“It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.”

Last Sunday I went to the Langdon farm and assisted in butchering a rooster and a duck, which was an interesting experience.  It was a dirty job, but even so, it was rather fun since it was with friends.  Awful lot of work for not a lot of meat, though.  I also discovered that holding a duck upside down by its feet in order to pluck it will dye your hands bright orange.  You learn something new every day.  After the carnage, we got to  play with an exuberant lab and a litter of impossibly adorable kittens.

Gallimaufry:

• Dream big.
• Joss Whedon’s version of Much Ado about Nothing is going to be released this summer.
• American literature classics are to be replaced by non-fiction in schools.  Heartbreaking and short-sighted, ladies and gentlemen.
• This is what the scrape of the frozen sea sounds like.
• Timelapse of all landings at San Francisco airport in a day.
• Cool Things to Find, a Mars Rover parody of Dumb Ways to Die.

Music:

• The Hobbit soundtrack preview.
• “Slow and Steady” by Of Monsters and Men.
• “The Wrote and the Writ” by Johnny Flynn.
• “Angel at My Door” by Needtobreathe.  I’m all about these guys lately.  Sorry for dismissing you out of hand back in my college days!

Books: After rereading The Hobbit, I decided to reread The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, since that’s also been turned into a movie this winter and I wanted to read the book again before seeing it.  Pi was even more brilliant than I remembered.  The first 100 pages are slow, but don’t give up: every page thereafter is more compelling than the last until you awake from the book with a start to find that an hour has gone by in an eyeblink.  The novel is rather uncategorizable; it’s part philosophy (maybe even two parts), part survival story, and part…something else that remains indescribable.  Somehow, Martel makes a wildly implausible premise into something eminently believable; so much so that by the end of the book, you desperately want the story to be based on fact.  The ending is the perfect blend of hint and ambiguity, which is no small feat.

Up next: Waiting for Godot and The Silver Chair, because literary whiplash is all kinds of fun.