Groan! Too many belly laughs

Much as I would have liked an early night tonight, I am forced to sit up a while to relieve the pressure upon my distended belly. I've just been out to dinner with a few young gorgeous bloggers (TJ, Foo, Zoe and Dean), celebrating Dean's 5th blogbirthday.

A small but jolly party, we made the walls of La Pasa in Canberra City ring with snarky laughter as we caught up on lots of stories that never get blogged and revisited quite a few that have. I highly recommend La Pasa as a restaurant. It served modern Singapore cuisine, and lots of it. We did the usual Aussie thing of ordering a dish each to share, and were gobsmacked at the size of the dishes when they arrived. The following photo really does no justice to the food, but it gives you an idea:

From left to right: Sesame chicken (with a sweet vinegary sauce); deep-fried prawns with peach (in a mustard sauce); tofu combination; Some kind of deep-fried curried chicken (actually nicer than it sounds); and some very nice duck. Yes, we went a bit overboard on the deep fried stuff, and we'll all suffer for it tomorrow, but it was all very delicious, and while we couldn't finish the dishes, we picked companionably at them after we'd finished until we were really finished, and then somehow had to wheel ourselves out onto the street. Oh, and I forgot to mention that we had entrees too, most notably duck pancakes. Oh, little piggies we!

TJ is looking better than her blog, which seems to be in malfunction land, Foo was quietly droll with some terrific jokes, Zoe was in fine form and Dean was very happy to have made 5 years. I didn't recognise Dean when he walked in, because he was dressed in a suit and a very smart grey wool coat, and I usually see him in t-shirts and jeans. He's Bumblebee's favorite new adult acquaintance at the moment, because I invited him to B's birthday party (they'd bonded really well at the piratey blogmeet last year) and he turned up with not one, but TWO lightsabres as a birthday present. That went down in the Annals of Birthday, I can tell you.

Groan! I have a sweet greasy after-taste lingering in my mouth, and want my belly rubbed soothingly by cats... time to lie down with a very easy-to-read book. I'm reading Liam Hearn's Otori trilogy at the moment. My lovely old nana asked my son what he wanted for Christmas last year and he said 'Deltora', meaning Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest series. She thought he said 'Otori', having just read the series and loved them. So she gave him the books, and they're way too old for him. Still, they're quick and easy. I've been using them as my lying-in-the-bath books, but they're perfect right now for a sore-bellied duck who doesn't want to think too hard and has to waddle off to bed.

OMGWTF

Happy Blogbirthday to Dean, at Canberra's Elsewhere Today, who has today been blogging for the awesome time of FIVE YEARS.

I guess that makes him one of the grandaddies of blogosphere, and yet he's still young and pretty. May he continue externalizing memory for many moons yet.

Wunderkammer: 1. The Pencil

Wunderkammer: a series celebrating the almost lost…

Did you hear the one about the pencil?
Nah, it’s pointless.

These days lead pencils seem to be used mainly by school children and artists. Most writing by adults is done on computers, with a pen occasionally dragged out of the top drawer to sign the bottom of the page or make quick corrections before typing again.

But there’s a lot to be said for the humble pencil. Let’s stop to celebrate this small piece of basic technology:

-- Lead pencils aren’t actually made from lead, and haven’t been since the 16th century. They’re made from graphite.

-- The first mass-produced pencils were made in Nuremberg in Germany in 1662.

-- A pencil mark is archivally stable, and will last longer than the paper it is on.

-- A pencil can write in zero gravity, upside down and under water.

-- Your average pencil can write 45,000 words, or draw a line about 56 kms long.

-- You don’t need an instruction manual to use one.

Cheap, light, portable and easy to use… who could ask for more?

[Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla]

Postscript: Since posting this at Sars, I've been told of the most wonderful pencil sites: Pencil Revolution, Dave's Mechanical Pencils and Leadholder: The Drafting Pencil Museum. Worth visiting from time to time!

PPS: Yes, took the photo myself. Didn't want to sharpen it first because I like the smoothness of the virgin wood :)

Golb is blog spelled backwards

My time-waster site of the day is called Judge a book by its cover. Lots of excellent pulp fiction covers from all genres. Right on.

Sarsaparilla

Hey, there's a new group blog in town! Check it out now, funk soul brother.

A small imposition

It's the 9th anniversary of Jeff Buckley's tragic death tomorrow, a close friend pointed out to me yesterday, so the soundtrack for my weekend has been Grace. That, combined with *finally* pasting together the mockups for my poetry volumes, has made the past two days very pleasant.

After that initial outburst of happiness back in February, the poetry books are progressing, but slowly. I'm in the process of applying for some funding to help me get them happening, and it seems that whomever I talk to in the Canberra arts community, they're applying too... and all I can say on that front is that Loadedog feels my pain.

But! The up side of filling out a grant application is that it's forcing me to really nut out the details of my project, and if I want to ask for money for paper, I have to work out exctly how much paper I need. And that has forced me to finally sit down and make the mock-ups.

A mock-up, for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, is the backbone of planning a book. You can't just plan it in a computer and do it; you have to make a real 3D model to see how it flows, with at least a sample of how the fonts look and the margins ruled up. Because I'll be printing the text four pages at a time, I've made a big rectangle of paper that is twice the height of my pages, and the width of a double-page spread, then folded the paper in half and in half again. That gives me a page section that looks like 8 pages without their tops cut through. Then I've pasted the poems (with a computer-generated layout to simulate the fonts I'm using) onto the pages in order, taking into account the inner folds.

Here's a diagram for those who are *really* confused:


Now that they're made, I can unfold the page and see which way to set up my type to print four pages at once... or where an image is to be inserted, etc.



As you can see, half your layout is right-side up, the other upside-down. If you get this wrong, the whole book fails. Each folded piece of 8 pages is a section, and this is what will be trimmed and sewn together during the binding process.

So there you are, a quick lesson in how to work out your page layout and type imposition. Bonus!

Yes, Virginia, it is

cartoon, originally uploaded by Ampersand Duck.

A cartoon I drew about ten years ago; gave the original to a friend and felt like having my own copy again, so I redid it. Probably not as good as the original, but hey, it's the thought that counts.

(I've been so goddam polite on this blog lately; thought I'd inject some humour again.)