linky link link! And livers.

[freckles_and_doubt]

Oddness. I've just received a phone call which sounded like nothing so much as a series of bad sf sound effects for a spaceship docking: clunks, scrapes, rumbling noises, spacesuit respiration and the hiss of airlocks. I think someone's cell phone may be dialing me accidentally, possibly while watching The Right Stuff. Check it isn't you :>.

There has been Much Work this weekend: 8 hours on Saturday and a good 5 yesterday, and I am beginning to throw around terms like formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism with a certain degree of authority, although it's probably a bit of a front. I rewarded myself with a spot of random browsing this morning, productive of the following interesting tidbits:

• For my surprisingly large number of Polish friends (i.e. >1): Henry Jenkins talks about Polish fantasy and post-socialist angst. In particular, The Witcher is apparently Polish trans-media fantasy that sounds really interesting.
• I am becoming increasingly enamoured of The Language Log, not only because it offers a head-on assault on linguistic myths, bad writing and evil misrepresentations of science, but because its writers are incisive, witty and often hysterically funny. This morning I got a bit lost in the byways of "X language has no word for Y" mythologies, starting with a lovely rebuttal of the old chestnut about the Eskimos' millions of word for snow. (They don't. They have about the same number of root words for snow-related concepts, but a really nifty and complex language structure which allows them to accumulate almost infinite modifiers onto the root word. They thus have pretty much infinite words for snow).
• Courtesy of Bowleserised, an obligatory Bah! Humbug! moment: Scared of Santa. Tiny tots terrified of weird old men in beards! Down with Christmas! The therapy bills aren't worth it!

Must go and search the house briefly for more bits of dead thing, my mother greeted the new day this morning by picking up a random bit of mess from the floor only to discover that it was an unidentified bit of bird innard, courtesy of an as yet unidentified cat dismembering some small, unfortunate bird all over the house. There's a wing in the Evil Landlord's study, and no doubt other little lovesome packages elsewhere. Fortunately my mother is a trained medical technician and is completely unphased by sudden tactile liver contact before her first cup of tea.

Then I shall work. Work worky work work work.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

hah! Also courtesy of the inestimable Bowleserised, I was browsing the scared of Santa pictures even as you updated your blog! Poor little creatures. Funny, though.

Dude!!!

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

The Witcher is my favourite fantasy series evar; I've been bemoaning the lack of an English translation for years. Now they're finally translating the first books -- I hope the translation doesn't suck.

This series convinced my mother that she could like genre fiction. I've lent Jo the Elder the first couple of books, in the hopes that she will find time to read them, some day, and I'll have another Polish person to talk to about them. ;_;

It starts off as a series of short stories which reinterpret fairytales -- but the same protagonist appears in all of them, and there's a consistent background and history. Then it turns into a really cool fantasy epic, which ties into seemingly throwaway plot elements from the earlier stories in interesting ways. It has realistic people and politics, and the best portrayal of elves I've ever seen.

Re: Dude!!!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Coolness! This sounds even more amazing, I also hope they translate them well and quickly.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I get a reasonable number of those calls, but then I am alphabetically advantaged. I once had to ask someone to put a dummy "aaa" entry in their phone to stop me receiving international crank calls from them.

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to The Witcher. I read the Penny Acrcade cartoon, http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/10/24 and looked it up. I am Stanislav Lem fan, but I can't think of any contempory Polish writers I've read. Surpisingly, Glen Cook is not Polish. He's just very big in Poland. I think it's the depressing worldview...