While yukon_jack and the lovely A. were here, we ate at Enoteca Roma, a remarkably good north-Italian restaurant where the specialty, they informed us, was the polenta. Only mollpeartree took them up on it, and she was unanimously declared the winner by conquest, especially after we all tried tiny morsels of her meal and then savored our own choices with the bitter tears of regret.

Previously, I have been familiar with polenta mostly as a boat for other things, such as the 'mazing Gruyere polenta I had beneath my pork chop with righteousfist at whatever that place was in Alexandria, VA a few years back. But the Enoteca Roma experience made me decide -- nay, vow -- to make polenta worth eating in its own right. And then to pile it with something really good just in case I was wrong about my polenta-making skills. A quick page through Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World, suitably adjusted for Enoteca-worthiness, and I felt ready to court the goddess Fortune, in her guise as cornmeal.

Short answer: I was not wrong.

( The long answer, coquettishly hidden beneath the cut... )

Every so often, I'll post an abbreviated menu to Facebook, usually while in a state of self-satisfied repletion. But this recipe is what it says up there on the tin. In honor of picnics in honor of the Fourth, here's the best deviled egg recipe I've ever made, by far:

DEVA'D EGGS

12 eggs, hard-boiled, halved, yolks separated

6 TBSP mayonnaise
1 1/2 TSP curry powder (we're dangerously low on Penzey's Maharajah blend, and I may have to devote an afternoon to cloning it. Or break down and buy another jar)
3/4 TSP garlic paste
1/3 TSP celery salt

1/2 TSP salt (or more to taste)
1/4 TSP fresh ground black pepper (or more to taste)
1/2 TSP lemon juice (or more to taste)

Dump your yolks in a big glass bowl, and mix in the next four ingredients. Then comes the slightly tricky bit with the salt and pepper -- don't over-salt the things; over-peppering them is more forgivable because the curry powder will give you some breathing room there. Once you've got the saltiness where you want it (or just a little below that, ideally), add lemon juice to brighten the flavor -- there will be a kind of hole in the top notes that slowly adding lemon juice will fill. If you over-lemon it, you can add another TSP or so of mayo to smooth it back out in the middle register.

Then take your little spoon and moosh the filling back into the hard-boiled whites, making sure to accidentally split one or three of them so that you have to eat the failures. (I usually have mollpeartree do this part -- only the willpower of someone who's quit smoking is up to the task of filling deviled eggs. If it were me doing it, this dozen egg recipe would result in about five eggs left over for company.)

One could, I suspect, make a slightly lighter version of this with olive oil in for the mayo, though you'd want to cut the amount by half or more, and you'd risk making it too sweet -- maybe some chili pepper would cut through that, but by now, you're talking about a whole different recipe, really. So I'd just stick with the mayo, myself.

Back from Origins today, and between my aching feet, piled-up work, and general sleep-dep, tonight was all about lying around with mollpeartree and watching Wanted. Oh, Angelina Jolie -- how you taunt me.

But even better than Angelina Jolie in tight leather on the top of a speeding El car in Chicago shooting around corners was winning the Best Non-Fiction Work of 2008 Origins Award for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. This was especially gratifying, as it's my first Origins Award for a project that was substantially my work -- although I have no delusions about righteousfist's crucial role in the book. And, indeed, I also owe many thanks to you kind folks, for reading the Tour in its initial form in these pixels, commenting, improving those posts with suggestions, and (speaking of suggestions) suggesting I collect the blog Tour into a book in the first place. So thank you all very much.

You can see a short film by wordwill on the Award here. It's a delicate little tone poem of a piece, and speaks volumes of the quality of his friendship (and his narrative skill, even in such glancing, almost calligraphic form). Given that wordwill and jtidball were also nominated for their superb ludoparemiography Things We Think About Games, I can't tell you how much it means to me that he put this together.

I was also deeply touched by my warm reception at the "What's New With Pinnacle" seminar, which Shane Hensley generously invited me to attend. I am not used to being applauded for thanking potential customers and making a potential product announcement. (Not even for anything specific, just: "Day After Ragnarok won't be my last Savage Worlds setting.") Savage Worlds is a great game, and if the audience at that seminar was any indication, it breeds great fans. And there was a song. Two songs.

Let's see, what else? You saw righteousfist and the game playwrights at the fantastic Burgundy Room, where I think the highlight this year was probably the Roasted Lamb Lollipop with Lemon-Fontina Enriched Risotto, Black Walnut Pesto and Red Pepper Relish. Unless it was the Asparagus, Pattypan Squash, Baby Zucchini, Raddichio and Smoked Mozzarella Ravioli with a Madeira Reduction.

I got some more half-price Osprey Books, did a podcast and a bit, helped out at the Hero Games booth (and as always, many thanks to dtwatts for his hospitality at booth and hotel), and chatted with a host of good friends. I love this convention, and after four successive lunches at North Market (with Jenni's Ice Cream for dessert each time), and a pint mojito or two with rockin' yukon_jack, I love this city.

Can't wait to go back next year.

I've made this meal three times, most recently last week, and all kidding aside, it's freaking wonderful. I don't even have a clever introduction for it; I was just struck by the desire to make risotto one day, and found a promising version of Red Bell Pepper Risotto online at the New York Times site, and modded it (via Bittman) as follows:

( Herein, What Followed )

Then, piling a Lucullan Pelion on Ossa in my Titanic hubris, I dug up a recipe for Paprika Pork Chops (Molise Style), reasoning infallibly that paprika would complement its red bell pepper co-varietal quite nicely. Again tweaking the recipe as I saw fit, I surmounted Olympus, raining down scarlet tastiness on the cowering gods below.

( Tweaking The Beard of Jove, Culinarily Speaking )

And I was right. The pork and the risotto blend to perfection with every bite. I serve it with a green salad and whatever vinaigrette I dig out of the fridge -- a little acid on the side helps out, too.

If you find that you've made too many onion bhaji, do not fret! Oh, don't get started now with the "How can there be too many onion bhaji? I love them so much!" questions. There were only three of us, there was a lot of other food, and there was a whole lot of bhaji that got made. Next time, we'll cut the gram and onion amount in half and keep the spice ratio the same, and there won't be any leftover bhaji.

Or maybe we'll double the spices, because it turns out there's something great to do with leftover onion bhaji.

The thing to do with them is to cut them up into little slices and put them on a turkey-and-Provolone sandwich, maybe a little mayo. You can do this with leftover bhaji cold from the fridge, no unsatisfactory microwaving necessary -- it will be the best non-November turkey sandwich you've ever had.

Try it and thank me, or rather thank mollpeartree, who discovered it.

Back from London, jet lag slept off, and only needing to bring everyone up to speed on the last day or so of the trip. (Strangely, jet lag the other way -- from US to UK -- apparently turns me into a real boy. On this trip, at least, I was up with the larks' immediate associates and nodding off at midnight or one every night.)

Tuesday was Stop Five of yojimbouk and my tour of London's Hawksmoor churches: Christ Church, Spitalfields. Fortunately, on Tuesday afternoons the church is open to gawkers, so we could go in, climb up into the galleries and even to a sort of viewing port just behind the (currently defunct) organ. The result was a fascinating discourse in proportion and forced perspective: from the floor of the nave, all your attention draws upward to the exaggeratedly high ceiling, which (thanks to two essentially free-floating beams at front and back) seems to exist in another, airier, space. From the galleries, that front beam pushes the altar back into a kind of separate space, and you are connected to the nave space -- looking up at the nave ceiling is a little claustrophobic, but your own ceilings are barrel vaults. From the upper rear, the pulpit seems pulled forward by some trick of false perspective, and the nave appears compressed. From any angle, the altar seems to dominate a room equal to the nave, even though it is actually in a fairly narrow space behind the beam. On the outside, not only do you get the Awesome Majesty of God falling forward onto you out front, the sides look much shorter than you remember the inside being, and the rear, as James put it, is "all classical temple." Apollo doing business out the back of Jesus' stand.

James tolerated a quick excursion to Mary Kelley's murder site -- and let me here repeat my praise for London's restraint. Despite the number of tourists who must be trying to do what I did, there are zero concessions to such ghoulishness: no signs, no blue plaques, no Interactive Jack the Ripper Museum. Just an anonymous parking garage, and London all around.

Hit Foyle's, as per usual, bought a present for mollpeartree (a book about a different ghoulish murder), and made three amazing discoveries, the first two of which I snapped up. First, it seems that Charles Nicholl has a new book out! I bought The Lodger -- Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street in paperback, and one chapter in, I am already thrilled to the Gnostic bone to learn that the co-author of Pericles was a brothel-keeper. Nicholl, for those who came in late, is the author of the single best book ever about Elizabethan espionage (The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe) and the single best book ever about Sir Walter Raleigh's quest for El Dorado (The Creature in the Map). In other words, a book from him on Shakespeare is a glorious eventuality. (While I'm thinking about it, I should probably wishlist his book on Arthur Rimbaud, as well.) Second, I found a whole new Elizabethan sorcerer-grifter-medico, the wonderfully-named Gregory Wisdom, and more to the point, I found Alec Ryrie's book on him, The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England, on sale in (relatively) cheap hardback. Sadly, my third discovery, Evelyn Lord's The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies, was available in expensive British hardback only, but then it'll probably be a year or so before I can get to my bruited Call of Cthulhu sourcebook on the topic anyhow. Plenty of time for the American paperback to come out. He consoled himself.

Anyhow, that night was dinner at Gastro, a French brasserie in Clapham, featuring a dozen wonderful oysters and the "rib of beef (for 2)". The rib was plenty good -- though the meat was less like American prime rib, more like steak -- but the peppercorn sauce that came with it was unearthly. Many, many thanks to simonjrogers for that dinner, and indeed for pretty much every meal I ate in his company. And for his hospitality, and company, and conversation.

It was a great trip, but then they always are, to London. Back across the Atlantic, to my wife and cat, and into bed for thirteen hours, and that brings us up to now.

So, Dragonmeet went off swimmingly yesterday; lots and lots and lots of autographing at the Pelgrane booth, chances to catch up with British friends from pwca to ffutures to timgray, some fine review-game swag for the column (which I hope to update while I'm out here with a Con Report), and plenty of people playing plenty of games.

Two panels; "Ask Robin and Ken anything," and "Ask Robin, Ken, James Wallis, and John Wick anything," which featured among other winners "What's the difference between Conan and Captain Kirk?" (A: Tragedy and responsibility, respectively.)

Lots of English breakfasts, high-end ramen at Wagamama (you can take the game designer out of direst poverty, but you can't take direst poverty out of the game designer), and off to the pub for a post-Con meetup in but moments.

Culinary highlight so far: simonjrogers' bread-and-butter pudding, made with panatone; and the Marks & Spencer "Christmas sandwich," which is turkey, stuffing, and bacon on brown bread with mayo. Thanksgiving leftovers achieved! U! S! A! U! S! A!

I love eating Mexican food. Since I live in Chicago, but not in walking distance from Pilsen, that means I need to cook Mexican food. This is not a particularly onerous burden, except for the burden of finding the right peppers, which is harder than it should be considering that I have a produce store about 100 yards from my front door. But you didn't come here for my whining; you came here for the: ( Chicken Corn Tortilla Soup Recipe )

Because it's me, and because this is what I love to do, I built the recipe out of six other recipes, from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World all the way down to Rachael Ray. No stone unturned, I mean to say. Although everybody already no doubt knows Rick Bayless (I bought his Mexican Everyday, just to have a Bayless book -- and it's a pretty good one to have) and Diana Kennedy (whose The Art of Mexican Cooking I scored off Amazon Z-shops for THREE LOUSY BUCKS!), let me give a big shout-out to Jim Peyton's New Cooking from Old Mexico. This was a sheerly serendipitous find, used on the Cookbooks table at Brandeis-Booksale-That-Was a couple years back, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of its magnificent potential. (Nor will I ever -- it has a day-and-a-half mole recipe adopted from the original convent in Puebla from whence mole sprang.) For example, I still owe kaynorr and gracefuleigh Peyton's Pork Loin Vampiro. Maybe closer to Halloween.

... before I can write anything else, including the many projects I brainstormed with various publishers at GenCon. Among them, my first Savage Worlds setting book, another Trail of Cthulhu sourcebook, two more GUMSHOE games, a third "Mini Mythos" book to follow the already-written second "Mini Mythos" book to follow Where the Deep Ones Are, and maybe a Traveller supplement if the licensing issues work out. Plus Casey Jones Is Dead, which I have now described to enough fellow game designers that I kind of have to finish it this fall. Plus other stuff, To Be Named Later.

* So, GenCon. Trail of Cthulhu won two Silver ENnies! Hobby Games: The 100 Best won one Silver ENnie! And it's all thanks to you good people! All those map links must have worked, eh?

* In other grand news, I'm going to be a guest at Dragonmeet in London on the Saturday right after Thanksgiving (Saturday, November 29 to non-Americans). I shall hope to see everyone there!

* Or, if you can't make that, how about GenCon France? I'll be GoH-ing it up in Paris in spring 2009; more details when I know them.

* Moving down the Excitement List, Where the Deep Ones Are sold over 200 copies at the show, emptying the tables at Atlas Games! This pretty much ensures that my next one is greenlit; details when I'm allowed to announce titles.

* Also, Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales dropped in print at the show! I knew it would look fabulous, as righteousfist had kept me apprised of things via PDF, but holding it in my hand was a thrill all its own. It looks so good, and so professional. (Our design document: "Make it look like a real book by grownups.") Toren Atkinson's spot art is perfect, too. One only hopes the words don't let the team down.

* And "Out of the Box" is (imminently) back! Sooner than any of us can believe it, my much-beloved review column will return in the virtual pages of Indie Press Revolution, in an Exciting New Format. I can hardly wait.

* I got interviewed for three podcasts and was a guest on the Friday 5pm installment of This Just In From GenCon, hosted by Master Plan podcaster macklinr and podcaster emeritus ptevis. I'll post links to the other podcasts when I get them, but you can hear breaking news from the floor of GenCon as if it were last Friday today.

* Speaking of ptevis, he and I were the fortunate beneficiaries of Jim Cambias' wrath at the pathetic restaurant offerings in downtown Indianapolis. Insisting that he could, and more importantly, would eat "an exquisite meal" in Indianapolis, he took the lead in finding, and driving the hellangone out to, Huachinango, a Mexican seafood place. We had the whole red snapper stuffed with shrimp, octopus, peppers, cheese, and maybe achiote among other things; the orange roughy "al ajillo," meaning in a reduction of guajillo chiles, garlic, orange juice, and brandy; and three ceviche tostadas. And bottomless glasses of sangria, all for a ludicrously small $27 each, including tax and tip. Some would call it exquisite.

* The rest of the show is a haze of walking the floor when I could, talking with friends and colleagues and friendly colleagues, parties and bars (including Ike & Jonesey's, the gayest straight bar in Indiana), and just glorying in perfect summer weather and full-immersion game fun with 40,000 members of My Tribe.

* I also talked with Diana-Jones-Award-winner the_monkey_king and Greg Stolze about alternative ways to finance game design (though sadly, my plan to be a fly on the wall during a convo with both of them failed of execution, just like half of all GenCon schedule plans do). Maybe we'll all talk about that question here in a bit.

I extended my stay in the Greater Minneapolitan Area by a day to hang about with John and Michelle Nephew, friends and publishers, and as a great bonus, got to share two meals (one of them the Mandatory Breakfast) with jtidball. Before then, Michelle and I strolled through the Science Museum of Minnesota studying its devolution (common to museums of the Middle Holocene) from museum to playground. We took in the "Star Wars: The Science of Merchandising" exhibit, which had the impressive original four-foot Millennium Falcon model, among other neat props and robots and such, but the real highlight was the extraordinarily magnificent dinosaur collection, featuring as its crown jewel this Triceratops, the best one in the world hands down. Not least because Richard Wagner's grand-daughter gave it a magic ring whilst christening it "Fafner" in 1969. No lie.

But only such direct contact with a mythic entity could rival CONvergence, which was my main reason for being in the area, and oh boy, did I have a grand time. I'd like to extend special thanks to weasel_king for inviting muskrat_john as a fellow Guest of Honor, since I never get to see him at conventions any more. muskrat_john led mollpeartree and myself into the mean streets of South Minneapolis for a Jucy Lucy (a hamburger cooked with a molten core of cheese), and it did not disappoint. Other culinary highlights included the "tasting tree" at La Fougasse (where John and I regaled a thunderstruck Trace Beaulieu with tales of Hot Doug's) and the lobster corn dogs at Ike's (where cajones and chebutykin regaled us with tales of the lobster corn dogs at Ike's).

Other highlights almost too many to mention: I was on fifteen panels, plus the one I crashed ("Game Design"), plus attending opening and closing ceremonies. Some I may have monopolized (though I prefer to say "heavily seasoned") in my Chicagoan-amongst-Twin Citizens fashion, while on others I was one attraction among many, and on the "History and Future of Star Trek" panel I had the rare (for me) experience of being a relative (and relatively silent) mundane as Robert Meyer ("Free Enterprise") Burnett and Daren (scarily uncanny impression of Lenore Koridian) Dochterman led us where no panel has gone before, past the barrier of nerd at the edge of the Galaxy. Mention must also be made of the "Breakfast Cereal Mascot Smackdown" panel, at which petsnakereggie tried his very best to destroy the pancreas of myself, Mark Evanier, Len Wein, cajones, and three members of the Soylent Theater troupe -- we were ordered to consume all defeated cereals, and the most excellent Soylentist Joe Scrimshaw, seated to my immediate left, nearly suffered the fatal consequences of Too Much Science when he combined the lot of them with whiskey.

I only goobed out like a big fanboy goober for Marv Wolfman, but I defy anyone who appreciates the true Dracula to remain unmoved in his august presence. Plus yes, yes, Crisis on Infinite Earths. Whatever. Tomb of Dracula, man, that's where it's at.

Speaking of Dracula, mollpeartree and I watched (she for the first time) Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary at Cinema Rex, the great and powerful movie room of the con (complete with free Ike and Mike), where I also saw the premiere of local film-maker Bill Stiteler's hilarious film THAC0, perhaps best explained as Waiting For Godot meets AD&D. And I saw Daren Dochterman's The Empire Strikes Quack, a mashup of Star Wars First Trilogy footage to the soundtrack to Duck Dodgers In the 24th-and-a-Halfth Century.

But an award-winning panel schedule and a good-faith attempt to love Cinema Rex as it deserves meant that many other things could only be enjoyed en passant: I hardly got to any room parties at all (but you know I ate food out of a replicator and drank Romulan ale), missed Connie's Space Lounge almost entirely (thanks not least to the second set by Savage Aural Hotbed and then to fireworks the next night), still haven't seen Soylent Theater (Blue or otherwise), and barely exchanged two words with fellow GoH Eric Flint. I did get to talk with Mercedes Lackey a bit, which I had wanted to do all through the show, and I explained the secret truth of Wall-E to Len Wein (among others), and I talked with lots of other wonderful con staff, con attendees, and fellow panelists -- but not enough.

You know what this show needs? Another day.

Five days.

(Note to Anton: I made it home!)

Just a quick post to limn the highlights of my Origins Game Fair experience, an experience made possible in so many ways (not the least of which including a bed) by dwatts that I even broke actual sweat while helping him set up and take down the Hero Games booth.

This year, I had but one goal: find and purchase a copy of Randall Reed and Vance von Borries' classic wargame Air Assault on Crete, which Avalon Hill published along with a bonus map and counter-set for an invasion of Malta AH scenario. I accomplished it on Thursday; ptevis converted my victory from Tactical to Overwhelming by good-naturedly playing the aforesaid Malta scenario with me on Saturday. Thanks to a lucky choice of invasion beaches, fascism was victorious. A robust, if not extraordinarily impressive or elegant, wargame of its era; the 6.1 rating from Boardgame Geek is about right if you add a point or so for people who like a) hex-and-counter wargames and/or b) invading Malta.

Other accomplishments included:

* Along with yukon_jack, attending Columbus' storied Comfest, featuring (in reverse order of satisfying-ness): squelchy horrid mud, an interminable version of "Rockin' the Bronx" from Black 47, two songs by fine college-rock band Sun, the rest of Black 47's set, the country cover of "I Want You to Want Me" by Megan Palmer and the Hopefuls, and the legendary fishboat.

* Three pint mojitos at the Bodega, immediately following.

* An assortment of business-themed chats, which may result in one or two logjams blowing open.

* Responding with all due modesty to the gratifying news that Trail of Cthulhu sold very briskly indeed, and to three requests for autographs of the same.

* Eating both kinds of meat banh mi from North Market. I want to see, or rather taste, a top-shelf ice cream throwdown between Jeni's Ice Cream of Columbus and Oberweis of Chicago. Jeni's Belgian Milk Chocolate (with Ashland County honey) is better than any Oberweis chocolate I've had, but Oberweis' Black Cherry is better than Jeni's Pear and Riesling Sorbet (which was delicious, but far heavier on the pear than the Riesling) or her Goat Cheese and Cherry Compote (in which the tartness of the goat cheese tended to over-amplify the tartness of the cherries).

* Winning 0.0099 of an Origins Award for Hobby Games: the 100 Best, which won for Best Nonfiction Book. This raises my lifetime total to 0.65206586, by my count.

* Being interviewed for two podcasts: The Pulp Gamer by Don Dehm, and The Game's the Thing by ronblessing and his lovely wife Veronica. Specific links to come when I know them.

* A nice haul of half-price Osprey books. Oh, how I loves Osprey books.

* Not killing myself before doing it all over again, with more parties, more movies, and more seminars, next weekend at CONvergence in Minneapolis. Hope to see you all there!

So for those of you wondering where I've been all this time, and perhaps even where I am now, the answer is Las Vegas, where I attended the GAMA Trade Show and did some work for one of Christian Moore's many enterprises and am now taking a weekend to hang with Christian & c. before going back to Chicago to get my lower right wisdom tooth taken out. "In one city, release from pain. In the other, pain."

Highlights of the trip include Owen and Daniela's new kitten Cosimo, who struggled manfully, and even kittenfully, to keep me entertained all last Saturday night: staging two prizefights with my left foot, running up and down my recumbent form, falling asleep on my chest, doing the old "random pounce" on anything that struck his fancy, and engaging in a bravura performance of Help, I've Somehow Become Trapped In A Sheet, featuring the most dramatic escape attempts since Houdini's milk can. Truly inspiring.

James Ernest was kind enough to help me brainstorm the central dice mechanic for Casey Jones is Dead, which you will hear more of later, unless you are kaynorr and gnosticpi, in which case you may hear of it somewhat earlier, perhaps during a lengthy playtest session.

I got to see the proofs for Where the Deep Ones Are, now coming in August, and for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, coming rather sooner than that both to PDF and print. And I got the green light for a very fun project along those lines that had stalled out after last GenCon, but is now under the control of myself, righteousfist, and philreed. Other GTS leads on other work will, as is traditional, appear in this space when they have ripened, or will never be mentioned again, by me or anyone else.

In gustatory developments, Owen and Daniela and I hit the Golden Steer, Las Vegas' finest steakhouse; a whole gang of us went to Pearl, where the scallops in XO sauce redeemed the chef's tasting menu; a different whole gang of us went to Lotus of Siam (as discussed previously in this space); a gang overlapping with the first two gangs went to Sushi Roku where Christian cavalierly sprang Kobe beef ishiyaki (cooked on a hot rock) on us; and then it was Thursday.

Upon which day the keen and incisive dwatts inveigled me into going out to scenic Cashman Field to watch the Triple A Las Vegas 51s (complete with alien head and Star Trek font on the jerseys) beat the living tar out of the Portland Beavers, 8-1, in a stunning defeat of walkable New Urbanism. It was, as minor-league games tend to be, a great day at the ballpark, if not much of an exhibition of quality pitching. (At one point the batter was hit by a ball hurled by the contemptible Portlanders, giving rise to crowd dissent, but we observed that if the pitcher couldn't hit a strike zone intentionally, he probably couldn't hit a batter intentionally either.) dwatts and I agreed that Cosmo, the 51s' mascot, while definitely gray and an alien, was more like a Nommo than he was a Gray. At the game, I had an Atomic Dog, which is a big fat Hebrew National frank stuffed with cheese, covered with chili and melted nacho-style cheese, upon which my encased-meat instincts drove me to splosh raw onions and yellow mustard. As always, my instincts proved sound.

Not so my instinct, upon polishing off three foaming beakers of Lucid absinthe (generously offered up to a select clientele by Jason W.), to go drink another couple of vodka tonics. But Lucid tastes far less foul than either the crazy Czech stuff or the bathtub stuff, and results in much the same fun sensation (if less overtly), so there is that.

Soon back to Chicago, and from thence to LA in a bare month for BookExpo. In between: dental surgery, much writing, and whining about both of the above. Oh, and Iron Man.

So the way I remember it starting is like this: sitting in the booth in Clarke's on Belmont with gnosticpi and serpentstar, eating a "hobo omelet" (though it seemed awful picky for a real hobo -- portobello mushrooms, red onions, and mozzarella) and thinking "it doesn't get any better than this."

It was about to get better.

But why I thought that: I was in my city, on my way to a party, in a place I'd never been and drinking the second mango-tini of the night, with good friends, one of whom had come all the way from North Wales to see me. I had fed him not just well so far, but superbly, to wit:

* Thursday, we ate Giordano's stuffed pizza, shipped piping hot from the outside of Plato's cave to Earth. (We also drank a great deal of homemade damson vodka, a lovely hostess gift from serpentstar.)

* Friday, we ate lunch at Hot Doug's: Bacon-Jalapeño Duck Sausage with Blood Orange Mustard, Pâté Bigarade and Mandarin Oranges; a Smoked Crayfish and Pork Sausage with Cajun Tartar Sauce, St. Pete's Blue Cheese and Diced Sweet Peppers; and a Bacon and Cheddar Elk Sausage with Guinness Mustard and Hickory-Smoked Rambol Cheese. The duck was so good it made the elk taste expected.

* Then dessert (black cherry and vanilla cone) at Oberweis Ice Cream, which puts the real into nonpareil.

* Then dinner (Seven Seas Soup at a Mexican seafood place in Pilsen where we went because I couldn't remember Cocina Mundial in time -- still pretty great, as were the salmon ceviche tostadas. The oysters were mediocre, but one can't have everything -- OR SO I STILL THOUGHT AT THE TIME, he foreshadowed.)

* Saturday noon I grilled up three New York Strip Steaks from Paulina Meat Market, where we had gone on Friday. The plan was to feed serpentstar on good Chicago steak so that, upon encountering actual good steak for the first time in his life, his fabled British reserve would crumble and he would roll around meeping in sheer delight while we sat and mocked him from the perspective of people who can eat steak like this any time we feel like it. Well, the enginer was truly hoist by his own petard -- even given the kack-handed way I wound up grilling it (on a freezing cold grill in 30-degree weather, so it never actually, you know, seared) it was perhaps the fifth-best steak I've ever eaten. So we all drowned out serpentstar's complete emotional collapse ("This is really quite good.") with our own ecstatic Maenad cries.

* Although they went with that meal, the martinis I shook up in my new Zeppelin-shaped cocktail shaker deserve their own bullet point. North Shore Gin, Vya Vermouth, blue cheese stuffed olives.

So I wanted to feed serpentstar Ethiopian food, but he threw a British tantrum ("Er, could we possibly have a salad?") so we went to Clarke's. Where, as I intimated previously, things were as good as they could get.

Until the waitress showed up with a hot-chocolate brownie, topped with whipped cream, and three spoons. "These," she said, "are from the young ladies in the corner booth." Yes, three cute girls had bought us dessert!¹ And sent us a mash note! With runes in it!

What could we do but introduce ourselves and invite them along to the party (a Flash Gordon screening at d_swindler's place, where rumor had it there would be Really Good Bourbon)? And who could then be surprised to find them au fait with RPG jokes and Sealab 2021? They turned out to be zombienedwin, Chesney, and Kris10, and were very funny and charming in addition to being remarkably trusting of strange men in diners.

So the moral of the story is: in Chicago, there's no top floor on that elevator. And the other moral is: eat plenty of salad.

[1] Technically, they no doubt had bought serpentstar -- who was his usual resplendent self in purple mohawk-dreads, leather, and ophidian skull tattoo -- dessert, but being courteous types, they included myself and gnosticpi in their gesture.

The twenty or so minutes of Jumper that were under the mostly sole control of Doug Liman -- the fight scenes and chase scenes -- are pretty darn good. The rest, not so much; it would be indefensible charity to give the movie anything better than a D+.

A detailed breakdown should be unnecessary, but: Rachel Bilson is certainly easy on the eyes, but like her namesake Rachel (Weisz), she apparently doesn't bother to, you know, act if there's no script. Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell aren't even given parts, so much as portraying bumpers off of which the impenetrable steel pinball that is Hayden Christensen (as terrible as ever!) thuddingly rebounds with only a very occasional "ka-pwing." Diane Lane is wasted with an almost breathtaking profligacy.

Unlike some reviewers, I actually approved of the movie's general churlish refusal to explain anything -- the film is built around disorienting, breakneck experience, after all -- especially since when Tobor the Script-writing Robot did occasionally attempt exposition, he made things worse and dumber. Far better to just see the weird machines and strange extensible Taser-nets and random knifings in the jungle and anonymous mook assassins. Most important, though, the morality of the film is repugnant where it is not merely despicable, and its stupid, brutish protagonist is concomitantly unleavened with any sort of human decency, fellow-feeling, or even charm.¹ Which is certainly a realistic outcome for an adolescent who discovers a superpower that lets him escape the consequences of his actions, but I didn't go see Jumper for the psychological realism.

I went to see it because Doug Liman had, up to now, made only really, really good movies. Consider that string well and truly broken.

The chicken vindaloo at India House, however, was really, really good, balancing the vinegar and the spices on a knife's edge. So between that and those 20 minutes of fights and chases I mentioned above, the evening wasn't entirely wasted.

[1] In this sense, Hayden Christensen is a triumph of casting -- but you can see him play a smug, pouting twerp in Shattered Glass, a vastly superior film, if that's all you want.

Monday after Dundracon was a lovely dalliance with stjeromes and themagdalen and El Bebe, punctuated by a BLT (technically, American bacon, spinach, and tomato) pizza from LaVal's and animated discussion of nothing much.

Come the evening, I met up with Brian Isikoff and giddoen at Endgame, the best-of-breed game store in Oakland, prefaratory to dinner at Le Cheval, a French-Vietnamese restaurant around the corner. I managed to bullyrag giddoen into splitting the "Five Courses of Seafood," each of which takes over one of the five basic flavors (hot, bitter, salty, sweet, sour) for a harmonious and tasty balance of humours, or chi, or whatever version of malarkey they have in Vietnam.

Regardless of their malarkey, though, the food was outstanding. I quote from the menu (muckefuck and other purists should insert diacriticals where needed):

GOI SUA SEN - SHRIMP SALAD W/ LOTUS ROOTS
Shredded cabbage, prawns, jelly fish, lotus roots, mint leaves, topped w/fried onions, peanuts, in our vinegar dressing.
CHEM CHEUP NUONG - BROILED GREEN MUSSELS
Broiled green mussels in half shell, topped w/fried onions and peanuts.
CANH CHUA CA - HOT AND SOUR SNAPPER SOUP
Snapper in Pineapple flavored broth w/celery, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and tomato.
TOM KHO TO - PRAWNS STEWED IN CLAYPOT
Stewed in our special sauce w/mushrooms.
FILET OF SNAPPER IN COCONUT MILK
Sauteed coconut milk and curry w/okra and eggplant over lightly breaded red snapper.

The mussels, the eggplant in the coconut milk, and the mushrooms from the tom kho to were the absolute standouts; I foolishly didn't start in on the shrimp salad until after eating enough of the other dishes that its delicate flavor stayed mostly hidden. That said, the snapper in coconut milk and the snapper soup were excellent; in both cases, the fish flavor came through, but it wore very different outfits.

And just because we could, everyone enjoyed a side of:

BO TAI CHANH - MARINATED RAW BEEF Served cold
Thin slices of raw beef, marinated in lemon juice, topped w/peanuts, sesame, ginger, fried and fresh onions.

The result was a kind of beef carpaccio ceviche; very tasty. The description above omits the cilantro and peppers, which were pretty key to the ingredient list.

From thence, then, to Isikoff Base Camp, where we recorded an installment of Brian's podcast, 2d6 Feet In A Random Direction, thence to Casa de luagha, and off to the airport bright and early Tuesday morning.

Speaking of orthography, I just now decided that podcasts, like other journals, take the italic. So that's done, then.

Nothing left but to read up on the Ahnenerbe and wait for the imminent arrival of serpentstar. Gosh, I hope he's hungry.

For Christmas dinner, we went over to our friends Rob & Jen's and enjoyed a Peking Goose fit for the August Sovereign of Canada Herself. (I'll be making a leg of lamb for Greek Orthodox Christmas.) As we departed, Jen gave unto me the poison'd chalice that is a big tub of goose fat, and Rob offered the tossed-off notion that I could make cassoulet with it. And thereby the Devil entered into me, on Christmas, yet. I blame the Tokay.

Having researched the issue in the sober-ish light of day, cassoulet seems crazy complex and worse yet crazy expensive, even if you are beginning with your very own tub of gratis goose fat and brand-new Christmas pre-seasoned cast-iron cookware (which has already made mediocre steaks taste quite adequate, and very good sausage-apple-potato hash taste really good). This doesn't mean I won't make cassoulet, but I figured I'd see if my assembled readership has either a) a better (meaning non-crazy) idea of what do do with a tub of goose fat, or at least b) a merely sociopathic cassoulet recipe, one that won't require the proverbial Wayne Foundation years-plus-fortune combo. So far the closest I've come to b) is the Bittman recipe, but that seems light on the goose fat.

For now, anyhow, I'm going to make hash-browns in goose fat, to go with scallion pancakes and the leftover Peking Goose.

As a last fling before mollpeartree came home, gnosticpi came over yesterday to play wargames (Twilight Struggle, at which he beat me like a rented mule, and History of the World, which is broken for two players), crank Graham Parker CDs on the stereo, and watch some Veronica Mars third season DVD goodness.

The highlight of all of that was dinner, which since it's none of it my recipe I ordinarily wouldn't post, but it turned out so well I can't in good conscience refuse to share. Being male, gnosticpi and I are both fans of Nigella Lawson, and I just followed her recipes donkey-fashion for Scallops With Chorizo and (translated to the American) Garbanzos With Cumin and Arugula. The first makes essentially the best Manhattan chowder variation you can imagine, being basically a pound and a quarter of protein (we doubled the recipe) swimming in bright vermilion chorizo-flavored scallop juice. The second is a real nice side dish -- as gnosticpi put it, "it's way too good to be a salad." The only changes I rang were in the side dish; since our main course was doubled in mass, I only used one can of garbanzos. I kept all the other amounts the same, so the flavors were more intense with half the beans. (Oh, I also used amontillado instead of cream sherry, to more than good enough effect.)

Possibly fifteen minutes total from firing up the first burner to hunting out the napkins, with time left over to make limoncello-and-champagnes. (Dump a couple shots of raspberry liqueur in there, and it's even better, albeit even girlier.) It's a real shame that mollpeartree isn't a fan of frozen scallops, because that meal is fast, tasty, and pretty much perfect.

Back from the Greater Minneapolitan Area, where I was the "also appearing" guest for the Worldwide Play D&D Day festivities at The Source Comics & Games. Even in my legendary arrogance, I can't very well assume that I'm the number one draw on Worldwide Play D&D Day when the other guests include Dave Arneson (the inventor of RPGs and the co-designer of D&D) and Mike Mearls, the lead developer on Fourth Edition. ("And also appearing, a guy who wrote nine, count 'em, articles in Dragon! Let's hear it for all our guests!")

On the other hand, as mearls pointed out, those people who did show up to see me were interested in my work rather than in hints about a game I didn't design, so gather ye ego-boo while ye may. The event went smashing well, with much playing and some signing and a good Q&A. I ran one of my convention games of Call of Cthulhu (one I haven't converted to Trail of Cthulhu yet), and finished out the day with good food and company at a nearby Chinese place, where the Szechuan duck was more than acceptable. Did lunch with the Nephews on Sunday, and then wandered the Como Zoo and Conservatory (the wonderful core of which was built in 1915) in St. Paul with chebutykin chatting as we will about Lovecraft and whatnot. We discovered the rare (and incredibly creepy) tailless whip scorpion, which I am informed by the relevant Wikipedia article "shows signs of social behavior." Wonderful. From that den of amblypygia we relocated to the Muddy Pig, where I discovered Victory Throwback Lager, and ate a really terrific burger, and we watched the poor Colts stumble at the last against the New England juggernaut. Thence to Casa del petsnakereggie for Film Night, where we and others watched Casino Royale nouveaux and chattered mostly about convention stuff well into the night.

It is perhaps here that I should reveal that I have been fortunate enough to be invited back as a Guest of Honor for Convergence X on July 3-6, 2008. (Origins being June 25-29 that year.) Be there or rue the day. Er, the four days.

Finally, we searched out a 24-hour Perkins to feed cajones and chatted about comics and such, bringing us full circle. (chebutykin and cajones and mearls and Convergence factotum Mike Lee and I had gone out for a demure little pub crawl on Friday, during which we discussed, among other things, cajones' appalling taste in Romanas.)

And no appearance can be complete without a breakfast with jtidball, so we had one Monday at The Bad Waitress in Minneapolis, where the coffee is even better than the typography, and the typography is damn good. Also good, the three-egg scramble featuring Gouda, tomatoes, and fresh basil.

From there to the Fantasy Flight Games offices, and from there to the airport, and home. From which, mollpeartree will be absent in Omaha for a week, leaving me once more to devolve into Madness, Debauchery, or Brutish Animalism. Perhaps all three.

... electronic limbo, where my disembodied voice lives on in macklinr's latest Master Plan podcast. We recorded this one in Sacramento toward the end of ConQuest Sac 2, back in April, so get nostalgic for those palmy days when everyone thought Arcade Fire would save rock and roll. How naïve we were!

... the "Tour de Lovecraft," which went a little long, but one hopes it was worth it. The smattering of plaintive howls for a compiled edition have been heard and shall be heeded, not least because one of those howls was from a very gifted layout artist, so we'll be getting on that. Meanwhile, I shall be redacting, redeploying, rearranging, rethinking, and very likely rewriting the Tour for Weird Tales, which has expressed a very flattering interest in seeing something along those lines. Which means that H.P. Lovecraft and I shall share, if only very glancingly, a masthead. Do pardon me while I gibber quietly to myself.

... the twentieth century, at least in part, as I (or rather kaynorr, who did all the hard work of hooking cables up and swearing and going tappa-tappa on the keyboard and searching on "Why the fact that this format conversion didn't work worth a good goddamn shouldn't vitiate in the least your childlike faith in Steve Jobs" message forums) replaced my increasingly wheezy and doddering Cube with a sleek, purring Mini-Mac roughly the size of a decent pastrami sandwich. mollpeartree has pulled the trigger likewise on upgrading our faithful TiVo now that TiVo Command has kindly offered to transfer our lifetime membership to a sexy new unit. Not before time, as our old one shows signs of diminishing, and going into the west. Could cell phone ownership and DSL be next?

... the season of Patriotic Fun, once more crescending on the Third (Chicago's Fireworks Night) and a party at New Josh City, where the balcony proved to be the sort of thing one rather wants to stay out on all night despite the fascinating company and tasty, tasty food indoors. Next year, though, we're taking the doorplate off the roof access if we can't stand outside and see the fireworks.

... Origins, where I once more enjoyed that most funnest of all game conventions (just enough pro-to-fan ratio; plenty of wargames; savvy local guide yukon_jack, who this year steered me to the Bodega bar and its Pint Mojito). For auditory details, seek out my guest shot on popular podcast 2d6 Feet In A Random Direction. This postprandial show featured ptevis in for Brian Isikoff, and a special guest appearance by Yours Truly and the excellent drivingblind. What prand was it post-, you ask?

Well, in company with wordwill, ptevis, drivingblind, Jeff Tidball, Chris Hanrahan, and myself, righteousfist orchestrated an outstanding dinner at The Burgundy Room, a bistro featuring a sort of French cuisine version of tapas highly influenced by northern Italian and Spanish ingredients. (Highlights: Steamed Prince Edward Island Mussels with Andouille Sausage, Yellow Holland Peppers and a Light Tomato Broth; Sauté of Seasonal Wild Mushrooms with Cipollini Onions, Summer Squash and Pasta de Radiatori in a Mushroom Nâge; and so forth.) We became highly influenced by the Riesling, the Petite Syrah, the noble Burgundy label I can't remember, and the Saint-Joseph. Dessert-wise, two flights of Madeira were consumed by the fiscally brave, while I settled for a fat thimbleful of muscat.

In other Origins developments, I lost two bucks at poker, but I beat the house roundly at Cineplexity. My unbroken reign of terror may well hit turbulence at GenCon if memento_mori's plan for an Ultimate Throwdown comes to fruition, and in a startlingly forced-looking segue, I shook hands on some deals that may kick my nascent PDF career into a slightly higher gear if they come to fruition as they should. All this, plus a vastly deserved Best RPG Origins Awards win for lukzu and Burning Empires, which is satisfying on so many levels that one hardly knows where to begin, and so one should probably choose to end there.

... which means my Origins-derived, and potentially staggering, information about the Eastern Front -- with very grave implications indeed for Operation Orient -- must wait for another entry.

If there's a better way to do the first day of BookExpo than on three hours of sleep after playing five hours of Memoir '44 with the Wise and Powerful lukzu and his Elite Cronies, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks to the kind hospitality of the Burning One, I'm typing this from my New York base, scenic Burning Wheel Global Secret Headquarters, complete with Robot Elevator Death-Trap. I am strictly enjoined from telling anyone how truly sweet the Burning Wheel: SSS07 Super-Secret Summer Surprise Release Of Utter Sublimity is. But perhaps you can guess.

Last night, we went to a Similarly Super-Secret Thai Hole-in-the-Wall down near Union Square, where I had quite possibly the best massaman curry of my life. I think it may have been made with cashew butter; the sauce kept coming around in layers and waves of subtle heat. And, not unimportantly, the proprietors used it to drench a mound of scallops, onions, and avocado slices. And oh! how we laughed when I blithely popped a green pepper into my mouth thinking it was an avocado slice. Ho-ho! Tears were running from my eyes with the laughing.

Tonight is Czech food in Queens, which sounds like the kind of plan Good King Wenceslas himself would have approved of.

The current Gift Book Count for mollpeartree stands at: Six [6]