From the light of a different sun

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sauvin
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:54 pm

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I am not myself Jewish, but my present girlfriend is, and so was one of the two girlfriends I had in high school. Until I'd met my present girlfriend some fifteen years ago, I'd forgotten how complex getting a bite to eat out at a restaurant could be because of Jewish dietary laws.

As an example, a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a shake are not a good idea because Jewish people aren't allowed to eat non-kosher beef, and can't have dairy products within a certain number of hours of having consumed any kind of meat, and vice versa. Furthermore, they can't eat any kind of meat that's been prepared with anything that's also been used to prepare anything with dairy content, like, ever (and also vice versa), so in their own kitchens they tend to maintain two sets of pots, pans, dishes, pancake turners and, for all of me, drain stoppers. There are whole bargeloads of different kinds of seafood they can't eat, and they seem to have something of an innate revulsion for any kind of pork.

Rina, my former high school girlfriend, lived in the Big City where there were tons of places run by and for Jewish people, so finding someplace to eat when we were out and about wasn't a problem. I didn't usually get bacon or cheese on my burgers when we were eating together, but those experiences reinforced what I'd already known: the world is full of perfectly yummy things to eat, and the Jewish world is most certainly no exception.

Eating out with my present girlfriend can be a bit more complex because Jewish people in my area aren't very much in evidence, so there's almost nothing around that advertises adherence to kashrut. I'd eat whatever I felt like eating and she'd wind up gobbling down all these fruits and salads and maybe (just maybe) a fish sandwich. We tended not to stay out all hours of the night because we'd have to get back home in time to shovel some real food into her before she wiped out.

There are plenty of people on other kinds of diets that have nothing to do with tradition. Diabetics aren't likely to gobble down huge sundaes, and neither are people with lactose intolerance. People with celiac can't eat one mutter-flipping thing that has gluten in it, which means anything made from wheat or related grains is out of the question for such folk; they can have the steak, but not the burgers because goodness only knows what the restaurants use for filler, and they'll be very specific about leaving the croutons out of their salads.

What's even worse is food allergy. Some folks cannot handle various kinds of nuts at all. Some people can't do walnuts, and others can't do peanuts; the smallest little sliver, even the smallest smear of oils from these nuts, can quickly send these poor folk off to the ER basically dying because they can't breathe. 90% of allergic reactions are caused by: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat (barley, rye, oats), fish and shellfish.

Man, if I had to cut milk, eggs, wheat (and kin) out of my diet, I'd have to say "byebye". People with any of these allergies have to be especially careful when they're eating out (and not in a position to supervise the preparation process), and they have to be very religious about reading labels on all the packages they're considering at the grocery store. Momentary laxity can be lethal.

As it happens, I work in the food packaging industry, and have worked in several restaurants in the past. I can tell you from this experience that it's a matter of statistical probability that the box of crackers you just grabbed off the Walmart shelf or that quarter pounder you just got from the McDonald's drive-through doesn't contain any of the allergens mentioned above in a package not appropriately marked, or these foods don't contain other contaminants from the processing equipment, from folks not washing their hands after sitting on the throne, or from the floor that's probably covered with every conceivable nastiness people tracked in from the parking lots, sidewalks and lawns outside. That "statistical probability" is very, very high, I assure you, because some of us grumpy loud-mouthed [BEEP]s can be utterly humourless with co-workers for forgetting that what we're handling is food, but it's still a matter of statistical probability because we work hard, and we get tired or show up for work distracted by crap going on in our personal lives, and sometimes - just once in a blue moon, mind you - there's an inherent conflict between taking the time to do the job right and needing to get enough of the job done quickly enough to meet production quotas.

Yes, we work hard. In the past week, I estimate that I personally lifted, carried and dumped 64 000 kilograms of product onto pallets. That's 70 US tons. A few of the girls on the line can move their hands faster than I can (I'll warn you: that's saying something, I'm [HONK]ing fast), and they spend all day every working day grabbing individual packages of product off a conveyor and throwing them into shipping cases at an average rate of two or three per second.

In an earlier attempt at humour, I had a slightly older Abby looking just a bit peaked knocking on Oskar's door, asking "Hey, um, you wouldn't happen to have a bottle of Type O in the fridge". If there's no other way, and eliforms can't use blood from pigs, cows, horses or anything other than human blood, then maybe they also have to be selective about what type of blood they consume beyond just having to have it while it's fairly fresh. Maybe they have to take a good, deep lungful of body odor to make sure tonight's meal is type O, rather than AB negative.

Eli's tripping on the cancer woman's blood suggests to me the possibility that tanking up on drug addicts' blood in a feeding frenzy might not be a good idea because if she can trip on it, she could also die from it. Siphoning off five or six litres of blood from a man massing some 140 kilograms who'd just had a few bottles of Jack too many could wipe Eli out, too, what with her 35 kilograms soaking wet, because the LD50 for alcohol is usually measured in milligrams per kilogram of body mass, so the blood alcohol levels for her would suddenly be about four times what it took to just about put a seasoned tippler under the table.

And, by the way, would eliforms object to a meal that includes a couple platefuls of French fried onions and a few slices of bread slobbered with garlic butter? Canon doesn't say.

As for taking Eli or Abby out for a nice meal, well, maybe you need to make sure she can bring in a Thermos without raising any hackles, or failing that, just resign yourself to enjoying her company during your meal, and spending a few minutes waiting outside for her after the meal while she looks for a nom or two in the alley behind the restaurant. If you have to do that, make sure it's a nice neighbourhood, where the statistical probability of nomming somebody who's full of Jimson weed is presumably low.

Just do me a favour, mmkay? Make sure you're very far from the food processing plants. We already gave at the office.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by dongregg » Mon Oct 09, 2017 1:34 am

Oh God, yes about the allergies. Even though my better half (22 years) is Jewish, her parents (New York) did not keep kosher and neither has she. But she developed a soy allergy that almost carried her off. Fortunately, the ER crew pumped her full of adrenaline. But then the docs suggested every diagnosis except allergic reaction. Fortunately, the Internet provided the answer. Clue -- she had eaten a soy burger.

But that put the kibosh to eating out. And no more annual trips to New Orleans to indulge in week-long food orgies.

As for Eliform vampires, one can imagine Eli ingesting something in the blood of her victims that could carry the little thing off. Yet, her vampiric ability to heal even from massive injuries could give her a lot of protection. I'll bet she would have had a roller coaster ride in Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. Acid. Speed. Heroin. Ubiquitous jugs of red wine.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by ltroifanatic » Mon Oct 09, 2017 3:40 am

Allergies .Yuk..My wife has gluten intolerance so no more impromptu eating orgies for us.Plus I'm on a salt free diet.lol.We don't go out to eat much these days.As for Eli I don't know if the "thing"inside her,wrapped round her heart would allow her to die from an overdose.I'm no expert but I think overdose deaths are caused by the heart just stopping (in most cases) .I've seen people overdosing and it looks like they're just falling asleep ( a sleep they won't wake from unless medical attention is received) but as we know Eli certainly feels the effects of the drugs.I'm smiling now just thinking of our lovely little Eli all dressed like a little hippie .In a tie-died cheesecloth dress.Flowers in her hair.A slight scent of rust and sandlewood perfume.A perfect little predator surrounded by a transient feast.Yum Yum..and how sad for her to be surrounded by peace and love and not having any herself. Our brilliant FF writers have covered the subject and it's easy to imagine Eli hating all mankind for what we let happen to her.Just shows how compassionate and beautiful she is to be able to overcome the tragedies that have befallen her.Mankind seems to have mastered the bad part of Eli (the killing part) so maybe it's time to copy Eli's best parts a little bit more.After all she has to kill.We don't."Be me for a little while".
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Mon Oct 09, 2017 4:14 am

ltroifanatic wrote:Allergies .Yuk..My wife has gluten intolerance so no more impromptu eating orgies for us.Plus I'm on a salt free diet.lol.We don't go out to eat much these days.
I know what it is to have to be careful about what to eat, but not nearly as much as some people. It stinks sometimes, doesn't it?
ltroifanatic wrote:As for Eli I don't know if the "thing"inside her,wrapped round her heart would allow her to die from an overdose.I'm no expert but I think overdose deaths are caused by the heart just stopping (in most cases) .I've seen people overdosing and it looks like they're just falling asleep ( a sleep they won't wake from unless medical attention is received) but as we know Eli certainly feels the effects of the drugs.
Small amounts of alcohol cause impaired judgement, slowed reaction times, slurred speech, loss of coordination and balance, along with a whole industrial laundry list of other familiar symptoms. This is an example of reaction to a toxic substance, and alcohol, if consumed in great enough quantities in short enough time, will kill. It'll just take your whole central nervous system out of play.

Different things are toxic to different people - and different animals - in different ways and to different levels. There are guys at work who can put away enough beer in a single night to put me in a box, but I can drink two or three Monsters just before going to bed and the only reason my sleep gets delayed or disturbed is that what goes in has to come back out. Fido can't have a single lick of the stuff because it's made partly with chocolate, and neither Fido nor Simba can handle some of the alkaloids in it, and there are guys at work who just need a single Monster to put their sorry butts right into high gear for at least a couple of hours.

Canon doesn't say much about toxicity to the infecting agent, but the Haakan example clearly states that the physical death of the host doesn't keep the infection from animating the corpse. The human parts of Eli very well may succumb if the rate of tissue damage exceeds the infection's ability to counteract it. We also know (from the movies) that eliforms can't hold down ordinary food, a fact from which I surmise that (1) the host's digestive processes have been extensively altered, with the implication that (2) what's ordinary food to us may contain substances toxic to the infection. Never can tell - maybe the secret to curing eliform vampirism is a course of intravenous espresso!
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Mon Oct 09, 2017 9:56 am

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This isn't "shop and chop". This is 100% Abby, with some rugosity added (texture taken from a Scotch-Brite pad) and probably less than a single can of spray paint. OK, OK, I'll fess up, some of the colour filters were also switched around a bit, too.

I could have done worse - FAR worse - if I'd had a stronger stomach. It's easy as pie to graft in patches of genuine wet gangrene, some liquefying adipose fatty tissue fresh off the medical examiner's table and maybe some ebola rash and necrotising fasciitis. Doing it this way was less repulsive and a lot more fun (I now know how to use bump maps!).

Boy, howdy, she's looking a little tired, isn't she? If this is what it's like to be only 250 or so, who wants to live a whole flipping millennium!?

Hey, you remember that kid? Sure you do! The one with the acne that just went absolutely ape all over the poor schmuck's face? Everybody called him "pizza face" and said they'd slap him but they're afraid that all that "stuff" would splatter and launch some kind of epidemic.

Or maybe it was that girl.

Whichever, the person who had to take that kind of abuse from just about anybody who ever saw his or her face was exactly that: a person. Most of us never saw the person because we couldn't help seeing the pizza. I'd really like to think I was myself never cruel like that, but... well... I can't honestly swear I never said anything to a walking pizza, and my high school sure had its share.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's said. Some of us actually like Abby because we can see the girl's gentle sweetness hiding behind the face of the monster, and because we can see how strong she is in the face of a desperate loneliness. Others of us don't like her because she seems to be a serial recruiter, and we get squicked out at the idea of a 200 year old cougar eloping with a preteen cub.

If we were to meet the girl for the first time out in the courtyard with her looking like this picture, some of us not yet twenty and others of us more than three times that age, we'd think we have something of an advantage over Owen because we know her, and we know there's nothing to worry about because we'll either be dead before the minute is out or we'll be comparing notes over the puzzle du jour and conspiring to run off to the video arcade together. If we knew this was Abby, facial perturbations notwithstanding, we'd be seeing quite a bit more of Abby herself and quite a bit less of that.. um... face.

Owen saw a sweet-lookin' babe first (kinda strange, walks barefoot in the snow) and then met up with a painfully shy sweet-lookin' babe a couple of times in the courtyard before he had to say hello to his new best monster. For him, the progression was pretty much exactly what it's like when we meet our significant others: it's all fun, games and Margueritas before we discover the clingy neediness, the insane and baseless jealousy and, in the case of a girl whose name actually is Ellie, a monthly condition her ex husband called the "Pre Monster Syndrome". Owen's ability to decide to co-exist with the monster may have been borne either by the lightless depths of his former loneliness or by the image of the girl he carries around, the one with the soft voice, the easy smile, the unjudgmental child-like curiosity and her perfect willingness to accept and extend simple affection. It may have been both the loneliness and the image.

But between ourselves and Owen, we from the outside looking in and from a more inclusive point of view versus Owen's close horizons of housing project architecture and thinly tamed chimpanzee classmates, which do you suppose can see the real Abby more clearly despite the monster?
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by ltroifanatic » Tue Oct 10, 2017 2:48 am

I think you may me right about the toxicity being too much for the "thing" inside her to handle.Hakan does say that the wrong blood (not fresh enough I think) could be harmful so I think Eli should be a little careful while she's in Haight-Ashbury in the sixties.On the other hand she's immensely strong and resilient so the dose would probably have to be massive.I loved your pic of Abby.So glad you didn't do the gangrene stuff..lol..just had a big lunch.Having watched LMI and liking it (it got me to watch and read LTROI).LMI is a very good movie but by the end of it Abby ,for me, was still an enigma.Was Owen just another in a long line of helpers or did she really love him?..Thankfully LTROI supplied the answers.As for pizza faces.Kids can be cruel and I think it would be rare to find someone who hasn't sniggered or made fun of these poor kids behind their backs.What's not talked about so much is the impact on the people who see the bullying.I was no stranger to bullying.I was a weedy little sensitive boy living in the slums.I enjoyed reading and playing the piano and school.Lol..Talk about a sitting duck.One day at school I watched as bullies publicly humiliated the fat kid in front of the whole class.I knew he was hurting.I knew what it was like.I don't know why I didn't say or do anything to defend him but I turned what could have been a memory of pride into a memory of shame.I regret it to this day. :(
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Mon Oct 16, 2017 10:16 am

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by PeteMork » Tue Oct 17, 2017 12:13 am

sauvin wrote:Image
I'm sure the guy she's looking at feels the same way :shock:
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by cmfireflies » Tue Oct 17, 2017 3:17 am

sauvin wrote:Image
As a no good do-nothing who doesn't hold a job and leeches off others (literally and figuratively) Abby has no reason to hate Mondays.
"When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it."

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Tue Oct 17, 2017 6:11 am

cmfireflies wrote: As a no good do-nothing who doesn't hold a job and leeches off others (literally and figuratively) Abby has no reason to hate Mondays.
Kinda depends on what her food ate that night, I guess. I got another one bouncing around with her holding her stomach and mumbling "no more Italians no more Italians no more Italians..."
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