Why Blood Tastes like Copper

Sorry for the long time away. Life is happening. I got a wife and baby and job and stuff. But anyway, here I am.

While my wife is sleeping off her night shift, I have spent most of the day working on my current novel in progress, which happens to be volume 3 of Jake and the Dynamo, currently under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

Anyway, as I was working, I happened to find myself asking a trivial question—why do we typically describe blood as tasting like copper?

This question led me to an interesting article on LiveScience. Although some speculation appears to be involved in the article’s conclusion, the apparent answer is that copper and other metals, including iron, don’t actually have the metallic odor we attribute to them. Rather, the smell comes from an oil in our skin, which breaks down in the presence of metal.

So, when you grab a piece of metal, the breakdown of the oil in your hands leaves behind the “metallic” smell. Naturally, since metal coins get a lot of handling, this makes coins smelly. Thus, the distinctive odor of copper pennies.

Similarly (this part appears to be more speculative), the iron in blood can produce the same smell for the same reason, and (this part is conjecture) we may be sensitive to this metallic smell specifically so that we can be alert to the smell of blood.

So, we smell blood because blood reacts to skin oil in the same way coins do, and then we turn around and attribute the smell of coins to blood.

So there you go.

Jake and the Dynamo: The Shadow of His Shadow
Phase:Writing
Due:3 years ago
33.2%

‘Rag & Muffin’ Excerpt

This is an excerpt from my novel Rag & Muffin. It is currently on an editor’s desk, but since I am getting ignored rather than rejections, I may move to self-publication in the near future. Anyway, this has to include a language warning since it’s more explicit than what I normally post on the blog.

In the dark, on her grass mat, Miss Alice sat in the Padmasana—Lotus Posture—one of the basic positions of Yoga. She had heard that if she practiced Yoga, she could make her Sammohana stronger.

She wanted to make it stronger.

It was the only thing she had.

She tried to focus on her breathing, but it was hard: She kept thinking about the men, about the chair, about the buzzing whine of the drill and the horrible pain it made when it went into her head. The back of her neck hurt. Her brain throbbed with a monotonous ache that made it difficult to think, and she still felt vestiges of the sickness and chills she got the last time they dug into her skull.

She didn’t understand why they were doing this to her. She didn’t even hate them. But she felt stark terror every time the door opened because it meant more agony, more screaming, more sickness. It meant their greasy hands and bad smells. It meant being hit and slapped and tied down. It meant searing pain.

She heard steps outside. She heard a hand rattling the knob. She heard the knob turn with a groan and a click.

The metal door opened with the ear-splitting creak of rusty hinges. Once again, she used her only weapon.

As he came through the door, she looked into his eyes. With a stab of pain, she felt her ravaged Heaven Seed gland squeeze down, and a pleasant ripple ran across her body. She began to speak, to order him to release her—but he simply walked over and slapped her on the mouth.

“Don’t you ever try that on me, you little cunt. And stop wasting your juice.”

It was the man they called Harman. The really bad one, meaner than the others.

Sammohana never worked on him.

Continue reading “‘Rag & Muffin’ Excerpt”

The Magical Pumpkin

This is your annual reminder that we know next to nothing about Samhain or its relationship to Halloween, that all Halloween customs have supposedly Christian origins just as convincing as their supposed pagan origins, and that none of this should matter anyway because every agricultural society has harvest festivals and cultural borrowing is the norm.

Anyway, in our last episode, I mentioned that the magical girls and I purchased pumpkins for carving. I planned to create a magical girl-themed Jack-O’-Lantern; I wanted such a theme both so I could display it on this blog and also just on principle. However, my main magical girl hadn’t carved a Jack-O’-Lantern before, so she wanted a more traditional one.

Since I’m not a master pumpkin carver and was not working with any fancy tools, I wanted a simple pattern.

I chose this:

Sailor Moon silhouette pumpkin stencil.

Now, I already know what you’re thinking: It looks simple at a glance, but it actually has a lot of small, delicate details and very little to hold the construction together.

At first, I was doing pretty well and thought I would get this right, but I eventually made some wrong moves. I lost the area below her arm, so I had to reattach it with toothpicks, but my biggest mistake was carving the moon out last, thinking I should do the delicate work first. I ended up with this:

Damaged pumpkin.
The hole in the pumpkin represents the hole in my life.

That’s the magical girl diligently working on her own in the background there. She was also laughing at me.

If carved correctly, the design has delicate spots that leave large parts of the image supported by tiny bits of the pumpkin’s rind. I broke through a couple by applying too much pressure. The result was what you see here: I shattered the entire image like an eighth-century iconoclast.

Broken like my life.
On the plus side, that’s a delicious Old Fashioned Cocktail.

My wife, who judiciously wanted a simpler, more classic design, was entirely successful in her carving endeavor. She and the other magical girl who can never leave her worked diligently, and now their Jack-O’-Lantern, made from a stencil my wife chose because it made her giggle, adorns the top of the post. I don’t have any tea candles to show it in all its glory, but I’ll undoubtedly display it lit up at a later date.

At the Pumpkin Patch

Yesterday, I, the magical girl, and magical girl 2 went to a local seasonal attraction, the misnamed “Pumpkin Patch.” I guess I was actually expecting a field of pumpkins growing on the vine, but it was actually a square of grass with pumpkins on pallets. Nonetheless, its creators had brought in lots of props and some kiddie games and such, so it made for some fun photo opportunities.

Magical girl holding a pumkin in front of the sun.

We ended up purchasing two pumpkins. The magical girl wanted to carve a traditional Jack-O’Lantern, but I wanted to use a stencil and carve a magical girl-themed pumpkin I can display on the blog.

Magical girl in front of rack of pumpkins.

So, anyway, we have our pumpkins. The question is when we’ll be able to find the time to carve them. I’m also contemplating turning their insides into pumpkin pie, but since these are large ones with probably stringy insides, that might be a bad idea. I’m sure we can bake the seeds, though.

Magical girl getting her height measured.

Art

Featured image: Unknown title and artist, originally found on Loveydoveship.

Have yourself some Shugo Chara! fan art. Alas, this image has been shared so much across the interwebs that I have failed to trace it to its source. It’s a depiction of the protagonist Amu in her four magical forms. In any case, if you are interested in the title, don’t miss my review.

Double Book Review: ‘Bambi’ vs. ‘Watership Down’

Sometimes, when I’ve had a bad day, I just want to watch some cuddly talking animals bleed to death.

This is, again, an old review salvaged from my previous, now-defunct blog and subsequently edited. Were I to write it today, I’d probably give fewer spoilers, so considered yourself warned. In any case, these are still two of my all-time favorite novels, so I think this review belongs over here. I can relate it to magical girls by pointing out that both these books are about talking animals, and magical girls are usually accompanied by talking animals. Or something.

Bambi by Felix Salten. Translated by Whittaker Chambers. Grosset and Dunlap (New York): 1929. 293 pages.

Watership Down by Richard Adams. Scribner (New York): 2005 (Reprint). 499 pages.

There’s an old joke, dating back to the 1960s, about what would happen if Bambi fought Godzilla.  The correct answer, known to anyone who’s read the original novel Bambi by Felix Salten, is that Godzilla would get his ass kicked, at least if he made the mistake of standing between Bambi and a doe in rut.

Felix Salten’s classic novel, an often dark and brutal story originally published in , has been eclipsed in most people’s minds by the Disneyfied version, though since I originally wrote this review, a number of lavishly illustrated productions of the book have come into print. I can vouch for none because I read this book in a 1929 printing, but some of the new editions are beautiful at least at first glance—though I have been warned that some contain an abridged text, so I pass that warning on.

In any case, Godzilla would also likely meet his demise if he made the mistake of harassing the lady friends of the bunny rabbits from Watership Down, except the rabbits would most likely coerce somebody else into delivering the beat-down for them—maybe Bambi, in fact.

So if Bambi teamed up with the Watership Down rabbits to open a can of whoopass on Godzilla, especially if they maybe, I dunno, used some powered mecha armor that somebody left in the woods or something, that would be kick-awesome.  Or maybe the rabbits could all drive armored vehicles that look like giant rabbits that shoot lasers out of their ears, and then Bambi could drive a vehicle that looks like a giant stag, and then they could combine together into a super giant robot that maybe looks like a jackalope.  I would totally watch this Bambi vs. Godzilla movie in the theater.

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Anime Review: ‘Princess Tutu’

You don’t know real pain until your waifu turns into a bird.

I am continuing to salvage content from my previous, now-defunct blog. This is a lightly edited version of a post that originally appeared over there: I am not entirely happy with it and may revisit this title at some point in the future, but in any case, this is my review as it presently stands.

Princess Tutu, directed by Shogo Koumoto. Starring Nanae Kato, Noboru Mitani, and Takahiro Sakurai. Story by Ikuko Itoh. Hal Film Maker (–). DVDs produced by AEsir Holdings. 26 episodes of 25 minutes (approximately ). Rated TV-14.

After I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, I thought to myself that I could use it to buy some edifying, uplifting literature, or I could use it to acquire more brain-rotting magical-girl junk. It’s no mystery which choice I made, and I have no regrets: I picked up a complete DVD set of Princess Tutu, which I knew by rumor and reputation but had not previously seen.

The first time I heard of Princess Tutu, the tale of a clumsy girl who receives the power to transform into a magical ballerina, I assumed it was a saccharine, fluffy, and disposable story on a par with something like Lilpri. I would have been cool with it if that were the case—since I’m totally into that—but in fact, my assumption was entirely incorrect because it is so good. This is easily one of the best anime series I have ever seen. It is the best magical girl series I have ever seen. This is an anime that rises, at least at times, to the level of high art.

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An Update to My Hate

I recently completed a small project I’ve been meaning to get to for a while: I went through all the posts in my hyperbolic but half-serious series of essays, “Why I hate Cardcaptor Sakura” to make improvements and corrections. I’d like to do this with several of my posts, but that particular series brings in most of the site’s traffic, so it got priority.

If you’ve read those essays already, there’s no reason to re-visit them unless you happen to be a masochist. WordPress has been through some updates since I wrote them, and I’ve learned more about writing for the web, so I went back to improve HTML semantics, add headings, clean out dead links, and insert additional links to make it easier to move from one essay to another. I also corrected typos and grammatical errors when I found them and occasionally rephrased a sentence to remove ambiguity, but the content is still the same.

On my list of things to do is to sit down with the Clear Card Arc, a sequel to Sakura that appeared about the same time I wrote those essays. I haven’t got to it yet because, though I exaggerated in the essays for the sake of entertainment, I mostly meant what I said: I don’t particularly enjoy Cardcaptor Sakura, so I’ve put off the task of slogging through more of it.

I have no timeline for when I might get around to the sequel; I have a bad habit of starting blog projects and then losing track of them when I get interested in other blog projects, so I should probably make fewer promises.

Featured Art by Pearlpencil

Featured art: “My Everyday My HiME -Feb 16- Sketch of Mikoto” by Pearlpencil.

I am still watching My-HiME, so today’s featured art is of one of the show’s main characters. At the moment, I don’t have much else to report. Life is busy but in a good way, as you might expect, as the magical girl and I are preparing for our first baby.

The Old Fashioned

To prove that we (or I, rather) live in a solipsistic universe and that the rest of you don’t exist, I recently learned of the existence of the Old Fashioned, a simple cocktail that lays claim (truly or not) to being the original cocktail. I thought it sounded really good and have been wanting one, and then I saw that a lot of people on my social media feeds were drinking them.

I needed to join in, so I bought a bottle of aromatic bitters and tried a few experiments.

The Old Fashioned pictured here is simple: I made it with brown sugar doused in bitters and dissolved in a spoonful of water. Then I added two shots of Maker’s Mark and some orange peel, and stirred with ice.

I’m quite pleased with the result: The bourbon still stands out, but the bit of water, flavoring, and sweetener takes away the “burn” typical of neat or on-the-rocks whiskey.

This may become my go-to drink.