Freckles & Doubt

I am extremely bronchitissed, and am dragging myself around in a pale and glandular state pausing only for demented and unnecessarily Gothic coughing fits. Also, my mother goes back to the UK today, or will do if she can persuade herself to untie herself from the leg of the dining room table. (She really doesn't want to go). We gave her larney High Tea at the Mount Nelson yesterday in honour of her 70th birthday next month, but it's hardly a consolation.

Fortunately, for woes such as the above there are marshmallow owls. Marshmowls. A concept so utterly logical it's unthinkable that no-one has thunk it before. I have somewhat repentantly stolen this off a Tumblr blog called Courtart, and suggest you follow the link both to assuage my guilt, and because there's an animated gif version where they bop.



She captions this "The rare, medium, and well-done marshmowls." Of course.

I am a sad fangirl. I still get an unholy kick out of sharing a birthday with Joss, who is 50 this year and still comfortingly older than I am, and who moreover validates my fangirling utterly not only by intelligently being born on the same date I was, but by producing things like The Avengers, thus neatly conflating several of my personal fixations. (I shall leave identifying the exact fixations as an exercise for the reader).

I have had a lovely birthday, doing not much in an entirely self-indulgent way - playing computer games (which is no different to a lot of other days, then, but without the guilt), eating chocolate, chatting to random lovely friends who dropped by for one reason or another, and going out to dinner with the usual crew to La Mouette, whose winter special tasting menu is a damn fine thing. There is still a ridiculous amount of chocolate in the house.

The computer games have not been materially assisted by the affectionate nature of the Hobbit, whose favoured position is recorded for posterity below. I need my right hand in Amalur for moving forward, parrying, swapping weapons and chugging healing potions, so it's not an entirely felicitous confluence of cat and gamer. The aching wrist from the heavy Hobbit-head, however, neatly balances the aching wrist on the mouse hand from clicking "attack" and clenching all my muscles while I swear.



I should point out that the weird brown box/paper thing behind Hobbit's left ear is my Evil Landlord's idea of a good birthday present, which is to wander into Tomes, the larney chocolate place in the Waterfront, and request two of every kind of dark chocolate they have except the ones with coconut. He is a civilised man and knows me well. Have also scored tea and chocolate biscuits, groovy clothes, cute cat-toys, interesting plants and umpteen wishes from people all over the show, for which my happy, grateful thanks.

Still homicidally misanthropic, a state not improved by contemplating the need to interview 60 potential orientation leaders in three days next week after spending the weekend writing a report for the Dean. Eek. I console myself with random linkery, hoping thereby to also entertain you, because by gosh and by golly just at the moment in my own right I'm not entertaining at all. I also suspect I'm giving innocent Scrooges and serial killers the world over an undeserved bad name.

• China Miéville does it again, where "it" entails being lyrically strange, wayward, incisively political, sad and haunting. I am completely seduced by this story, it has a beautiful, inscrutable and tragic inevitability, and some really weird literary echoes. Also, China Miéville is one of the few writers I can think of who could make the phrase "hydrocarbon Ragnarok" do so much work. Covehithe. You should read this.
  
  
• Random Heartwarming Moment: Paul Simon makes a simple fan very, very happy by hauling her up on stage to sing and play guitar. She does pretty well, despite the inevitable hyperventilation. It's a sweet enough moment to penetrate even my current homicidal misanthropy.
  
  
• Just for smoczek, chart porn. Many of these are witty and recursive to an extremely pleasing extent.
  
  
• Fafblog, predictably enough, weighs in on bin Laden's death with the proper perspective. The mash-up of the "killed thing" with the royal wedding, while perfectly politically pointed in terms of media spectacle, cracked me up completely.

While I hate everything and everyone, I hope you have a lovely weekend. Please to raise a glass at some stage to my esteemed mother, whose birthday it is today - one she shares, weirdly enough, with the esteemed egadfly. Homicidally misanthropic felicitations to both of them.

Need I say what an enormous and wonderful boost it is to my inner fangirl to share a birthday with Joss Whedon? It's fate. It's Kismet. It's the Cosmic Wossnames, telling me that I have every reason in the world apart from my recent acquisition of Still Flying to re-watch Firefly yet again (once I can tear myself away from the script iniquities of STNG), and in fact I should get my shit together and actually track down a copy of Dollhouse sometime, or surrender my fangirl buttons to the hollow square of drummers.

So, this birthday thing. I wasn't going to do anything about it this year, I'm still a bit shellshocked from my dad's death and the debt issues and the three-week glandular fever attack and what have you, and definitely don't feel partyish. However, the dread jo&stv persuaded me to do a small, spontaneous dinner thing this evening, so we're going to trundle into town and pig out at Jewel Tavern, my all-time favourite Chinese place. This is not a birthday celebration so much as an excuse for crispy duck with pancakes - I'm really not expecting presents from anyone this year.

Except ... I bumbled out of my bedroom door this morning, more than usually dazed after another night of sleepwalking (woke at 2am and 4am, turned bedside light on and off in sleep twice, and switched on heater for no adequately defined reason), and stubbed my toe on a large, square, gift-wrapped box sitting mysteriously outside my door.

"Hmmm," I thought.

The envelope on the outside was inscribed, in the Evil Landlord's characteristically precise capitals:
"HAPPY BIRTHDAY! ON AVERAGE, 41 IS JUST AS SIGNIFICANT AS 40 AND 42."

"Hmmm," I thought. Cute.

Inside the envelope was a copy of a certain recent XKCD strip, annotated thusly:

"Meanwhile, on a train in Glasgow..."



"OMFG!" I thought.

In side the box was a brand new netbook. Packard Bell. Black. Cute. Tiny. Just what I'd been planning to acquire for myself sometime towards the end of the year when I've placated my credit card and all, and very similar to d_hofryn's one that I drooled all over a couple of weeks back. Will allow me to stay connected to Teh Internets during this UK trip, and look up actors on IMDB while I'm actually watching TV, and not fool anyone when I take it to a coffee shop, and the whole thing. Did I mention, ineffably cute?

I have simply to say, eeeeeeeeeeeee! Best birthday present EVAR!, which is saying a lot given my significant history of incredibly cool presents from my lovely friends. I have a deeply, absurdly generous Evil Landlord who not only gets my cultural references 100%, but also clearly listens to my burblings a lot more than I think he does, as I don't think I've mentioned wanting one of these more than once in his hearing, in passing. I am a very happy Extemporanea, and have been joyously fiddling with it all morning in default of actually doing any work.

I also have to say, modern tech has revolutionised birthdays in more ways than one. Today I have received:

• One Netbook;
  
• birthday greetings via email from my mother, co-workers, the university Alumni association (with animated fireworks) and a whole bunch of friends;
  
• birthday greetings via Facebook and Twitter from a whole bunch more of friends;
  
• SMSes from three stores where I have accounts and even more friends (mad props to librsa for recursive self-referential email/sms greetings); and,
  
• three cellphone calls from friends in two cities.

Thank you all! I was trying to more or less ignore this birthday, honest. Doomed. In a good way.

Thought for the day: dear spammer, if your email has a subject line which reads "PLS OPEN YOUR ATTARCHMENT AND FEW YOUR WINNING PROCEDURE" it is so utterly doomed before it starts that it's causing me actual pain to contemplate the mere fact of your existence. Not that the existence of spammers is anything other than painful at the best of times, but I mean, really. If you're going to be a pestilential blot on the face of the modern internet community, can't you at least be competent at it? Incompetent evil gives me toothache.

Talking of which, I am still attempting to live down the fact that I inflicted G.I. Joe, now with added pointlessly inept bad guys, on jo&stv for our Friday night movie veg-out, on the grounds of (a) probable cute crash-boom special effects, for which I have a well-documented weakness, and (b) Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In the event we spent most of the movie wincing sympathetically on behalf of JGL and other unfortunate actors (Christopher Ecclestone? noooooo! Arnold Vosloo? shaaaaame!) clearly forced by incipient starvation to sign on the dotted line for the ginormous cheque. (Theory: JGL does this sort of thing to fund his next three indie movies of choice, and it is our duty to support him on the grounds that we might get another Brick.) G.I. Joe is a bloody stupid film. It has occasionally cute if somewhat predictable special effects. Channing Tatum is unexpectedly likeable if more or less mahogany all through - it's particularly interesting to see him doing the action thing given that I last saw him bopping around the show in Step Up, about which I decline to be embarrassed on the grounds that Jo gave it to me as a joke present.

Following the random association game, I have just scored a copy of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing courtesy of Jo's birthday, since she received a duplicate present and passed on one to me. This is a weird, lateral, poignant, beautiful, delicate, intricate, heartbreaking and very, very odd piece of graphic art, and I'm more than slightly in love with it. Have a look.

I'm also slightly in love with the new version of Firefox, which has produced all sorts of minor innovations with things like new tab placement: it now all conforms much more closely to my personal logic, which either means (a) score, the design team think like I do, or (b) score, they've trained Firefox to read my mind so it thinks like I do. Not that I think much today, being still a little short on sleep after Jo's raucous party on Saturday night, with attendant booze levels, epic clean-up and more wine for dinner last night. I don't think I was hungover, but I'm a tad fragile still.

We also watched The Hangover on Friday night. I didn't expect to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. It looks as though it's going to be the usual horrible frat-boy dick-joke gross-out collection of misogynistic bullshit, and at every point in the film where it starts moving in that direction, it takes a sudden hard left turn and goes somewhere else instead. It was refreshingly unexpected. It's also more or less completely sold by its cast, who are superb, and by the pleasing levels of surreal generated by the flashback format. Drunken manly antics are much easier to deal with when they're all postmodern. Bonus tiger, Mike Tyson, Bradley Cooper giving a surprisingly good imitation of a total dick dead against type, and a completely inexplicable chicken.

I'm going to stop there, because this wayward puppy thing could get out of hand. Tomorrow I shall attempt to post about the house, which is almost finished and looking, while still inexpressibly grimy, rather excitingly new.

Yesterday was suicide hot. Ungodly hot. Possibly apocalypse hot. Hell may have opened, briefly. The English cricket team folded completely against South Africa, it was that bad (SA innings 312/2. Gawsh). Today is better, cloudy and slightly cooler. It's also the Evil Landlord's birthday, so anyone who knows him, please do the usual email thingy! it's his big 40 and he's trying to pretend it isn't happening. To which I say, bollocks.

Yesterday's heat also means I retreated cravenly into the arms of the air-conditioned cinema as soon as I finished work. It's a bit difficult for me to review 500 Days of Summer because I think the Pajiba review nailed it so cleverly, but hey, it's that or actually get on with reviewing excluded student transcripts, which is uniformly depressing. 500 Days, despite being a cute, quirky movie about falling in love, watched by me, single for the last 8 years, all on my own in the cinema¹, surprisingly wasn't.( I don't think you can actually spoil this film, but have a cut anyway. )

This has been a good decade for indie whimsicality. Shall add this one to Eternal Sunshine, Waitress and the rest on the Must Acquire list. The one Pajiba identifies as "whimsyquirkalicious", and about my fondness for the movies on which I am completely unashamed.

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¹ This is a rhetorical whinge, I actually love watching movies on my own.

Because I have to: courtesy of grumpyolddog, "Hey There Cthulhu", a particularly iconoclastic filk which renders a slightly saccharine song pleasingly demented.



Several peoples have asked me what I want for my birthday. I'm personally totally terrible with gifts for other people, it's completely random whether I find something for you or not, so I truly don't mind if you turn up just with you, booze and the desire to party, it's karmically inevitable. But in case you're in the mad present-giving mood and want some hints, here's the Usual List:

• Books, DVDs, cds, graphic novels always good. I have slightly random wishlists on both Amazon.uk and Loot.co.za, under my Real Name, TM. Anything on there is something I mean to acquire sometime. You probably want to ignore all the kids' books and music, they're there because I plan to get them for my niece. In the graphic novel arena I still only have the first Sandman volume, and am also pining vaguely after 1602 and pretty much anything Ultimate. Because they're so pretty.
• Cookbooks are always good, my sister's family + dad just gave me a couple of massive and lovely British winter cookbook tomes which have made me Very, Very Happy. I don't own any Jamie Oliver (stv, stop spitting) or Nigella Lawson. These are my Secret Sorrows.
• You absolutely, totally, cannot go wrong with either chocolate or flowers, love 'em both. Also vouchers, wine or exotic bath oil or bath pearls and other strange unguents.
• Functional owls. You know the drill. I love owls but hate bric-a-brac, so anything owl-inscribed that I can actually use gets my vote. (first_fallen, I'm not sure the loopy owl pen with the eyes that roll back actually counts).

Mostly, though, it'll just be lovely to see everyone.

This post does have a unified theme, btw. pumeza's birthday card to me was this (by Ursula Vernon, naturally):

I do love extended birthdays. Celebrations for mine this year started yesterday, owing to smoczek having the brilliant idea of using my birthday as an excuse to go back to Overture, which the Salty Cracker Club loved. So I was hauled out there for a birthday lunch with smoczek and maxbarners and the Evil Landlord and the friendly_shrink and her Internet Romance, now Internet Husband, and fed royally. Also wined a lot. You can do the Overture meal with wine by the course, and they give you a large glass of wine with each dish, impeccably tuned to the food, and fill it up if you ask. (Jo asked. Naturally). They are also remarkably understanding if you turn down the aforementioned impeccably chosen pairing, as I did, on the grounds that you can't stand muscadel and would rather have port, which they cheerfully supply.

The food was wonderful. The food is always wonderful. The waiter's mastery of the lifted eyebrow when Jo ordered pork belly for dessert was commendable. The company was perfect. Probably the best part of it all, though, was the view.



and:



and Jo, hauntingly backlit:



Memo to self: take mother there while she's visiting. It's the perfect excuse.

This is a public service announcement. Today is my Evil Landlord's birthday. Eschewing all pretence at being a Lawful Good Tenant, I am announcing this to the four winds of Teh Internets, wilfully disregarding his preference for sneaking this unGermanic birthday business in under the radar in the hopes that everyone will ignore it. It would make me strangely happy if as many people as possible would email or phone him with birthday greetings, which would (a) simultaneously annoy and amuse him, and (b) go some way towards assuaging my guilt at not having been able to think up a present for him. He's hell to buy for, and my inventiveness kinda dried up after the sizzling inspiration of the original Star Wars theatrical releases on DVD for Christmas. There should probably be a law against birthdays occurring too close to Christmas, it's wearing on the gift-provisionally-challenged. I'll wait for something to occur to me randomly at some later stage when he's least expecting it. Heh.

Life is a bowl of cherries this morning. Fresh cherries are reasonably cheap in the shops at the moment, and there's something curiously satisfying about cherries for breakfast. Although I have to restrain my impulse to spit the pips out of my third-floor window at passing students. Students have no business cluttering up campus at this time of year, they're probably writing supps or doing summer term courses, and are therefore academically dodgy and deserve aerial pip bombardment. Although the Dean probably wouldn't like it, so I merely think wistfully about it, instead. Lawful Good, that's me. Occasionally.

Edited to add: stvil has updated the Evil Landlord's blog, a sort of Baudrillardian simulacrum written by lots of people not including the Evil Landlord, with a fine and vintage display of Goon Show pseudo-German. Bring your own pickelhaube, and read at your peril.

My Evil Landlord ¹ is severely in the dogbox at the moment - not because I'm fulminating domestically against him (although I am led to believe that our exchanges about loading the dishwasher are worthy of an Old Married Couple) - but because he underwent a rare moment of unGermanic inefficiency over the weekend and missed his mother's birthday party. He was convinced it was on Saturday night when it was actually on Friday; various frantic relatives phoned all conceivable friends-of-Evil-Landlord² with increasing desperation as Friday night wore on, but no-one's cellphone ring was loud enough to overcome the ambient noise at the steak restaurant where we were doing our usual end-of-month payday restaurant celebration with jo&stv. His mother is apparently severely narked.

The problem I have - and I'm surveying this anthropologically, from the point of view of someone with deeply civilised parents who I think would resort to ridicule rather than guilt-trip if I screwed up thusly - is that her level of infuriation seems to indicate that he is in the particular dogbox reserved for Offspring Who Forget Parental Birthdays, with a side-order of Offspring Who Forget Important Family Gatherings. This seems unfair, since he clearly remembered it and planned to attend - in fact, he's guilty of no more than momentary mental aberration, disorganisation and planning snafu, which happens to all of us, be we never so German. I suspect the guilt-trip response is partly because they were seriously worried he'd had an accident or something, and swung to the relieved/annoyed pole when they finally made contact. Which is understandable, but still a tad unfair.

Then again, the victim is my Evil Landlord, who has Shrug And Ignore It down to a fine art.

I have to say: Nelson's Eye? Seriously good steak. They proudly trumpet their basic disinterest in such frou-frou as starters and side-dishes, which they provide in more or less token form, and which are in consequence seriously behind those of the Hussar, my usual steak-house benchmark. This is problematical while you're actually eating the starter, because Nelson's Eye's prices are ... pricey. One and a half times Hussar, on average. You feel gypped for the duration of the starter. Then you wade into the steak, and All Becomes Clear. Those prices? Totally valid.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was trying to knit socks. This was a sad, frantic experience during which I became bogged down in morasses of multiple double-pointed needles in hundreds of sizes, circular needles like coiled springs and art deco representations of Shub Niggurath, and rope-like, writhing yarn in nauseating pastels. I think my subconscious is seriously threatened by my current vague leaning towards trying to knit a woolly hat for my niece. It seems a valid use for a skein of purple wool, but if normal needles warp space-time, imagine what I could do with circulars.

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¹ Who finally gets his own tag. Words cannot describe how little this would mean to him, given his professed and vindictive ignorance of all things bloggity.

² If the EL had a blog, or thought about these things, he would presumably be apologising e'en now to all the people who had their Friday nights disturbed by frantic EL relatives, but he doesn't and doesn't, so this is about as good as it's going to get. I'm personally rather interested to see how far they threw the net.