Freckles & Doubt

Cape Town! currently the locus at regular intervals of storms, heavy rain, hail, high winds, cats puddled around heaters, a soaring electricity bill, and that savage bite in the air that tells you somewhere in the fortunate upcountry there is snow. I am, needless to say, an extremely happy pervy cold-weather-fondler. This last is despite a certain amount of unavoidable angst, given that I leave for a three-week overseas trip on Saturday, and while plane tickets, hotels, visas and various other bits and bobs are duly sorted, I have only written one of the two papers I'm supposed to be giving. (For no adequately defined reason, an entirely unnecessary re-read of Memory, Sorry and Thorn appears to be implicated in this last dereliction of duty). However, deathless insights into feminist re-writes of "Aschenputtle" will buy it over the next few evenings, stat. News at eleven.

In support of this, should there be, as yesterday, a brief and unlikely lull in the atmospherics resulting in a resurgence of the worry-factor, there is always the soothing option of http://www.rainymood.com/. It was clearly designed specifically for me, and I'll probably run it nonstop during the February heatwaves.

And, by way of inspiration, there are always the Bulwer-Lyttons. This year they have caused me unholy glee in the SF section by the perpetration of ungodly puns.

Professor Lemieux had anticipated that his latest paper would be received with skepticism within the small, fractious circle of professional cosmologists, few of whom were prepared to accept his hypothesis that our universe had been created in a marijuana-induced industrial accident by insectoid aliens; nevertheless, he was stung when Hawking airily dismissed it as the Bug Bong Theory.

Hee.

Good lord. I just killed Canada. This is thoroughly antisocial and curiously rewarding. Watch out for Madagascar, if it closes its borders you're toast, and your goal of total extermination will never be achieved.

One of the things that narked me off about the success of Harry Potter was, in fact, the existence of Mary Stewart's novel The Little Broomstick, which is Exhibit A in the "wizard schools are nothing new" stakes. This combines standard kiddielit themes - a lonely child discovering friends through magical experiences - with some quite unsettling elements, since the magic school is sinister in the extreme, an opponent rather than a new environment. Mary Stewart's Arthurian series was always a bit gritty, and I think you can trace the suspense quotient of Little Broomstick back to her thriller/romances. The novel also has a definite animal anti-cruelty message, and I remember being a bit horrified by the nasty magical experiments; on the upside, cute cats, exciting broomstick flights and evil suitably trounced in the end. Her other children's fantasy I've read is Ludo and the Star Horse, which is about the zodiac, and rather charming, but this is my favourite.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was assisting Nathan Fillion in his brilliant plan to break a whole bunch of teen-aged schoolgirls out of a prison. The plot seemed to revolve around him leading large-scale synchronised dance moves. Also, lounging on a poolside chaise-longue engaging in witty banter with the prison authorities. While holding my hand, so score.

This is all khoi_boi's fault. Fantastic Contraption. Fritter your day away in watching your ungainly creation stagger drunkenly across the screen, the very paradigm of design flaws. Or is that just me? Tony Stark crush notwithstanding, so not an engineer.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was infiltrating a medieval castle by suborning the young son of the castle's lord. This worked only up to a point, after which we ended up being pursued through the castle sewers by unspecified evils, including some villainish type who had electrified the whole system and whose silvery robot we had to prevent from throwing the switch.

I should be marking third-year essays on vampires. Instead, I'm cruising the internet looking for distraction, a technique doomed to success. This follows an entire weekend spent reading highly eroticised Spike/Buffy fanfic. I plead extenuating circumstances. Term has just ended, and I have a cold.

Iain Banks talks about his new Culture novel. Also about his hatred for Bush, Blair, and the Iraq war. Lovely quote from his new mainstream novel: "The USA is a great country full of great people. It's just their propensity as a whole for electing idiots and then conducting a foreign policy of the utmost depravity that I object to." Oh, yeah.

I always found Geoffrey Chaucer's Blog a bit, I dunno, twee? Then they published LOLPilgrims.


This one, in particular (it's the Pardoner) is such a complex piece of cultural layering, and speaks with such horrible truth to the academic experience, that I laughed until I choked. On quick review I'm not sure anyone else who reads this blog will necessarily appreciate all the layers, which are very English-geek heavy, but allow me my moment of isolate glee.

A World Without Oil. This is a newish acronym to me, an ARG - Alternate Reality Game. It's a strange, bizarre, fascinating concept.

On the wabbage front, non-befriended readers may have noticed the random blog redesign. Judgements welcome, I'm not sure I'm happy with it, and have every intention of frittering away a goodly part of the afternoon with more fiddling.

1. Tokara. Now starring as my favourite Cape Town restaurant, not that it's actually in Cape Town, but hey. Stunning setting and views down the valley from the head of the Helshoogte Pass above Stellenbosch. Incredible food. The red wine sauce on the fillet of beef was possibly the best I've ever tasted. Thanks, Tinnimentum. You can visit any time.

2. Chuzzle. Aaargh! the cute! Little fuzzy things that meep and quiver and make adorable noises when lined up and exploded! The addiction!

3. The book. Still have not eradicated the major logic flaws in Chapter 1, on account of how they're buggers. The chapter, however, is now shot through with little yellow comment boxes all saying things like "This is bollocks, rewrite." I suppose it's progress, of a sort.

Much as I would like to blame the Birthday Conspiracy for the fact that I've played ShadowMagic for two days solid (because it just looks so cool on this new screen), I know, deep down, that I've played ShadowMagic for two days solid because I have the approximate focus and self-control, work-wise, of something small and fluffy and ineffectual, probably drawn by Ursula Vernon. Goldarnit. Must ... finish ... Tolkien ... paper! Must also get self off butt in order to take car in for (a) electrical overhaul (random indicator and brake lights have died) and (b) mechanical overhaul (still drinking water like a fish). However, I vouchsafe to all you witterers the unhappy truth that probably I'll sit here all day playing ShadowMagic, possibly with a small break to maniacally practise up my recorder piece for Bardic. I have an exam meeting tomorrow, however, which will drag me kicking and screaming into some sort of activity, whether I like it or not. At the very least, running amok in the meeting with a blunt object, such as the Riverside Chaucer. (They tend to be lengthy and frustrating).

Have discovered two things this weekend, diametrically opposed in terms of value:
1. LiveJournal is disgusting over weekends for us mere dial-up plebes. It takes 20 minutes to load a page. (Probably exacerbated by IAfrica's connection foibles, which are also worse over weekends). This possibly explains the fact that I never seem to post on Saturdays, although conversely it utterly fails to explain the fact that I almost always post on Sundays.
2. I appear to share my birthday with Joss Whedon, if Meg's Boyfriend Page is to be believed. (And thank you, scroobious, for the link to that little time-waster!). How cool is that?

Some of today's slight dreaminess and tendency to revert to ShadowMagic may be because SABC2 chose to show Batman Forever really late last night, and I'm a tad short on sleep. Don't know why I've never got around to seeing that particular Batman movie before, since generally I adore superhero movies. It's a rampantly camp and ham little production, isn't it? (She says, laying on the assonance). It is my considered opinion that, Eternal Sunshine notwithstanding, Jim Carrey should be taken out back and shot in the overall interests of the human race, and that Tommy Lee Jones should know better. I ask you. Even Nicole Kidman was ham. It quite made Val Kilmer's characteristic tonelessness attractive by comparison. Also weird multiple personality tendencies in the dialogue: 90% of it was really bad, and the other 10% was inspired and screamingly funny. I suspect they hired Joss Whedon or someone to salt it with one-liners after the fact.

A new Cunning Plan to combat work-avoidance has vouchsafed itself to me. Bizarrely enough, it entails making use of the local video store's R50-and-five-videos-for-a-week special, mostly in the arena of bad sf movies. I trundled homeward today with a whole fistful of B-grade horrors, including X-Files, Star Trek: First Contact, which I've never seen, The Faculty, which is horrible and cheesy and which I adore for actually quite similar reasons to my adoration of BvS, and Dracula 2000. This constitutes actual work conditioning in that I can only really watch them in the evenings, as our TV is old and dying enough that it's barely distinguishable in daylight. I thus have to finish all my outstanding work before sundown, when the vampires come out. This works! I marked like a fiend all afternoon, finished the batch, updated the course web page, cleared my e-mail, sent off the newsletter and tidied out my study, this last being imperative as the library keeps sending me polite reminders about the nasty critical tomes which are buried somewhere in the literary strata of my workspace, or rather L-space.

Anyway. Dracula 2000 is what I watched this evening, leaving me all jumpy at sudden noises because, man, I still cannot take the build-up of tension in horror films. It was on the list because a student wants to write an essay on it. Not only was the film not as bad as I expected (actual plot coherence! actual cool use of vampire mythology! actual eroticism! and actually well filmed, bizarrely given that Wes Craven produces rather than directing), but the additional bonus unexpectedly surfaced of a whole minute or so of Nathan Fillion screen-time. Playing a priest. Again. What's with that man and priests? I kept on getting Caleb flashbacks, although this was a good-guy Catholic priest rather than an insane preacher. And if he's not playing priests, it's embittered atheists. Definite religion issues here. Or maybe it's just the shape of his face. Not that I am, for an instant, taking issue with the shape of his face. Sigh.

The Evil Landlord has been living in a giddy whirl of transport angst, starting on Thursday night with his car being nicked from outside the house. Car-less weekend, with me playing chauffeuse, which is sure as hell karmically overdue given the amount of ferrying around the countryside he's done on my behalf during My Carless Years (2002-2004). Then the police found a car which was possibly it, on Sunday afternoon. After crawling through an epic snarl of paperwork, he has established that it is, in fact, his car, more or less intact apart from the buggered lock and ignition. All is gas and gaiters in the New South Africa.

Today's Interesting Lecturing Factoid: out of a class of 20 third-years, ONE had heard of blogging (she keeps one), NONE have ever been in a chat-room, and TWELVE know all about fantasy role-playing games (can you tell we're onto internet culture, net.sex and MMORPGS?). What's with the youth of today? It's the bloody mainstreaming of geek culture, that's what it is. *seethes quietly*. I remember the days when one whispered about Dungeons and Dragons.

p.s. Those of you who are, like me, unashamedly mad Buffy-philes, may be interested in the current special on at dvd.co.uk. Buffy and Angel, all seasons, at £18 per season, free UK delivery. I can feel another credit card assault coming on...