I watched the first two episodes of Carnival Row early in the last week. It's urban fantasy, mystery, and horror all wrapped up into one. It's a beautiful style, a new world with a bleep-ton of backstory to it. It's neo-Victoriana, with well-thought faerie culture. It thinks about colonialism. It is right up my alley.

There are some issues. It's way too dark for my TV -- I have to have no lights on and the shades drawn to actually see what's happening on the screen. While there's both male and female nudity, the female nudity seems a lot more salacious than the male nudity. There is a thriving sex industry, but no indication that anyone other than skinny women are whores. (And there is very little respect for these sex workers, but that's also part of the fantasy racism.) The background cast is very multicultural, which is nice. Almost all of the speaking cast is white, white, white.

But, as of the end of episode 2, the good is outweighing the bad, and I am excited to get to episode 3.

( Now we're getting into some more serious spoilage )

I am very disappointed in what really looked to be an interesting, new story.

Yes, dear. While many workplaces may have access to the internet, not all of them will allow you the bandwidth to stream, and not everyone has their own hotspot. Sad, but true.

(All SSC entries are tongue-in-cheek references to times when I feel like an old on the internet. Please read them in a state of gently amused sarcasm.)

...but I'm seriously tempted to commission a calligrapher to write this for me:

"Every cause is interdependent on other causal factors."

Because, somehow, that speaks to something very deep in my soul, and I'm not sure what it is.

Also, studying makes me want to get a tablet. Something easier to access than my laptop, but larger than my phone.

This is from Kristen Painter's book, The Gargoyle Gets His Girl. It's a very fluffy paranormal romance, and the third in a series. I thought the first one way okay, enjoyed the second immensely, but was nudgy about this one, because the hero is described as ... not my preference in romantic heros. But the heroine isn't bad, and the plot set-up is kind of intriguing, so I can deal with a hero who's not my cup of tea.

Until I hit this passage:

"I'll have a double cheeseburger loaded, cheese fries, and a chocolate milkshake." Willa smiled up at the waitress...

He held up his menu. "Same."...

Nick's brows lifted, and he looked at Willa, seated across from him in the red vinyl booth. "Quite an order. You going to eat all that?"

"That's the plan."

There was something unspeakably sexy about a woman who ate like a long-haul trucker. "Then I have serious respect for you."

She squinted. "Why's that?"

"It's a rare woman who looks like you and doesn't live on rabbit food alone."

Amusement danced in her eyes. "You mean salad?"

"Uh-huh."

"I like salad too." She studied him for a moment. ... "Especially if it has bacon and cheese on it."

I tried to read past this, but just couldn't. I hate the dismissal of women who enjoy those foods but who aren't size two. I hate the dismissal of women who want to be size two and put a lot of energy and work into doing that. I hate the knowledge that advertising has taught this character to find something sexy that simply doesn't exist in real life except for in the fantasies created by ad execs.

Mostly, I hate that a romance, a book written for women, by a woman, is playing with something that's so hateful towards the people who are reading this book.

Just before I read this, I re-read Jem and the Holograms: The Misfits. That is a comic book that has one issue dedicated to each of the five Misfits. And you know what? Each of those women is shown as a woman of worth, a woman of power, a woman who deserves love. And I love and respect all of them so much more than Willa, who doesn't give Nick the finger for questioning her order, or Nick, who doesn't have any comprehension of the toxicity of his ideas about food and women.

Am I overthinking this? Probably. But this equating food with sex, and with thinness with beauty at the same f'ing time makes me angry, and I am metaphorically throwing this book against the wall. (Because it's an ebook from the library that I'm reading on my phone, and I don't intentionally throw my phone.)

Stormer, you tear the world up.

What Did I Make?: Fettuccine with Bolognese Sauce, from Coco Morante's The Essential Instant Pot

What Did I Change?: Instead of a pound of beef and another of pork, I used beef and lamb. (On the assumption that one of the things that the pork contributed was fat; otherwise I would have used ground chicken sausage.)

Would I Make This Again?: ... It's complicated.

I saw this recipe for a pressure-cooked version of a low-and-slow bolognese sauce. And I'm all, I have to try this!

So I do. And it's...okay. It's edible. But it's too watery for my thin dried fruit noodles to go well with. It's greasier than I'd like. It tastes overcooked and meh. (It wasn't until today that I realized that the recipe called for neither oregano nor basil. Really? No oregano in a red meat sauce? Heathens.)

But it's fine, so my husband and I eat it. And we discuss it, because this is what we do when one of us makes a dish. And he mentions that this would make a good meat sauce for lasagna.

Since we now have multiple containers with the leftovers, I think this is a brilliant idea.

The layers of lasagna are as follows, but not in the right order:

1) No-boil noodles

2) Meat sauce, with each meat layer sprinkled with oregano because dear G-d, what do you mean there's no oregano.

3) Zucchini, which has been grated, salted, drained, squeezed, and rinsed.

4) A cheese mixture of cottage cheese, some whipped cream cheese that Kidlet won't eat, an egg, basil, salt, and pepper.

5) Sliced Gouda and Havarti, because we bought it for the Channukah party, and it needed to be eaten up, and I needed Melty cheese anyway.

6) Finely grated Parmesan.

Did the whole thing up as per Cook's Illustrated, and... it's really good. Greasier than I'd like, but a lot of that was the cheese. Very dense, but a much better dish than it was yesterday.

So, would I make it again? Maybe. If I we're hosting game or something. If I had a fat separator. And it would probably be better with the mozzarella instead of the Gouda/Havarti mix. But I don't know, and it's certainly no weeknight supper.

But at least I was able to take something mediocre and turn it into something better.

I got the family an Instant Pot for Channukah. And I've been trying to use it, so as to justify its existance. Also, it is winter, a time for low-and-slow foods. This has meant gathering some Instant Pot cookbooks from my local library. (I am very far back from the one by the Cook's Illustrated crew, Multicooker Perfection, but I will wait, because I trust those folks.)

Anyway, I am going through a bunch of IP cookbooks, and twice now, I have come across a green bean recipe. It is listed as Italian. And I look at it. And I snicker.

Because this is the Sephardic recipe for Vegetables. (And Some Meats.)

What is the Sephardic recipe for Vegetables (And Some Meats), you may ask?

1) Add oil to a pot. No, more. Where are you from, a place that is scared of oil? (My husband always complained that I used too much oil when sauteing. Then we got a cookbook that has all of the old family recipes. Now he still complains, but he knows why I do it.)

2)Add a chopped onion and saute until soft.

3) Add a can of chopped tomatoes, the Vegetable (Or Meat), some salt, and some pepper.

4)Add water until everything is covered.

5)Simmer on the stovetop and get the rest of the meal finished.

What you get out of this recipe is the same thing you will get out of these IP recipes. Except with the IP, you have more work to do, and more cleanup.

It's just really amusing to me to see people use their IPs for things that are simpler to do on the stovetop.

Back in the beginning of the year, (was it really the beginning of this year? 2018 has been a very, very long year.) I got to go see Hamilton with my mother, sister, and a dear friend. As we were leafing through the program (because of course we got there with plenty of time to spare), we noticed that the Seattle Rep was going to be producing Miranda's first musical, In the Heights. Said friend, who is Hispanic, said that she needed to get tickets, because she really wanted to take her mother to it.

Fast forward to later in the year, and another friend, who works at the Rep, asked me if I'd like to go, as she had comp tickets. I said, yes, please, oh, and could I get two more? She had two more, and last night, my friend, my friend's mother, and I all got to see In the Heights.

It was magnificent.

I had tried listening to the soundtrack before, but due to time, how I was listening, and other stuff, it didn't really grab me, and I wound up not listening to more than half the first act. So I came in knowing the basics of the story, but very little else. My friend knew the soundtrack very well, but had never seen it live.

If you are a mostly monolingual gringa like me, the best way to describe this is like watching Shakespeare. You know that the language is beautiful, and between the acting and what you can understand of the words, you're going to get most of the story. But there's going to be a good chunk of the play that you're just not going to understand, and you have to be okay with that. It's not necessarily easy, but I actually found it really refreshing.

And in part, I found it refreshing because of something written in the program. The program noted that the creators of the play used Fiddler on the Roof as a touchstone, which, upon seeing the play, made absolute sense to me. There are a lot of goyim who see Fiddler, who love Fiddler, whose souls are touched by Fiddler. (It's extremely popular in Japan, for example.) But if you are a Jew, there is something extra, because that's your family up there. That's your story up there. And I knew, just knew, that there is an extra layer to In the Heights that I will never, ever quite get. And it was actually really nice, to see that, and know that, this play means so much to so many people. You certainly see it in what many of the cast members chose to put in their biographies.

(Humorous side note: both my friend and her mother felt very "stared at" during the intermission and after the show. This being both in Seattle, and the theatre, it was a very white, older crowd. Both my friend and her mother were wondering if people thought that they were extras in the show. Definitely not, but it was kind of funny and kind of weird.)

Having seen this and Hamilton, you can definitely tell that there were a lot of the same brains behind both shows. The music, while not the same, has a very similar feel, as does the frenetic pace and the melding of traditional Broadway styles with different music (rap, Afro-Latin rhythms, hip-hop). There's the incidental tips of the hat ("It's hot in here, like Cole Porter", forex). Also, even though Hamilton has Alexander Hamilton as the main character, both Aaron Burr and Eliza Hamilton have large enough star turns/chunks of plot that you could make a case for either of them being the main character. (And I love that the Hamilton cast doesn't come out one by one. I love that they make all their bows together. Some people may be more prominent than others, but everyone is important.) But while Usnavi is the main character of In the Heights, he is the frame through which we see the play proceed. I would say that Nina is the actual protagonist, and the characters who are the actors of the plot, the people who do things, are the trio of women with arias: Vanessa, Nina, and Abeula Claudia. It is a very different sort of musical, and one that I would love to see more of.

The acting was excellent. The men playing Usnavi and Benny were absolutely channeling Lin and Chris Jackson, which was interesting. Poor Nina's mike didn't work at first, but she did her very best to hold her own against a heavily miked counter-chorus. (Another humorous aside: When my friend and I saw Hamilton poor Lafayette's mike cut out at the beginning of "Guns and Ships" and didn't work again for the rest of the first act. We felt so sorry for him, and so relieved when Jefferson was clearly audible in "What'd I Miss". Abuela Claudia looked old, but not all the time, and I thought she should have been a little more shaky than she was. But here voice was glorious, and she carried her part well. Nina's parents were completely fantastic and totally believable.

I loved that the Nina/Benny/family subplot isn't fully okay by the end of the show. It actually gives me more faith in the continuation of the Nina/Benny relationship going forward.

We saw a preview, so if you can still snag tickets, I would absolutely do so.

The only thing really wrong was that the guy sitting next to me was manspreading something fierce, so when I was getting restless in the middle of the second act, there was no good place for me to rearrange my legs. I gave up when I realized that he not only had a quarter of my space, he had a quarter of the space that his date had as well. Phooey on you, theatre manspreader!

Watching the second episode of the She-Ra reboot. It is adorable, and cute, and well-written, and very, very good. Well worth watching.

I'm kind of glad I didn't write this earlier, since I was feeling really bummed out the day after, and now, things are looking much better.

On the personal front, the candidate I was out stumping for, Kim Schrier, won, and won very well. W00t! The last day of phone banking had over 150 people there, including one lady who'd come down from Bellingham. This was a phone bank in north Seattle, so most of us weren't district 8 people, just folks who were really into flipping the district. And it happened! Yay!

I think the best take, overall, comes from Gin and Tacos: I Know Why You're Sad. Basically, what a lot of people (me included) was a repudiation of fascism, racism, misogyny, antisemitism, white nationalism, aand all the other "ism"s on display in the current Republican party. What we got was subpeona power, the power to block a lot of the worst impulses of the Republican party, and confirmation that this is an extremely divided country, and that rift is severe and serious.

I am scared. But I was talking with my mom the other night, and she is ready to go out to the streets. Because, as she put it, "There is no safe place for Jews anymore." And if there is no place where we can trust to be safe, well, we have to fight (along with a lot of others) to bring that safety back.

I will not forget. I will be out stumping in 2020, and I will find other ways to support organizations doing good work before then.