The Lair

Ok. I get the fact that we need to protect kids from some influences. That’s the whole point of having authority figures. I get that. I really do. But sometimes you have to wonder …

Borders asked to ban “racist” Tintin book. Tintin? Seriously? Apparently so. Yet another facet of my childhood (who didn’t read Tintin when they were growing up?) has now been swamped by the PC brigade. Sickening.

Actually, I have read Tintin in the Congo, the comic in question. Does it have dodgy cultural references? Yep, I’m pretty darn sure it does. It fits perfectly with the other national and racially stereotypical names that Herge adopted for the other characters in the series. Try Chang, the obscurely named Chinese companion of Tintin. Or Rastapopulous, the big nosed arch villian of the piece. Or Abdullah, the mischievous Mid-eastern kid with the megarich father. Or my personal favourites; Generals Alcazar and Tapioca from San Theodoros. Stereotyped? Yup. Funny? Yes, I think so.

That’s actually not all.

The PC brigade have also had a go at Noddy and Tinky Winky of the Teletubbies. Right. So, there’s really no excuse to be watching the Teletubbies at any age. I send the nieces Disney DVDs just to get them to watch something else. I’m doing my bit to rid the world of the menace. I still think I made my point about political correctness gone mad.

Eejits. My lawn. Get off it.

With the possible exception of The Silence of the Lambs, every effort is made to portray Hannibal Lector as someone merely tragically flawed rather than an out and out psychopathic monster. He is often shown acting appropriately for the hero of the piece instead of the villian. Therein lies the moral dilemma. You want him to go down. Yet, he’s smarter than the opposition and you feel sympathy for his torment at losing his family. James Hadley Chase might have had Hannibal Lector committing suicide or running heroically into a police cordon only to be gunned down in a hail of lead in the final moments. Not Thomas Harris. Hannibal Lector escapes, gets the girl (well, sort of) and lives, as far as we can tell, the carefree life of the wealthy-enough-to-not-care.

If I wanted to compare Thomas Harris in Hannibal Rising with a completely different author, an easy jump would take me to Without Remorse by Tom Clancy. Just substitute profiteering Hiwis for drug dealers and the plot line runs essentially the same way. John Clark never did cannibalism though… “A brouchette, cheeks and morels” may well be the new “I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti”.

Oh and major spoilers for Hannibal Rising follow..

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And there it was, the much anticipated Christmas weekend. Where I could potter around yon olde residence, reduce the reading pile by a book or four, hack away at some stray bits of code I’d been meaning to work on, have the TV humming in the background and of course, perform some culinary experiments.

Yes, experiments. I never really know how the stuff I cook will turn out – but it’s almost always edible. And without experiments, how could I find out that drippy Marmite brew is a wonderful glazing to apply on bacon just before popping into the oven? Yup, the salt in the Marmite makes the outer skin crispy and crunchy. Just the way I like it.

On the subject of Marmite, the wikipedia entry has the following sentence:

In Sri Lanka it is dissolved in boiling water and some lime juice and a fried, sliced onion is added, allegedly an excellent pick-me-up drink for recovering from a hangover

I don’t know about a hangover cure, but I was definitely fed that brew when I was a kid… It was a flu remedy? Or maybe I’ve conveniently blotted out my childhood alcoholic binges. I do remember getting slightly tipsy on cough syrup when I was a kid, maybe that was where my decline into dipsomania started.

There has been a long (well, since the 19th century) tradition of turkey eating for Christmas … but pigeon? That sounds a bit less appetising, eh? Only, Salem the friendly neighbourhood cat decided (on Christmas Eve, no less) that both my landlord and myself really needed to eat pigeon on the morrow and deposited two very dead feathered rats outside our respective doors. Not being able to read cat minds just yet, the theory is that this is Salem’s attempt to share out his hunting bag amongst the residents of the household. Or maybe he just wanted all the turkey for himself and wanted us to make do with pigeon. I’d have been more interested if he figured out a way to bring down the wild (allegedly*) pheasants that lurk in the nearby fields though.

Oh and the smoked gammon turned out extremely well. I should try my hand at it more often.

And in other news, the long awaited Variable Star and Hannibal Rising were both on my reading pile for last weekend. Unfortunately, I was sidetracked by a massive collection of older Heinleins and the Dark Materials trilogy. Maybe this week then.

* allegedly wild because apparently these pheasants belong to the local nobility (aka Lord Deramore)’s estate. I don’t know if the official punishment for poaching his lordship’s game birds is still beheading. Given the number of local laws which haven’t been revised for centuries, it’s probably not safe to find out.