1) d|p got into the Master Gardener Program!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!11!11!!!!!!ELEVENTYONE!!

2) Happy Armistice Day.  I go on about this one every year, but I like it better in the original usage.  Veteran's day takes the responsibility of war off of those who did not fight it; it doesn't remind those who did not fight that our duty is to make damn certain we don't ask other people to fight for us unless there is no other choice.  Also, I read this morning we have 3 people left who fought in an survived the Great War, and that is frightening.  I don't want to see this gone from living memory.  I see what time has done to our memories of the war that followed that one, and the distortions of it that we get away with in this country. 
I am terrified when I think of the fact that, one day, the Holocaust, too, will pass from living memory.  I am terrified to think that the Rape of Nanjing or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be as dead to our memory as Gettysburg, or, soon enough, the trenches. 

3) Wow, I fell off that horsey where writing is concerned, and the last week or so has drained a lot of the get-up-and-go out of me.  Mistaking a Widex/GNNetcom week for a non Widex/GNNetcom week is also problematic.  Oh well.  There will be words before the day ends.  This, I command.

4) Before then: Playtesting Saturday, but that requires work on my part, so I am backing off the not working on just TCihS this month.  I'll just be working mostly on it.  Today, I also hope to get some work done on Beech Province, since that one keeps slipping through my fingers.  They have the Twilight, they are a former part of the Old Kingdom that gets a lot of flack for doing things that the other former Old Kingdom Provinces for cutting deals and throwing their former countrymen under the bus.

One of the things I am stealing from is Dread, which, BTW, looks like a really awesome game.  The thing I am stealing, at the suggestion of benhimself , is their questionaires for character generation.  Eventually, I am going to develop this into something more mine and less larcenous, but, in the meantime, I'm pretty excited about the idea - essentially that, as the first step to generating a character, you are forced to ask some very probing, incriminating questions about your character.  I am thinking this is an excellent way to link characters to their Provinces.  Here's what I have so far for Beech Province:

1. The second time you returned from the Twilight, the people who knew you say you came back different.  Why?
2. How do you explain the mushrooms that sometimes sprout from your scalp?  What do you do with them?
3. If you truly believe the carving knife that almost killed you is cursed, why do you still have it?
4. When the wagon tracks on the roads of your town spontaneously filled up with blood, why were you blamed?
5. Why did you send those travelers into the Baron's forest, and what did the vampires give you in payment?
6. Where did the cloth strips you tied into the branches of the old shelter beech come from?
7. Why is your family's barn covered in patterns that look so much like human shadows?
8. Why did the wound that you gave yourself leave no scar or mark?
9. What gives you the right to preside in trials over the elks?
10. How badly overgrown is your father, and what do you make from the strange flowers that blossom in his hair?
11. Why did you seek the aid of the Blackthorns and what did they ask of you in payment.
12. What did you see when you drank the cider from the silver-chased jug?
13. Why have you not sold the blood-wood beads you carry?
14. What is the significance of the four stick figures carved on the axe you carry?
15. What else did the curse that turned your eyes green do to you?
16. Where did your city cousins go after they came out of the Twilight and stayed with you for a night?
17. How did you resist the song when the flute tree sang your unit to death under its branches?
18. When the kudzu pushed your father's grave, who did you discover was buried in his place?
19. The last person to whom you told the reason that you never eat meat was horrified.  Why?
20. When is the forest foretold to claim your soul, and how did you learn how it will happen?

My sense is that Children will need to answer 1 of these questions, Adults 2, Initiates 3, Parents 4 and Changed 5, but the last question is always "Why did you become Changed?"

Hey, if anyone wants to pick some Provinces and send me questions, please do!

Many on my flist are posting Wilfred Owen, or Siegried Sassoon, and those poems are vivid and harsh and awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. I had my 150 students read "Dulce et Decorum Est" yesterday, and it was wonderful. But as I was thinking about what to post, I remembered this one, which is not as in your face as some of the WW1 poems, but which I find inexpressibly moving:

Patterns, by Amy Lowell

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles
on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon --
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
"Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se'nnight."
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
"Any answer, Madam," said my footman.
"No," I told him.
"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer."
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, "It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

-- Siegfried Sassoon

For convoluted reasons I wanted to remind myself of the writing experience of the early days post-longhand. I learnt to type and write electronically (in grad school--undergrad I wrote only with a pen) on compact Macs, Plus and SE mainly. A handful of years later, my first office machine was an SE/30, dated by then but remarkably capable. It still boots up fine:



Writing in MSWord 5 again was unfamiliar at first, but overall it worked pretty well for my translation task.

The only hitch came when I tried to offload what I had translated: floppy disk? My laptop doesn't take them. Internet? Eventually, but not without some creative fiddling with the access settings, as SE/30 doesn't have any browser even remotely up to date, nor any SFTP software currently. That'll be a project for another day, I think.

rhytidectomy - n., (medical) a face-lift.


That is, plastic surgery to remove wrinkles from the face, also known as rhytidoplasty. Yeah, kinda boring but I had to do it sometime, and if you want to know how it's done, I leave the details to your own curiosity. Pronounced rit-i-DEK-teh-mee, coined in the early 1930s from Greek root rhytís, wrinkle + -ectomy, itself from Greek ek-, out + -tomiā, cut.

---L.

Hi, I hope you could help me with this one, please:

What is the difference between those two sentences??

車をするなら酒を飲むな。。

車を止めたら、 ライトを消さなければなりません。

When we use "nara" and when "tara" structure?
Also, when we use the "-ba" form?

Thank you a lot!

Hi to all.

How do you say the command "fire!" in Japanese? Can't find it in my dictionary...

Thanx a lot!

    If in this world
there were no quickly fading
    cherry blossoms,
then in spring the heart
might become tranquil.


Original by Ariwara no Nirihara:


yo no naka ni
taete sakura no
nakariseba
haru no kokoro wa
nodokekaramashi

You can read the first third of Overqualified here: http://www.shortcovers.com/mixes/Overqualified/book-buH3VXBquUCmH6lc7vTOpw/page1.html

It's formatted pretty terribly on the site, to be honest, but you can get a sense of how the novel differs from the original letters that are online, and the new material. This first section is mostly about my brother Adrian. Anyway, I hope you like it!

You guys have been an enormous help on the rough draft chapter, which I've taken down. I revamped it after seeing patterns in the responses, for which I thank you!

It looks like several of these are going to be contracted for.

I am going to do one last pass on SLAM JUSTICE and then take it to market. I really want to get the YA ones caught up.

Just in case anyone missed this amazing photo montage of before and after the wall coming down, at and around the Brandenburg Gate.

I might be able to pull this out.  A little.

Jeff: I don't mind butterflies. I just don't like caterpillars. Too many legs. And they're fuzzy!
Me: Legs are creepy.
Jeff: What I don't get is how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
Me: Metamorphosis!
Jeff: They go into a cocoon for a few days and come up with fewer legs, no fur, and wings. Their bodies are completely different. How does that happen?
Me: Neat, huh?
Jeff: I don't get it! How do they change?
Me: Well you know how a human becomes a werewolf during the full moon? This is the same thing, but in slow motion.

I may have to drop out of this my self-imposed goals.  There will certainly be no words today.  I will be lucky if I can leave here with my work finished, and even luckier if I do not have to come back after class and work until the small hours.

These pictures are just so stunningly beautiful. I love the one that shows the tracks from a NASA lander. Is it silly that I just can't help imagining an alien emerging from behind some of these dunes?

In the tangled wetlands, there's not much color anymore, but there are movements and sounds. Today it was all wings, wings beating, fluttering, all around. Cedar waxwings, robins, juncos come down from the north, chickadees, sparrows, bluejays, crows. Somewhere there was a bird with a strange song I've never heard--I tried to record this and the sound of all those wings, but must not have pressed the right button, so no video to share.

It was definitely a province of birds there, this morning, enjoying all three dimensions, free to fly as they are.

Here is a feral apple tree, with its unharvested, unfallen apples.



Meanwhile, some ominous power, some sorcerous magic, is revealing itself on the side of the supermarket. It's kind of terrifying the way the paint has melted and oozed, makes you wonder if the cinder blocks below are melting and oozing as well, and what will happen when they melt away entirely--what will be revealed or will come out?

amphisbaena - n., a mythological serpent with a head on each end of its body.


In Greek mythology, it lived in the Lybian desert, having been spawned from the blood of Medusa's head as it dripped on the sands as Perseus flew home. Although poisonous (Cato's army reportedly had trouble with them during the civil war of Caesar and Pompey) it supposedly mostly ate ants, of all things, and seems to have had cultic connections with ants in some obscure way I really wish I had time to track down now. In addition to the mythological creature, there's a real one named after it -- a genus of South American lizards with a club end to the tail, making them look two-headed. The spelling above is only the most common variant, but they all come from the Greek via Latin, constructed from amphís, both ways + baín(ein), to go. (I'm reminded of the Pushmepullyou of Dr. Dolittle.) Pronounced am-fis-BEE-neh or, sometimes, with an initial æ.

---L.

Evening dark arrives so early now -- we've been eased into it with a full-to-waning moon, which I've enjoyed driving home by these last several days. But by six p.m. today it was already full night black.

So, not sunlight, but reflected light today:



[Sorry if it's a bit bright -- contrast boost, etc., via iPhoto]

Requests aren't done, they will be popping up as we go, but honestly I do not need annnyymooreee! I was looking at the Wonder Women that I drew last year and started drawing her again, because she's pretty fun to draw, and surly Wonder Woman here came out. Don't settle for being a tits and tits heroine ladies, be yourself! Poor Nibbles.


Hey Montreal! I'm going to be at Expozine this weekend! You should come.

Store!

rain drop baptism
stains bleed out, drip down my scalp
eyes begin to sting
now I cannot see your face
hidden under lightning skies

At the fiber festival in October, I bought an ounce of angora bunny wool to spin. This morning I found the clamshell box on the floor, bunny fur spilled everywhere. I have no doubt Kippy was behind that. At least she didn't eat it.

I pulled out a spindle this afternoon and started going. It's spinning very thin, except for a few places. The fur wasn't prepared at all (as far as I can tell), so it's straight off the comb they used to brush the bunny. There are a few little knots and some dust, and it must smell like bunny because the whole time I was spinning, Kippy looked at me like this: O.O

Someone thinks she's a predator. How cute.



Yesterday evening, I tried out the sunset setting on my camera. I think it turned out okay.



I also took (another) video of the baby ferrets playing, but it's long (four minutes) and still uploading, and I want to get back to my story. I got 1000 words yesterday. Considering I've been getting about 500 words a day, this is more than adequate progress. :)

Some lightning flashes apparently contain antimatter. Think on that a moment. Lightning is already one of the coolest phenomena under the sun, and now it's just that much cooler. It's positively positronic.

The story, which I found out about from nancylebov, is here.

Happy Birthday, marri!!

Dragon Age: Origins is a game I've been excited about for more than a year. I loved Baldur's Gate II, and its expansion, and I lost more time to Neverwinter Nights than I ought to admit. So a new single player fantasy RPG by this company, billed as the "spiritual heir to baldur's gate" (spiritual because this new one is their own IP, and not a D&D game - though the mechanics are very similar) got me all giddy with anticipation!

And it's great. I've been having a really good time playing it. It isn't without it's flaws, but the overall experience is good enough that I've been all too happy to overlook the frustrating bugs. The onion AV Club gave it an A though, which I'm not sure I agree with entirely. I wrote a big comment on that AV Club review. And here it is!

The bugs in this game are frustrating.

The two big ones are:

- Quests that don't register their completion can leave you running around an area in frustration after fighting, say, the hordes of bad guys in the Redcliffe castle mission, wondering what small thing you haven't yet done. Only looking on the internet led me to the conclusion that something had gone wrong on their end. Reloaded a save game, fought the battle again, and CLICK - cut scene. Also, it didn't help that while I was trying to figure out what was going on, the aggravating fight scene music kept playing! It's great and cinematic when actually fighting, but while running around in empty areas trying to figure out what to do, it sure adds to the frustration!

- cut scenes sometimes screw up, and you'll go through a cut scene, make one of the games (actually pretty interesting) moral choices, and then suddenly be watching the cut scene again. I chose a different choice the second time, and was then moved forward in the game as though I'd only chosen the first. Later, other characters alternated between acting as though I'd chosen A or B. It sort of took the wind out of that choice. This happened to me in the Redcliffe section, as well.


That said, The game has some very good things in its favour, too:

- the moral choices themselves feel more satisfying. I really like the game's system of having the choices affect the world itself, rather than some arbitrary slider of how good or evil you are. You make a choice, and your companions approve or disapprove, sure, but also you'll find that your future options in the game world have changed, too. It really adds to a sense of immersion.

- The combat's good. Not too simple, but not ridiculously complex either, and the tactics reward the learning curve that comes with understanding how they're interpreted by the game. After playing with the tactic programming for a while, I found my party members acting just how I needed, which was useful for adapting to harder fights and made the combat feel genuinely tactical rather than like a mashfest.

- Some of the characterization is great - Morrigan and Shale are both fun and interesting, and I like the way they fit into the game world, and the major events of the game, rather than just having discreet stories of their own. Some of the characterization is sort of lame, too though. (The voice acting also runs from very very good to characters who seem to change voice actors mid-dialogue, again, in the Redcliffe quest, which led me to have most of my doubts about the game. Maybe the people in charge of the Redcliffe quest

- The skill trees feel well balanced, and it's fun to play as a warrior or mage or rogue (except for some rogue dex issues that they've acknowledged and which are being fixed in an upcoming patch) and for the most part the specializations really give a different feel to your class when you get to that stage. And a couple of the specializations are tied to the game world in a fun way. In a lot of these games, specializations just add a couple generic skills. Extra damage, and such. In this, they add skills that tie into the story sometimes. "Blood magic" being a big one, and that sort of detail really adds to the feel that you're a part of the game.

- The game gets its title from a system where you can choose your "origin" - each of which is a different way to start the game. The origins are a couple hours, before merging with the main storyline, but which will affect the game further down the line, too. Every character has to go to the dawrven city to seek aid, for instance, but that visit has a very different tone if you are a dwarf noble who was falsely accused of killing her brother the heir to the throne and then exiled.

I would give it a B, or a B- (with it moving to an A after a bug patch or two for sure.) A lot of care and love went into the game, and despite the couple frustrating bugs above, I've put in a couple dozen hours since it's release and haven't lost interest yet!

Penny Arcade had a pretty funny comic about how they do downloadable content. There are characters you come across IN-GAME, who describe the DLC for you, and the dialogue options say "downloadable content" right on them, which takes you out of the game a bit. ( I have, of course, downloaded them )

Have you played it? What do you think?

adiaphorism - n. in moral theology, the tolerance of actions or beliefs not specifically prohibited or enjoined.


And said actions or beliefs are adiaphora, which comes from Greek meaning indifferent. Comes up most often in a Christian context, but the term was taken over from the Stoics, which used it in much the same meaning, only without reference to the Bible.

---L.

At Monson for the Memorial Half-marathon today, one of my favorite races -- there are always pipers to see us off, and today the weather was pleasant enough (66F and sunny) to actually stand around and enjoy the place. For the second Sunday in November I generally expect chilly rain or sleet. . .

So, here are the pipers, and their wee drummers too, warming up:



They all play at one volume--loud--and when warming up they were all playing different tunes (or parts of tunes). It was an extraordinary racket, but certainly helped in the psych up process!

Yesterday we went out Christmas shopping. Jeff gave me my gift early: a new digital camera, since my old one was doing this thing where it didn't always take pictures no matter how nicely you asked or what names you called it.

This is my new one. It's an unfortunate shade of orange (which they wisely decided not to advertise on the website), but I am not defined by the color of my camera. I love it anyway. Mostly since it takes videos with sound, which my old one didn't. (Also an Olympus FE, but a much earlier model.)

Not that ferrets actually make that much noise, but I always felt the silent videos were unnerving. (And for some reason my phone and computer stopped agreeing to let files work between each other, so my options were getting pretty limited.)

I'll have to get used to a few new things with it; the controls are buried in other controls. Overall, though, I think I'm going to like it.

Here, have some ferrets in pants.

Still not feeling up to much. Better than yesterday, for sure, but still a bit off-colour. Just tired and achy with a bit of a sore throat and a bit of trouble breathing and a headache. I wish it would either develop into something dramatic or go away, because now I'm in something of a dilemma about work. Normally this would not keep me away, but we've been given pretty strict instructions to stay at home with a hint of anything. I'll see how I feel tomorrow. In some ways, I hope this is the swine flu, and it's just a very mild case; then I won't have to worry about getting it more badly at some future date.

It was downright warm, bordering on hot today, which was weird, but not unpleasant. The light was gorgeous, too (Moss and I theorize that we get awesome afternoon light up here in exchange for early sunsets). Anyway, we went on a rambling walk, arriving home just as the sun had set. If you have some misguided notion that I wouldn't a) take pictures, and b) post them, then you clearly haven't been paying attention.


The bikepath all awash in golden afternoon light.

( follow the path to birds, leaves, water, and trees )

Tomorrow, maybe I will feel up to providing some non-picture content. Today, though, I think we should all just look at pretty things.

For other installments, click here

Dear K--,

You haven’t answered my last letter yet. I even used Mr. Tiptoe’s cell phone to call Mom and Aunt Christie to see if maybe you sent a letter there instead, but they said no. I can’t use the computer at the library because it’s still closed for repairs after Helga, so yesterday in school I asked Mr. Dubois if I could use the computer in his room. (He’s the nicest teacher in the school; I’ll have him next year.) I searched for news stories about your country, and the first one to come up was “Tensions Increase in the Island Nation of W--.”

It sounded pretty bad. People in the mountains attacked a bus from the capital, it said, and set it on fire, and in the capital a mob beat up two men from the mountains and left them to die by the factory where they worked.

And then the article said there was going to be a trial for one of the “imprisoned insurgents,” but the name it gave wasn’t yours. The article didn’t mention you at all. But further down there was an article that had your name in it, so I read it--it must have been the one you wrote to me about, because you mentioned Mermaid’s Hands, just like you said you would. And then that organization said it was going to help Mermaid’s Hands! I knew it--I knew it was because of you that we were back in the arms of the sea again.

I wish I had a good idea for helping you and people where you live, the way you helped us, here. But it seems like all I can do is send letters and hope you get them. I think of you all the time.

Love,
your friend M--

Can anyone please tell me what this means:

しゃしんはあなたですか？

ぼくのタイプです。

Hello,
I was doing some exercise practice for the JLPT 3 exam, and I came across several sentence structures that I have never seen before (this is making me panic, bleh):

１．さんまは秋が旬の魚で、１０月から　１１月に　かけてが　一番おいしい　ころでしょう。
→ I don't quite understand the sentence structure: why is the て-form followed by a particle - in this case, が？ How do you use this sentence structure, and what is it used to express/used for?

２Ａ．また、あなたが家にいない時間に録画をしたいときは　録画の　予約ができ、たいへん便利です。
２Ｂ．それから、コピーの　機械の　ふたをあけ　コピーしたい　げんこうをおきます。
→ I've kind of figured out by guessing that this sentence structure (i.e. using the stem of a verb's ますform) functions somewhat like the て-form of a verb, in the sense that it's used to join sentences. One question that I have though, is this: when is it appropriate to use the stem of a verb's ますform and when to use a verb's て-form to join sentences?

Help will be much appreciated because I am really quite confused! :(

Thanks a million in advance! :)

    What goes on inside
human hearts cannot be known,
    but in my home town
the plum blossoms still give off
the same perfume as of old.


By Ki no Tsurayuki. Original:


Hito wa isa
kokoro mo shirazu
furusato wa
hana zo mukashi no
ka ni nioi keru

Hello! Could you please tell me what does this mean:

復旧の目処は立ってない。

Amazingly, sunshine with real warmth today (for all that the wind was a bit chill), and after a short run in the middle of the day I took this pic of the weeping cherry out front:



Most full size trees are completely empty by now, but in the shelter of the house with afternoon sun this dwarf tree is behind the times.

It's a pick-up or delivery place, not an eat-in place. It's tiny. There is a tall counter two steps away from the door, as you enter. Over on the left there are the bags they put the pizzas in when they're delivering them, the special bags that keep them warm. Behind the counter, against the wall, is a stainless-steel refrigerator. A little more to the right is an oven, and there are more ovens around a corner out of sight. (Over there is also where they cut the pizza.)

On the counter is a ceramic clock that looks like a pizza. There's a phone, and it's covered in the cornmeal stuff that they put on the bottom of pizza crusts. I thought about this: the phone at the mechanic's shop has black smears on it, oil and grease. Here, the phone has cornmeal on it. It's whatever your hands have on them when you go to answer it.

To the far left is a storeroom, and the girl who was at the counter when I came in keeps on getting pulled in there and is giggling and laughing. I think it's funny that I can't see her companion. Some invisible someone who's making her laugh.

It's a guy who was out of sight on the other side who rings up the transaction and gives me a pizza.

And now, very soon, we will eat it!

Queries: 124
Requests: 3: 2 YA fantasy and 1 one mystery (not genre, just a mystery) submission via Jenny
In my inbox: 1 partial

--

Yeah, boring slush stats today since I was gone and didn't have time to get a query project ready.

My spindle post is on Robin's blog tonight.

I was going to write more about using a spindle, but got a little side tracked.

And I'd better hurry and put together slush stats, since I've been gone all day. Stand by.

The Autumn constellations
Begin to rise. The brilliant
Moonlight shines on the crowds. 
The moon toad swims in the river
And does not drown. The moon rabbit
Pounds the bitter herbs of the 
Elixir of eternal life.
His drug only makes my heart
More bitter. The silver briliance
Only makes my hair more white.
I know that the country is
Overrun with war. The moonlight
Means nothing to the soldiers
Camped in the western deserts. 

-- Tu Fu 

 

         scent of bitter herbs
no longer greets my morning
        left with rotten flesh
prickly spikes poke into my spine
     fell in love with a durian

that sweet sticky smell
every morning I wake up
scent of persimmon
greets me with pungent odor
as I roll out of this bed

last night was spectacular. I saw Captured!By Robots. It was probably the most fun I've had at a concert in several years. This guy hooked up a bunch of electric and pneumatic solenoids up to digital outputs and then connected them to robotic fingers and servos. I think he used a PLC to program all the
timing for the devices but I'm not sure. I asked but he wouldn't tell me though I'm pretty sure that's how he did it. He played a bunch of awesome classic songs and then used them to add a semi-motivational Tony Robbins spin on it. It was fucking hilarious. He started off with the Rocky Theme Song, Gonna Fly Now, then Eye of the Tiger. then he did Beautiful Day by U2, a Dead Kennedy song, some other Rocky song, and then Journey's Don't Stop Believin'. The best part was that he would run down into the crowd and dance and fuck around and for some odd reason he asked me to fight him so we did it old skool raver style. We all formed a circle and I kicked his ass for a song. It was pretty cool. He smelled of Jameson and sweat :P

Well, I used a lot of the suggestions that came my way from that post the other day! I was pretty pleased with the turnout of readers for that question, I must admit. I guess it's because you hear a lot that people don't give a darn about history in this country, if depressing yearly polls from the Dominion Institute mean anything, but it's clearly not the case among my livejournal followers. You guys are great!

I had to do a general sweep that involved a good range of places, professions, backgrounds and time periods, so you know, not everyone's favorite author is going to be in there but I sure did like the range in suggestions. Looking at it now I wish I had someone from the NWT (not one! for shame) and New Brunswick. Stompin Tom is from New Brunswick but he's also sort of from everywhere.  I could have put the Irvings in there, I think they control history in NB as well as anything else.

I was all crazed out with strep throat while I did this, but listening to Radiolab shows and a burning passion for Canada I guess(?) kept me going.  You can find the image in today's National Post, along with an article about the Historica/Dominion merger! Interesting stuff.


( picture is under the cut because it's huge )


Here is the legend, the rows are sort of wonky but you'll figure it out:

Row One (bottom):
James Wolfe, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, David Suzuki, Louis-Joseph Papineau, John A. Macdonald, Terry Fox
Row Two
Emily Carr, Joseph Howe, Joey Smallwood, Robert Bartlett, Louis Riel, Joy Kogawa
Row Three
Marshall McLuhan, Samuel de Champlain, Marilyn Bell, Wayne Gretzky, Emily Murphy
Row Four
Rene Levesque, Sam Steele, Farley Mowat, L.M. Montgomery, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail, John McCrae
Row Five
Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker), Oscar Peterson, Rush, Pierre Berton
Row Six
Les Filles du Roi, Mary Pickford, Skookum Jim Mason
Row Seven
Charles Best, Frederick Banting, Pauline Johnson, Mordecai Richler, Tecumseh, Stompin’ Tom Connors
Row Eight
William Hall, Tommy Douglas, Marc Garneau, Roberta Bondar, Rosemary Brown, John Diefenbaker
Row Nine
Shanawdithit, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, David Thompson, William Shatner

Swine, swine, go away...

Have distinctly uncomfortable throat and the beginnings of a cough and I feel rather nauseous.... Please, don't let this be swinish.

It wouldn't surprise me, however.

I am going to take ColdFX and echinacea and think powerful anti-flu thoughts.

A bit late, but I've started my un-nanowrimo, translating something every day straight to paper, no computer in-between.



My Smith-Corona Corsair needs some of the rollers and a couple of springs replacing, but that's not going to happen. I'll just accept some typos and edit it all when the month is over, or at least the bits I want to save.

This one is the start of a teenage composition by Takuboku, btw.

On the rush across campus this time I had my camera, and though it's a poor shot, I love this sight every time I pass it:



Now they know how many cardboard boxes it takes to fill the gallery alcove.

It's a bright and frosty morning



and the thinnest, finest, newest ice has been born on the low-lying puddles



the sun is already high--what adventures await you today?

Our Blogging Challenge has made the Camosun website: on the School of Arts and Science and the English pages.

Some encouraging words for writers by Neil Gaiman

Velvet Verbosity, who dropped by to comment on my 100 words post yesterday, has more 100 word prompts, and tips for writing word portraits.

Went out and about tonight, and met some new people. Discovered several others who adore the Samuel Whittemore historical marker as much as I do, because, really now. How can one not?

Then ckd pointed out his favorite traffic sign in Cambridge. It may be my favorite now, too:



Also, Christina's has Mexican chocolate ice cream! This is very exciting, especially since Whole Foods stopped carrying the delicious Palapa Azul kind. Boston has so much wonderful ice cream. It's ridiculous (in the best possible way).