things ending in "olly"

It has been pointed out to me, forcibly, that good taste rather tends to dictate forbearance from the kind of disgusting mucusoid details with which I have recently regaled my beloved witterers. I hang my head in shame, and shall refrain from waxing lyrical over the joys of a completely ineffective brew called "Mucospect" in imitation plastic-cherry flavour. Instead I shall hasten to make reparation with something in the nature of, in the fine old phrase of boingboing, a unicorn chaser. (Except that my inner "tchah!" will have nothing to do with actual unicorns. On a not unrelated note, I recommend to your attention Ursula Vernon's My Leper Pony. Warning: lesions, although no actual mucus.)

So. On an earlier occasion I drew your attention to the lurking threat of tinsel-encrusted snowman earrings, and the distant but hideous possibility I might actually be forced to wear them. In keeping with this theme, recent acquisitions in the service of the household feline complement have tended similarly to the glittery. The cats have a bunch of small, fur-covered, mouse-form toys, known colloquially as "multicoloured gerbils of paradise" owing to the pathetically bald backsides which, before enthusiastic kitty-games intervened, used to be graced with feather tails in shades of green and pink. After a moment's impulse-buying in the vet shop, the gerbils have now been supplemented with what I can only describe as shiny 70s glam-rock drug hedgehogs, thusly:



Stv, who has a possibly infernal Superhero Power of Naming, has christened them Rod and Stuart. Their younger brother, Gary, has gone as an offering to the jo&stv kitten shrine.

I also finally finished watching Hogfather. I have to say, it didn't grab me at first - despite being visually stunning and spectacularly well-cast it seemed slow, slavishly faithful to the book to the detriment of actual cinematic quality, slow, slightly unimaginative, bitty, pedestrian and slow. However, at just after the half-way mark it contrived to exert some sort of grip, possibly because I'm in the kind of sinus-induced drugged-out haze appropriate to the work in question, or perhaps because the characters had had time to mature and develop. The last few sequences, particularly the resurgence of the Hogfather, actually packed quite a punch. After an initial sense of outrage, I also really enjoyed the Victorian flavour: thinking back over details of the book, there are huge chunks of Victoriana among the more medieval elements in the Discworld pastiche, particularly given Hogfather's theme: a lot of what we think of as traditional Christmas is actually Victorian. They were responsible for a horrible quantity of sheer tatt. Rule Britannia.

Bunny Threat Level: slipping inexorably back into the green. Determination notwithstanding, I'm still fluey enough to be thinking slowly, painfully and mostly in circles, which is a no go. Anyone foolishly tackling Angela Carter needs to keep their wits about them. Also, general physical debility is making me tend to drift depressively into the conviction that I can't do this academic stuff and need a new career.