I’ve mentioned my favorite art history professor to @systlin a few times, but there’s one story of him that stays with me. So for you, Plant Aunt, I’ve crafted a tale of one immortal spitefully making sure another immortal finally gets his:
The running joke among David’s students is that our beloved professor is clearly an immortal. How else could we explain his small office crammed with illuminated manuscripts, Scythian and Mongolian bows, 3rd cent. Roman gladii, near-Eastern rugs and ancient swords? The way he sighed wistfully in class and told us how beautiful the Parthenon was when it was new and, “not just a damn tourist attraction”? It wasn’t uncommon for us to see him hefting a sword over his shoulder, leather trench coat flapping in the wind, flipping off the head of security who really should have stopped trying by now.
It was also a running joke that our favorite immortal just did not get technology. I worked at our Help Desk for all four years of college, and David would always request one of his students to come and fix his computer.
“This computer isn’t fast enough,” he told me once, polishing an enameled chalice. Google maps was still loading on the page, trying to parse the coordinates he entered. It was likely looking ten centuries too late. “It needs more of that RAM. Really. I could be soaring over ancient Rome like a bird!”
After repeat requests, he got a brand-new Macbook Pro, which he promptly abandoned for his antique slide projector.
“I just don’t get the new technology,” he shrugged. “You can’t get the feel of things.”
That was the only sentiment he shared with his nemesis.
The name is probably Hideously Problematic ™ but at this point it is traditional and cannot be changed.
For the link-averse, here is the text:
Naamah’s Ginger Spice Cookies Ginger Sluts
Ingredients:
¾ cup vegetable shortening
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 large egg, beaten lightly
¼ cup unsulfured full-flavored dark molasses
2-5 tablespoons crystallized ginger, chopped at most to the size of mini chocolate chips (“optional” but without it they are not ginger sluts)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon salt
granulated sugar (or turbinado/demerara sugar) for dipping the balls of dough
optional: black or cayenne pepper
optional: for raw-dough safe cookies, or vegan cookies, substitute ¼ cup pumpkin and 1 teaspoon of baking powder*
optional decoration: red and green sugar sprinkles
Preparation:
In a great big bowl, cream the shortening, brown sugar, molasses, and egg together until smooth. If you are adding pumpkin, do it now.
If you are adding the crystallized ginger, add it now.
In a second bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt. Add any pepper or cayenne at this time. If you’re substituting pumpkin for egg, don’t forget your baking powder. When you measure the flour, use a tablespoon to add it to a measuring cup to be sure it has the proper loft, then level with a knife.
Add the flour mixture into the shortening mixture in several batches, stirring well. The finished cookie dough may be soft and may be stiff, depending on whether you used shortening in a stick (recommended, IMO) or shortening from a can (harder to stir). Either way, cover it and chill it for at least one hour.
Roll even tablespoons of the dough into balls and press one side of each ball into the turbinado or granulated sugar. Around Christmas I like to mix red and green sugar crystals with the dipping sugar, but these cookies look great with plain granulated sugar and best of all with coarse, caramel-colored turbinado or demerara sugar.
Arrange the balls well-spaced with the sugar sides up on greased baking sheets. They spread a lot! Bake them on the middle rack of a preheated 375°F oven for 10 or 12 minutes, or until the surface puffs up and then flattens way out. Keep an eye on them the first time you make them. Some oven configurations will produce a done cookie in only 8 minutes!
When ready they will be gingery-colored and cracked, like Mars. They’ll be a little poofy and soft but not gooey in the middle. Let them cool for a minute on the sheet (they will deflate a bit), then transfer to cooling racks with a metal spatula.
Take them out on the early side if you like chewy, soft cookies, on the late side if you want them a little crispier.
If you use strictly level tablespoons of dough, this recipe makes around 40 cookies. They will disappear much faster than you think. Don’t make them too big; as I said, they spread.
The raw dough is VERY good.
* I am not actually vegan, and so I have never actually made them this way; I can’t personally vouch for how well this works, as I’m going by alterations someone else made and then told me about.
Notes:
THESE CAN BE PRETTY HOT COOKIES. Depending on the quality of your crystallized ginger and your other spices, they can be too much for people who don’t like spicy food. I’ve had two people tap out of the “hot” version I like. Err on the lower end of any hot ingredients if you want to make something only gently spicy. These are still wildly tasty without the crystallized ginger.
I adore richly-flavored spice cookies and if you do too, there are a few things I highly recommend adding to this recipe. Coarse turbinado/demerara/raw sugar for dipping adds a more rustic look and a little flavor. I use full-flavored dark molasses, and I never make these with anything other than dark brown sugar. This gives the cookies a great depth of flavor. Crystallized ginger is the perfect accent to these, as it candies up during baking and gives the baked cookies a wonderful texture and bursts of flavor. I suppose you could add too much candied ginger to these, but I have not managed to do this yet. I also like to give my flour mixture just a few twists of fresh-ground pepper or a pinch of cayenne about the size of the pad of my pinky finger. If you’re feeling frisky, try both.
Baked properly, these are the perfect medley of rich flavor and rewarding texture, and very fun to eat!
You can get Sugar in the Raw turbinado sugar at a lot of supermarkets, and Panera usually has little sugar packets of it you can tear into and check out if you’re curious how it tastes. It’s good stuff.
Y’know an awful lot of Terry Pratchett’s books are concerned with how powerful women are when they get angry and how important anger is as a driving force to defend what is right and to tackle injustice.
A lot of his most interesting and most deeply moral characters are angry ones. Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Tiffany Aching. All are to a large extent driven to do good by anger.
And that honestly means a lot to me.
Terry was an angry man. This is not the same as saying he was a bad man. He held a righteous fury, the kind that comes from looking at the world, and knowing just how much better it could be if only we stopped being bastards. He held a genuine belief that people can and do change the world for the better, not by big things, but by the little. He believed in the kindness of others, and that kindness means more than wishing well and prayers. He knew the difference between being good and doing good, and that you technically couldn’t be the first without the latter.
He was angry at the world because he loved it, and he wanted us to feel the same, to not feel helpless, to know that something can be done, to know that anger is not just the tool of abusers and tyrants but the chisel by which The People might chip away at oppression and fear and bring it crumbling down. He gave us the drive needed to believe in hope. because he wanted to make the world better with words and not violence.
Nogling 