This is One Carrot the Bunny Will Never Eat

I made carrot cake for Easter. I used red Japanese carrots so the colour's a little different. It also looks different because I had to use my Japanese grater. The Western style box grater seems to be totally unknown in these parts. The difference is that, while a box grater turns your carrots into thin little strips, the Japanese grater turns it into a paste. This is how the wasabi is prepared for your sushi--wasabi in its natural state is a root vegetable. So I made red carrot paste to mix into the batter. It's not bad.

The frosting is my weak attempt to combine cream cheese, almond milk, and sugar without a power mixer. Luckily, it was improved by dehydrating overnight in the refrigerator.

Here are some cherry blossoms I saw on the way to the grocery store:

Still no cherries in the store, though. I really want to try cooking with cherries.

X Sonnet #1830

The zombie cake was making up the face.
Reminders stuck as cheese to pepper feet.
Remainders sunk equations half a pace.
Surpassing heat defines the mollusc meat.
Intrusive clogs were shoes for runny mud.
No talking showed the cops their honest names,
The soap's reduced to just a single sud.
'Tis jelly all the butter ever blames.
A flash of metal dims behind the dust.
Relayed explosions stop the touching meal.
A sign of hearts dispersed remains of rust.
The only beat corrupts what passed for real.
Discussions break the early birds apart.
But many's the word the blinding day'd impart.

A Bunny's Cinematic Conjuration

Happy Easter, everyone. As sort of promised, I came up with a list of Easter movies for you. Maybe it'll be especially handy for those of you who are still on Saturday.

There just aren't many Easter movies. When I google "Easter movies" I see things like Veggie Tales and The Last Temptation of Christ. The Last Temptation of Christ is a good movie but I feel like a good Christmas movie isn't necessarily a religious movie so there should be non-religious Easter movies, too. There just aren't any real ones. I mean, there are ultra-cheap cash grab movies about the Easter Bunny but there's no Miracle on 34th Street for Easter. So I started thinking just about tone and aesthetic. It should be a movie with lots of pastels and formal attire. One thing that came to mind was:

The Prince and the Showgirl

Shot by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, this movie has lots of soft colours, lots of lavender, and Sir Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe entering upon a very respectfully scandalous affair.

For something ever so slightly raunchier:

French Can Can

Jean Renoir's film about the Moulin Rouge is a light foray into sensational ribaldry. Springtime scenes feature lots of shiny pastels.

Easter Parade

The only bona fide Easter movie anyone can remember. It's not an exceptionally good Fred Astaire or Judy Garland movie but it does definitely contain scenes revolving around Easter, though a lot fewer than you'd think.

Twin Peaks

It's not about the bunny . . . Is it about the bunny? No. It's not about the bunny. Arguably, Laura's death is the Good Friday preceding an Easter that is teased for thirty years and always remains tantalisingly out of reach. As an Easter movie, or series, rather, this may be for those who have explored the furthest extremes of Easter pleasure and now require psychological restraints in order to push blood into their Easterogenous zones.

Alice in Wonderland

Almost any version is a good choice but for Easter I would most recommend the 1949 French and English co-production. Again, for the pastels.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

If you don't like pastels, here's a movie with a very warm palette with lots of fire engine red. If the movie evokes any season, I'd say it's late summer. But the title character is a rabbit and the film contains a lot of thematic rebirth.

So there you go, there's some ideas for you. I also like to watch Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock on Easter but it's kind of an ironic Easter movie. A lot of people would also recommend Harvey, the movie about James Stewart having an invisible rabbit for a best friend, but somehow that movie doesn't seem very Eastery to me, as much as I do like it.

Is It About the Bunny?

Happy Easter, everyone. It was actually yesterday here in Japan but since practically no-one celebrates it I may as well celebrate it to-day. I wasn't yearning for Easter candy this year. My sweet tooth seems to be at an all time low. I tried having one old fashioned doughnut with my coffee two weeks ago and it felt like eating grass. Which reminds me, yesterday I ate a dandelion. That's kind of Eastery, I guess. Did you know dandelions are edible? I didn't. I'd seen dandelions in a lot of sushi bentos and assumed they were just a garnish before I saw this episode of The History Guy on YouTube:

I guess I should've known from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

I can't say I really enjoyed the flavour but I seem still to have some infantile fun at eating something I'm not supposed to.

I'd like to watch a great Easter movie to-night but there really isn't one, is there? I usually default to Alice in Wonderland. For a while I thought Picnic at Hanging Rock was Eastery but it feels more like summer. Maybe I'll just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy almost sounds like bunny.

Twitter Sonnet #1686

A spinning flower grants her petals breadth.
Recumbent ovens often warm the heart.
A shapely arch can grace the stage with depth.
When freshly baked, what need has bread for art?
Behind the shop, a thousand toys are boxed.
Chaotic heaps of dolls and jacks await.
The eager cricket over piles hops.
But sloppy humans first'll take the bait.
Adventure eggs were gone beyond the shell.
Precocious fingers shaped the yolks to hares.
A ghostly hand produced a bunny Hell.
The basket bears a load of grass and cares.
The rising bunny blocks the vengeful sun.
A wealth of love and fur exalts the bun.

Easter Sugar

Christmas is so popular in Japan so it's kind of surprising that people seem barely aware of Easter. I was in the mood to celebrate it this year so I hosted an Easter themed chess tournament and Easter Egg hunt in Second Life with my European friends.

I did find some Easter candy, though, at the department store, just one solitary bag of little chocolate eggs. It's probably just as well, I seem to have completely lost my sweet tooth. I think I may have overloaded myself my first year in Japan. Being an American whose sweets were so often made with high fructose corn syrup, it was kind of amazing to be in a country with so much real sugar. I was eating a lot of doughnuts for a while, now they just make me feel sick. Even if I try to eat just one old fashioned doughnut.

I do still seem to enjoy ice cream. A new shop opened up recently called Blue Seal, apparently a famous chain from Okinawa. I finally had a chance to stop in a couple weeks ago and I immediately ran into two of my former students there eating crepes. They watched me eat two scoops of ice cream--strawberry cheesecake and cocoanut. "Oishii (delicious)?" one of them asked. "Oh, yes," I said. It was some of the best ice cream I'd ever had.

Twitter Sonnet #1573

The living cable clasped the floating room.
And so the house began to build but slow.
The strange events assort the beams to boom.
A wooden voice affixed a word too low.
The eggs were always hid in easy view.
Deceptive bulbs illume the lamps about.
The chocolate dots arrive in bitter queue.
The hands of yellow peeps have traced the route.
Potato lunches stole the breakfast week.
A giant shape condemned the darkened street.
There's many parts of cars exceeding weak.
A helpless song observed a toneless beat.
A carton held a round and limbless team.
The empty egg could yet contain a dream.

The Easter Bus Goes to the Desert

Ten years ago this month, Doctor Who aired its one and only Easter special, the Tenth Doctor story Planet of the Dead. Generally, and rightly, considered the weakest of the series of specials that concluded Ten's run, it still has plenty of good qualities.

A wormhole transports a London bus unexpectedly to another planet. The group of passengers, which includes the Doctor (David Tennant), a noblewoman thief called Lady Christina de Souza (Michelle Ryan), and an assortment of ordinary people must pull together and figure out how to get back home.

The shooting location in Dubai offers some impressive visuals, particularly since the production crew opted to transport an actual London bus to the location. The vehicle was severely damaged in transport but the crew decided to work the damage into the story, an idea that pays off really well.

Generally what hampers the episode is its weak supporting cast. Daniel Kaluuya as one of the bus passengers already exhibits the blandness he would later bring to bear in Get Out but, more importantly, there's almost no chemistry between the Doctor and Christina. Michelle Ryan seems to be forcing a smile on her face for the whole episode, as though being on Doctor Who is something she must grin and bear and get over with.

The exception is Lee Evans as UNIT scientific advisor Malcolm Taylor. He effectively conveys his giddy adoration for the Doctor and it's fun seeing him get to speak to his idol. He seems to have a lot in common with his successor, Osgood. I can't remember if that's ever mentioned. "Planet of the Dead" introduces yet another UNIT staff we never see again before Kate Stewart and Osgood finally return the military organisation to some kind of consistent recognisability. But no-one's ever come close to replacing the Brigadier.

Aside from a couple lines from the Doctor at the beginning, the episode has nothing especially to do with Easter--arguably it's more of a Good Friday special. It's good seeing Tennant again, though. I love how good he is at creating the sense of having two simultaneous thought processes--there's the blustering and joking fellow, setting everyone at ease with genuine enthusiasm, but there's also always the quiet, deeply worried genius. He's always captivating.

Easter Bunny Day

Happy Easter, everyone. Easter hasn't been on April 1st since 1956. 1956 was also the year the Easter Bunny finally died though he'd been retired since 1948. There were still a few photos taken now and then for a magazine but he didn't make any public appearances anymore. Even by the 40s he wasn't the crowd pleaser he was in the late 20s and early 30s but in his heyday he was quite the charmer.

Fan magazines weren't consistent about his place of birth, usually Wyoming or Kansas, I think, on some farm with rosy cheeked Norman Rockwell farmers. I saw a show in the 80s hosted by Orson Welles that put his real birthplace in Arizona under far sketchier circumstances but I don't know how much those old supernatural mystery specials from the 80s should be relied on. He certainly was no natural rabbit and I don't think anyone really believes a normal bunny gave birth to him. I saw an interview with Joel McCrea from 1961 who did a photo with the bunny in 1938 and he mentioned a bad smell. He didn't mind it so much, he said, it's not really a surprise from an animal that size but the publicists and studio people seemed to have less patience for it.

The Easter Bunny was really strong, I heard they had him crushing cocoanuts for an "Easter in Hawaii" pin-up calendar, but he was really docile. He never tried to escape and seemed content to be led around but no-one liked to stare into those big black eyes too long. There's a clip where a model posing with him kind of jokes about wondering what he's thinking and she has this nervous laugh like she's really afraid to know. But the thing just sat there. They never let him pose with kids, probably because the smell would've broken the spell. The smell was something like rotten vegetables and brine and his fur, which looked smooth enough in photos, was coarse and patchy. It looked like segments sewn together for a costume but it was clearly living flesh.

In the early days, though, everyone seemed tickled by the novelty of the thing. Maybe it was related to the heedless exuberance of the 20s before the Depression but none of qualities people talked about later seemed to bother the people who worked with him in those days. But the smell didn't bother McCrea either--personally, I think as time went on the people around the bunny just weren't the sort who were used to working with animals.

Well, he may be gone but he did leave a really big egg. So we'll always have that. I saw it once when I was a kid and it came to the Natural History Museum here in San Diego. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, it just looked like a big black lump, some kind of ore. I wonder where it is now.

Twitter Sonnet #1099

From painted walls the paper steps away.
A wind invests the bannister with stairs.
The carpet stretched to fit a clock's delay.
A local lodge admits the wild hares.
A pair of eggs replied in purple spots.
The rabbit tongue replaced his foot to walk.
The eaten grass collects and quickly clots.
Through candy mower blades the spirits talk.
The shadow of the rabbit burned the duck.
In fires scratching clouds the time revolved.
A ghastly foot contains the rabbit's luck.
And not a peep escaped when spring dissolved.
A banner made of felted fur ascends.
The giant magnet egg at last descends.