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🧄 National Garlic Day 2023 🧄
Vampires beware! 🧄🧛🧄 Today is National Garlic Day. Some people like it. Some people hate it. Some people practically swim in it.
Taxes
Any politician promising not to raise your taxes is like a vampire promising to become a vegetarian. ~Pierre Poilievre
The big day has come and gone. The less said about yet another of our three-letter agencies, the better. All I can say is that I hope the House can keep all of those new agents from being funded.
Actually, I’m really hoping the House can do some serious work to keep a lot of nonsensical things from getting funded. If Joe Average needs to tighten his belt and cut down on the extras, then so does Lunchbox Joe.
There’s a lot of pork on the Administration’s wish list and they need to be put on bread and water instead. We’ve had about 2 years of doing it Joe’s way. It just keeps getting more unaffordable.
Let’s just say it plainly. We can’t afford Admin46. We can’t afford the current direction. We need more common sense and a lot less of what these clowns think are great ideas. They aren’t.
Just 🧄 Add 🧄 Garlic
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Admin46 isn’t the only thing with a strong odor.
Garlic is often ridiculed for its stink, but it’s actually both delicious and nutritious. It can be a wonderful member of a flavor ensemble or it can confidently take center stage.
Personally, I like to shake a dash of garlic powder into the water when I make spaghetti. Not only does it help to infuse the flavor into the noodles, but it also serves as condensation nuclei for the starches released into the water. I find that this helps to keep the water from frothing up and boiling over the edge of the pot.
While I don’t use it for every dish, every day of the year, I am pleased to inform you that I have used it often enough to dissuade vampires from stopping by.
In any case, I found some garlic-centric recipes for us to enjoy. You know the garlic butter mushrooms & onions are going to find their way onto my plate soon and often. The garlic butter chicken and the Transylvanian pot roast will have to wait for the right opportunity.
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Time To Spice It Up
Paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right: you can never have too much. ~Thomas Pynchon
Something I’ve been looking into is how to portray my Conclave of evildoers.
I really wanted The Sentinels to come across as a classic comic book superhero group, but that’s actually more of a Silver Age concept.
I had a notion of showing my heroes in stark opposition to The Conclave in form and style, but it occurs to me that I also wanted to handle the initial trilogy of the Sentinels’ tridecology with a Golden Age flavor.
The thing about the actual Golden Age of Comic Books is that it was the origin of modern comic media. Primarily, the comic series focused on a single superhero such as Superman, Batman, Captain America or Shazam (aka Captain Marvel).
In the Sentinelsverse, these actual comic book ages had already come and gone. Lucky was born in 1956 and became intensely interested in comic books and superheroes after his godfather saved him from being run down by a drunk driver when he was 6. Lucky’s desire to find other supers and form a super team like the Justice League or the Avengers was inspired by the fact that he was growing up well into the Silver Age.
As far as the tridecology is concerned, each of the founding members of The Sentinels have already had their individual origin stories and initial adventures before Lucky found them.
His godfather had gained his super powers back in the 1880s, when he was serving wth the 10th Cavalry in the Old West. Foxfire had already made a name for himself in the vicinity of his home town in Upstate New York before Lucky found him.
Mary Christmas was a slight exception to this rule. She had already been accidentally abducted by The Conclave a year before he met her. Lucky helped Angelica secure custody of Meirhe when she turned up after being held captive for a nearly a year. She wasn’t exactly a superhero, but she and Angelica had a number of adventures as private investigators and confidential informants to the ECPD.
When the series begins, all that is over a decade past and they’re pondering their future as a super team before Tanda gets her powers.
When I shifted the story to pick up from when Tanda gets her powers, it gave me an opportunity to portray how The Conclave reacts to the news that The Sentinels won’t necessarily fizzle out when Lucky and Foxfire retire. The villains considered the heroes to be a flash in the pan. They were counting on simply waiting them out.
Once it becomes clear that Tanda could lead to a new generation of Sentinels, they decide to switch from a passive stance to active interference.
Since they’re used to operating from the shadows, obscured by layers of expendable lackeys, paranoia is something I need to weave into the initial trilogy of the series. I need it to be a bit grittier, street-level and in the style of thrillers than a standard super team story.
These guys are not set up for world-breaking threats the way the Avengers or the Justice League are. They will get there in later phases of the series, but for the first three books, they need to be more like The Defenders.
The Conclave isn’t exactly like the Hand or the League of Assassins. They’re actually more like the Court of Owls, except that (like the Hand and certain members of the League of Assassins) they are effectively immortal.
In DC’s Court of Owls, it’s a cabal of Gotham City’s founding families. The Conclave are not officially among Empire City’s founding families, but they actually are. The oldest members were among the first generation of Dutch settlers. They hid in plain sight until the city began to take form.
When the English took the settlement over, the founders of The Conclave stayed in the periphery. They were as opulently rich as any Gilded Age families, but didn’t interfere with the fashionable circles. Nobody knew who they were, but they quietly pulled the strings of power in the growing city.
Empire City is an enormous spider’s web. When a thread is plucked, they know. When someone becomes entangled, they stand ready to drain them dry.
The Conclave has divided the city among their eight members. The Eight Boroughs are held as their personal fiefdoms. Each borough is controlled with layers of vassals, each counterbalanced against the other. Most don’t even know who they answer to.
Because of this deliberate obscurement, any action they take against someone often appears to be completely organic. Only those who truly displease a member of The Conclave learn who’s behind it all, right before they disappear permanently.
The Court of Owls resides in Gotham City’s collective memory as a kind of grim nursery rhyme. The Conclave leaves no such evidence. They strike from the darkness without warning. This is why they’ve survived for four centuries without getting caught.
That’s it for this aromatic Hump 🧄 Day. I hope you get some flavor in your week, too.