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.