But I think that if you are making a left-hand turn in an SUV, you should stop applying mascara until the turn is completed.

Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is one seriously bizarre book. I am also not sure why the spine says "Fiction" when it is clearly fantasy (hint: Norse deities wandering around as real entities). I now realize that this is a sequel, but it holds up well enough on its own. It is wacky, perverse, colorful, specific, and bizarre, not necessarily in that order, and sometimes all at once. There is a weirdly not-exactly-likable "holistic detective" named Dirk Gently, who ends up where he needs to be if not where he wants to be; a mysterious Coca-Cola machine and a homicidal giant golden eagle; and my favorite character, Kate Schechter, an New Yorker living in London who is generally nice except for when it comes to the difficulty to getting pizza delivered.

Plus, there is an evil refrigerator. Is there ever a good refrigerator in sf/f?

Also, color me stupid but it took me over half the book before I realized why a book set in London would have "Elena" and "cleaner" as rhyming words.

I'm not sure I followed all the plot, which was twisty and involved lots of coincidences, but it was a fun ride.

Now trying to decide what to read next: Glen Cook's Tower of Fear, or Naomi Novik's Black Powder War since we have that and Victory of Eagles on hand, or should I save the Novik novels for the plane flight back home?

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epilogue: 1936 words, and that's an end.

Which puts the whole beast around 491,000 words.

Also, this means I have got to that point within thirteen years of starting it after all.

Any number of things still need doing to it; but not now.

Okay, why did nobody ever tell me that Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was so riotously funny?
First three paragraphs:

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the constellation of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

I am especially appreciative of this after multiple times flying through Kimpo (Gimpo, whatever) Airport in Seoul, which for my money has got to be the ugliest single airport I have ever gone through, ever. I think it made Top 5 Ugliest Airports in some airline magazine I read several years back. Thank goodness for Incheon.

Anyway, I am sure people would have told me how hilarious this book is if I'd been willing to listen, but given that I am one of like three people who bounced hard off the Hitchhiker's Guide books (I read something like four of them and didn't like any of them, and only laughed once)...yeah.

I need to go curl up with a book! Especially since I have been trying to get into D&D 4E PHB and it is deadly dull. If this book had a taste, it would taste like plain tofu, that's how bland it is.

My father-in-law and the lizard put up the Christmas tree tonight. Actually, I'm not convinced the lizard was more help than hindrance, but at least she didn't break anything. (My mom will inform you at length that I broke multiple expensive glass ornaments. I have particular fond memories of, um, picking apart the pretty glass balls that were wrapped around in satiny thread so that the thread came off. I was very young...) Ooh, the TV in the living room is turned off, which means I can venture out and do some reading/writing out there instead of being in here to escape, well, the TV. (I have an aversion to Christmas programming. As I'm sure you may have guessed.)

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For kate_nepveu. Prompt: "fierce clarity."

It is not true that the hawk maidens of the moors have no hearts. Although they come down from the moors only rarely to trade and to find fathers for their daughters, they wear their hearts on silver chains. Hawk maidens are deadly hunters and far-seers, and to become an adult, each one must grind her glass heart with sand of her own choosing. ( Read more... )

Okay, that's it! Just out of curiosity, would anyone be interested if I did another batch of $6 flashfics sometime in January?

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Found on ONTD - there is a new Oscar category for Best Thing in the World, and this person is the ONLY NOMINEE:



"Cinema 2009: 1 Year, 342 Movies, 12 Months of Production, 7 Minutes."

I don't know if anyone knows this, but I love movies a lot? Anyway, this is basically what the inside of my head looks like, all the time, awake or asleep. (This also explains why I forget real-life stuff - you notice there is no frame in here that says YOU ARE OUT OF MILK, for example.)

Dear person who made this: you are a genius.

We haven't even left yet on our 10-hour drive, and already I am tired of the children, especially The Dillo. All day long, if I leave the room to try and do something, he hollers Moooooom! And he wants to leave, insisting we can go NOW even though I have explained we aren't going to leave now, Daddy is at work. He offers to go to Aunt M's by himself, on foot if necessary. I am tempted to send him that way.

Another AU Felix & Mildmay dream last night, this one claiming to be an animated series which might aptly be summed up as: "He's a gay wizard with a dark past; he's a cat burglar with a price on his head. Together, they fight crime!"

Whatever it is you celebrate, have celebrated, or will celebrate at this time of year, I hope it is, has been, or will be very happy.

And I wish you and all the world the very best for 2010.

Chad plugs his new book How To Teach Physics To Your Dog (inspired by his old blog posts in which he explained physical principles to his dog Emmy) in Scalzi's Big Idea series.

I was fortunate enough to read an early draft of this book a couple of years ago, and it was really good, one of the best popular expositions of modern physics I've seen. I haven't yet read the finished version, but presumably it's even better now.

I got to sleep in this morning (ah, bliss!).  When my alarm went off at nine, I was dreaming that I had just happened upon a "Super Toys R Us," (Like a Super Target or a Super Big K), that was 8 stories tall with each floor being a different kind of toy, and I had just gotten the last parking place and was stepping into the elevator.

I decided to sleep for another hour, and promptly went back to dreaming.  This time I was living in a nice apartment building by the sea, which was a few stories deep--all underground with the top floor/entrance at sea level--and a hurricane was about to hit.

GRR. Where is my 8-story toy store, dammit?

If one must be in the office, working alone, on financial paperwork, there are worse things to find on the internet radio than Al Green.

Somehow I managed to avoid ever hearing about this.

yeloson showed this to me and it confirmed what I've always known about those collectible dolls. Don't watch it before bed. Really.

The bed is lonely, cold, and deep
And empty of a Joecat's sleep
Reducing me to awful rhyme--

Joe wouldn't let me finish, and is now coming to bed, where he will sleep be my heat source. *\o/*

(Crime? Time? Chime? Prime? Finish the verse for yourself!)

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From PC Gamer Holiday 2009's review of Quantz (rated a lowly 54%), by John Walker:

I've now played so many games about destroying objects by matching colors that I'm afraid to put my socks in their drawer, lest they align and evaporate.

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One of my favorite things in the world is watching historical documentaries (generally biographies) that have extras in the background, looking historical and Very Serious. They're never allowed to talk, of course, but sometimes they get to "Peas and carrots" their way through something as historians explain things in the foreground. It's all extras, all the time, and it's awesome!

The best of these I've seen was "The Real Jane Austen," which aired a while ago on PBS, and was amazing because it took the framework of a talking-heads biography with actors as the talking heads. It was narrated by Anna "I always play harridans for some reason" Chancellor, and starred a list of actors I can hardly believe managed to get in the same project just to make my life easier/worse: Gillian "Stuck in a Cookson" Kearney, Jack "Also stuck in a Cookson I haven't recapped yet" Davenport, Lucy "Becoming Jane" Cohu, Oliver "I had two lines in Lorna Doone" Chris, and Beth "Yes, I'm Kate's sister" Winslet.

(Oh, Awesome British Actor Camp, you always know just what to say!)

The one I'm watching at the moment is about the youth of Queen Victoria, with a narrator who seems to be reading her lines off cue cards she has never seen before, and the Queen Victoria extra's job is to look up off-camera and shake her head "No" every time we cut to her, and it's delightful. Also it's about history, I guess.

(If I ever have a month to myself, I should start peoplewhohangaroundindocuemtnariesdatabase.com. Best month EVER.)

My next heavy metal band will be called "The Soaking Lutefisk" probably with at least two extra umlauts. The lead guitarist would have a lute shaped like a giant fish.

And they'd play heavy metal music.

While wearing viking hats.

Being a this-year reminder that Honeybell oranges are now available for the ordering.  (See here for last year's Honeybell post.)

I am told that mine will be here on January 11th.

I expect they will all be juiced and gone by the 12th.

I never want to see Xmas programming on the TV ever again for the REST OF MY LIFE. Also, I am deathly afraid that what Joe tells me about Santa Claus's red-and-white coloration being due to a Coca-Cola promotion (?) is actually true. (No, I have not checked wikipedia. I am happier living in uncertainty.)

Despite only having caught about 5 minutes of it, I already like Kung Fu Panda (which my father-in-law had on for the lizard earlier) much better.

One of these Christmases I will whisk the lizard away and send her to E. to learn arnis or something instead. Or teach her how to write IFs full of sudden deaths of the "HA HA HA YOU HAVE DIED" form, which I'm sure she would adore.

In the meantime, I have suddenly discovered that the disadvantage of writing 10,000+ word stories is that the editor might ask you to revise them. I am currently desperately reviewing the story in an attempt to remember what it was about. I know it'll come back to me, but in the meantime, that's a lot of story.

Also, I wish the D&D 4E. PHB weren't so much more boringly written than Over the Edge, but I suppose that's to be expected.

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Took Dillo to the dentist. He was very cooperative. He has cavities in 5-6 of his front teeth, deep enough that they should be filled. So, we're doing that in January.

The office does Versed sedation, and doesn't allow the parents back into the rooms. Cash, Steph, does this jive with your experiences of fillings in preschoolers? I felt good about the office and the dentist was clear and frank. It still won't be fun. Also, expensive.

And of course this is a parenting fail - several of the cavities are in full view on the front of his front teeth. He hates to brush teeth and doesn't really spit, so we have been lax and haven't done fluoridated toothpaste yet.

Argh, argh, argh.

Please comment there.

Ian McDonald's Desolation Road. Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich.

We have no icicles at the moment, but I expect we will after the monstrous storm that is brewing up to hit us on the 25th. People on the East Coast may laugh hollowly if they like; it's still uncertain whether we are going to get buried to the extent that you guys did.

( The book )

( Medication )

I've just started a conversation with the relevant parties about postponing our Christmas celebration until the 27th. I doubt that David's mother, his sister, and her partner will be able to drive from Northfield if the forecast is accurate. It's even possible that we won't really want to try getting to Eden Prairie from Minneapolis. I will be making pies again. No apple this time. The 25th is Eric's birthday, so the third dessert will be pots de creme.

( Recent Reading )

( Cooking )

This post makes me think the booj needs a fire.

Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

I have one other creepily interesting observation, which is that the standard defense of "Hitler doesn't know what his subordinates are doing" would later be picked up by the Hitler apologist, David Irving, who used it in Hitler's War to argue that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews.

Just woke up and feeling vaguely sluggish so have an NSFW video about a sex toy that I find perplexing. I get the idea, but the execution seems like so many things can go wrong in ways that will land a hapless user on one of those ER shows on TLC.

My part of grant app == about twice as much work as writing up my PhD thesis in about a quarter the time.

Deep breaths.

*scream*

Deep breaths.

But what I don't see among these Avatar tie-in products is a novelization along the lines of the one Card did for The Abyss.

Mormon Gubernatorial candidate expresses interest in constitution.

Candidate previously made news with joke about hunting, killing President Obama.

I have a vision of the future and it doesn't include this guy as governor.

I don't think the Mormons really have the numbers to stage a coup (even if we don't take into account that not all of of them are wing-nuts bent on destroying the US) and their potential allies in this matter don't see Mormons as Christians and by extension, as proper humans.

How is it so many conservative Christians are determinedly anti-American?

Nicked from pharyngula

One of the stores in my neighborhood has a home-built Dalek in their back-room. Yes, the fog-cannon works (I'm told - they didn't fire it off while I was there).

PEI reluctantly enters 21st century.

At least, its legislature has. Don't read the comments.

Parliamentary Sex Shocker as NDP Leader Jack Layton caught hand-holding, smooching with MP Olivia Chow!

Of course, the fact that they've been married to each other for over twenty years just demonstrates why Canada can't have juicy political sex scandals like other nations.

Nicked from ms_danson and montrealais.

Onoraptor Makes a Friend Coloring Book by charibdys [Etsy]. Yes: now you can get a printed copy for $5 plus shipping! Sorry for the late post. I've been distracted. ETA: by way of telophase, relisted (old listing sold out).

( Webreadings: books, philosophy, Dollhouse, sci/tech, music, miscellany. )

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My elaborate plans for last night (I would be dropped at the bookstore, finish shopping, while mr. flea and the children would go to Target and procure light bulbs and juice boxes) were dashed by the invitation from our neighbors to come roast marshmallows in their chiminea and drink cocoa and peppermint schnapps. How could we say no?

Happily this morning I was WIDE awake at 4:30 am, so finished up most of my wrapping, did dishes, did laundry, made speculaas dough, and fished out Casper's swimsuit for the YMCA.

Today I finish work, leave at 3 and take Dillo to his first ever dentist appointment (THAT should be fun - he is still very shy with strangers), then reassemble with the whole family and get us all H1N1 vaccinated before the clinic closes at 6 (mr. flea missed his work vaccination; he was in the field that day.) Then we need to eat dinner (do I have a plan? nope!). Then maybe we'll do the bookstore-and-Target plan.

Tomorrow:
pack
bake
watch Prep and Landing another 6 times
maybe leave and spend the night in, like Tennessee?

Teachers get all the fun. I mean, inspire kids to study science. :)

The Paper of Record takes on the Physics of Space Battles.
 
Mexico City to legalize gay marriage. (It passed, now the mayor just has to sign it, and he's expected to.)
 
New York City comes in dead last in happiness ratings. And yet, I'm pretty happy here. Am i just a freak, or would I be a truly scary Pollyanna if I lived anywhere else?

For not-currently-paid LJ users, $10 off a year (as previously mentioned); I have lots so just ask.

Comments screened.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

So I realized, a few episodes ago, what the TV show White Collar is.

Despite having a con artist as one of its main characters, it's not a caper show (like Leverage) or an action/MacGyver-y show (like Burn Notice or, indeed, MacGyver). Instead, it's a cop show, subcategory reluctant-partners. This accounts for the (rather disappointing) paucity of capers, cons, and nifty technological tricks, and the generally slower pace.

(Perhaps this was obvious to others from the beginning, but I heard about the show through fannish osmosis and got the impression that it was much more like Leverage.)

Which brings me to the half-season finale which aired some time ago and which I only watched on DVR tonight.

( spoilers )

The best down vest in the world.

Technically, it belongs to my mom.  I snagged it when I moved out here in 2005.  And I'm not the least bit sorry, given the number of coats she's "borrowed" from me.  You know how in some families, everybody wears everybody else's shoes?  My family is like that, except with outerwear, and except that we don't necessarily return it when we're done.  Instead we have this conversation

Family member #1: Is that my coat?
Family member #2: ...no?
Family member #1: Lies!  Vile lies!
Family member #2: Isn't that my fleece?
Family member #1: ...no?

It thoroughly predates 2005, though.  I don't remember a time before the Vest.  It was made by Trailways (not the bus company), and I've never even heard of Trailways, and I worked at REI: I know my outerwear.  Possibly it even predates me.

That's not the point.  The point is, it's the best down vest in the world.  It's battered and stained and the pockets, at this point, are well-lined with sugar-cube crumbs and other less mentionable substances, and it is the best down vest in the world.  It is undaunted.  It is undauntable.

Except that the zipper was starting to get sticky, last winter.  I had it all figured out--as long as you kept the tracks aligned just so, everything was fine--right up until tonight when the slider bit finally, finally broke clean off in my hand.

I thought, "Oh, no!"

I thought, "The end of an era!"

I thought, "Whatever will I do?"

Because you know, this is not just any vest.  It is the best down vest in the world.  It has been there.  It has done that.  It has superpowers of resiliency and warmth.  When you wear it, you can do anything, and stay cozy while you do.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.  And it's just about the nearest thing I have to an heirloom, and I'd broken it.

Then I thought, "I bet the zipper could be replaced."

And I thought, "Or maybe even just the slider."

And then I thought, "Well, hell, it has snaps, anyway."

Because that's the kind of vest it is.  It can do, and it does.

Truly, it is the best down vest in the world.

I fully expect that if I have kids someday, one of them will "borrow" it from me.  In the meantime, I practice on the yellowdog*:

( the saddest (but warmest) dog in the world )

* Please note: I am not a horrible and/or crazy person!  He was shivering** and he wouldn't stay under a blanket even when I tucked it into his collar like a cape, so I put him in the vest.  He felt much better, for certain specific values of "better."

( He had been helping me shovel... (Note: pictures not actually of a shoveling dog. Sorry. Sorry!) )

...part eleven hundred and nine:

They don't get tired.

At all.

Ever.

Hmm. ( Spoilers. )

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