Nov. 21st, 2009


[info]squeaky
[info]announcements

[info]squeaky
[info]announcements

IJ Holiday Sale


[info]squeaky
[info]announcements
We are starting this years InsaneJournal holiday sale. From now until the end of the day Friday, November 27 we are going to be holding a sale on Self-Committed[paid] accounts and Extra Userpics.

The prices are be as follows

Self-Committed[paid]
1 Month -> $5
6 Month -> $15 $10
12 Month -> $25 $18

Extra Userpicx
6 Month -> $10 $5
12 Month -> $20 $15

Then on Friday November 27th from 8am until 4pm (Eastern US time) we will be running a very special sale on Permanently Insane accounts.
[info]f_shippers_feed
[info]f_shippers_feed

Another Notch

[info]f_shippers_feed
Title : Another Notch
Author: [info]dalehead
Pairing : Karl/Harry/Orlando
Rating : R – adult themes
Summary : Karl and Harry are hardcore.
Disclaimer: This is entirely made up.
Author’s Note: For my [info]darknightjess

(Read more ...)
[info]f_shippers_feed
[info]f_shippers_feed

Fic: The Delayed Flight, Part Eight

[info]f_shippers_feed
Title: The Delayed Flight, Part Eight
Author: [info]tweedle_
Pairing/Characters: This part – Elijah Wood, Billy Boyd, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom, Karl Urban.
Rating: NC17.
Warning: AU or roles I quite fancy the boys being given a chance to play in a TV drama.
Disclaimer: Fiction. Roles. Characters. Wishful thinking.
Beta: The very excellent [info]ismenin. Thank you!
Summary: Elijah’s flight is delayed by a certain someone and things go well and truly pear shaped.
Comments: I really would appreciate hearing what you honestly think. Honest. :)

(Read more ...)
[info]manolobig_feed
[info]manolobig_feed

Thanksgiving Thoughts #6

[info]manolobig_feed

You know, back when turkey became the expected Thanksgiving treat, people actually cooked it more often than they tend to do these days. Sure, a lot of us have some turkey on hand in the freezer much of the time, often in the form of either ground meat, sausages, bacon, or small medallions that can be quickly cooked any night of the week for dinner.

But how many of you out there have cooked an entire turkey at any time of the year other than Thanksgiving? It’s a heck of a lot of food for a modern family, and besides we are taught from childhood that it’s a process fraught with the potential for disaster.

Consequently, we find ourselves nervous when faced with cooking a fifteen or twenty pound bird, and it winds up becoming something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We assume it’s beyond us, and we find ourselves unprepared when the big moment comes. Lack of preparation is a huge part of kitchen failure. Knowledge is power, whether you’re talking about the boardroom, the bedroom, the closet or the oven.

So for those of you about to cook your first turkey, or those of you who haven’t done it for a while and are feeling rusty, here are a few useful tips that should help you produce a bird that is tasty and moist.

Leave yourself plenty of time for thawing a frozen turkey. Turkey will thaw in the refrigerator at the rate of approximately five (5) hours per pound. That’s right, hours per pound. If you find yourself rapidly approaching the time you need to start roasting and still in possession of an ice block of bird, move the turkey to the kitchen sink. Cover it in cold water and change the water about every half an hour. That brings the timeline down to about thirty (30) minutes per pound. Do not attempt to speed things up from this. At that point you’re courting spoilage. Salmonella is not a welcome table guest. Better to have to wait an extra hour or two for dinner than spend your holiday suffering from food poisoning.

The right pan makes a difference. A good roasting pan large enough to hold a whole turkey is a great investment even if you don’t ever cook a turkey in it. You can use it to roast other meats and vegetables, make lasagna and other baked, layered one-dish meals (shepherd’s pie, anybody?). Besides, if you are going to cook a turkey, a too-small pan can spell disaster. You’ll want something about two to three inches tall so you can keep the juices in the pan, but no taller so as not to keep the dry heat from crisping the turkey skin. You’ll want strong, stationary handles and sturdy construction. After all, you don’t want to finish cooking an eighteen pound masterpiece only to find that a too-thin pan has burnt the bottom or that the super-cool movable handles decide to move at a key moment when you want them to stay put. If all you’ve got to work with is those disposable aluminum trays from the grocery store, at least use two at once. It’s not an ideal solution, but it will do in a pinch.

If you’re putting stuffing in the turkey, wait until just before roasting to fill the cavity. Many people prefer to cook the stuffing separately from the bird, either for health concerns, so that vegetarians at the table can share in the treat, or because they think it has a nicer consistency that way. I still stuff because I like the way the stuffing and turkey suffuse one another with an extra layer of flavor. Besides, I think it’s fun to dig out the stuffing. In the end, to each their own. But if you are going to stuff, stuff safely. You can make your stuffing ahead of time (assuming your recipe deals well with that), but don’t put it in the bird until you’re just about to put it in the oven. Stuff loosely, and cook until the stuffing reaches between 160 and 165f on the thermometer. Again, safe food handling trumps everything when feeding a crowd.

Trussing is optional. Trust me on this. If you’re worried about trussing because you’ve never done it before, just recognize that you have the option to leave that step out of any poultry roast. I have never trussed a bird in my life, and they’ve all turned out just fine. In fact, there’s a school of thought that trussing the bird can make it more difficult for the heat to properly distribute in the inner portions of the legs and wings, meaning that you have to cook longer, thus almost guaranteeing dried out white meat. I don’t know if this is an accurate theory, but I can tell you that I have never trussed a turkey and I have never served a dry turkey. Food for thought.

Unless you brine, baste often. I’ve never brined a turkey. I honestly have no tips or tricks on that. But I swear by my own method of keeping turkey moist while it cooks. Heat equal amounts of unsalted butter and olive oil in a small sauce pan until the butter melts. Leave it on the lowest possible heat on the burner and baste the turkey with this mixture every twenty minutes to half an hour. Be liberal with this concoction. Not only does it keep the meat moist, it also imbues it with a sinfully luscious flavor. Oh, and be sure to roast the bird breast down. It makes a difference.

You know the turkey is done when the thermometer tells you it’s done. For safe eating, the dark meat will need to reach 170f. Don’t fudge this. Get a good, accurate, instant-read cooking thermometer and use it.

Let the meat rest before you carve. Once you take the bird out of the oven, transfer it to the platter and cover it tightly for about ten or fifteen minutes with aluminum foil. Meat carved too quickly after cooking can dry out when the juices run too freely.

Relax. If the turkey turns out a touch dry or everyone has to wait another half an hour because it’s just not getting to the temperature it needs to be, it’s not the end of the world or proof that you’re an incompetent cook. It’s just something that happens. A little gravy or cranberry sauce will make the drier bits of meat go down just fine, and a short wait for Thanksgiving dinner only whets the appetite more. Besides, there are few greater party killers than a panicky host/cook telling everyone how badly the food turned out. Serve it with a smile and offer up gravy. Everything will be fine.

roast-turkey-l


[info]kyuuketsukirui

[info]kyuuketsukirui

Daily Happiness


[info]kyuuketsukirui
1. Carla got her new computer today! My old laptop (which she's currently using) is really starting to die (looks like it needs a new hard drive), so instead of saving the new computer til Christmas, we decided she'd just start using it now.

2. Had a nice walk tonight. Four miles, which is longer than we've done in a while. She's been busy with school, I've been busy with work, there's yoga two nights a week interfering with our schedule, and then for the past couple weeks she's been sick. But tonight Alexander wanted something from the Apple Store, so we walked down to the Promenade and back. Stopped at El Pollo Loco on the way, yum.

3. Speaking of chicken, I was boiling a whole chicken earlier today for use in enchiladas and I kind of forgot about it on the stove and so it got cooked way longer than I meant it to...but that ended up being a good thing! The chicken was just falling off the bones!

[info]mirabile_dictu

[info]mirabile_dictu

Twentieth day of writing


[info]mirabile_dictu
xposted to IJ and LJ

Word count: 1,024. Yay! No end in sight, though.

[info]sorchar

[info]sorchar

Today's Twittiness


[info]sorchar
  • 10:59 $1200 to fix mah car AGATSFSDQ!!!! >:O #
  • 11:32 Is scratched paint and broken
    side lamp from little bump in parking lot. I was thinking it would cost maybe $200. Hah! #
  • 11:32 @thessaliad I has bought! #
  • 11:34 @bibliotech @darkrose why must people be so very douchebaggy? #
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[info]beandaily_ij
[info]beandaily_ij

New Percy Jackson Trailer

[info]beandaily_ij
Some very nice shots of Sean!


[info]beandaily_ij
[info]beandaily_ij

Daily Beans

[info]beandaily_ij
For [info]nrgbunny Boromir...

[info]viggodaily_lj
[info]viggodaily_lj

viggo_daily @ 2009-11-20T21:46:00

[info]viggodaily_lj


Nov. 20th, 2009


[info]darkrose

[info]darkrose

Television Without Pity--But Racism is Dandy!


[info]darkrose
Okay, I should have known better. But I was enjoying the SGU thread on TWoP, with all of the lovely snark. And I appreciated the fact that most of the posters seemed to get why having sex in someone else's body was skeevy, and why it's problematic that the black guy in SGU is yet another Angry Black Man.

Seriously--I should have known better. )

[info]ponderosa121

[info]ponderosa121

[FIC] Batman - Batman/Joker - The Frayed Ends


[info]ponderosa121
Spam! Wrote this not long after TDK came out but never posted it. Since the evil twin just wrote Joker/Scarecrow with similar elements, I knew I had to post it as the same time as hers or I'd never do it. Team Porn does Arkham. Arharhrh.


The Frayed Ends
Batman. Batman/Joker. R. ~1000 words. Nolanverse. Violence.
Darkness gathers into a swarm around them and Bruce doesn’t want to let the bastard take one more goddamn breath.



Read Me. )

[info]zillah975

[info]zillah975

OH ALSO


[info]zillah975
There's a huge goddamned difference between wanting "all women characters all the time to be treated like goddesses" and wanting some women characters to at least some of the time be treated like real human beings. See: Leverage, The Three Days Of The Hunter Job.

In that episode, a female broadcast journalist is portrayed as scheming, evil, heartless, grasping, and not terribly bright, AND YET. Because Leverage typically treats its female characters -- especially its two female leads -- as real human beings, the fact that this one character is an awful, awful human being is not problematic.

So fuck off with your* blinders, all right? It's not as fucking simple as you want to pretend.


*"you" being no one actually on my flist, as far as I'm aware. This rant brought to you by my failure to avoid reading comments on the internet.

Mirrored from this post at Dreamwidth, which currently has comment count unavailable comments.

Read comments | Reply
[info]freakonomics
[info]freakonomics

Of God and Money

[info]freakonomics
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good?
[info]freakonomics
[info]freakonomics

A Few Questions for Belle de Jour, Call Girl and Scientist

[info]freakonomics
In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty memoirs beginning with 2005's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The books were adapted for television in the U.K. (where she is portrayed by Billie Piper) and later in the U.S.

[info]ponderosa121

[info]ponderosa121

[ART] Steve & Tony Warmup Drawing


[info]ponderosa121
Just a little something to get me in the groove for doing homework. Done without access to my usual brushes so there are several big things that make me go DDDD:, but I didn't want to spend more than an hour on this. Warmup means warmup, Pondy.

Avengers. Steve/Tony. G.



Steve & Tony Warmup Drawing )
[info]manolobig_feed
[info]manolobig_feed

Friday Fierceness: Isabella Blow

[info]manolobig_feed

Isabella Blow was a genius, and she got screwed.

her signature slash of red inspired MAC to create a color called Isabella

La Blow, former Tatler editor, muse, star-finder and influence-wielder would have turned 51 yesterday, and her tragic story was fashion legend even before it ended with her death-by-weed-killer in March, 2007.

She was not a pretty girl.

No true fashion visionaries are traditionally beautiful (Miuccia Prada, Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, etc), she had a weak chin, droopy eyes and perhaps the most painfully British set of teeth to be found outside the Royal Family.
In one of her more tame chapeaux

But she had an eye.

BOY did she have an eye and she decided to follow Oscar Wilde’s commandment: if she could not BE a work of art, then at least she would wear them.

Thus created was the woman Lady Gaga wishes she could be.

She was an Evelyn Waugh character come to life: high born, brilliant and hopelessly self-destructive.  Blow left England in 1979 and wound up in New York, working as Anna Wintour’s assistant (the Devil may wear Prada, but the Assistant discovered McQueen) and then for André Leon Talley.

an homage to the Dali/Schaipirelli "Lobster Dress"

She returned to London to work for Tatler, which is like American Vogue but smart and interesting, first as an assistant and then as its Fashion Director. She also bounced around the rest of Conde Nast and did a stint as the Sunday Times Style section (London, not New York).yet another Elsa Schiapirelli homage

During that time she developed her relationship with boy-genius milliner Philip Treacy and became his muse, constantly daring him to create a hat she would not wear (as noted above, lobsters were not a barrier to millinery).

She discovered straight-then plus-then straight-sized model Sophie Dahl (Granddaughter of Roald, which explains why the heroine of The BFG was named Sophie), Stella Tennant and perhaps most legendarily, discovered Alexander McQueen when she bought young Lee’’s entire student collection for ₤5,000 –paid for in ₤100/wk allotments as she couldn’t afford it all in one go– in 1992.

one of Treacy's more intricate works

Her personal life was not a happy one.

Disinherited by her father in the early 90’s she was married briefly in the 80’s and then joined her lot with Detmar Blow in 1989. Their marriage was not a success as Isabella battled with depression and could not conceive a child. Detmar, needing to carry on the family name in order not to lose the familial manse designed by his muckety muck architect ancestor (also a Detmar Blow) temporarily left Isabella when her I.V.F. didn’t work so he could knock up some girl.  Charming, no?

Recalling Avedon

As Isabella continued to suffer from depression and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, the people she discovered and nurtured –particularly McQueen– were moving onwards and upwards.

Her friend Daphne Guinness said “She was upset that McQueen didn’t take her along when he sold his brand to Gucci. Once the deals started happening, she fell by the wayside. Everybody else got contracts, and she got a free dress” which was especially hurtful as Blow was cripplingly low on cash and was rumored to have personally negotiated the Gucci deal.
Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow by David LaChappelle
Blow tried several creative attempts at suicide, finally succeeding by drinking Paraquat in the bathroom of the family manse her husband had left her to save.

Blow’s memorial service was, as you’d imagine, well-attended and there has been a great deal of guilt –both public and private– about her treatment by her fashion friends and colleagues. Read Simon Doonan’s self-punishing recollection –published shortly after her death– here.
McQueen's Homage to Isabella S/S 2007

As a personal note, I wept when I saw Alexander McQueen’s S/S 2008 show, an homage to Isabella chock-full of Philip Treacy confections (including a quivering mob of feather butterflies which I came up with for a Halloween costume in 2001. I have proof.)

Isabella Blow did not have a happy ending, nor indeed a happy middle or beginning, but she was one of the few great characters of the post-couture era and her eccentricity has inspired a new generation of  fashion daredevils.  Have a great weekend, and wherever you’re going, put on a hat. Do it for La Blow.


[info]kyuuketsukirui

[info]kyuuketsukirui

Supernatural 5x10, Modern Family 1x08


[info]kyuuketsukirui
Supernatural 5x10 )



I also watched Modern Family, but I don't really have anything to say there. There wasn't anything wrong with it, per se, but it was the weakest episode so far and I just wasn't finding much to get excited about. (Probably because the main storyline was about Phil and Claire and I just don't care about them.)
[info]lotr_findr_feed
[info]lotr_findr_feed

OMG!! Boondock+LOTR?????

[info]lotr_findr_feed
Since suffering from a bit of Boondock Saints fandom-hysteria lately, combined with my all-timeLotr-obsession ----> and Ping! - why the hell have I never thought about THAT?!

Maybe it exists lovely combinations of the two; or more - like Endless Possible Verses and I´m going to faint immediately if that is so and DOES ANYBODY KNOW?? Say it does - say it does..pleasepleasepleeeese
*bounces and ties myself up with ropes*

Is there by any chance any crossover/Au-fics between Boondock and LOTR (Fp or Rp) floating around anywhere??

I would squee myself to death. And I crave it!!

*draws smutty hearts*
[info]manolobig_feed
[info]manolobig_feed

From Francesca’s Inbox: Sales for the Weekend

[info]manolobig_feed

Francesca wishes to apologize for the technical difficulties sometimes present in her posts, such as dropped words, links that go to the wrong attire, etc. Rest assured that she and the rest of the Manolo team are working on smoothing out these quirks. Meanwhile, if there is something confusing you wish Francesca to clarify, please write to her at francesca@shoeblogs.com and she will try to respond in a timely fashion either by email or with an update in the post.

Liz Claiborne has new markdowns.  Click here to go straight to plus sizes. Snakeskin lovers: Elsie python leather handbag is about 70% off.

Avenue is selling select jeans and denim capris for $15 while supplies last. Free shipping on orders of $75 or more with code AV91140, through December 10.

Catherines is having a “buy two, get one free sale” in stores and online through Tuesday. Buy any two items, and get any third (for equal or lesser value) for free.

Zaftique is having a sale on select items through Tuesday. Many pretty dresses and shirts.

Figleaves is enjoying its first mention on Manolo for the Big Girl. A purveyor of lingerie for the large-chested girl, and located in the UK, they will ship to other countries for a flat rate of 5.50 BP (1 BP currently is 1.68 dollars). Through Monday evening (England time), they have taken 20% off the prices of select items by Pour Moi, and other various designers (note: things like robes and nightshirts do not necessarily come in plus sizes).

Torrid introduces their “True Romance” collection. Sequin leggings! Chanel your inner Liza! Black lace tube top! Oh, to be in her 20’s again.

Old Navy will give you 15% off purchases of $75, or 25% off purchases of $100, through Tuesday, with code ONSAVE15. Also, through December 15, free shipping on any purchase of $50 or more. Click here to go straight to plus sizes.

Junonia has taken 30% off outerwear through Sunday. They are based in Minnesota so they know of what they speak.

Talbots has new arrivals. Click here to go straight to Woman sizes, here for Woman Petites.

Ashley Stewart has taken 30% off all sale items, for a limited time.

Igigi has added new items to their sale rack.

And in accessories/makeup news:

Perfumania will take 20% off your next order, through Sunday, with code ERENOV. Perfume makes a great gift if you know what she wears.

Shoe Mall is having a huge sale, and offers free shipping as always.

Happy shopping and happy weekend. xoxo