gabrielle zevin writes

friday nonsense, no. 10: my parents’ pre-oscar dinner menu with puns. Having seen The Help, I’m a bit worried about the dessert. Mom and Dad have been making awesomely bad food puns for years.

Hello Fellow Cinemaphiles,

  

Please join us for Pre-Oscar Dinner on Friday, February 25^th.

Nominations are:

 

Appetizer: 

Eggstremely good and incredible caviar

 

Entrée:

Scallops are better than War Horse meat

 

Side Dish:

The Descendants ate pineapple and rice

 

Dessert:

Just say no to The Help’s Pie

 

Please let The punny Artist know whether the envelope will say “yes, we’re coming, but no more bad puns please” or “no way”

 

Mom and Dad

monday obsessions no. 4: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman is just plain wonderful. 

friday nonsense, no. 9: my dog, nico, would rather not pose with my mom’s portrait of him.

wednesday narcissism, no. 7: anya on tragedy

hipsterbookquotes:

Submitted by notesfromagloe.

monday obsessions no. 3: Another Earth. Loved the writing and the performances in this 2011 Sundance winner, which you can now see on DVD, etc. 

friday nonsense no. 8: anthropomorphized dogs. Elsewhere readers will know that anthropomodogs are my weakness.

firsttimeuser:

William Wegman at Work © Madeleine de Sinéty

thursday chocolate, no. 8: this one’s about coffee, which frequent readers of my various ramblings will know I prefer to chocolate anyway. According to this piece on NPR, Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, used to decapitate people for drinking coffee!

Other interesting bits:

“If you look at the rhetoric about drugs that we’re dealing with now — like, say, crack — it’s very similar to what was said about coffee,” Stewart Allen, author of The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, tells The Salt. In Murad’s Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would inspire indecent behavior. As the bean moved west into Europe, physicians rallied against it, claiming that coffee would “dry up the cerebrospinal fluid” and cause paralysis.

But apparently the motivation was really political:

Monarchs and tyrants publicly argued that coffee was poison for the bodies and souls of their subjects, but Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — says their real concern was political. 

 “Coffee has a tendency to loosen people’s imaginations … and mouths,” he tells The Salt.

And inventive, chatty citizens scare dictators.

According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

“He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,” says Allen.

British anti-coffee manifesto from the 17th century:

npr:

Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head!

Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement.

But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword.

Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense.

The sultan was so intent on eradicating coffee that he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with a hundred-pound broadsword. Unfortunate coffee drinkers were decapitated as they sipped.

Murad IV’s successor was more lenient. The punishment for a first offense was a light cudgeling. Caught with coffee a second time, the perpetrator was sewn into a leather bag and tossed in the river.

But people still drank coffee. Even with the sultan at the front door with a sword and the executioner at the back door with a sewing kit, they still wanted their daily cup of joe. And that’s the history of coffee in a bean skin: Old habits die hard. —Adam Cole

thursday chocolate no. 7: the prettiest petit four of the day accompanied by a Dorothy Parker poem to temper the sweetness:

Cherry White

I never see that prettiest thing-
A cherry bough gone white with Spring-
But what I think, “How gay ‘twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”

Poor Mrs. Parker and her suicidal tendencies. For further explorations in Mrs. Parker, I recommend The Portable Dorothy Parker. I loved Dorothy Parker when I was a teenager.

Wondering whether this poem is too depressing to post. Then again, literature is dark, people. I don’t think I even knew what depression was until I read The Catcher in the Rye at age 12.

(via yummiliciousfood)