Thursday, June 30, 2011

Thrusty Thursday: Darren Shahlavi

Think of Darren Shahlavi as Zachary Quinto on steroids. Not to say that the Iranian-English martial artist / actor's physique comes from anything other than hard work, as far as I'm aware. But those eyebrows, that subtly evil glint in the squinty eye…a more feral, jacked, hairy-chested Quinto. Definitely.

I know Shahlavi solely from the 2010 film Ip Man 2 (which I'll be reviewing next week) a sequel that surpassed its equally beautiful but less exciting predecessor. Shahlavi plays a thoroughly hateable "foreign devil", an English prize fighter who bullies, mocks, and grievously injures the local Kung Fu practitioners of Hong Kong in this movie set in 1950. Colonial tension, you can has!

Shahlavi was born in Manchester, England in 1972, and he's been training in a variety of martial arts since he was seven. He's been a gazillion and one movies of varying quality, most of them martial arts related. Without further ado, a man-tage from the film:

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sunday Puzzle

It's Sunday again, and you know what that means—time for me to rip off the puzzle segment from NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday!

Mustachioed enigmatologist
extraordinaire, Will Shortz
If you're a newcomer, each week on Weekend Edition Sunday, Will Shortz (the hardcore crossword puzzlers' almighty God) comes on the radio to do three things: share the solution to the previous week's puzzle, invite a winner who entered the correct answer to play another puzzle (usually word-related) on the air for word-nerdy prizes, and present everyone with the next week's puzzle (answers due in by Thursday afternoon via the WES website if you want a chance to play on the air).

Note: I never post the solutions on this blog…at least not before the submission deadline. I see lots of keyword traffic coming from people looking for the answers, which is at best impatient, and at worst, cheating. For shame.

Now without further ado, here's this week's new puzzle:

Take the word "ballerina," drop one letter and rearrange the remaining eight letters to name a well-known fictional character. Who is it?

Click here to see the original puzzle posting, check the answer to last week's challenge, listen to the segment, or find the link to enter your answer.

Friday, June 24, 2011

PSA: Male Models Need Assistance With Shirt Removal

While curating the Thrusty Thursday posts for David Gandy and Eric Monjoin, a recurring theme began to concern me. Is there a silent scourge sweeping the male modeling community? A rare and acute developmental disorder affecting specific motor skills? Is it possible there's some correlation between devastating good looks and the inability to effectively operate one's shirt? Now I'm no scientician, but take an objective look at the following man-tage and judge for yourselves. Bear in mind, these dudes are the top of their profession…the evidence seems both disturbing and conclusive.


If anyone is interested in applying to sign with my new agency, Maguire + McKenna Male Model Shirt Aid Unlimited, please submit a video of yourself assisting a male model with his shirt, two minutes or less. Please note: Gandy is already under my personal management. Man doesn't even realize you can't take your sweater off while your coat's still on. Poor lamb.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Thrusty Thursday: Eric Monjoin

If you like this week's thrustee, thank my real-life pal, romance novel enthusiast, and sometimes French language copy editor, @drpuma. Please join her in thrusting against French model/actor (another Jeudi Frotteurible! Sacré bleu!) Eric Monjoin, aka that dude from the elaborate Heineken ad. Now, let's man-tage!


Okay kids, this clip is an advertisement for alcohol, so don't hit play unless you're of legal age in your country, lest it compromise your morals.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Sunday Puzzle

It's Sunday again, and you know what that means—time for me to rip off the puzzle segment from NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday!

Mustachioed enigmatologist
extraordinaire, Will Shortz
If you're a newcomer, each week on Weekend Edition Sunday, Will Shortz (the hardcore crossword puzzlers' almighty God) comes on the radio to do three things: share the solution to the previous week's puzzle, invite a winner who entered the correct answer to play another puzzle (usually word-related) on the air for word-nerdy prizes, and present everyone with the next week's puzzle (answers due in by Thursday afternoon via the WES website if you want a chance to play on the air).

Note: I never post the solutions on this blog…at least not before the submission deadline. I see lots of keyword traffic coming from people looking for the answers, which is at best impatient, and at worst, cheating. For shame.

Now without further ado, here's this week's new puzzle:

From listener Adam Cohen, of Brooklyn, N.Y.: Think of a former world leader whose first and last names both sound like things you might see in a mine. Who is the leader, and what are the things?

Click here to see the original puzzle posting, check the answer to last week's challenge, listen to the segment, or find the link to enter your answer.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Recipe: Lentil and Rhubarb Stew

I was skeptical too, but stay with me, here.

We just started getting the summer's veggie boxes from a local farm, and whoa is it ever rhubarb season. If you don't know much about rhubarb, as I didn't, it's a weird thing. I ate a raw slice and can only describe it as a cross between celery and a Granny Smith apple, in both texture and flavor. Sweet but sour and quite fibrous.

But when you think rhubarb (if you do) you probably think pie, and as you may know, I'm off sugar this month. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy finding a savory rhubarb recipe. I got lucky and stumbled across this one, which I had to rejigger quite a bit to work with the ingredients I had. It sounds weird, but trust me, it's delicious. The rhubarb gives the stew the most fascinating citrus-y flavor, and though there's no fat added, it's very savory and rich-tasting. I entered the recipe into my nutrition app and it's less than 300 calories per serving (makes about six servings).

Anyhow, love this. No longer afraid to find rhubarb in my weekly farm box. Bring it on.

1. In a large pot, add these together:

6–8 stalks rhubarb, cleaned and chopped
2½ cups dry yellow lentils (or dry split peas), rinsed
chicken, chopped into stew-sized pieces (I used 2 boneless breasts, but I think 4 thighs would taste even better)
½ medium onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced

I tossed in the following spices, but feel free to use whatever Indian-type flavors you prefer…
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ginger
½ tsp. tumeric
½ tsp. chili powder
½ tsp. cumin seeds (can you tell I love cumin?)
lots of black pepper
[salt comes later]

2. With all that in the pot, add water, enough to cover everything by an inch…well, except the rhubarb, which floats. Bring to a low boil on medium-high heat, then cover and reduce to a simmer for 30–40 minutes, or until the lentils and rhubarb are soft. I stirred occasionally, though I'm not sure I was supposed to. It didn't seem to hurt anything.

3. It will look very unappetizing at first, but as the rhubarb stews it'll break down into sheer deliciousness, mingling with the lentils. When everything's softened, add a lot of salt and adjust the spices to your liking. I used too much water, but thickened it with a few shakes of corn starch.

4. Serve alone or over rice. Enjoy! Like I said, it tastes sooo much better than it sounds.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Thrusty Thursday: Clancy Brown

This is another one of those posts where I give away my weakness for evil-looking dudes, and actors who are serially cast as baddies. I was driven to pick Clancy Brown after watching The Highlander over the weekend. I always felt guilty, thinking Brown was dish the many times I watched Shawshank (my all-time favorite movie, in which Brown plays the horrid Hadley, head of the prison guards) or creepier still, the way underrated and prematurely cancelled HBO series Carnivale. Those black contact lenses…shudder. I wonder if he'll get to play a good guy in Cowboys and Aliens…

But shifty or not, he's such a fox. An evil, alpha fox with a deadly voice, who makes six-three look like eight-foot-nine. He's been in a gazillion-and-one things and done even more voice-over work, so I won't bore you with a list. You can head to IMDb for that. Instead, let me show you his varied and progressive foxiness through the ages:


Oh and before you go, check it—Clancy Brown in this montage from 1987's Extreme Prejudice! If the still isn't warning enough, let me point out that it's a violent clip, though not explicitly gory. And far more importantly, Brown's sporting a beard, a cowboy hat, and a variety of guns! (If you're impatient, just skip to the 1:25 mark. Good stuff there.)

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Life Without Sugar

Away with ye, temptresses!
It's now midway through June, the halfway mark in my month without sugar (part of Discipline Year, if you're not a regular). Here are my findings thus far:

1. I've lost five pounds.
2. It wasn't really that hard.
3. It's easy to make your own faux masala sauce.
4. Cupcakes have taken on a mythical quality.

So, for me anyhow, giving up sugar hasn't been too hard. (If you're wondering what I mean by "sugar", i.e. do fruit and wine and such count? you can check out the month's parameters here.) I didn't have too many regular treats to lament—a couple squares of dark chocolate after dinner, and a few sauces I relied on for my dinner repertoire. But aside from the occasional pang of wistful longing as I gaze upon the chocolate in my husband's hand, I've been fine. I think the standard-issue holier-than-thou diet attitude got me through the first week, and by the time the self-satisfaction wore off, so had my body's cravings…for the most part.

So the first week, I couldn't care less about sugar. By week two, I did catch myself ogling the carrot cake in the café's dessert case as though it were an oiled up David Gandy. But not once have I been actually tempted, nor have I cheated. I consider myself pretty lucky to be more of a salt-craver than a sugar-craver. Let's just hope my blood pressure stays low so I never have to test my resolve in the sodium department. I used to have a diet soda habit, but thankfully I gave it up a few years ago. Even fake sweeteners can affect your insulin levels and desire for real sugar.

The five pounds I lost since June began are most definitely from a variety of changes. Ditching the sugar certainly helps, but more than that, I simply haven't been snacking. Couldn't tell you if that's some blood sugar craving chemical-whatnot being subdued, or purely incidental, or something else entirely. Perhaps there's just nothing tasty to snack on that doesn't have sugar in it. I've also been very diligent about my nightly yoga and calisthenics regimen since mid-May, totally unrelated to this expriment…though my weight didn't change until the sugar got 86ed. I've also just generally felt less…puffy. No clue if that has anything to do with some blood sugar / water retention link or what, but I'm not complaining.

I'm donating platelets this afternoon, and I'm praying the Red Cross's snack basket has pretzels stocked this week. If not, my remaining choices are all off-limits, and the RC techs can be quite forceful when it comes to making sure their donors eat something. Note to self: buy a banana at the grocery store this morning.

Unrelated—I'm excited to donate today, as I'm downloading Tina Fey's Bossypants audiobook right now!

That's it. Anyone else in the midst of a nutritional experiment? I know my friend Shoshanna's eating like a caveman at the moment…or that's what I gathered. What I hunter-gathered? Ba dum-bum! Well, whatever that's about, it's got to be way more interesting than kicking cupcakes!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Character Interview Questions

Hey, all!

I wanted to share a customized version of one of my favorite writing tools—the character interview. I'm sure you've all heard of this technique from countless resources, but these are the one hundred questions I personally find the most useful when I'm looking to get to the bottom of a new character. Sometimes I print the pages out and fill the answers in old-skool-style, other times I simply consult the list and type the answers into a new doc, a sort of biographical dossier. Either way, I find it very useful to respond in the character's voice.

In my opinion, these questions are best answered after you've spent a chapter or two with your new characters. Doing them at the outset to create a new character is problematic—there's a temptation to address each and every one profoundly, which can lead to attribute overload! Some of them simply won't apply. Instead I like to fill this out when I think I know a new hero or heroine. I have a handle on their personality after a few scenes, especially if they've been interacting with the other character(s). That's when it's time to ask some deeper questions and figure out what life experiences and attitudes shaped their values, humor, goals, fears, temperament, and so forth. Some of these questions include:
  • How deeply does your job / social role define you as a person?
  • What are you the most hopeless at?
  • Whom would you contact first to share good news?
  • Have you undergone any dramatic physical transformations in your life?
  • What would you never do, no matter the price?
  • Who has hurt you the worst in your life, and how? Have you forgiven them?
  • What has the hero/heroine changed your mind about since you met?
  • What secret would you feel the most vulnerable sharing with anyone?
  • Why should the reader care about your story?

And so on. Anyhow, enjoy! It's an exhaustive list, but I always come away from this exercise with a better understanding of the people living in my head. I hope you will too.

Click here to view or download the PDF.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Sunday Puzzle

It's Sunday again, and you know what that means—time for me to rip off the puzzle segment from NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday!

Mustachioed enigmatologist
extraordinaire, Will Shortz
If you're a newcomer, each week on Weekend Edition Sunday, Will Shortz (the hardcore crossword puzzlers' almighty God) comes on the radio to do three things: share the solution to the previous week's puzzle, invite a winner who entered the correct answer to play another puzzle (usually word-related) on the air for word-nerdy prizes, and present everyone with the next week's puzzle (answers due in by Thursday afternoon via the WES website if you want a chance to play on the air).

Note: I never post the solutions on this blog…at least not before the submission deadline. I see lots of keyword traffic coming from people looking for the answers, which is at best impatient, and at worst, cheating. For shame.

Now without further ado, here's this week's new puzzle:

This Hat Rack Puzzle by Sam Lloyd was published 100 years ago in Woman's Home Companion: A hat room contains a wall with 49 pegs, arranged in a 7-by-7 square. The hat clerk has 20 hats that are to be hung on 20 different pegs. How many lines, containing four hats in a straight line, is it possible to produce? A line can go in any direction: horizontally, vertically or obliquely. To explain your answer, number the pegs in order, from 1 in the upper left corner to 49 in the lower right corner; list which pegs you put the 20 hats on, and give the total number of lines containing four hats in a row.

Click here to see the original puzzle posting, check the answer to last week's challenge, listen to the segment, or find the link to enter your answer.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Thrusty Thursday: David Gandy


Yeah, this is just shameless. No goofiness, irony, or cheek this week, just plain old man-hotness. Behold, the beauty of British model, David Gandy! The only thing that horrifies me is that he's younger than me, if only by ten months. For realz? He actually looks like he could give a woman an orgasm, which for some reason I have a hard time believing of anyone born in the eighties. Anyhow—here are several reasons I'll forgive him:


And before I go…

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Stuff that's good…

I spent so much of May in a rough mood, I wanted to write a post about stuff that's good. So without further ado, here are some awesome things.

1. A new season of The Bachelorette. My favorite guilty TV pleasure…until Instant Watcher posts another season of Celebrity Rehab, anyhow. I'm saving yesterday's episode for tomorrow afternoon, once I've hit my word count goal and tackled a bit of design freelance and wine o'clock rolls around. And whenever possible, I like to complement a new-sale bottle of champagne with an episode of The Bachelor or Bachelorette. I figure if I poison both my mind and body at once, they'll cancel each other out. So far this season I'm rooting for two of the dudes—West and JP. Not sure they've got the best chemistry with Ashley out of the whole group, but I hereby declare them my top-pick foxy front runners.

2. Neko Case. I've been listening to her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood practically non-stop for the past month. Love love love. It's already right up there in my moody-folky-chick-rock favorites list beside Patty Griffin's Flaming Red and Tori Amos' Boys for Pélé.

3. Weekly writing goals. In just the past three weeks I've switched from daily word count goals to a weekly one. It's tough to predict whether I'll be able to churn out 4,000 words before lunch, or struggle all day to type a measly 500, so instead of saying, "I'm going to write 2,000 words every day this week," I'm saying, "I'm going to write 10,000 words this week." It's an ambitious number for me, but I try to take weekends off from writing and editing (work-life-balance and all that) so if I'm still a thousand words short on Saturday morning, I can play a little catch up. I think the key has been not capping myself at 2K for any given day, as I used to, as once I'd hit that number, I was off the hook, mentally clocked out for the rest of the day. Now I think, "I hit 2,000 easily. Better push for 3,000 in case tomorrow brings a word drought." It's working great so far, and I recommend it to other writers with fluctuating daily counts. A good month for me used to 30,000 words, and now I'm looking poised to bank about 45K.

4. Dog the Bounty Hunter's autobiography. Well, his second autobiography, anyhow. I'm just about done with Where Mercy is Shown, Mercy is Given. I grabbed it randomly from the library and checked it out without shame. It's not a literary masterpiece, but it's endlessly entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt.

5. No sugar = I lost three pounds. Actually, I couldn't tell you if it's absence of sugar or my getting back into yoga and calisthenics in the past couple weeks, but I've lost weight. It's likely both, of course. But ditching the sugar has definitely reduced the random carb cravings. As with meat last month, I'm really not missing it—the odd wistful twinge as the manfriend enjoys a block of chocolate or an ice cream sandwich, but nothing I could classify as true temptation.

6. Klondike. I've absolutely re-addicted myself to Klondike. Found the nifty free Real Solitaire app for my iPad and both the manfriend and I can't quit. Every morning over coffee, over lunch, over beers while dinner's cooking, before bed… In fact, new Angry Birds Rio levels came out yesterday and we haven't even opened them yet—the deck's got us by the throats.

6. Crank 2. We watched this movie randomly because for whatever reason, Revolver (another Jason Statham movie) decided not to play on Instant Watcher. I can't remember the last time the manfriend was so delighted by a movie. We'd never seen the original Crank, but that didn't matter. This action movie was spastic, incessant, ridiculous, nearly seizure-inducing…but really fun. Plus it's got Statham in a fitted hoodie, running really fast, all throughout the movie. And you know what a fast-running, desperate man does to me. He also electrocutes himself with jumper cables every ten minutes or so, which I found oddly stirring.

Hope everyone's enjoying their Junes so far!

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Sunday Puzzle

It's Sunday again, and you know what that means—time for me to rip off the puzzle segment from NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday!

Mustachioed enigmatologist
extraordinaire, Will Shortz
If you're a newcomer, each week on Weekend Edition Sunday, Will Shortz (the hardcore crossword puzzlers' almighty God) comes on the radio to do three things: share the solution to the previous week's puzzle, invite a winner who entered the correct answer to play another puzzle (usually word-related) on the air for word-nerdy prizes, and present everyone with the next week's puzzle (answers due in by Thursday afternoon via the WES website if you want a chance to play on the air).

Note: I never post the solutions on this blog…at least not before the submission deadline. I see lots of keyword traffic coming from people looking for the answers, which is at best impatient, and at worst, cheating. For shame.

Now without further ado, here's this week's new puzzle:

From Mike Reiss, a former writer and producer for The Simpsons: Take the two-word title of a TV series. The first word contains a famous actor's first name in consecutive letters. The second word is a homophone for this actor's last name. Name the series and the actor.

Click here to see the original puzzle posting, check the answer to last week's challenge, listen to the segment, or find the link to enter your answer.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Thrusty Thursday: Bradley Cooper

It's almost too easy, isn't it?

The weird thing about Bradley Cooper is that despite being a massive fox, he's not particularly photogenic. I had a tough time finding a picture that did him justice. So if you haven't seen AliasThe Hangover, or the A-Team remake, take my word for it, he looks far thrustier in motion than static.

I had Cooper on the brain, as I'm working on a book with hero who's a bit of an unscrupulous layabout. Since I'm not attracted to Matthew McConaughey, it's been an appreciable relief to have recently discovered Cooper, who I find to be a more palatable flavor off that same sort of duuude menu of actors for casting characters in my head.

I'm busy today and could only bother to do the most cursory research on Cooper, and I must say, laziness aside, there's not much on him…though I do make it a point to avoid the toxic tabloid sites, so perhaps there's juicier stuff to be glommed outside of Wikipedia. The best I've got for you? He's thirty-six and fluent in French. Très bien!

Here's a short and highly unprofessional interview (pardon the stretch, it was that or use an embed with an ad) conducted by Cooper's Hangover co-star Zach Galifianakis. It ends in a slappy-man-bitch-fight, so don't miss that.


If you has, sends to me.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Jujube-Free June

Well, as Discipline Year was originally designed, this was supposed to be No Java June, but as I said yesterday, I'm hopeful I may be on deadline before long, and that's no time to invite caffeine withdrawal. Thus, I'm swapping June and July's challenges [read: delaying the inevitable torture of giving up coffee].

So June is the month of no sugar. That is to say, no significant added sugar. Obviously, fruit is full of sugar and I'm not giving up fruit. I mean sweets—candy, pastries, drinks with sugar added—as well as packaged foods with sugar (or sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, etc.) listed as one of the first five ingredients OR with more than five grams of sugar per serving listed on the nutrition facts.

I just inventoried my kitchen, and was sad to discover these parameters rule out my favorite soup (six grams of sugar per serving, meaning the meals I make it into have twelve grams!) our usual barbecue sauce (eleven grams of sugar in two tablespoons!) and the not-as-lovely-as-I'd-thought Yellow Thai Curry Sauce from Trader Joe's (a relatively low six grams, but sugar is listed third, after water and canola oil—ewww). There are other places you wouldn't expect to find added sugar either, such as in crackers and pre-made pasta sauce. I'm a little worried about the latter, as it's a staple in our house. I've got a lot of label-reading to do this month.

We'll be getting farm share veggie boxes starting next week, and I'll be royally bummed if the Indian simmer sauces I rely on to dress up surfeits of less thrilling vegetables are packed with sugar…I don't have any jars of the stuff in the house at the moment, so I'm not sure. But I suppose I could make facsimiles with tomato paste and curry and cumin and onions and salt and cream and so forth. I suspect I may be in for a few disappointments when I go to the grocery store tomorrow.

I'd like to make a goal for how much sugar I'll aim to take in each day, but I'm not entirely sure where to set the bar. I think I'll keep an eye on it for the first few days, and go from there. Today I've only had breakfast so far and I'm up to four grams—two grams from a slice of spelt toast, and two grams from a couple of tablespoons almond butter (where is the almond butter getting its sugar? the only ingredients are roasted almonds and sea salt!) Thank goodness half and half is sugar-free, as is my taste in coffee. So perhaps twenty-five grams of sugar per day? That seems ambitious yet reasonable. I'll workshop it, though I don't want to make myself crazy keeping track of the math, either. Most of what I cook for dinner is from scratch, and the individual vegetables don't come with nutrition labels. Thank goodness brown rice has zero grams of sugar or we'd be screwed—we eat that with half our dinners.

Want to hear something terrifying? A tall (that means small) Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino contains thirty-four grams of sugar. That's without whipped cream. Even more horrific, a CAN of Mountain Dew has FORTY-SIX grams of sugar! All of it added, of course, as there's no fruit in there, just some citrus flavor chemicals they probably engineer in a bunker in Newark. That's nearly two days' worth of sugar, by my experiment's standards, in a twelve-ounce can. And in a Super Big Gulp of the stuff? About 150 grams (if you add ice—otherwise closer to 170). Shudder. Get your shit together, America.

Now those two examples aren't a temptation for me, but alcohol had been a worry. I assumed wine was packed with natural sugars, and though no sugar is added, a serving would still have exceeded my five-gram-per-serving limit. But no! A glass of merlot, for example, has only about one gram of sugar. Score! A sweeter wine, like riesling, has closer to five or six grams per glass. Beer is trickier. I found it very difficult to sniff out specific sugar content for various brews, but it looks like although beer is high in carbohydrates (often twenty or more grams per bottle) sugar makes up a relatively small portion of those carbs (between two and four grams, in the handful of examples I found). So beer isn't especially safe, if only because it's so hard to know what you're consuming, but it's not as decadent as I'd feared. And generally the maltier the beer, the more sugar it contains, and I prefer crisp, dry beers. But I think we're good—let summer commence!