too, including Ender himself, which seems a terrible thing to say, as he is just a six year old child at the story's commencement, and an unfortunate one too, with a scary older brother tormenting him at home, and a group of bullies hounding him at school, until he is forced to defend himself from them. But Ender is introduced so dispassionately. He is too intelligent for his own good. He doesn't act like a child. He barely acts human. There is something just a bit too cold and calculating about wee Ender Wiggins.

There is something just a bit too calculating about the whole Wiggins family, actually. Mr. and Mrs. Wiggins have turned their backs on their religious backgrounds, conforming outwardly with the secular requirements of their society, but they play both sides, by baptising their children, and giving them saint's names. Peter, the oldest child, a bully and psychopath, knows just how far to push his younger sister and brother, and always stops his games before they are driven to tell on him, or the adults catch on to his behaviour. Even Valentine, Ender's sister and protector in those early days, knows just how to manipulate Peter's cruelty and egoism, to keep him in check. And then, there are the enigmatic characters who have been keeping an eye on Ender - Graff and Anderson, who exist, at first, as mere conversation on the peripheral of the narrative, vague and faceless. Between the bleak vision of the future, and the loveless family life of the Wiggins, and the disconcerting presence of those two voices, I nearly gave up on Ender's Game this time around, as I have always done  before - and at just about the same place as usual. But I had made my mind up to read the thing, so I stuck to it, and got through those early dismal bits and into the heart of the story. Gradually, I lost my impatience and dislike. Once I accepted the story on its own terms, it sucked me in completely, and I devoured it. The ending came when I was not expecting it too, a powerful ending, that nearly made me cry. I closed the book, surprised by how much I had liked it after all.

The plot of Ender's Game is quite simple. Some years before the story begins, the Earth was attacked by an army of aliens. After a horrific battle, the aliens were defeated, but the Earth is still recovering from the attack, and is in immanent danger of another invasion. In order to train top-notch fighters, the Battle School is set up, and promising young children are recruited for rigourous training as elite soldiers. Ender is the most promising of these students, and from the start, he is singled out for the closest observation, the harshest and most extreme training. He rises to each challenge, and grows believably into a great tactician and leader. Summed up like that, Ender's Game sounds boringly predictable: poor but talented boy, lifted from obscurity, to become the hero upon whom the survival of the planet depends. And yet, the way the story is told, seriously, thoughtfully, and with a moral back-bone, raises it above banality.

The pacing of the book is very deliberate, and the action is largely restricted to the final chapters. However, the  descriptions of tactics and strategy are fascinating, the war games which are used for training, are exciting. There is a high level of tension running through the whole narrative, which manages to keep the reader on the edge of the seat, even when there is not much of anything actually happening. Character development is masterful. A cold and calculating Ender Wiggins in Battle School, is somehow more human and sympathetic than the same character was at home. If he he grows believably into a superior soldier, he does so with a solidly moral center, which prevents him from ever becoming heartless. He retains a sort of simplicity and a desire to love, even as he does what he has to do as a soldier and a commander of soldiers, with the result that he grows more sympathetic as the story progresses. The enigmatic Graff emerges as a complex character, an old soldier who has spent his life fighting in defense of his home; the one who recruited Ender, who pushed him to the very edge of his strength, so that he could be the hero the world needed when the time came; who was stern and implacable to the boy's face, but who loved him and deplored the bitter necessity that had driven them to such measures. He understands Ender. No doubt, he was very like Ender was when he was young himself. He knows how far to push the boy, and when to stop, and he hates doing what he is doing to him. He is conflicted, but he is, at heart, a good man, who really just wants to be able to go home in peace. Both Ender and Graff grew on me, so that I was fond of both of them by the end of the book, but I think, if I had to choose a favourite, I'd have to go with Graff. I have a soft spot for old soldiers.

The ending took me entirely by surprise. Perhaps it shouldn't have. Once I finished reading, it seemed so obvious and logical, that it simply couldn't have ended any other way. But the flow of the story is so carefully paced, the object of all that battle training so desperately focused, that when everything falls into place, it comes as something of a shock. It is a very good ending, though not exactly a happy one. Would I recommend this book? Yes, definitely. It is extremely well written and well worth the effort. It gives thoughtful treatment to the themes of sacrifice and honour, duty and moral courage. If the tone is somber, there is also hope to it, and it is satisfying. Perhaps I just happened to pick the right time to read it, but it was rather good for me to read it, and I am glad that I did.

Border Tart

Among the things I did over the last couple months which I meant to blog about, but never got around to, was the celebration I had for White Rose Day. I bought white roses for my table, broke my fast on tea and scones, with clotted cream. (The clotted cream was a huge treat. I had only ever eaten it in Scotland, because I could not find it here. But it turned up on the shelves of the local Grocery Outlet, and I pounced on it with glee and jubilation.) For dinner, I cooked up a bit of haggis, neeps, tatties, and a wee bit of steak in case the company I invited (in this case, my brother and several sisters.) did not enjoy the great chieftain o' the puddin' race. Fortunately, most of them like it quite well, and those who were not crazy about it, did not dislike it, and so it was eaten entirely. We finished with the customary toast to the King Over the Water - a neat little ceremony. One simply raises one's glass, says, "To the King!" and passes the glass over a cup of water before taking a sip from it. It was a lovely day.

For dessert, there was a border tart. I got the recipe out of a really beautiful cookbook which I received a couple years back, for Christmas. Scottish Heritage Food and Cooking it is called, a beautiful book, full of pictures. Some of the recipes are a bit hoity-toity (and one calls for avocado which is most emphatically not Scottish.) Still, there are a sufficient number of quite manageable dishes, so I have enjoyed trying my hand at the occasional recipe. It is this book right here:

THE RECIPE:

The Auld Alliance crust is probably the best and easiest pie crust recipe I have ever come across: Cream together 10 tbsp butter and 1/4 cup sugar. Add 2 cups flour and 1 egg. Mix until just combined - do not over-work the dough. Be lazy with it! Chill dough until ready to use. It is light, flaky, and very tasty. I shall never use another pie crust recipe again. 

I did make a few changes to the filling. I could not find currents anywhere. Perhaps I am looking in all the wrong places. Perhaps there just is not a great demand for currants in my neck of the woods. I used raisin instead, and it tasted just dandy. Even the sister who does not like raisin agreed that they are good in this recipe. And, for some reason, I had an excess of almonds when I set out a-baking, so there were almonds as well as walnuts in the tart. 

Here I am, setting the tart out to cool. Yes, I really am wearing an apron that looks like a kilt with a sporran and Prince Charlie Jacket. It was the gift of a cousin who knows me well. The sporran is actually a pocket.

And here we have the finished tart, in all its glory. It tasted as good as it looks, and it is so very easy to make:

As a side note: this is also a very versatile recipe. You may use just about any sort of nut and dried fruit mixture that strikes your fancy, and it still turns out quite nicely. I know. I've been experimenting. It is wonderful when it is still warm from the oven, and it is also very nice the next day, taken cold. It is the ideal dish to take to a dinner or a pot luck, because it looks like farm more work than it is :-)

The Hermit Emerges From Her Cave

We hermetical sorts need to have a place to which we retire for a reprieve from the world - much as Batman has is Cave, and Tony Stark has his workshop, and Steve Rogers his gym with its never ending supply of punching bags. A period of retirement to the Hermitage does wonders for one's outlook. And now that I have emerged I have discovered.... that there seems to be an unconscionable number of many-legged, exoskeletal creatures bugging about the domicile these days. The entomological portion of the invasion are largely inoffensive, and their chief aim in life appears to be the finding of a sheltered spot in which to die. Take the Mosquito Eaters (aka: Crane Flies) who appear, one or two a night, and who spend several hours dancing in the airs that circulate in the corners of the ceiling until they drop down dead from all the excitement. At least, I am guessing it must be something like that, for I keep finding their corpses each time I sweep the floor. (And I am something of an obsessive floor-sweeper.) Then there are the curious little brown beetles, who mostly slip in, each one by its lonesome, to whir about my ears just before I fall asleep and then go off to die in the corner, beside the Mosquito Eaters. However, there was one evening, a couple weeks back, during a nasty hot spell, when I opened  my front door in the vain hope of letting in a refreshing breeze. Apparently a whole family of brown beetles had been laying in wait for just such a move on my part, and by means of a curiously varied serious of locomotions - part crawling, part short-distance, low altitude flight, part leap-frogging over one another - they all proceeded to tumble about my floor. One wee brown beetle does not disturb me greatly, but that miniature swarm was most upsetting. I spent a rather hysterical 30 seconds telling them, "Out! Out!" as though I were shooing away a dog, and encouraging their departure with the vigourous application of a broom.

Still, by and large, the bugs and I are tolerant of each other. It is the arachnid portion of the exoskeletal invasion that is causing me the most distress. I have a deep-seated horror of spiders. Yes, yes, I have heard all the pep talks about spiders being mostly harmless to Man, and indeed, beneficial in controlling the population of other, more undesirable pests. "Spiders," I remember a grade-school science book informing me cheerfully, "are our friends." But they are so dreadful, with their compound eyes, and their eight creepy legs, their mandibles, their webs of death, their disturbing mating practices, not to mention the way they suck the fluids out of their prey. I do appreciate them doing their bit to keep down the population of mosquitoes and house-flies, but I look at the little horrors and I do not see a friend. I see the enemy of my enemy, who is unnatural in his habits, and likely as not to turn and employ his unnaturalness upon me.

Unfortunately, my house seems to attract spiders - and very industrious ones too. I left a pair of shoes out one night, and by morning, one of them had a thick mass of web spun inside, with a predatory brown creature gazing balefully up at me from his hidey-whole in the corner. Weeks will go by, and only a small arachnid, or possibly two, will make brief appearances, and then, some silent message goes out, and I find spiders of all sizes and colours crawling about and putting webs up at an incredible rate. Then I engage in a full-fledged war of extermination. I hunt them down, and kill them - mostly by means of trapping them beneath coffee mugs until they roll on their backs with their legs curled up... I cannot abide the sound or the sensation of squishing the things. Then I destroy their nasty, nasty sticky webs, both inside and outside. I go from being a tidy person to being a raging clean-freak, leaving no corner unswept, no surface undusted. And then... they leave again, the horrible things, and life is good. But for right now, the spiders and I are at war with each other, and thing came to a rather dramatic head last night. I had the front door open, as I often do on summer evening (leap-frogging beetles notwithstanding) and the outside light was on so that the insect life would be drawn to it and not to my living room. (Yes, that sounds silly, but it mostly works) It was a beautiful cool night, and I stood for just a minute upon the sill, to breath deeply of the air, and.... God help us! There was the most enormous spider's web that I had ever clapped eyes upon.

Now, for this story to make sense, you must all keep it firmly in mind that my house is shaped like an 'L'. There is a bit of a patio area that runs along the front, and the roof comes down in an over-hang supported by a series of wooden beams. The door is in the corner of the 'L' and as you look out it, the bedroom wall is on the left with a window in it, and to the right you see one of the wooden beams. The whole front entry-way is no more than about three feet square, and right there running from support beam, to bedroom window, and from over-hang roof, nearly to the ground, was an enormous web - a huge, perfect spiral web, the sort everyone thinks of when they think of spiderwebs, but much, much bigger. And there in the center of it, in the midst of creation, was the spider herself. The outside light was shining behind her, and she stood out, brown and gigantic, every detail of her sharply illuminated. She was, running about the webbing, spinning silk, and fiddling about with all eight of her legs. Everything about the scene, from the web to the spider, was nightmarishly large, and all of it, a scant 3 free from where I stood, bare-footed and pajama-ed.

I stared at the thing, making sounds of horror and distress, until my sister came to see what ailed me. She liked the view no better than I did, and we wasted a few moments in staring and shuddering and discussing what exactly one does in such a situation. We elected to do what seemed to be the only logical thing. I picked up the yellow, plastic watering can that stood there by the door, and tossed it at the web. Well, it flew through straight through, leaving a mess of tattered silk behind, and the spider fell right down, landing in one of the patio flag stones, its eight legs out, all tense and ready to spring... and then some Creature of the Night - I know not if was a bird of prey, flapping down off a tree, or the neighborhood raccoon on the prowl - made a great sound of movement from somewhere off in the darkness to the right, and we two courageous ladies came tumbling back into the house. The sister slammed the door closed, and locked it, and dead-bolted it, so that we would be safe from any direct attack from either Spider or Creature of the Night.

We cowered behind the solid slab of wood that stood between us and the Terrors of the Night, but no sound of movement could we hear, no bird call, nor the shuffle-snuffle of a hunting raccoon. Gradually the fear of the unseen Creature of the Night went away, and we were left with the dilemma of what to do with the enormous arachnid. It was too warm a night for the sealing up of doors and windows, and the thing was definitely alive. Spiders have a nasty habit of rebuilding webs, which in the case meant that there was a very real danger of the beastie coming in through the bedroom window, which was too horrible to contemplate. And even if the domicile itself was not invaded, it would likely re-construct the Web To End All Webs, and neither of us was keen to be confronted with that on the way to work in the morning. So we unbolted the deadbolt, unlocked the door, opened it a wee crack and peered out together.

The beastie was still there, looking as monstrous as ever. We wanted it dead. Neither of us was any good at stomping on spiders. Neither of us wanted to get close enough to place the coffee mug of death over it. For some reason, killing it with a practice sword seemed like the best option. Do not ask why. It was late. We were both rather jittery from the shock of the web, the spider and the Creature of the Night. We were both horrified by the notion of that enormous spider living in our house. I keep my swords, for convenience (and against the highly unlikely event of an attack by a raging sociopath) beside the door, so the decision was not quite so random as it seems. The sister attempted it first, making little rushes at it through the door, only to leap back with a squeak of alarm each time she felt the thing through the capped-off point of the practice foil. I eventually dispatched it myself, while the sister encouraged me loudly to "Stab it with the sword!" (Here's hoping none of the neighbors heard that.) And lest it should still have life within it (by this time, it had taken on the aspect of a veritable Shelob in our minds) we covered it with a cup so that there was no chance whatsoever of it moving in with us, and withdrew to the safety of our undefiled abode.... where neither of us had a very restful night, being both of us afflicted with the feeling that many-legged things were crawling on us, followed by spidery nightmares.

You Think You've Got Problems. What Are You Supposed To Do If You Are a Manically Depressed Robot?

Regular programing will be returning to this stations soon. Stay tuned for further developements.

Late Again

Last year, I posted Hayley Westenra's version of the Corpus Christi Carol, and I was a day late on it. This post is two days past the date of the feast of Corpus Christi - but I have only just discovered this extremely fine version of the carol and have absolutely fallen in love with it. The tune and the arrangement are nothing at all like Hayley's version, but it is quite beautiful: