What a great combination of subjects, eh?

hp_holidaygen is now open for signups, yay! I had great fun writing mine for last year, because I was assigned characters I don't usually write and thus given a chance to stretch myself a bit. Signup post is here, so go forth and put your name down!

On a totally 'nother note, Mr Psmith has gotten me hooked on Sons of Anarchy. Initially I thought it was pretty awful, like a soap opera only with more guns and a much higher body count, but as I've been drawn in I'm starting to see a sort of epic-ness to it. Some of the episodes, admittedly, are just epic train wrecks that you can't look away from: anything these guys touch seems to disintegrate into a bloody fiasco and nobody tells anybody the truth, ever, under any circumstances. But the last two episodes from Season 4 were classic Greek tragedy.

( More here, but spoileryCollapse )

I'm sure there are more analogies that can be made (Piney, for example, nags at me as being an archetypal figure but I can't put my finger on it), and I'd be interested to hear any that others have spotted or conjectured.

So it's turned out to be an interesting ride (no pun intended!), and I'm looking forward to next weekend when Season 5 starts with a whole new set of episodes to probe for classical/mythical allusions :)

Top Chef Just Desserts. I actually watched it twice last night just to see Seth do his huffy pouty meltdown thing. Spouse also observed that while on Iron Chef (which I'm not ashamed to admit I watch) some of them may in fact be gay, you'd never know it, whereas here it seems to be a casting requirement to have one in every season. (Sidebar: Iron Chef Cat Cora is in fact gay; she recently spoke out on that so-heartbreaking Tyler Clementi suicide.)

Sister Wives. Maybe because I've never been good at having female friends, I'm fascinated by these women who are such good buddies they manage to SHARE A MAN. What's that all about??

Teen Mom. Just for Macy. The rest of them are train wrecks but that girl seems to have her head on straight.

I really should cancel my cable. It's rotting my brain, and it's not like I have enough brain cells to be able to spare that many. (NB: The theory that killing off the weak brain cells makes you smarter turns out, sadly, to be flawed.)

Now that I've owned up to habits so disgraceful that none of my friends (either real life or virtual) will respect me ever again, I'm going back to my medieval history, comparative religion and Neil Gaiman. Just to prove that one can enjoy both ends of the intellectual spectrum without spontaneously combusting. Though I do feel a little flushed...

0 hrs, 0 words (monumental suckage, if only I could count the crap I write for work...)
(...46 days...)

Meme thing has infected me in the form of nursedarry Here's how it works:
A. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
B. Tag seven people to do the same.
C. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it."

And here's the results:

List of Randomness:
1. I love to ski and have safely made it down several double black diamond slopes (ok, it was 15 years ago, but still...)
2. My favorite "guilty pleasures" book is V. C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic. I'm now officially embarrassed at having admitted that.
3. I'm a kick-a** pool player and I own my own cue named Merlin.
4. I can recite the entire Monty Python parrot sketch from memory.
5. The sound of fingernails on a blackboard makes me curl up in a fetal position and shriek.
6. I won the county spelling bee three years running.
7. I can't watch the Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad, it upsets me too much.
8 (Bonus item). I'm rubbish at putting my clothes away.

Can I tag some of the same people my tagger tagged? (That sounds way more confusing than it is...) I'm going to go with yes, therefore I'm tagging kilter and ladyoneill along with annabird, were_duck, nuclearsugars and noeon, mostly because I'm really curious what they'll say :) That's only five er, six but hey, it's quality that counts, not quantity, right?

My reading in December outstripped my desire/spare time/attention span/dedication to writing about it, so herewith a very brief summary of the last of 2009 to get us up to speed:

It Could Happen Here (Judson) - prediction of collapse of the US due to gross economic inequity. Cites things like the French Revolution and the Great Depression as evidence that excessive economic disparity in a country leads to instability and therefore quite possibly to revolution.

Book of Live Dolls (Gates) - children's book; all the dolls in a village come to life and they and their "mommies" have adventures. OK, it's from the 1950s and it's hokey as hell, but I was sick and wanted mental baby food. This one, perhaps obviously, was a re-read of a childhood favorite; I can't think why I like it so much since I never played with dolls, but it's sweet in a daffy kind of way. (There are NO BOYS in it at all, apart from the main little girl's father!)

Day Watch (Lukyanenko) - second in the supernatural series translated from Russian. The books aren't exactly sequels in that the main characters aren't the same throughout but rather the focus of each story shifts from one character or set of characters to another; a better description would be a series of interlocking short stories or novellas. Fabulously complex, original, and engrossing (pretty much the polar opposite of the preceding book, now that I come to think about it).

The Left Hand of Darkness (LeGuin) - Hugo AND Nebula winner, a double header. Exploration (sort of) of gender and what happens when there isn't any as we define it. A groundbreaker in its day but it's a bit of a slog to read now; one wants less politics and more sociology.

Time of the Hunter's Moon (Holt) - Victoria Holt's gothic romances are one of my guilty pleasures, crammed with young pretty governesses, lonely moors, huge old manors with dark hallways and bloody histories, mysterious noblemen with suspiciously-deceased first wives, strange old women who drop elliptical hints, secrets and lies and (of course) rakes who Just Haven't Met The Right Woman. I'm embarrassed to admit how much I love them. (Reread)

Modern Magic (Alcott) - Continuing the gothic tradition, we have (again) mysterious governesses, previously unknown love children, cross-dressing, drugs, and death squads from India. Includes such immortal lines as
" 'Heaven bless hashish if its dreams end like this.' " These are no doubt the same stories that were "the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns" and are great fun, not only for themselves but also because it's so easy to picture Jo scribbling them in her garret.

Total books read in 2009: 99, about 70% new and 30% rereads.*

Whew. Caught up and ready to start 2010. Ooh, and on the writing front, have not one not two but THREE ideas for short stories. AND another writer who I very much respect has suggested I sub one of my pieces (with some minor polishing) to a pro magazine. w00t!!

(...51 days...)

* That does not count the 437 times I read "The Berenstain Bears' Picnic" to my 4-1/2 year old nephew. I think I have it memorized. "Mother Bear, put your apron away -- we are going to go on a picnic today!!!" Every time we got to the scene near the end where Poppa Bear is flipping out and waving his arms The Nephew would say, "Wait, I have to show this page to daddy, it's his favorite." Heh heh heh.

This book is definitely not Great Literature (lots of tell vs show, one-dimensional characters, etc, but the period details are excellent, which of course pleases Historian Me), but it's an epic page-turner nonetheless and I must admit I love it. It's like the British version of Gone with the Wind. Little orphaned Amber St. Clare, raised as a farmer's daughter in the tiny little town of Marygreen, sleeps/marries her way to the top and ends up rich, powerful, and mistress to Charles II. Shows what you can do with tawny hair, green eyes, perky tits, and a certain -- OK, a total -- lack of scruples. Unlike Scarlett O'Hara, she actually gets to sleep with the guy she obsesses over, but alas, it doesn't cure her (I've long thought that if Ashley had just schtupped Scarlett once she would have gotten over him) and eventually it leads her to do things ranging from foolish to downright cruel.

For most of it you feel at least a little sorry for her; like Scarlett, she gets what she thinks she wanted but finds out it isn't enough, and Lord Carlton comes across as a pretty much a total prick. She saves him from the plague, gives him a son, loves him for years despite his (and her own) infidelities, but the ungrateful dog won't marry her! And he keeps leading her on by telling her he's breaking off their affair and then letting her seduce him back. I'd forgotten the ending, though. By that point she's gotten so irrational you're rooting for Lord Carlton and Corinna, so the conclusion leaves you thinking, "My god, are these poor people never going to escape this obsessive psychopath??"

I did a little googling (ah, the wonders of technology!) and found out the book was famous in its time -- translated into ten languages, banned in 14 states, mentioned directly or indirectly in tons of radio and tv sketches, all kind of brouhaha. The first state to ban it was Massachusetts, for "70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, 7 abortions, and 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men." Ooh, so racy. And to think, Massachusetts now allows gay marriages. How times do change.