Kivrin

What it actually says: seeking volunteers for a research study, blahblah qualifications, time/travel reimbursement available.

What I read: TIMETRAVEL reimbursement available.

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- A lifetime of reading (mostly) amateur-sleuth mysteries is poor preparation for a police-procedural fandom, especially a very small one where there aren't fannish resources. I need a 20th-century law-enforcement equivalent of What Charles Dickens Ate and Jane Austen Knew.

- There appears to be no P.D. James fic in the world. Not even from Yuletide. Not even based on the dramatizations. I sort of expected there to be a small but devoted circle of Adam Dalgliesh/Cordelia Gray shippers writing multi-part curtainfic.

- Department of meta jokes: This bit of Acorn Media's "hey look at all the videos we'll sell you" montage, in which Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison says "Don't call me ma'am, I'm not the bloody queen" and there's a cut to Michael Kitchen as Christopher Foyle saying "Well, unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise."

- Apropos of the above, should The Doctor turn up, B&R and I are going to see tiny!baby!Helen Mirren in the 1965 National Youth Theater Antony and Cleopatra, with tiny!baby!Michael Kitchen in a small role. (And then we'll go see Antony Sher's Richard III and Patrick Stewart's Othello and the original cast of My Fair Lady and Liam Neeson and Laura Linney in The Crucible and...)

- Department of Foyle's War spoilers, Series 7/8 (depending on numbering) Ep 1: The Eternity Ring: ( Read more... ). Short version: still not planning to take anything after V-E Day as canon.

- I would really like to see the other scripts Anthony Horowitz apparently wrote for 1943 and 1944 but had to throw out due to ITV being all "hmph, only one more series for you."

- Connected only by WWII, Strange Glory by Charles Marsh is a very good life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's... well, it's pretty grim, because Nazis, and there's a good deal of fairly serious theology covered, but it's readable and informative and I'm glad I'm reading it as my first Bonhoeffer bio and not the Eric Metaxes one.

ME: Everyone always rags on David Mitchell for being ridiculously posh but he just doesn't seem that posh to me. Maybe it's another You Have To Be British thing.
B&R: Well, they probably just pick something. And he is pretty posh, he went to Cambridge and all.
ME: Does that make him that unusual on the British comedy scene? Stephen Fry went to Cambridge.
B&R: Stephen Fry is in a class by himself. A class made entirely of tweed.
ME: Right, fair point. But other people went to Cambridge! Not Lee Mack and Alan Davies but other people. I mean, nobody rags on HUGH LAURIE for being posh!
B&R: That's not about him being posh, that's about him being HUGH LAURIE. You don't rag on him AT ALL. Or his revenge will be swift and terrible.
ME: Right. Or long delayed and even MORE terrible.
B&R: Right.
ME: And involve the playing of blues harmonica at you.
B&R: Probably.
ME: And sometime, much later, when you're hanging around before a filming you might mention that you've taken up a new hobby of, like, macrame, and Hugh would say "oh, that's quite interesting, have you any macrame string here?" and you'd pass so over and he'd whip up a large Hadron collider out of it and say "oh yes, I see how that could be very relaxing."
B&R: I think you need to tell the internet about that.

- There is a Giant Stupid Genealogy Event at work which is possibly going to cause extreme crazy tomorrow and Monday. And then I have a big event Wednesday night. I am full of a Blackadderian sense of exhaustion and dread, not least because my boss and grandboss have recently been excelling themselves in Baldrickian stupidity.

- Someone has written David Mitchell/Dara O'Briain UST with good voices and it is awesome. Dara and David's Art Follies by Karaokegal. Features a cameo that will be of interest to White Collar watchers.

- And speaking of White Collar, whyyyyy is the season over already? ( WC Spoilers within )

KNITTING
- I am trying madly to finish an overdue contribution to a knit-a-thon for the benefit of people living with breast or ovarian cancer. I'm working on a striped scarf in a lovely feather-and-fan pattern. I like the pattern but all the ends I'm going to have to weave in are discouraging to contemplate.
- I am starting to think holiday knitting thoughts. I've misplaced my pattern for this Botanic Hat but as soon as I unearth it I want to start on one in blue and gray for one of my no-longer-so-very-young cousins.

READING
- Picked up Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream yesterday. Like Nickel and Dimed, it is well-observed and persuasive and deeply disheartening, the more so because it describes the world of unemployment as it was circa 2004 - and the picture is only worse now. I want to take both books and beat certain powerful individuals with them.

VIEWING
- a new season of QI
- odd episodes of "Would I Lie To You," most recently an episode that had Lee Mack asking David Mitchell "Too large for what? THE SEA?"
- Doctor Who, of course. I am, at the moment, feeling some dissatisfaction with the split season because I feel like we got almost all meaty arc-y episodes in the first half and we've had mostly one-off-with-arc-y-nods episodes in the second half.
- A Bit Of Fry And Laurie, which will go off Netflix Streaming on Friday. I'm on an ancient grandfathered plan that allows five hours of streaming a month, which will not be quite enough to get through all the episodes we've not yet seen, but we're going to give it a jolly good try.
- Soon, s2 of Downton Abbey.

LISTENING
- Kat Eggleston's renditions of old and should-be-old ballads in which women are NOT screwed over. "The Flower of Northumberland," "Banks of Sweet Dundee," "Birken Tree," and "The Naked Highwayman." (Her original songs are frequently good also.)
- John Oliver's news podcast "The Bugle." It's funny, and for the John-Oliver focused, also is a source of tidbits like the fact that he has a puppy named Hoagie. A PUPPY NAMED HOAGIE.

- Knit and watch tv eight hours a day.

- Sleep for a really long time.

...that's kind of it.


However, I think I can muster up the oomph for the Holiday Anonymous Love Meme now in progress. I have a thread here and would welcome links to other folks' threads.

- Giant, stupid work project of rage is complete. I may be a slightly less tedious conversationalist now. Maybe.

- I have repaid my karmic debt to Greyhoundliz for her heroic scrubbing of the Lush Youki-hi bath bomb stains out of my tub the last time I moved. To wit: I scrubbed her stovetop, her sink, and two freezers.

- I should not gain any merit from taking Science Soprano's cantoring responsibilities for Sunday, since I will enjoy getting to cantor for R the choir director one last time before she buggers off for her fabulous new job in FRANCE.

- Though maybe I should, since I am also up next week, and will have to be the first to work with Interim!ChoirGuy and Interim!Organist.

- Though Wednesday is my late morning, today I got up at more or less the regular time and... well, mostly read and drank tea, but I did also do a load of laundry and create a tiny bit more order in the apartment.

- I'm on a London-Blitz-and-postwar kick, it seems - I've been grazing in David Kynaston's monumental Austerity Britain, as well as reading Connie Willis' All Clear and Sarah Waters' The Night Watch. Recommendations gratefully accepted.

So yesterday, after a grismal (that would be grisly and dismal at once) day at work, I went to a painfully upscale restaurant-bar for a quiet drink and twenty minutes with the new The Sun magazine. I'd been thinking of a beer or maybe a Hendricks G&T, but I ended up getting an Old-Fashioned, and it made me remember how I once (pre-LJ, pre-wikipedia, high days of late-college hubris) used the drink in a fic in a hilariously tone-deaf manner.

An Old-Fashioned is a drink that gives you an idea of how horrible Prohibition-era bathtub spirits must have been. It's bourbon, poured over ice and muddled lemon and/or orange, maraschino cherry, and sugar. Okay, and bitters, but there's a lot of fruit. I would hazard a guess that it's the girliest way there is to drink bourbon.

As a non-drinking twenty-year-old from a family of minimal-drinkers, I had never seen mixed drinks except the ones on menus in Chinese restaurants, and I knew of Old Fashioneds from a Jack Finney novel (The Woodrow Wilson Dime) in which the despairing New York advertising man makes them when he comes home from work. From that, I concluded that they were Serious Drinks for People With Sophisticated Palates, and were more mature and complex than martinis.

So. When I had a scene with a romantic dinner between a retired Navy captain (who in my personal canon had something of an anti-sweet-tooth) and a beautiful-yet-tough-a-la-Katharine-Hepburn multi-doctorate'd scientist... I had the Navy man make them Old-Fashioneds, thinking I was lending a serious-yet-sophisticated scotch-and-soda vibe to the scene, rather than a just-shy-of-paper-umbrellas vibe.

The story is mercifully not available to me right now, so I can't check to see if the disconnect is as obvious in the reading as it is to me in the remembering. But it makes me want to send an email to my younger self to say "psst! honey! get a liquor-picker to go over your stories, or get a cocktail book! ideally both!"

I will not troll.

...but I am SO TEMPTED by the blog of this ridiculously naive, yet self-important, American in London, who is all OMG THE BRITISH ARE DIFFERENT FROM AMERICANS! AND THERE ARE MUSLIMS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!!! WOMEN WITH COVERED FACES, AND SOUNDS OF PRAYER FROM A MOSQUE, I AM ASKEERED!

She just finished an MA at Oxford; I don't know whether to be disappointed in the university's lack of standards, or heartened that I would have a better shot than I thought at getting into such a program if I wanted to.

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In happy knitting news, I am over three-quarters done with my second Elder Sibling Crown of the summer. I hope it's as well-received as the first was. For those interested, the pattern is "Loved" and the yarn is Comfy Bulk from knitpicks.com, and I could easily have made two crowns with two skeins (though I've used three because I wanted different colors for each.)

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Last weekend I went to the beach for what might have been the first time in nine years, since I rode out a hurricane in Panama City Beach, FL with some friends, drinking hard lemonade and reading aloud from book three of A Series of Unfortunate Events. breadandroses and I went to Ocean City, NJ with the World's Cutest 3-year-old and her parents. We lunched on crepes, then set ourselves up on the beach and jumped over waves, dug in the sand, ate lots of frozen custard and fried dough, and went on a few rides on the boardwalk. And then had dinner at the world's slowest Chinese restaurant, and the kid and I were briefly trapped in the ladies' room by a sticky deadbolt. I had her on my hip because she wanted to switch off the light, but I had to dissuade her without freaking her out because I could not get the door open. All ended happily, though.

There was a hilarious moment in the car coming home. All four adults were trying to get the kid to sack out and sleep, and she was trying to resist, of course. She insisted she needed my sarong from the swim bag as a blanket "because it has stars and moons for nighttime!" I covered her up, asking if her bunny and giraffe wanted to be tucked in too. "I think... I think they want to be left alone," she said, shoving them down by the door. I tucked her in and said good night. Literally a moment later, she sat bolt upright and said "I don't think it's working." "Sweetie, you need to give it more than a nanosecond, okay?" I said. I tucked her in again, and by dint of everyone in the car except the driver pretending to sleep, we got her to drop off.

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In televisual news, Merlin set reports, pictures, and cast interviews make me both happy and annoyed beyond all reason. Happy because Colin Morgan is still an adorable studious good-natured little squishyface and Bradley James is the world's first successful nerd/jock hybrid and Tony Head giggling is like frickin' champagne and I want Richard Wilson to be my extra grandfather. Annoyed because where the hell is Angel Coulby, people? Katie McGrath is perfectly lovely and all but I want more Gwen in the show and more Angel in behind-the-scenes stuff. (More Gwen, but not more Gwen/Arthur, or at least better Gwen/Arthur than last time.)

In other televisual news, breadandroses and I have begun watching White Collar and are well and truly hooked.

Also, Patrick Stewart in MacBeth will be on PBS in October. Markez-vous vos, um, calenders, tout le monde.

- A few weeks ago I lost my karaoke virginity. It was surprisingly difficult, though considering how little "songs I know AT ALL" overlapped with "songs on offer" it went quite well. I found it quite hard to hear, and "Take A Chance on Me" by ABBA was a poor choice because it required me to switch registers between the boys' and girls' bits, and when I couldn't quite make it I went into the wrong key, which was embarrassing.

- This morning I have the Fry and Laurie Hey Jude running through my head.

- Last Sunday, during the group tromp up to the altar for communion, someone managed to kick out the plug to the miniconsole for the organ, which makes the whole thing stick on the current chord until the choirmistress can run up to the loft to do something to the main console. So Herbert Howells' MICHAEL had rather a hiatus. Fortunately, there's a piano in the nave and New Bass, though now a grad student in sociology, formerly was a voice performance major in a program that enforced the mastery of basic keyboard skills. So as soon as the choirmistress shut off the organ, New Bass started in on the piano and we picked up with verse 3.

- I was telling a friend the other day about the dream I had a few months before Eprime's wedding, in which Eprime wanted me to play a piano piece during the ceremony, and I thought "Right, I don't know how to play the piano beyond plunking out a melody line written in treble clef, but maybe I can practice reallyreally hard and master this one piece." Then I listened to a recording of this piece and realized that NO, that would not work, and I must have hallucinated the request. Then (still in the dream) I saw Eprime and said "hey, I had the craziest dream that you wanted me to play the piano for your wedding!" "But I do!" said Eprime. "Ummmm," said I. And then there was a lot of stuff about pearl hair ornaments, and then I woke up.

So. Saturday has begun with me POURING JUST OFF THE BOIL TEA over my left hand. I've soaked it as much as I can bear to in icy water, and there's only a slight red mottling showing on the skin, but it hurts - just a little at rest and more when I touch it or subject it to even tepid water (as when I washed my hands just now.) This may perhaps complicate the cooking plans for this evening's Buffy Night. Perhaps today my job will be Organize Objects rather than Wash Stuff.

I have been reading the Sparkledammerung summary of the Twilight "books" and concluding even more forcefully than I did before that my mother's plan to read them so as to understand her adolescent girl students is A BAD PLAN. Even having her read the summary is A BAD PLAN because I think the hilarious manips that illustrate it will confuse and disturb her even before the plot can do so.

Totally unrelated, does anyone use Audacity for sound editing (particularly converting cassettes to mp3s??) I've got the software in and I've recorded one side of a tape, no problem, but the program won't let me edit the file. I can see "export selection as mp3" but the option is grayed out. Any idea what option I've enabled or disabled that I shouldn't?

ETA Figured it out! I hadn't downloaded the mp3 encoder thingy. That, as it turns out, makes alllllll the difference.