(no subject)

And a happy belated birthday to praetorianguard

Phooey

All right, now I'm all ticked off at Ursula K. LeGuin, for having already put all the speeches in The Farthest Shore I wanted to put in the ice palace book about the folly of trying to escape from death. Which is really stupid, because it's not like she has called dibs on the topic and has said everything that can be said on the subject.

Anyway, it's entirely my own fault for not having read the book until now.

This is the song

that's stuck in my head today: "Alasdair Mhic Cholla Ghasda" by Capercaillie. You can find an mp3 to listen to a snippet here.

What makes it particularly vexing is that the words are in Gaelic, which makes it most difficult to sing along.

If I get any more groggy this afternoon

I'm going to have to resort to having my Strider action figure use his sword slashing action to whap me on the cheek to wake me up.

Either that, or I'll stick his sword in my eye. . .

Gah, will this tape I'm transcribing NEVER END?

Dinner at Pat Wrede's

Met there with Pat, and Lois Bujold, and pameladean and Caroline Stevermer 1crowdedhour.

Conversation ranged far and wide, touching at one point or another on:

asparagus, vegan cooking (including a recipe for French silk pie using tofu which Pamela promised to e-mail to everyone), my desire to learn to play Gaelic fiddle ("WRITE THE BOOK FIRST, PEG"), the movie "Touching the Void" and mountain climbing, Krakatoa, mass extinctions 250 million years ago, the change in European weather patterns from 1100 to 1400, Shackleton's expedition, Canadian roses, Canadian explorers, the discovery of asphalt under the ocean, the Bronte sisters and their novels, George Elliot and her novels, the distinction between George Elliot's and the Brontes' concept of feminism, LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, Mark Twain and what he would have thought of Lord of the Rings (we decided he probably wouldn't have liked it very much, based on what he did to Arthurian legend in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), Joel Rosenberg's opinion that Lord of the Rings would have been better written by Roger Zelazny (oy!), the ironic versus the non-ironic viewpoint, A.S. Byatt's Possession, which Pamela offers up as a fine example of a book that doesn't start with a murder but still hooks her right away, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas (esp. Pirates of Penzance, which Lois and Pat just went to see together), Ten Chimneys, the home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Noel Coward, stage actress Barbara Bryne, engineers' ideas of practical jokes, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, The Eyre Affair, Edward Gorey's The Unstrung Harp (we amused ourselves by seeing how many bits we could recite out loud from memory. Lois, particularly, knew quite a bit of the book by heart), the New York City ballet (apparently Edward Gorey used to go to every performance. He also liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Maxfield Parrish, the beer ball game tradition at Carleton College and why it didn't make it into Tam Lin, a Sooper Secret writing project, World Con, Wiscon, Tommy Lee Jones, Al Gore, John Steinbeck, fanfiction, cats, gardening, and of course, LiveJournal.

*Sigh* I really treasure my friendships with these women.