charlesoberonn:

The fact that this joke is from the very first episode (which aired in January 1997) is messing with me.

cloversloth:

liberalsarecool:

queerism1969:

💫💫💫💫💫

bellybuttonblue2:

petermorwood:

neil-gaiman:

I will let someone in the notes describe and explain Black Pudding. Someone will take joy in it.

@dduane called upstairs and told me: “Neil’s got one for you!”

Well, maybe not me specifically, but here goes… :->

Black pudding is the Irish / UK name for a sausage made with blood - pig, cow or sheep - rather than chopped or minced meat as the main ingredient, forms of which are found in cuisines all over the world.

Black pudding can be long or short, straight or curved (“stick” or “ring”), and sometimes even a cake or terrine.

The “pudding” part, which USAians associate with a sweet dessert, comes from the French word “boudin” (boudin noir is French blood sausage) and seems to have something to do with “edible material inside a wrapper” - the wrapper may also be edible, like the skin on a sausage or black pudding…

…and the suet crust of a steak-and-kidney pudding…

…or inedible like the cloth or bag used for a boiled pudding. This is how Christmas puddings used to be made, hence Dickens writing that the Cratchit house smelled like a laundry, and why traditional images show them as spherical with a sprig of holly on top.

Black puddings are also boiled before going on sale, so they’re actually cooked and ready-to-eat, though I’ve never heard of anyone hereabouts doing so.

Usually they become an ingredient in a recipe such as this salad (one of DD’s Middle Kingdoms dishes)…

… or appear sliced as part of a fry-up.

The black puddings I’m most familiar with (Irish / UK) mostly use pig-blood, oats or barley and various herbs and spices. They’re a standard part of a Full Irish Breakfast / Ulster Fry - just the sort of thing to start a day that involves ploughing a 40-acre field behind two Shire horses, though perhaps best eaten infrequently if just sitting at a desk.

This is pretty close to the sort of Ulster Fry I grew up with, including the black pudding…

…though there should also be a slice of white pudding (minced pork, oats or barley, spices) and that ordinary fried bread, nice though it looks, would be a half farl of soda and a couple of farls of potato bread instead.

(For those familiar with a Full English Breakfast and wondering “Why no baked beans?”, AFAIK there should never be beans with an Ulster Fry since, unlike everything else, they can’t be fried - which, as the name suggests, is the whole point…)

Black puddings were used as weapons (!) for “the Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump” (!!) in an episode of 1970s comedy show “The Goodies”; this is the notorious episode where a TV viewer died of laughter…

There are regional variants of black and white pudding all over these islands: Stornoway black pudding from Scotland, Pwdin Du from Wales, Bury black pudding in the Midlands, Hog’s Pudding in the West Country and so on.

Perhaps the best known Irish black pudding variant is “drisheen” from Cork and Limerick; its signature herb is tansy, and oatmeal rather than barley gives a softer texture than regular pudding.

Cork and Limerick were major Viking settlements, so I wonder if there’s some association between drisheen with tansy and Scandinavian blood sausages with marjoram and other herbs.

That notion was first prompted by Frans Bengtsson’s well-researched novel “The Long Ships”; Michael Meyer’s excellent translation is the usual English version.

There, black pudding - or at least blood sausage “with thyme in it” - provokes a tearful emotional response from two hard-bitten Vikings who, after several years as slaves then mercenaries in Andalusian (Muslim) Spain, get their first taste of Real Grub at King Harald Bluetooth’s Yule feast.

The book version’s a bit long, but you can get the picture (hah!) from a couple of frames of the graphic novel.

Wild boar, bread cakes and fried turnips were carried in, but when the blood-sausage came, Orm and Toke got tears in their eyes.

“That scent is best of all!”

“There’s thyme in it…”

“Please, if it’s not against Harald’s orders, could we have some more? For seven years we’ve been eating vegetables in the land of the Andalusians. We’ve missed seven Yules-worth of blood-sausage!”

Back in 1987, I felt the same way about foods from home after only 6 months in Los Angeles - and yes, one of those foods was black pudding…

tchaikennugget:

man the site that used to be full of people horny for the onceler now getting really hyped about tree law is some serious poetic irony

macabrekawaii:

PLEASE do not spread misinformation about cosplay, fandom and the Strike. SAG-AFTRA has NOT called for any cessation of cosplay/cosplayers or fan/nerd events including drag & burlesque. As a cosplayer (non pro) and nerdlesque producer I’ve seen a lot of disinformation spreading with good intention. Unless you are a *paid influencer* (re: someone receiving income from the studios) a call to cease work for “promoting struck properties” does not apply to you! 

Cosplaying at an event or con for fun is not paid work.

This call to not accept “promotion” work is for *paid influencers* receiving payment or press kits from the studios themselves.

Please PLEASE be mindful of what information you share as I have already seen people calling for a boycott of fandom events 

Here’s a great flow chart i found here

docgold13:

woo-boy! that’s a tough question.  A lot of variables to consider in formulating an opinion on such a thing.  But just going with my gut, I’d say that the best of the best would be made up of (in no specific order)

• Gravity Falls
• Batman The Animated Series
• Samurai Jack
• Avatar: The Last Airbender  

with honorable mentions to Scooby Doo Where Are You?; Adventure Time; The Boondocks; Young Justice; Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts; and Over the Garden Wall

blorb-el:

Calling golden age Clark an anticapitalist/socialist paragon is only true for prewar golden age Clark (1938-42). The instant the US entered the war and the character started to be used to sell war stamps, he couldn’t act as anti-authoritarian; destroying a car factory for its use of unsafe, inferior materials (action 12), trapping a mine owner in his own mine to force him to improve conditions for his workers (action 3), or tearing down tenement housing in order to force the government to build better, safer apartments (action 8) are all actions that would be seen as actively traitorous in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The Superman office contributed enthusiastically to war propaganda in all the forms of media the character was appearing in (comics, newspaper strips, radio show, and the Fleischer animations). By the end of the war Superman the Character was firmly established as Establishment. Postwar golden age Superman is still devoted to doing the right thing, of course, but now he helps raise money for charity, donates his time and labor to build orphanages, that sort of thing. He’s not trying to tear the system down… much as I wish DC would let him try.

Instead of Siegel’s original justice cryptid, the furiously kinetic Champion of the Oppressed outsider Superman, postwar to modern day we get a Clark who shifts back and forth on the spectrum of establishmentarianism depending on the writer, but who is generally not allowed to act directly against institutions (Wolfman, Morrison, Waid, Byrne, and Maggin for example all have WILDLY different takes on the relationship between superman and Authority). My personal favorite Take is that Clark as a person is not establishmentarian, but the establishment of superheroes and their conduct codified (or calcified, if you prefer) itself around him and his personal conduct. Both in a Doylist sense and in the continuities where he’s the First Superhero a Watsonian one. How does your behavior change when you know people are looking to you to determine what’s right and what’s allowed for themselves? How does that constrict you, when your actions are dissected and taken for justification? That’s why I always think of him as a person whose natural inclination is to be chaotic good, but who restrains himself into being lawful good. Clark would sure LIKE to Solve Capitalism. But he both can’t, and will never be allowed to… and that tension, far from being a bad thing, can fuel a good interpretation.

afterlifeoftheparty:

the answer is not “complete desexualization of fat people” or “aggressive posting about how much we want to fuck this fat person” it’s actually a secret third thing called being normal