Final Star Wars: Episode VII Mood

Eppu

In our area, there were Episode VII showings pretty much continuously starting from 7 p.m. last night. I was ever so briefly tempted to go from viewing to viewing straight through the night. But no.

FB The Dark Side of Force 5 More Mins

No, we didn’t go.* Instead, we’re about to head out to a noon showing. It remains to be seen how many others we’ll have to fight for seats decided to wait till daytime on the official release day.

How early did you see The Force Awakens? Do tell!

*) I think we’re both at that stage where, rather than do something right the moment it’s possible, we prefer to take our creature comforts into consideration. (Especially sleep, much like an old cat. Yay for old cats!)

Image via The Dark Side of the Force on Facebook

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The Return of the Bread Pudding

Erik

For our final Star Wars rewatch, here’s a sweet but simple bread pudding.

The Return of the Bread Pudding

Ingredients

  • Stale bread, any kind, enough to make 4-5 cups loosely packed cubes
  • 4 egss
  • 1 tablespoon rum
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 3 cups milk

Cut the bread into chunks and press into a buttered baking dish until well packed in.

Beat the eggs, rum, sugar, and spices together until well mixed.  Add the milk and beat well.

Pour the milk mixture over the breadcrumbs. Press down the top with a spatula or spoon to make sure the liquid is well distributed.

Let sit for half an hour, pressing again occasionally, until the liquid is thoroughly absorbed by the bread.

For best results, set the baking dish inside a larger dish of water to make a water bath, ensuring that the level of the water reaches up to the top of the pudding. If this is not practical, you can just bake the pudding in its dish, but be aware that the edges may get crusty.

Bake at 350F / 175 C for 1 and 1/4 hours.

Serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream.

 

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Our Star Wars Rewatch Project: Epsidode VI

Erik

Our Star Wars rewatch concludes with Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.

1. Best Fight

Eppu: The space battle above Endor! Epic! (Even if it’s modeled after aerial dogfights, but nostalgia…)

151217atstErik: Ewoks vs. stormtroopers. I know some people think it’s too silly, but I disagree. The rebellion vs. the empire was always a case of guts and inventiveness vs. industry and regimentation. The fact that the empire never even considered that the ewoks could be a threat was their undoing. Besides, there’s nothing like seeing an imperial walker get smushed between two dropping logs.

2. Best Line

Erik: “I don’t know. Fly casual.” Han’s approach to life in five words.

Eppu: “How are we doing?” Luke: “Same as always.” Han: “That bad, huh?”

3. Best Minor Character

Eppu: This may be a little corny, but Admiral Ackbar! (“It’s a trap!”)

Erik: The commander in charge of the Death Star construction. He seems like a well-organized, conscientious leader, just the sort of person you’d want to put in charge of such a huge project. Too bad he works for a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship.

4. Best Reveal

Erik: R2-D2 was carrying Luke’s lightsaber in Jabba’s palace all along. The moment that lightsaber handle pops up out of the droid’s top is the moment when “Luke, you naive idiot!” turns into “Luke, you cunning bastard!”

LG_CRACK lennongirl Han epi626

Eppu: A two-parter: Luke finds out on Dagobah that Leia’s his sister, and Leia tells Han that Luke’s her brother. Mostly the latter because of the expression on Han’s face (click, click, click… you can see the wheels turning).

5. Best Save

Eppu: Chewie and ewoks commandeering a walker on Endor and turning its guns against the Imperial troops. Pew pew!

Erik: Luke Force-floating C-3PO in the ewok village to convince the ewoks to let them go. C-3PO’s mid-air freak-out pushes it just far enough over the top to go from ridiculous to hilarious.

6. Best Visual

151217MFErik: The Millennium Falcon racing the fireball out of the exploding Death Star. It still gets me on the edge of my seat.

Eppu: The rebel fleet coming out of hyperspace to attack the new Death Star.

Extra: Best Guess for an Episode VII Hook

Eppu: Leia’s become a Jedi. Her title has been revealed to be General, which lines up nicely with her holo-message line to Obi-Wan in Episode IV (“General Kenobi. Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars…”).

[And a week after writing the above, the world came crashing down: J.J. Abrams revealed in an interview with IGN (as reported by Moviepilot) that Leia chose to lead the rebellion instead of becoming a Jedi. Ohwell.]

Erik: Palpatine has been pulling the rebellion’s strings all along. He’s a master manipulator who can foresee the future. Did he have a contingency plan for Vader’s betrayal and his own (apparent?) death? Are his dead(?) hands still pulling the strings?

Images: Ewok log trap via History Bomb. Han’s bafflement via lennongirl / LG-CRACK on LiveJournal. Millennium Falcon escaping Death Star via Starscream & Hutch

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Leena Krohn on The New Yorker’s Best of 2015

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Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction, an anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, made it onto The New Yorker‘s best-of list!

Cheeky Frawg krohn-cover-largeJoshua Rothman writes of his selection of Krohn for The Books We Loved in 2015 like this:

“I also found myself hypnotized by Leena Krohn, a Finnish writer whose collected stories and novels, rendered into English by many different translators, have just been published as a single volume, ‘Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction.’ Broadly speaking, Krohn is a speculative writer; one of the novels in the collection, for example, consists of thirty letters written from an insect city. (‘It is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face.’) Krohn writes like a fantastical Lydia Davis, in short chapters the length of prose poems. Her characters often have a noirish toughness; one, explaining her approach to philosophy, says that when she asks an existential question, ‘life answers. It is generally a long and thorough answer.’”

Just a week ago, Krohn’s anthology appeared on The A.V. Club‘s Best of 2015 list (along with The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen). Again, congratulations!

Found via Helsingin Sanomat.

P.S. Try Krohn’s Lucilia Illustris for free, published in December 2015 by Electric Literature.

Image via Cheeky Frawg Books

Star Wars and the Classics, Part II: The Original Trilogy

Erik1 Comment

151216vaseYesterday we looked at how classical literature offers interesting ways of looking at the Star Wars prequel movies. We continue today with the original movies.

Episode IV: A New Hope – Homer, the Odyssey, Books 14-22

Episode IV can be read, from a certain point of view, as an essay in heroism. In particular, we see three different kinds of heroes: the always-was-a-hero, the becoming-a-hero, and the choosing-to-be-a-hero.

Leia is the always-was. She is a hero from the beginning of the movie straight through to the end. We never see her stop being heroic, even when being rescued. She has been part of the rebellion literally since she was born and even the destruction her homeworld doesn’t stop her.

Luke is the becoming. He starts as just a farmboy who dreams of far-off adventure. When he discovers his true heritage he strives to live up to the legacy of his father Anakin the great Jedi. Much is expected of him and he does his best to be the hero that people like Obi-Wan and Leia need him to be.

Han is the choosing-to-be. He’s a smuggler and scoundrel who isn’t in it for the rebellion. He just wants to do a job and get paid. He could have just flown away from Yavin with his hold full of cash and nobody would have been surprised. Instead, he decides to come back and help Luke blow up the Death Star.

The same three kinds of heroes appear in the Odyssey. In Book 14, Odysseus has just made it safely home to Ithaca but is still in disguise, getting the lay of the land and figuring out how to deal with the suitors who have been gorging themselves in his hall. The next few books follow Odysseus as he gathers allies, makes plans, and finally confronts the suitors in the final battle in Book 22.

Odysseus is here the always-was. He is a veteran of the great war at Troy and a cunning warrior. He begins the epic as a hero and never falters. Nothing stops him in his determination to get home and reclaim his place as king. Books 14-22 show him as a steady, crafty commander, biding his time and waiting for the right moment to strike.

Odysseus’ son Telemachus is the becoming. As the epic begins, he is just entering manhood and starting to take his first tentative steps into his father’s old role. For Telemachus, the Odyssey is all about proving that he is a worthy son to a heroic father that he knows only through stories. In this stretch of the epic he finally meets his father and proves that he can live up to his example.

The choosing-to-be hero of the Odyssey is Eumaeus, swineherd to Odysseus’ house and one of the servants who remains loyal to Odysseus, even when his master has been gone for twenty years. The sensible thing for Eumaeus to do would have been to abandon Odysseus and suck up to the suitors, like many of the other servants do, to secure his place in the household when Penelope eventually marries one of them. Instead, he sticks by his old master and helps him take back his home.

Continue reading →

Star Wars and the Classics, Part I: The Prequels

Erik1 Comment

151215stormStar Wars takes many of its cues from mythology and classical history. Here’s some recommended reading if you want to see how themes from the classics found their way to a galaxy long ago and far, far away.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace – Homer, the Iliad, Book 1

I can still remember my feeling of anticipation when I first sat in the theatre to watch The Phantom Menace. We’d waited years to get the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace. We were going back in time to a more civilized age, a golden age of Jedi knights and the sophistication of the galactic republic.

The screen went dark. John Williams’s fanfare blasted from the speakers. The opening text began to scroll up from the bottom. This was everything we had been waiting for!

So what’s this crap about taxation of outlying trade routes? Huh? What is this, Accounting Wars?

The story began. We saw Jedi sitting in a conference room waiting for some cowardly bureaucrats to come and talk turkey. My heart sank in disappointment. (And we hadn’t even gotten to Jar-Jar Binks yet.)

It took many more years and several viewings of Episode I for me to appreciate what George Lucas was doing in this movie. There is a point here and it’s an important one: momentous events don’t start out looking momentous. Terrible things happen because no one is paying close enough attention to stop them when they’re small enough to be managed; only when they roll out of control do people realize what’s happening. Of course the fall of the galactic empire started because of a minor trade dispute and a lonely boy from a desert planet in the middle of nowhere. It could have started in any number of ways, but they all would have seemed just as trivial.

(Mind you, this doesn’t actually make Phantom Menace any better as a movie. It’s still plagued by terrible dialogue, wooden acting, and disturbing racial caricatures. But as a storytelling choice, it’s interesting.)

The classic mythic example of small causes leading to momentous and terrible events is the Trojan War. While pieces of the story are told in many different sources, there’s no single work that covers the entire war. Book 1 of the Iliad, however, puts us in the middle of the action to watch the last act of the war unfold. I’ve written about Book 1 of the Iliad here before, but it’s one of those texts that rewards going back to again and again.

As the Iliad opens, the Trojan war has already been going on for ten years. What we witness here is the conflict between two of the Greek captains, Achilles and Agamemnon. It begins when Agamemnon refuses to ransom a captive woman back to her father. By the end of the book, Achilles has withdrawn his forces from the fighting, which will swing the war in the Trojans’ favor, leading to the near defeat of the Greek forces, the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and Achilles slaying the Trojan prince Hector in madness and grief. The death of Hector robbed the Trojans of their best warrior and sealed the fate of Troy. And it all flows from a dispute over the ransoming of a prisoner from an outlying village.

Continue reading →

Stadi Wars – The Empire Attacks Helsinki

Eppu

Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Finnish daily, celebrates the impending Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens premier with a special piece. Titled Stadi Wars (stadi being a slang name for Helsinki), it shows what the city would look like if the Empire were to attack Helsinki.

Helsingin Sanomat Stadi Wars Senate Square
What if the Senate Square in Helsinki were attacked by the Empire via Helsingin Sanomat

Apart from photos, video, and 3d-renderings of Imperial transports, Helsingin Sanomat interviewed a member of The Finnish Reserve Officers’ Federation and got his opinion on how the Finnish army would fare against stormtroopers.

Even if you don’t read Finnish, the page is worth a visit for the very cool photos of Imperial walkers and ships set against a modern cityscape.

Images, video and graphics by Boris Stefanov, Uolevi Holmberg, and Petri Salmén via Helsingin Sanomat

In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.

Travel: Small Groups on Foot

Erik1 Comment

151214BoromirDespite what you may have heard from certain Gondorian captains, one does sometimes have to simply walk into Mordor.

In the first installment of the travel series we looked at some basic issues involved in travel in a pre-industrial world. Today we tackle the kind of travel that most people did most of the time in the pre-modern world: overland journeys by foot in small groups (or alone). We have a few basic questions to ask: How far could they go? How fast could they get there? How much stuff could they take with them? And what did it take to make the journey successfully?

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The Empanada Strikes Back

Erik

Empanadas are often savory and filled with meat, but for our Star Wars rewatch I made this sweet variety filled with caramel and apple.

The Empanadas Strike Back

Crust

Ingredients

  • 1 cup milk
  • 3/4 cup butter or shortening
  • 1 package dry yeast
  • 3 cups flour
  • pinch of salt
  • pinch of cinnamon

Heat the milk in a saucepan until bubbles form on the top.

Add the butter and let stand 10 minutes until butter is melted.

Stir in the yeast and let stand another 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and cinnamon. Make a well in the center and pour in the milk mixture. Stir until it forms a ball.

Turn out onto a floured surface and knead well, adding flour as needed.

Let rise in a warm place for 30 minutes to an hour.

Punch down the dough, turn it out on a floured surface for another quick knead, then divide into sixteen small balls. Flatten these balls out into six-inch circles and place them on parchment paper on baking sheets.

 

Filling

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons water
  • 2 tablespoons cream
  • 2 medium apples

You will want to fill and bake your empanadas as soon as the filling is ready, so preheat the oven to 425 F / 220 C while you work.

Peel, core, and finely dice the apples.

Place the sugar and water in a shallow saucepan and stir until the sugar is well dissolved.

Put the pan on medium heat. Large bubbles will eventually give way to smaller bubbles. Stir gently as the sugar mixture begins to brown.

When the caramel has reached a golden brown, add the cream and mix well.

Add the apple pieces and stir well.

Place a generous tablespoonfull of filling centered on one half of each dough circle. Fold the dough over and press the edges together with your fingers, then crimp the edge with the tines of a fork.

Bake for 20 minutes or until beginning to brown. You can continue to cook them as they are until golden brown (about five more minutes) or take them out, glaze them with egg, and return them to the oven to finish baking.

 

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!