Come friendly bombs » Uncategorized

The boys are back

admin — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:35:59 +0000

Their reports, that is. The boys themselves never left, more’s the pity. So the reports are back, though not necessarily monthly. There used to be a rationale for such regular updates on their pooping and so forth, as the pace of change in each (boy, not iteration of poop — though, come to think of it, that too) was so quick. That rate of change has slackened a great deal, but some token documentation on a regular basis still needs to be done. So we’re taking this up again on Come friendly bombs, though maybe more like quarterly than monthly. Or whatever the mood will bear. We’ll see. Let’s get down to it:

McQueen cake dry run

Today Adam is five Malkoviching years old. This frankly freaks us out. It seems so recently that he was that tiny wrinkled red squalling stick of a baby that would fit on your forearm, fragile egg of a head in your palm, non-existent ass in the crook of your pitying elbow. He changed so fast in those days, changes that were a major impetus behind the founding of isoglossia to begin with. The changes that come now are not so outwardly visible but impressive on the inside — the curiosity, the swelling cerebral cortex, the incessant earworms. He’s FIVE and sitting here at my feet singing “Jingle Bells” in a constant, error-ridden loop, and making me question my dogmatic abhorrence of Christmas. I feel I ought to have put together something a bit more momentous in recognition of this milestone, but this is what I was able to throw together.

Element boy

Adam’s recent obsessions include the scientific, as we see here in his proud displaying of “THE BEST PRESENT EVER, BETTER THAN TWO MCQUEENS”, a Bulgarian-language periodic table of the elements, upon which he’s become fixated lately. He’s also been making great progress with reading and writing, though the quantum leap is still in the offing in both areas.

Vex me not sorely

Alek? You have been pissing us off lately. First of all, this potty-training opt-out is just not on. May the Malkoviching first we put you on the potty, with the goal being a September start date for Kindergarten. Now it’s clear that it’s not going to happen for a January enrollment. You’ve been making all kinds of progress, sure, but evolving more sophisticated ways of making your older brother howl in pain or frustration is not the kind of progress we consider productive. The poop goes in the POTTY. Get on that.

Thomas the tractor beam

Worse yet, your sleeping schedule has deteriorated as your behavior has become more chaotic, willful, violent, and generally Tasmanian. You were a great sleeper as a baby, in stark contrast to Adam, but as a two year old you frankly suck.

Sorry, three year old — in a month you’ll be three and it seems like those god damn terrible twos just become more and more unbearable for you and for us.

Quit that thrashing.

SHUT UP.

Oh, all RIGHT. Here’s your Malkoviching choklit mook at zero four hunnerd you unspeakable pants-shitting baby. I am tempted to hold any further reports hostage until you agree to our demands: release your deuces into the proper receptacle.

Airborne toxic event

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:16:56 +0000

Chili chop

Because you have chosen to live in a country which inexplicably refuses to import Sriracha chili sauce, and because your dependence upon Scoville units shows no signs of abating, and because you are the sort who is not afraid to experiment with a blender, you have created an airborne toxic event in the kitchen. With a result rather pleasingly similar to the authentic product, the chunky widemouth seedy one, the one you prefer to the smooth and squeezable one, the one which is even harder to obtain. So you made some. Once the coughing had subsided and it was safe to go back into the kitchen (about 90 minutes after you first took the lid off the blender and inhaled, you ridiculous, hacking moron), you found it was pretty god damned good.

Here’s how you will do it again:

You will need
– a can of peeled tomatoes. I know, I know. This is not tomato sauce you are making, but consider this the substrate, highly necessary to dilute the hell you will release from
– a bunch of the hottest, reddest, deadliest chilies you can obtain; enough to fill your two hands
– some garlic, say, four, five, six cloves, unless you want a lot more
– a few minims of salt
– a glug of vinegar. Ideally the stuff left over from that jar of peperoncini you just finished
– a tiny jar
– a zip-lock bag

Half-empty

Drain the tomatoes and thrown them in the blender with the garlic and salt. Blend the hell out of that shit. Coarsely chop the chilies and add them to the mix. Blend slowly, monitoring the consistency — you want the chilies to retain a little bit of chunkiness. CAREFULLY removing the lid, pour in a little vinegar. CAREFULLY replacing the lid, continue to blend, adding more vinegar if necessary, until the mixture is a chunky, spoonable, chili hell.

The catch — shelf life and potency are at odds. The quantity you have just made is far more than any sane person could use before it goes fizzy, and not in a good way. So spoon a small, sane-person amount into a five-ounce jar and keep it in the fridge. The rest goes into the zip-lock and is frozen.

Congratulations, pinhead! You have learned how to utterly disable both your lungs and your tastebuds with a single stone. When you have depleted the little jar’s supply, thaw the zip-lock, refill the jar, and refreeze the balance. This batch should last until real Sriracha becomes available again.

While reasonably close to the real thing, this is not identical to Sriracha. Around our house this variant is known as ‘my mouth is the fire’ sauce.

Close this

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:25:25 +0000

Get off my back

So a friend and colleague writes, is it worth my time to upgrade the bitwrathploob wordpress installation, or has the project come to a close? and I’m all like, really? BITWRATHPLOOB is running WordPress? Doesn’t he know how open to exploits that is? but whatever. And no. No. No no no no no. The BITWRATHPLOOB project is no way, shape, or bucktoothed rope-armed troll-haired woodbear form, pantsless or otherwise, coming to ‘a close’. Hello? This is the BITWRATHPLOOB we are talking about. This woodbear will be pantslessly circling the globe when we are all forgotten ashes. This peripatetic rope-armed monstrosity did not touch down in Denmark, Denver, D.C., NovafrickinGorica, Cantabria, Albion, Beijing, Aotearoa, Benelux, and Hawaii, with side trips to countless other colorful locales only to become becalmed in Bulgaria of all places. Okay, he’s enjoyed his stay, maybe overstayed his welcome a wee bit, but ‘a close’? Please. The BITWRATHPLOOB will be moving on.

Takers?

What do you think I meant?

Owly adopter

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:46:36 +0000

Sad mouseless lad

Apple shop owner: Hello. What is your name? Can you say ‘hello’?
Adam: [frost]
Apple shop owner: I said ‘hello’. Look, I have a present for you!
Adam: HELLO! [accepts Apple-branded mousepad]
A few minutes later…
Adam: Papa, now I need a MOUSE.
…
And a COMPUTER.
…
And I think I am ready for a KEYBOLD.

Still a bit baffled by his liquid phonemes, ‘owly’ is how Adam still pronounces ‘early’; so his oft-requested Thomas the Tank Engine video, “Thomas: The Early Years” comes out “Owly Yewills’. Laffs.

[NB: Sofia has two authorized Apple shops. Neither one is readily Googleable even if you know they exist. Enter a string like apple mac computer sales service sofia bulgaria and you will not turn up links to either iStyle, the trendy boutique at Rakovski and Graf Ignatief in the heart of the center, nor Creative Center, the far more utilitarian and service-oriented place (excellent service, I might add -- these guys replaced my logic board competently, quickly, and for free) on Ul. Svetoslav Terter. Why these guys, of all places, are not search engine optimized I do not know, but maybe they'll be slightly more Googleable now via this addendum.]

'Can it be two words?'*

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:05:21 +0000

Not actual size, more's the pity

So it’s another Sandwich Party, is it?

For the first time, I am letting someone else do the sandwich construction for this Sandwich Party. At Sandwich Parties past I painstakingly constructed, or reminisced about, or at least observed the preparation of, sandwiches to which I had some sort of deep psychic connection.

This, on the other hand, is the Leprechaun Burger.

The plan had been to run some errands downtown and cap the morning with lunch at Murphy’s Irish Pub, in the heart of downtown Sofia. Just to the left of Murphy’s's front door is a brass plaque attesting to the fact that it was constructed by genuine Irishmen and lovingly reconstructed here in the heart of the Balkans, Leprechaun Burgers and all. Given that Magda has done little but extol the virtues of the Leprechaun Burger since having one last spring, I fully expected that we would order two, allowing me to photograph the pair of them with the Guinness tap in background bokeh and puckishly title this post ‘Sandwich Parity’, but at the last minute she pulled ye olde switcheroo on me and called for an open face smoked salmon & scrambled egg confection.

Ye olde switcheroo

This sandwich treason aside, we had a very pleasant lunch, Leprechaun Burger notwithstanding. It is exceedingly unusual for us to be able to get away at all, and this being our second lunch out in a month makes this autumn a high-water mark for shaking the kids from around our ankles. Murphy’s, as the plaque should attest, is plenty authentic, right down to the eye-watering smoke and rugby projected onto the wall. They certainly know how to wreck a burger.

TASTING NOTES

Always after me Lucky Charms...

The sandwich arrives with an accompanying miasma of tobacco fumes and liberal ‘f*cks’ and ‘c*nts’. A tiny wee coy stoneware pitcher of ketchup gestures helplessly beside a pile of coolish steak-cut fries, while a coterie of recently frozen onion rings gazes jealously askance. Two reasonable looking slices of plum tomato on the plate give the impression that they wish to have no truck with the burger, which, upon opening, is revealed to be dressed with two shy ringlets of onion and a rather embarrassed pickle slice. The burger hunkers beneath its doughy upper bun. On picking the sandwich up, one is struck by the bun’s surprising amount of give. A squeeze to consolidate … the first bite reveals a puckish quality — not the Midsummer Night’s Dream puckish, the Canadian winter sporting spectacle puckish. This first impression is borne out upon further investigation, if not by actual eating to the usual conclusion.

It is a pub burger. It is accompanied by beer not much warmer than the pub fries, beer charged with nitrogen, whose creamy, foamy head forgives all. Almost all.

I may have failed to point out that this sandwich is called the Leprechaun Burger.

I hope that some sort of bonus points will be awarded for my refraining from gratuitous insertion of the word ‘shillelagh’ into this post.

* From a Tina Fey interview. Asked for the funniest word, she responded with the title’s question and ‘hamburger sandwich.’

Simon goes back to basics in Belgium

Erik’s Spanish cheeseburger

Jane’s grilled cheese

North Pole missive

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:48:49 +0000

This may feel like jumping the gun, but Thanksgiving has already come and gone here in Sofia, and with kids the pressure to get one’s ducks in a row is a bit more intense, particularly as expectations escalate. So we resorted to the oldest^[1] trick^[2] in the book: ask the kids to tell Santa what they want for Christmas and then arrange to intercept the intelligence for parental exploitation. Here Adam lets the boreal fat man^[3] know about a little something he’d like to find under the tree on Christmas morning:

(For those of you who lost track during isoglossia’s long hiatus, Adam will be five in two weeks.)

Now Alek, six weeks shy of three, gets his turn (sort of):

These kids get harder to please all the time.

Macroblogging ≠ Britney*

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:00:14 +0000

An enormous, warm, and somewhat nervous welcome to any visitors to the new site. It has been a long time coming. The heavily Slovenia-specific theme of www.isoglossia.com has been out of date, graphically and geographically, for nearly a year and a half. Dithering over the priorities of updating the theme versus content led to 17 months of neither, and finally an ill-advised update to the software that serves the content caused the theme to break down. At that point I had to decide: forget the whole thing, or start again from scratch?

I decided to go with the second option. Isoglossia lives on, just not with all of its original clothing and with what remains in a bit of déshabillé. All of the archives remain intact, and a link to it is featured prominently in a place of honor at the top of the left sidebar.

Isoglossia was nearly entirely handmade in the sense that Frankenstein’s monster was, its code pieced together over time from a generic theme’s body parts and various internet morgues, and it showed — I put personalized over aesthetic, and, clunky as it often was, I preferred ‘I made it, sort of’ to ‘it looks good and works’. That was done back in the days when I had a government job and Adam was not yet ambulatory, so there was plenty of time for me to dick endlessly with tiny shards of css without mastering a damn thing. It’s been nearly five years (!) since isoglossia launched, and the change in WordPress’s level of sophistication over that time amazes me. I am delighted to be using the Atahualpa theme by BytesForAll to power (and I do mean power) this new blog. It is astonishingly configurable, and as it’s early yet in what I hope will be another fruitful five years, don’t expect the site to remain in exactly its present form for long. I have a fairly long list of tiny but doubtless hour-consuming tweaks, changes, additions and so on to make to the site, which list will no doubt grow rather than shorten, thus endlessly feeding my tiny, tiny streak of OCD. Please write or comment if you are having any particular issues with it (the site’s rendering, not the OCD); I know, for example, that the header image is catastrophically cropped in Mobile Safari, and I would like to know what other failures are out there. They are probably legion, and I should have let the OCD win out and kept this on localhost in my laptop until 2012, but I wanted to let Come friendly bombs go live in time for the post just below this one.

For some insight into the name, see that post, and you might also considering reading the nascent About page, reachable by the tab at extreme upper left labeled ‘CFB WTF?’

The header image owes an enormous aesthetic debt to Banksy, with minimal (MINIMAL!) cooperation from Adam and Alek.

I hope you like it. I hope you like it all.

I love you!**

*Sorry. The headline refers to a saying we have in our house, “As over as Britney.”
** Magda! Oh, what the hell; all of you!

Happy anniversary

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:00:20 +0000

2003: young, hot & single. 2009: 2 out of 3 ain't bad

Today is our fifth wedding anniversary and, well, it astonishes me, as it does, you know, that I’ve had the fortune to spend five years with the woman pictured at left. In the face of such daunting astonishment and joy I am moved to get all sarcastic and stupid, as in past years’ posts on this topic, but I’m going to fight it, even though I strongly wish to provide enough text to wrap this photo so I can ensure that the wrapping on Come friendly bombs doesn’t look too bad, and getting all sarcastic and stupid has served me very well in the past when I’ve needed to fill column inches and/or placate a spouse who secretly wishes I would do more around the house.

This year I’m not going to do it, because I appreciate you more than ever, Magda. This is partly just due to the growing-together we’ve done over the passage of years — and at the five mark I don’t think it’s too early to begin talking in such terms — and to a large extent is the result of seeing how much you are capable of. A year ago you returned to work full time — VERY full time, sweet corn, how hard do teachers WORK? — and have not let up one jot on the immense amount of labor and drudgery you do to keep this family running, work which has not diminished an iota as the boys have grown and we have moved not once but three times since changing jobs, living in places that have often been less than ideal. On the contrary, it feels like you are doing more all the time. I have been doing a bit more cooking and a token amount of cleaning since we moved into Last House, but it occurs to me that while I have caulked two bathtubs here, I have not experienced cleaning a Last House toilet.

What we’ve managed to build together brings me more and more joy all the time, including our shared idiolect, which grows along with our love, and which is among the sources of this site’s name. Happy anniversary, sweetheart. One anniversary present is a new ‘website’ (because I know how you hate blogs). Another present to you is this, and I’m using our new site to state it publicly: I am cleaning the toilets from now on.

Hello world!

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:50:00 +0000

Well I’ll be damned. It’s working.