Jilli, I tried sending you info about sources for short black jackets - not sure it got through.

Hmmm, I didn't see anything. If you still have the info, would you please try sending it to gothiccharmschool (at) gmail? My webmail for the GCS site is not happy with my corporate firewall at the mo'.

This 300 talk reminds me about the vid Matt posted a link to in the movie thread after my comments about being overwhelmed by the testosterone funk of the movie: Matt the Bruins fan "Buffista Movies 6: lies and videotape" Aug 26, 2007 10:31:21 am PDT

It is hilarious.

I don't think I could go back to 45 minutes.

Exactly how I felt. Honestly, it was a major con on my list when I was struggling with whether or not to change schools the year before last. Everything else about the school--for the most part--I love. But the schedule sucks donkey balls. Yeah, I said it.

t is defiant

300 was so far removed from reality it was hard to even link it to Thermopylae...but it was removed from reality across the board. The men were airbrushed and CGId into unrealistic proportions, Xerxes was about 9 feet tall, and somehow the Persians got elephants onto their skinny warships. And a cave troll.

I know, I know. I just can't get past my disappointment that somebody made a movie about Thermopylae, and it wasn't anything like the Thermopylae in my head, you know? It's not that I'm opposed to playing with history or inserting fantastical elements into reality--my WIP is a Napoleonic Era alternate history, and I can hardly wait for the next volume in Naomi Novik's Napoleonic-Wars-with-dragons series. But for whatever reason I couldn't bring myself to buy into 300's departures from reality.

Jilli, insent.

(didn't go see it, but didn't get outraged at the inaccuracies)

Well, I'm not outraged at them; it's just not like the story as I've been wishing someone would tell it ever since I got hooked on that corner of history. Which is probably to the good, given that so far a major source of my own artistic inspiration seems to be reading other people's books or watching other people's movies and saying, "What?! That's not how *I* would do it! Is no one going to tell that story the way I want it told? Really? Nobody? Well, FINE. I'll go write it myself." I then stomp off in an inspired huff, and 100,000 words or so later I at least have the satisfaction of having told myself the story I wanted to hear.

ah ... well, I took my degree in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology (and hasn't THAT turned out to be practical!) so I know the history, and when the ads started coming out I was sitting there appalled, working on the assumption it was supposed to be at least quasi-realistic. And, as one of those things that's inspired a fair amount of poetry, I was getting fairly cranky about it. But understanding that its connection to reality was pretty tenuous, I started ignoring the glaring historical inaccuracies and just watched the pretty.

America's Test Kitchen just did a low-fat cheesecake recently, but the one thing that they said to do was not to substitute the sugar in it, since in baking, sugar is considered to be a liquid, and Splenda is a solid in baking terms, so the texture ends up all wrong if you use Splenda. They ended up going with a mixture of low-fat cream cheese, yogurt cheese (drained yogurt) and cottage cheese, run through the food processer to get rid of any texture issues.

I KNOW there are good no-sugar cheesecakes though -- I've eaten them. And its good to keep the fat when something is low-sugar because the fat tasting good makes up for a lot.

Of course, they were from commercial bakeries and this is of no help.

Toddson, I knew we went to the same college, but I didn't realize we had the same major, too... heh.

Well, it was one of their better departments ... and when I was there at least one very charasmatic teacher.