A very happy birthday to the great Dizzy Gillespie. To cellebrate lets enjoy his wonderful “Night in Tunisia.”
http://youtu.be/hXdpIaEOETo
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Today’s sketch is some concept designs for Sun Wukong aka Monkey and all of his companions from Journey to the West. I’ve always liked Journey to the West from a beautiful children’s book version called “Magic Monkey” (Can’t find a reference for it. It’s probably been out of print for ages) to finally reading the Anthony Yu translation very recently. It’s a story with seemingly endless material for doing great images.
Even though the source material generally describes Monkey as mostly human shaped, I usually prefer to keep him as monkey like as possible usually going with a Macaque as my starting point though I suppose I could just as easily go with a Golden Monkey.
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I had a nice bit of serendipity. I’ve been having one of those oh so entertaining week of being between paychecks and finding myself going a little deeper into the rations then I would like. I’ve had enough of these close calls from college and onward that I always make a point of having at least a gallon of peas and lentils in my pantry at all times. It get’s the point that whenever I worry about my fiscal status I get a hankering for split pea soup. Unfortunately I hadn’t checked my levels for a while so this time it was down to the beans.
The last time I was down to beans was awful. All I knew what to do with them was boil them and while they sustained I was washing them down with a lot of water. This time it was different this time I had onions and a blender but I wasn’t expecting anything out of it other than extremely dull servings of protein.
But then I remembered I had a bag of chicken bones in the freezer from a batch of my favorite 40 clove chicken recipe that I was saving for stock. So while I was soaking the beans I made stock. On top of this I found a can of steamed tomatoes in the far back of my cupboard. So I added that into my mix. In the end the dull bean porridge I was bracing for myself for turned out to be something excellent.
Here’s the basic idea of what I did, keep in mind there’s a lot of room for finetunig here.
3 cups of dried beans (What I used was half red beans and half great northern beans I’m sure going either way will be fine)
3 medium sized Onions
5 cloves of garlic
Butter
3 tomatoes
fresh thyme
4 cups of chicken stock
4 cups of water
(I actually used a lot more stock then that and no water but the batch of stock I made was rather thin so for the recipe I’m going to call it half stock half water)
Soak the beans for about six hours. Chop the onions, garlic and thyme. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and sweat the onions, garlic and thyme.
remove the skin and seeds from the tomatoes and chop. Add to the saute mix and continue till the onions are soft.
Add Beans and stock, bring to a boil and simmer for an hour. Puree mix. (I did that with the messy tedious process of moving it too the blender cup by cup… I’ve got to get one of those wand thingees)
Let it cook a little longer. Serve hot and enjoy. All in all while this is clearly a work in progress, it came out really well with the tomatoes giving it a certain sweetness.
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Today’s Rhapsody is the Rhapsody No1 for church organ by Herbert Howels (Op 17) performed by Harold Darke.
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Well all in all this was a very interesting day for me. It actually started earlier this week with my WordPress dashboard beginning to show signs of… personality especially in the area of creating and editing posts. For the most part I figured out the way around it and so had chalked it up to another nuisance I would have to put up with from here on in.
It became a genuine problem for real after I had what wasn’t so much a eureka moment as it was a “you idiot why didn’t you think of this years ago” moment. For a long time one of my on going “knitting projects” (That is to say something mechanical, uncreative and tedious to do when the muse is taking a day off) has been adding keywords and transcripts to strips in the archives to help make them more visible for search engines. My not so eureka moment was the sudden thought during a WordPress users group that went as such: “Why don’t you put keywords in the current strips?”
After getting over the embarrassment of not thinking of it sooner. I couldn’t get home fast enough to do it. So far it seems to have worked. While it’s still too soon to tell the last two days normally two of my lowest traffic days are giving me numbers that have surpassed my peak times.
Anyway as soon as I realized this I added keywords to the rest of this months material. And once I’d finished I said to myself why stop there put the transcripts in too! Regrettably that brought up the problems I’d mentioned before. Once I was editing full posts (I hadn’t noticed when I had put in the keywords since I was able to do that in quick edit) every time I tried to publish any changes it gives me the white screen and when I go back to the page nothing has been saved. I’ve had the white screen before when uploading but at least there, despite the nuisance factor, everything was saved. I was be able to create new posts after a fashion but all that was saved was the post’s title, it’s content and nothing else. Keywords and publishing dates were ignored and only saved the post as a “draft” or “pending review” those changes could only done in quick edits which didn’t help with putting in anything big. At this point I wasn’t sure if this problem was WordPress or the Theme I reinstalled both with no luck. It also occurred that if it was the Comicpress theme this might be the perfect opportunity to try the new Easel theme. This also didn’t work in fact the white screen of death blanked out everything until I deleted the plugins associated with it.
At this point I was getting frustrated thinking if I hadn’t broken my page it would be dead in a week since I couldn’t fix anything. I spent the next hour reading what I could , posting questions and tentatively tweaking what I could with extremely mixed results. (The worst of which was accidentally moving the admin folder into the content folder which was briefly worse than the white screen of death.) But I finally fixed it by deleting and deactivating a handful of unused plugins.
It’s amazing how much you can learn by reverse engineering your own stupidity.
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Today’s sketch is one I get a lot of compliments from. It’s an illustration scene from the Dresden File’s Novel “Small Favor” where “Tiny” the elder brother Gruff enters McAnally’s Pub to formerly challenge Harry to a duel.
I enjoy Jim Butcher‘s work. I wouldn’t say it’s high art but compared to a lot of the boilerplate urban fantasy out there he creates an original and well thought out setting.
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