Cookie-tickets

The cats are one of the few bright points in Inside Llewyn Davis, which I saw last night with G. It is a watchable but bleak film, minor in its ambitions. I liked Luc Sante's account (that's the movie I saw, unless I'd been reviewing it for Cat Fancy or similar!); here's another interesting related link.

Closing tabs:

Indestructible but non-delicious gingerbread houses; the great Finnish gingerbread ticket fiasco of 2013.

I need to do a proper light reading end-of-year roundup, but that entails reading back through the year's blog posts, and I am not sure I have the vim to do it this evening. Currently having very enjoyable Susan Howatch reread - I reread the three St. Benet's books and now am on the second of the Starbridge novels. Appealingly both like and unlike Trollope.

Sister-clones

Jessica Rath's apples.

Black velvet icing

At the FT, Rebecca Rose on the Experimental Food Society (FT site registration required).  Great pictures there: I want a sugarcraft eagle and an Eiffel Tower made of Curly Wurly bars!  The Experimental Food Society website has more pictures...

"It's not very nautical"

Reproducing Noah's ark within the constraints of EU guidelines... (Courtesy of I.H.D.)

"Those pushpins, you wouldn't believe how small they are"

At the New Yorker, Richard Brody on the stop-motion animation of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox production (subscriber only):

Anderson wanted the figurines to have "a believable sort of finish, a lifelike quality," according to Andy Gent, the puppet master. Although the largest of the figurines were only about eighteen inches tall, their fur was, indeed, fur (which, Gent said, came from "safe sources," suc as "food production"). They had been crafted for maximum pliability of expression: Mr. Fox's eyes were poseable, and his foam-latex face had a jointed framework that could register the slightest sneer or snarl or raised eyebrow. Moreover, the figurines had tailored clothing, made with fabric. (Anderson designed the clothes himself, having his own tailor send fabric samples. He has a suit made from the same corduroy as Mr. Fox's.) In closeup, not only are the buttons on Mr. Fox's white shirt visible; so is the stitching on the edge of the collar.

Molly Cooper, the film's co-producer, told me, "Wes wants the references to be from the real world. A desk actually has a coffee stain, piles of papers, things you'd have in a real-world setting." Standing before the set of the supermarket, which is filled with hundreds of miniature boxes and cans and bottles and jars, Anderson told Dawson, "Stores don't put bread in the refrigerator." Dawson joked, "Here they do," and Anderson responded, "I'm saying a serious thing. Maybe we shouldn't have bread in the refrigerator." Another set featured a miniature piano, whose keys could be depressed individually, so that, when a figurine played, the motions matched those of the real performance being heard on the soundtrack. The walls of one character's office were lined with tiny cards that Anderson had based on the scheduling board in the film's production office. On his computer, he'd shown me a still frame of that set and said, gleefully, "Those pushpins, you wouldn't believe how small they are."

Also (courtesy of Wendy): miniature city in The Hague reduces everything to a fraction of its original size! (And I wouldn't mind seeing Miniatürk, either...)

Nonpareil arabesques

From Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary:

Large dishes of yellow cream, that trembled with the least shake of the table, had designed on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in nonpareil arabesques. A confectioner of Yvetot had been entrusted with the pies and candies. As he had only just started out in the neighborhood, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a wedding cake that provoked loud cries of wonderment. At its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars; then on the second level was a dungeon of Savoy cake, surrounded by many fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges; and finally, on the upper platform a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top.

"It's utterly fab"

The Phillips machine (and see also "Gloop!").

Extreme movie makeovers

At the Telegraph, pictures of an amazing (insane!) Star Trek bachelor pad...

Scale models

At the TLS, Sean O'Brien considers the latest installment of Edward Mendelson's edition of the prose of W. H. Auden:

Displayed to good effect throughout his first prose book, The Enchafèd Flood (1950), or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1949), and elsewhere here, Auden’s liking for lists and taxonomies and subheadings suggests, as does his prose in general, that he had a natural talent for teaching. He likes to provide a relief map of a mass of information with the major features pointed out and distinctions boldly drawn.

There is also (and this too suits the schoolmaster’s role) at times something eerie and even slightly mad in the tenor of the reprinted lectures which make up The Enchafèd Flood. It is as though the process of model-building itself, with its binarisms and special cases, is the real object of Auden’s interest. He engages in a form of secondary world-making analogous to collecting complete sets of tea-cards or, as in his own case, the scrutiny of books on mining and engineering. Something in Auden that was precocious in childhood comes to seem childlike in adulthood. The desire for reason and order is equalled by a belief that these properties in themselves are resonant with magic of divine provenance. (Is this a gendered condition? Many women seem baffled or irritated by men’s attachment to information or facts for their own sake.)

Mildly annoying generalization at the end there, eh? My answer is "No"!