entirely safe and fun

17 Apr ‘08, 3.52pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

At Gundlach-Bundschu, Sonoma.

And now I have an inch of polypro in my hand.

I am thirty years old. I have used my time adventurously: whitewater boating, downhill skiing, martial arts, and so on. And through all of these adventures, I have managed to avoid reporting to the emergency room for even a single stitch. This weekend, I managed to slice my hand open on a broken glass while doing the dishes, requiring two stitches. What kind of world do we live in, where a man can spend several years of his life safely engaged in mixed martial arts — no-holds-barred fighting with other full-grown men — but be sent to the hospital while cleaning a water glass? I have jumped off cliffs wearing skis! I have paddled rafts through rapids where people drowned the week before, where rivers break boats over rocks with irresistible force!

And this is where regression to the mean chooses to draw the line — at the sink.

7 Apr ‘08, 9.40am PDT PST: by ccreitz

Medallions of pastured pork in a reduction of rosemary- and sage-infused zinfandel with dried cranberries. These are served on a bed of mushrooms and leeks in a sautée, with a side of lemon-braised carrots and beets, and salad of bitter greens.

FTW note - Virtually none of the ingredients have traveled more than fifty miles to be on this plate; some have traveled less than fifty feet.

“From such churches, owls… make their paradises.”
Photo by michelphoto53, cc-by license

Some unordered thoughts on the topic:

• More and more material keeps popping up on Google Books: Bladé’s Contes Populaires de la Gascognie republishes the chapter from the Quatorze Superstitions on the Mass of Saint Sécaire. A generous sampling of Gareth Medway’s Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism is available online — this is a breezy, skeptical look at the topic, despite the rather sensationalistic title.
• I called the Saint Sécaire contre-messe “peculiar” when compared to other accounts of black masses. Just to be clear, the chief peculiarity is the matter of the host; in other reports, the host at a black mass is a fully consecrated one, stolen from a “legitimate” church. This tradition calls for a purpose-made black host, which, as Bladé might have said, is «quelque chose de bien plus rare». Which is a more complete reversal of the sacrament?
• Boingboing had an article today pointing to a master’s thesis, by a certain Cecile Dubuis, on libraries and the occult, which I’ve begun reading. Synchronicity indeed.
• Everyone’s favorite occultist/creepy uncle, Aleister Crowley, wrote a short story inspired by the Mass (creatively entitled “The Mass of Saint Sécaire”). I’ve acquired a copy and am considering my options for making it available. For the record, Crowley cited Bladé’s Quatorze Superstitions — his scholarship was at least impeccable, even if his prose wasn’t. That said, the plot would be of interest to fans of (say) White Wolf’s Mage roleplaying game: a grasping woman conspires with a corrupt priest to have the mass said for a soldier who campaigns in Africa. Nothing appears to happen at first, but eventually the soldier sickens and dies — coincidentally? — of the then-new-to-science tropical disease trypanosomiasis, which (of course) the doctors can’t do anything about. Good times!