Not Familiar With

It's cooooooold.

From a scones recipe, one of the more bizarre notations I've seen in a recipe yet: If you are not familiar with buttermilk...

Not familiar with buttermilk?? Come on, people, it's buttermilk. Not some fancy ingredient you can only find in specialty stores or freakin' Whole Foods or something. Buttermilk. It's right next to the regular milk in any Wal-Mart. They sell it at gas stations, for crying out loud. Granted, I am speaking from an American Southern perspective, and we put buttermilk in everything and down it by the glass, but I cannot imagine that the situation is that different in other parts of the country, and this is an American website.

To me, it's like saying 'if you are not familiar with sour cream' or 'if you are not familiar with yogurt' or...butter or something. GAH.

In Which I Get My Ancient Greek Rant On

As I'm sure some of you know, I am all about some ancient Greek history. Especially the battle of Thermopylae, for some reason. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I, um, cried at the monument at Thermopylae. I couldn't explain why. I just did. So I should be thrilled about 300, the upcoming movie based on the comic book about the battle of Thermopylae, as imagined by Frank Miller. And I'm sure that, as a movie, it will be quite stunning. I'm equally sure it will have little to nothing to do with the battle of Thermopylae. For one thing, there are those two degrees of remove to contend with, and for another, well, 'as imagined by Frank Miller.' I seriously doubt I would be as concerned if this project were Gates of Fire based on the excellent novel by Steven Pressfield (recommended to me by a Classics professor, who said it had the best and most honestly brutal descriptions of how the Spartans trained and did battle she'd ever seen anywhere).

And lest anyone forget, this is how Frank Miller 'imagined' Batman.

Anyway, until now it's all been bitching into the wind, because I hadn't actually read 300, only seen some scans at scans_daily, and perhaps those scans were nonrepresentational. Maybe it was good!

( contains spoilers )

So, basically, I'll see this movie, because I'm weak and it's Thermopylae and Gerard Butler's in it. But I'm going to have to pretend it's some bizarre AU where up is down and black is white, or I'll be throwing things at the screen the whole damned time.

And seriously. Xerxes just looks stupid.