incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

We watched the end of Samurai Champloo last night. I don't know if I can drag anything coherent out of my restless, short-attention-span, cold-addled brain, but I'll give it a shot.

Spoilers for the entire series, obviously.

( Samurai Champloo, end-of-series spoilers )

Too tired for an actual post, so have icons and links instead. The Samurai Champloo ones are dead simple, but I'm pleased with the Saiyuki Gaiden butterfly ones; they aren't fancy either, but I did a fair bit of cleanup on the images, since the originals weren't scans but pictures of the book being held open. For public use with credit to me; a comment to say you're taking is nice too.

( six new icons )

Link dump:

• ajhalluk reviews Brokeback Mountain from a different perspective than any review I've seen:

  . . . the sheep make their first appearance, and very scary this is, too, for anyone who knows anything about sheep. sollersuk is Welsh, and I grew up on the fringe of the Lake District, so both of us can reasonably be said to have a reasonable familiarity with sheep - in fact, there's probably ewe in our mitochondrial DNA, and both of us concluded that them there sheep were not natural (and, in parathesis, I think a director whose pacing is such as to leave members of the audience discussing whether the sheep are OOC is getting something seriously wrong).

  (I haven't seen it; I don't like downer movies, basically.)

• Slate cooks the NYT's no-white-sauce macaroni and cheese and concludes it's not all that; I'm pleased to hear it, because I thought it sounded weird when I read the article. (My baked mac & cheese uses papersky's non-roux method for cheese sauce, though with different proportions (1/4 cup each of flour and butter; 2 cups each of milk, cheese, pasta (before cooking).)
• Scientist jokes at Uncertain Principles: physicist, engineer, and mathematician variants in comments, and mostly physicist in another post.

Last weekend, I got most of my Christmas shopping done and saw Rent (ridiculously long post on that forthcoming). (We still have to see the new Harry Potter movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and so forth, but I figured that they'd be in theaters a lot longer than Rent.) I finished the rest of my shopping today, then went into work and cleared up a bunch of stuff while checking the Patriots-Bills score online (go, Pats, even if the Bills aren't very good).

Yesterday, we went to our first event of the season, a Physics Department party. That was fun, and started and ended early, so we got home in time to decorate the tree we'd bought earlier in the day. It looks lovely, even if Chad was disappointed by my refusal to follow his family tradition of examining every tree in the lot minutely and agonizing over them (actually, it occurs to me that they treat trees the way I treat, say, shoes, or suits). I was minorly disappointed that all the baked mac & cheese we brought got eaten—I'd been hoping for leftovers—but I am flattered (also, there were a lot of kids there, and it's a very safe food for them. Have to remember that for the future.).

In household news, our roof has been fixed. Actually it was mostly fixed before we even noticed—this is what happens when you come home in the dark, you don't see the new roof until the next morning. We'll have to get the plaster in the entryway repaired too, but that can wait until after the holidays.

I also made peposa in the crockpot last week, a good winter dish; the recipe and notes follow. ( peppery beef stew )

In DVDs, we watched the first two discs of Samurai Champloo. Surprisingly, I'm enjoying this a lot; I had basically no expectations, unlike Cowboy Bebop, and so far the tone is more consistent too. It is silly, with just enough seriousness to keep it from floating away; the snark amuses me, and you know I love Jin. (The first disc was somewhat distracting; I don't know if any of the voice actors are actually the same as Cowboy Bebop, but I kept hearing them as such. This passed fairly quickly.)

Oh, and the preview on disc one for the Saiyuki Reload anime was absolutely hilairious. It was just a sequence of character poses, without (I think) a single word of dialogue; I can't imagine that it would sell a single person on it who didn't already know the story. Well, I'd heard the anime was terrible anyway, and that preview certainly didn't make me doubt that opinion.

We're also watching season one of HBO's The Wire, which is well-done but not entirely my kind of thing. However, so far there have been two great scenes that entirely justify the series' existence, the chess explanation from the drug dealer to the pawns low-level flunkies ("the king, he stay the king"), and the working of a cold murder scene conducted solely in variants of "fuck."

Finally, I don't think I actually want an Avenging Unicorn, but the idea really amuses me.