Buttered toast

These little things are fine for now. 

But eventually I'm going to have to make a proper meal. Or else go out and score one. 

And when I'm out scoring a meal maybe I will see a person and help them score one too. Or whatever it is they score. 

That is my attitude that I told my friend to answer his attitude which is different. My friend shot back that they will buy alcohol. I said, I know. It usually happens immediately outside the bottle shop down on street level anyway, but so what. People buy me drinks all the time. We were at a party with a tended bar. My friend ceded the point by admitting, yes, he said, when you move in the right circles you get free drinks all the time and it ended there. It has nothing to do with the right circles, I do not think, but we did not argue beyond that. He missed the chance to point out that in both our cases alcoholism has not cost us our marriages jobs or homes. That would have shut me right up, but I was already shutting up. Anyway, at some point I am going to have to come around and make a proper meal. 

Pecan and gruyère on bread strips

The other day I made a plate of fruit and cheese and nuts, to pick at here and there. My favorite combination on that plate was the cheese and pecans together. It was an odd combination but it was so good. That would be perfect by itself. One pecan half with one little bitty piece of good gruyère cheese X 25.  

The pecans have a weird mouth-covering thing happen when they're raw so they must be toasted. Then they are excellent. The combination with this particlar cheese, which I discovered by chance, is extraordinary. I thought the bread would be a good neutral way to carry it. But then I added my own mustard and honey. That is all a little too complex. It is still very good, and I am not complaining, but it is not as good as the other day. 

Fusilli

Snack.

This started out as something else.

Now I'm right back to thinking about the original thing. 

Potato and sweet potato, sesame seeds

It is vegetarian if you don't count all those deer ticks. 

Kidding. Those are toasted sesame seeds. 

Spicy potato. Not hot spicy, but happy spicy. 

My favorite spices that I think will go with this, into a pot with butter. And onion. And garlic. 

Except I forgot turmeric.

It also has tamarind paste and mango curry.

So lots of happy sweet things, cinnamon, and such along with savory spices all mixed up, a little bit of chile pepper flakes, but not much.   

The spices in the pan with butter or oil to excite the oils within the seeds, mostly seeds, but all the spices have oil of some kind that does become activated with heat, and then it exhausts. So to prevent spice exhaustion the whole business is doused with water once it gets going. Aroma escapes, water captures it. Water that cooks the potatoes. 

The water boils down while cooking the potatoes which get all spicy inside by soaking up the spiced water as they cook and tenderize, and then the spiced water concentrates to a sauce which is assisted in viscosity by the tamarind paste and by the mango curry. Water was added twice and the heat cut back because the process kept racing ahead.  

Snack, apple, orange, cheese and pecans

Hey, you are the apple of King Tut's eye.

Do you want to hear something that I think is funny?

Every now and then you hear King Tut's name pronounced like King Two Tank Amun and this is wrong. Tut is right and Tank is wrong. Right after I wrote that I heard the name pronounced like that some 10 times by a guy on the History Channel. It was a very good show otherwise. If anybody ever says Two Tank Amun in front of you then think of this:

I'm not even going to link this because it's all over the place. Pick any random hieroglyphic site and look at the sign for the letter W and notice it is a chick. They will say the chick stands for the near consonant W and sometimes U. 

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

Over and over they say that. Then, 99% of the instances the chick really does indeed translate to W, or so it is thought. Sometimes you get lucky and have solid cross references, but most of the time you do not. It is not known for certain if any vowels occur before or after or between the known consonants, and here is a near consonant, W, and not even a real one. Vowels are not denoted in hieroglyphics, and U is a vowel. 

How do I know it is tut ankh and not two tank or two tankh? 

Because the symbols say so. 

The word  'tut' means 'image' and the sign sequence looks like this:

But we've been told over and over that means twt, and it does. The ankh, of course is clearly an ankh and is pronounced as such. The t does not go with the ankh so there can be no tank or tankh. 

The ligature offers kerning possibilities. Yes, the Egyptians were early kerning specialists. Because the chick is drawn at a diagonal, it provides space that is not to be wasted for the preceding and for the following 't' and that's another way we know the letters go together in a group and are not sounds floating around or part of another group.

And that is how you always see it. It looks like a percent sign immediately, %, see it? I'm not moving until you say you see it. Okay, fine, a backwards percent sign. 

But we are taught the chick is a W and  infrequently a U so our eye catches this percent sign and our mind reads the twt as twat, perhaps twit.

So, king Twat. That's a potty-mouth word in English. That's what I see every time I see the name and I do see it frequently. 

Now who else is going to tell you these things?