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March 11th, 2019
12:46 am
It was very very much A Weekend and I am starting the week the week fairly exhausted so that's great. But:
Watched Captain Marvel on Thursday evening and enjoyed it - was a fun movie, above average in my own personal MCU ranking but not way up top. When I got home I was like, that was nice, but I remember Brie Larson can really really really pack an emotional punch when she wants to, let's rewatch the trailer for Room, which ended in me staying up until 3AM to rewatch the entirety of the movie Room, which remains amazing.
On Friday I drove up to Haifa to meet a friend who is visiting from the US for a week. 70% of conversation was about babies, because this is where my Haifa friends are at, pregnant or with newborns. We met up on the Carmel, then drove down for a stroll on the beach - she lives in Boulder now, which is both inland and was apparently -16 degrees last week or something, and misses the Haifa beach a lot. It was lovely. The water was a beautiful shade of blue that day, sun shimmering on small tide pools between the rocks, and the rocks were all covered in algae that looked like a bright green muppet had exploded all over them but really you just wanted to lean down and pet the moss, it was so soft.
After, we met another friend at a cafe, where I had cauliflower patties and the most delicious orange cider; I love apple cider, but man, orange cider is a serious level up.
In the evening I went to friend #2's apt to hang out for a bit; her oldest kid knows me well enough that he remembers me now, and I think he likes me. There were strawberries and whipped cream, which were basically my pre-dinner snack, because for a late dinner, I met friend #3 and her husband at an Italian restaurant. It was great seeing them; I used to see them a lot in the center, but they had a (very) premature baby two months ago and spend every day at the hospital as he grows gram by gram; hopefully he'll be discharged in a few weeks. They are tired but in good spirits and seem to support each other very much, which is all I could hope for.
I slept at friend #1's airbnb; it was really good to see her. We hadn't seen each other since August, which is longer than at any time since I've known her, but in a sense it was also the most time we've gotten to spend together recently, her visiting sans-family. In the morning, we went down the mountain to share coffee and breakfast in what is apparently the hipster neighborhood of Haifa; we found a small cafe/bar with low ceilings and bright sunlight, with walls painted desert and turquoise and soft jazz playing and dogs waiting outside.
I was going to drive back south by the coast, but I'd heard there were flowers - and here is the important part - right by the parking lot of this park up on the mountain. Well, thought I. As long as it's, I mean, right there by the parking lot, might as well go up and check. So I drove up and parked and god, guys, the country is beautiful right now. Everything was green, and there were wildflowers everywhere - red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, white, the mountain overflowing with them, and grass and trees all around, and perfect cool-warm weather, and the view of the bay and the ocean below. After walking around for a bit, I found myself a tree and sat down with a notebook and brainstormed Purimgifts until I settled on an idea.
Drove back down after that, stopping at McD's for lunch because it's the only thing with a drivethru. The flowers from earlier had made me want to get some new plants, so I stopped by the nursery at Ramat Hasharon to buy some, and since my grandmother lives nearby, I checked if she was free and she was, so I dropped by for a quick coffee and hi. Apparently her boyfriend had just been hospitalized, which is DDD: for me but she didn't seem worried. Ironically, my friends' two month old (but really still minus one month old) baby and my grandmother's 93 year old boyfriend are now on the same medication and have the same side effects.
I got home around 5:30 PM, just in time to pot my new plants, burn a CD of In The Heights for the road, and leave to pick up sister and friends on our way to Jerusalem, where we had tickets for a local community theater production of In The Heights. Drove up to Jerusalem, got there in the nick of time, just managing to glimpse how pretty the walls are in between the traffic. I had such a fun time watching the show - both getting to learn the plot and story, but also being able to participate in that energy of live, non-profit community theather. There's something so raw and joyful there; it was closing night after a 6-show run, and I am very happy there was a large enough group of talented enough people to pull this off in English, in addition to everything.
Got home after 1PM, and it was a wonderful weekend, truly, but also I feel like I need another weekend after that. Work, alas, does not work that way; today was rough. But now I will go to sleep, and hope I will not wake up to online conversations that will make me want to tear my hair out about Gal Gadot's politics.
( just a few picsCollapse )
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April 27th, 2018
02:06 am - Unspoiled
I am going to Avengers tomorrow! I don't want to jinx it with only 12 hours to go, but I am pretty proud of the steps I've taken to avoid spoilers, which were basically: remove twitter and tumblr shortcuts from my phone so I wouldn't be tempted to check in, and basically not log into the internet for anything other than work, news, AO3, and like the two hours a night I spend binging on MCU cast members on late night shows or whatever. This is completely normal behavior.
ANYWAY: it's been fun, the excitement leading up to this movie. Like, my expectations for the movie itself are simultaneously high - that's the emotional part, not the logical one - and extremely, extremely low, which is my head.
Watching Cap 3 two years ago when I was in China was such a unique experience. I wrote about it here a few weeks after the fact, and I've just been thinking about it. Of course, back then I could thoroughly enjoy the thrill of the movie, having only 10% emotional investment in it. My emotional investment in certain MCU characters is currently closer to 500%; I guess we'll see to what extent I'm able to enjoy new canon, now that I have seen these characters written with incredible subtlety on AO3, and now that I care about some (and do not care at allll about others, who will probably get all of the screentime.)
...as you can see this is just me being on the internet talking to myself to avoid interaction that might be spoilery. I feel like I've been waiting for this forever, when in fact I have only been legitimately waiting for 24 hours - last night I was still at the office at midnight, which is when the movie was released here, and I was just like. The movie is 15 minutes away. Why don't I just GO.
ANYWAY. Clearly I need dinner and some sleep. I will leave you with three fics I have greatly enjoyed recently:
despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained) by ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/05efab35906ca58bad52faaa669f9c2adece7a28274747fd9376fa0c9c20f020/P2WlxyVijxKghG5s8cZWVEMdsf-ah7h03lyBT7tFit_V_A3GmtarRkU0BwhxH1t4tU1b0jTdbEFY:LdtlL8AQ7JSujCz2Uv1lcw) praximeter (Steve/Bucky, 71k words, explicit) - I saw recs for this fic (aka "the maskfic") pop up all over last week when the last chapter was posted and decided to click and boy howdy did I get sucked in. In a sense this is a fairly traditional post-CA:TWS "Winter Soldier recovers" fic with a twist - in this AU, the mask was grafted onto Bucky's face, so during CA:TWS Steve never discovers that the Winter Soldier is actually Bucky. Team Steve manage to capture Bucky after the movie ends, and it's the road to recovery from there. It's got a really great Steve and Sam and Bucky and Tony and I could not stop reading this fic for all of Sunday, it was the best(/worst, depending on how productive I wanted to be with the rest of my life, really.).
Better Than to Bend by silentwalrus (Steve/Bucky, Steve/Bucky/Peggy, 23,000 words, rated mature but honestly explicit)
In which Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is tired, hungry and completely failing at not sticking it in the crazy. Also there’s a war going on or something.
aka world war threesome. Fear these queers.
This fic is actually just the very short part 1 of another fic that I've seen recced everywhere and is next on my list - If They Haven't Learned Your Name, the 236k sequel. But the prequel's all I've read so far, and it was just so lovely and warm and, I feel weird describing a WWII fic as having good vibes, but. It's just a really good WWII fic about Bucky outing himself tot he Howlies and how they bond as a unit and also some really hot and lovely OT3 and a really good Bucky voice, which I look forward to reading more of.
under a golden january sun by newsbypostcard (Steve/Bucky, 17,000 words, mature) - written before IW comes out so no spoilers, and I don't know how canon compliant this will be after tomorrow, but it's just a story that takes place between Black Panther and Infinity War. Has good Steve, Bucky, Shuri, and is mostly just exactly the kind of Steve/Bucky fic I wanted to read after watching the BP post-credits scene.
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February 7th, 2018
04:47 am - working late, lately working
You know when it's the end of the day and you take a hot shower and compose a post and you know, you really know, that when you get out of the shower you will once again be too tired to even think about opening your laptop and jotting it down?
NO. Fuck it. Post, I told myself in the shower. Don't make it into a thing. Don't start with another lament about never posting (already, I fail). Don't try hard because you'll psyche yourself out of it and also, it's 3:30AM and you need to sleep. Just post something and go to sleep.
After successfully leaving [new job] before 8PM for the last two days, today I left work at 9PM when the power mysteriously went out at the office, took a break for dinner and Supergirl, and proceeded to work from home until 3AM, and I am... not saving the world, okay. There are reasons for these hours, and I've been saying they're temporary, and I'm really hoping for temporary because obviously these kind of hours are something I neither can not want to do in the long run, and I'm just... waiting for temporary to end.
For now, I do love the people I'm working with, but: weeks have been long, and I miss having free time outside of weekends and also vitamin D.
*
In other news:
1. I have tix for Black Panther next week and I am excited.
1b. Steve Rogers is strutting around with exposed wrists in the new Avengers trailer and I am psyched.
2. The Olympics are about to start and I am SUPER psyched. Tell me about people you are rooting for? Due to the NHL being dicks I don't actually know any of the men's Olympic hockey players except like three, and I don't follow figure skating fandom, and I definitely don't know any other participants. So if you have any favs or are rooting for narratives, please share. I will root with you.
3. Apparently I will be in London again in late March - at a conference around the 19-21st, and I'm extending it to stay over the weekend, the 22-24th. If anyone wants to meet up, or take a day trip outside London, or is fine with me crashing over but I will survive either way, do hit me up :-)
THERE. Post. Boom.
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December 6th, 2017
03:30 am - Things I've enjoyed recently
Things I've enjoyed recently other than the Photography Marathon:
1. EVERYTHING BRITISH ROYALTY. I don't know, guys. I watched the entirety of The Crown, then rewatched The King's Speech and The Queen because idk I guess I just need more Elizabeth in my life? What even. I started watching Victoria too, on a roll and all, but quit pretty quickly; it was hard switching to a teen-aged queen so quickly after the maturity of The Crown.
2. It's possible that the sudden royalty obsession came from the recent royal engagement news, but it's EQUALLY AS LIKELY that it came from either
(a) my watching Netflix's A Christmas Prince - the actual dumbest perfectest but truly bad (yet wonderful) holiday romance novel film, which had every single trope: American journalist goes undercover at a European Palace as a tutor to the young princess, in order to get a scoop on whether the Prince intends to marry by the end of the year, which he must in order to inherit. Will she and the Prince end up falling in love? WHO KNOWS REALLY.
or
(b) my watching the BBC's new Howards End, which boils down to Hayley Atwell being utterly gorgeous as [Peggy Carter's mom] Margaret Schlegel and Matthew Macfadyen being finally hot as Mr. Wilcox, though I don't think I'm actually supposed to ship them as much as I did. Just, British period dramas where everything is delivered with such restraint doesn't always get to me but with these two. Like, gah, look at the proposal scene - in text, or if you will, at least until someone takes it down, on youtube. They've known each other for a while and were neighbors and had two platonic yet chaperoned lunches and now he's showing her a house which she's considering leasing and as she suspected, boom, proposal. I love her character here, and they just play it so well. Not to mention later on, when due to the circumstances [of him being a douchebag] he's all, "I have the honor now to release you of your engagement," and man does he deliver the line.
Anyway, it's a well-made period drama that isn't subversive and I'm not sure is justifiable other than for the purposes of giving Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard as her sister good parts to play, but I enjoyed it greatly.
[After reading some more about E.M. Forester who wrote the book but whom I knew literally nothing about, I read The Machine Stops (text), his short story from 1909 about future technology an essentially the internet. I am not a big classic scifi or short story reader so for all I know it was super par for the course, but for 1909, it's a pretty interesting read.]
ANYWAY - as a post script to all this royalty talk, I'll just take a moment to rec ![[personal profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/f16a35eed000fbf0a24a10e7d5a507e711726388e7db9f58b2c840b7764cc213/P2WlxyVijxKghG5s8cZWVEMdsf-ah7h0yFmVCbZBitHe5BHQgcnrB1ghT056GQJiv05e0zTaZg1RFEYV0g0o-lRBm3nIevQ:AFL67trygPerIk5Py4zZMQ) copperbadge's God Save the Queen, because a Captain America/WWII-era Elizabeth crossover needed to happen at some point, of course, so it did.
3. For Hebrew-subtitle-readers - I'd heard good things about Tzufit Grant's Avudim/Lost and I've only watched the three-episode story opening this season but damn, it's good. The show is an investigative documentary helping people track and reunite with missing relatives, and the season opens with Lost in Morocco: a 76-year-old old Jewish-Moroccan woman who immigrated to Israel with her two kids in the '80s is looking for her four eldest children, who were kidnapped/taken away by the authorities in Casablanca in the '60s. It is a wild ride, and I'm looking forward to watching more episodes when I'm in the right kind of mood.
4. Okay I'm going to spare you most of my unending MCU cast feelings because I'll never stop if I start, but I'll just say that: a) recent photos of Sebastian Stan not just with gray stubble but with actual graying hair are driving me crazy, I assume a byproduct of being in my thirties, b) I just listened to the two 2016 episodes (1, 2) where Anna Faris had Chris Evans and Jenny Slate (and Chris Pratt) on her podcast, and this is like the flirtiest thing I've ever listened to and a joy to listen to if you have any interest in these people, though I'm 100% sure they wouldn't have recorded it had they known they were right on the cusp of dating. Having said that, I will also point you towards the Evans/Slate tag on AO3 which has only 2 works on it but both of them are fanfuckingtastic.
5. Romantic comedies are not so much a well-made genre these days but I watched Home Again, which came out this September, and could not wipe the delighted grin off my face the entire way through. Reese Witherspoon plays a single mother of two, who has a single night of partying on her 40th birthday and ends up with guys in their mid-twenties, best friends and aspiring filmmakers, living in her guesthouse, one of whom is her love interest. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and something to go terribly wrong, but while the plot has some ~obstacles for them to overcome, most of this movie is just really fun and sweet and her having three young hot guys who adore her and admire her and get along well with her kids and it's like 90 minutes of delightful wish-fulfillment and I loved it a lot. Here's the trailer; the first half of the trailer sets it up and that's all you need, really.
6. Just random youtube videos that made me happy, like this video of Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo completing intimacy challenges which I feel should just in general be mandatory filmed exercises for all actors and characters I like, or seeing Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet on Ellen, which - I was not super into the prospect of this movie (Call Me By Your Name) or these actors, but after seeing them interact on camera it's hard not to root for everything about this project to succeed. And okay now I've actually watched a clip of a scene and yes, definitely want to see this movie.
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November 3rd, 2017
05:27 pm - Things for the weekend
1. Watched Thor: Ragnarok last night and enjoyed it a ton, as expected. Feel free to talk at me, or headcanon me, or... whatever you want. It's not a spoiler that Bruce Banner/Hulk are in this movie, and as one who does not usually enjoy his portrayal of Bruce nor Bruce's character in general in the MCU, after the movie I immediately re-recced a friend what is not only an amazing Bruce fic but really one of the best fics I've ever read, the kind of fic that if I had to gently introduce a newcomer to fanfic via Avengers gen, I would 100% use this and I'm sure it would blow their minds. It is an old fic but the fic that made me not only like but love Bruce, at least this iteration of him, and I know I'm late to discovering it like I am to most MCU things but nevertheless here it is: the Responsible Science series by lettered, and specifically, parts four (The Kids Aren't Alright - age regression, gen) and five (Let's Stop the Time Warp (Again) - groundhog day, gen). Those are the only two in the series I read but I couldn't stop thinking about them for days afterwards - such a good team dynamic between Bruce, Steve, Tony, Pepper and the other Avengers. So if you're in the mood for Bruce, post Thor, I so so so recommend it.
2. I'm in the middle of a Stranger Things season 1 rewatch. I watched season 2 last weekend, threw up a lot but not all of my immediate feelings in kitajmaze's post here, then went back to season 1 to rewatch all the fun character bits, the binged on cast interviews (and man do I need to find a way to watch more full episodes of Beyond Stranger Things), read as much fic as existed within the first few days of the season's release, and then roped another friend to watch season 1 by promising to watch it with her, so we've been going through season 1 again in full. So uh. As you might be able to tell: this show + my heart = true love.
2.5 Speaking of Stranger Things, let me just throw this prompt out there and beg for someone in the universe to pick it up, because just imagine: the Winter Soldier escaping in the '80s. A group of kids in Hawkins, Indiana finding him in the woods. Recognizing him as Bucky Barnes and having faith that there's still good in him. The Winter Soldier meeting Eleven.
.................I'm just saying. *gets down on knees and prays for this fic to exist*
3. I had two job interviews last week that didn't go amazingly by I'm glad to get the practice of interviewing, after not having done it for years. Got rejected from one, and a homework assignment from the other, which I'm halfway through, so that's nice. Sent my CV to a few other places this week too, and had two lunches with also unemployed friends who are in a similar place as I am, both of which were helpful, motivation-wise.
4. I was going to go to Haifa this morning, but all of the signs warned against it: the trains were cancelled. Then we discovered there'd be heavy traffic because of the Haifa marathon. Then whatsapp crashed. So it's a good thing I didn't go, and instead spent the morning watching outdoor jazz at Ben Gurion Avenue with iced coffee and fruit salad in the sun.
5. I have more weekend plans and coffee and ice cream, all of which are nice. Well, the Rabin memorial assembly tomorrow evening is perhaps not the same category of nice, but if it'll be as big as the event planners are hoping it will be - well. I really hope it'll be big.
6. OH I ALMOST FORGOT. This is just to say - two weeks ago I watched a musical that was, like, WRITTEN FOR ME OKAY - for me and also for a whole bunch of you, I bet, and I wish you could all be here to see it with me. It's titled King Saul and YES IT IS A MUSICAL ABOUT KING SAUL, you can watch the trailer here, and it starts with the people asking Samuel for a king and ends with Saul's death on Mount Gilboa and David's lamentation and god, it was so brilliantly written and performed with such a talented cast. I had a few small issues with it - their David was not quite my favorite iteration of David (he was manipulative and seductive but didn't quite have the heart that my favorite versions of David, which might be imaginary, do) - but it was just so freaking good. I would totally buy the album if they had one. My face hurt from smiling by the time the show was over, not necessarily because it was funny the whole way through, but because I could hardly suppress the squeeful grin I had on my face the entire time. And Saul was never one of my favorite characters, but oh, man, did I feel for him here, for better or worse (and of course there was worse). Poor guy only wanted to fund his asses :(
The production plays about once a month and if you find yourself in the area, I do recommend it.
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August 21st, 2017
10:35 am - Notes on The Defenders
Which I come at from the point of view of someone who has only seen Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and the first episodes of Daredevil (which I might one day catch up on) and Iron Fist (which I definitely will not).
So:
( Spoilers for all episodes of The DefendersCollapse )
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July 8th, 2017
06:14 am - Spiderman: Homecoming (sorry Spider-Man SERIOUSLY what is this spelling)
I will be frank there is no serious analysis going on under the cut, mostly strings of words and punctuation marks:
( Spiderman spoilers under the cut. SPIDERMAN. Je REFUSE, MARVEL. JUST SAY NO TO WEIRD SPELLING.Collapse )
I'm probably missing a lot but at least I got that out of my system. Fic incorporating this new canon into the MCU, I AM WAITING FOR YOU.
Last thing - I will just say it was a delightful experience watching this movie in the US. I know academically that US audiences are more engaged, especially in comedies/superhero films (from what I've heard), and this turned out to be SO TRUE here. I watched this in a full house theater, and there was not just laughter at various jokes, but sighs and gasps and excited rustling when the movie warranted it, and it was so much fun. The only experience I've had like that in Israel was watching Wonder Woman on opening night, which had the audience erupting in spontaneous applause multiple times, which was super gratifying and basically never happens in Israel.
*icon does not reflect my reaction the movie but is the only teenaged-superhero icon I have*
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June 7th, 2017
04:53 am - ART: "A Bedtime Story" for Cap reverse BB (Sam Wilson, MCU)
---> following my previous post, FINALLY, I also participated in the Cap Reverse Big Bang as an artist, and made digital art for the first time. The fic that was written for the art was:
A Bedtime Story (MCU, 5200 words, Sam/Steve/Bucky, gen) - Sam, Steve, and Bucky tells their kids the story of how their family came to be.
Thumbnail! I haven't done this in such a long time I don't remember what thumbnails are for.
And here is the art below the cut, or here on tumblr:
( also titled Sammmmmmm.jpg in all the draft foldersCollapse )
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August 24th, 2016
04:33 pm - it must be niiiiice (to be able to think of normal titles to posts WHY ARE TITLES really)
HELLO! I cannot believe and am angry at myself for not having posted anything for four freaking months, and also for starting a post with as boring a line as "why haven't I posted for so long" blah.
I'm back in Tel Aviv now - got back from China just over two weeks ago, and it's so hard to even try to summarize it. While I was there, my schedule consisted of, usually, long enough work days that by the time I got off, I had neither the energy nor the language skills to find activities to do in the evenings, and just stayed in with TV and internet most days. On the weekends, I usually stayed in one day, and managed to drag myself out and be touristy the other day.
I have a ton of great photos - about half of which are on Facebook, and half of which I still need to go over and post hopefully in a timely fashion - and I also documented a liiiiitle bit of my time there on - sadly only five - medium posts:
The first posted a few days after I arrived, already linked here
The second about springtime in Beijing (with photos yay), also already linked
The third about the experience of going to the movies (specifically Cap 3: Civil War - the only movie I have watched in thaeters since March)
The fourth, about actually socializing a little bit and like, going out and doing things That One Week
The fifth, about five extremely questionable choices I have made including oh yes buying a 9000 PIECE PUZZLE WHAT. WAS I THINKING.
A questionable choice not mentioned in the above choice was the terrible, terrible decision to: "Oh hey, I haven't read any ![[personal profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/d5e9ff5f15fed6096465ef509428594f35f00fbe13a463d6687e02c703bde4da/P2WlxyVijxKghG5s8cZWVEMdsf-ah7h0zACGVbdSgsfa9wzc2863DwUvDUA4DUR9vQ1cmDjQdwpRBB0Zjh0psVYBjDXS:KD4-C6iseHePI6cEfsxixg) copperbadge fic in years, why don't I check out his AO3 page and see if there's anything good to catch up on!"
One giant mistake later, I had read 88k words of Steve/Tony MCU fic, and for the first time in my life was actually interested in Steve Rogers as a character. Two or three months later, I have consumed thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of words in an endless wormhole of MCU fic, catching up on like 5 years of excellent writing and ugh. I have like 100 open tabs + a to-read list that's pages and pages long. IT'S A HARD LIFE.
For the record, during this time I have rewatched all MCU movies, finally watched Agent Carter, and have been reading... basically any permutation of Steve, Tony, Bucky, Sam, Rhodey, Natasha and Thor that came well-recced. So that was... uh, is... time consuming. As you can imagine.
I have a whole bunch of recs - for fics, for books (...not that many), for TV and films, that I would like to make, and maybe I will actually end up making, if my self-discipline ever shows up again! So far, in the three-ish weeks I've been back, it's mostly been a lot of unwinding, both outside of work but also at work, which is what I should really start to try and get a grip on.
I have been kind-of-but-not-entirely up to speed on reading my flist this entire time. It's weird, cause I don't feel like I've been gone from the internet at all - I haven't - but my levels of interaction have decreased to almost nothing. I have become - I am only just now realizing - a lurker. I will definitely strive to change that, because for me, it's a pretty frustrating state of being - flailing and talking is communication is one of the best parts of the fandom experience for me, and I have been very, very lacking in it.
FINALLY I will just mention that yesterday I went to a pub quiz with a friend who is visiting from Seattle so I named our team Washington On Your Side and was so incredibly pleased with myself for the name. I was hoping someone would recognize the reference but alas, other than some members of my team, no one else did. Also was very happy to have gotten "Who was the Merchant of Venice?" right, when the actual quizmaster got it wrong and switched to our answer upon appeal, yay.
Okay. Hi again! *waves*
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