Condo Hunt

Yesterday I went condo hunting with my friend Lee. She came over in the morning with the daily papers and we circled some open houses. The first place we saw was a half-million dollar highrise penthouse with a stunning view of the river valley. But the best thing about it was dozens of scary clown paintings on the walls everywhere you looked! By freakin’ Red Skelton no less!!! I think they were original oil paintings – at least some of them (but I could be wrong). The condo lady had been friends with Skelton (or an acquaintance anyway) and there were autographed photos of him around the place, and pics of the two of them together. I was dying to take pictures of all the art because it was so weird and overwhelming, but I thought it would be an invasion of privacy. It was a nice place (if you could get beyond the clown art) but out of my price range.

This is where I want to live:

Eco-house in Old Strathcona: solar roof panels, geo-thermal heating, triple glazed windows, R28 insulation, a bicycle room(!), etc. etc. And way more styly than anything else we saw this day. Seven 2-storey townhouse units on the bottom floors and eight 1-storey flats on the top two floors. They weren’t having an open house, it’s just someplace we passed by on the way home. It’s still under construction and apparently all the units are sold already. Dammit.

article

website

We also managed to squeeze in some thrifting (never too busy to thrift).

Lee with pixies.

What is this stuff called? I thought it was tole, but google convinces me that is wrong.

Oooh, 3-D!

Record Cover of the Week

Johnny Williams: Checkmate

The hand-altered cover reads in part “YAA! YAA! YAA! 1 2 3 CHA-CHA. Exiting? 1902.6 seconds of the greatest listening pleasure!” I haven’t checked the math but I agree with the conclusion. This is a great early 60s crime jazz score by John (Star Wars, Jaws, ET, etc.) Williams. Checkmate was a TV detective series starring Anthony George, Doug McClure and Sebastian Cabot that ran for two seasons. The record is a little the worse for wear and would sound so much better in stereo, but it’s still a great find.

Here’s another artfully altered record I saw at Goodwill, possibly from the hand of the same artist:

The same Goodwill store also had nearly a hundred RCA SelectaVision VideoDiscs:

Essentially movies on record, RCA released VideoDiscs from 1981 to 1986. They had many of the same limitations of vinyl records – skipping, short playback times (1 hour per side, so for a feature you’d have to flip the disc; movies longer than 2 hours were on multiple discs), and because the technology was analogue needle-in-groove, video and audio quality degraded as they wore out with repeating playing. The players never sold as well as RCA anticipated and the medium went the way of the 8-track tape. I can’t recall ever seeing a player at a thrift store but I find the movies fairly often in the record section.

Wikipedia entry

VideoDisc FAQ

Comfy

Yet more comfort food.

Sunday dinner at my folks place, my mom made a turkey and I put a few roasters of veg into the oven at the same time: beets, yams, carrots, fennel, radicchio and savoy cabbage, liberally tossed with olive oil, garlic and fresh herbs. The beets and yams were particularly delicious – a couple of hours of slow roasting made them incredibly sweet and earthy. I went home with lots of leftovers, so yesterday I made a turkey pot pie.

To the chopped up turkey and vegetables I added some green beans I had in the fridge (blanching them first). I sautéd some mushrooms in butter and olive oil, which I used as the base for a white sauce.

I forgot to stir in the rosemary so I just sprinkled it on top, then topped the pot with piecrust.

Out of the oven.

Dessert:

Dirty Old Holes

The recipe is from a wonderfully wonky book called Scrambled Brains, by artist Robin Konstabaris and chef Pierre LeBlanc. It’s sort of a combination of cookbook and graphic novel. I recommend you order it if you want to make dishes like Hell Turds, Nun’s Farts, or a tofu pig’s head.

The recipe is simplicity itself: peel and core an apple, fill with Nutella, wrap tightly in pie crust, bake.

As it bakes, the Nutella will ooze out (puncture the top or leave an opening in the crust), and you will know how this recipe got its name.

Gross but delicious.

I baked you a cake

…to celebrate Bowling Trophy’s 1st birthday today. I didn’t really bake it, I only scanned it from an Australian birthday cake book. It’s an echidna ice cream cake. When I posted this other spiky echnidna cake it became one of the most frequently googled items on this blog (though not as popular as how to draw horses or the Sylvers). To make it, fill a metal bowl with softened ice cream and freeze. Unmold, add a twinkie for a nose, coat the nose and face with that gross chocolate coating that hardens on contact with ice cream (because it’s full of coconut oil or wax), stick it full of chocolate fingers, sprinkle with grated chocolate and add a couple of smarties for eyes.

If you’re not partial to chocolaty marsupials, maybe you’d rather have a piece of Zappo the Alien:

Record Cover of the Week

Liza Minnelli: Come Saturday Morning

A fresh-faced, 24 year old Liza stares out from the cover of her 1970 album. The repertoire includes songs by John Denver (Leavin’ On A Jet Plane), Nilsson (Wailing of the Willow), Gordon Lightfoot (Wherefore and Why), Randy Newman (Love Story), Liza’s then husband Peter Allen (Simon) and Jimmy Webb (MacArthur Park/Didn’t We).

Found Photo

Found on the floor in the book section at Goodwill. The date stamp on the back appears to be Aug. 14, 1994.

Ides of March

shitty shit shit shit.

Hair Day

This is my new hair style. It’s based on River Phoenix’s hair in My Own Private Idaho. I call it “narcolepsy chic.”

The Dollar Show

I went to a movie today with my friend Gaenor – except that she calls it going to “the show.” We went to “the dollar show” which is her name for Movies 12 (it used to cost a dollar at one time – now it’s a whopping $3.50 to see a second run movie).

Gaenor loves the dollar show. It reminds her of ’70s/’80s New Wave style (per Wikipedia: “a desire to embrace contemporary synthetic materials as a protest and celebration of plastic. This involved the use of spandex, bright colors (such as fluorescents), and mass-produced, tawdry jewelry and ornaments, typified by the dayglo aesthetic of the band X-Ray Spex. As a fashion movement, then, New Wave was both a post-modern belief in creative pastiche and a continuation of Pop Art’s satire and fascination with manufacturing.)

It just makes me want to poke my eyes out.

I’m pretty sure Gaenor would be thrilled to have her birthday in the party room at the dollar show.

The movie we saw was Persepolis, which I adored. It was almost worth the irreversible retinal damage.

The only crime here is the decor.

Best Scones Ever

Ginger scones from epicurious.com, by way of my friend dogbytes. I replaced some of the candied ginger with fresh ginger for a little extra zing.