Continuing on my Nonfiction Writing Month experiment, I actually have had a somewhat reasonable word count the past few days: 1350 words total today and yesterday. Plus, I found a quote that I had been searching for for AGES. Now, I need to get back to editing.
I also finally saw the Michael Jackson documentary, "This Is It," yesterday. I went with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maydayj . The movie was really quite good -- maybe I'll have time to post a review in a few days (or after I see the movie again.) I read a comment from a fan that pretty much summed up my sentiments: "MJ was so funny that I couldn't even cry." His dancing and singing were still great, despite his health problems and his age -- but then, I knew they would be. He wouldn't have signed up to do a show otherwise.
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You know what, if someone had told me two weeks ago, "Masha, there's a new show out there with a premise more or less exactly like in Catch Me If You Can, except Leonardo DiCaprio is even prettier, and Tom Hanks doesn't look like Tom Hanks but like Harrison Ford, and they're all over each other" I would not have waited those two weeks to start watching it.
Also, regarding this week's Sarah Jane, ( Was it creepy or what? )
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I swear, this kid is a constant source of surprises. Most of them are horrible, I grant you--the old food stashed under the bed, the fights at school--but this one was of the more pleasant ones. He had an assignment to write a poem using 18 prepositions, and he wrote this. A love poem. Jan said when he saw what it was turning into, he just ran with the genre.
I just don't expect this sort of thing out of a 10-year-old male hellion who's into Wii combat games and sees everything through a lens of espionage and war.
Transcribed from his paper--all notes and misspellings are his. Prepositions are underlined as he had them.
Michael Poem (weird! I don't know how it turned into a love poem)
Across the sea and over the land,
Seeing you is just grand,
Beyond beauty and above heaven,
Your love is a given.
But when you leave my heart is gone,
Without you, my love is gone off.
Upon my sorrows, you arrive
With your arrival, you make me derive
Into your arms, to wrap around you
From inside my heart, through and through
Toward your arms I go into.
Of all beauty, only you are the most
From east to west, from north to south,
You are my sunshine.
--Michael, October 2009
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Oh look, it's Remembrance Sunday again. As if it happens every year or something. I had vague thoughts brewing about my mush of often-contradictory personal and political thoughts, but then I figured that the point of remembrance is that it's not about you, or even what you think of the military, or what you think of the reasons people got sent to their deaths. I am slowly reading through the essays here, and thinking of those people.
( more links )
NB: many links c/o here. I'm pretty sure there's more information in Robert Winder's Bloody Foreigners, which is an awesome book I keep recommending in any case, but sadly that is in a different city atm. The above links are for WW1, but the same is true for any war since, and many of the websites cover WW2 and later as well. I have very little information on non-British (Empire) Allied forces, and just about non on German etc forces. Education always a plus!
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I don't say they are the best, but they are the ones I like most, so far
- Let the Right One In (2008)
- Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
- Whale Rider (2002)
- Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
- Cache (2005)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Children of Men (2006)
- Notre Musique/The Gleaners and I (2004/2000)
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001 - 2003)
Close behind, The Lives of Others, The White Ribbon, Bleak House tv series, and Firefly/Serenity
ETA - I forgot one film which I will put alongside Notre Musique - Agnes Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneus (The Gleaners and I) from 2000. I had thought it was released a year earlier than it actually was.
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Argh, Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People FAIL! I have been debating whether I can justify ticket purchase for WEEKS. subservient_son just offered to make it my Christmas present. I love EVERYONE I have heard of in that lineup. But now after the initial 'omg Dara O'Briain' I do not want to get a ticket, because I do not want the organisers to go "ooo, adding Al Murray to our bill worked! what a great idea that was!". BAH. HELP ME, LAZYWEBS.
While posting about comedy, here are two quite great links from Chortle.co.uk: Comedy review: Nick Griffin, Question Time and why Mock the Week is quite crap. ( snippet from latter )
ETA: There are fireworks outside! I forgot what day it was. YAY FOR AN OPPRESSED RELIGIOUS MINORITY FAILING TO BLOW UP OUR ARISTOCRACY!!1!1 um, srsly, I want sparklers now :(
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My, but this motherhood business is a BOON to Sinister Social Science! Not that I had a child for Scientific reasons alone, I hasten to add. No, no (though I do recall one of my psychology lecturers, a huge, genial Scotsman, recounting with glee that many a researcher, despairing of his research ethics committee, has found his eyes straying over to the playpen...). Nonetheless, it's very interesting watching a human being develop right from the beginning. Very interesting indeed. And while I, being a very model of a middle-class educated mother, spent my entire pregnancy reading books and asking questions*, I am still continually stumbling over things I never knew about or thought to ask. Such as:
Crawling. I never really thought about how babies come to do this. I knew roughly the age at which they tend to start, and that some babies never do it (some bum-shuffle or wheelbarrow or cut straight to walking), but in the absence of any first-hand observation or second-hand information, I vaguely supposed that the developmental stage arrived and they just sort of did it. It didn't occur to me that crawling is a tricky physical skill, which like all such skills has to be learned. And that the learning can take months of experimentation.
( The crawling side-salad: A sonata in three movements )
Skin. You know how your parents used to buy you too-big clothes to grow into? Well, it seems that Mother Nature builds babies with the same philosophy in mind. The side-salad's skin is oddly loose and stretchy, like a flesh-coloured wetsuit half a size too big.
Appearance. I discovered that sprouting a biological child is a cue for friends and relatives far and wide to converge upon the baby for the Official Scrutiny. The purpose of which is, of course, to dissect his unfortunate features and determine where they came from. As a dark-haired, hazel-eyed Eurasian woman who has produced a blond, blue-eyed child, I've been surprised to find I'm quite annoyed when people take one glance at said child and declare that he looks IDENTICAL to his father on the basis of his colouring alone. One friend went so far as to declare that people must think I'm the nanny!
Without meaning any disrespect towards nannies, I went through nine months of pregnancy and 48 hours of labour to squeeze this boy out and I am not having any of this "you look like the nanny" crap THANK YOU. And he does SO look like me. He does have his father's hair (which was much fairer as a baby) and body shape, but his mouth and eyes are definitely shaped like mine. As for the eye colour, as I keep on pointing out to people the Pilgrim, pure Caucasian though he be, has darker eyes than mine. The blue eyes are presumably the product of a recessive gene collaboration care of the Pilgrim's mother and my paternal grandfather. Besides, no nose like that has ever been seen on the Pilgrim side. The side-salad has, by some strange genetic twist, inherited a nose very similar to my mother's. The Pilgrim declared it a Cantonese nose, but as I pointed out, my mother has her Hokkien father's nose, not her Cantonese mother's nose. We debated this on and off for ages before the arrival of my Uncle George unveiled the intriguing truth. A century or two ago, the fierce hill tribes the Malaysians refer to as the Batak people used to sell the odd daughter to the Chinese, and my great-great-grandmother had the darkish skin which suggests that she was descended from one of them. Apparently they were so vicious and scary that the Muslim missionaries didn't dare to proselytise to them, so they ended up becoming Lutherans. Which would explain a lot about some of the women on my mother's side of the family.
( Yeahhhhh! (glee with pictorial evidence )
*In fact, to be honest I was reading and asking questions about such things long before getting pregnant was at all on the cards. Human development and experience are the very lifeblood of the Sinister Social Scientist!
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I'm not really doing NaNoWriMo, since I'm not writing a novel. Instead, I'm thinking of it as National Nonfiction Writing Month. And, it seems to be helping. I had gotten very little writing done lately; I've been preoccupied with my health problems. (That doesn't mean I've done nothing on my book, but I've mostly been reading stuff and watching interviews, rather than actually writing.)
Having publicly committed to getting writing done during November seems to be working. In the last couple of days, I've edited 4400 words of my book proposal. I'm not sure how I'll count that towards my goal of 50,000 words written, rewritten, or edited, since the editing in this case was pretty light. But, it's certainly progress.
I've also written 400 new words towards my book proposal. Expect another update from me in a couple of days!
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Apparently so, since we're resetting the store for the holidays. Lots of work. I put in close to 11 hours yesterday, I think. I know my manager said he was staying late. Considering the buses, he probably worked until around 4 this morning - a 15 hour day. Wonder how much was left for today's staff to do. Massive price changes are the worst part. That and resetting our confection. I stickered soooo much chocolate for the clearance bin yesterday! Should have thought to bring some home, too, but by then I just wanted to come home.
We have free passes to see Pirate Radio this evening, courtesy of Alliance. Yeah for them sending us passes. Andy and I are going out for dinner beforehand. Kind of a belated birthday evening out for him. I don't think he's had dinner out since we went to The Works in January!
Contemplating getting dressed and heading to the post office to pick up a parcel. I know it's books so I'm debating whether it'll be too heavy to carry home. I need one of those little wheelie things that people use for groceries. Then again, I'd have to drag that through the construction zone that is Wellington Street. Perhaps better off to struggle with carrying it. Curses to whomever it was who pointed me to bookcloseouts.com. I spend far too much money there. Hey, not my fault they keep having sales!
On the plus side, some of the books are Christmas gifts. That'll be 3 people done off my list, leaving me 9 more people to buy for. Hmmm, if I'm going downtown for dinner on Saturday, perhaps it'll be time to get a bit more shopping done. The sooner done, the better.
Have also been watching the price of airline tickets to San Antonio. Prices range anywhere from $350 to nearly $800. The only drawbacks to the lower priced tickets is that I'd have 2 stops each way instead of just one. That could be brutal. Also, for the most part the flights arrive very late in the evening. Still, getting there in 8-9 hours is much better than the 48 that Greyhound takes. And the cheapest airline ticket is only $140 more than a bus ticket.
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31. Movie Mavericks: Trivia from the Filmmaking Fringes - Jon Sandys
Fun to play with at work when things are slow. Some of us know the most obscure things about the movies on our shelves. :)
32. Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker - Robb Walsh
Lots of good food writing, a few recipes included.
33. Thunderstruck - Erik Larson
Love this man's writing. Combines the story of Dr. Crippen with Marconi's story.
34. Heir Apparent - Vivian Vande Velde
Stuck in a video game and trying to stay alive until they can get her out.
35. A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray
Magic, suspense, girls with power!
36. The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963 - Christopher Paul Curtis
Well told story about growing up in the '60s.
37. The Dead Girls' Dance - Rachel Caine
Book Two of the Morganville Vampires series. Love these books!
38. Specials - Scott Westerfeld
Read this so I could finish the series. While I like the first book, this last one just didn't do it for me.
39. Best Friends - Martha Moody
Chick lit, follows two friends through their meeting in college and on into later life. It was okay.
40. The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History - Jim Piazza and Gail Kinn
Seems pretty complete to me. Well, aside from stopping in 2005, right before it was published. Lots of little lesser known tidbits. I know there's a spot somewhere in the book where I corrected something, but darned if I can find it now. :)
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*slinks in with tail under her legs*
Hi everyone. Obviously, I aten't dead, I just have awful non-posting ways. I'm not even sure what happened to autumn, both online and IRL. November only barely qualifies as autumn. Right now I'm feeling generous because it's not cold enough for a hat and gloves during the day, and the air is crisp and fresh, the leaves bright above and rustly underfoot, and the wavy grey sky is my favorite out of all the seasons, but it'll all go to the dogs within a week, so it's hard to enjoy it properly. Also, DST is over and all of a sudden it's now dark as I leave work, and that displeases me as well.
Anyway, I haven't really had much to talk about, but now I do. So without further blathering, let's get right to it.
French class! ( In brief, fun, and almost done )
Seeing Cate Blanchett onstage as Blanche DuBois
Oh my, what restraint, posting this as item #2. Uh. This happened last Thursday. If you've known me for a few years, my ridiculous, fluttery, love-her-and-despair crush on Cate Blanchett has been an ongoing theme since basically the day I created my LJ, as evidenced by the fact that I don't even have a freaking tag for her because tags didn't exist then. ( In short, Cate was in town! And I was in the same, if extremely large, room as her! ) And to think that I was a bit upset when she decided to take a break from movies and do theater for a while. I laughed when I remembered that. Also, Cate seems to be a really nice down-to-earth person in person. If you search for her on youtube, there's her being generally hilarious at her Oscar presser, and even more hilarious in this interview, because she fidgets more than me, which is saying something. And the two public sightings of her so far have been not at a super-expensive restaurant but at a Safeway and a Target. What's not to love?
Unseen Academicals
Fall means a new Terry Pratchett book! It used to mean a new Snicket book as well, but we're screwed there, I suppose. ( This wasn't my favorite, but I liked quite a bit about it. But I have a problem and questions about one thing, so please chime in! )
Doctor Who/Sarah Jane Adventures
( Oh jesus. I have missed these shows. )
Well, after an hour of practically nonstop typing, I think I've poured out everything that's been on my mind. It's good to end on that lovely note. Thank you for reading!
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Much catching up to do. I'll break it over multiple posts to as not to have it one long list. :)
21. Ten Big Ones - Janet Evanovich
22. Eleven on Top - Janet Evanovich
23. Lean Mean Thirteen - Janet Evanovich
24. Plum Lucky - Janet Evanovich
Fun to read, quick, light on crime, heavier on the drama.
25. Trading Up - Candace Bushnell
Decent chick lit
26. Blinded - Stephen White
Average crime drama
27. Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
I loved this, even if I did want to give Mel a shake now and then. :)
28. Scarlett Slept Here: A Book Lover's Guide to the South - Joy Dickinson
Yeah, travel book. Obviously tying what you've read with where to go. It's pretty average, as travel books go.
29. Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit - Carole Nelson Douglas
Mystery and cats. Not bad.
30. Random Acts of Badness - Danny Bonaduce
Autobiography. Like watching a trainwreck on the page.
Now I can finally take this pile of books off the dining room table and put them away! :)
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You know how a valuable part of childhood is learning, usually before the age of four, to check that the lid of a half-eaten jar of pasta sauce is securely on before shaking it up?
...yeah.
Feel free to bring on the allcaps comments and failboats.
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Bits and bobs:
- I am back from The Flat Hills Of My Homeland, having not done nearly as much to Sort Out Life as I should have, but was grateful for the time. I felt a tiny unironic pang when the train changed drivers half-way through and we were greeted with “Welcome aboard your 3.06 service; calling at Stowmarket – Diss – aaand Naaar-igde”. Currently back in London for another day or so to try and sort out temp/JSA stuff, and then I will hopefully debunk again to see subservient_son and try and be a bit more functional in a different city, as I am mostly hiding here. (I'll work through it, not particularly feeling like details now)
- John Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality is the first book in many years I've felt the need to dustjacket. It comes down heavily on the side of 'myth', and is so far a generally sober and reasonably 101-ish discussion of religion and politics and the dangers of orientalism; still, the spine reads THE ISLAMIC THREAT, and I really don't want to be responsible for giving someone sitting opposite me on the tube a slightly worse day. (I am not quite sure what the point of this, er, point is. The social pitfalls of attention-grabbing titles?)
- LMotP's fourth season is so far disappointing :( ( spoilers for a show nobody but me is keeping up with )
I am so happy it is a yuletide fandom, though! I do not generally devote much thought to it before the fics are published (due to being unable to write to save my life), other than providing Moral Support, and haven't looked through the whole list of nominated fandoms - but I skimmed half-way down it and was delighted to see LOLcats listed. Oh, yuletide. (I don't think I linked to this gorgeous multi-fandom fanvid last year, but I remembered it the other day after reading the vidders' notes and comments on various matters, including race and representation in fandom)
- I just had to put up a note in the kitchen saying “the recycling bin isn't for food waste” for benefit of USian!Housemate, this apparently not being obvious from the council flyer on What Can And Can't Be Recycled, after having to fish mouldy rice and a packet of beef out of it. WTF, I don't know if you guys do things differently, but he's been over here for more than a year so I am going with 'no excuse' *shudders* (I actually live with people who are generally unobjectionable and drama-free, hence the channeling my grouchiness into irksome domestic mishaps. STILL YOU GUYS EW)
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From this generally excellent fisking of Julie Bindel's latest appallingness, this is one of the better one-liners on the whole matter:
"Because, y'know, the feminist campaign for gender equality is totes about forcing people to be something they're not based on their biology."
Further links and comment from LJ: here; here; and here.
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Choking fit inducing story of the day from the newsfeeds: David Wilshire, the disgraced Conservative MP, has compared the treatment of politicians over their expense claims to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.
.....
.......OH NO HE DIDN'T.
(Browsing wiki, among his previous claims to fame was apparently introducing Section 28. Well, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.)
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( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
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It has been a very happy Halloween and a very Blessed Samhain with those of like mind. I miss sharing it with Mother but maybe we'll get that opportunity another year.
Lots of little Guisers at the door and great fun. Had to explain that my "witches outfit" is actually my posh going out get up!!
Too tired to stay up late - been farming this weekend - but watched Coraline DVD in D with daft little red and green glasses - now that was good!
Back in own home and J and I have hoovered up the feathers from the cats' offering. Work looms tomorrow and thus appears another week.
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| User: | jacinthsong |
| Date: | 2009-11-01 12:53 |
| Subject: | Extended QOTD |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  amused | | Music: | Iona reading excerpts from Private Eye |
I am currently reading Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia, a retrospective look at the 1970s ("a decade in which nations were brought to a sclerotic halt by power cuts, military coups, economic anarchy and the arrival of Yuri Geller"). It is a good book for a hungover Sunday (after a most excellent party, which will hopefully produce pictures soon), filled with anecdotes about Nixon, G. Gordon Liddy and Marcia Williams being impressively awful. I am unsure how I feel about the constant references to mental erraticity in said tales; the point behind it is roughly that it was a politically twisted, paranoid and high-strung time that very few players could cope with without legal or illegal self-medication, rather than any individual defect, and he also covers the leaks about Thomas Eagleton with great contempt. Still, I am suspicious by default of references to ill health as synecdoche for Terrible Things!, and I'm not sure it does enought to dispel that.
Anyway! That was not why I thought I had to post about it. I had to quote this passage from the section on the Oz obscenity trials:
Once again, what seemed to be on trial was not so much a specific publication as all sexual activity except the missionary position, performed within wedlock and preferably at weekends. The purpose of one classified ad, Brian Leary told the court, was 'to glorify the art of fellatio...it must have the effect of encouraging people to do that sort of way-out sexual thing'.* ('I wonder how many of you, members of the jury, had heard of fellatio before you came into this court,' Judge Argyle said in his summing-up.) When the jazz singer George Melly testified that 'I don't think cunnilingus could do actual harm,' the judge had to seek clarification: 'For the benefit of those of us who did not have a classical education, what do you mean by this word "cunnilinctus"?' Taking this as an invitation to be less formal, Melly cheerfully offered a few demotic translations. '"Sucking" or "blowing", your lordship. Or "going down" or "gobbling" is another alternative. Another expression used in my naval days, your lordship, was "yodelling in the canyon".' Argyle looked like a man who had just found a dildo in his wig.
* A survey conducted in America in 1974 found that 72 per cent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one indulged in this way-out sexual thing.
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impressed
overslept oops
fierce and warlike
optimistic
awake
accomplished
accomplished
blah
shocked