its sinister seduction of our seas

I should be checking board schedules, which means I'm surfing the internets instead. Wicked puppy. However! Random linkery must inevitably ensue.

• In solemn memory of that hypothetically terrible day when Saddam Hussein sent pretend terrorists to attack fictional buildings with weapons of mass imagination! Or, in other words, Fafblog is back! Insane political sarcasm, or sarcastic insane politics, or possibly politically sarcastic insanity. Also, for some reason, cute.
• Science geek tattoos! I'm not even technically a science geek, and these are way cool.

I read Jim Butcher's Storm Front yesterday - this is the first in the Harry Dresden series, aka The Dresden Files, recent TV series which died after one season. (This may have been because it was dreadful, but conversely it could also, on recent evidence, have been because it was reasonably solid.) The book was interesting, featuring a wizardly private investigator with a sort of noir feel - it pulled me in enough that I'll definitely read the second one, and the character himself is solidly realised and rather likeable. The writing drove me monumentally bats, however, with a sort of half-assed stab at actual human motivations - the responses of Harry himself and many of the peripheral characters are simply illogical. Bit like Rowling: you keep wanting to hurl the book across the room while screaming "Just tell them what's happening, already!" But, no, narrative kludges prevail, and the Hero will go gamely on into his Magnificent Isolation, Utterly Misunderstood and fighting Insuperable Odds, because the scenario demands it and actual communication between characters would get in the way. Phooey. I'm annoyed, because fundamentally I liked the setting and the characters, and I'm hoping it'll settle down in subsequent books into something slightly less logically cardboard-and-string.

In other news, my possibly disfunctional and obsessive relationship with Take2 has led to the acquisition of two Arcade Fire albums. Hooked! Complex, layered, multi-instrumental, slightly wistful. Would be making noises about how I'm clearly all over the David Bowie fixation, except I think I may have only bought the albums because David Bowie likes the band. Help, rescue me from sad geeky self. As a pitiful stab towards same, the subject line of the post is not a fragment of David Bowie lyric for the first time since... (researches quickly) ... ooh, 8th December. Exactly four months, then. That's a lot of David Bowie lyric.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was buying yarn for mittens. Fancy, patterned, Scandinavian mittens, such as I would never dream of wearing, let alone knitting.