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continental contrasts
A sentence in today's Irish Times reminded me of the different ways that Ireland and the US view the world.

Every year in Ireland, people gather in Newgrange to watch the sun rise on the morning of the Winter Solstice. This year, it was too cloudy for any light to make it's way into the passage tomb along the aperture cut at the specific angle of the sun at dawn on Winter Solstice. That wasn't what struck me in the article though. It was instead this sentence:

"...nature's cycle continues, the beginning of the end of winter has begun."

which reminded me that while the Irish are celebrating the mid-point of the winter, the Americans think it has only just officially started. Which makes some sort of sense, when you consider that in New England, at least, the snow doesn't let up 'til late March / early April, and May really is a spring month. Whereas in Ireland the crocuses and snow drops appear in January and the trees start to bud in February, with St Brigid's Day / Imbolc heralding the beginning of spring. Given the year that it's been so far: cold, wet, stormy; well, let's just say that I'm hoping for an Irish winter and spring.

When Donna and Ten met Five...
As my friend

kathyh pointed out, the BBC, in its laudable effort to dedicate this year's Christmas to Doctor Who in general and David Tennant to particular, did not stop at on screen events, oh no, there is lots of radio as well. Which is good news for us non-Brits because they tend to make these shows legitmately available online afterwards. Here's a list of all the events thoughtfully provided by

kathyh. The one I absolutely must listen to is David Tennant and Catherine Tate stand in for Jonathan Ross again, with one Peter Davison who I hear shared a past job with Mr. Tennant as their guest. Seriously now, how is a DT/CT/PD combo not squeeworthy in the extreme?!? (

bimo, I'm looking at you.)

Fannish speculation makes me wonder wheter Our David will make Catherine watch at least one Five adventure before letting her loose on Peter Davison, and if so, which one. Methinks Black Orchid would be best suited to an Old Who newbie with no Sci Fi knowledge, but if anyone has other ideas, bring them on!

Current Mood: hyper

Winter Solstice
Happy Solstice! Blessed Yule, and all that sort of thing. Today I celebrated by giving gifts of food (the results of my baking this weekend) to various co-workers. Actually I had planned to do it today because tomorrow is when people start taking off for their vacations and today just so happened to be the Solstice but we're going to pretend like I planned to do it this way the whole time.

Things given out:

Apple butter crumble
Gingerbread (of the bready texture, not the cookie kind)
Blondies
Fudgey bars
Hot chocolate onna stick

People seemed happy to get a little unexpected something. I was certainly happy to indulge my love of baking, so really it all works out in the end.

Current Mood: chipper

As it turns out, I'm NOT a wimp...
I woke up this morning with my lower back going into full-on bitch mode at me.

I of course blame this on the Plow Snot that had been dumped at the end of my driveway that came up to — OhSweetJeezus — my chest. Now, I admit I be short (5-feet, 1-inch in my stocking feet to be precise), but that's a fuckload of snow.

Even in snow that wasn't pushed into a tiny mount of Plow Snot, it came up to my knees, which is roughly 16 inches (I have long legs for my shortness). I figure...drifting snow. And I'm being a baby about this (I mean literally, because I was whining the entire time I cut through the Plow Snot just so I could see my car, let alone reach it.)

Thanks to my local paper, I can now officially say that I was not being a baby. My town got whammed with 14 inches of snow. So there.

And my lower back is still in full-on bitch mode, although giving myself a nice big stretch seems to make it happy and calm it down for an hour or two.

In other news, Sing-Off Live Finale Tonight! Go Beelzebubs! Okay, not a chance in hell you're gonna win, but I'll be happy if you beat Voice of Lee, if only because their fans over on the NBC community are kind of ass-hatty.

[Side note: Stay the hell away from from the NBC boards for this show if you want to prevent cranial trauma by head-desk. The FAIL is great there. And I mean FAIL on a scale that I never thought I'd witness this side of a newspaper comments section.]

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Current Mood: in pain
Current Music: Eddie Izzard - The Deathstar Canteen | Powered by Last.fm

Very delayed reading post (going back several months): Part I Litfic

E H Young, The Vicar's Daughter (1928). I am carefully rationing out my E H Youngs, I think I have one more to go, although there are a couple of early ones that are said to be a bit atypical, also hard to get hold of as never Viragoed. This one was up to the usual standard - complex familial interactions, piercing sharp insights, and a twist in the tail of the plot.

Kate O'Brien, The Last of Summer (1943). I'm also currently reading Pray for the Wanderer, written slightly earlier, which has a similar plot involving someone with Irish (specifically, 'Mellick') connections but who has been living in a more cosmopolitan milieu, coming to family whom they have either never met (The Last of Summer), or have long been away from (Pray for the Wanderer). In both cases the setting is contemporary rather than set back into the past (or abroad, as in Mary Lavelle), and, while they're good, and readable, and have many excellences, I wonder if giving a bit of distance in time and space did benefit O'Brien. Of the two, I think The Last of Summer deals with similar issues rather more successfully.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1975). Very well-written, rather depressing, but not as depressing as it might have been - the ending came as a surprise. I am encouraged to try more Taylor, having rather bounced off her in earlier readings.

Barbara Hambly, Homeland: A Novel (2009). I'm not sure that the words 'epistolary novel set during the American Civil War' would normally tempt me to a book, but, well, it's Hambly, and I was not disappointed. Letters between two women, one, in the North, whose husband has left to fight for the South, one in the South who had been going to study art in Philadelphia before this became impossible. Gritty, realistic, gets the voices and the hesitations and the elliptical and oblique communications. Wonderful.

Rumer Godden, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963). Picked up in a secondhand bookshop - I'd read it years ago and hated it rather (it's probably right at the bottom of Goddens I'd recommend anyone to read) but thought I might give it another go. I had to give up. Too much character torture.

Josephine Elder, Lady of Letters (1949, recently reissued by Greyladies). This had its moments and its points - I mark it up for having a relationship between two women which, although not without its tensions and difficulties, is not seen as pathological and is presented as mostly nurturing and benign - but I'm not sure I like it as much as The Encircled Heart, to which it is possibly a bit of companion piece. Again, it's intriguing as much as social history - the world of girls' schools and provincial universities - as anything.

Plus a few other things I've previously posted about.

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Comment on "How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics"

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Not sure whether you'd be interested in this and/or have the time to take a look, but it seems to me my dissertation from 2006 has some significant affinities with this project.

The abstract is below, and if you or someone on your team would be interested in reading it, I'd be happy to provide you with a copy.

---------------------

Television viewers of NBC’s The West Wing respond to the series in a multitude of situated ways that underscore the nature of contemporary U.S. politics and the need for continued study of the relationship between media forms and their consumers. Ethnographically informed analysis of the rhetorical features of responses by the program’s producers, print journalists who write about the series, and online fans indicates viewers are anxious about the relationships among quality television, political realism, entertainment, and political participation, but find different ways to address these anxieties in their public discourse. The visual economy of representations in the program and producers’ univocal ancillary promotional materials encourage identification of the series as a quality television program that attracts affluent and educated viewers. Journalists and critics formulate responses that indicate an underlying idealism about the aesthetics of television and its relationship to politics, though they are often voiced in a register of cynicism. Online fans in internet newsgroups write of the series both as an object of fandom and as a resource for understanding contemporary politics in their daily lives, often intermingling the two. Their roles as fans and as citizens are frequently blended through their implementation of practical knowledge and judgment as opposed to strictly logical frameworks. All of these groups constitute communities of judgment in which the focus on a central object for evaluation and assessment allows for a greater tolerance of dissent. This tends to stave off the social fragmentation and isolation some contemporary social critics have lamented. Because journalists and online fans identify with the series as fans and as citizens simultaneously, they more readily blur the boundaries between fiction and fact and entertainment and politics. This tends to encourage recognition of novel connections and discourage disengagement with other citizens and fans who have fundamental disagreements.

- Brett Boessen

Comment on "Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (

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There's no inherent financial incentive for Verizon or AT&T to get involved in NPL, yet intrinsic in our form of government is the universal mandate to scrupulously inform the public.

Somehow (media) corporations have come to be exempted from that fundamental and overriding participatory mandate. How?

- scottellington.wordpress.com

Anime & Manga Fans
I took over maintainership of

anime_manga, which was abandoned in 2004. Time to get it running again, right?

This is a community dedicated to all things anime/manga. Fanart, fanfiction, doujinshi, graphics, cosplay photos, general discussion, news, questions or live reports - it's all welcome here. We are multi-fandom here, not restricted to one or a few specific series/shows.

Find rules and guidelines here.

Holidaze Furlough?
Bored? Got some time to yourself and nothing to do? Feel inspired by something you saw on television, at the movies, in the paper, from a book, on your computer, read in your ebook etc?

Then how about trying Fanfiction? Yes, the wonderfully creative world of fanfiction!

At

alikelyscenario we give you 21 challenges/scenarios on which to base your fic upon. Each scenario comes with 5 prompts associated with it to inspire your writing. Come sign up and try your hand at fic writing.

Already have something written? We have a few fandom specific journals that are waiting for you.

heroes_fiction - The Heroes fandom burst on the scene four seasons ago. Since then there has been a lot of good fic. Come and share yours here.

sanctuaryforall - For the Webseries turned television series Sanctuary. Here you can post not only fanfic, but fanart, icons, challenges, news about the show, and anything else related to the fandom.

startrek_redux - Beam yourself up to this asylum for the new movie. Like the asylum above, anything related to the new movie is accepted.

Got something not associated with any asylum listed above,

multi_fiction welcomes any and all fandoms. No matter what genre, we want it.

Blessed Yule
I am at home with the family this year and suffering a little with jetlag, so I missed the dawn this morning. Will light a candle tonight and watch the sun come up tomorrow instead.

When I think of Yule, I think about the rebirth of the sun, and the light's return as the days start to get longer again. So to celebrate, here are some pictures of the sun amid the snow:

( 3 more after the cut )

Current Mood: tired

Happy 117th birthday to Dame Rebecca West!

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Comment on "How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics"

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Prof Jenkins,

I found an amazing YouTube clip wherein Zachary Quinto's narration of the 'Star Trek' audiobook was recut into Kirk/Spock erotica:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOmDIdd0dPg

Thought you should know, and didn't know if your old Institvte email was working.

"Signed,"
Ah CMS Oh-Faux

PS
I also recently saw an illustration of Data "kissing" C-3PO. Does that count as slash? p_o

- http://openid.aol.com/mosnokame

Culinary - further adventures in smoking

During the week, made a batch of the Famous Aubergine Dip for house-warming/Christmas party* chez coughingbear, hano and frankie_ecap, plus on Saturday itself made the by now traditional foccacia to go with it.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajara cinnamon and raisin.

Today's lunch: I smoked 2 halibut steaks with reasonable success( Read more... ).

Served them with quinoa with cumin seeds, stirfried sugar snap peas, and baby cauliflower steamed whole and then turned in melted butter + juice of a lime + crushed garlic.

This week's loaf: the dill batter bread out of James Beard, which I'd originally intended to take to the party, but which turned out rather wonky and misshapen (possibly because it is less of a fairly quick bread than it sounds when scanning the recipe). Tastes fine though.

*Which was extremely enjoyable, even if getting there was more of an expotition than anticipated with the local tube station closed because of the football, and various other misadventures I shall not recount.

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in the not so bleak midwinter
I've had a frightfully busy weekend, which makes for more short entries. However, I offer links and film excerpts!

Fanfiction of the crossover kind:

Torchwood/Doctor Who: Elevator to the moon (a little out of reach). In which post-Children of Earth Jack runs into the pre-Waters of Mars Doctor. Post-CoE this plot has practically become its own subgenre, and there have been lots of good variations, but for some reason, none of these has ever completely satisfied me. This story does, perhaps because it works with understatement, lets the unspoken be as important as the things said out loud, and is neither a fixit nor an exercise in hopelessness. Instead, it does justice to both characters and their respective situations. Kudos.

West Wing/Doctor Who: there are actually four different ficlets in the entry I'm linking, and they're all enjoyable, but the last one, which is a WW/DW crossover in which Josh isn't happy his assistant is currently vacationing with a time-travelling alien in pinstripe suits, and doesn't quite now how to handle the red-haired temp bearing her name either, has really captured my heart. Bonus use of the entire WW ensemble. And a helpful note from Ten as how to best handle slaps from Donna. Check it out and squee!

Speaking of slaps... now, one more link first: Patrick Stewart gets a knighthood. My dad the determined Jacobin would mutter about useless titles, but I think it's a nifty British honour, that one.

Now, on to my last offering. These days people talk about favourite (or most disliked) Christmas movies. One favourite of mine is In the Bleak Midwinter from 1995, written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, about an unemployed actor who directs an unlikely group in a Christmas production of Hamlet. It's funny and playful (presumably Branagh's way to relax before his own Hamlet), pulls off its insane premise, has a lot of oneliners and is guaranteed to make you smile if you're fond of Shakespeare, theatre or various British thesps who show up in this little black and white picture. First, here's Our Hero (played by Michael Maloney) auditoning his cast. His appalled agent is played by Joan Collins.

This is the climax of the film when Hamlet is actually performed against all plot-derived odds. I regret to this day that no other production of Hamlet I ever saw let Ophelia do what she does in this one, because IT IS SO NECESSARY:

Current Mood: drained

Oh the weather outside is... not as bad as advertised, actually
We got hit with snow here in the land of Siam, but not the Snowocalypse that others along the East coast got. I'd say maybe six inches all told? Possibly?

I'll go out into it later to shovel and clean off my car. First I'm going to get cracking on all sorts of holiday baking. I was going to do this all weekend but the oh so slow to arrive storm left me with a headache until about six pm yesterday, give or take. I did get some things done, but not nearly as many as I'd hoped. So today shall be a marathon session, as I need to get things ready to give to people at work tomorrow (aka before they leave for the holidays).

Granted that all this requires getting up off of the couch. Details.

Current Mood: busy

yesmeansyes - Anti-rape/sexual violence blog

blackandmissing - Blog that focuses on highlighting the Black missing & murdered ignored by mainstream media

Happy birthday,

hafren!

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Update
I guess I should start doing the research on my Pretty Lights Fic, due today (and also find out if the deadline is something other than midnight E.S.T.).

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YT story done!
Done, beta'd, posted! With more than 46 hours to spare! (Erm. Could've posted yesterday; wanted to tackle strange new archive settings when I was rested.)

Invisible, anonymous Yuletide collection sitting at 440 works now. Was at 307 when I posted a little while ago. Wow. Gonna be a lot of manic posting, mm-hmm. (The code wasn't ready until a day or two ago.)

I haven't been the site enough so I hadn't seen the adorable AO3 logo now visible on the front page. Is a squee icon!

If anyone who isn't doing YT wants an AO3 invite, just let me know. (Not that I'd forbid them to YT people, but YT is sending those invites.)

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Codsmack candidates

This guy, in fact, is on the coelocanth list for being a living fossil:
A Tory MP has bombarded the government's equalities watchdog with a series of extraordinary letters about race and sex discrimination, in a one-man campaign against "political correctness".:

In the latest of 19 letters sent since April 2008, and likely to dismay equal rights campaigners, Philip Davies asks Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: "Is it offensive to black up or not, particularly if you are impersonating a black person?"

Yet another guy who tells the world about his extreme activities and near-death experience doing same.

Stuart Jeffreys (yet again), along with the other characters in this incredibly icky anecdote:

At university I remember fancying an unattainable woman. For her birthday, I bought her a copy of Borges's Labyrinths. What a loser. My rival bought her split-crotch knickers, and was soon exchanging more with her than lecture notes.

Can you see what I did wrong yet? I sought, paternalistically, to buy her something I thought she should read, and at the same time tried to persuade her by the nature of the gift that I was the kind of cultured ponce she should be dating. But she didn't appreciate Borges or me imposing my (frankly superior) literary tastes on her. In one ill-considered purchase, I destroyed £6.99 of value and blew the chance to get into her unspeakably tacky knickers. True story.

Call me Ms Picky About Etiquette, but I consider it highly inappropriate for a man to give split-crotch knickers to a lady unless they are already in an ongoing legover situation. So either Jeffreys had missed this pertinent fact, or, in my view, the woman in question should have stuffed them down the gullet of the giver while kneeing him in the goolies. If not, I think she deserved codslapping as well.

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Comment on "The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part One)"

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Interesting discussion! Thank you;)

- Amam

Restaurant rec

Today we went out for our section Xmas lunch to a local restaurant, and I was tending to assume it would be a bit ho-hum, because for a variety of reasons we were rather late booking, and I assumed that anywhere that had a table for a group of 6-8 still available on this particular Friday was probably not remarkable.

However, that might have been because it's only relatively recently opened on the site of a restaurant that really was rather ho-hum.

Because we had an absolutely fabulous meal of Lebanese mixed mezze which had plenty to offer both carnivores and vegetarians.

So let's hear it for the Qasser Lebanese Eatery on Tottenham Court Road (two blocks south of Warren Street station), even if their website does play music (which is an abomination).

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Five Friday Reasons of Fannish Happiness
1.) Trailer for the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet , which both brings back the joy of having watched this live and the anticipation of seeing it again. I just hope the RSC delivered that dvd I ordered eons ago as promised. Also, once the dvd is available and the film has been broadcast, I hope for lots of screencaps and plenty of icons, hopefully some of which will show both actors I tend to fangirl in the same shot. (The publicity photos by the RSC last year just weren't what I wanted in this department.)

2.) Yuletide Uploading is open. Uploading my story reminded me again what fun it was to write. I've always looked forward to the 25th because Yuletide is such a great ficathon, but this year there is that additional slight nervousness which comes with having made a contribution as well. Let's see how rare that rare fandom is...

3.) Discovered via

vilakins: Pride & Prejudice via Emoticons. Who cares about adaptions with zombies if you can have adaptions via emoticons! :)

4.) Methinks Warren Ellis really hit his stride with his second arc in Astonishing X-Men. #33 is out, that's the third issue in a row which is fun to read, doesn't have wth? character moments and came without any long interruptions in between. If you really want to nitpick, you can argue Storm's role in the Ellis line-up is, the one discussion she had with Cyclops in the last arc aside, somewhat bland, especially compared with Kitty in the Whedon line-up, but that's really not much of an issue. I'm so happy Hisako continues to play a major role in AXM, and Ellis writes her absolutely delightful. He also seems to want Scott/Logan 'shippers really happy with this second arc, seeing as he continues to write their interaction. Also, the art for the second arc is way better than for the first, especially for my beloved Abigail Brand and for Hank McCoy. Speaking of my favourite morally ambigous agent, ( I continue to harbor a spoilery suspicion. )

5.) Five Minutes, Mr. Welles. I had heard about this short film (31 minutes) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2004, starring and directed by Vincent D'Onofrio, but I had no idea it was available on YouTube until yesterday. D'Onofrio had played Orson Welles before, as a cameo in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, but this time he gets to use his own voice. Which doesn't sound at all like Welles', but that's beside the point here. (Especially since he's great with the body language and the script.) This particular short film is set during the shooting of The Third Man, at a time when Orson Welles had long since stopped being a beloved prodigy and was now in quasi-exile from Hollywood, mostly living in Europe and hiring himself out as an actor to finance his own movies. Quite often, this meant a lot of mediocre films to play in, but occasionally, he lucked out in his quest for movie-financing cash and got a role in a great picture. But you don't even have to know that in order to enjoy this half an hour which among other things showcases some magic of acting, as D'Onofrio-as-Welles goes from memorizing the Ferris Wheel scene in a listless, lifeless manner to injecting a flicker of personality in the lines to finally, at the end, coming up with a complete performance of Harry Lime, complete with the ad-lib Welles contributed to Graham Greene's script. The second character is an invented one, but in complete contradiction to my nagging about the book Me and Orson Welles I shall praise her existence. Katherine, scriptgirl-plus-personal-assistant, played by the classy Janine Theriault whom I've never seen before but now shall look out for, goes from seemingly powerless to actually powerful, and goes the through the full O.W. experience of alternatingly being frustrated, angry, challenged and charmed. There are some lovely visual homages to Welles as a director (the camera angles are obvious, but I clued in the Othello bit one only after I'd seen it; well-done, especially since Othello was the film Welles was needing the cash for). And in case you've never ever seen The Third Man - and what stopped you so far? - this is the scene Welles is rehearsing in Five Minutes, Mr. Welles. One of the all time classics and endlessly quotable. (And imitated and quoted from about a million times.)

Current Mood: bouncy

Grumpy hedjog

Have been v tired all week - the gloomy season, the cold, the snow, all contributing I suspect.

An array of completely first-world annoyances and nigglesomeness, each one trivial in itself, nonetheless scratching on my already not very good mood.

If anyone would like to lighten my mood in any way (hugs, jokes, nice things...) via comments, would be v grateful.

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