If I had readers, I'd hope that they were all enjoying their assorted holiday seasons.

It turns out, somewhat to my horror, that I'm not all that big on fudge. I've got a piece right here, and while it doesn't contain any of the extraneous fudge ingredients that strike me as being, at best, totally unnecessary (walnuts?), it just isn't working for me.

This is a problem, as there is rather a lot of it.

Christmas desserts that outlive Christmas are always delicious (except for, bewilderingly, fudge), but also sort of depressing, because, I mean, now what? How long can I live off leftover pie and a plastic bag full of turkey?

In her diary entry for October 9, 1942 Anne Frank wrote

But that's not the end of my lamentations. Have you ever heard the term "hostages"? That's the latest punishment for saboteurs. It's the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens - innocent people - are taken prisoner to await execution. If the Gestapo can't find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall.

One of the things that strikes me about reading this book as an adult is the juxtaposition between's Anne's more or less ordinary middle class life prior to and even during the war, and the events that overtook her, as well as between what she accepts as ordinary v. what I do. Here, for instance; was hostage so rarely used around a thirteen year-old girl in the Netherlands in 1942? (Or is it just as used in reference to the specific practive she outlined?)

There's some essential paradox about life during times of crisis here, but I don't know how to talk about it.

He also had a complete crush on his escort. The name Anchovy suited her - she struck him as a small canned cold fish. Eddy found this perversely attractive. In fact he found her so attractive he was having a hard time standing still and breathing normally. He really liked the way she carried her stripe-gloved hands, deft and feminine and mysteriously European, but mostly it was her hair. Long, light reddish-brown, and meticulously braided by machine. He loved women's hair when it was machine-braided. They couldn't seem to catch the fashion quite right in NAFTA. Sardelle's hair looked like a rusted mass of museum-quality chain-mail, or maybe some fantastically convoluted railway intersection. Hair that really meant business. Not only did Sardelle have not a hair out of place, but any unkemptness was topologically impossible.

Bruce Sterling - "Deep Eddy"