Kivrin

So, you remember in Gaudy Night how Lord Peter's "John Doe" name for a student is "Mr. Jones of Jesus [College]" and upon meeting Mr. Pomfret he says something along the lines of "Good God, it's Mr. Jones of Jesus" to which Mr. Pomfret replies "Who are you calling a bloody Welshman?"

I have always been mildly perplexed by Pomfret's response, but recent browsing through the histories of Oxford colleges* has revealed that Jesus College was for a time (as in, for about two centuries, from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth though not at the time of its foundation in the early sixteenth century**) almost exclusively Welsh in student population, with fellowships reserved not merely for Welshmen but for men from SPECIFIC AREAS OF WALES.

So it's a college joke as well as a name joke.


* With the aim of choosing a college for Andrew Foyle. All we know, canonically, is that he's a member of the college Howard Paige attended, which is rather dire because given the apparent Trinity-Balliol rivalry it would be pleasing to send Paige to Trinity ("What could one expect of a Trinity man?" Lord Peter might say of HP) it would not be pleasing to condemn Andrew to the same fate.
**Insert Eddie Izzard routine about the attitude of Americans to history because that is the sort of face I keep making when I think hard about how long Oxford has been going.

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!"

Still snowing.

Probably I should go shovel again. And I should definitely do some cleaning... it's just hard to find motivation when I already know I'll be home tomorrow too. *does a happy dance*

I have imported nearly all my fanfic to AO3, and may do some additional tagging and sorting of drabbles into serieses.

Spent much of the day reading Connie Willis' brand-new novel, Blackout, which I am really enjoying but which ends, I warn you all, with A GINORMOUS CLIFFHANGER. The conclusion will be out in the fall.

woohoo! Remix is live!

Echoes in the Air (Pistolwhip Remix) is a great post-Eyghon story. I really like the spycraft-y atmosphere.

The first ten people to comment in this post get to request a drabble of any pairing/character of their choosing from me. In return, requesters should post this in their journal, offering in return fanworks of the kind they enjoy doing. Fic? Icons? Meta?

I'll drabble or meta-rant on Buffyverse, Firefly, BBC Merlin, New Dr Who through "The Last Doctor," any Star Trek but Enterprise or the new movie (though I've only seen half of DS9), seaQuest if anyone else remembers back that far, or... well, try me. If I don't know the canon I'll make something up (or beg you for a different request.) :)

Take your icons. List the people who appear in them. Alphabetize, and pair off.

Private Baldrick/ Violet Baudelaire - She'd be kind to him and possibly would invent something to either keep him from smelling bad or to keep her from perceiving the smell. However, romantically that just... isn't.

Captain Edmund Blackadder/ Dream of the Endless - Can you imagine what Blackadder would say if confronted with Dream? "Oh, God, what are you, some runaway from a mummer's troupe? A renegade mime? Look, thickie, the idea is to run out of the trenches, disguise yourself as an artist... or mental patient... and hide in a town. Not to put on black draperies and a lot of white face-paint and then come cavorting about in a trench!" "I do not... cavort" "All right, mincing about. Anyway, sod off. Some of us are busy trying not to get killed."

Elizabeth I [Cate Blanchett]/Eowyn of Rohan - I can't decide if they're alike in ways that would make them get along or kill each other. A royal wedding between them would be very pretty, though.

Rupert Giles/Xander Harris - Well, it's not a new idea. :)

Qui-Gon Jinn/The King of Siam [Yul Brynner] - Wow. That would be... kinda hot. They'd enjoy talking about Buddhist philosophy. And hello, the pretty.

Veronica Mars/Lilah Morgan [Stephanie Romanov] - That would be... really, really dark and scary. There's just no way for the age and experience difference not to make that a completely exploitative situation. Maybe when Veronica's older...? But I can't really picture it. Except in a scary way, with Veronica thinking she could handle herself and then being totally over her head with bondage games and W&H and oh, no, badbadbad things.

Willow Rosenberg/Lt. the Honorable George Colhurst St. Barleigh - This just makes me laugh. He'd be intimidated by her, and she'd think he was kinda cute, and they'd stammer at each other a lot.

Buffy Summers/King Theoden of Rohan - They would probably kick significant ass as co-generals, but I think there would be way, way, WAY too many cross-cultural issues to a personal relationship.

Jane Tennison [Helen Mirren]/Andrew Wells - Oh, now that's just cruel. To them both.

Lord Peter Wimsey/Wesley Wyndham-Pryce - HEE!! Now, let me be serious... HEE! Heeheeheeheeeheee! *cough* *ahem* Well, Wesley could stand to learn about how to use the silly-ass-about-town facade to one's advantage. And Peter could... well, okay, Wesley's job would probably give pre-Harriet Peter a nervous collapse, and post-Harriet Peter is not going to be looking at anyone else, though I suppose the two of them might raise a manly glass together on the village green, or some such. (Peter/Wesley. heeheeheeheeHEEEheehee!!)

Silly Kivrin, I said to myself some little time ago, Why are you noodling online while half-watching Jeopardy through your open bedroom door when there are so many more productive things you could be doing, from the slightly more productive, such as watching something from your spanking new AtS season 5 and Buffy season 7 dvd sets while knitting a fingerless mitten or hemming your pants, to the greatly more productive, such as making scones for the party at work tomorrow or packing for that rather significant trip you're taking in about ten days?

Hum, I said to myself some even smaller time ago, is it not Odd and Peculiar how many people have rewritten Stephen King's The Stand to incorporate characters from television shows. This fic before me, for example, is at least the second and possibly the the third Buffyverse version I have read. There was an X-files one I remember, too. Surely there's a West Wing version somewhere in which Bartlett stops the plague, because That's What Jed Does. Besides, wasn't Rob Lowe in the miniseries? This story, though, it... oh dear...

Silly Kivrin, I keep saying to myself, why do you read things that you could have predicted would make you anxious and jumpy. You don't like large-scale epidemic stories. You always think you will, and then you end up all atwitter.

Okay, Kivrin, I say to myself, go read your nice book-club book about plants and make your scones.

Drinking my second bottle of hard cider this evening (an unprecedented indulgence for me when I'm on my own... it's probably a good thing for my liver that I so rarely have alcohol in the house) and waiting for Eprime to call me back with an account of the Richard Shindell concert she went to last night.

A good songvid is a beautiful thing. Diana Williams' Q/O vid using "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge (it's on Songs for Slashers #2) is brilliant, and the Jim/Blair "This Kiss" had me making chirpy noises of fannish pleasure, even though I've never seen an episode of the Sentinel and have read about three fics.

But I just spent an hour painfully downloading an extremely disappointing vid. I was excited about it because I actually knew the song being used, and because I haven't seen any LOTR vids yet. Well, now I have, but... well...

The timing was excellent, and the narrative and point of view worked reasonably well, but where the vid really ran into trouble was with clip selection. The song was a slow, reflective, moody piece that meshed well with scenes of people being thoughtful, but didn't work at all with battle footage. Nor with the single biggest jump moment of the movie, the Bilbo-becomes-a-demon scene in Rivendell. All three times I saw the film, that scene had me grabbing the nearest hand. It is not suitably paired with music that E's older brother described quite accurately as sounding like Enya on speed.