Backyard fig trees are producing!
Posting for Hammad Rais’s Weekend Sky Challenge.
Category: Food and Drink
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The prompt today is COLORFUL.
And does self have a picture for you!
Took it a few minutes ago, after exit-ing Century 20, where she watched Sisu, which is so awesome she might not have enough words!
Do you want to watch a movie about a lone man who wipes out a whole company of Nazis? A movie set in Finland? During World War II? Then Sisu is for you! FIVE STARS! I laughed, I cheered! Who knew Finland could produce something so intense, so action-packed, so pulse-pounding? It’s this year’s Road Warrior, this year’s The Raid, this year’s John Wick 3: Parabellum!
This is a flowerbox around the outdoor seating for Quinto Sol, fantastic Mexican restaurant right across the street from Century 20, featuring specialties from Michoacan.
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Back to crushing the reading list.
Five stars for My Sister, the Serial Killer.
- Footmen, bone, china — it sounded posh, and I suppose it was, but under those fancy domes was just kiddie stuff. Fish fingers, cottage pies, roast chicken, green peas.
Nothing smacks of neglect more than the fact that Will and Harry were offered such plebeian fare! Of course disguised under “fancy domes.”
I’d always wondered about that. Thanks, Prince.
Kudos, time and time again, to the Prince’s ghostwriter.
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Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
Hard to believe that self arrived in the Philippines only a week ago.
The day after self arrived, she attended the 90th birthday party of her uncle Tony, the last surviving of Dear Departed Mum’s siblings.
It was a truly special occasion. Self got to see uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews she hadn’t seen in decades!
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Self can hardly bear to describe the fascination of this book, which is the first she’s ever read that describes the “system” — of course there was a system to the murder camps (She refuses to use the Nazi term “concentration camp”), the Germans lived for numbers and tallies and all that. That was how they were able to “detach” — to view the Jews as just so much human cargo that needed to be “processed” as quickly as possible.
Each train car that arrived in Auschwitz was greeted by blinding electric lights, lighting up the platform as if it were noon. The separation of the men from the women and children had to be done quickly, so clubs and beatings were liberally employed. Then, the emptying of the cattle cars. Men rushed in at top speed and threw out luggage, everything landing in a heap on the platform.
The job of unloading the luggage was a privilege given only to the group known as “the Kanada boys.”
The Kanada boys knew which Jews they were unloading by the provisions that suddenly became available. If they were tasting cheese, they had just received Jews from the Netherlands. If it was sardines, a transport of French Jews had arrived. Halva and olives identified the Greek Jews of Salonica, dressed in colours Walter had never seen before and speaking a language that was new to his Ashkenazi ear: the Sephardic Jewish dialect of Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. He saw them all, delivered to Auschwitz by the thousand.
— The Escape Artist, p. 97Only after every last piece of luggage was unloaded would the men attend to unloading the dead. And there were always dead.
A transport from the East, in midwinter, that took ten days, might have as many as a third of the passengers, perhaps 300 people, dead on arrival.
— The Escape Artist, p. 97Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Reading The Escape Artist, one question occurs to self, over and over: Who made the decisions — a myriad of decisions — that made daily life in Auschwitz as miserable as possible for the Jews? Someone had to be making these decisions, and self so badly needs to know WHO. So that they can be held accountable, at least in her head.
For instance, food. Since the camps were packed (at least in the beginning, before its inmates started dying off), the only way to feed these men was to impose rations, since the Germans had not figured the cost of feeding a large population into their camp budgets. It would be best, of course, if the inmates died, as quickly as possible. But in Auschwitz, 1942, the Germans were quite content to have inmates die of slow starvation. Which could take weeks. Even, months. Seems rather inefficient. Wouldn’t they have saved on food if the population died quickly?
Reading the passage below shows how the ever-inventive adminstrators of Auschwitz managed to come up with a food budget that was as cheap as possible. And, of course, they didn’t bother providing eating utensils. That would have added to the expense:
After four hours, a whistle blew and Walter could stop . . . it was noon, and food appeared. A version of soup, the same as every other day, either potato or turnip, doled out in one bowl containing about a litre, to be shared between five people. There were no spoons. So desperate men, famished from the work and thirsty from the heat, would have to discipline themselves to swallow no more than the two or three mouthfuls that were theirs. Afterwards, the same routine, one bowl between five men, this time containing some ersatz tea.
— The Escape Artist, p. 57 -
Am continuing with The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, which is fascinating, as much of a deep dive into self’s girlhood (she visited Hong Kong on Family trips, maybe five or six times in her childhood) as anything else.
Sentence of the Day:
- Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, the 1994 film of canned pineapples, painful longing, and drug dealers, is your favorite film — it’s why you want to visit Hong Kong, really
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Self loves that she can join Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge (CFFC) this week. She has got a gallery of rides!
- The Rolls that has seen better days was near Spitalfield’s, East London.
- Beltane & Pop van was on the London Eye Pier.
- The bus was self’s ride from Belfast to Downpatrick, on her way to River Mill for a month of mad writing, last April.
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Took this picture on Christmas Day 2022. Self had driven to Mendocino to de-stress. Mostly, she just walks around the Village, gets take-out from Patterson’s, and browses in Gallery Bookshop. The Corner Bakery makes the best tamales! You have to get there early: they might sell out.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday.
The sign said “Open” but the bakery was closed in honor of Christmas. Whose bikes were those, then?
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Narrator: Sarah is the Chinese American assistant film producer and unofficial ghost writer for Xander, a movie director.
Jason is a well-known actor.
I was also the person who knew the script backwards and forwards, when each character was needed in each scene, how each narrative twist led to the next one. So I sat there quietly, soaking in this vicarious praise.
“Amazing script, can’t wait to get started,” Jason shouted. He turned to me in a lowered voice. “Hey, can you get me a glass of sparkling water before we start?”
— Complicit, p. 214
Kanlaon 