You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2011.
Well, here we are. WordPress is a handy little beast, I must say. I suspect we’ll be friends very shortly.
- A Faustian Bargain. Scathing, witty, and oh-so true.
- Interesting if not exactly groundbreaking news on women in Viking culture.
- Medieval weapon push-pins. Excellent!
- Third Hobbit production diary.
- Books: the best weapons in the world. But you all knew that.
Snazzy videos I’ve run across (I hate to end that with a preposition, but “videos across which I’ve run” sounded pedantic even to me, so…):
- Porcelain Unicorn, the winner of Phillips’ short film contest in which all entries must use the same dialogue.
- Eyrie.
- The world is where we live.
- Improv Everywhere: The Mp3 Experiment.
- A Briton in Los Angeles. You may be tempted to pronounce it “Los An-gel-ease” after watching this video. Consider yourself warned.
- Impressionist does Shakespeare in different celebrity voices. You may never be the same again.
- Goodnight, Jasper.
- Hipmunk: because everything is better with cute animals. You know what I’m talking about, internet.
Music:
- “Crystalline” from Bjork’s new album.
- “All Is Not Lost” by Ok Go. I am really undecided on whether this is creepy or cool. Thoughts?
So Queens’ Play by Dunnett turned out to be bloody fantastic. Still very dense (as in compact, not as in stupid), so it took me some time to get through. I felt as if it were a bit over my head; I’m only somewhat familiar with that page in history, and even then, I know the events more than the players. I kept belatedly recognizing political attachments and feuds after the fact because I didn’t know who was affiliated with whom. It felt like historical fiction for the history scholar, and while a scholar I certainly am not, it was lovely to read such a well-written book.
I went to the library to return a book and nearly ran smack into a book called Robota, by Doug Chiang and Orson Scott Card. It looked so intriguing that I picked it up on the spot and ran out into the rain with it. The illustrations are absolutely magnificent, full of sailing ships and spaceships and robots and dinosaurs and giant monkeys. Really, I didn’t see how one could possibly go wrong with that combination. The plot was a little shaky, particularly at the end, but I can’t say too much against the book, with pictures like these.
Currently working on leapfrogging to WordPress from Livejournal. Pardon the dust! It will probably look like a typewriter vomited around here for a bit until I get my act together. Mind your shoes…
I was going to post something all meaningful up here, but by the time I got through putting in the links below and raving about books below that, I ran out of steam. Er, next time?
Last night two friends of mine and I all dressed up as cows and got free meals at Chick-fil-A! Highlights of the excursion involved hats with cow ears, getting my braid pulled by somebody in a legitimate cow costume, and consuming ridiculous amounts of chicken. Afterwards, we all studied Latin, still in bovine dress, just for the heck of it.
There have been incredible amounts of good times in general lately, including pell-mell adventures on the 4th in which several friends and I chased down an ice cream truck in a neighborhood none of us lived in, got caught in the rain waiting for the city’s no-show fireworks, and ended up watching our neighbor’s (no doubt highly illegal) fireworks display from our balcony instead. Earlier in the weekend, more friends congregated for the consumption of spaghetti made according to Audrey Hepburn’s recipe, phenomenal homemade cake from Sarah of Culinary Quixotic fame, homemade blueberry soda from the same source, and fresh bread from the farmer’s market. It was quite the day!
