Allegra Sloman's blog

http://www.wftv.com/news/4045352/detail.html – you will find this link informative and educational. The whole Alligator in the Sewers story takes on a new complexion when you pull a 400 pound alligator out a waterway in downtown Miami. You have to wonder how many homeless people it ate before they caught it. This link will probably disappear sometime soon so go have a look.

George’s memorial service was absolutely wonderful, and it feels really strange to know that somebody at Beacon congregation fought against the Anschluss and had to flee Austria way back when. We sang Die Gedanken Sind Frei – which is a Unitarian hymn, by the way. I think it was on a Limelighters album which my folks had – I remember being so pleased and startled the first time we sang it in church. The German speaking guys all used to stand at the back of the church and sing it in the original German while trying to drown the rest of us out. Happy memory.

My heart leapt up when I realized that my Monkees album still exists, and then my heart crashed when the ******** turntable drive belt which I JUST BOUGHT turns out to be suboptimal in performance. Take wow the wow last wow train wow to wow Clarksburg wow indeed.

There is one song on Encore, the new Eminem album, which I cannot get out of my head, but I think that’s the general idea. Seeing as how some of the lyrics run, “Every time I think about you, I puke” I’m almost inclined to try running the Barney song in my head as a substitute. On the other hand, Katie could not believe, when she played it for me and John, that we actually liked it. Maybe like is the wrong word. Maybe, identified with. After all, there are a lot of people in this world that I should be trying to feel compassionate for, but they just wanna make me hurl. I am a dead loss as an enlightened human being, but I’m okay with that.

Today I am going to do my homework and prep for my next writing class. And do laundry. The Neverending Story.

Got an interesting book from my folks’ place called the Skeptical Feminist. It was worth picking up just for the title.

Also reading a novel, the Navigator of New York. It starts slow but I’m finding it really compelling reading.

Paul does his first evening shift today, so he won’t actually be here for supper, which is roast pork. I am thinking of inviting the non bf for supper, and if he doesn’t want to come, somebody else, but I’m wracking my brains who else I can invite over without having to clean anything. I mean, except the kitchen and the bathroom, you don’t want people to be scared to use the john, or concerned about ptomaine and giardia and e. coli and salmonella and suchlike.

Don’t I just sound like Susie Housekeeping.

Now the kids are working their way through Babylon 5 and Paul said, (this comment deleted)(plaintive) “I prefer Buffy.” Yes dear, but we ran out of Buffy. This line deleted because nobody wants to hear about our shopping trip last night, although I suppose it could be comedy material.

Katie says School sucks the fun out of everything. She doesn’t know how lucky she is. Keith is reading Dana Stabelow, John’s running sound at church, and the yard is a peaceful winter wonderland – apparently the white stuff is going to hang around for at least a week. May you enjoy a Sunday of recounting your mixed blessings. Pic is random. From Phyllis’ apartment in London, circa 2001

Experienced another classic Mike Moment last night. He’d brought out a water glass and a small snifter of cognac; the snifter was inside the glass. I was following him out to the hot tub (two inches of snow on the path) and he skidded, fell on his ass/back, and sproinged back up in the air in a fashion that left me gaping. I was the only witness; Tori had popped back inside for shoes and Paul and Keith joined us a couple of minutes later.

All those years of Kung Fu! He did not spill a drop, was uninjured, except for his dignity, and what really amazed me was how fast he recovered. I’ve taken bad falls without dropping what I was carrying so that part didn’t astound me. However, when I fall I generally lie there for a while going hunh? and don’t LEVITATE back into bipedalism. It didn’t look real! It was like a movie!!! (See earlier comments by Lexi (who’s moving this weekend) about how she hates it when people say “It was like a movie”. But that’s the frame of reference. Really what it was like was a guy with a shipload of Martial Arts training, but I’m still shaking my head this morning. Mike said, upon getting up, in an oh so sophisticated tone, Well, at least I still know how to fall.

So we sat in the tub for a good while – Keith bailed early to go in and read Japanese books Tori had; the rest of the time we did the Buffy and Angel spoiler game, and described our favourite scenes so far. I am thinking the role reversal in I Only Have Eyes for You was my fave long scene so far; the Judge saying “What’s that do?” was the funniest one liner; and my favourite facial expression is Seth Green looking quizzical.

If you don’t read Dunnett, skip this paragraph. Dunnett fans will of course wonder where the hell my head has been for the last ten years, as there is an intense amount of Buffy/Lymond/Niccolo cross over in terms of fandom, and now all the times people have moaned that James Marsters could do Lymond if he wasn’t so bleeding tall (Lymond is not tiny, but he ain’t immense, either, not like Niccolo, who’s bloody massive) actually make sense to me. Personally the only person I’ve ever seen on screen that makes any sense to me as Lymond is a very young Peter O’Toole; except OF COURSE that Peter O’Toole is too tall for the role as well. I have never seen, and possibly never will see, an actor who can do Niccolo. He’s big, and ugly from some angles and impossibly gorgeous from others, and is physically graceful, and has a beautiful singing voice (as in, better than the professionals) and for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that he really really likes women, he’s dead sexy. I think that the biggest reason that there is Buffy / Dunnettfandom crossover is because the quality of the friendships in the Dunnett/Whedon oeuvre is a major part of their appeal (and the love interests OF COURSE – think Buffy and Angel’s tragic love, or Jerrott and Marthe’s starcrossed, bizarre marriage, or Tobie and Clemence’s completely stage managed courtship and marriage, or Phemie and Anselme’s ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ relationship after his first wife dies.) Phillippa’s sacrifice for Lymond (no spoilers on this one, brrr) is a major achievement in fiction. If I read you off ‘what happened’ you’d go, “Oh, she was just frikkin nuts, eh?” but Dunnett writes it so the whole horrible slide into martyrdom makes sense; at that point in the books (like an inch from the end of it all) you are as passionately in love with Lymond as she is, even if you know that he’s one of the biggest jerks in history. But sexy. And hardworking. And self-disciplined. And meaner than a junk yard dog. My kinda guy.

Okay, back to real life, where two inches of snow fell last night and Paul is doing sound for a memorial service today and the kids are still asleep and there’s a massive flea invasion and I found out that I can’t actually loan Rob of Nine the Michael Moschen DVD because Keith took it into school for another juggler. Some noises were made yesterday at lunch about the idea that a juggling club could be started at work. I’d join, but I am kinaesthetically challenged (the left side of my body is notoriously snobbish about cooperating with the dominant and right side) and now that I’m in two separate writers’ groups I think I’d be somewhat pressed for time.

Peggy is plugging away at transcribing my hymn “Not Afraid to Believe” and says it’s a challenge. I don’t read music – another of my many lapses in good taste and judgement, not to mention energy. I am grateful she’s spending some time on it. I was hoping once she gets it transcribed to have the privilege of listening to Tori try to sight read it; that would be great if it happens.

Katie went through the family photo albums last night, and started describing how she wanted to go through them with the Non BF. I want to type his name SO BADLY, mostly because it’s great having somebody in my life whose name is weirder than mine. And he is cute. Katie has finally brought somebody home that I can stand looking at. You will understand it all when the Cone of Silence flies back up into the ceiling.

Note to Jeff: Blasted through Eleanor Rigby right after Christmas and enjoyed it, but Coupland mismatched the character and the way she talks; since he does it consistently it’s easy to deal with. Really, it’s a Harlequin romance with Buffyverse sized coincidences, but I enjoyed it. Adam’s Curse by Ryan Sykes is proving to be a bit harder slog. I’m going to have to find the Eurekalert reference to the Y Chromosome stuff that challenges some of what Sykes has to say. However he says one thing at the beginning of the book which made me want to buss him soundly, and it goes like this, from Page 4.

“On a very practical note, sex and the reasons for it are fundamental to this book, and I use the word in several different contexts. Sometimes it refers to reproduction, sometimes to gender and sometimes to intercourse. I adopt this general usage to avoid, among other things, the angst of defining *exactly* what I mean by gender and to sidestop such literary absurdities as describing the shedding of pollen as any sort of intercourse. I hope the context will make my meaning clear.”

When I write my masterpiece on the Trader’s Peace I think I’ll post that over my desk.

The Trader’s Peace is a concept I have about the reconciliation of the long running battle between men and women which is based on an extreme shift in how relationships between men and women are viewed and transacted (with appropriate and concurrent rules for lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, neuter and asexual people). I’ve been thinking about it my entire adult life and I keep reading books that help refine my conceptions about it. Maybe instead of a book I should just do a manifesto. Manifestos are shorter, and you don’t need bloody footnotes. Just what I need, another project. Hit delete, delete, hit delete, delete.

Well that’s a whole bunch of verbiage, and for what? Catch y’all later.

 

View from 2019 – OH GOD there’s so much to unpack here, but let’s just say I got virtually all of it wrong.

Came back from my first comedy writing class in four or five years, impressed as hell with David Granirer, who is smoother than triple filtered cream these days in terms of delivery. Wowie Zowie.

Delighted to see Julie’s cheerful phiz in the mix, made for two familiar faces in the room and my god, the talent. To be respectful to the other comics I won’t go quoting all their amazing stuff. There’s one woman in the room who is orders of magnitude funnier than the rest of us, but very generous and fun to be round.

Gotta go, I need to pay attention to the new Eminem album.

too much to report more later

Owen, a one year-old baby Hippotamus gets close to his adopted mother, a giant male Aldabran tortoise at Kenya’s Haller Park, January 6, 2004. The 120-year old giant tortoise living in the Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from the baby hippo rescued by game wardens, sanctuary officials said on Thursday. (Peter Greste/Reuters)

Cheese racing is now an official sport, as well as being proof of the existence of the Prince of Lies. Hopefully the Apocalypse will happen before the sport goes Olympic.

I mentioned to Paul that nasty white cold flakes of water were going to precipitate out of the atmosphere last night. He moved the car into the garage, and now that I have a chance to survey my domain, I’m glad he took the implicit advice. There’s an even centimeter all over everything.

Watched a PG movie with my family last night. Had to go to bed to recover from the shock. Mind you, it’s always funny watching a teenage girl react to her first Steve McQueen movie. I said “Isn’t he the hottest thing ever?” and she had no difficulty agreeing. So I told her that he made a lot of bad movies, but he made some good ones too and she should check them out… starting with Bullitt. When I was little my dad put together a goodies reel of all his favourite crap on GET THIS Beta…. that’s how old I am!!! and it included, among other things, Stan Freberg’s turn on The Monkees (ha ha, that’s how old I am! I OWNED a Monkees album but sold it when I left TO for Montreal and it’s too bad because I’ve had the overwhelming urge to listen to “This Just Doesn’t Seem to Be My Day” in the last few days) and the chase scene from Bullitt, and I can’t remember what all else right now but it was fun. If I ever put together a goodies reel, it would be interesting. Hm. Just what I need, another project. Hit delete, delete, hit delete, delete… Anyway, we watched the Great Escape. Read the liner notes and was startled to discover that three, count em three, members of the cast actually HAD been in POW camps, which accounted for the non-hollywoodesqueness of the set dec, among other things.

Must remember to thank Bree for the Buffy links. Seeing a picture of Anthony Stewart Head done up like Frankenfurter made it all worthwhile. The transcripts are proving useful, as well. Skipped forward to the sixth season because I HAD to read the lyrics for the ‘musical episode’. Keith and I were in hysterics – can’t wait to acquire the rest of the oeuvre.

Listening to Katie hum the theme to The Great Escape, I said, if you ever want to make a certain kind of grownup laugh, hum that when you’re trying to get away from something. Paul’s making me oatmeal, driving me in, and otherwise making life wonderful. Hm. Actually, the oatmeal’s ready, time to fly.

I type without a net. I have tried typing these things out – yeah it’s TYPING not WRITING what’s it to ya – into a proper text editor but when I transfer it back it’s full of those freaking html hiccups that are so gross I’d rather have an honest typo than one of those monstrosities. So if you see a typo that I didn’t catch, it’s not because I’m too ignorant to spell check, it’s because I’m in too much of a hurry to mess around, most of the time. I am not proud of myself, but I am not making any excuses.

Buffy continues to erode the non-necrotic portion of my cerebellum. I’m getting VERY non watching of the fights, mostly because the shift into the cartoon universe where getting snapped against a concrete wall doesn’t cause depressed fractures, followed by coma and death, is getting really tiresome. I’m much more into the investigating and smooching. I mean, I want to investigate and smooch, I do NOT want to be snapped like the end of a whip into a mausoleum wall.

Note to the woman who promised me a phone call in November and has been known to read this blog. (Lowers voice to whisper.) I’m still waiting.

I am very happy to be heading back to work. A quarter sized chunk of my heart has been ripped out of my body and staked underneath my desk, so I must needs return due to – well, you know about why, I need not explain.

Because people have been fired all over the world for what they said in blogs, I am only going to say nice, or possibly weird and uninterpretable things, about work. So just forget about the heart and the staking. It’s all bogus, anyway. And if I said work is very frequently an even more entertaining and educational place than the Buffyverse, nobody, including most of the people who work there, would believe me.

Which reminds me of a story from Sunday’s supper table. Bree said that a guy who applied for a job at a certain company got googled, apparently that’s S.O.P. now, in which case I’m hopelessly boned for ever getting another job, and said candidate turned out to have a weblog ON WHICH HE HISSED AND HE DISSED about the interview process. Next, please! If only weeding out the morons were always this easy, sigh.

 

Pic is from a car show in Japan; anime comes to life! I had to rub my eyes.

Had a wonderful time singing and playing at Tom and Peggy’s last night. Paul cooked ginger chicken on Friday so the spicing had a chance to spread out a bit; it was really yummy; there were also chocolate macaroons, although if you don’t like coconut that won’t thrill you too much.

And ice cream. Butter pecan.

Considering that she picked up a banjo scant months ago, Brooke is really playing well; and she TUNES it, which is great. She also performed the stellar public service of tuning one of Tom’s 12 strings. I grabbed the Larrivee and played standing up for a change; I should probably give up this singing and playing sitting down stuff. More calories required if you’re standing.

Katie is still recovering from spending 36 hours with her non bf. If I even hint at asking, so what’s going on with this young man? she claws and spits; p’raps I’ll drop the subject for a while.

Paul had a horrible nightmare last night. Sure woke ME up; I’d describe it but it’s too creepy.

Back to work, school, etc for the mass of us tomorrow. John is back tonight, which reminds me. I have to go downstairs and feed Pokey. I am actually looking forward to going back to work, strange as it may sound. I don’t think the kids are looking forward to going back to school. Keith has a project to finish; I should remind him about it before he gets too far into the Buffyverse, because of course we’re still mired in season three.

What is with the right wing Yank pundits? I just exited Juancole.com; there’s an interesting trace on a standard right wing meme. Americans give much to tsunami relief, what about those oil rich Muslim countries giving generously to the relief effort in Indonesia? Then when you do the math, OF COURSE, per capita, places like Kuwait are giving more per person than the US. It’s crazymaking. But once it gets repeated, it is TRUE.

Keith is practicing katakana. He still wants to learn Japanese.

Not much to report. Katie finally came home last night but I have no idea when. Still hard at work on the world building. Could NOT easily sleep last night. My characters were eating lunch in my head and I couldn’t get them to shut up, especially once the new hire started talking. And two more characters strolled up and sat down, and Rick started talking about how this isn’t a job interview, it’s an audition. It’s completely freaky, and it’s more like being possessed than anything else I can imagine. I can see them, I can hear them and they are going places I didn’t know about previously. I knew the building was wired, but it’s insane how much more complicated it is now that I’m actually world building and having to describe all the Millennium Falcon style ‘special modifications’ have been done to the building, much to the landlord’s continuing horror. Oh, do I hate the landlord. I hate him with a passion that is purple and everlasting.

“If audiences in general are underestimated, kids really get the patronizing treatment. Two things are often forgotten about kids. One: They have no taste. They will watch just about anything. This is normal and healthy. Taste comes later. Two: They are not stupid! Kids are born intelligent, and there’s no good reason to make dumbed-down entertainment for them.” *Craig Good, Pixar.

I think I’m going to do a Buffy goodies reel, nothing but interactions between Buffy and Angel. I mean, if it wasn’t for Buffy I would be in this jam.

Comedy class on Thursday. I am so stoked. Printed out all my routines and of course edited on the way by.

Pic is Marilyn Manson as a child.

It occurred to me that you might not have figured out HOW I got the weird piece of metal. You take tin solder and melt it in a spoon over coals in a fireplace and then dump the melted metal into a bucket of water. The variation in the shapes is unbelievable from person to person; Jarmo’s was the most amazing mother goddess figure I have ever seen. The children present got long streamers, and John got a scythe…. which I have to admit freaked the hell out of me.

. . .irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that “more” and of the outsider’s incomprehension. . .”

— h. w. fowler, linguist, and author of modern english usage (1968)

Getting ’nuff irony these dayz?

Katie coming to a Harry Potter movie with us on the transit

AP photo credit. These are lynx kittens. One last furry animal pic for the year.

May I take this opportunity to wish my audience (that would be my mother, two of my coworkers and a couple of Unitarians) a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR, filled with peace, prosperity, and not very much broken glass. I’ll be soaking in a hot tub at midnight. Hope you will be as comfortable as I.

Pic is random BC scenery, prob’ly Widgeon Creek.

The Lymond series changed my life. Dorothy Dunnett is one of the best writers in English. The six novels in the series are The Game of Kings, Queen’s Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle and Checkmate.

I can’t recommend them enough. Despite the fact they are jam packed with battles on land and sea, historical characters, and have the single most incredible hero in all of literature, Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, for some reason they are considered chick books.

I remember Ingrid telling me that for a YEAR after she read the Lymond books, she was thinking to herself in situations What Would Lymond Do? Then I read the Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold and had yet a new hero to worship. If you like humour, action, dastardly villains and I mean DASTARDLY and deeply flawed and brilliant heroes, look no further than any of the Vorkosigan novels. I started with (strangely enough, loaned by Ingrid) Cordelia’s Honor and that’s not a bad place to start, as it has the single most memorable exchange between a happily married couple in all of English literature. Suffice it to say that the word “Shopping” is involved.

Wade Davis in person and in print is a man to change your brain. In person he’s the single most attractive person I ever saw who wasn’t making a living from his appearance; as a presenter, I have only ever seen one other person who could command a room like that, and that was Harlan Ellison in his heyday. On a printed page he has a masterful and restrained prose style. He has a new book out which Chapters, may they disappear into the Hellmouth, isn’t carrying. At Xmas time they aren’t carrying a coffee table book by a local author? Duh. Anyway, the book I like best of Wade’s, which I reread every winter, is One River.

Edward Shlain’s Sex, Time and Power. Some of it is just plain wrong, some wrongheaded. But where he got it right, he got it very right indeed, and I read the book in 24 hours last Christmas while my brain just about burst. It is impossible to look at the godawful mess between men and women the same way after reading this book. It improved my life a lot. Essentially, once I read it, many human activities which had made no sense to me at all, did. The hair thing, for one thing.

Elaine Pagels’ the Gnostic Gospels. The first place I ran into God as Female and it made sense. (God was a boy for me prior to that). Spinetingling.

Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, Men and Women in Conversation. This book changed how I talk to men, and how I listen to them. I should probably go back for a refresher.

First Things First by Stephen Covey and a couple of his henchthingies – one of those neverending self improvement books. However there are a LOT of good ideas in it and it continues to help me.

On the self improvement note, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. So simple that a sophisticated person might say what nonsense, but I didn’t. A powerful and thought provoking little book.

Kerri Hulme’s The Bone People. I don’t know what to say about this Booker Prize winning novel except that it is such a rare and crazy book with such deeply memorable characters, that the flimsy plot means nothing compared to how it’s written. Easily one of my top ten favourite books.

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy. Finally picked it up in soft cover. A beautiful and chilling fantasy.

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, OF COURSE.

The Lost Queen of Egypt by Lucille Morrison. Yes, I know this is a children’s book. But the depiction of family life and the strength of the friendship between the characters is truly memorable. I’ve been looking for an (affordable) copy for 30 years.

Paul Blackburn Collected Poems. I dedicated the long poem In Colours Unsuspected to him. A great great poet. Everything I love best about poetry, the direct voice, the passion, the economy, the grinding down of one’s own daily life in the mill of art to achieve transcendance, it’s all there.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s the Mists of Avalon. The ultimate read in the bath book. Makes magic and myth and real life into something truly great.

I light a candle for Tori’s stepdad, who died of cancer in Newfoundland this week. She’s gone to the funeral, where I hope she will be of some comfort to her poor mother, who is burying her second husband. My woes look small and my complaints like the bleating of a sheep stuck, due to its own stupidity, to a fence, by comparison.

I light a candle for George P who passed away from heart failure this week. He will be sorely missed by many for his honesty and deep mind.

I light a candle for a member of my family experiencing issues around custody right now. May it come right for the child involved.

The non bf was here yesterday and chose to interact with me rather more than has been the case previously. As in, Katie said Don’t Send Him that Picture, and I said I will, and then revealed that I already knew what his email address is. Oops. Nosy woman that I am.

Hi Sam! For those of you who don’t know, the picture of the people standing around a truck that’s gone off the road was actually provided by Sam, who said she was really surprised when she found it on my website. Just remember, in cyberspace nobody can hear you scream, and a picture is forever, once ‘oogle picks it up!

Honourable mentions for Books. Brain Droppings by George Carlin, a very funny book.

Blue Skies No Candy by Gael Greene. A very funny, entertaining soft core porn novel. All the soft core I’ve done is in emulation of that book… the notion that there are a MILLION nice men out there, and you simply WON’T have time to sleep with them all – so you’ll have to write about it instead. Sigh…. Man, ya gotta be careful what you read when you’re 18.

Um. Angel is on his knees embracing Buffy. Like, the Bufferama is over, but the images linger on – we got to episode 4 of the 3rd season and that’s where we got beached. I ADMIT IT. When David Boreanaz/Angel fell back out of hell into the vamps mansion, stark naked, I made Katie run it back. More than once. Then Katie said it might be a stunt man. Jumping Jimmy Christmas, what a horrid notion! That my own child could say such a thing. Mind you, I’m thinking that a place of torture that makes you look like you just spent 6 months working out and powering down protein shakes can’t be all bad. Where do I sign up?

I shake my fist at Glen, who got me started on all this stuff. Glower, glower. But he knows I love him anyway.

o, books! I forgot Dave D’s Machine Language, the best poem ever in the English language, but I’m prejudiced; he uses a word I invented. But that isn’t really a book… I’m sliding off the criteria now. Enough rambling, I have to get back to my world building.