The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

shark_hat @ 2009-10-02T11:17:00

2009-10-02T10:20:15Z

September books

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, The Dagenham Dialogues
Charlotte Macleod, The Silver Ghost
Georgette Heyer, The Unknown Ajax
Elizabeth Wein, Coalition of Lions
Diana Wynne Jones, The Game
Georgette Heyer, Arabella
Judith Van Gieson, The Stolen Blue
Charlaine Harris, All Together Dead
Lauren Henderson, Black Rubber Dress
V. L. McDermid, Final Edition
Charlotte Macleod, the Balloon Man
John Gordon, The Giant Under the Snow
Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman
Jennifer Crusie, Tell Me Lies
Rosemary Kirstein, The Outskirter's Secret
Jim Hines, The Stepsister Scheme
Rosemary Kirstein, The Lost Steersman
Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden & Bill Oddie, The Goodies File
Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden & Bill Oddie, The Goodies book of Criminal Records
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Frances Hardinge, Verdigris Deep (Thanks to the people who've mentioned this- lady_schrapnell?- it was excellent)
Rosemary Kirstein, The Language of Power (such a brilliant series, this- one of the few that I think every SF/F fan should know about)
Eddie Braben, The Best of Morecambe and Wise
Michael Braun, Love Me Do!
Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Played Brahms
Tim Brooke-Taylor et al, The Best Of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
Charlotte Maclead, Vane Pursuit
Tim Brooke-Taylor et al, The Almost Totally Complete I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns
David Brin, Glory Season
Tom Holt, Ye Gods
Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist (all about Progress and rational religion. Though the one about philosophical ants was quite interesting.)

shark_hat @ 2009-10-01T11:22:00

2009-10-01T10:31:27Z

C'mon, the SFO; and the Attorney General had better show some spine.

I reckoned the new Shooting Stars was bound to be rubbish but it's not been bad; the Hartlepool Puppet Film Re-enactors have been very amusing, and last night it was a pure joy seeing Noel Fielding being comprehensively upstaged and out-wierded by a burger van owner and a balding man from Middlesborough.
Also rewatched the Saturday Night Grease ep of the Goodies. If you forward past the first ten minutes and get to the sketch where Tim does an update of the Chartered Accountant and Graeme's dressed as a ballet dancer, and the dance chase scene at the end, it's very good.

ISIHAC!

2009-09-28T16:19:18Z

sigmonster and I saw the Clue tour on Friday, and it was fun all the way from beginning to end- you miss Humph, of course, but Jack Dee wasn't bad. Particular highlights for me: a longer game of Mornington Crescent than you get on the radio- and Jack pulling out an impressive pile of rulebooks when Graeme started nitpicking; a Cheddar Gorge where the inexorable logic of the sentence got Tim and Jeremy [1] to go "You-" "-fat-" "-bastard" and giggle; a Ning [2] peeking out of Hamish's sporran; and some virtuoso swanee-whistling. (The audience got to kazoo along with several songs at the end; Tequila! worked very well. Jeremy conducted and sternly said "Music is my life. Don't fuck this up.")

[1]Not that Jeremy
[2]Not that sort of Ning

(We also picked blackberries, ate blackberry crumble, watched some Morecambe and Wise- and the DVD of the previous tour, which is excellent- and generally had a nice weekend.)

shark_hat @ 2009-09-14T12:13:00

2009-09-14T11:20:58Z

Sweet god WHAT? Vampire Diaries synopses, discussed.
(My policy of not reading a book that looks as if it might be a supernatural romance unless I already trust the author has just paid off bigtime, because I had not even heard of these books. Tree penis WHAT.)

(Can I say, because I don't think I commented in my last book post, how good Brennan's Demon's Lexicon was? She did not pull any shit like blood-vomiting crows, and if she HAD, it would not have been funny unless she meant it to be.)

shark_hat @ 2009-09-11T14:08:00

2009-09-11T13:16:48Z

I just went over to our canteen and the World Powerlifting Championships were going on in the Atrium. Fish and chips acompanied by the odd *"HUUAAARRRGGGH!"* *ripple of polite applause* was a tad surreal.

(I don't really understand sporting subcultures. It must take an awful lot of effort, money and pain for these men to get to the point where their thighs are wider than their heads and they can lift heavy things over their heads for an audience of about 30 fellow competitors and 23 people pausing on their way back from lunch. Ah well.)

Some unsolicited advice

2009-09-11T10:34:44Z

If you're planning to drop a box of something highly staining (say, blackberries) mixed with a mordant (say, vodka) onto the floor (say, from the top shelf of the fridge to get a really good explosion), I highly recommend that you actively dislike your floor covering. I mean, you'll dislike it even more with a massive purple blodge on it, but it cuts down on the angst.

(What nurk chooses grey carpet tiles for a kitchen anyway?)

shark_hat @ 2009-09-08T17:11:00

2009-09-08T16:18:29Z

I AM BECOME DEATH DESTROYER OF MOUSES

(Poison, traps and wire wool bought. Hm, maybe I can let next-door's bloody cat that always tries to get in the house have its blasted way, and then trap it in the cellar so it'll smell all catly? No, that would not be kind. Also it would probably get too catly unless I remembered to let it out again quite quickly.)

(Also many thanks for the well-wishes in reply to the last post, which I can't reply to because I'm an idiot and deleted the notifications before remembering they were screened.)

shark_hat @ 2009-09-02T11:22:00

2009-09-02T10:23:35Z

August books

Maureen McHugh, Nekropolis (good, but depressing.)
Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Lexicon
Amy Sedaris, I Like You
Andrew Davies, Marmalade and the Big Time
David Langford, Starcombing
Elizabeth Bear, Undertow
Sherri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women's Country
Charlotte Macleod, The Curse of the Giant Hogweed
Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven
Naomi Novik, Black Powder War
Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus
Rose Henniker Heaton, The Perfect Hostess
Karen Gordon, The Transitive Vampire
Lawrence Block, The Burglar on the Prowl
Diana Wynne Jones, The Pinhoe Egg
Nick Rennison, The Book of Lists: London
Garth Nix, Sabriel
Garth Nix, Lirael
John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air
Garth Nix, Abhorsen
Terry Pratchett (Illus. Paul Kidby), The Last Hero
James Chapman, Inside the TARDIS
Lauren Henderson, Dead White Female
Lauren Henderson, Too Many Blondes
Lauren Henderson, Freeze My Margarita
Vonda Mcintyre, The Entropy Effect
Lauren Henderson, The Strawberry Tattoo (Where is Black Rubber Dress? I thought I had Black Rubber Dress. Need more Henderson!)
Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness
Dorothy Heydt, A Point of Honor
Elyce Rae Helford (ed), Fantasy Girls: gender in the new universe of science fiction and fantasy television
Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt), The Interior Life
Jennifer Crusie, Fast Women
Sherwood Smith, Once a Princess
Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World
Andre Simon, The Gourmet Week-end Book
Sherwood Smith, King's Shield
Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways (this strikes me as having too much in it for its length- not that it's confusing, but that there are so many threads to set going that we don't get a chance to engage properly with any of them before the customary Jones whooshy tie-everything-together ending; the Elfgift and the Witch of Wherever-it-is, for example, aren't as foreshadowed as they could be and I think they make it feel a bit deus ex. Or to put it another way, MOAR LIBRARY AND LUBBOCKS PLEASE.)
Samuel Delaney, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Peter Scholliers (ed), Food, Drink and Identity
Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children
Ian Rankin, Mortal Causes
Charlotte Macleod, The Family Vault
Charlotte Macleod, Exit the Milkman
Charlotte Macleod, the Luck Runs Out

shark_hat @ 2009-08-31T15:32:00

2009-08-31T14:39:14Z

Some things that I have done recently, in no particular order: read a lot of books, sneered at a castle, helped make pear bread and chutney, gone through someone else's wardrobe, grunted at a pig called Chipolata, picked apples, seen an amazing water-powered trip-hammer (beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, v. cool.) I know you were wondering.

shark_hat @ 2009-08-26T14:57:00

2009-08-26T15:50:59Z

(Oh yes and I finally saw the Harry Potter film yesterday, at the IMAX- envy me- and so I can read Sarah's parody of it, and it is an amusing one, so all I really have to say other than yes, it was enjoyable is TINY RUFFLED BANGS OF WOE, or to put it another way, I would not have been too unhappy if the film had been called "Draco Malfoy And The Photogenic Angst".)

shark_hat @ 2009-08-11T15:48:00

2009-08-11T15:11:38Z

Hello folks.
A. and I went for a pub lunch in a village called Goose Eye, and had a walk up a stream which used to be channeled for a wool mill; it was cool. I saw a frog.

Saw The Travelling Improv Troupe Who Aren't Allowed To Call Themselves The Comedy Store Players, But That's Pretty Much Who They Are, last night; despite having to do the first half mikeless, they were very good. (They come to the area as part of an outdoor Shakespeare festival, so they improvise a Shakespeare play; Romeo and Bob had a sad lack of actual Romeo/Bob content, but was very funny. Plus, it had cross-class tensions, in that Bob was a sturdy man of the people- "Bob, a builder thou art, cans't fix my roof?" "Aye, marry can I.") Also, during a Theatre Styles, getting the suggestion ballet ("fuck you"); a sketch about the Antarctic getting derailed into a load of one-liners ("they're a right bunch of comedians, this lot"); and Richard Vranch impersonating a kebab.

Interview in two days.

Blackberries have started; must finish off the ones in the freezer from last year!

Finally got round to getting the gutter fixed (now just need to get the plumber in, and a carpenter, oh and replace a window), and also pried some plywood off the banisters on the hall, so the stairs get much more light. So I need to do a spot of painting... at least the place is only Victorian, so I don't get quite the, um, interesting layers left by 300 years' worth of of botched-up jobs that the parental unit's house has.

shark_hat @ 2009-08-05T12:25:00

2009-08-05T11:28:43Z

July books

Goscinny & Uderzo, Asterix en Hispanie
Diane Duane, Spock's World
John M. Ford, How Much For Just The Planet?
David Langford, The Limbo Files (ooh, this brings it back. Signed, ex-PCW8256 user.)
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good
Goscinny & Uderzo, Asterix in Switzerland
Dave Barry's Guide to Guys
Goscinny & Uderzo, Les Lauriers du Cesar
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Charles De Lint, Yarrow
Goscinny & Uderzo, Asterix Chez les Bretons
Ina Rae Hark, Star Trek
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Balance of Trade
A. L. Morton, A People's History of England
Lois Bujold, The Sharing Knife: book 3, Passage (this series is definitely getting better as it goes along)
Edwin Page, Horribly Awkward (vaguely interesting, but read like a first-year essay, all description and no analysis.)
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Local Custom
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Scout's Progress
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Crystal Soldier
Mary Kirby-Diaz (ed), Buffy and Angel Conquer the Internet: essays on online fandom
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Crystal Dragon
Liz Berry, The China Garden
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Partners in Necessity
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, The Tomorrow Log
C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law
(some magazines on the plane)
Sydney Taylor, The All-of-a-Kind Family
Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle's Circus
Andrew Lang, Violet Fairy Book
Colin Watson, Snobbery With Violence
J. K. Rowlang, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (yes, the American version- yuck)
Edmund Crispin, Beware of Trains
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

shark_hat @ 2009-08-01T19:10:00

2009-08-01T18:17:59Z

Back to land of speedy wireless: swam in bay 5 times, in pond twice (New England pond, ie, large lake); bought one painting; had four bowls of clam chowder, three lobster rolls, four kinds of ice-cream (and two sundaes); have 20 insect bites but no sunburn; saw rabbits, chipmunk, fish, dragonflies. Also spent a few minutes with family.

Massachussetts

2009-07-23T15:20:03Z

We were picking raspberries and frightened a big bird away from the feeder- very big, what is that, a goose- no, a turkey!
A very cool one for the life list.

shark_hat @ 2009-07-17T15:51:00

2009-07-17T14:59:37Z

Went to a memorable outdoor Midsummer Night's Dream last night: memorable partly for the direction and staging, which set it in the sixties (all the songs set to classic tunes- worked very well, actually; bits of Puck's final speech go to Daydream Believer beautifully) and had lots of fairies hanging from tree branches, and partly from how much it rained in the second act. (The audience were mostly under a tree or bundled up in waterproofs, but the actors just got wet. Thisbe looked particularly bedraggled.)
It was fun, anyway, and the actors were great- I'll definitely try to catch Theatre of the Dales again.

shark_hat @ 2009-07-08T12:50:00

2009-07-08T11:52:00Z

I agree with everyone that Torchwood is being strangely good.

(My main thought yesterday- other than hard hat awww and yes, hit that car, estate youths! was OMG NO THE ARCHIVES!!!.)

shark_hat @ 2009-07-02T12:19:00

2009-07-02T11:22:52Z

June books

Diane Duane, Dark Mirror
Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp, Flann O'Brien: an illustrated biography
Diane Duane, The Wounded Sky (It's not that this one's bad in itself, it's just that irritation at Duane's recurring entropy-religion thing (and her only ever having done one conlang, reusing it for Darthene dragons, New York cat wizards, Romulans...) overcame my enjoyment. A pity, because if this had been the first book of hers I'd read, I think I'd really have liked it.)
Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things (lovely.)
Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Blood of a Dragon
Hazel Holt, No Cure for Death
Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow
John M. Ford, Final Reflection
Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Lady
Martha Wells, Reliquary
Garth Nix, Across The Wall
Chris Wooding, The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
John Thorne, The Pot On the Fire
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
Georgette Heyer, The Toll-gate
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (I remember being disappointed with the ending last time I read this, but this time I thought it worked well. Dunno what's changed.)
Georgette Heyer, Cotillion
Dave Barry's Gift Guide
Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: the invention of modern shopping
John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, The QI Book of Animals
Dave Barry Turns 40
Garth Nix, Lady Friday
Katherine Kurtz, Saint Patrick's Gargoyle (I was lent this. A reasonably interesting short story about an old man helping gargoyles defeat a demon, puffed up to book length with many lengthy infodumps about Dublin architecture and Catholic minutiae.)
Russell Ash and Brian Lake, Bizzarre Books (has one of those marvellous indexes you can just sink in to. As, for example,

Dog, see Cancer; Shag
Dollyland, War In, 170
Dope, Careers in, 63
Drudgery, Blessed Be, 169
Dull Life, see Romance
Dumps, 173
Dung Fungi, 193
Ear Rims, Hairy, 16
Egglaying, see Helium)

Hillary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book
Paul Jennings, Next To Oddliness
Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need
Qiu Xiaolong, Red Mandarin Dress
A. Uderzo, Le Grand Fosse
Cleolinda Jones, Movies in Fifteen Minutes (genuinely laugh-out-loud. See m15m for examples.)

shark_hat @ 2009-07-01T14:49:00

2009-07-01T14:06:29Z

Um, book post tomorrow, when I've checked what I read at the weekend...

My teeny bookswapping efforts with someone at work are going well- she liked The Changeover (Mahy, not Jones) and has just lent me an early De Lint.

Had a smashing weekend; a steam train on the mainline, whizzing along at 60 (and scaring sheep and horses and herons who regard diesel trains with scorn), also, a lovely walk on the moor including through an abandoned quarry with huge rocks scattered around, all mysterious in the slight mist (which also kept the temperature down), and bilberries ripe all around the paths, and a peaty stream to balance across on rocks (and Nick Park asked H. to take a photo of him with his family.) And there was a garden centre where I finally got a castor-oil plant for the garden (also a lavatera, some lobelia, a scarlet pink, a campanula, a blue clematis, a lavendar, a cat-scarer and a big bag of manure. But no alyssum, because I had one plant that had actually survived from the seeds I planted earlier, and some little bastard dug it all up last night. Did I mention I got a cat-scarer?) and a kitchen shop with half-price knives, and food.

(Speaking of food, there was a do at lunchtime in our building, and the leftover food just turned up in the staff-room. Profiteroles! Free salmon for supper! There must have been some external bods there, that's all I can say. Oh, yes, and my response on being told of said profiteroles revealed to me that my active vocabulary includes the ejaculation "Heavens to Betsey". Live and learn.)

shark_hat @ 2009-06-22T15:17:00

2009-06-22T14:21:34Z

Somebody's put a recipe for SLUG DEATH in our staff room (crush 1 head garlic, boil in 1 pint water 4 mins, strain, dilute 1 tbsp in 1 gal water, spray on affected plants, since you ask). Someone has then written MURDERERS! on it. (Possibly our vegan contingent, who have a sense of humour.)
Anyway, what would the Discworld Death of Slugs look like? A heap of salt? A skeletal blackbird?

shark_hat @ 2009-06-22T13:28:00

2009-06-22T12:37:51Z

I know descriptions of dreams are dull, but, really, after a day of going to the shops and scrubbing a wall, what was there in my subconscious that led to "escaping through South American jungles with a woman who could knit bridges as we went along" and "reluctantly arresting two Elizabethan poets for sodomy"? I mean, not that they weren't intriguing. (I'm a bit cross that I dreamt one of the poets had some MS circulating, but didn't actually get to read any of them.)

Also, Top Gear may be slipping over into self-parody. This is not a complaint. (I love the way that descriptions of bits of it can sound like dreams themselves. It was amusing when the bacon flew up the funnel of the steam train, for example.)

Chalet School

2009-06-15T09:05:37Z

Hello folks,
does anybody know where there's any Chalet School fanfic? googlebrat's interested.
I know there's a childlit mailing list that has quite a few Chalet School fans on it, but can't remember the details; lady_schrapnell, do you have sekrit knowledge of where there might be any other fans, or am I misremembering?

shark_hat @ 2009-06-10T13:13:00

2009-06-10T12:41:47Z

Well, series 2 of Star Trek is thoroughly fun so far, I have to say (Amok Time and Mourn for Adonais); I keep snidely muttering things at the screen, like "'It 'im again!" and "Um, you've got a first-aid kit 3 inches by 6 and one of the things in it is a massive syringe of neuroparalyzer???" and "Artemis would not have been seen dead in a gown like that, actually... Oh, my god, it's utterly backless. Held on by Ancient Greek Boob Tape, I assume," and "Wow, I hope that's due to mind-control, because otherwise she should not have got through Starfleet's psych screening".

(I have seen the odd episode of this before, of course, but not watched them deliberately. General impressions so far: Kirk is a prat, Chekov is sweet, Uhura has more to do than I thought (soldering together a whole new type of comms relay FTW) and is cool, as are Sulu and McCoy, other wimmin are ditzy, the remastering was pretty stupid- replacing not-very-good dated model shots with not-very-good anachronistic CGI doesn't add anything- and altogether it's both mockable and enjoyable for its own self.)

shark_hat @ 2009-06-09T15:47:00

2009-06-09T14:56:31Z

Good Omens flatpack fic!

Saw Singin' In The Rain on stage on Friday; very good (liked the "cut the 11-minute ballet, substitute a song for Lina" decision), also prompted me to watch several musicals over the weekend, and to see what else Donald O'Connor was in, anyway, which was quite a lot of things, so I should get hold of some of them probably (his IMDb page says he had to have three days in bed after shooting the Make 'Em Laugh sequence, which makes my slightly achy calves from last week look a bit pathetic.) I would quite like to see some Don/Cosmo or Don/Kathy/Cosmo.
And! My delayed Amazon package has arrived, so I have birthday presents for young relatives, and also some Star Trek:TOS.

Emily Davies died for me

2009-06-04T11:28:33Z

My polling station's lovely! 5 minutes walk from my house, only slightly out of the way from the walk to the station, and has a nice garden (it's a community centre rather than a school)- I note their foxgloves are well out whereas mine's still just leaves. Are foxgloves biennial?

Also, polling station was completely deserted apart from the poll workers- has *anybody* been canvassed this time? Or do they usually not bother for the Euro elections?

I'm always amused by the way you have to produce proof of address and ID to join the library or set up a bank account or whatever, but to vote you just wander up and they hand you the paper...

shark_hat @ 2009-06-03T15:33:00

2009-06-03T14:44:26Z

Saw the His Dark Materials production that was sold out at the National a few years ago (well, the touring version, which has less staging FX, apparently); pleased to have finally seen it, well acted, the daemons worked spectacularly well (the polar bears even better), compressing three books into two plays makes the first half very full of characters and plot, (even with Mary Malone and Lee Scoresby's subplots left out) but the second half had more air, the ending felt more satisfying than in the books but a bit confusing, and I've talked about it so much with the people I saw it with that I'm sort of out of opinions. We all enjoyed it, though. (And I may reread to get some of the setting and atmosphere that you can't convey with just a stage and a few props.)