Interesting Things

Anna and I are in the process of -- or recovering from -- taking our beloved kitty Gerry to the vet, so have some Things That Are Nifty.

• Nightmare Magazine's 100 Horror Books.
• 11 Zombies We Didn't Want to Kill (from SciFi Wire or Blastr or whatever the hell it calls itself)
• Unofficial (but very familiar) fandom superlatives (from WhoQuotes)
• Marzipan. Icing sugar. Joy.
• Amazing thoughts from Anna Guest-Jelley of Curvy Yoga on home practice.
• And Bradley Harding of Planet Fury takes us through his (hilarious) dark tea-time of the soul when it comes to found footage horror movies.

And just to make sure you have a good midweek, one of the ravens from the Tower of London.

Source: Uploaded by user via Christian on Pinterest

Spiffyness

Here are some cool things for midweek because I haven't finished my post on "The Girl Who Waited" yet...

• A Master's thesis on literature and the black death: "Living on the Edge."
• "Grub Street in 1641."
• Some wonderfully porny fanfic:
• It's Surrender (TeenWolf)
• Three fantastically damaged Thor/Loki fics (Thor/The Avengers)
• Body Memory (Stargate: Atlantis)
• A fantabulous clip from an English TV show called The IT Crowd which I didn't know of before cthulhuchick was kind enough to link it.
• Great vintage ads for libraries and reading.
• Fandom teas. Seriously. You can buy Doctor Who tea, Supernatural tea, Firefly tea...

And, finally, an owl getting his/her head scratched:

One of Those Weeks

You know the ones I mean.

So no time to blog this week! Instead, have my two favorite new Tumblrs:

mishagantic: I don't know what the name means either. Ask her -- she's very nice! French Supernatural fan with a serious thing for Castiel/Misha Collins in general as well Dean/Cas which warms my twisted little heart. Love this blog.

houseassbutpotionsmaster: More Spn goodness -- also random DW goodness -- just goodness all 'round really.

And a third option in case you're not into either Spn or slash (in which case what do you do with your spare time?!), Bookshelf Porn. Pretty much what it says on the label.

Monday again, huh?

Anne Lamott, in her great Bird by Bird once describes the first day of the week as "your mute, Slavic uncle Monday." She suggests not starting big things -- no new novels; no screen plays; no house cleaning projects -- on Mondays 'cause, dude...uncle Monday.

And so that's how Monday is personified for me a lot of the time: an out-of-proportionally big guy, in an overcoat that doesn't fit, and huge clown shoes. Except all in a kind of rusty, grungy black. Shaggy dark hair, and no use for language.

In order to give uncle Monday a little run for his money, lets look at pretty things instead, shall we?

My two favorite new Tumblr blogs are all about the pretty things. Lets give some love to "You only lose what you cling to" and brown dress with white dots. These are both primarily photo blogs; the former is colloquially known as "fuckyeah cats lesbians and buddhism" -- just so you know what you're getting into: some of it may be NSFW, but the photography is wonderful.

brown dress is my new favorite photo blog at this point; sometimes the stuff going up can seem a little...posed and slightly artificial to my eye -- my totally untrained, amateur photographer's eye, by the way -- but then there's shots like this and this and this .... oh, and this.

So go forth and look at pretty things and maybe mute old uncle Monday will come and chill out with you for a bit and think about cats rather than glooming in the corner and thinking about cockroaches.

Since I kind of think of it as "Whovian Wednesdays" around here -- although, obviously, I would never title anything that because, God, what kind of person do you think I am? -- here is something Whovian for your mid-week.

Also, I can't face thinking about The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People just now and I really do have to watch the episodes again to refresh a few details before I wibble on about them.

Normally I wouldn't link to io9 because I don't like the site that much but I can't resist the breakdown of 10 Totally Different TV Shows That Doctor Who Has Been Over the Years.

dr_who_who by the-quick-brown-fox.

Pretty Things

What do we all need on a daily basis? Yeah, yeah, apart from the whole "food, water, air" triad. Well, one of my yoga teachers (via DVD only, sadly, but that still counts, right?) says, "Space" which is as good a suggestion as any. A bumper sticker on my kitchen wall says, "Chocolate" which is an excellent answer most days. "Whatever the hell gets you out of bed" also works -- unless it's an illegal substance or something which contravenes someone else's human rights.

But one of the things I think we all need more of are pretty things to look at! Who doesn't need something lovely to look at while cubicling the day away? (And I say this as someone who really kinda likes her cubicle.)

So here is a selection of "Pretty Thing Providers" -- i.e., Tumblrs.

WhoQuotes. It's kinda all in the name here, folks, but you get a great assortment of quotes (Whovian, of course) and images on here.

I love classic horror/sci-fi images. And the Swamp Thingy blog meets that craving beautifully; great combo of animated and static images and lots of other fun blogs to find if you enjoy link-surfing (and who doesn't?) It's like a daily Godzilla quotient!

Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. The Lazy Book Reviewer is neither lazy nor self-indulgent but she does give you some of the funniest, sharpest, most amusing Tumblr commentary you're likely to get: on books, TV, movies, and her dog.

book lovers never go to bed alone. Bookshelf pron. Book pron. Bookstore pron. Are you literate? Do you have a thing for books? Then this is for you. You may wish to put something over your keyboard before you start looking at the images; drool can short out your keys, y'know.

fuck yeah dr who -- while I may not agree with their spelling (I prefer "Doctor" to "Dr."), I love what they do! Old series; new series; it's all here.

Off-the-Mat Reading

I've decided to expand my blogging realm a little.

With the encouragement of a couple of friends, I'm looking forward to doing some regular blogging about yoga (which I love*) and history (which I also love). I still want to keep writing about Doctor Who and the other genre stuff that makes it worthwhile to get out of bed in the mornings, but I figure the occasional Saturday post about "something else" can't hurt, right?

So I thought a nice way to start out would be to spread the blog love around a little.

After all the time I spent last weekend talking smack about Yoga Journal, I figured it was only fair to point out at least one of the things they do very well: blogs. They have some fantastic bloggers and one of my favorites is Kristin Shepherd at Beginner's Mind. Shepherd is a chiropractor and a newbie yogi. At least, she was when she started but the blog is at least a year old at this point -- at least in my memory it is! -- so she isn't that newbie any more. But her enthusiasm for "all things yoga" -- most recently her investigations into the wonders of meditation -- is infectious; she is consistently respectful to her reading audience; and she is never jargon-heavy or pretentious. These are valuable assets in a yoga blogger! Plus, her columns are short, readable, and great for a little midday "why do I do this thing with the colorful mat again?" moment.

Curvy Yoga is one of my favorite blog finds for the past few weeks; I found it because of Anna's fantastic post about the same YJ article I was grumping about. Her's is slightly more...controlled than mine, shall we say, and far more like an actual, reasonable letter. :) What else is to like about the blog? The inclusive tone, consistent respect and friendliness, a desire to see everyone in a position to enjoy a fruitful yoga practice if they want to. And she recommends at least one of my favorite yoga clothing retailers (Athleta, if you must know. And, yes, I know they're really owned by Old Navy or The Gap or something else atrocious but their pants are so damned comfy!) Anna's a certified yoga teacher; she's going through further training with Sadie Nardini who also rocks (and whose blog is temporarily down as of this posting; go to that link and poke at the "Blog" tab until it works -- she's well-worth a read, too!) What is not to like about Curvy Yoga? I have more or less let myself get psyched out of going to studios; I comfort myself with the thought that most teachers seem to say that regular home practice is just as, if not more, beneficial than a 90 minute "kick your ass" session once a week at a studio; that studios are expensive; that I can't afford the time out of my week (even though I probably could). All of these reasons are sort of true -- but I really love that there are folks like Anna out there who don't let themselves get psyched out. That's just awesome.

Not last or least, Spoiled Yogi. How can you not love a blog that has posts like "Just Say No--To Yoga Guilt!" And lookie here! Guest posts from Anna over at Curvy Yoga. :) Anyway, the Spoiled Yogi spotlights lots of guest bloggers and her own posts are always thoughtful and engaging. Do you have trouble springing right out of bed into that blissful morning sun salutation we all hear we should be salivating to do? Yup, so does she. And, like Kristin Shepherd, she's exploring meditation these days. And look! She's looking for folks to talk about how/why/where/when they got into yoga.

Last and still not least: Y is for Yogini. Irreverent? Tongue-in-cheek? Snarky? Oh, my friend: yes. A healthy dose of irreverence is at least as important as a well-balanced downdog. I'm not saying don't be serious about your practice -- I don't think Lo is saying that either -- but don't let your sense of humor die every time you step on the mat. The only problem with this blog is that the RSS feed isn't working properly so it won't load into a reader -- like Google Reader or Bloglines -- correctly. If anyone comes up with a fix for this or sees something I didn't, please let me know! I've been keeping it open in a separate tab in Chrome for a few weeks now, but there has to be a better long-term solution than that!

 *Disclaimer: I am not a yoga teacher. I hold no certifications. All opinions here are only my own and only opinions and should be taken as such.

interesting things

It was a rough weekend, ladies and gentlemen, thus no post on Monday. If you were hanging around with your tongues out waiting for it -- well, I apologise and...er...don't you have something else to do with your time?

Anyway, I still don't have a lot of time to write anything thoughtful for this week, so, instead, here are some interesting things taken almost entirely at random from my "blog" bookmarks folder, Google reader list, and Tumblr blog. I figure about 70% of my memory is currently housed online...

Arbogast on Film reviews Population 436 which I reviewed on here a few months back and comes to basically the same conclusions I did which is kind of awesome.

Tor.com is doing Zombie Week.

Shane Perez takes brilliant photos of abandoned or "not currently in use" environments. Beware: some of the series do feature a naked model, so may be NSFW.

It's the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain and the RAF Benevolent Fund has set up a website detailing the events of the Battle through "blog entries" from eyewitnesses. The eyewitnesses are fictional, but their experiences are real and this is just a jimdandy use of primary source material -- photographs, diaries, footage (footage yet! some it's color!), newspaper stories -- to create a new kind of narrative about an event.

And here's a slightly different way to look at the sky: some shots from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010 competition.

Some free fiction from the Living Dead 2 collection, edited by John Joseph Adams: a story by David Wellington, one of my favorite authors, and eight other stories to whet your appetite for the full collection.

The Guardian interviews John Simm. Worth clicking through for the photo alone. Chippy or not, Mr. Simm, sir, we love you.

Finally, a list from the SciFi Wire: (some of the) best sci-fi episodes ever aired.

Photo by Nick Deaves

(slightly past) mid-month note

Behold! I have rediscovered capital letters and I have a new method of procrastination!

Check it out: my Tumblr.com mini-blog thing of doom. (Because why not of doom?)

And you can see it over there in the right-hand column of this page, too. Look. Right over there. Ain't it neat?

Update -- okay, so the Tumblr feed in the right-hand column was driving me nuts, so I moved it. Now it's right up there. See? A whole separate page. Much neater.

friday fun times

no youtube'y goodness today, folks. but i assume you've all heard of a little thing called the san diego comic-con? yeah, thought you had.

and i don't really want to get into the details but suffice it to say that some folks with a fucking nasty turn of mind decided for reasons best known to themselves to protest the good ol' sdcc.

go forth and enjoy some heartwarming geeky responses here and here. also here. and over here.

:)

things look bad. send chocolate.

feeling kind of uninspired this week, folks. one of my jobs is ending, my other one is ramping up hours but only for a week or so, and there is continual construction near and about the apartment which is unconducive to rest and relaxation, let alone coherent writing.

so here are some other interesting things for you instead...

an article about justin cronin's new vampire book, "the passage."

a much more positive review of david kynaston's family britain than my own.

edited highlights from the saville report on bloody sunday (the one in 1972 in northern ireland). (and if you're thinking, "gee, you do irish history. shouldn't you have more to say about this enormously important report than a one-line write-off in a links list?" you'd be right. and i do. but i need time to catch up on all the coverage first!)

and some more relaxing things....

lots and lots and lots of pretty pictures of ilm special effects.

some absolutely fantastic costumes (and more) from dragon-con courtesy of jen at the epbot blog who also does the wonderful and wonderfully wrong cakewrecks blog.

and warren ellis's take on the england/us soccer match last saturday.

*kof**sneeze**sneeze**kof*

you know what really just sits on all your blogging plans like a bollog with no head and crushes them into tiny smithereens? a head cold.

no, really, it does. sudafed and ibuprofen do not make you smarter. they don't even let you stay awake for very long periods.

so here are some people who are much cleverer than i am at the minute....

a video, courtesy of the guardian, of bill bryson at the hay festival.

another one, still from the guardian, of simon schama.

jo brand, who i used to love when she was part of the team doing the mary whitehouse experience on bbc radio. hilarious stuff, if you ever get a chance to listen to it. i know there was a tv series, too, but i never got to see it and i lost all my (probably totally illegal) downloads of the radio shows in a laptop crash a few years back. very sad.

"am i bothered?"

okay, so i'm out of inspiration for this week. sad to say, but true. the weather is ghastly -- 80+ and humid; i've been having to boil my drinking water since saturday night; and i've got a long week in front of me. i'm quite happy about some of it -- a new meditation class is starting on tuesday -- but it's still long.

so here are some things i've recently found through other blogs i read which you might also find interesting.

have you heard about the new, restored print of fritz lang's metropolis which is being released this summer? no? well, there you go.

a few years ago -- honestly, i don't remember how long -- comic relief/rednose day in britain did a doctor who parody with rowan atkinson as the doctor called "the curse of the fatal death." for those of you who remember the old jon pertwee-style episode titles, this sounds completely believable. beyond the fact that atkinson looks as if he's nicked his coat from pertwee, his tie from troughton, and his hair from hartnell -- and then dyed it to match tom baker's. in any case, sf signal makes both parts of the parody available here.

and here are a couple of great posts from sadie nardini over at yoga journal's yoga diary about learning to work with the your strengths and working with balance. i wouldn't like to say "these are problems i have every day" because that casts things in a very negative light and i'm trying not to do that so much -- so lets say "i think about these things a lot." sounds better, doesn't it? yes, i thought so.

on a slightly lighter note, a post from bj-c's day of the woman blog (great stuff over there if you don't already read it) about "15 horror locations to avoid like the plague;" a dialogue between the little professor and her books; and pictures from the guardian of mari kasurinen's absolutely wonderful artistic work with...my little pony (tm).

"we apologize for the inconvenience."

not that it's really inconvenient, but this is cross-posted from anna's blog yet again because, well, my wrist hurts and i had a remarkably depressing friday and i asked her -- nicely! -- to write something for today...and she did.

Okay, okay, so it's not like we think there are legions of fans out there waiting with baited breath for the forth installment of our 100 movie quotes endeavor (see parts one, two, and three for a refresher), but still: we apologize for the fact that we are delaying the post for another week. Hanna has been working industriously all week transcribing the terrible handwriting of ninteenth-century medical photographers and her wrist has become (as they would have said back then) overstrained. It needs bedrest and a cold compress. And a day or two away from typing -- even fun typing.

So instead I bring you a few movie-related links that will hopefully brighten your weekend, and Hanna has volunteered to augment my ramblings with some deftly-chosen youtube clips (minimal typing required). So here we go.

If you're looking for list-type things to read, wander on over to debontherocks @ Blogher, who put up a post this week of her nominations for "the Opposite Oscars," where "we could call out the performances and films that aspired for greatness, but turned out to not even be worth the popcorn required to survive them." While I am not particularly partisan in terms of the films she nominates (most of which I have not seen), I enjoyed this description of the ceremony:

Nominees could attend in their jeans or yoga pants, grab a boxed lunch from the folding table by the door, and wait expectantly to see who was dubbed worst. The loser could then tell off the people who led them to that bad performance, they could nurse their wounds, or just apologize. "I needed the money to pay a bad IRS debt/lift-tuck the twins after breastfeeding the real twins/buy back a digital video camera I inadvertently left in a South Beach hotel room," they would say. And we might understand, or we might cluck and boo, but at least we'd have resolution.

debontherocks would probably appreciate (if she has not already read) what might just be the best movie review of the year, to date. Actually, I'm quite sure it's the best movie review I've read several years running. Although I feel a bit diminished, as a human being, for writing that since it's a total pan of a film that I haven't even seen, the romantic comedy Valentine's Day. Sady Doyle @ The Guardian writes:

The cumulative effect of Valentine's Day is to make you feel that all human emotions are shameful. Have you ever been sad about a break-up? Had a crush on someone? Wanted your ex-lover back? Been happy to meet somebody promising? Wanted to have sex? You are terrible. You are feeling the same emotions portrayed in the movie Valentine's Day. And these emotions, Valentine's Day confirms, are cheap, and disgusting. For they make you like the characters in this movie.

I mean, wow. That's quality panning.

If this is really the effect of Valentine's Day then it deserves to be panned. Because, you know what? Human emotions aren't shameful. And any movie that makes us feel they are is a disservice to the craft. In fact, I'm a firm believer in movies doing quite the opposite: giving us space in which to witness and experience human emotions (light, dark, and all the shades between) without embarrassment. For example, here's some quality romance, brought to you by the team who were also responsible for that near-perfection of a film, Love Actually.

(Hanna says I am required to warn you that tissues will be needed to watch this scene.)

I will love John Hannah forever for this scene (well, and for his character in The Mummy, but this primarily since it was the first role I ever saw him in, and he made me cry).

Speaking of things that have made me cry recently (I didn't realize this post was going to be so teary, but there we are -- I promise to end with something more ebullient!), Terry Gross recently interviewed Colin Firth about his Oscar-nominated role in A Single Man.



This, like Valentine's Day, is a film which I have neither seen nor heard very much about, but which after listening to said interview I fear I might never be able to watch. Not, however, because I fear it sucks, but because I fear it does not. In fact, I fear it is brilliant. It is the story of a professor who, in the opening scenes of the film, loses his lover in a car accident, and who struggles to go on living in the aftermath of that loss. Terry Gross plays, toward the beginning of the Fresh Air interview, the scene in which Firth's character recieves word that his lover is dead. The audio alone was enough to make me tear up, sitting there at my desk at work.

Firth, in the interview, likens the story to Joan Didion's memoir describing the loss of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, which I likewise know I would love and also know I may never have the strength to read. (For those of you who are tempted to think there's some enobling purpose to suffering, go read Jonathan Romain's recent commentary at the Guardian: "Let's be very clear: there is no divine purpose in suffering whatsoever.")

And because I can't possibly leave you all on a note of such existential despair, here's Colin the Sex God from the aforementioned Love Actually exploring the wilds of Milwaukee with a blackpack full of condoms and an openness to cross-cultural experiences.

Hanna reports there is an urban legend that Kris Marshall refused his paycheck for filming this scene on the grounds that it was just too much fun to count as actual work. I leave it to y'all to decide whether that's true or not.

Have a good weekend. We'll be back next Saturday with more movie fun (and possibly even some movie quotes!)

in leiu of part 4, here are men in kilts...

cross-posted from anna's blog...

So it's been one of those weeks where every day seems to run from about six am to midnight without a lot of time to stop and pause for breath. Let alone movie quote blogging. So Hanna and (much more tangentially) I are taking a pass this weekend on the final installment of the movie quotes post.

If you are absolutely positively dying to read lists of things related to film and our commentary about them, then you can enjoy last years' list of twenty-nine of our favorite romantic movies.

Meanwhile, we were sucked into watching the latter half of the opening ceremony of the Olympics last night and were completely won over by these guys (and gals)


Who played fiddles, had GREAT body art, and did step dancing in doc martens to boot


And in case you happened to miss the show, here's the answer to the mystery of who was going to carry the torch on its final leg to the stadium.

Enjoy the long weekend, sports (if you like that kind of thing) and movies (if you enjoy that). See you back here next Saturday for the concluding installment of "don't ever link those two things again..."

*image credits: Winter Olympics - Opening Ceremony and 95658513PB085_Olympics_Open @ Flickr.com.

"people don't understand about time."

i had some things i thought i was going to be prepared to blog about by this weekend but, between being unwell and...well, being unwell, it didn't happen. i've got a whole stack of books to read -- not for the edification of whoever's reading this blog necessarily but just for the hell of it -- and some movies backed up on my netflix queue, but it's hard to feel enthused about speculative fiction when you can't breathe through your nose. at least, it is for me.

so for this sunday, we just have some random links of things that came across my feed reader this week which i think are interesting.

first off, there's a link from jo walton over at tor.com of "neglected books." if you're looking for something to read the next time you're at the library, this might help!

also from tor.com, some stories available online from the year's best fantasy 9. there's some awesome stuff in here: kage baker (two stories!), cathrynne m. valente (if you haven't read the girl who circumnavigated fairyland..., you also might want to look into that -- y'know, if you've got a couple of days to kill), kij johnson.

more from tor about the new companion in the yet-to-be-seen 5th season of doctor who. personally, when it comes to the use of the companion as a bit of eye-candy to make the show's ratings jump a bit, i always remember an interview with louise jameson (leela over there at the left) when she was talking about her experience on the show and all the fanmail she found she got from fathers rather than children: "but i guess when you wear a leather bikini and you're on right after the pools results, that's what you're going to get." she was massively good-tempered about it and seemed to look on the whole thing more as a good joke than as anything offensive or troubling.

a distressing (for me anyway) snippet of news via the scifiwire: fox may be developing a u.s. version of torchwood. since the bbc hasn't said anything about a 4th season of the show post-children of earth (and, really, who'd be left to be in it?!), you'd think i'd be more enthusiastic about news that the show could have a new home. i'm not. fox is a show-killer. beyond that, they are ratings-hogs show-killers. one of the things i adore about torchwood is the subtlety of the inter-personal relationships (shall we say); i can't see fox preserving that. what'd be a grand way to get ratings? sell it as gay scifi. please, mr. barrowman sir, refuse.

and still on the scifiwire/torchwood kick, another film version of sherlock holmes with the odd familiar face or two in it...

from the more academic side of things, a speech from the most recent american historical society meeting in san diego earlier this month: "is google good for history?"

and there's ten ton of stuff i have marked about the recent kerfluffle in northern ireland about the robinsons and mrs. robinson's affair and the dust-up about the devolution of police powers to northern ireland -- but that's a whole 'nother post and so i will leave you with a mstk3 clip for the day:

"don't ever link those two things again..." (1 of 4)

okay, so in the spirit of "don't complain about something if you're not prepared to do it better," i noticed over the past couple of weeks two lists -- one from wired and one from a blog i know not of called ink-stained amazon which i have to say is beautiful to look at it -- that both purport to be 'essential lists' of 'geek culture' quotes.

ahem.

okay, so the wired list starts off with monty python and the holy grail and the amazon list includes the sarah jane adventures -- but i'm still not wildly impressed with either one.

i figured i could do better.

then i thought about it and realised that, on my own, i didn't have the time to do better so i roped in my ever-patient girlfriend to help me do better. :)

first off, a couple of notes:

1. this is for fun. if you're not amused, go read something else. i won't be offended, promise. that being said, suggestions and additions (politely phrased!) are welcome in the comments. but keep in mind this is installation 1 of 4! not everything will fit in here.

2. these are probably mostly going to be dredged out of my memory, anna's memory, imdb, or official show/movie sites. inaccuracy is, therefore, almost inevitable. not to mention repetition of shows or characters. if this annoys you-- well, make your own list. :)

3. i'm not aiming for some kind of "worst to best" or "best to worst" list. they're here because the two people making the list think they're fun or because one of us was able to strong-arm the other into including them. brief context is provided where anna or i thought it was necessary. i also tried to find links for character images that were from the episode/scene/moment where the quoted line was spoken. this isn't always possible but i'm fairly pleased with myself for getting as close as i did! fair warning: links may contain spoilers, particularly links to doctor who or torchwood episodes.

5. i am aiming for 4 posts of 25 quotes each over the next 4 weeks. tune in each friday/saturday for your new installment!

okay, and that being said...

1. Tim Latimer [talking about the Doctor]: "He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe...and... he's wonderful." Doctor Who, "The Family of Blood."

2. Captain Jack Harkness: "Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Tracking down alien life on Earth, arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you gotta be ready." Torchwood, Season 1 opener on all episodes.

3. Brother Justin Crowe [talking about his upcoming radio broadcast]: "In a single coast-to-coast broadcast, I will speak to more souls than our Lord did in his entire lifetime. It's going to be breathtaking." Carnivale, "Ingram, TX."

4. Dominic Toretto: "I retract my previous statement." The Fast and the Furious.

5. Murtagh [in reference to a stone wall he and Eragon have run up against in their attempt to join the rebels]: "Tell me your vision looked something like this." Eragon.

6. The Guide: "Don't Panic." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

7. The Doctor: "Don't blink." Doctor Who, "Blink."

8. M [to James Bond as he almost says her real name]: "Finish that sentence and I'll have you killed." Casino Royale.

9. Captain Jack Sparrow [in reference to almost anything]: "Not good -- not good!" Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

10. Alice [before killing the monster that used to be her work partner and "husband"]: "I'm missing you already." Resident Evil.

11. Riddick: "If you can't keep up, don't step up. You'll only die." Chronicles of Riddick.

12. "I'm going to curl up in his sock drawer and sleep for days." MST3K riff in MST3K: The Movie: This Island Earth.

13. Dean Winchester: "Well, that's healthy." Supernatural, Pilot.

14. C-3PO: "Shutting up, sir." Star Wars: A New Hope.

15. Dr. Frank N. Furter: "What ever happened to Fay Wray? That delicate satin-draped frame...how it clung to her thigh as I started to cry... 'cause I wanted to be dressed just the same..." The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

16. Jim [wandering in an empty London]: "Hello! Hello -- hello! Hello!" 28 Days Later.

17. Temperance Brennan: "I don't know what that means." Bones, multiple episodes.

18. Plankton: "Well, goodbye, everyone. I'll remember you all in therapy!" Spongebob Squarepants, "The Algae is Always Greener."

19. Wesley Gibson [talking to Sloan who may, or may not, be trying to induct him into a secret brotherhood of assassins]: "So do you make sweaters or do you kill people?" Wanted.

20. Toshiko Sato: "Because you're breaking my heart." Torchwood, "Exit Wounds."

21. The Doctor: "Well, progress is a very flexible word. It can mean just about anything you want it to mean." Doctor Who, "The Power of Kroll."

22. Michael Corvin: "Are you fucking kidding me!" Underworld.

23. Mme. de Pompadour [talking to/about the Doctor]: "Such a lonely little boy. Lonely then and lonelier now." Doctor Who, "The Girl in the Fireplace."

24. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker: "We're smarter than this!" "Apparently not." Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

25. Marvin the Paranoid Android [about life in general...]: "I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side..." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

intellectual vanity

i saw this article in the guardian over the weekend and thought it was worth ruminating on it a bit here, since it also followed through on a conversation i had with friends over dinner on friday night. natasha tripney over at the guardian books blog wrote about "the unvanquishable bookpile."

i have pretty much had the "unvanquishable bookpile" since i could read. it varies in height, weight, dust collected, and number and genre of volumes included based on my proximity to a library (or libraries), my ability to afford bookstore prices (used or otherwise), and whether or not i'm in school. during my time at simmons, i have to say the bookpile was most often made up of irish history or historiography reading i was woefully behind on. you don't want to know how much of it i managed to catch up on -- really catch up on -- before finishing my thesis. we'll just say it was a percentage.

now the mix is better. there's still a lot of irish history because, well, it's what i do and i love it and i can't imagine not reading more about it because that would be silly. but now there's the new stephen king novel (100 pages in), wolf hall (2/3rds of the way in) and some other assorted random stuff, mostly culled from the "new books" shelves at the library because "ooh, that looks cool." it may be; it may not be; but now that i'm not reading against time for my thesis, i can find out.

if i'm closer to a library -- or more than one since i currently have lending privileges at three, one academic and two public and both public ones are part of ginormous lending consortia -- the bookpile expands geometrically. it's so easy to follow up on interesting book reviews, footnotes that look intriguing, or recommendations from friends.

having book feeds continually dumping new and interesting stuff via google reader or oldfashioned email isn't the most helpful thing, either. pretty much every day there's something from the guardian or bookninja or tor that just cannot be passed by. this is what the goodreads list is for, i figure. i dump it on there; if i come back across it in six months time and still remember what it is and why i put it on there, i'll see about finding a copy. it's the same theory as the bottom 100 on my netflix queue. every now and then i pass through the list and if i have no idea why it's there, out it goes.

and then there's the whole question, as ms. tripney notes, of how you find what you're reading. this is why the bookpile never, in essence, gets smaller. as far as academic reading goes, the pile is never going down. there's always a footnote or a reference or a related field or a new theoretician -- at least someone you haven't heard of or haven't read or haven't read enough of -- to follow up on. i think this is why it stays continually fascinating. and there's always something new to read that makes you want to go back and re-read something old because now you have this great new idea for how it could be interpreted or applied or used.

this, of course, leads to book-sluttery of major proportions. not only bookstores, but used bookstores. not only used bookstores, but $1 carts -- of which boston is all too full! not only used bookstores and $1 carts, but amazon's used section. and not only amazon's used section but powell's and the book depository--and--and--and-- and a continual shortage of bookshelves, in my experience. thus the unread book pile, not shelf or case. you don't have enough shelves. there are never going to be enough shelves.

and that's fine by me. yes, there are days when the book pile must be sorted and shelved or at least maniacally dusted, but for the most part i'm content to have it there. after all, there's probably something really awesome in it somewhere.

theobromos cacao

this is not a post i wanted to write.

kage baker, one of my favorite authors, is dying. there are a couple of stories about it here and, from tor.com, here.

i never write to authors. ever.

i'm going to write to her because her books are phenomenal.

if you haven't read them, you should. they're hard to find but, i promise you, it is worth it.

it is stupid and awful and pointless that there won't be any more of them.

important scientific research

so i'm writing this post on sunday evening in the full anticipation of being so fried by thursday of this week that i will barely be able to think straight let alone post anything particularly wonderful.

there is much visiting to be done with diana who is coming to boston for alise conference ahead of the ala midwinter conference. there is contemplation of the eddie izzard concert on tuesday to be done. there are preparations to be made for new job, letters to be written for possible future jobs -- just all sorts of things that i'm anticipating taking up time this week.

so go find out about pavlov's cat results. you didn't know about those, did you? no, i didn't think so. :)

pre-posting/post-writing edit: the eddie izzard concert was knock-down fan-fuckin'-tastic. three solid hours and my throat ached i was laughing so hard. he got laughs off of jokes about latin -- latin, mark you! and mudskippers. to say nothing of badgers, raptors in trilbys, giant squid, and the existence or non-existence of god as evidenced by the fact that no-one reached down from the sky to knock hitler's head off.