Pancake pandemonium!

Well, Flapjack Friday turned out to be a real barn-burner - the townhouse saw the biggest turnout in some time!

The tote board tallied a lucky thirteen revelers, including some guests we haven't seen in a good long while. BK and Tyrtle made the long trek in from the farm, and by my reckoning it has been just a week shy of two years since their last visit, at a moovie nite featuring The Incredibles! Wowsers! Like some of the rest if us, they are settling gracefully into the afternoon of life, including starting to count down to retirement in months rather than decades. Also returning after a fairly long stretch were JagGirl and Dvd, bringing their usual sweetness along with some marionberry dream to top the flapjacks. J-Force and Keeps arrived, a little tired but a lot fun. Johnbai and O came bearing fresh strawberries and a delightful breakfasty, bread-puddingy, casseroley thing that was a bright; Sachet brought them, as well as a veritable grocery cart of goodies, including two varieties of chocolate soy mile for taste-testing, some edamame (?!), and a lot of attitude française. Dingo surmounted car-battery woes to bring E-rik, who came with homemade marmalades of diverse and wonderful composition: sweet, savory, and spicy, just like him. Soapy bounced in with some old-school syrup and Yojimbo rounded out the party, reconnecting with BK and Tyrtle after two decades or so. And thus was the circle made complete...

The food-fun part of the evening was a rousing success; as griddle-master, I got to stay put and let the party come to me, while Otis was circulating. Flapjacks got flapped, and topped with toppings, and soysage got nibbled and mimosas sipped, and all was well on the comestibles front.

At a certain point, we cranked up the spectrator unit and watched Our Feature Presentation, carefully selected by Otis and I at random, after minutes of intense consideration, from whatever was in the indie section of the local Lackluster Video: Raising Genius. Although the movie had a killer cast (with Wendie Malick, Steven Root, and Ed Begley, Jr. among the principals and with cameos by Shirley Jones and Tippi Hedren), this film-festival fave was perhaps just a but too quirky for its own good. While no one really thought it was a bad movie, and some people actually enjoyed it, the viewing experience never seemed to coalesce into any identifiable response. Oddly enough, for a purported critical darling of a film, I couldn't find any reviews online, other than these from people who had bought the video from Amazon.

But cinematic ambiguity did not dampen the evening! The lights came up, the talk began, the revels renewed, and all was good with the world. Even a repeat of Dingo's car troubles when she finally headed home didn't dampen the evening too much (she just borrowed mine and put off the solution for another time). It was a great night with good folks and worth every bit of batter.

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Speaking of revels, a three-year streak is snapping: There will be no Oscar party this time around. No multi-screen, no giant image, no costumes, no jammies. Maybe it's because I have only seem one or two of any of the films that have been nominated for anything that I couldn't get up the requisite interest this year; maybe it's just that the townhouse doesn't seem as suitable a venue as the apartment was. If you want a weightier reason, here's an ex post facto rationale from The Guardian. Perhaps the whole tradition was too tied to a particular place and time. In any case, not this time; but we'll never say never again, right?

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And finally, for Otis, who always roots for the winged ones, here's a video of a bird who did not accept a gilded cage: