Galvanizing

1. This was not a year I remotely cared who won the Super Bowl.

2. One of the best times to go grocery shopping in the U.S. is a half hour after the Super Bowl starts.

3. On the way home from our lunch outing yesterday, younger son recited the entirety of this episode of Pocoyo. Which means that a. we're letting him spend far too much time watching stuff on the computer, b. his memory is pretty darned good, c. I need to listen to other stuff he's saying and see if he's doing this with other shows -- older son often echos lines from movies, but that's the autism there, and d. if he ever does it with the right accent, I'm signing him up for acting classes when he's old enough.

4. Why am I drawn to punk and heavy metal music lately? What is it about loud thrashing fast music that's so damn satisfying? Is it psychic caffeine, an outlet for rage, or what?

5. Shiner's current seasonal brew, Dortmunder Spring Ale, is pretty good.

6. I hope they're going to do the Ruby Redfruit again for this summer. Beer brewed with grapefruit juice and ginger -- sounds weird, but turns out to hit the spot when it's 102F out.

7. Does there exist a fic where Sally Donovan and Martha Jones go out for a pint and a debate on how best to cope with annoying geniuses?

8. Have been spoiled, but haven't actually seen that bit; summary data inclines me to suspect that I might have done the same thing in the character's shoes, but we'll see what I think when I actually watch it and find out how much of their actions were based on evidence and how much on seeing what they wanted to believe.

9. Speaking of spoiled, I really need to get back to watching DW season 6.

10. I clearly do not talk much about fandom with the spouse, as he had never heard the term "slash" before. (The topic came up because he was seeing homoerotic subtext in an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine. Make of that what you will.)

11. Now I want to request Thomas/Diesel 10 for next Yuletide. Which is simply Wrong.

12. But not as wrong as the new Thomas episodes where the trains' faces move. That's so wrong it makes kitten trees look right.

1. Crossovers I did not need in my head: the voice of Scottish singer Andy (no M) Stewart singing "Sherlock, Where's Your Trousers?"

2. Saying that fanfic is training wheels for writing original fic is like saying that sonnets are training wheels for writing free verse.

3. A concept that lacks a word: liking songs of protest and rebellion that are far enough removed by time, language, or distance for you to ignore the fact that actually, you're in or would've been in the group being protested or rebelled against. (This describes a decent percentage of my music library.)

4. Happy Asimov's birthday! His science fiction never did much for me, but I devoured his essays on science when I was a kid, and I still enjoy rereading the Black Widowers stories. (Now, *there's* a rare fandom I should suggest for Yuletide next year....)

5. I saw Tinker Tailor Solider Spy last week with my knitting pal; it was an excellent movie and seems to be a good adaptation of the book. Oldman's performance as Smiley was subtle and absorbing, and the rest of the acting was great as well. I'm probably *not* going to buy the DVD in the near future, but only because there are a few scenes so brutal, disturbing, or gruesome that I don't want the short people seeing them accidentally. (Generally they were telegraphed well enough, though, that I could look away in time and avoid having the detailed mental image seared on my retinas. But it's definitely not a movie for those who want to avoid depictions of graphic violence.) I might take an afternoon off sometime to see it in the theater again. And my knitting pal and I were amused to realize that there were three former Austen heroes together in one movie.

6. Evil Author list, entry #13: If in one of my works I am ever tempted to take a silly way out of a tense cliffhanger when the silliness does not fit with what led up to the cliffhanger, I will go write fanfic of my own story instead and get it out of my system, and then come up with a solution that actually makes sense and fits the established tone of the story.

I need a t-shirt that says "My best friend went to Reichenbach Falls and all I got was this lousy t-shirt ( three years later)."

1. Listen to Cabin Pressure episode in car en route to dentist.

2. While teeth are being cleaned, attempt to visualize 100 otters.

3. Ten asterisk-like figures of ten otters each works pretty well.

4. From this geometric figure, branch out to platonic solids with otter edges.

5. Ponder how to get otters to form a dodecahedron.

6. Decide that the only way to do this in practice is by using large acrylic tubes to contain the otters.

7. Remember that "if I should ever become so rich that blowing a few hundred K is nothing" plan to build an octopus Habitrail at ceiling level throughout the house. Wonder if otters and octopuses could coexist for more than ten minutes. Decide probably not. Also, much larger tubes would be needed, and presumably sea otters rather than river otters, and general upkeep would be too much even for theoretical level of filthy richness.

(At this point, the dental visit ended. No drugs were involved in this routine cleaning. No otters or octopuses were harmed, even hypothetically. Remember to floss your otter.)

On a complete tangent: 2011-11-02. Nice.

1. Youtube: enabling American preschoolers to watch the Teletubbies in Portuguese. Somehow I don't think that's what its founders had in mind.

2. Overheard in the Castiron household: "Spiders with opposable thumbs. Now, *that* would be scary. Why didn't Tolkien think of that for Shelob?"

3. Rule: If visiting Austin for the Texas Book Festival, assume the weather will be warm. Doesn't matter what weekend they hold it; it will be warm enough to make the inside of the tents extremely uncomfortable. I think there's been one exception in the years I've attended.

1. My car was broken into last night. Fortunately, there wasn't anything important in there, and it looks like nothing was taken. Spouse went to a junkyard, found a replacement window for about a tenth what it would've cost to get the auto glass folks out here, and installed it. (As my dad would say, I'm adding another year to his contract for that.)

2. The weather report did not lie! We are experiencing northern European summer temperatures! I wore the wool waistcoat.

3. No, brain, no. "Reichenbach" and "Turkish oil wrestling" do not go together in any universe.

4. Dear fiber: You have been drafting beautifully and making a very nice fine single. Please stop breaking now.

5. Things I have Googled for fic-in-progress: the status of the death penalty in Berne in 1891 (had been abolished some years earlier, FWIW); Swiss prisons of same era (never heard of Dr. Louis Guillaume before, but he sounds like an interesting person; his name shows up everywhere in prison reform literature of the time); photocopy policies of the British Library; frequency of autopsies in the UK.

6. Trying to search the BBC site for sound clips to find how a city name is pronounced -- a bit more challenging when a British political figure has that name as a surname. The goal, however, was achieved with a bit more search narrowing. (Different fic-in-progress.)

If J. R. R. Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle had attempted to write a series of stories together, would that be like a matter-antimatter collision? Continuity and anticontinuity?