Poem for Monday

Oh! Where Do Fairies Hide Their Heads?
By Thomas Haynes Bayly

OH! where do fairies hide their heads
   When snow lies on the hills,
When frost has spoil’d their mossy beds,
   And crystalliz’d their rills?
Beneath the moon they cannot trip
   In circles o’er the plain;
And draughts of dew they cannot sip
   Till green leaves come again.

Perhaps, in small, blue diving-bells,
   They plunge beneath the waves,
Inhabiting the wreathed shells
   That lie in coral caves;
Perhaps, in red Vesuvius,
   Carousals they maintain;
And cheer their little spirits thus,
   Till green leaves come again.

When they return there will be mirth,
   And music in the air,
And fairy wings upon the earth,
   And mischief everywhere.
The maids, to keep the elves aloof,
   Will bar the doors in vain;
No key-hole will be fairy-proof,
   When green leaves come again.

--------

Yesterday's snow continued until well past noon today, causing the cancellation of Hebrew school and our older son's planned meeting with the kids with whom he is working on his science project, so we stayed close to home for shoveling, snow forts and enjoying the scenery. Although it snowed for hours, the temperature hovered slightly above freezing, so there were icicles melting and refreezing in spectacular patterns along the upper branches of trees and on the deck furniture. Supposedly we got about two inches of snow, but it looked like more at first as it was the thick, fluffy kind, and then later looked like less as it was falling onto thin layers of ice that it cracked into puddles. Later we had dinner with my parents, who pulled one of their usual passive-agressive bullshit routines.

My mother is flying to my sister's a week from Wednesday, and apparently has decided to take an 11 a.m. plane. She needs a ride to the airport (which means walking her in and helping her with all the excess crap she always brings, including more presents than my sister's kids want or need -- we both have an ongoing thing with my mother about the fact that she gives our kids gifts every single time she sees them, to the point where my younger son -- who's as much a pack rat as his parents -- can barely walk through his room, and she sees him at least once a week). My father asked ME to do HIM a favor and drive her to the airport, because my mother will NEVER risk being the bad guy by saying that SHE needs something (and also my mother sometimes turns me down when I request help with my kids because she has manicure appointments, but if my sister asks her to go to New York for a week while SHE is in the Bahamas with her husband, my mother goes, because it's her big chance to see her granddaughters).

Now, Wednesday afternoons tend to be a hectic around here for a whole host of reasons, and Wednesday lunchtimes are pretty consistently my time with my friends -- the only chance I have to chill in the middle of the week because Thursday is an early morning and an absolutely insane carpool day; it's not like I'm my mother and get a manicure every Tuesday, etc. so it's not like I routinely would blow her off in the middle of the week. Taking her to the airport will pretty much take up all my time from the time the kids are off until I have to get home for the afternoon rush, and I'll have to break plans I already have with people. Plus I'll have to work in the evening without having had any down time during the day.

I told my father (since he's the one who asked) that I had plans, and he gave me the whole Jewish guilt "Oh, fine, I'll find someone else to do it" as if, of course, my schedule should be at their disposal because god knows whatever else I might be doing is worthless in their eyes, since I am neither an attorney nor a good housekeeper. Now, I am annoyed at my father, but I am much more angry at my mother, because this is a classic example of how she operates. She needs a ride to the airport. She let my father launch the discussion; she stayed TOTALLY SILENT when I said it's the one day that I had plans that week; she didn't say a word when my father started in with the guilt routine, though she'll often intercede to be the "good guy" on behalf of one of my kids even when my kid is totally in the wrong, thus making my father blow up at her; and I didn't even get a fucking thank you from her when I said fuck it, fine.

The kicker is that my husband is so used to them acting this way that he couldn't even figure out why I was so pissed off that I didn't say two words while we were at their house. He figured that if I was really, REALLY upset, I would have had the argument with my father and allowed him to yell and my mother to do her tearful poor me routine in front of my children, which is something I try to avoid except when it's a matter of really enormous importance, which apparently my schedule must not be even to me. Arrrrgh.

We came home and watched Pompeii: The Last Day on the Discovery Channel with the kids, who stayed up late since their school start is delayed two hours tomorrow (causing consternation for me as I have a 10:30 dentist appointment and am not sure how I can be there and at an elementary school at the same time). We had taken the kids to see the exhibit on the Stabiae excavation at the Smithsonian last summer, so they knew something about the eruption of Vesuvius, and while I sometimes get annoyed with historical reenactments in a history or science show, they were completely engrossed, so I guess in this case it was a good thing (though now they are a little worried about visiting Seattle when Mt. Rainier might be active, heh). Little of the information was new to me except the details on how the people in Herculaneum died, and I probably could have done just as well without knowing. I liked the computer visualizations of what it would look like if Vesuvius erupted now, and some of the details on the excavations, though I wish there had been more archaeology and less speculation on why they found the people as they found them -- the how and why of the speculation. Still, it made for a pretty good "story" though I couldn't help imagining the one we're undoubtedly going to get on the tsunami, very similar in structure.

Anyway, sorry about the rant and now I am very tired and have not looked at my friends list for two days...I have no real excuse today, as other than writing two articles I spent most of my time around the house, taking pictures of the kids in the snow, counting icicles and posting the fic I posted earlier because the next part is nudging me to write it and it's very different in tone and I just wanted this bit out there so I had some idea whether it would even float. Any time I have posted a multi-parter, the amount of feedback has dropped off dramatically from section to section, until I felt like only ten people were following it down the line, and from that standpoint as well as being sure HP:HBP is going to wipe out canon as I know and imagine it, I really don't want to start anything that goes on and on. I want a clear sense of why I am writing the chapters I'm writing and how I could curb them if necessary. Okay, enough babble, and hope everyone has had a great weekend without petty annoyances!

Trees in front of our house covered with snow and ice in the late afternoon sunshine.


This is what the branches looked like around 10 a.m. before the sun came out, while the snow was still falling in fine powder.


Before the sun, the snow stuck to the cedar shakes on the side of the roof in lovely cotton-ball puffs.


The snow clung more tenaciously to the evergreens than the deciduous branches when it started to melt.


My children built the Two Towers in the back yard. Sort of.


The cats were watching outside shoveling between the vans, but when they realized that I was about to take their picture of course they had to turn around and pose.

Poem for Sunday

A Haiku
By Basho
Translated by Robert Hass

     Winter solitude --
in a world of one color
     the sound of wind.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Book World, on epigrams, haiku and other short-form poetry, "the particular pleasure in how a very few words can slow us down, a paradoxical joy in the slowing down of time achieved by swiftness." Here is the "candidly lovesick" Meleagros translated by Dudley Fitts:

O Fingernail of Heliodora,
Surely Love sharpened you, surely Love made you grow:
Does not your lightest touch transfix my heart?

--------

It's been snowing in fits and starts since late this afternoon, and while there is almost no accumulation, the mere fact of it makes me sort of hibernate. Before it started, we went to Huntley Meadows to see the wetlands iced over, which was lovely -- several groups of geese flying in and landing on the ice, a lone and apparently confused tadpole-looking creature in one of the rare pools of water, and a heron flying across the horizon at the edge of the park. We did not see deer, but we did see their tracks. And the muskrat were either hibernating or, if muskrat do not hibernate, just hiding someplace warm.

Otherwise my simple pleasures were discussing Lemony Snicket with my younger son, who is reading the tenth book -- I think he read seven of the books this week -- and trying to explain to my older son why his father was watching the SNL cowbell sketch with Christopher Walken (link here) and howling hysterically. Also, on the way to Huntley Meadows which required a stop at the library to return books, I read the February 4th Entertainment Weekly -- the Oscar issue, in which they made some annoying predictions, but they also interviewed host Chris Rock, who made me smile by saying, "My new thing after seeing Alexander is that only Russell Crowe should be in period pieces. Even if the movie's about something that happened three weeks ago, they should hire Russell Crowe. He's just better than everybody."

GIP by , part of my recruitment into Highlander love (because who wouldn't want to do it with Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, really -- Methos is so my dream alter ego here). And this is a good segue into raves!

I suspect that really expected me to rant about people who can't tell the difference between Penn vs. Penn State rather than rave, but I have never been terribly upset about this...except that I don't know anything about the proud history of the Nittany Lions because I grew up around Michigan fans. Pennsylvania State University is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year -- next month in fact -- after being created by a charter from 1855 governor James Pollock, and it's a great public university. Penn, on the other hand, was founded by Benjamin Franklin and opened its doors in 1751, a private school with the intention not of focusing on clerical education but on public service. I believe Penn's is the oldest med school in the US and everyone who went there knows about ENIAC, the first electronic computer. The former is in Harrisburg, the latter in Philadelphia; the former has the Lions, the latter the Quakers which are not allowed to play in bowl games by definition because Ivy League schools don't participate in football playoffs (though Penn's basketball team often wins the Ivy title and gets to go to the NCAA tournament). So both these schools have a lot to be proud of, even if the Quakers have much better school songs! *g*

wanted me to rave about swans, which is not easy because I really know next to nothing about them -- unlike ducks and geese and herons and egrets, which I have on many occasions observed up close, I have mostly seen swans ornamentally and from a distance. But I associate them with two places that I adore: Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, and Stratford, Ontario, home of the Shakespeare festival where and I used to go every summer when we lived in the midwest and where, on our honeymoon, we went canoeing in the midst of the swans that float so gracefully on the water flowing past the theatre complex. So I associate swans with Shakespeare, travel and being very happy.

wanted me to rave about outdoor activities in the DC area, and wanted me to rave about Baltimore, and I feel like the best thing I could do for both of them is to refer them to my photo pages and tell them to look at places we've gone in the area. Huntley Meadows, where we went today, is one of my favorite outdoor spots around, a Fairfax County park in northern Virginia. Great Falls, from which I often post photos of the Potomac River seen from both sides, is just one of a great many national parks in the greater Washington area. In Baltimore I tend to favor the waterfront and the area around the zoo, both of which have historical buildings, maritime history and a number of good places for children, but Baltimore is full of wonderful historic districts and writers' houses and universities, plus the B&O Railroad Museum. Probably I should go collect links I've posted in the past!

A flock of geese flying in at Huntley Meadows Park in Fairfax County, Virginia (you can see how it looked in June here).


The geese in the air met up with the gaggle already on the ice. We also saw a heron fly around the perimeter of trees at the far edge of the wetlands, but it landed too far away for me to attempt to photograph.


There was a great deal of evidence on the ice that there had been more waterfowl -- it was warmer earlier in the week, and the slushy snow had apparently refrozen when the temperatures dropped, with footprints from deer and things with paws as well -- probably dogs, though technically it is illegal to bring dogs out onto the boardwalks or in the wetlands.


Back in the woods, the snow looked as if it had never melted; I doubt enough sunlight got through.


Nonetheless there was a lot of evidence that the ice was not solid -- big bubbles visible beneath the surface and running water in places.


The patterns of the crystals were gorgeous.

1) and 2) : I hope that you both got booted and recovered quickly, and that it's not that you're pissed off me for what I had to say about 1) grad school and 2) Snape. I must go to bed now, and am bailing on AIM, and feel badly!

Poem for Saturday

The Butterfly
By Pavel Friedman
Translated by Hana Volavkova

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
        against a white stone. . . .

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly 'way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it wished to
         kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live in here,
        in the ghetto.

--------

By request, the title poem of I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of poems and drawings by the children of Terezin Concentration Camp. 15,000 children passed through Terezin between 1942 and 1944. Less than 100 survived. This poet died in Auschwitz in 1944.

I've no idea where Friday went. Despite not getting any work done, I didn't leave the house till three, at which point I had to run around all over the place to pick up one son, get the other to a birthday party, take the first out to dinner before coming home to review Enterprise, and I wanted to be here an hour early so we could watch "Journey To Babel" before "Babel One" so the comparisons would be fresh. I must say that this week's original series derivation worked a thousand times better for me than last week's, and ten times better than the week before. This is in part because of Jeffrey Combs and Shran's awesome antennae, and in part because of the slashy-subtext moment of the season so far, in which Trip laments that there's nothing between himself and T'Pol in case Malcolm wants to make his move on her, and Malcolm insists that it's not that he's interested in T'Pol at all, honest! I wish I dared to write in a review that T'Pol should really be with Archer, who is so much better suited to her and vice versa in so many ways, and then maybe Tucker could make Reed the happiest boy in Starfleet.

Stupid thought: Archer/T'Pol reminds me of Harry/Hermione. Tucker/T'Pol reminds me of Ron/Hermione. In both cases I prefer Couple #1 to Couple #2. Now must figure out exactly who it is I identify with...in both cases I think the women are smarter than the men, but less so in in Couples #1 to Couples #2, and I also find nothing personally sexy about the guys in Couples #2 even though I think they're both nice enough guys...just not interesting to me that way at all. And I do suppose it's stupid to be drawing analogies between HP and anything ST, anyway. But it leads into a nice segue for the first of the Friday memes:

: What five crossovers would you like to see?
I really do not like crossovers, almost never read them, and -- with the exception of one absolutely brilliant X-Files/The West Wing crossover fic where Bartlet has to figure out what to do about Mulder officially being dead -- really haven't saved any. But if I did:
1. X-Files/VR5. It seems so obvious that Mulder and Scully should have figured out what happened to Sydney and brought her back. Also, X-Files/La Femme Nikita, because it also seems obvious that Mulder and Scully should know what that particular world government conspiracy is up to.
2. The Prophecy/Harry Potter. Because I have a very fucked-up desire to see Viggo Mortensen's Lucifer getting it on with Jason Isaacs' Lucius Malfoy. Now stop laughing, it would be SO EFFING HOT.
3. Sharpe/Master and Commander. This is really a no-brainer, isn't it? Jack Aubrey has to transport Sharpe and the Chosen men somewhere. Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany and Sean Bean all get naked and go swimming. Oh, and there should probably be some kind of Napoleonic war plot, too.
4. Mission: Impossible/Space: 1999. And another no-brainer. Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter (Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) get fed up with being secret government agents, enroll in the space program and become John Koenig and Helena Russell (also Martin Landau and Barbara Bain). Bonus points if you can work Buffy's Drusilla (Juliet Landau) in as their daughter.
5. Voyager/Space: 1999. This is fan artist Yul Tolbert's fault. You know the episode where Chakotay keeps seeing the reflection of the moon to tell him that he's dreaming? He drew a cartoon where the Moonbase Alpha crew kept seeing Voyager to tell them that they were dreaming. It's a perfect concept, heh, and just silly enough that it does not hit my serious crossover squick.

: F'ing F'ing F'er
1. Do you use profanity?
Hell yes!
2. What are your favorite words of frustration?
Fuck, Shit, or, if the kids are right there, Giant Penis (this never fails to get a laugh).
3. Did your parents ever swear in front of you?
My mother, pretty much never. My father, regularly. My grandfather, in Yiddish.
4. Do you think that films should be rated based on the language they use?
I think racial epithets and misgynistic language should be rated more strongly than the F word, which every second grader has heard. The fact that a film can get an R rating because of repeated use of the F word when violence is rarely a factor in bumping up a PG-13 to an R seems quite ridiculous to me. I would never rate a movie NC-17 based on language, though; it should be up to parents rather than the MPAA what children can hear.
5. If you could curse out someone right now, who would it be?
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, whose columns piss me off so often that I can't figure out why I ever read that paper's editorial page. Know your enemies, I guess.

: Donation
1. What blood group are you?
O+, the most common.
2. Do you give blood? Why/why not?
I have in the past. Last time I passed out for a good long while, and now am being chicken.
3. Are you listed as an organ donor? Again, why/why not?
I am.
4. Would you donate an organ or other part of your body (eg bone marrow) while still alive?
I've been tested to be a marrow donor and my sister actually gave marrow. I've never been called.
5. Would you consider leaving your body to medical science? Or maybe just parts of your body?
I don't want to be a medical student's cadaver. I'd be happy for my organs to be recycled.

I so, so knew this about , and in particular:

Jobs for your LJ Friends by brianwarnersgrl
Username
are you sure you want to know?
positive?
ok this person is a hooker:	thingsunseen
this person is a wrestler:	seelechen
this person is in a famous band:	ghazalah
this person is the singer of that band:	vaverine
this person will be the future president in 2026:	annmarwalk
this person is a babymaker:	dellastarr
this person is a drug dealer:	eemilyvr1
this person is a stripper:	aesc
and of course we all knew they would be a nun	pitchblackrose
Quiz created with MemeGen!

They're saying right now on the news that Sammy Sosa is going to be on the Orioles next year if he passes his physical! Whoo! I've been a Sosa fan since we lived in Chicago before our older son was born, having seen him on both the White Sox and Cubs.

I owe raves on swans, Baltimore, Penn vs. Penn State and outdoor activities in the DC area but those must wait till tomorrow as I am about to drop and have to rewrite an article tomorrow that I lost tonight when my computer insisted on rebooting without the familiar "Do you want to save your work first?" box.

Comments on this entry are in the locked entry before as there is discussion of stuff there I no longer wish to remain public.

Poem for Friday

Shema
By Primo Levi
Translated by Ruth Feldman And Brian Swann

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

--------

posted this poem. I was going to post one from I Never Saw Another Butterfly that was more directly about the ghetto and the camp but this one hit me so hard that I needed it today. I couldn't watch the news -- not because of the Holocaust coverage, but because of the Iraq coverage and, more to the point, the non-coverage of Sudan and places where saying "never again" on Yom Ha'Shoah always makes me feel like an enormous hypocrite. And I don't even want to get started thinking about Israel and Palestine tonight or I'll get too stressed out to sleep. I saw several people posting photos of memorials or flowers, but this is the image that sticks with me...actually this is the current, cleaned-up sanitized image. The actual images are not something I would post without a warning and cut, even though I think they absolutely have to be seen, because I have no words.

Am not ranting, as there is already more than enough of that around here. But I will rave. Surely you know the rules by now from other people's journals: Comment with any subject that you would like me to rave about (I reserve the right to reject certain topics out-of-hand, like what a great job Dubya is doing or why Kathryn Janeway is the greatest female Trek character ever). I don't swear to rave long, but I do swear to rave loud. *g*

Today was pretty quiet, other than lunch with my Mistress who has promised me more lunch and Harry/Draco recs next week if I behave, some necessary shopping in the mall where we met, the usual Thursday carpool insanity and sitting on younger son's head to get the spelling homework done this evening, after which I needed an hour of Dawson's Creek to decompress. Was depressed writing articles about UPN's future for TrekToday -- hadn't realized that Veronica Mars was being considered for cancellation, I thought they'd been talking about bumping it up to CBS because it was so good! Then tonight relatives called (, will you forgive me? The phone was not free until nearly midnight!) Also, you know what a whiny bitch I was two days ago? I should have realized that it was PMS. I can't keep my own schedule straight these days. Ah well, from :

Your Silver-Age Superhero Career
LJ Username
Your alias first-name is:	AstroAtomicBitterBlackBlueCoffeeDangerDarkDeathDoomFunkyGreenHappyHarmlessHyperLemonLethargicLiberalLightningMedicatedMegaObsessiveParanoidPlasticQuantumRedShadowSilverSleepyStarSunshineSuperTacoTheUltraWonder
Your alias last-name is:	BadgerBoyBozoBubblesCatCaptainChefChiefCowDogDudeGalGirlGuyKidKnightLadLassManMuffinNeighborPersonPigSquirrelStormThunderWoman
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You team up with...	unen2gemismasin
...to battle:	Cuba
You petition to join:	the X-Men
Their response:	they agree, and when they all completely disrobe in celebration, you flee in terror
You are best remembered for:	winning 3 NFL MVP trophies
Your heroic level: - 74%
This cool quiz by sigma7 - Taken 35014 Times.

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Poem for Thursday

Sonnet 6
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow

Is he native to this realm? No,
his wide nature grew out of both worlds.
They more adeptly bend the willow's branches
who have experience of the willow's roots.

When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead--
But may he, this quiet conjurer, may he
beneath the mildness of the eyelid

mix their bright traces into every seen thing;
and may the magic of earthsmoke and rue
be as real for him as the clearest connection.

Nothing can mar for him the authentic image;
whether he wanders through houses or graves,
let him praise signet ring, gold necklace, jar.

--------

Tuesday I had a cranky day, but Wednesday I got a reminder of why fandom is so wonderful. I spent several lovely hours with and (both of whom I met because of slash, one here on LiveJournal and one in a parking lot at Best Buy discussing Highlander) watching Jason Isaacs and Lord Byron in that self-same TV show, as well as bloopers and the scene where Duncan comes home and finds Methos in his bed. *g* I have never actually watched a full episode of Highlander before today, though I had seen the movies...and I admit that during "The Lady and the Tiger" I was rather distracted by Jason being a bad boy, mmmm, not to mention Elizabeth Gracen, though the guys playing Byron and Shelley could not hold a candle to Duncan or Methos and I see why everyone says to start watching when Methos shows up. Now, I realize that I am the last slash fan in the world to stumble into this fandom, but I need someone to explain: does an immortal pick up memories as well as whatever sort of life force comes into him or her during a Quickening? In other words, if a certain poet had memories of shagging Methos, did Duncan get them? *g*

So I was all set to root wholeheartedly for the Patriots in the Superbowl. Then, today, my younger son came home from school all excited because a Philadelphia Eagles player who was going to play in the Superbowl had visited his class! Why? Because the player had attended the school, had had my son's teacher, and had gone on to the local high school -- my high school -- before playing at Michigan and then for the New York Giants until he joined the Eagles. How did I not know that Dhani Jones was from this area, let alone that he went to my high school? How can I not root for him?

Tonight's Smallville was painfully awful, despite how hard Tom Welling was obviously trying, which made me sad for him. Which is not to say that it did not have its amusing moments, but at some point I asked my husband whether it was the "don't have sex in high school" episode and at the end we got a public service announcement from Allison Mack assuring us that, yep, it was! Did they get abstinence education money for this or what? Don't get me wrong, I was ecstatic that Lana didn't do it with her gay boyfriend and relieved that Clark didn't consummate his "marriage" (incidentally, didn't we find out that Chloe was still a virgin in the witch episode where Lana needed the hair of virgins, or am I misremembering?) The highlight by far was the Lex and Lionel show, as always. I am dying to know what's up with Lionel but at the same time I don't want to know...the longer this goes on as a mystery the better!

The West Wing however was quite enjoyable, again not a subtle or sophisticated episode but man I love seeing the primaries and caucuses pilloried like that! I'm annoyed that the writers had Santos cave when he argued so passionately against ethanol, though it's sort of hard to tell at this point how much that was his wife's issue rather than his own; we haven't really seen enough of him to know what his sticking points are and what issues he considers expendable so I'm not ready to see him compromise. Vinick came off wonderfully by contrast to all the Democrats, including the invisible Bartlet and missing Hoynes. I really like Santos' wife, though, and how much he seems to listen to her, and of course I adore watching her and Josh fight over Santos (he called him Matt!)

Both Smallville and The West Wing had extended sequences set to songs I like, and in the latter case the producers had BETTER provide the payoff on the Josh/Donna teasing or I am just going to scream. (Yes, I know I was just shipping Josh and Matt and now I am shipping Josh and Donna, but even though I'm not sure J/D is a good idea or even that I like them together, I firmly believe that it is not fair of producers to hint and hint and hint that they are going to do something and then jerk the audience around. I'd rather not watch than witness another case of the JanewayChakotayMulderScullyNikitaMichaelChickenshitTease.

Okay, so this is pretty much all fangirlish babbling and does not even discuss my younger son's incisive analysis of the eighth Lemony Snicket book nor my older son's explication of Tennyson for reading class. Incidentally, I locked yesterday's post because it has a photo of my kids where they look a lot more recognizable on my laptop than I thought they did on my desktop screen. Sorry about that.

Further proof that Jack was on the deck.

Poem for Wednesday

At the Fishhouses
By Elizabeth Bishop

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

--------

This is a reposted public version of a post I made private because of family photos and such that I didn't want to leave unlocked, in case anyone wanted the poetry and advertising snark but couldn't see it.

So you know how I was snarking about Viagra and Cialis ads the other day? Now, from The Onion, "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV". This made my day, along with rumors that Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes will be in the Enterprise series season finale...and how much does it suck that my first reaction was, "Shit! This probably means no Shatner!"?

Something had to make my day because the Marriage Protection Act = oh F U a$$holes and no Best Picture nomination for Eternal Sunshine = Hollywood sucks though I should not care because no matter what else happens, there is no way Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman or the increasingly less-odious-by-comparison Renee Zellwegger can win an Oscar this year. Michael Moore, I hear you made your own bed, sorry about that, though I did squee about the Razzie nomination for George Bush and Condi Rice as Worst Couple in your film. I still want to trade The West Wing for the actual government -- I promise to watch the weekly Bush sitcom, it can have the highest Nielsen ratings ever!

It's been a Shitty Fannish Day. I could blame January, except I want to know why I felt that way the 25th instead of the 24th. (Probably because I had kids home and went to the movies on the 24th, and mostly stayed off the computer.) Wednesday, barring snow or other disasters (and I am knocking wood as we have managed to have to postpone repeatedly), I am going to see and get Highlanderized! So expect me to babble, or to come home and have to write HP because Snape will have been talking quietly in my head all day long like he did during Phantom of the Opera the other day except when Lupin took over and tried to convince me there should be Remus/Sirius songfic to "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again," which made me blush so hard that I was really glad it was dark in the theater. Below, the soulmate quiz -- does this mean the real me or the person I should be with, which is how I tend to think of "soulmate"?! Of course, none of the people I really wanted to date were on here...I was hoping for Remus 98%, Snape 95%, Sirius 92% and Lucius 90%.

You scored as Hermione Granger. Yup, you are an insufferable know it all! However, you do manage to get people out of tight places every time. ps. watch out for mysterious purple hexes! Hermione Granger 75% Ginny Weasley 69% Harry Potter 56% Neville Longbottom 56% Luna Lovegood 50% Fred/George Weasley 38% Ron Weasley 38% Draco Malfoy 31% Who is your Harry Potter Soulmate? created with QuizFarm.com

I really enjoyed Veronica Mars again, though I am with : the lead boys look too much alike! It's very confusing until you start paying attention to their clothes! There were some lovely story elements and I was very creeped out by the nightmarish stuff, though I am still astonished at the "oh, date rape doesn't really affect anything" mentality that seems to be going on. I suspect this show is going to be laundry-folding and pleasant diversion rather than serious fandom for me, which is fine -- I haven't really had one of those since the end of Dawson's Creek, unless Smallville counts since I've only ever been very marginally involved in that fandom. There's a new episode this week, right? Forgive me, but I am more eager to see Josh and Matt again. *g*

Poem for Tuesday

Being Jewish in a Small Town
By Lyn Lifshin

Someone writes kike on
the blackboard and the
"k's" pull thru the
chalk   stick in my

plump pale thighs
even after the high
school burns down the
word is written in

the ashes   my under
pants elastic snaps
on Main St because
I can't go to

Pilgrim Fellowship
I'm the one Jewish girl
in town but the 4
Cohen brothers

want blond hair
blowing from their
car   they don't know
my black braids

smell of almond
I wear my clothes
loose so no one
dreams who I am

will never know
Hebrew   keep a
Christmas tree in
my drawer   in

the dark   my fingers
could be the menorah
that pulls you toward
honey in the snow

--------

Rushed post after rushed zip through my friends list. Tonight all my comments on fic and art were along the lines of *love* and *yay*! Please don't be upset; the choice was either comment while I was thinking about it or save the fic and try to remember to go back and comment later, and I figure most people would rather have the "Yay, read it!" than risk nothing at all. And I did save the longer fics, anyway.

It snowed more! I took my kids to the movies and didn't worry about parking on the upper, uncovered level, because I hadn't heard and reports of additional precipitation headed our way, and I came out and my van was covered! The roads, fortunately, were clear though wet, but the windshield wiper fluid had frozen and all the salt spray made the front window cloud up badly and I couldn't squirt to clean it and had a few scary moments on the highway when I could barely see. This is why I stay close to home when there is weather! We did see Phantom again, and both my kids seemed to enjoy it more this time, though they sometimes get restless on repeat viewings; in this case, though they had known the music for years, I think it really helped them to have a visual sense of the story. We had a long conversation when we came out about how come they felt sorry for the Phantom even though he was sort of the bad guy, and it was interesting how many details they had picked up on (including Christine's specifically erotic attraction to him -- I thought they tried to block things like that out *g*).

This evening I wrote a bunch of drabbles, trying to clear my brain from the two inconsistent directions that the "Compellation/Affirmation" sequel wants to go -- it can do one or the other but not both. "Whelping", for the beginnings challenge at ; "Locks", for the scars challenge at ; and "Untainted", for the "funniest thing that ever happened to me, by Snape" challenge at .

Tonight we watched the History Channel's Digging for the Truth on pyramids, but my in-laws called in the middle so we missed a great deal of it. Then we left the channel on and watched the special on Nefertiti, which was very interesting. I had intended to pop in a movie (I was in an Alan Rickman mood, surprise surprise) and fold laundry, but I didn't, so I guess the laundry will get folded to Veronica Mars. I am very proud of my scathing Enterprise review this week because it garnered six pieces of hate mail, the most I have gotten all season; I had feared that absolutely nobody was watching the show any more, if they were not bothering to write and tell me what an idiot I was for whatever I said about it! Obviously I just needed to be really scathing. But honestly, how many times can the producers do a straight riff on a classic Trek episode rather than a new spin on it?

Some squirrels to go with the gerbils from the other day. Again, for the uninitiated, these are Jack and Stephen, so named after Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin from Master and Commander etc. Speaking of whom, people in Europe who have Nikolai Tolstoy's biography of Patrick O'Brian: is it good? Is it worth my ordering from amazon.co.uk and paying overseas shipping, since it isn't out here yet? I read his Merlin novel a long, long time ago but don't remember it very well, and have never read anything biographical by him. Thanks!

While he's doing important reconaissance looking for birdseed, Jack catches Stephen snoozing in the sun.

Poem for Monday

Nothing Stays Put
By Amy Clampitt

In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985

The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes -- a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom --
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics --
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above --
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're
made of, is motion.

--------

We did not get more snow but it's COLD and tomorrow morning it's supposed to stay SINGLE DIGIT COLD and I have slippers and two pairs of socks on and my feet are COLD and while I do not consider myself a warm climate person, this is TOO COLD! That said, we had a nice day in the snow, walking and sledding and then going to my parents' for chicken soup with matzoh balls, chicken and noodles for dinner because what could be better in COLD like this?

My father is much better, though still somewhat uncomfortable, and we watched the end of the Philly-Atlanta and the first half of the New England-Pittsburgh game with him. I am quite satisfied with the Superbowl match-up, given that my in-laws are New England fans and I went to college in Philadelphia and rather like the Eagles, but none of these are "my" teams so I was not as passionate as I would have been had the Redskins or Ravens or even the Bears been good this year.

I am curious: if suggestive dancing is deemed inappropriate by the FCC for "family entertainment" like professional football, how come ads for Cialis and discussions of erectile dysfunction and "lovemaking at a time that's right for you" on commercials are not? My children hardly noticed Janet Jackson's pastie-covered nipple during the Superbowl, but they have both asked questions about erections that last longer than four hours. I am not suggesting censoring anything, and I am perfectly willing to take responsibility for their educations and to explain this, but sheesh -- if we're going to have these ads, can't the FCC shut the hell up about what else we shouldn't be allowed to see on TV?

The hill behind the local middle school (my junior high school) is the perfect place to sled. It's about a quarter mile walk, just enough to get warmed up by the time you get there and sled down and get snow all over every part of your body.


There were surprisingly high winds for a day with such a clear sky, after yesterday's snow. Here you can see the snow blowing off the roof and over the hill from the soccer field that's off to the right.


Here's a windless, unobscured view of part of the hill, the snow-covered tennis courts, the soccer field and the roofs of houses across the street from the school. Some of those trees visible against the sky are the ones whose red leaves I posted in the fall.


Here are my kids, fully bundled, returning from successful expeditions down the hill. We only had tears twice -- once from a boy hitting his elbow on the side of the school, and once from a boy overturning and getting snow into every crevice of his face and neck.


The neighborhood as the snow fell. It was powdery at first, so we did not get spectacular laden tree branches. This does not bother me, however, as those spectacular branches sometimes ice over, break and wreck power lines.


I am perfectly content to look at the crystals, though the urge to start making snowballs is really quite overwhelming when there are kids around.


Here's another view of the wind chimes on the deck with snow falling and making streaks, to go with the one from the other day, only with harder snowfall this time.

And while you're back here, a Harry Potter quiz with entirely predictable results for me:

You scored as Ravenclaw. You have been sorted into Ravenclaw- you value intelligence, and love the chance to use your cleverness (and maybe even show it off- just a little). You're keen and incisive, and you just love a challenging problem to solve. Ravenclaw 90% Gryffindor 75% Hufflepuff 55% Slytherin 50% The Hogwarts Sorting Hat! created with QuizFarm.com

wrote me a Josh/Matt drabble! Not all that 'shippy, as she said, but any Lyman/Santos winking at this stage must be considered a good thing -- they're still in the foreplay stages of the relationship. Oh I look forward to The West Wing these days, for completely different reasons than most of my friends who are still TWW fans, but hey, we take joy where we find it, right? I am saddened about Johnny Carson, though even in college we tended to skip over him and wait for Letterman to come on, back when they shared a network. He had a wonderful run.

By my older son's request, since there is no school, I am taking my kids again to see The Phantom of the Opera. If the temperature were slightly higher, I would consider going to protest against the March To Deprive Women of the Right To Make Their Own Reproductive Decisions -- I can't believe I overlooked both the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade until I finally got around to reading the Sunday paper (I always turn first to Book World, then *blush* Parade, and I only get to the main section and op-ed later on). I probably read more of The New York Times online than I read of The Washington Post on my kitchen table in the morning.

There is a spectacular bright full moon outside. Looks amazing on the snow. Is that Jupiter or Saturn at five o'clock?

Poem for Sunday

From Leaves of Grass, "Song of Myself" Section 52
By Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my
        gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd
        wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

--------

From Poet's Choice, now by Robert Pinsky in the Sunday Washington Post Book World. Pinsky's first column is about "our national poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson," and how they wrote about poetry. "Whitman accepts the notion that poetry may be silly, a matter of gab and loitering rather than purpose," notes Pinsky, though Whitman also claims that poetry is of national and global importance, reaching into the future in ways the poet may not even imagine. In the fragment above, "He is accused by the hawk, and he is the hawk. He is under your bootsoles, and he is over the roofs of the world. You in the future may not know who he is or what he means, but he will be in your very bloodstream." Dickinson, on the other hand, sees the poet as smaller but a scope just as grand:

The Poets Light but Lamps
By Emily Dickinson

The Poets light but Lamps --
Themselves -- go out --
The Wicks they stimulate --
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns --
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference --

--------

And all right, I miss Edward Hirsch's three-year tenure in the Poet's Choice column already, but no one who starts with a barbaric yawp can be too bad.

Spent the entire day snowed in, so you'd think I would have had time to catch up on all kinds of things, but when one is snowed in with children, somehow the day becomes very involved in keeping them busy. My younger son's Hebrew school was cancelled as was a birthday party he was supposed to attend, originally moved from 3:30 to 1:30, then called off altogether when the hands-on science people couldn't get to the party so the kids could make slime. We expect that our older son will not have Hebrew school tomorrow, and the county already planned no classes on Monday because of teacher's meetings, so hopefully I will not have three straight days of not being able to go anywhere with the kids! We got perhaps five inches of snow today, but more is expected to fall overnight, and our little neighborhood has not yet been plowed.

Thanks so much everyone who sent regards for my father -- he spent the day resting at home (I suppose the weather was perfect for lying around recuperating, no temptation to go anywhere or do anything), and it sounds like he is feeling much better. Had the weather been slightly better we might have gone over to watch a movie with my parents but the snow fell steadily all day, so we stuck close to home, and the kids surprised both of us by wanting to watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban -- like I was going to turn that down! Also to my surprise, my younger son wanted to get under my afghan with me -- this is cuddlier than he has been since starting second grade, I think. So after the obligatory attempts at shoveling and brushing off the vans, which were covered again half an hour after being cleaned off, we sat around eating popcorn, watching the movie and playing all the games on the second DVD. (Speaking of POA: Have I no friend will rid me of these pesky Britpicks? Please? See previous entry!)

I did take snow photos, and shall post some tomorrow, but you can get an idea from and among others what the Maryland-DC-Virginia region was like during the storm. The greatest excitement in our house all day was that both gerbils decided to come out at the same time, and they were quite friendly and groomed each other, and much butt-sniffing ensued. So, for old time's sake, I bring you...

A Tale of Aragorn and Boromir!
For the uninitiated, Aragorn and Boromir are my sons' gerbils. For many months they shared a single cage and starred in their own gerbil soap opera, snuggling adorably when they were not off on adventures with Legolas and Gimli. Then Boromir came under the influence of the Ring and the Dark Cat, Cinnamon, and after a vicious biting incident was moved into his own cage.


These days Aragorn (the lighter gerbil) spends most of his time being a Ranger on his wheel while Boromir (the darker gerbil) attempts to rebuild Osgiliath out of toilet paper rolls and paper towels. They spent an active morning gnawing their halves of a cut-up paper towel roll to increase their massive mound-nests -- very necessary to keep warm even in the kitchen where they live.


This, for instance, is Boromir's hidey-hole, consisting of chewed-up cardboard, torn-up paper towels and commercial cage fluff. When Boromir is asleep, we can only see the tip of his nose sticking out the top of the volcano cone, and when he decides to emerge, the nest erupts all over the cage and onto the kitchen floor.


By evening, however, Aragorn and Boromir were bored, and when I opened Aragorn's cage to give him food, he climbed over my hand and up the side of the cage. This is a very dangerous activity as Cinnamon is always watching when a cage is open, ever vigilant for the opportunity to attack and eat the rightful King of Gondor. Boromir quickly insisted upon following, and the two of them spent many happy minutes running around on top of their cages looking for a way to dive into the cups full of pennies behind them (currently empty as the pennies have been donated to tsunami relief).


Aragorn can never resist an opportunity to sniff Boromir's butt. Sometimes Boromir plays hard-to-get and pretends that he does not like this, but tonight was not one of those nights.


Truth be told, Boromir is rather fond of sniffing Aragorn's butt as well, but he's usually too quick for the camera to catch a Captain of Gondor engaged in such an activity in public.


But Aragorn and Boromir's mutual favorite activity seems to be for Aragorn to groom Boromir's face. Sometimes they attempt to do this between the bars of their cages, standing on the upper levels. Unfortunately if it goes on for too long, Boromir inevitably decides he's had enough and tries to bite Aragorn, so he must be returned to his cage before the evil influence of the Ring and Cinnamon can be felt.

Poem for Saturday

Sequestered Writing
By Carolyn Forché

Horses were turned loose in the child's sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow.
The way light fills the hand with light, November with graves, infancy with white.
White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.
The way they withdrew from the child's body and spoke as if it were not there.

What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?
-- With its no one without its I --
A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?
Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss.
Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house.

At the end of the hall, it sleepwalks into a mirror wearing mother's robe.
A bedsheet lifts from the bed and hovers. Face with no face. Come here.
The bookcase knows, and also the darkness of books. Long passages into,
Endless histories toward, sleeping pages about. Why else toss gloves into a grave?

A language that once sent ravens through firs. The open world from which it came.
Words holding the scent of an asylum fifty years. It is fifty years, then.
The child hears from within: Come here and know, below
And unbeknownst to us, what these fields had been.

--------

My father had surgery for his kidney stone this morning -- more complicated than they originally anticipated, they needed to use general anesthesia, and he'll have to have a stent and more tests and other very not-fun things. But at least now they know exactly where the problem is and how to fix it. In typical style, my parents did not tell me that they knew yesterday that he would have surgery this morning, but only called right as it was about to happen (I found out that my father had melanoma from a friend of his who called to see how he was doing, and that my mother had breast cancer on the morning she went in to have it operated on -- I was pregnant at the time so I was hardly a child). I can't figure out if they feel like it isn't real or scary if they don't tell their kids, or if they are trying to protect us, or what. Anyway, he's home now and resting, and it's a good weekend for that considering we have up to eight inches of snow forecast; we shall see how many actually arrive.

It was a less pissy day than Thursday all around, though -- the news didn't say one word about Dubya, having big thrilling salt trucks to cover, and UPS finally brought my replacement battery charger, so I can use my new camera to take pics in the snow we should in theory receive in abundance soon. and I had talked about going to see In Good Company, but given the chaos in both our lives, we decided to hang out locally instead (we both had coupons for free California Tortilla which made it easy to decide where to have lunch anyway). Just in case I had not had a sufficient Paul Bettany fix yesterday -- and can anyone ever have sufficient Paul Bettany, anyway -- we watched Wimbledon, which she had not seen before, and I either regaled or totally annoyed her with tidbits learned from the commentary track (since she had a cat asleep in her lap while I was playing that for her, she was pretty stuck on my sofa regardless). Tonight, since my parents were out of commission for Shabbat dinner, we took the kids out to stock up on emergency supplies for the snowstorm, along with every single other person in the greater Washington area; the food store parking lot looked like a tailgate party at the Redskins stadium, and people were being vicious trying to get those last boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios.

I was totally unaware until today that living in a pineapple under the sea was code for being gay. I must encourage my kids to watch more Sponge Bob. Meanwhile, since we all watch Enterprise together, here is my quite scathing review of "Observer Effect". Because while last week the flagrant ripping-off of past TOS and TNG episodes was somewhat charming, this week it went much too far and wasn't even enjoyable. I will get more hate mail than I can answer in a week if I say this at the Trek Nation, so I am saying it here: I think Manny Coto is damned mediocre, and Enterprise was better last season than it is this season. Not only are the storylines mushy rehash of much better episodes of the earlier shows, but the show has gotten considerably more stupid in its portrayal of women. Even while I was falling asleep during BSG I couldn't level that complaint.

Having gone irrevocably over 500 people on my friends list, I refriended some communities I was reading via links just to stay under. As before when I went over 500, LJ is randomly reporting that some people are "also friend of" rather than "mutual friends" even though I have not removed anyone from the list and I am still showing up on those people's "friend of" lists. Please don't be distressed if this has happened to you, as I assure you I have no control over it whatsoever and would fix it if I could. Now here are the Friday memes in lieu of photos:

: Name five fannish topics you would like to have a discussion on, but never have.
1. The whole character/actor blur -- what do other people make of the continuum in which we know perfectly well that Kate Mulgrew isn't Kathryn Janeway but we sometimes believe with great confidence that she is that person "Kate Mulgrew" whom she plays so charmingly at Star Trek conventions, even though we must know from watching her on talk shows and reading her interviews that that's as much a character she puts on as anything she's done onscreen or onstage? (I picked Kate as the most screamingly obvious example from my own fannish experience, but I could easily have said "Viggo Mortensen.")
2. Like many other fans of my age, I wrote fan fiction before I had any intention of showing it to anyone, ever. Now, however, I am quite disappointed if I write something and it seems like no one has read it. Did the internet change how we think of the function and purpose of writing fan fiction? Would this have happened anyway? How acute is it for others?
3. Why do some people seem to believe that the only positive criticism is to be compared favorably to someone else?
4. Why do people get off on wank? What is the appeal of ridiculing other fans on a broad level? I think we all understand that sometimes there's a post so stupid we want to show our best friends, or a proposal so outrageous that we have to rant in private, but why make it something for dozens of people to jump and flame all over?
5. Do all the remakes of popular entertainment from my childhood -- Starsky and Hutch, Battlestar Galactica -- ever seem to anyone else like a form of commercial fan fiction? Is it hard for anyone else to take a remake seriously as "canon" no matter how good it is?

:
1. Which is worse, the Burning Question ~OR~ the Painful Truth? The painful truth. The burning question is exciting and passionate and something to pursue ardently, even when it's driving you nuts. The painful truth is something that sometimes benefits no one -- not the person revealing it, not the person being told it -- it gets used for power when it could be gently broached as something constructive.
2. "Live hard, die young and leave a beautiful corpse" ~OR~ "Live long and prosper"? Oh be serious! Which do you think I'm going to answer?
3. Let bygones be bygones ~OR~ Bitch, I'll cut you!? Let bygones be bygones, but sometimes it takes awhile of not even hearing the person's name -- not out of fear of breaking into violence, but because it still hurts, unexpectedly, way too much.
4. Private hell ~OR~ Sharing is caring? Sharing is caring. Would I talk this effing much if I believed otherwise?
5. Open hearted ~OR~ Walls around your heart? There was a time I would have said the former without hesitation, but get stabbed enough by people you didn't even know had knives, and you get a little more cautious. Though really it depends on the situation -- I was defensive in high school because I felt like I had to be, not very defensive in college and grad school because it seemed foolish to be, not at all defensive when I first had kids because I didn't remember how to be, and online I've probably been much too open in a lot of ways.

: Stump the...
1. Number of jobs you've held: Counting college work/study or not? Counting grad school assistantships or not? I have no idea how to answer this, as my "career" such as it is has not by any means followed a traditional path. Does "homemaker" count for shit, here, either?
2. Biggest raise, by percent: Again...I have no idea how to answer this. My single biggest raise was when my company was bought out by another company but since I was technically a freelancer on contract, it was article by article.
3. Have you ever quit? Dropping out of grad school cost me one assistantship. I also quit my very first job at a travel agent after three days, one summer in high school.
4. Have you ever been fired? Only if the company going out of business still owing me $3000 counts.
5. Worst mistake, while on the job: NOT quitting when it became obvious said company was going down, and believing them when they said I would get paid even if they did.

And from my long-lost friend from Janeway/Chakotay fandom, , The Big Five Word Test. This "emotional stability" score makes me really curious about why we were asked to rank ourselves on a heterosexual-homosexual continuum for these categories, which ones it impacted, and why. I'm fairly proud of the orderliness one, and imagine this ties right back into that jobs meme.

Big Five Word Test Results

Extroversion (81%) high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity. Friendliness (60%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly kind natured, trusting, and helpful at the expense of your own individual development (martyr complex). Orderliness (31%) moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, random, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of structure, reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment. Emotional Stability (41%) moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious. Openmindedness (76%) high which suggests you are very intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.

Take Free Big Five Word Choice Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Poem for Friday

Meditation
By Roberta Spear

I could sit in this hot bath for hours
both ends disappearing at once
old skin sloughed and lacy
as bits of lichen
until only my navel
a stone cast
leaves rings on the surface
and over the water closes over it.

I am the reed
you peeled back and snapped
off your bare shoulder
a slow spear
that landed ever so lightly
on the glassy lake
and stayed afloat.

My arms
even my chin
are weightless . . .
and I could almost go under
without a breath --
the water like a mother
with her gloves and small parcel
saying I brought you here
and I can take you back.

--------

Oh I'm glad this week is almost over. Thursday was one of those days where nothing really bad happened, but literally a hundred small annoyances and petty things occurred, and I spent much of it feeling cranky and tired and also ungrateful, considering that there are so many people who have genuine crises going on instead of this bullshit. I blame my mood in general on the inauguration, which I ignored entirely, having left my television off all day, and on the idiocy of the Montgomery County Public School System, which had sent out e-mail last night saying that if school was delayed this morning (as it was for two hours), the math midterms scheduled for today would all be delayed till Friday.

This morning at 8 -- AFTER all the kids from our side of the county in the magnet program were already in transit, and they spent two hours on the bus yesterday due to traffic problems from the snow -- they sent another e-mail saying that the exams would be given on schedule today. How fair is this to the kids? I sent e-mail to the principal, called the school, apparently we were not alone because the principal later sent out another rather pissy e-mail noting that the initial delay was for the convenience of the teachers, not the students, and the teachers had assured her that the students were ready so the parents should chill. Does this woman know what middle school students are like when you change their routine? We told ours to study for his social studies test in the morning because he wasn't going to have the math test...this is not a kid who deals well with changes of routine in general, let alone for his first middle school midterms. I was delighted to hear so many other parents had complained!

And then, because I was not stressing enough about the schools, we got e-mail from our younger son's school that their power was off! They managed to get it back on, but not before I had cancelled out on lunch with in case they closed the building and asked us to pick up our kids. This after he didn't leave the house till nearly eleven because of the delay, so I had pretty much no time to myself all day. On top of that I didn't get a package I expected and needed, my father is home feeling crappy and may need a stent after all, I didn't get to the store and get stuff we needed and...well, George Bush is president of the United States again. Yeah. How come I did not know about 10,000 Jesuses before today?

After the usual insanity of carpool-in-snow and getting one child to Hebrew school, the other to violin, my evening brain-clearing activity was watching Wimbledon with the commentary on. Why did no one here mention to me that Paul Bettany as well as director Richard Loncraine did the commentary track? It didn't even say so on the DVD case! When Paul's character says, "There's something I haven't told you," meaning to reveal to Kirsten Dunst's character that he's planning to retire from tennis, Paul interrupts himself onscreen to say, "I'm massively gay." Then while the director is trying to talk about the use of music in the scene, Paul insists on sticking to this theme, going on about how that would have made it a different movie if he was gay and how they could always reshoot the film again.

The big bummer (so to speak) of the commentary track is Loncraine announcing that they had to digitize out part of Paul's anatomy when he flips on his back to pull on his pants because Sam Neill is coming to kill him. They joke about how big it was and how much it cost. During the scene when Paul has to climb over Jon Favreau to get out of bed after his character has acupuncture, Jon moans, "Jennifer," which cracked Paul up and apparently nearly ruined the shot. Paul calls Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays his character's practice partner -- the one whose weakness is men in leather shorts -- "too good-looking to live." But my very favorite moment is when he and Loncraine are both praising the teenage ball boy and Paul claims that the boy is really Russell Crowe, who is such a great actor that he can actually make himself smaller, and the director adds that he completely loses the Aussie accent, too. Paul just can't resist talking about Russell, can he?

While I'm borderline RPSing, Ted on the Golden Globe parties: "Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were hubba he-man supreme, huddled away together at Miramax. Yes, they wanted to talk about the chicks, but, look, they did it in that totally too funny Hobbit-holding kinda way: all touchy-feely, girlish gossiping. Kate, did you teach Mr. B. such silliness?" This makes me giggle, particularly coming from Ted. (Sorry, , I can't resist Orlando sometimes!) And on this cheerful note I am going to bed.

Looking up from the deck yesterday, the snow coming down and obscuring the trees.

Poem for Thursday

Spellbound
By Emily Brontë

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

--------

Being stuck at home, I wrote drabbles, "Purge" for the challenge wherein Snape blows up a cauldron at and "Totality" for the 1970s challenge at . I also wrote an incredibly dorky not-quite-drabble for 's "1001 Places Remus and Sirius Defiled Hogwarts in Many Interesting and Complicated Ways" challenge.

Wednesday did not go as planned because by the time my younger son was at school, it was snowing. I called and reluctantly told her that I thought I should postpone my pimping into Highlander fandom in case our county closed schools early; it did not, but our neighborhood was not plowed until after 4 p.m. so driving was a nightmare, and after watching cars skid in front of my house, I spent the entire day close to home with no Methos or Duncan to console me. The domestic excitement included walking in the snow to retrieve kids, getting hit by snowballs from said kids, howling and telling the kids to go sledding before it got dark because school would be predictably delayed the next day despite midterms this week (and it shall, in the morning).

Figuring I am on a roll with trying new things such as Veronica Mars, I watched Lost. I was not bored. I mean, it's hard to be bored while watching a BIG WHITE POLAR BEAR on a tropical island, but it's also hard not to giggle. I like the little boy, I like his father, I rolled my eyes like crazy when what should have been a lasting conflict about loyalty and identity was wrapped up in a few seconds of a boy screaming "DAD!" and two guys bonding over saving him. I wasn't repelled by Dominic Monaghan and his moping over Claire's diary, though I wasn't impressed either, but he looked far more attractive to me than usual and I can easily explain why: it's because I think Ian Somerhalder is one of the least attractive men I have ever seen in or out of show business, and he makes every other man within ten miles look good.

I have no opinion on any of the women because none of them were onscreen for more than ten seconds at a time. My husband and I had an easier time predicting this plot than we did with The Incredibles even though we've never watched the show before, right down to him yelling "IT'S CLAIRE!" right before she walked out of the bushes at the end. I feel like I have not missed much and am now going back to my Lost-free existence quite comfortably. Afterwards we watched The West Wing, not one of its better episodes, but still light years ahead of most of what's on television for both entertainment value and inspiring me to think. Even without getting to see my newfound Josh/Santos love, which along with Donna was missing for the entire episode, it left me feeling happy and energized and pissed as hell at the things not being done in the real world, but more on that later.

People in England who are fans of Star Trek and/or Dawson's Creek (I know you are reading this, you can't hide): Popbitch has cheap (£12.50) tickets to the new David Mamet play, A Life in The Theatre, starring Patrick Stewart and Joshua Jackson at Apollo Theatre; call 0870 890 1101 and say "Popbitch offer." Someone needs to go see this and report back to me, please.

And speaking of things fannish, David Yates...I know nothing about him. Recent interviews sound promising: he seems to be enthusiastic about Harry Potter, at least. But I read something terrifying in someone's journal, confirmed in an interview here, that David Thewlis had said he had a huge project in the works and might not be in the film of OOTP. Is this even POSSIBLE? Don't tell me they didn't make him sign an extension clause! If they make an OOTP with anyone else as Remus, my wrath will know no bounds. There shall be Cruciatus curses leveled at Warner Bros. and Imperius used on David himself. And I shall hiss at all the "Oh, but Jude Law/Ewan McGregor/Orlando Bloom should have played Lupin" fans forever.

A couple of personality quizzes, one Harry Potter-based with results that made me squee and squeak in the first two lines, and one that seems quite accurate...

You scored as Sirius Black. Your Alter Ego is Sirius Black. You are gifted wizard and loyal to your allegiance. However you can be a little arrogant and reckless at times.

Sirius Black 75% Draco Malfoy 75% Hermione Granger 70% Severus Snape 65% Harry Potter 65% Ron Weasley 60% Remus Lupin 55% Albus Dumbledore 50% Peter Pettigrew 30% Lord Voldemort 20% Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Verbal/Linguistic. You have highly developed auditory skills, enjoy reading and writing and telling stories, and are good at getting your point across. You learn best by saying and hearing words. People like you include poets, authors, speakers, attorneys, politicians, lecturers and teachers.

Verbal/Linguistic 100% Musical/Rhythmic 96% Intrapersonal 93% Interpersonal 79% Logical/Mathematical 39% Visual/Spatial 29% Bodily/Kinesthetic 14% The Rogers Indicator of Multiple Intelligences created with QuizFarm.com

I do not want to think about the Bad Thing happening in my city tomorrow. If there were less snow and the kids had a full day of school, I would be thinking about going to the protest. Some unknown liberal group (I belong to several -- could have been Kerry campaign, ACLU, Billionaires for Bush, PFAW) -- left the greatest sales message ever on my answering machine: a fake recording of Bush thanking his fellow Americans and Jesus for giving him the divine right to do what he wishes and warning us not even to think about joining those anti-God activists who want to destroy America by insisting that we actually count the votes in Ohio, Nevada, Florida, etc. McPherson Square is sounding pretty good right now.


Snowy neighborhood scene at twilight today.

Poem for Wednesday

Needles
By Ronald Wallace

My father said he thought I was a baby
for fearing needles, he whose body'd been
invaded by all manner of contraption:
hypodermic, catheter, intravenous tube--he
took them all with matter-of-fact de-
rision. They were nothing. But a son
who, at the very sight of needles, whined
and blubbered like a two-year-old-- that he

couldn't stomach. And so I said, to spite
him (though I told myself that I was lying),
that yes, I was a baby; he was right.
And to this day refuse all novocaine,
a full half-hour of exquisite live pain
better than the needle and the numbing.

--------

Tuesdays that feel like Mondays always throw me off so much. I got quite a bit of work done in the morning -- had to, as it appeared for a few minutes like the Star Trek world was having a meltdown, with SFX reporting the imminent demise of Enterprise and Rick Berman protesting too much that of course the eleventh movie is going to get made, just not until he sucks up successfully to the new head of Paramount Pictures. The part of me that cares, sadly enough, is the part of me that wants TrekToday to have something to keep reporting because it would be really sad if it went away, and I can't see how viable a daily Star Trek site is going to be if there's no television show in production or on the horizon and no movie in the works. A five year hiatus would probably be a good thing for Trek but it would suck for me on a number of levels.

So all you people who told me to watch Veronica Mars? You were so right, and your timing was so awesome because UPN reran the pilot this week! What a wonderful character and what an interesting show. I had been afraid from the plot description that it would be a little too Twin Peaks for me but it's not at all, or at least it's understated, keeps its sense of humor and of the absurd low-key. I had a little trouble believing the flipness of Veronica's tone after the series of unfortunate events packed into this one episode -- the way rape was (not) dealt with really, really bugged me -- but overall I adored her as a character and liked the setup very much.

Alexander fans, or anyone who's a fan of stunningly pretty men, really: go visit Kim Schultz's page, scroll down and look at her drawing of Jared Leto. I am weak in the knees. And tomorrow I am getting pimped into Highlander fandom! (At least, if it does not snow enough to warrant my kids' schools being closed/delayed, which will throw the entire day into chaos. It is very very cold tonight and I am not sure how that bodes for precipitation.) has promised me the Jason Isaacs episode and the Double Quickening, so I am sure I will be perving all over the place tomorrow night.

To whoever nominated us: thank you and *hugs*. I am still resistant to fannish awards, and the snarking and competition and resentment that can go on surrounding them, so I do not want to pimp or name the place, but I really, really do appreciate the fact that you enjoyed the fic enough to nominate it.

Probably everyone knows this already but I saw it in surprisingly few places so in case you didn't know, if you have a paid account, LiveJournal is giving all paid users two free weeks to make up for the weekend problems. Click to get your free time. And one more Goddard pic...

This is the Explorer XXXIII test unit. Launched at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1966 atop a Delta Rocket, the actual Explorer XXXIII was sent up to study interplanetary magnetic fields and is still in an orbit that takes it past the moon. Past it you can see the grounds of Goddard, a huge wooded site with deer and hawks.

Poem for Tuesday

The Marshes of Glynn
By Sidney Lanier

Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
  Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,--
                     Emerald twilights,--
                     Virginal shy lights,
Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
  Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
        The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;--
Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,--
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,--
Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;--
O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,
While the riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long did shine
Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine;
But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,
And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,
And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem
Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,--
Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
  Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
  And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
  And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,--
Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
  The vast sweet visage of space.
To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,
Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
  For a mete and a mark
    To the forest-dark:--
                     So:
Affable live-oak, leaning low,--
Thus--with your favor--soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
                     Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.
  Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
  Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.
Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl
As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows
    the firm sweet limbs of a girl.
Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,
Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.
And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?
The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
To the terminal blue of the main.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
  Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea
Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:
Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
        Here and there,
                     Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,
That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow
  In the rose-and-silver evening glow.
                     Farewell, my lord Sun!
The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run
'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one.
How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
                     And it is night.
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
                     Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.

--------

This morning there was snow on the ground! Just look at the piles we had on the deck as the sun was rising through the trees:

Okay, obviously it was not enough to sled in and not even enough to make a decent snowball with but it was snow and I get to gloat about it. It was much too chilly for Fort McHenry again, so that got put off until a different weekend entirely and instead we took the kids to see The Incredibles. It was as funny as I had heard, and a great movie to see with my kids, though my husband and I were whispering predictions about things to one another all through the movie and were right on all of them, particularly the two biggest factors in the villain's comeuppance. Pixar's animation is amazing; I am often somewhat bored visually during animated films, even very celebrated ones; either there's not quite enough going on to keep me focused visually, like Sponge Bob, or there's so much going on that I get a headache as has happened with several Asian-made films.

I had some niggling issues -- well, okay, some genuine irks -- with the characterizations of women, particularly wives, in the film. But I've gotten good at lowering my feminist annoyance to low simmer while watching most popular entertainment, unless it's something that really rubs me the wrong way like pretty much every character Billy Crystal has ever played. I have been thinking a lot, though, in the past few days, about how much I absolutely loved Kathryn Janeway when Voyager premiered, and what a monumental disappointment she and the other women on the show proved to be in the end, and how much I miss Deep Space Nine and Xena and La Femme Nikita, and wish Space: Above and Beyond had lasted longer, and wish Alias or Joan of Arcadia had done anything for me while I watched them. Much as I love C.J., The West Wing is still very male-heavy, and I really could not stand the new BSG and I forgot to watch Medium. Would most people here recommend Veronica Mars? Can I start in the middle?

And may I just mention how much I do not want to see Sideways, no matter how many awards it wins? I know I was dubious about Hotel Rwanda a few days ago, but even if that film turns out to be the most preachy, ham-handed portrayal of the situation in Africa (I still haven't seen it so I don't know), I'd rather see it winning all the awards than yet another male mid-life crisis story, no matter how good the acting is. I'm trying to decide whether I can sit through two boxing movies in a single year just to see Hilary Swank, since I don't care about Eastwood and I know I'm going to see Cinderella Man when it opens. My kids want to see Phantom again and maybe Coach Carter, I still haven't seen House of Flying Daggers or Closer, my parents insist that I should see Meet the Fockers (apparently this is a Jewish rite of passage)...Sideways is definitely on the DVD-if-ever list. Not wanking anyone who saw it and loved it, just saying it is so very much not my thing and I won't change my mind even if someone tells me the two guys are slashy as all get-out.

Speaking of slashy, today I created backups of both and at GreatestJournal, Perfect Duet and Slither In. If there is ever another catastrophic LiveJournal failure, this way anyone over there will be able to find Aubrey/Maturin and Lucius/Severus fans. Please feel free to join and feel free to crosspost there!

Tonight we watched the History Channel special on the French Revolution. It's fairly simplistic for anyone who's done much reading about the period, but it's a very well-produced documentary with dramatic enactments of some of the big events: the destruction of the Bastille, Louis XVI's beheading, Marat's killing, Robespierre's increasingly fanatical speeches. Versailles looks wonderful; so does Charlotte Corday, right out of a painting. There are a number of historians narrating while artwork and historical illustrations are presented, and the by-now-expected defense of too young, too uneducated Marie Antoinette who never said those terrible things attributed to her. If you're looking for a brief overview with numerous shots of rampaging mobs and bloody guillotine blades, this is well worth the two hours to watch; it's on again Tuesday at 1 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m.

I'm behind again -- again! -- but I got three articles written and Abe's of Maine has promised to send me a new battery charger, so I am counting Monday as reasonably successful. Oh, and GIP, because some Snape-Phantom crossover was just begging to happen, particularly since my older son has wanted to listen to the Broadway cast album repeatedly since seeing the movie.

Poem for Monday

Alone
By Maya Angelou

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

--------

Back to business as usual except that now I am behind on two friends lists instead of one. *g* Am hoping everyone crossposts their GreatestJournal entries here!

the comfort meme:
comfort food: If my stomach is upset, chicken soup and peanut butter toast. If my stomach is not upset, cheese popcorn and milk chocolate.
comfort drink: Sweet iced tea or lukewarm hot chocolate, depending on the season.
comfort movie: Paul Mazursky's Tempest.
comfort book: Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time.
comfort fic: L.R. Bowen's The Cardassian Mask.
comfort clothes: Oversized sweats.
comfort song: "I Will Survive," Gloria Gaynor.
comfort outing: Alone, Borders; otherwise dragging , or to lunch with me.
comfort company: , or, on the rare occasions when he is the reason that I need comfort, .

It was a little chilly for Fort McHenry, so we took the kids to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. We hadn't been in a couple of years, and they have a new, fabulous exhibit on the Hubble Telescope (and the curator was well-informed about the state of necessary repairs and the target shuttle dates). They show Cosmic Voyage, which was originally made for an IMAX theater but looks pretty good on a standard auditorium screen on DVD; in this film, Morgan Freeman narrates what we'd see in increasing powers of ten out to the edge of the known universe and looking into a drop of water down to the level of quarks, and the kids were fascinated. They were also happy because we stopped at Best Buy to get them a new cable so they could link their Game Boys, and since we were already on Route 1 I asked to visit The Crystal Fox in Laurel, one of my favorite local metaphysical stores.

Came home and watched the Golden Globes. Had one of those shameful moments of Death By Orlando Bloom that I always deny happened afterward. *g* Was amusedly happy for William Shatner, absolutely thrilled for Anjelica Huston, delighted for Jamie Foxx, ambivalent about Glenn Close because although she was my favorite actress for years and she deserved more awards than she ever won, she didn't do a thing for me in The Lion in Winter (that's Katharine Hepburn's role, dammit), pleased for Leo, reasonably pleased for Annette Bening but thought she sounded terribly overrehearsed...well, these are the awards that can be bought, as Pia Zadora proved. For instance, I like both Clive Owen and Natalie Portman, but given the people they beat -- and the clip they showed for Closer was all the two of them, no sign of Julia or Jude in the film at all -- tell me the production company didn't offer the Hollywood Foreign Press Association amazing schwag. The Robin Williams tribute was the highlight of the show; he made some sort of joke about how having Shatner, Mick Jagger, P. Diddy and Prince on the same stage was a sign of the Apocalypse, and ended with a tribute to Christopher Reeve (his Juilliard classmate I believe) quoting Hamlet. Not a bad waste of a few hours while also reading and cleaning.

Schmoopiest fannish thought for the day: Kathy Mattea's "Ready for the Storm" is such an Aubrey/Maturin song. In other fannish news, made me very happy with screen caps from The West Wing's "Opposition Research" -- go look and admire the Josh/Matt love. And went and made me all sniffly and nostalgic about it being our anniversary. So in her honor, a couple of photos from our geeky space fan trip to Goddard.

The Great LiveJournal Outage of 2005 During the outage I coded another journalling system to use for myself. What did you do? Brought to you by geek-foo

Happy Martin Luther King Day. Here's "I Have A Dream", posted last year.

Poem for Sunday

Taking Leave of a Friend
By Li Po
Translated by Ezra Pound

Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other
        as we are departing.

--------

From Edward Hirsch's last Poet's Choice column for The Washington Post Book World, on goodbyes, which "belong to the part of life that's hard to write about," he claims. He explains that his grandfather taught him that when a friend or relative left on a train, he should stand on the platform and continue waving until the train had disappeared, and discusses Chinese and Japanese poetry with that theme. Then, as a more personal goodbye, Hirsch quotes Walt Whitman from the 24th section of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass:

Lift me close to your face till I whisper,
What you are holding is in reality no book, nor part of a book,
It is a man, flushed and full-bodied -- it is I -- So long!
We must separate -- Here! take from my lips this kiss,
Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;
So long -- and I hope we shall meet again.

--------

Star Trek: Voyager premiered ten years ago tonight. Within a couple of days of that event, I was posting Voyager fic on alt.sex.fetish.startrek (later alt.startrek.creative.erotica), where I met some of my longest-lasting and best friends in fandom. I feel like I am celebrating a tenth anniversary with , with whom I started corresponding very shortly after January 16th, 1995 and forged an unholy alliance which continues to this day...but I also think of , , , , , , , , and many other people reading this journal now whom I have known since long before LiveJournal existed. In fact, I met , who gave me my LiveJournal code, through , whom we both knew from Voyager fandom. (ETA: And and and...oh crap I am certain to leave someone out. My point being that there are lots of people I adore whom I could name but the Golden Globes orchestra would play me offstage.)

Given the recent outage, I need to take a moment to be thankful that this site is here, because I'm sure my contact with these people and many others would be much more sporadic if it wasn't, and I am very grateful. I have updated my User Info here to include my other journal accounts so that people can find me in case of another catastrophic LiveJournal outage. It seems like most people gravitated to GreatestJournal today; is that because JournalFen was not permitting new accounts and Blurty was slow, or is there something specific about GreatestJournal that people like, besides lots of userpics which is why I signed up for one all those years ago? I've created a backup for there as well, but have not updated it at all. Anyway, I hope that continues, !

In the morning before I was really awake, my mother called to tell me that my father was in the hospital -- he had been in pain when we were at their house for dinner and it turned out he had a kidney stone that had become excruciating overnight. Since he has heart and blood pressure issues, they kept him there from midnight last night until after noon today for tests, so we stayed in the house and fretted and waited to hear from them since we couldn't call them on the cell phone.

Meanwhile, remember I said that my new camera had arrived with a cracked battery charger, that I had to send back (at my own expense) to get a replacement? Well, the new one is completely missing the plastic flip cover for the battery compartment -- ANOTHER one I have to send back. I am asking them not to bother replacing it as I want to buy one locally where I can see it, and I refuse to pay for shipping -- they can send me a preprinted UPS label, or I am telling my credit card company that I refuse the charges for repeated shipment of rejected merchandise and they can fight it out with Abe's of Maine! Grr!

Am very excited by the Titan pics; somewhat excited by the forecast of snow overnight though they say accumulation will be negligible; and absurdly excited to have just watched Die Hard with my kids, who absolutely loved it, and it really seems not to have dated despite being almost 20 years old. Who but Alan Rickman could pull off the line, "I am not a common thief, I am an exceptional thief, and since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite!"? I even really liked Bruce Willis, which has never happened to me before.

Oh, and speaking of movies, I have to quote this portion of The Washington Post review of In Good Company by Ann Hornaday: "The relationship between Dan and Carter, played by Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace respectively, is the real romance at the center of "In Good Company"...sure, Carter meets and falls in love with Dan's college-aged daughter Alex and complications ensue, but it's Dan and Carter's relationship around which the real action of this dramatic comedy revolves." WHOO! , we are going to see this one!

: Lost
1. Have you ever considered running away?
When I was seven and my sister was four, we were going to run away to Rhode Island where our friend's grandmother lived. We packed nothing but food and stuffed animals. But seriously? No. I've considered disappearing for a couple of days, but that's it.
2. If you ran away, where would you go?
If I felt like exploring, Scotland; if I was feeling spiritually bereft, Mt. Kailas.
3. Who would miss you?
I would like to believe that my husband, children and parents would. Plus my cats, who would miss their three o'clock feeding.
4. Do you speak a foreign language?
Un peu francais.
5. Do you have a passport?
Yes. Taking it to England in two months.

:
1. what is one thing about you that you hate?
Lack of willpower and laziness when it comes to things I need to do.
2. what is one thing about you that you love?
My spiritual conviction. I never feel like there's no point to life or the universe.
3. if you had to change one thing about you what would it be and why?
I do have to change my exercise habits or I am going to have the same heart artery diabetes etc. problems as my parents. Hence #1 here is of real importance.
4. what is one word that you would use to define yourself?
Ungrounded.
5. imagine what you would look like in a perfect world...what do you look like?
I'd effortlessly be at a healthy weight, and perhaps tall enough to reach the glasses in my cupboard.

Poem for Saturday

Wilderness
By Carl Sandburg

There is a wolf in me ... fangs pointed for tearing gashes ... a red tongue for raw meat ... and the hot lapping of blood -- I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me ... a silver-gray fox ... I sniff and guess ... I pick things out of the wind and air ... I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers ... I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me ... a snout and a belly ... a machinery for eating and grunting ... a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun -- I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me ... I know I came from saltblue water-gates ... I scurried with shoals of herring ... I blew waterspouts with porpoises ... before land was ... before the water went down ... before Noah ... before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me ... clambering-clawed ... dog-faced ... yawping a galoot's hunger ... hairy under the armpits ... here are the hawk-eyed hankering men ... here are the blond and blue-eyed women ... here they hide curled asleep waiting ... ready to snarl and kill ... ready to sing and give milk ... waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes -- And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart -- and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

--------

WHOOO! It posted! So here is the entry I posted nearly 24 hours ago elsewhere. With LiveJournal down, I actually used my backups at GreatestJournal, JournalFen and Blurty. (Anyone have a DeadJournal code they'd like to trade me for some Gmail invites?) If LJ goes down temporarily again, I will post again at these places until it's back up.

I went Friday morning with to see Phantom of the Opera again, because she hadn't seen it and has had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week (plus I had not seen her and was going through withdrawal). I actually enjoyed it more this time around; I noticed more detail in the costumes and sets, particularly the fetish-wear and the S&M imagery, which may have more to do with the time of month than anything in the film but what the hell. The music continues to hold up well enough for me; Butler and Rossum are still not Crawford and Brightman, but they're there on the screen and their chemistry is really quite lovely in "Past the Point of No Return" in particular. Of course we all really want them to end up together with pretty boy Raoul and his pony and sword out of the picture.

Friday afternoon I had to write a pile of articles to make up for yesterday, and my kids were playing with a friend (since it's Friday, they're allowed to play video games), so it was relatively quiet. We had dinner at my parents' house and came home so I could review Enterprise. Here's the "Daedalus" review, mostly positive even though the episode stole from so many original series, TNG, DS9 and VOY episodes that I lost track of them in my notes. And my husband tells me it stole from a James Tiptree short story as well. But the actors were sharp and the guest roles were perfectly cast, and I liked the B storyline, so overall I give it good marks. I give this entire season good marks, and am really sorry odds are good that the show will be cancelled in a couple of months.

So is anyone else feeling the Josh Lyman/Matt Santos love enough to be writing fic, and where can I find it? I have a serious craving, here. I heard from an old friend in fandom today who had drifted in a West Wing direction back when I was drifting in a Nikita direction during the waning days of Voyager -- she was highly amused I had finally written fic in this fandom and it's absolutely nobody's OTP. I don't think there is any CJ/Toby in me; that's just how it is. The thing is, I know it has wonderful angsty potential, but I don't want CJ angsty. I want her brilliant and strong and secure and happy. There are plenty of other characters for angsting; she, however, is the most powerful woman in the world, and I love her that way.

It's very cold this weekend -- finally! -- so although we all have Monday off, I'm not sure we'll be venturing out anywhere exciting. Friday night's sunset however was spectacular. I did not tamper with the colors at all, so you're getting it as my camera saw it, which is pretty close to how I saw it...

Tonight's sunset from the front yard...


...and from the back

Poem for Friday

The Trunk of the Olive Tree
By Homer
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald

        An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,
lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof,
gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.
Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches,
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as model for the rest. I planed them all,
inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory,
and stretched a bed between -- a pliant web
of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.

--------

Thursday is always my early day yet it always seems to be the day on which I get the least practical work done, like I never fully wake up and stay half in a dream state all day. I can write and edit fic, I can cry over anything I read, but I can't stay focused on anything for long. I did some research about places we want to see in England, and I read some Hornblower, and I tried to come up with a system for organizing all the cords for my cameras, Palm and other portable electronics...anyone know who makes a good case for that? It's also the craziest carpool day, with one son having violin at the same time the other has Hebrew school, so by dinner I am always sort of fuzzed out. (, we missed each other again! Next time we must specify who will call whom as I'd forgotten and by the time I remembered, it was nearly midnight here!)

Crossover perversion: Jolene Blalock, Star Trek: Enterprise's T'Pol, talked to Playboy about what her ultimate love scene would be like. "It would have to be a psychological thriller with Gary Oldman," she said. "The female would be the unwitting victim, much like the kind Michelle Pfeiffer usually plays. Oldman would play the guy you don't want to like but do anyway." Oh dear, Jolene and I have common Mary Sue fantasies!

But Prince Harry is a fucktard. I hope it's true that Prince Charles privately ordered both his sons to visit Auschwitz. I can't believe the royals are now acting outraged that people would put pressure on "the boy" for a real apology rather than a two line statement I am sure he did not write. He's 20 years old, he is not a child. He has inherited all the privileges of being a royal; he can accept some responsibility for having a public life.

Instead of photos today, my two new Harry Potter het OTPs! I am writing the first one for the FA "What's Your OTP" 2005 Valentine's Day Challenge. The second one just made me smile.

FredWeasley wants to give a Valentine to NarcissaMalfoy

DennisCreevey would become an Animagus for NymphadoraTonks

And this is one hell of a bunny; I got it one click too late to use, but I might try to work it in anyway...

DracoMalfoy studies with RodolphusLestrange

...but if only Harry and Sirius had known this, everything might have happened differently.

Buckbeak swore everlasting loyalty to Voldemort

What's Your OTP?
TheRogue.net & FictionAlley Valentine's Day Challenge

I'm feeling boring tonight, as I am apparently the only person in North America who does not watch Lost. Does anyone else boggle on Thursdays at the quantity of "OMGLOST!!!" posts? There are over thirty entries on my flist about it thus far this week, and those are just the ones I actually managed to see. Doesn't anyone still love Smallville even a little? And I'm starting to have BSG:TNG fear: I fell asleep during the miniseries. Ah well, GIP, because it's been my Wednesday night love off and on since long before the others were on that night. Sending out love to and and their kitties in mourning. And gacked from many people, the A to Z Meme.

A – Accent: Vaguely Brooklyn, unless you're actually from Brooklyn in which case you may tell me that I sound like a Southerner (has happened before). But I picked up a lot of my parents' phrases, like standing on line instead of in line.
B - Breast size: 38D.
C - Chore you hate: Cleaning the toilets.
D - Dad's name: Roy.
E - Essential make-up item: Sunblock, in summer. I almost never wear makeup. If I'm going to a wedding, it's likely to be eyeliner.
F - Favorite perfume: Some mix of vanilla, clove, patchouli and nag champa oils, used very sparingly.
G - Gold or silver: Silver.
H - Hometown: Washington, DC. Born in the city, raised in the suburbs.
I - Insomnia: Rarely.
J - Job title: Freelance journalist. Or just writer.
K - Kids: Two boys.
L - Living arrangements: Townhouse with husband, children, two cats, two gerbils.
M - Mum's birthplace: Brooklyn, New York.
N - Number of apples you've eaten: I have no idea! More than three. *g*
O - Overnight hospital stays: Two for childbirth, one for a hernia when I was nine months old.
P - Phobia: Nuclear holocaust.
Q - ?
R - Religious affiliation: Radical feminist Renewal movement Jew.
S - Siblings: One sister.
T - Time you wake up: As late as I can get away with. Would naturally sleep till 9:30 every day left to my own devices.
U - Unnatural hair colors you've worn: I have never put any color in my hair except the washable kind for Halloween.
V - Vegetable you refuse to eat: Broccoli and asparagus.
W - Worst habit: Losing my temper.
X - X-rays: Besides the dentist, I can't recall having had any. Ultrasounds, yes.
Y - Yummy foods you make: S'mores.
Z - Zodiac sign: Sagittarius, with Scorpio rising.

Poem for Thursday

Darkness
By George Gordon, Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them -- She was the Universe.

--------

Rediscovered this poem while hunting up Byron quotes for and "What Deep Wounds Ever Closed Without a Scar," which has revived my long-dormant Byron passion (I go through phases with all the big-name Romantic poets...sometimes Shelley is my favorite, sometimes Wordsworth, sometimes Keats...rarely Coleridge but I like to read him when I've been indulging in Wordsworth).

Orthodontist said son's teeth look great, so much so that he could take the braces off and give him a retainer for the next several months until the permanent incisors are fully in, but we agreed that it might be easiest simply to leave the brackets rather than worrying about him losing a retainer or sneaking gummies. The appointment was so early today that I had to take him out of school before lunch (the third grade is the last lunch group, they don't eat till nearly one) so we went out for Japanese food together afterward and had a nice conversation about ways kids can help tsunami victims.

This evening we all watched The West Wing together. I am so insanely in love with Matt Santos...I am wondering whether Josh is also insanely in love with Matt Santos and only just realizing that because Matt Santos is an insane choice as a viable candidate, which is why I am insanely in love with him. Absolutely can't stand what they're doing to Donna but don't really care at the moment, as I'm not terribly focused on her; Allison Janney was entitled to a week off, adore the Bartlet family politics, liked Toby's nudging Josh, am not in the least sorry that Will is there to run the VP's campaign because if they tried to write any of the other regular characters that way, I'd throw up.

Anyone in the DC area, want to meet up with me to meet Bernard Cornwell on Wednesday, February 2nd at Borders in Bailey's Crossroads? He's reading and signing at 7:30 PM (promoting The Last Kingdom which isn't out till January 25th, but I'm sure he'll sign Sharpe books too). , , if you want a ride around the Beltway, just let me know!

So is there a way to input data from a videotape (a commercial VHS tape, not DVC) so it can be burned to a DVD? (Will send backup copies of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Caravaggio and The Competition to anyone who makes this possible!)

I am behind on comments etc. again because Lupin decided that I should write a sequel to "Compellation" -- I think he just wanted to hear Snape talk dirty to him some more but they are insisting on being somewhat serious before the smut. You'd think I could write consequence-free porn in this fandom, but no they're insisting on falling in love or something but don't tell Snape I called it that. Tomorrow is the day I have to get up very early because always has an early meeting Thursday, so I shall finish up then...

Younger son's drawing of our family as a totem pole for a school assignment. As you can see, I am on the bottom in clashing colors but apparently I am carved of red cedar because it doesn't rot! Also note that older son and I are both wearing glasses, and younger son is wearing his green sweatshirt with the hood.

Movie Meme Answers

Original quotes and people who guessed the correct answers are here.

1. "From now on we are enemies, you and I." This is from Amadeus, spoken by Salieri to God as he burns a crucifix, having just been given a glimpse of Mozart's astonishing talent by his wife who wants Salieri to recommend Mozart for a position tutoring a princess. Salieri is furious that this buffoonish boy has been graced with so much talent while he has so little, and spends the rest of his life hating Mozart and himself and God. It's rather a cautionary tale, I think. *g*

2. "It won't be a home-cooked meal, you know?" This is Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston) speaking to her son, Roy (John Cusack) in The Grifters, after he decides maybe it's time to make peace with his mother following a confrontation with his girlfriend (Annette Bening) in which she accuses him of having the hots for her. I really can't explain why I love this movie so much; the first time I ever saw it, in an artsy Chicago theater where normally people complain if other people are chewing their nachos too loudly, the audience was squirming and writhing and screaming advice at the screen during the last scene. It's the most perverse modern noir I can think of, the performances are flat-out fearless, and it has that film noir lightheadedness where you know that the punishment in store is going to be awful so you might as well really enjoy the crime.

3. "The nicest thing about being happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again." Molina to Valentin in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and it's a crime that this film is not out on DVD. I saw it six times in a week when it came out; I don't think any other film has ever had that kind of impact on me. It's about a gay daydreamer and a political prisoner who are sharing a jail cell and the ways in which they influence one another; it's also about art and life and power and love and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

4. "It costs extra to carve "shmuck" on a tombstone, but you would be worth the expense." Greta (Lee Remick), the piano teacher and onetime virtuoso, says this to Andrew (Sam Wanamaker), the conductor, in The Competition, following an argument in which he tries to convince her pupil Heidi (Amy Irving) not to switch pieces on the night of the big performance. One gets the impression that there is A Past between these two: Andrew holes up with the prettiest of the girls in the competition, and Greta gives Heidi a speech about how there will always be some man there to distract you from the brilliant career you could be having, but it's nicely understated. Again there's an art versus life conflict going on, but it's also funny and subtle.

5. "Everyone lies...but not all the time." Russell Crowe's Andy says this to Hugo Weaving's Martin near the end of Proof. Martin, who apparently reviews classical albums for a living (though I didn't pick up on this until I listened to the commentary tracks on the DVD), is a photographer by hobby, which is particularly fascinating because he's blind and needs someone else to tell him what his pictures show. His one requirement is absolute honesty, but Andy gets entangled with Martin's housekeeper and tells what should be a fairly insignificant fib, except in Martin's life it's everything, as he believes that his mother always lied to him about everything and therefore he can't trust anyone, ever. It's really a devastating characterization, except it has this lovely hopeful ending and you just want to kiss Russell, I mean Andy.

6. "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time." Spoken by Terence Mann, the J.D. Salinger-based character in Field of Dreams, to Ray Kinsella when he's thinking he's going to have to plow under his magical baseball field in Iowa where the 1919 "Black Sox" are currently playing. This scene never fails to make me bawl, and I'm even worse at the end. I am a shameless baseball as American myth fan, and films that touch on that -- The Natural, The Rookie, etc. -- never fail to do it for me.

7. "This isn't my gun. I was never here." The only one no one got! I'm not surprised, given that the film is fairly obscure: David Mamet's brilliant neo-noir House of Games, starring Lindsay Crouse, who was then his wife, as a repressed psychotherapist who doesn't even realize that she's unhappy until she meets a con man who makes her see the relative morality of all crime and guilt. It would give away far too much to explain the quotation itself but it's an absolutely shocking moment, and I highly recommend the movie.

8. "In the end I distilled everything to one simple principle: win or die." This is Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' Marquise de Merteuil, played by Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. There isn't a version of this story I haven't enjoyed, even though every single one has a different ending (this is a longtime interest too). Here's a transcript of the whole speech from the IMDb, though this is not exact: "When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learn how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die."

9. "God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big..." I have quoted this in my journal before, and I used to have it on an icon; it's from Joe vs. the Volcano, spoken by Joe himself, a character who learns how to live starting the day he learns he's dying, even though he quite literally can't escape from his baggage. In this scene, he's starved, dehydrated, floating on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, talking to the moon.

10. "Do you know how you got that dent in your top lip? Way back before you were born, I told you a secret. Then I put my finger there and said 'Shhhhh!'" I really wanted to quote Viggo Mortensen's Lucifer from The Prophecy, but all the lines just seemed so obvious. This is instead Christopher Walken's Gabriel. I'm just going to link to my review of this one, too, to explain why I have such affection for this rather overblown heavenly war epic in which God and his angels are the bad guys. As Elias Koteas' Thomas Daggett says, "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like?"

11. "You're the one who stopped sleeping with me! It'll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date because it was Hitler's birthday." Woody Allen's Cliff says this to his wife, Joanna Gleason's Wendy, in Crimes and Misdemeanors, a movie with a screenplay so brilliant that I could have quoted the whole damn thing. The more memorable line in this scene is "A strange man defecated on my sister," but the way Hitler hangs over this entire movie fascinates me. On the surface it's a sprawling family epic centered on Judah, an opthalmologist whose mistress is threatening to blow the cover on their longtime affair; his story connects loosely with that of Cliff because Wendy's brother Ben, a rabbi, is slowly going blind, and Wendy's filmmaker brother Lester is romancing the woman with whom Cliff (also a filmmaker) would like to commit adultery. But really the entire movie is about whether morality is possible or relevant in a world where the Holocaust happened, though the Holocaust comes up only in oblique ways, like this one. The predominant metaphor is eyes, and whether God is blind. Every time I see the film it astonishes me.

12. "There's no Messiah in here! There's a mess, all right, but no Messiah!" I thought about including Hannah and Her Sisters as well as Crimes and Misdemeanors for the line about how if Jesus came back, he'd never stop throwing up, but it's not nearly as good a movie, and as far as commentary on organized religion goes, there's none I've seen better than Monty Python's Life of Brian. I adore the political relevance of the scene where two Jewish terrorist groups trying to kidnap Pilate's wife get into a fight about who's the Real Movement and end up killing one another while Brian pleads with them to remember the common enemy -- "The Judean People's Front?" "No, the Romans!" But my favorite moment in the entire film, even more than "No one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle even if they do say Jehovah," "What have the bloody Romans ever done for us?" and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," is the one where Brian wakes up after a night of sex with the pretty woman who inspired him to join the movement, opens the window, and stands there, stark naked, as thousands of followers cry, "MASTER!" Then his mother arrives and disperses the crowd.

Poem for Wednesday

Egyptian Death Song
From the "Dispute of A Man with His Ba," papyrus manuscript of the 12th Dynasty
Translation by Erik Hornung

Death stands before me today
like the hope of health for a sick man,
like stepping out into the open air after
a time of suffering.
Death stands before me today
like the aroma of incense,
like sitting under the sail on
the Day of the Great Wind.
Death stands before me today
like the odor of lotos-blossoms,
like the first moments on the
edge of sweet drunkenness.
Death stands before me today
like the end of a long rain,
like the homecoming of a soldier
a long time at war.
Death stands before me today
like the clarity of heaven,
like the answer long-desired
to a heavy riddle.
And Death stands before me today
like the way a man feels about home
after he has spent many years
in bondage.

--------

Above swiped from who is trying to pimp me into Highlander fandom from across the Atlantic. has promised to give me a thorough recruitment demonstration next week. *g* I can see why the poem would be relevant to Immortals, but the bunny it wants to give me right now is about Sirius Black. *hangs head*

I met my beloved for lunch (if I am the minion, does that make her the mistress or the evil overlord?) at the mall, making this the first time in I don't know how many years that I've been in the mall two days in a row, and I bought myself fuzzy slippers on sale. Any day with new fuzzy slippers must be considered a good day. Otherwise it was mostly uneventful, involving work, a dispute with a cat who needed her claws clipped and a son who did not want to finish his spelling homework.

Tonight, because the wonderful had provided me with the goodness, we watched Windprints (a.k.a. The Killing Wind). I know a decent amount about what was going on in South Africa in the 1980s but next to nothing about Namibia -- in my public school system we were taught African history for eight weeks in seventh grade, so except for events in Egypt and Morocco that directly impacted European history, that was the last time I had it formally taught to me -- and we were both absolutely fascinated. I know the note at the beginning said that the film was based on actual events, but does anyone know how directly? It's about a liberal South African of Afrikaner roots (though he can't speak the language and is "accused" of being English) sent to work on a theoretically objective BBC-type documentary who finds that everyone makes up their own myths concerning a renegade Nama accused of killing black people on farms in the region. It's a very dark story yet every scene is almost absurdly bright, set under the desert sun, and it has some twistedly funny moments involving the various racial and cultural prejudices that keep flaring up. I kept thinking too about how people complain that there are too many guns in the U.S., but the number of guns carried around in this film is pretty startling. The film concludes quite abruptly, without trying to draw any morals or conclusions, which I really like; it's very emotional but it doesn't have any pat lesson for viewers.

On a related note, I'm curious, people who've seen Hotel Rwanda: is it a good movie? I've talked to a couple of people who thought it was weakened greatly by cliched characters, particularly Nick Nolte's, and to a couple of others who insisted that it was an important and meaningful film that played almost like a documentary. Obviously there is a great deal of ignorance about what went on in Rwanda, just as there's not a lot of talk about the nightmare that continues to unfold in Darfur (with all the talk about helping tsunami victims, I wonder why this is so very rarely mentioned in anyone's journal -- do other people just feel completely helpless at getting any sort of aid to the people who need it there, as I do, or do a lot of people simply not know, given how it tends to be buried on page 31 of my local paper when it's mentioned at all?) So of course I think it's wonderful that someone made a film that attempts to make the tragedy in Rwanda comprehensible, but at the same time I can't figure out whether this is a film I want to see, or whether, like sometimes happens with movies about the Holocaust, people are afraid to criticize the movie because it seems insensitive to the subject matter. If it deserves ringing endorsements please tell me.

Earlier was talking about the vagaries of LiveJournal and I was trying to explain that my friends list does weird things in terms of dropping entries, which I used to think had to do with the times that people posted in different parts of the world, but I now suspect are just completely random. For instance, I have on both my default list and my list of people I know in the flesh (I try to keep up with people I know in real life, particularly when we've known each other for many years), yet her posts never show up on my friends page no matter which version of my list I'm reading -- I have to remember to go read them at her journal. Also, whenever I go over 500 total entries on my Friends list -- because LiveJournal combines individuals, syndicated feeds and communities once the total is over 500, and stops listing them on the User Info page -- then LiveJournal promptly takes and off my list even though I still show up on their "friend of" lists; it's always those two individuals, both of whom have been on my friends list for quite some time and have never been taken off by me. I keep ditching communities from my friends list to keep the individuals from being kicked off, but I am running out of communities to unfriend. Does anyone know why this happens, and whether, if my friends list gets longer, more people will be arbitrarily unfriended by LiveJournal?

On a happier fannish note, the lovely and wonderful has links in her journal to Thirty Odd Foot Of Grunts videos, including some hosted at gruntland.com (TOFOG's official site). M&C fans, you must go watch the video of "Sail Those Same Oceans" on the ship! And "The Photograph Kills" has footage from Virtuosity. Am guessing from the two un-guessed lines in the movie meme earlier that 80s noir is not terribly popular; shall post answers tomorrow when I am awake enough to explain why I picked the films I picked. Younger son has yet another dentist/orthodontist appointment to see how the pulled tooth is doing and to adjust the braces...

Stephen the squirrel takes a rare visit to the front of the house in search of berries fallen from the neighbor's tree.

Movie Night Baaaaa

The guess-my-line meme:
1. Pick one dozen movies that you have special feelings about.
2. Pick a few lines of dialogue.
3. As people guess the film, strike out that entry.
4. If possible, after the film is guessed, explain why that movie made the list.

I decided arbitrarily not to include any Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, partly because everyone would get them immediately and partly because I couldn't decide which to choose.

1. From now on we are enemies, you and I. ()
2. It won't be a home-cooked meal, you know? ()
3. The nicest thing about being happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again. ()
4. It costs extra to carve "shmuck" on a tombstone, but you would be worth the expense. ()
5. Everyone lies...but not all the time. ()
6. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. ()
7. This isn't my gun. I was never here.
8. In the end I distilled everything to one simple principle: win or die. ()
9. God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big... ()
10. Do you know how you got that dent in your top lip? Way back before you were born, I told you a secret. Then I put my finger there and said "Shhhhh!" ()
11. You're the one who stopped sleeping with me! It'll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date because it was Hitler's birthday. ()
12. There's no Messiah in here! There's a mess, all right, but no Messiah! ()

ETA: Am screening comments so that people who want to guess can guess untainted. *g* Shall mark off the ones already guessed correctly with the username of the person who guessed first!

ETA #2: Answers here.

And in unrelated entertainment news, October Project has uploaded a free download of an a cappella version of "Eyes of Mercy"! Voluntary donations will go to help tsunami victims.

Poem for Tuesday

From Doctor Faustus
By Christopher Marlowe

Marriage is but a ceremonial toy;
And if thou lovest me, think no more of it.
I'll cull thee out the fairest courtesans,
And bring them ev'ry morning to thy bed:
She whom thine eye shall like, thy heart shall have,
Were she as chaste as was Penelope,
As wise as Sava, or as beautiful
As was bright Lucifer before his fall.

--------

This one also snicked from a Washington Post Book World article, this time Michael Dirda's review of The World of Christopher Marlowe. He noted of the lines quoted above that the focus unexpectedly shifts from fair women to male beauty, "the same kind of slither that takes place in the latter part of the gorgeous soliloquy about Helen of Troy":

O, thou art fairer than the evening's air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

Mephistopheles used sex to divert Faustus from having any real earthly impact after selling his soul, so it's interesting that a male god is Faustus' point of comparison for Helen. Edward II is of course Marlowe's more famous play about a man in love with a man, though very dark. Dirda didn't love the new biography, but he does offer a list of alternatives and has put me in the mood to reread plays I haven't looked at since grad school more than ten years ago.

: "Riddikulus" for the "cranky" challenge. this week is Severus' birthday which I believe I covered already -- how many spankings does the man need? Heh, never mind, don't answer that one!

Nothing exciting to report from my day. Took kids to the mall after school because older son needed to have his glasses repaired; made the mistake of going into Game Stop at their request and then had to deal with meltdown because I refused to buy a Kirby game on the spot (older son has a $35 Best Buy gift card that has been sitting at home since his birthday in September, no way was I letting him spend cash on a mall-priced game), bought them Dippin' Dots which apparently did not make me the good guy, dragged them into Ritz looking for a decently padded neck strap for a tiny digital camera, came home and overate just because the spicy peanuts were there. I feel like I'm drowning in stuff -- too many games the kids can't fit on their shelves, too many CDs we can't fit on the rack, too many computer parts we no longer use...anyone need a Mac (SCSI) Zip drive, unused for two years but in great shape, takes only 100 MB disks? Free to anyone willing to come and get it.

Incidentally, are there differences among brand names for SD cards? How come some have more little gold contact points on the back than others? Is it necessary to store them in little plastic cases away from the batteries or do they do all right just dropped in a camera bag? How come I can get a Kingston 128 MB card for $15 but would have to pay nearly $70 for a Panasonic 256 MB card?

And while I'm asking questions, has anyone found a downloadable version of the first 5 minutes of Elektra, posted on Yahoo!, which apparently contains the entirety of Jason Isaacs' part in the movie? I would so love a link, as I can't figure out a way to save it and I really don't want to see the film but I was whimpering over his accent. ETA from : here! Thank you, sweetie! (I assume most interested people will have found 's Phantom of the Opera in 15 Minutes but I will link to it anyway just in case, because it made me howl so!)

Gacked from , my angst tastes like licorice, like hers, which pleases me because it means my breath probably smells sweet, but I'd rather my angst taste like dark chocolate.

My angst tastes like...

Black Licorice
Find your angst's flavor

And asked whether I had any photos of Matildaville, the remains of the village near Great Falls, Virginia. These are a couple of years old, but as you can see, there is very little left of Matildaville, so it changes very little year to year...


Matildaville, named by its founder, Revolutionary War hero "Light Horse" Harry Lee (the father of Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee) in honor of his first wife, Matilda. It once contained the Patowmack Canal Company superintendent's house as well as a market, mill, foundry, inn and some private homes.


What's left now are the foundations of some of the buildings, the locks of the now-dry canal, and stories about George Washington's passion for trying to build a canal to make the Potomac River navigable for commerce...


...which eventually happened, but by then the railroads were faster and more efficient at moving the goods. Here's how the holding basin looks nowadays.

Having lunch with my beloved , shall answer comments later!

Poem for Monday

Song
By Robert Pinsky

Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body. The body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.

The bird a medium of song.
Song a microcosm, a containment
Like the fresh hotel room, ready
For each new visitor to inherit
A little world of time there.

In the Cornell box, among
Ephemera as its element,
The preserved bird -- a study
In spontaneous elegy, the parrot
Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.

--------

Another by Pinsky quoted by Edward Hirsch in Poet's Choice in yesterday's Washington Post Book World.

Today was warmer and clearer than yesterday, and we went to the Virginia side of Great Falls to hike a bit. Several of the paths and overlooks are being repaired from damage from previous storms, and we didn't make it to Matildaville, the ruins of an 18th century town that flourished along the Patowmack Canal while it was used for commerce; now, unlike the C&O Canal which is still full of water and can lift boats through the locks, only the ditches remain of the Patowmack Canal. On the way home we stopped at the Bethesda Co-op to stock up on meat-free sausages and grab some chocolate covered cherries.

Tonight we put on Breaking Up while doing various chores -- I'd forgotten how luminous Salma Hayek is in that, and Russell Crowe is adorable even though I want to smack his character about fifteen times (Salma's is unbelievably restrained, even though she's supposed to be a hard-to-live-with firebrand). I can't decide whether the ending is supposed to be hopeful or chilling, either. There's a case of two actors who have such great chemistry and generate so much energy that it's possible to overlook the weirder parts of the script; a lot of it sounds like a stage play that no one bothered to convert into the more natural language of film, which is really necessary unless the cinematography and staging of the film suggest that it's not supposed to be entirely realistic. Structurally it has a lot in common with Better Than Sex, which makes it fun to have watched it not long after.

I played a little with my new camera, though there are lots of things I haven't figured out how to do at all; it has a great many preprogrammed modes and you can override all of those, but I want to see what it can do with the point and click settings on for when we're on vacation. I love little things like the ease of turning the flash off and on and the built-in lens cover...I bought this one for convenience over sophistication! While hunting for my old camera to swipe the strap, I had an urge to take a darkroom course, but remembered how expensive it is which is why I never got very involved in photography in the first place.

I'm behind on reading my own friends list again because I was reading ' earlier (and she read mine, brave woman!) -- I shall try to catch up tomorrow. Hope everyone had a lovely weekend and is keeping warm!

My kids climbing on the rocks above the rapids on the Virginia side of the Great Falls of the Potomac River.


Spray from the river, which was slightly higher than normal but only barely so as we have had no snowfall to speak of all winter.


Here's the side from which I more often take my photos of the river, the main overlook on Olmsted Island on the Maryland side of the falls.


This is the bridge we cross from the C&O Canal towpath to the island. You can see the part that's dammed from debris in the lower right.


And here's Mather Gorge from directly above, with the national park dedication plaque.

Poem for Sunday

If You Could Write One Great Poem,
What Would You Want It To Be About?
By Robert Pinsky

(Asked of four student poets at the Illinois Schools
for the Deaf and Visually Impaired)

Fire: because it is quick, and can destroy.
Music: place where anger has its place.
Romantic Love -- the cold or stupid ask why.
Sign: that it is a language, full of grace,

That it is visible, invisible, dark and clear,
That it is loud and noiseless and is contained
Inside a body and explodes in air
Out of a body to conquer from the mind.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post Book World, in which, to my sorrow, Hirsch announces that this will be his next-to-last Poet's Choice column. The column will be taken over by Robert Pinsky, whose poetry I like very much...but I like the poetry of Rita Dove very much as well, and though I read her columns when she wrote Poet's Choice before Hirsch took it over, she was not as interesting an interpreter of the poems of others. Still, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project while he was poet laureate of the United States, and he's certainly no traditionalist, nor a snob about verse. It will be interesting to see which poets he picks to talk about, and whether, like Hirsch, he devotes some columns to poetic forms and language rather than specific writers.

Today started quietly, with a neighbor boy visiting my sons to play and me doing work around the house. Then my parents took the kids to the Wizards game tonight, leaving and myself free to see The Aviator. (I will never understand the MPAA rating system -- why is Life of Brian rated R, but The Aviator PG13? I am so glad we did not take the children to this one!) We both thought it was superb -- beautifully filmed, very well acted, and we were surprised after it ended to discover how long it had been -- we were under the impression that it was only a two-hour movie and it felt like a two-hour movie, with excellent pacing and very little that I could imagine being cut; the early scenes with Kate Beckinsdale's Ava Gardner weren't very impressive after Cate Blanchett's astonishing Katharine Hepburn but Scorsese had to do something to convince us that she cared enough for Hughes to be there for him later, when he started to come apart, so I suppose they needed to be included.

I am one of those people who wasn't all that impressed with DiCaprio in Titanic and couldn't believe how famous it made him -- he now claims he didn't want that, but nobody gets on that many magazine covers without himself and his publicist and manager making it happen -- so I held that against him for several years, but seeing Total Eclipse reminded me of just how good he can be, and in The Aviator he takes a lot of similar risks. I love how unafraid he is to be really despicable in scenes when he could try for empathy; he has a lot of sympathetic moments but he doesn't ever soft-pedal the really rotten stuff. I had read that The Aviator didn't deal with Hughes in his insane last years, so I didn't expect his earlier OCD and related issues to be portrayed so graphically; the lunatic edge is very striking. It's funny, because there's no one I came away from this film really liking; Hughes is very messed up, but the accusations he levels against all the phony people around him strike home (the actresses all act with him, the politicians are all sleazy, the people who work for him all suck up). It's not a pretty picture and yet, like a plane wreck, you can't look away.

When we got home, we set up the telescope to look at Comet Machholz, which we couldn't see last night due to rainy weather. We couldn't make it out with the naked eye in our very light-polluted suburb, but it was clear with binoculars, a fuzzy spot just to the right of the Pleiades (north, I think?) Not as spectacular as Hale-Bopp but still neat! I wish I knew enough to take a photo, but I suspect we have the wrong lenses for our cameras and telescope both.

The peacocks at the Baltimore Zoo wander free, like this one resting in a corner of the farmyard exhibit.

Poem for Saturday

The Mountain Cemetery
By Edgar Bowers

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots' broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.

The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust
That came from nothing and to nothing came
Is light within the earth and on the air.
The change that so renews itself is just.
The enormous, sundry platitude of death
Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.

And splayed upon the ground and through the trees
The mountains' shadow fills and cools the air,
Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth.
The rhododendrons suffer with the bees
Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth,
The heaviest burden it shall ever bear.

Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep.
Although the spring must come, it passes too
To form the burden suffered for what comes.
Whatever we would give our souls to keep
Is merely part of what we call the soul;
What we of time would threaten to undo

All time in its slow scrutiny has done.
For on the grass that starts about the feet
The body's shadow turns, to shape in time,
Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade,
The final shadow that is turn of earth;
And what seems won paid for as in defeat.

--------

Had a wonderful lunch with the lovely and generous (happy birthday sweetie!) and her mother at a superb Indian buffet in Virginia where we talked travel plans and fandom and food and brought me Kate Rusby CDs. Whenever I see these two women, it makes me a little sad that I don't have a daughter. Of course if I had one she might not be as utterly fabulous as , and I would not be as wonderful as , so this is probably delusional on my part, but it does cross my mind.

And sent me the Big Gay Boat Mix! Thank you! *hugs* Oh, I must drive to Baltimore to see the Constellation soon while listening to it! I am having an urge to drive to Boston to see the Constitution, but I think it will be awhile before I get up there again. Being in Philadelphia has put me in a colonial history state of mind. I should drive out to some of the historic cities in eastern Maryland, it's been ages, and I am dying to go see the beach in winter. Every time I think there might be a good reason to move to Virginia, like lower housing costs and some good public school districts, I am reminded that it's a bad bad bad idea...

Otherwise, I wrote three articles, had dinner with my parents, answered a hundred comments (yes literally, or very close to), worked a bit on fic, and *hangs head* got stamps for my last two holiday cards that are going to people I didn't expect cards from and didn't send cards to! Fortunately, neither is on LiveJournal so I can admit this here! Am trying to decide whether I dare sign up for that Friends list swap, if it's not too late for it...I love meeting people but then I feel guilty at the number of people on my list I wish I knew better whose journals I rush past because it's too big already...

Since it's Friday, you get memes instead of photos. In case you are feeling deprived, I know lots of people have linked to it already but I have to share the story of the tortoise who adopted a hippo and the photos that go along with it!

: Holy snow batman!
1. What's your opinion on snow? Love it, so long as I don't have to shovel large quantities of it.
2. Have you ever built a snowman? Many, many times. Have never decorated one with more than vegetables, sticks and other disposable items, though.
3. Do you do any winter time sports? Before I had children I loved to ice skate; now I'm afraid I watch it more on television, since my kids do not. I sled with them when we have appropriate weather.
4. When's the last time you had a snowball fight? Last winter. We haven't gotten enough snow yet this winter.
5. What's the most snow you've ever gotten in a single storm? I don't remember -- more than three feet, when I was young, and in Chicago we got quite a lot by the lake. That was always so beautiful.

:
1. What is the first book you remember reading? I know I read many, many books before it, but the first one I retain conscious memories of the experience of reading is A Wrinkle In Time, which I started in the car driving home from a family trip to New York and refused to put down for lunch at Roy Rogers or anything else. I remember sitting in the rest stop devouring it, vaguely annoyed at all the background noise like my mother telling me to eat.
2. What is your favorite book? One? ONE? Sheesh! The Collected Works of William Shakespeare. Oh, sorry, is that cheating?
3. Who is your favorite author? One? ONE? Sheesh! Whoever is responsible for the King James Bible. Also cheating, hah.
4. Pick up the nearest book (magazine or any available printed material will do). Turn to page 24 (or the closest to it). Go to the 7th line. What is it? "By the time the film came out, however, Poland was undergoing a post-Stalinist thaw." From The 'Jew' In Cinema: From 'The Golem' to 'Don't Touch My Holocaust' by Omer Bartov (Bloomington: IUP, 2005).
5. If you could be any character in literature, who would you be? God in Milton's Paradise Lost...nah, not enough passion. I know...Donald Shimoda in Richard Bach's Illusions.

Poem for Friday

On Time
By Ronald Wallace

He knows, for her, ten minutes late is early.
She knows, for him, ten minutes early is late.
And so they live their lives together, but
in different time frames. He thinks that she will surely
miss the boat that he is the first on. And surely,
she thinks, when he arrives he'll wait and wait.
She will put herself in the hands of fate;
he'll take his fate in his hands and hold it securely.

"The early bird may get the worm," she says,
"but who wants worms?" "Late is just," he says,
"a synonym for dead." And so the worm
of discord continues turning surely between them.
He wonders if there's time to save the day.
She thinks that it is just too soon to say.

--------

schlepped over here for lunch and Joe vs. the Volcano, which I feel badly about as I had meant to go to her and bring her cookies, but by the time I had things in order, I wouldn't have been home in time to get my kids. Instead she brought George the kitten over, making both my cats rather nervous (Rosie sat in 's lap the entire time she was here and rrrowled like a lioness every time Georgie walked by), but making both my sons very happy when they got home from school. Kittens improve everything, unless you happen to be the Cat Ruler of the House.

In good news, my new camera arrived! The battery recharger, which came in a separate package, is cracked and has to be sent back and replaced (minor grrr) but the camera itself is tiny and weighs next to nothing and still has the flash and zoom and manual settings I want. Have not really examined any of its capabilities nor even installed the software that came with it, but I did take one experimental photo just to make sure that the camera would power up and read my SD card, and that the SD card reader could retrieve the photo:

Cinnamon recovers from Georgie's visit.

I'm feeling crazed and unable to get caught up on comments -- I keep having to choose between doing that and listening to characters babbling in my head, and the characters keep winning because they are just so much more persistent. Also, I hit -250 and quit; it's just too many hours of my life to read the list every day. P.S. : I miss you horribly and must see you soon.

On a related note, am I the only person here totally unconcerned about LiveJournal being bought out? They say not much will change, I don't see any reason not to believe them, and it's been obvious that increased numbers of users have caused burdens that the current management has struggled with. I've had JournalFen and GreatestJournal accounts under the same username for years but I can't be arsed to use them; something in me doesn't like the idea of a journal that's supposed to be fandom-only. I have a fic journal here just to keep from driving people nuts if they don't want to put up with photos of my cats, but I operate under the delusion that LiveJournal is a microcosm of the world at large and not just fandom at large, with no idea why this distinction should matter to me since most of my friends here are friends from fandom. Still, I suspect that if LiveJournal went away or started driving me completely insane with outages, fees, etc., I would not move over to JournalFen or GreatestJournal but would take it as a sign from above to stop babbling like this and do something else with my time. Is this passive-aggressive or a form of denial or what?

My gemstone. Blue topaz is sometimes the alternate birthstone for December, because turquoise is so rarely set in gold and jewelers want to make more money than silver, so I suppose this is appropriate:

You scored as Topaz. Not like any other, topaz-types love to stick out from the crowd! They tend to have their own style and make their own decisions and they're rarely afraid to show it. They tend to have many successes because of their own ingenuity and most show their feelings on the outside. They are their own person and many have great imaginations. See All Results/Comment Topaz 80% Emerald 77% Peridot 77% Ruby 73% Garnet 70% Aquamarine 67% Celestite 60% Athemyst 50% Which Mystic Gem Stone Relates To You? created with QuizFarm.com

Poem for Thursday

Hariot's Round
By Dan Beachy-Quick

     I know, to entice, to convince, I must sing
   Your ear inside stone, must sing
     Gold bitten and true, the corn kernel, one seed,
       I must plant one gold seed in your mouth with my lips.
Raleigh says: the Queen knows my name. The Crown
       Of a woodpecker is ruby, but shy.
     Inhabitants adorn themselves with feathers, and feathers
   Bright on arrow ends. Bow--before a Queen. Bend closed my book.
The page is deaf that turns back to look at what it found.

--------

It's late again and I have to get up very early tomorrow, and my thoughts are generally in chaos but the migraine is gone and really sometimes that's all that matters. Spent half the morning having a bitter argument, over e-mail and then on the phone, with Dell -- remember how last week I explained that I had spent half the night on their live chat site trying to straighten out IEEE/Firewire issues? Well, they had promised to send me the correct cable (after initially sending me the incorrect cable) and yesterday I discovered that they had cancelled that order, without any word of warning to me. This required what could have been a polite inquiry, but quickly led to aggravation. While I understand the need for a global economy, is it too much to ask that US companies who export their customer service departments to Pakistan and India require that the employees there have a basic grasp of English for dealing with US customers? And if they are being asked very simple, basic questions that they cannot answer, would it not be more fair to the employees as well as to customers to have someone standing by who does speak English and can say something other than, "Did you look again on the web site for your answer?"

In other annoyances, we have our van back (YAAAAY!) but the insurance company that is allegedly covering our rental has not yet paid since December 17th (!!!!) so we can't get back our security deposit until they do so. Had I mentioned that we could have gotten the van back last week, had our insurance contact used next day mail to send a check, yet she insisted on using regular mail, which meant five extra days driving the rental? The cost-ineffectiveness of businesses is really pissing me off tonight. How many hundred dollars that could have been used to rebuild houses in Asia has been wasted because of laziness and stupidity on the part of corporate managers?

Okay, enough ranting. I actually had quite a pleasant afternoon writing porn for , who somehow got me into a discussion of how Alan Rickman pronounces the name "Lupin" (i.e., like Snape wants to wrap his tongue around the word, or around Remus, I can't tell which). Obviously this called for "ohgodyesseverussaymynameagain" fic (at least, Lupin claimed it did). I sent it to Cate first, since it's her fault, but shall post it tomorrow in penance for having not posted any fluff in weeks. Now I have to write fic where Lupin says "tell me you love me" and Snape safewords...

And I had a semi-pleasant evening watching first Event Horizon on SciFi (what a great cast for a terrible screenplay -- Jason Isaacs, Joely Richardson, Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, acting all excellent, story incredibly stupid), then The West Wing (dammit, John Wells, stop making me cry, I do not in principle even like you, and I am SO SO GLAD C.J. refused to answer the question). I am ready to vote for Jimmy Smits. Or, for that matter, Alan Alda, if either one of them could trade places with George Bush and he could play the president on TV instead. Younger son's mouth is feeling much better, recovered in part by tooth fairy gift of Kirby for the Game Boy which he is not usually allowed to play on school nights; older son watched Event Horizon with me and narrated explanations of how horror movies work (SciFi cuts for 7 p.m. showing still a little much for a 12-year-old; I am glad he was watching with a critical eye but every time my kids don't get scared by a movie I can't help thinking that seeing 9/11 unfold live on television really numbed something in their sensibilities).

Tomorrow is going to be insane and I am hoping to see in the midst of it, so again I may be late on all comments -- apologies in advance. Have been absolutely fascinated by the comments about Minas Tirith, both the people who agree and the ones who strongly disagree. Thanks so much for telling me to look at photos of Siena, something I've never really done before -- it only reminds me of Minas Tirith superficially, as it seems much more vibrant to me, but I definitely see the resemblance here and here.

The USS Constellation lit up for the winter holidays. Note that, unlike in my previous photos, she is now docked with her prow facing the harbor; she had sailed to Annapolis for her birthday and was feted upon her return with the promise of a new visitor's center at the pier.

Odd Revelation About LOTR

... said after I posted that photo of Elfreth's Alley last night that it sounded like something Tolkien would make up, and I had a sudden, overwhelming revelation about what I really, really hated about the film of The Return of the King: Minas Tirith.

Yes, that's right. Every place we saw in Rohan, from the village Saruman's hordes were burning at the start of The Two Towers to the Golden Hall and all the connected rooms, looked like someplace where ordinary people could live and work. We don't actually see the gardens being tended nor the food being prepared as we do in the Shire, but it's easy to believe that these things are taking place just offscreen -- that the stables where Brego is kept have to be cleaned, that Eowyn has a chamberpot where she can run and puke after Grima puts his hands on her. Edoras manages to look regal yet earthy, a place where a King can relate to his subjects; this is true both when Theoden is under Saruman's spell and after he's lost a huge number of subjects at Helms Deep. I know exactly how far the ordinary person must walk in Edoras to see flowers blooming on a hillside.

Minas Tirith looks wonderful, on first view, from a distance, like a fairy tale castle high on a hill, but it leaves me as cold as its stones. I can't begin to guess where the people collected those flowers they strewed at the feet of the soldiers riding to Osgiliath -- another city of big cold stones, whose only warmth I associate with Boromir's presence from the extended TTT. In the case of the latter it's easier to blame the orcs, but no matter how terrible things were in Gondor under Denethor, that doesn't explain why a city with pristine banners and scrubbed-clean carvings doesn't have one flowerpot that looks real, let alone one child drinking from a decorated earthenware cup. The impression I get of Minas Tirith even at Aragorn's coronation is of a place where a King will sit high on a great big throne and everyone else will mill around like pretty ants, kneeling when he kneels, and even so I don't have a clue where the laundry might be done, the meat smoked, the apples planted.

I can't write about Aragorn, Arwen, Faramir or Eowyn in that city. It isn't that I had any sense of how Minas Tirith should have looked; my visual imagination is quite limited, and it's always been easy for me to accept a film's casting of characters because it's very rare for me to have a rigid sense myself of how anyone should look. There are cases where I can say it just seems wrong, like Emma Thompson in Branagh's Henry V as a very young, virginal French princess -- I love her, but that casting was ridiculous, I felt like Branagh had just insisted on having his wife in there -- but the whole "David Thewlis isn't hot enough to be Remus Lupin" argument always struck me as ridiculous too. So Minas Tirith is not a case for me where something doesn't look the way I imagined it, as some people seem to have with aspects of the Harry Potter films. Minas Tirith just doesn't look right to me. Even the long-awaited Houses of Healing are too cold and dark; I'm not sure I'd heal there even with Faramir smiling at me.

I've no idea whether this makes any sense, but it was crystal clear to me as soon as I read the comment about Elfreth's Alley. Tolkien might have imagined a place like it for men to walk, but we never saw anything like that in Gondor. Where does a city like Minas Tirith hide its pubs, its schools, its birdfeeders? Not in the sun...not anyplace I saw near that impossibly cold stone facade. My Aragorn would have shriveled up and died in that place.

Poem for Wednesday

A Simile for Her Smile
By Richard Wilbur

Your smiling, or the hope, the thought of it,
Makes in my mind such pause and abrupt ease
As when the highway bridgegates fall,
Balking the hasty traffic, which must sit
On each side massed and staring, while
Deliberately the drawbridge starts to rise:

The horns are hushed, the oilsmoke rarefies,
Above the idling motors one can tell
The packet's smooth approach, the slip,
Slip of the silken river past the sides,
The ringing of clear bells, the dip
And slow cascading of the paddle wheel.

--------

You can thank for the poem. Am deep in migraine right now and cannot be coherent, must go to sleep. Younger son had a tooth removed -- it had abnormally large base for a baby tooth, required two shots of novacaine, he was crying -- most of today is better forgotten, but much of it is a blur now anyway. In positive news, it was warm again, though I suspect a front may be coming through to change that, hence the splitting headache. I read that a lot of people who suffer from migraines got them, all over the world, just before the earthquake that caused the tsunami and am slightly worried and wondering whether some higher power is trying to tell me to make another donation. I wish I could do something more concrete than just typing and clicking to forward cash -- no one has created a fic-for-donations site like , have they?

made me happy with this news via Murph's Place: "As many of you know, the San Diego Maritime Museum purchased SURPRISE (ROSE) last October. I learned recently that she goes off display this March. She will be dry-docked for a survey and refit. While the contract with the studio mandates that her paintwork be 'weathered' (like it was in the movie), her bottom gets cleaned and other maintenance performed. In fact, many small repairs are already underway. The goal is to have SURPRISE (ROSE) ready to sail by 2006. In fact, if all goes well, she will sail in November, for STAR OF INDIA’s 162nd 'birthday' sail." My fantasy is that the studio wants her "weathered" for a reason. But even if not, I am very glad they are restoring Surprise to sailing shape.

In other historical news, more Philadelphia:

Betsy Ross' house on Arch Street, where the first American flag was stitched.


The Bourse, Philly's original commodities exchange, now containing the food court where we had lunch. If you saw National Treasure you may remember this as the place where Diane Kruger ran to hide from the bad guys.


Elfreth's Alley -- the oldest residential street in the United States, existing in its present form since before there was a United States.


Franklin Court -- onetime site of Benjamin Franklin's house, now a museum.


Here one can see Franklin's printing press, which encouraged rebellion against the British...


...and his privy drain, well below current street level.


A costume from the Mummers Parade from years past. Each New Year's Day, the Mummers recreate a version of the Saturnalia with costumes, music and comedy -- a Philadelphia tradition since before the city's founding, the parade has been official since the early 1900s.

Coupla memes while you're back here since I saved them from earlier:


alt="I am nerdier than 63% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!">

Hunger Comfort Hygiene Energy Fun Social Bladder Room Love

Reach for the lasers with Antic's Sims-ulator!

Poem for Tuesday

My Aunts
By Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Always caught up in what they called
the practical side of life
(theory was for Plato),
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets
that turned a linen closet to a meadow.

The practical side of life,
like the Moon's unlighted face,
didn't lack for mysteries;
when Christmastime drew near,
life became pure praxis
and resided temporarily in hallways,
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died--it happened
even in our family, alas--
my aunts, preoccupied
with death's practical side,
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don't just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
                    the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

--------

Kids back in school. Laundry done. Some small percentage of correspondence attended to. Latest on camera search: Abe's of Maine (from whom we have purchased binoculars in the past) has absolutely unbelievable prices on the Coolpix 3200 and 4100; the former gets slightly better reviews for its programming but the latter has more megapixels, and there's only a $25 difference, and they're both only a little over $150 (Office Depot online has the Coolpix 2200 for $99, but I'd rather pay $50 more for the additional megapixels). Tomorrow younger son has tooth extraction, so I am boring and domestic. It was 64 degrees today so it isn't as if I can complain about anything. And I wrote two drabbles:

: "Bane", for the first-time challenge.
: "Calling the Wind", for the retro challenge (25th anniversary).

While folding the laundry I watched the Richard Loncraine-Ian McKellen production of Richard III, which was on cable. I had not seen it before though it has a great many things going for it -- like a 1930s setting with spooky fascist parallels, absolutely gorgeous costume design and Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth in a wonderful performance; Maggie Smith, who plays the Duchess of York, is wonderful as well. Richard's character as written by Shakespeare is entirely over the top, with none of the subtlety of most of his heroes or even his most flagrant villains -- when Richard wants someone dead, he says so, and if the person to whom he is speaking doesn't say "Great idea, I'll do it right away," that person doesn't last long. McKellen (who co-wrote the screenplay) plays much of Richard's creepiness for laughs; he's not a hunchback here but has an arm apparently withered from polio, though he blames witchcraft. The script is tight and cuts quite a bit of Shakespeare's language but there's not a boring moment, and in a production with kinky sex, numerous murders, tanks and airplanes, endless conspiracies and Robert Downey Jr. as Rivers, it's very easy to follow the story and have fun watching.

Catching up with photos, here are some more from the National Museum of American History's transportation exhibits:

An exhibit of cars and trailers on Route 66, the route we drove the summer before last...


...and our predecessor on that trip, the first car to drive cross-country.


The Bolivar Point lighthouse lens from Galveston, Texas, which saw duty from 1907 to 1933.


From the enormous collection of model ships, whalers and a painting of their seas.


The propeller from the Indiana, brought up from the bottom of Lake Superior.


The engine and some cars of the 1401...


...and a Chicago subway car from the America on the Move exhibit.

Poem for Monday

From "Red Foxes"
By Robert McDowell

When she was younger Nessa shot a bird.
She was playing Annie Oakley. Her friend Ramon
Had handed her his Christmas BB gun.
She raised the barrel, sighting a mockingbird
On a telephone wire. "One shot," she told her friend.
Impossible. They both laughed at her bragging
As she squeezed the trigger, then the bird fell down.
Ramon picked up the rifle, ran for home,
While Nessa, unbelieving, held the bird,
Refusing to accept the death she'd made.
So that was how easy making death could be.

--------

This reminds me of Robert P. Tristram Coffin's "Forgive My Guilt" only in tighter modern language. I can't find the poem online, but I remember the opening lines: "Not always sure what things called sins may be/I am sure of one sin that I have done:/It was years ago, when I was a boy./I lay in the frost-flowers with a gun..."

Had another relatively quiet family day; kids had a friend over in the morning, we brought pizza in for them for lunch, then older son had to go to visit the friend from school with whom he is working on his science project, so after dropping him off the rest of us went to the pet store for food and cage fluff, then walked into Circuit City since it's next door where I inspected the digital camera I want to buy myself before we go to England, preferably with enough time to play with it and see what it can do. (Would love to get the Nikon 4100, will settle for the Nikon 3200, and would buy the 2100 if I could find it for under $100 because spouse is annoyed that I feel the need for a smaller, lighter camera -- he doesn't carry the 995 around his neck all day, along with the digicam for video. The 2 MP cameras are only about $50 less than the 3 MP cameras, so it would be nuts to buy one, but it's another $75 for the 4 MP cameras so I am not anticipating that happening even if I sell stuff on eBay to compensate for the cost. We have to have the deck repaired in the spring, so there goes any potential play money for all of next year, really.)

Amusement for the day: discovering that Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin performed "I Want It That Way" at the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival last year, and it's online along with the rest of the concert at EZTorrent. (Whenever I hear this song, I sing the "Which Backstreet Boy Is Gay" version of it almost automatically so it was really fun to hear two women folkies singing it.)

had a contest in her journal to identify Christmas carols, and I came in second, so she owed me fic in recompense, and I said I wanted happy Lupin/Snape and if she could throw in happy Black as well, I would be her love slave. She wrote me "Bound". Now I owe her sexual favors. Hehehehe.

asked for:
1. top five cds that came out in 04. Which I absolutely cannot answer, because I bought almost no new music last year. U2? Barenaked Ladies? Reunited October Project? Most of my new CDs were movie soundtracks consisting of old music!
2. top five movies that came out in 04. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Finding Neverland, The Phantom of the Opera (because I very nearly said De-Lovely, but the gender politics of that film bug me even more than Phantom), and -- okay, fine, ridicule me all you like -- National Treasure. Keep in mind that I have not yet seen Kinsey, Sideways nor The Aviator.
3. top five memories/experiences you had in 04. Mystic, Cape Cod, Plymouth, Salem, Boston.

, posted late on Sunday:
1. How often do you cook at home? When the spouse can't or doesn't want to and we don't have time for takeout.
2. How did you learn how to cook? Hahaha, from a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese box. Not even being in love with my eighth grade home ec teacher could make me want to learn.
3. What is a meal that has special meaning to you? Soup and applesauce. Latkes, I guess, because they're the only thing I've cooked for my in-laws. All Passover-specific foods.
4. What is the last meal you cooked? See aforementioned Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
5. What is your least favorite thing to cook? Absolutely anything that requires the use of the stovetop where something could spatter.

I haven't forgotten the Philly and Smithsonian photos, but since this was likely our last outing for the break, I shall post pictures from this evening's activity. Since we had to pick older son up from his friend's house near Wheaton Regional Park, we went to the Brookside Gardens' walk-through Garden of Lights.

The sea monster in the fountain where, in summer, frogs hide between the plants.


"Flowers" blooming in front of the herb garden.


A dragonfly for .


The walk-through caterpillar tunnel for .


Thunderclouds, rain and lightning (which flickers on and off, accompanied by sound effects)...


...leading to a rainbow.


From across the pond, the lights of the pagoda, some of the bushes and the giant dragonflies in the trees.

Wizarding Pictures Question

How come some people in wizarding pictures can interact with people outside the pictures in current time, like Phineas Nigellus and the Fat Lady, while other people, like Harry's parents, can only smile and wave at the moment in which they were captured? Is this a painting/photo distinction? But then how come Lockhart's photos of himself all nod in agreement when the real Lockhart talks? Can anyone shed any illumination on this for me? Many thanks.

Poem for Sunday

Burning the Old Year
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn't,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn't do
crackle after the blazing dies.

--------

Poem stolen from who posted it yesterday. There is no Washington Post Book World, so far as I can tell, since it's a holiday week, so your regular Poet's Choice column snitching shall resume next week.

The temperature in the DC area hit a record 69 degrees today. Though we had had a vague notion of perhaps going to a movie, obviously weather like this could not be wasted, so we headed out to Great Falls (apparently half the region had the same idea, as it took nearly half an hour to get from lower MacArthur Boulevard into the parking lot despite having a National Parks pass). Instead of walking out to Olmsted Island as we almost always do, we walked the towpath down to the rocky area where the kids climbed happily and we all got muddy shoes. We saw another lovely sunset, though not so spectacular as yesterday because there was barely a cloud in the sky. Then we came home and had fondue, which we had planned to do for Chanukah but our evenings were crazy, so we saved it for tonight -- chicken, turkey meatballs, breaded cheese squares, bread, etc. The table got royally spattered and my hair still smells like frying oil but it was wonderful.

Since secret santa identities were revealed today, I now know that wrote "Culmination of a Vague Idea" for me. I would like to thank her again, as she pushed all my OOTP-era Remus/Sirius buttons -- realistically cranky, yet optimistic and very sexy.

I should probably have explained weeks ago that when I joined , it did not occur to me to think of it as an "exclusive" community but as a bunch of people who wrote Remus/Sirius with a common sensibility; I did not really pay attention to the vicissitudes of the community description, only the list of members, and I figured one of the ones I knew must have mentioned me to the moderator. The larger a fandom, the more limited communities seem desirable to me, where they're grouped by common interests rather than making claims of quality control. I read a number of web pages that consist of a bunch of longtime friends who all read each other's stories (in The West Wing fandom for instance), and that has never felt cliquish to me but rather makes it easy to find those people instead of having to wade through huge archives.

Even so, I know I don't rec things very often, and I decided today that I am going to stop reading lengthy rec posts. I already avoid rec communities the way I tend to avoid exclusive comms and fannish awards. Though I have on occasion discovered a story that I might otherwise have missed, long rec lists often frustrate me -- if the recs are for a fandom with which I am intimately familiar, I tend to get annoyed at the omissions, particularly if it seems that the poster has a grudge against other writers whom I enjoy or has simply overlooked them. Trying to balance things out by doing my own recs will undoubtedly just lead to my hurting someone else's feelings. I keep thinking that there must be a way for fandom to be all pleasure and no pettiness, which is probably idiotic on my part since I can be as petty as anyone, but I am happiest when it's about the squee and discussions and debate about the source material and it doesn't feel competitive or angry.

, silly because it's late: Predict your lasts... of 2004
1. The last person you will talk to in 2004: I would have predicted that it would be my husband, but in fact it was my younger son, whom I had expected to be asleep; I told him to hurry downstairs or he would miss the final seconds of the ball dropping.
2. The last meal you will eat in 2004: We'd planned to have a simple meal after getting back from the zoo yesterday because we planned a big pancakes-and-eggs brunch for this noon and fondue for dinner tonight, so my last meal was soup, cheese and crackers and mustard, plus 's mint chocolates.
3. The last person who will say, "I love you," to you in 2004: I would have predicted my husband and I would have been right.
4. The last party you will have attended in 2004: Was my family's Chanukah party the last? We didn't go to any Christmas or New Year's parties so I think it must have been.
5. The lasting memory of 2004 that you will still think about in 20, 30 or even 40 years from now: All the memories that come immediately to mind have to do with ships -- the Liberty Clipper, the Mayflower, the Constitution, the Constellation, the Pride of Baltimore -- but I imagine that what I will remember best is spending an entire year sailing on paper with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

A white oak against the woods and reflected in the C&O Canal.


A happy squirrel who had found a nut.


Ice beneath the water flowing over the dam.


A kayaker paddling beyond the ice on the canal, cracking and spotted with air bubbles beneath.


Trees bright in the setting sun above one of the locks.


A lockhouse standing sentry, whiter than the remaining ice.

Gacked from all over:

In the year 2005 I resolve to: Get further into debt. Get your resolution here

Since we are going to England in March and Seattle in June, just like in 2003, this ought to be a cinch.

Poem for Saturday

Not to Mention Love: A Heart for Patricia
By David Clewell

Not one more figure of speech, I promise,
not here, under the pressing weight of centuries
of metaphors insisting on the heart's unbelievable resemblance
to anything else we know. One more could finally break it
irretrievably, and I don't want that kind of metaphorical blood
on my hands. So this time around, let the heart be the heart
the surgeon discovers when he lays open the chest so gently
it's easy to miss the self-effacing beauty of precision,
the way he comes at it directly, the only way he knows.
And the heart, exposed exactly for what it is: homelier
than we'd like to imagine. And alive beyond compare.
Here, the heart is the heart, and isn't
a fist or a flower or a smooth-running engine
and especially not one of those ragged valentines
someone's cut out, initialed, shot full of cartoon arrows:
the adolescent voodoo of desire. Here nothing's colored
that impossibly red.

There's nothing cute about it. The heart
is the heart, chamber after chamber. Ventricular. Uncooked.
In all its sanguine glory. I couldn't make up a thing
like that. The heart's perfected its daily making do, the sucking
and pumping, its mindless work: sustaining a blood supply
that's got to go around a lifetime.
Sure, there's a brain somewhere, another planet
just seconds or light-years away, and maybe some far-flung
intelligence madly signalling for all it's worth--
but the heart wouldn't know about that. It has its own
evidence to go on. What's convincing to the heart
is only the heart. It doesn't have the luxury of stopping
to weigh, to reconsider, to fold and unfold the raw data of the world
until it's creased beyond recognition. Some days it can't distinguish
a single sad note from a chorus of exhilaration, but still
the heart has its one answer down to a science: yes. Over
and over, that iambic uh-huh. Whatever it takes, some kind of nerve
or unlikely grace: the heart never knows what to think.

* * *

If this poem has had its moments already
when I haven't been quite as good as my word--
when the heart's been anything less than the heart
or even the tiniest bit more--believe me, I've tried
hard to keep the heart in its proper place for once. It's not
in my mouth or on my sleeve or winging its way lightheartedly
in circles over my head. It's more or less right
where it belongs inside of me, no small thing. And not to mention love
even once by its own name, Patricia:
that's a proposition I never meant to enter into, anywhere.

So when you turn out the light
and this page goes as dark as the room you're lying down in
and for one night at least there are no more distractions,
it's my heart you'll be listening to. And it's yours.
We fit together so well sometimes it's not easy
telling whose lips, whose arms, whose heat in the groin,
whose very good idea. I'm not taking any chances
bigger than the one you've given me--your insistent heart
mixed up with mine: uh-huh, uh-huh, huh-huh,
and my heart has never been the heart it is right now.
It's what we've both been waiting for: I'm asking you
to make of it what you surely will, to take it from here,
in your love beyond these imperfect words, please
take it wherever you're going tonight from here.

--------

We had a nice, quiet last day of 2004 in uncharacteristic 60 degree temperatures at the Baltimore Zoo, then at home having comfort food for dinner (chicken soup, smoked turkey sausage and cheese and crackers), and then -- by unanimous vote of the other members of my family while I was out of the room, still under the impression that we would be watching either Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- we all sat down together and watched The Return of the King extended edition. I was the only one who had seen it straight through, and it seems in retrospect a very suitable way to end the year, as that will remain in many ways the movie of 2004 despite its December 2003 opening and I appreciate the movie much more now than I did last new year's eve. So my kids were awake after eleven, and we figured there was no real harm in letting them stay up to watch the ball drop -- first time we've all done that together. Now I'm drinking a miniscule amount of eggnog with brandy and laughing at the various things considered hip these days by Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve, which is clearly more a nostalgia-fest for people my age; what a pity that Barry Manilow isn't on there singing "It's Just Another New Year's Eve," or maybe he is.

Got wonderful mail today from (yum, we are all enjoying them!), (haven't installed yet but will send a report when I do) and (haven't watched yet but thank you so much), tossed a couple of articles up at TrekToday since I'm the only one in town to do so and my editor has made me very happy by offering to pay me next year to review the entire original series on DVD, talked to a couple of friends (though not my parents who are at the beach with their friends). So am mellower and more content than yesterday -- not having cramps makes a big difference here. The rest of the weekend is likely to be quiet, as older son needs to meet with a friend on Sunday about a lengthy school project and both kids are likely to sleep very late tomorrow. It's supposed to be quite warm again, so I am hoping to get some outdoor time in if they can handle more walking.

No resolutions, they're just exercises in bad self-esteem for me as I never keep any except incidentally (as in, not because they were new year's resolutions but for other reasons). Don't really feel like rehashing last year, which had a lot of very nice moments and a few I never want to live through again even vicariously. So Happy New Year everyone, and hope your 2005 has begun wonderfully!

Image above from photo taken while driving on I-95 between Baltimore and Washington just past sunset. The last light of the year could not have faded on a more beautiful note. I had hoped to take a photo of the Mormon Temple against the twilight, but due to beltway traffic that stops (or, rather, moves) for nothing, not even New Year's Eve, it was already too dark by the time we reached it.


Crested cranes in the Africa exhibit at the Baltimore Zoo -- one of the few sections of the zoo that is not undergoing extensive renovation in 2005 and will remain open as is. The zoo is closed for all of January and February with the exception of a couple of weekend tours of the polar bear exhibit.


The two female African elephants will both be inseminated in the near future as the zoo is hoping to breed them before they get too old.


The flamingo flock taking a late afternoon nap. By early evening when we left, they were quite actively eating and grooming each other.


The otters swim on both sides and overhead when one is walking through the plastic tunnel of the wetlands exhibit.


One of the snowy owls in the arctic exhibit, which also includes foxes and polar bears, who seemed to enjoy the warm weather as they were swimming and foraging quite enthusiastically.


Some of the large flock of African penguins. When we arrived one of the volunteers was feeding them fish, so they were in a happy circle around her while seagulls flew overhead crying out in envy.


And why not end the year with a little sex?