More shrooms

My neighbor's yard continues to impress with its mycological bounty.

Blueberries: clafoutis or flognarde?

Yesterday I decided to finally do something with all of the blueberries in my refrigerator which would surely go bad at the pace I was eating them: put them into a clafoutis.

I went looking for recipes online and discovered that the dish was traditionally made with cherries thusly making my creation a flognarde. You learn something new everyday.

However classified, it turned out well.

The recipe called for 3 cups of fruit but I had maybe half of that. How did the recipe's author expect me to fit anymore berries in there?

Proggy goodness, old and new. Well, it's all old, really.

Many thanks to MadCity Music for the new tunes.

I've always meant to investigate Caravan beyond the title track of In the Land of Grey and Pink and a remaster with bonus tracks for $5 was an absolute steal. The Kansas set is a live album. I've heard several songs from it and this is the band in fine form - perhaps at their proggy peak. It's full of energy and twists & turns and is just wonderful. (I wonder if there's overdubs.) I already have Mayhem Symphony, a cleaned-up radio broadcast courtesy of the Progressive Rock Remaster Project, from Pittsburgh on Halloween 1976, but Two for the Show was recorded on the Point of Know Return tour and has some classics from that album.

Listening to J-Tull Dot Com has been fun. It brings back a lot of memories from a time in my life that were a bit like wilderness years. I was single and getting on my feet career-wise. In a sense it was around this time that I really began to mature into an adult. While it's not Tull in full on prog mode, there's a lot of nice riffing from Martin Barre, Andy Giddings continues to bring vitality to keyboards in Tull's sound, and they both getting writing credits here. The flute playing is loud and brash. Plus some of the outtakes are just as good as the material that made it onto the album.

The 2026 remixes are really good. There seems to be more space between the instruments with everything a bit more upfront. Plus I think there's more stereo separation, though I haven't done a thorough comparison.

Cups of hope

Yesterday I had my first taste of the coffee I bought in Indianapolis earlier this month. We didn't get a hotel downtown so there was no closest coffeeshop for us. And so I opted for daily jaunts to Command Coffee on Monument Circle where I've been going there for past 2 or 3 years when we were staying at a hotel nearby. Good coffee, not overly crowded.

This is a lighter roast and I taste milk chocolate and a fruity kind of thing. Cherry seems appropriate but there's some other fruity taste here too. Not citrus, though. I don't know what passion fruit tastes like so a definite maybe.

Regardless this is tasty stuff and quite a bit different from the darker roasts I've been having lately which are more roasty and dark chocolatey.

Song of the day, 16 August 2026

With a tree about to meet its end down the block, let today's song be about our leafy friends who majestically tower over us, shading us from the sun, providing a place to climb. And some of them give us their sappy goodness for our pancakes.

Trees, glorious trees!

Goodbye my sylvan neighbor

On Friday evening as I walking down my block I noticed a sandwich board thingy and stopped to read it.

I was touched by the impending loss of this sylvan friend. Judging by its size, I'd guess that it is original to the neighborhood - probably planted in 1946 or '47. Perhaps it has succumbed to disease. Sad.

I felt it really neat that the owners created the sign and publicly acknowledged the tree's fate. Rather than being an isolated action of the property owner, it was cast as a communal loss.

Doctor Who is helping me prep for Manchester

Next up on the audio drama front is Paul Magrs' The Peterloo Massacre. The Peterloo Massacre happened on this day in 1819 in what was called St. Peter's Field in Manchester. A group of around 60,000 people had come together to demand suffrage for all men and they were attacked by a cavalry regiment that had been sent to disperse the crowd. According to Wikipedia, on that day "between nine and seventeen people were killed and 400 to 700 injured".

As for the audio drama, it is a gem. A pall hangs over every scene as you know the horror to come. The acting is superb and, despite knowing the history, the tension is palpable. One of the last - perhaps the last - classic Big Finish tales from the original line when stories were generally 4 parts. A tour de force for the Fifth Doctor. And Paul Magrs too.

I believe that the Peterloo Massacre memorial is not far from our hotel so I am planning a stroll to see it.

Willow is ready for her close-up

I have 'maters!

As my serrano plants goes gangbusters, my tomato plant is slowly, but surely, growing some fruit.

Loude drink ku ku!: A Ku Ku by Browar Błonie

This, sadly, is my final review of the Polish folklore series from the Polish brewery Browar Błonie. While this is my fourth tasting, the series has 7 beers and I don't believe I've ever seen the remaining 3 entries which are a hemp lager, a mead, and a dark lager with raspberry. All sound tasty to me. Perhaps I'll run into them in Chicago on my coming visits.

 

Honey is, to my mind, a staple of the Polish kitchen. While granulated white sugar is certainly common, honey has the connotation of tradition with countless generations of Poles having tended to apiaries through the centuries. Strolling through a Polish grocery store, I find honey advertised on many products. There's cookies and cakes and other sweets, but I also see it in the liquor aisle. Last time I found myself in one, I spotted more than one honey liqueur as well as multiple varieties of honey beer, including this one.

While I've had American beers brewed with honey, brewers here don't advertise it prominently like they do with fruity hops. Polish brewers, on the other hand, give it pride of place as I presume it evokes a sense of pride and tradition. Plus I gather it's a flavor that Poles enjoy greatly.

Me, I have found beers with honey to be hit or miss. All too often the honey flavor has a skunkiness to it, perhaps an oxidized flavor. More like hemp than a flower. With the right flavor in the right amount, a honey beer can be a thing of great joy.

I have never seen a Polish honey beer with an English label slapped on it that used the word "braggot" or "brackett". Still, I would imagine that these beers fall under that category since those are just beers that have honey added to them in time to be fermented, right? If you add honey and its sugars get eaten by the yeast it = braggot = brackett = honey beer. That's my take, anyway.

Google Translate failed epically on the beer's name. It was worse than "All your base are belong to us". Translating the brewery's site yields "And to the Ku" while Wiktionary explains that it's an interjection akin to "peekaboo!".

Pictures of beer taken at my desk make every pale brew a deep gold/amber and no exception here. This stuff is actually of a medium yellow hue. It was hazy though I caught some bubbles inside. The small head was a lovely white color but lasted only a short time.  Nonetheless I managed to get a snap of it. I smelled a wonderful biscuit scent along with some straw and the honey. Here the sticky stuff had a very pronounced floral thing going on that was...I want to say creamy but that's not right. It wasn't bright but more rounded - kind of waxy.

Taking a sip I found that the brew had a medium-light body and a real paucity of fizz. Man, and could I taste the honey - a big, bright floral flavor. I liked this taste quite a bit as it had the floral thing going and not the skunky one. But man oh man, it was overpowering. As in I could barely taste any malt. While not sweet, I think the flavor tricked my brain into initially perceiving the beer as such and heavier/more cloying than it was. This stuff must have been barely hopped too because it seemed there was just a tad of herbal something in there with only the faintest of traces of bitterness.

The earthy sweetness of the honey lingers a long while after swallowing and then fades quite slowly to a very gentle bitterness and the barest hint of dryness.

This stuff did not sit with me well. The lack of grainy flavor and the waxy aroma of the honey put me off.  Perhaps some more hops for balance and definitely more fizziness were needed to bring it closer to a dry mead. The floral element of the flavor was wonderful, though.

Junk food pairing: Pair A Ku Ku with something solidly savory. I recommend a paprika flavored potato chips such as Jays Hot Stuff. Alternatively, try a bag of Snyder's Sour Cream and Caramelized Onion Pretzel Pieces.

An ironic name?: Cuda Wianki by Browar Błonie

So here I am once more with a beer from Polish brewery Browar Błonie's Polish folklore series. This one was purchased in Chicago last month - Andy's Deli on Milwaukee Avenue, if I recall correctly.

A wianki is a Polish floral wreath. From my experience, they're worn on your head though I suppose you could hang one on your wall or wear it on another part of your anatomy. This beer's name, Cuda Wianki, translates to something like Miracles of the Wreaths or Miracles and Wreaths. I am not sure what this is supposed to mean so let me look it up...

I see that there's a restaurant in Poland with this name...Oh! Wiktionary says that it is a colloquial expression meaning "something unusual, unique, and overly fancy". Interesting.

The label indicated it was an unfiltered pale lager and I suppose the unfiltered part is uncommon, if not exactly unique or overly fancy. Perhaps the name is meant to be ironic. Speaking of the label, it is gorgeous, abounding with cerulean flowers. The English translations on the bottle don't give away much in the way of details about the ingredients. There's water, barley malt, hops, and yeast. What kind of malt? What kind of hops? Only The Cień knows.

My pour produced a small, white head that consisted of big bubbles like soda pop. It went away quickly and successfully eluded my camera as you can see. The piwo was a hazy gold hue but I was able to see some bubbles inside. It smelled wonderful with a goodly amount of bread along with moderate honeyed sweetness and a touch of hay from the hops. What I'd expect from a Euro pale lager. Maybe something more floral if Polish hops had been used but that didn't seem to be the case.

The first sip revealed a medium-light body without much fizziness. There was a little bit of bread that wasn't accompanied by much in the way of sweetness. The hops took on a herbal aspect on my tongue. Despite the mellow hops flavor and seeming lack of fizz, there was a firm astringency. On the swallow a mild grainy taste was quickly supplanted by the hops which took on a spicy flavor to complement the herbal taste. Not a bitterness bomb, by any means, but the finish had just enough of it to make for a crisp and fairly dry denouement.

Cuda Wianki was OK. I think it needed a more pronounced malt flavor though I did really enjoy the brisk hoppiness. It was a fine brew to refresh me after work and, at 5% A.B.V., it stimulated my appetite.

Junk food paring: Also purchased at Andy's was a bag of Polish snacks that paired perfectly with Cuda Wianki. They were like Gardetto's rye chips but loaded with artificial kielbasa flavor and shaped like biscotti. Ciesz się posiłkiem!

Song of the day, 14 August 2026

OK, back to Mancunian tunes.

Shrooms

A neighbor's yard is home to a plethora of mushrooms, real and simulacra. Just look at that big Arecibo dish shroom.

My ladyfriend says these are pleated inkcaps.

Coming soon, 12 August 2026

Seen at AMC Fitchburg before a screening of Sheep in the Box.

I enjoyed Sheep in the Box but felt it held back, for lack of a better way of saying it. The premise is that a couple whose son died order a life-like robotic of him to assuage their grief. I expected more conflict/discussion between the husband, Kensuke, and wife, Otone, to go deeper into their relationship as well as the question of what it means to be human.

There's fairly little discussion about how well the android fills the space left by the death of their son, Kakeru, and I struggle to recall exactly how this is treated non-verbally. If memory serves, Otone's sister verbalizes something that gets tossed around a bit: that this new simulacrum is just as good as the real thing if Otone and Kensuke think it is. This stands in sharp contrast to Otone's mother who leaves a note on the refrigerator saying she wants a real grandson.

The more I think about it, the more scenes I recall that deal with the human vs. simulacrum tension. But it feels like they were put together with bailing twine and duct tape, that they don't hold together quite right.

I did really like the gang of other androids along with the odd human being that Kakeru falls in with and, eventually, leaves his "family" for. It vaguely reminded me of the android police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Trees are a motif here. Otone's mother urges her to deracinate a tree that is associated with her dead son. Because she is an architect, Otone builds models and she includes trees with them. In the movie, she is designing a house for a couple that is to be perched upon a small hill in the middle of town. She tries to sell the design to the couple by noting how the house would be surrounded by trees. Furthermore, Otone buys a tree for Kakeru and we see them plant it in a spot chosen by the android. And, in the end, the motley, disheveled group that Kakeru falls in with leave the town and move out into the woods.

This last act shows a couple things. First it displays a desire on the part of androids to seclude themselves away from humans and their society. But I think it also demonstrates that Kakeru has learned from Otone. We know of Otone's fondness for trees already. Now, when Kakeru first encounters the group of misfits, they live in the basement of a disused church. Their leader tasks Kakeru with finding a new place for them to live and, as he eventually see, he chooses the woods, he chooses a place filled with trees. Being pro-tree, I appreciated this greatly.

Alright, onto trailers.

Man, there were a lot of them. Lots of anime and animated features, generally.

Tree!

Gojira!!

Now, this one is a part of UW Cinematheque's fall season and I would be surprised if this one actually screens at AMC. Maybe I'm just jaded because a friend saw the trailer for The Samurai and the Prisoner there and there's no sign that it will never grace their screens.

That's no blini, you Perv

Last weekend I attended the birthday party of a Ukrainian lady and I ended up eating well.

That's a stuffed zucchini up top - vegetarian - while on the right we have a cheese blini/blintz. The hostess told us what they're called in Ukrainian but I forgot. Google says nalisniki which comports with my vague memory of what she said, i.e. - not beginning with "bli-". The other delectable here was cabbage wrapped in Phyllo dough.

Not shown is the hostess' Ukrainian potato salad which has a reputation that precedes it. People far and wide remark upon it when the hostess comes up in conversation and/or the possibility of attending a soiree at her place. It was tasty stuff indeed - potatoes, peas, dill, and other Slavic goodness.

I am looking forward to the cooler temps of autumn so I feel motivated to cook inside more often without fear of heating my apartment up.

Having gone out for dinner and eaten Buffalo wings twice in the past week or so, I decided to make my own last night. At first I was going to grill them but the chance of rain scared me away so I ended up cooking them in the oven. The sauce was store bought - Frank's Red Hot wing juice - and I dusted them with some spice mixture from Penzeys that was 99% pepper.

Not deadly hot by any means but a they had a little zip to them.

Lately I've been drinking some fine java from Llama Bean Coffee Co. down in Naperville, Illinois.

The beans are Peruvian in origin but the writing on the label looks like "Perv" and so I have been getting grief from my ladyfriend.

It's is tasty stuff.

Willow the Nibbler

"Hello, hooman."

"Let me relieve you of that burdensome PINKY FINGER!"

Coming soon, 8 August 2026

Seen at Flix before a screening of Catvideofest 2026. What can I say? I laughed aloud multiple times and drowned in cuteness overload at the sight of all those kittens. 70 minutes well spent.

 

Coming soon, 25 Juli 2026

Seen at Flix before a screening of Her Private Hell which I enjoyed. I liked how the fog has settled upon the neon city with no explanation. It jumps between Elle's life and the dream world(?)/flashbacks(?) of Private K and I loved how they merged towards the end on the crystal world.

Since I enjoyed Under the Silver Lake I figured that David Robert Mitchell's latest, The End of Oak Street, would have a little sumpin sumpin arty to it but, after seeing the trailer, I became convinced that it was just summer blockbuster schlock.

 

Tell me, Christopher Nolan, of the man of many turns

The email arrived in the morning, about 7 hours before I was to see The Odyssey on glorious 70mm IMAX.

Unfortunately I have some bad news. We encountered an issue with our film system lamp before our first show of the day today and had to cancel the show. The nature of the issue requires in depth technical repairs that will effect all further shows for today. 

Dammit!

I was in Indianapolis for Gencon and decided to avail myself of the opportunity to see Christopher Nolan's latest epic on the big-big screen and on genuine film, the way he and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, intended. Back in 2023 I saw Nolan's Oppenheimer on 70mm IMAX there and was looking forward to further Nolanian celluloid revelry. But cruel Fate intervened which meant I was relegated to seeing it projected digitally onto the IMAX screen at the Indiana State Museum which, I should add, has an exhibit going on now about cats and dogs.

Well, I will have to be content with looking forward to Nolan's next summer blockbuster on 70mm at a Gencon coming soon. (When the Signia by Hilton Indianapolis is open and I get a hotel room downtown again. Rant over.) 

Truth be told, I am not a Nolan fanboy. I respect his love of film, the IMAX format, and practical effects quite a bit but his output after The Prestige - what I've seen of it - has been hit or miss. I love that he loves film but I don't necessarily love his films. Going into the theater last month my main concern was peeing as much as possible before taking my seat as The Odyssey is nearly three hours long and I wanted to see every byte of every digital frame. I am incredulous that men in middle age or older make these 3 hour epics and don't include an intermission. L-A-M-E. I get it, it's your movie and you can sit around in an editing bay and hit pause at your leisure to take a leak. However, I do not have that luxury.

Beyond prostate issues, my hope was to simply have a good time watching Homer's poem brought to life on a ginormous screen. On that count, The Odyssey delivered.

It had been several years since I'd read the poem (Robert Fagles' translation) so it was not exactly fresh in my mind as the lights went down but I recalled various plot elements from the written work that Nolan had discarded as I watched.

I want to add that there was one trailer at this screening. Well, not a trailer, really, as it was a few minutes of Dune 3 or whatever it's called. Basically a bunch of futuristic flying Higgins boats land on some planet. Ramps open and space infantry run out looking for shelter on some kind of Herbertian version of Omaha Beach. Laser cannons make mincemeat of many of them before a giant worm emerges from the ground and basically it's real shit show for the poor space infantry.

I am not someone who maintains that Nolan had any obligation to slavishly adhere to the source material but some of the things he excised disappointed me. The Odysseus in the movie wasn't as clever as Homer's hero, e.g. - where was the "nobody" subterfuge? Odysseus is supposed to be hubristic - he didn't tell the cyclops his real name in the movie, did he?

Instead it seems that Nolan crossed Homer with The Deer Hunter. Matt Damon's Odysseus is suffering from PTSD after the Trojan War and 10 years of wandering doesn't help. Speaking of the wandering, Scylla was really neat and Charybdis looked fantastically menacing on the IMAX. Those giant armored warriors - weren't they cannibals in the poem? I suppose the main point was that Odysseus lost a lot of men and was left with but one ship. Still, that scene feels incomplete, a bit random.

The Odysseus of the film is a bit one note - he's got shell shock. His cleverness doesn't get the attention it deserves, although the Trojan Horse scene is really neat. It gave you a taste of his ingenuity and a large dose of the horror of war that has so traumatized him.

The Circe sequence in the film was great fun and the transmogrification of Odysseus' men into pigs was simply fantastic. The way they gorged themselves with the stew and how she massaged them and put her hand in their mouths to mold their faces into porcine visages was at once entrancing and grotesque.

Didn't Odysseus schtup Circe and Calypso in the poem? He is oddly asexual in the film.

I recall being rather appalled at the graphic violence in the poem as Odysseus puts paid to the hopes of the suitors by terminating them with extreme prejuidice. If I recall correctly, Homer describes evisceration and a pecker or two being lopped off.  Odysseus is absolutely vicious. While he is definitely out for blood in the movie, it's mostly stabs and slashes with no viscera falling out.

Robert Pattinson is a fine actor to my mind and he is generally good as the venal, arrogant jagoff of a suitor, Antinous, in the movie. Yet I had to wonder why Nolan had him verbalize what we were able to so plainly see in the scene where Odysseus returns. The weapons that line the great hall are stowed in a room upstairs so that they're inaccessible to the suitors who are locked in when Odysseus appears to take his revenge. But one of those who sought to gain entry into Penelope's knickers and purse enters the store room and busts a hole open in the floor down which he drops weapons for those confronting Odysseus. Every time he drops a spear or some kind of melee weapon, Antinous is shown in close-up urging someone to take up the newly available weapon.

A spear drops down so he says frothing at the mouth, "Get the spear!" Then a sword falls to the floor and we again cut to the suitor in close-up who shouts, "Use the sword!" It made for a weird, superfluous kind of play-by-play.

And there's Athena. Rather than a goddess of war & strategy who favors Odysseus because of his cunning and actively intervenes on his behalf, she's just this robed apparition in the movie that glumly stares at our hero for a spell before disappearing. And she's not clad in armor nor does she have a shield nor a helm nor any weapon of any kind. She appears in robes looking more like a sullen Aphrodite than a bad ass who wields an Olympian croupier stick as she plots of the fates of men. It's like having Thor appear in a suit & tie with no hammer.

OK, so Nolan's movie is missing a lot of the cool bits of the poem. But as far as spectacle goes, it was, um, spectacular.

The Trojan Horse was really neat. Rather than standing upright on all four and being on wheels, it has its two front legs up in the air with no helpful wheels. And so it's a hard slog pulling it into Troy meaning Odysseus and his men are thrown about as the horse is dragged inside the city walls and they relieve themselves in situ. The sack of Troy was exciting and visceral. And horrific too so it's no wonder that Odysseus agonizes once the war is done.

As I said before, the scene with Scylla and Charybdis was thrilling. The long shot of the whirlpool churning away amongst the rocks was gorgeous on the IMAX and made me feel the peril in my bones. The sequence where Odysseus' men are slaughtered by the giants was heartrending. This bit also benefited from the IMAX format by emphasizing the large size difference between Odysseus' men and the badass islanders. The heroes of the Trojan War are puny in contrast to the warriors who are built like Tiger tanks and you just know they're doomed from the start.

Circe was cool but I felt that the scenes with Calypso didn't get across just how long he had been there very well. But I think Nolan gets away with combining the nymph and the Lotus Eaters.

I felt that The Odyssey was an old school Hollywood epic full of beautiful actors with lots of dramatic conflict, thrilling action, and a fairly simple good vs. evil binary. Trading the wily, horny, hubristic hero of the written word for a shell shocked warrior rendered a more simplistic Odysseus. Nolan's hero is imperfect but not flawed.

I've been thinking about theme here. Zeus' Law™ is invoked multiple times during the course of the film, - the concept that people should welcome visitors and treat them well and, in turn, guests should treat their hosts with kindness. Odysseus sees the Trojan Horse episode as a violation of it in that he treated his hosts poorly. Really poorly. The sack of Troy here is a lengthy sequence full of Greeks committing atrocities. It is quite intense as we see that women and children are not spared.

And so he feels tremendous guilt - a bit like the subject of Nolan's previous film, Oppenheimer, dare I say. I'd need to watch The Odyssey again to get this straight but I think our hero sees Zeus' Law™ breaking down everywhere in his homeland and he is exiled at the end of the movie for dishonoring the ultimate law of hospitality in a scene that reminded me of the end of The Lord of Rings, like he's being sent to the Valinor Home for Naughty Kings.

Odysseus sees the Bronze Age coming to a close and a dark age, of sorts, beginning because Zeus' Law™ is being ignored. And he has contributed to this.

Does this, along with a generic "war is bad" thing count for deep thematic content? It's a general exhortation/admonition that we should be nice to one another. I suppose this is the true modernization of the tale.

Before I end, the soundtrack deserves mention. Nolan eschewed the conventional orchestral accompaniment with sweeping washes of strings for music that sounded like it had one foot in the ancient world and the other in 2026. Were replicas of ancient instruments used? Sampled? The music aimed to manipulate the audience just like a typical soundtrack would but it felt older, more period. Good stuff.

Despite some shallow characterization and missing source material I simply had a good time watching The Odyssey. It was wonderful to see so much of the epic brought to life on a very large screen. Watching Antinous get what was coming to him was extremely satisfying while seeing Argos lying on a dung heap tugged at my heart strings.

However flawed Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey may be, it is still full of thrills and a lot of fun. 

Willow about to sneeze

Rhiannon Giddens covers Elizabeth Cotten

Rhiannon Giddens has released another track from her upcoming album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, which comes out next month. It's her take on "Freight Train" by the great Elizabeth Cotten.

Song of the day, 12 August 2026

NPR's All Songs Considered recently did a multi-part Grateful Dead extravaganza so their music has been floating through my brain lately. While there are surely some fine live versions of "Terrapin Station", I don't believe they ever played the entire song live. However improbable, the strings and horns rarely seem cheesy or get in the way for me. 

I just like the way it wends its way through the various sections. It feels purposeful and adds some dynamics to the tune. Let's hear all 16+ minutes.

Stay off the Yahara River in early November

The Dave Matthews Band will be in town for a show on 4 November so put those canoes and kayaks away until they're safely out of town.

Song of the day, 11 August 2026

I just learned that The Mindbenders were from Manchester. Brings back memories of high school dances where Phil Collins' version was played many a time.

Feline friends, 11 August 2026

George in mid-meow.

Toe beans!

Song of the day, 10 August 2026

More Mancunian music.

I didn't know Van der Graaf Generator were formed in Manchester until recently. Here they are at Shank Hall in Milwaukee back in 2009. I was at this show and "Interference Patterns" (heard here) and "Man-Erg" left me gobsmacked.