Stuff and Moonshine

Amazingly, found the morris dancers before they started. One of these years I’ll wise up and take the subway instead of hiking up from the south end of the park. Spent several minutes homing in on what I thought was faint music in the distance and turned out to be the Grenadier Restaurant’s generator.

Above-average number of people in cloaks here. Props to the person in the Metallica Pushead Sun hoodie.

We’ve been informed it’s five minutes to sunrise. Someone is tootling a while concerto in their car horn.

They’ve blocked off the road this year so we won’t have to yell CAR like it’s a street-hockey game.

Man in Charge: *bellows something*
Man with glasses drawn on his face, carrying a small broom: “He’s saying the next dance is called ‘The Bells of York.’”



The man with glasses drawn on his face has offered somebody a dry leaf. Am beginning to suspect him of being one of the Fair Folk.

"This is going to go on for a bit, so if you want to step away and go for a coffee, or a meal, or to put a child through university, that’s all right. It’ll all look just the same when you come back.”

H. R. Wakefield is mainly remembered for his ghost stories, and for frustrating scholars of the genre by saying he’d had “over a hundred” published, of which only sixty or so are known, and nobody’s sure if he was exaggerating or if there are still a bunch out there.

Meanwhile, a lot of the stories in the anthologies I’ve downloaded aren’t stories, or even weird fiction or sff, at all. ‘Swim-Ease’ is a lightly comic novella about a woman attempting the first-ever cross-Atlantic swim, on behalf of a bathing-suit manufacturer. It’s a delight, and I wish some studio had turned it into a quota-quickie.

Anyone hear of an indie label called Sarah Records, and/or of a band called Heavenly, from the early 1990s?

I’d never heard of them, although I see their singer, Amelia Fletcher, is important enough that another band have written a song about her:

Lying awake at 4:30am, I suddenly realized how Goon Show-influenced this episode was. Embarrassing that it took me so long, given that one of the performers is straight-up doing the Bluebottle voice.

The lunchroom at my current job:

Yesterday’s was a trip to Taylor’s Bell Foundry where Anthony and Sam, a pair of large cheerful men who look as though they probably have the upper-body strength of medieval long-bow archers, cast and re-cast church bells while discussing what kinds of cheese everyone would be if they were cheese (“I asked Josh. He’s mozzarella.”)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/215938916

Walter and Livia continue their adventure underground. Hannah’s search for them takes her to an unexpected place.

Had several dreams, including one in which sovay  and I were watching an old movie titled, iirc, Coral Island, though it had nothing to do with the Edwardian boys’-adventure novel of the same name. I’m pretty sure Robert Newton was in it, though his character disappeared from the plot midway through.

sovay  then learnt of some recently-discovered footage in which the camera had been kept running between takes, and the chatter of the actors was audible. In the manner of dreams, the footage was immersive, and we could walk into it. Apparently we were visible to them, though they took us for extras and mostly ignored us, except for somebody from Wardrobe who ran up and handed me some more-appropriate stockings and shoes.

Somehow this then segued into a different dream in which I was editing/writing speeches for the Democrats. I kept telling anybody who’d listen that I was Canadian and I wasn’t sure if I could legally work for them, but nobody paid any attention. Also the speech I was writing eventually turned into a script about the protagonist seeking advice from a magical cat. 

Got a temp contract starting Tuesday, as an admin assistant at the offices of a construction company. I plan to overdye my hair back to brown till I can figure out what the unspoken dress code is—“business casual” can mean just about anything. Mind you, at my last long-term job, also construction-adjacent, the head of Payroll mainly wore hoodies with classic-rock logos on them and had both his ears pierced. In any case I feel like changing up my hair a little. Was going to dye it today but the weather dissuaded me from shopping.

Watched the National Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest last night. It’s up on YouTube till the 18th if you want to watch it too. Heard of it because Ncuti Gatwa plays Algernon, and he’s excellent, but Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell is amazing.

Yesterday I disassembled the too-wide bed frame and assembled a new one that’s the same length but a foot narrower, so Andrew has room to get into it from the side. I then packed the big frame into the new frame’s box, with the instructions, screws, and alan key, and took it down to the recycling room in the basement of our building. There’s a section there for people to leave stuff that other residents might want, so I set it there. Someone else had left a “Phantom-Line 100,” a vintage device for superimposing ruled lines on paper when doing calligraphy. I took it home, on the suspicion that it was a type of camera lucida. It sort of is—I would have to invert it and mount it at eye-level to use it as such, but in the meantime I’ve had some luck with balancing this tablet on it and using it to trace images from the screen onto a surface.

The device flips the image from the original.

Monday Andrew had been watching Blackadder, and I’d remembered that Rowan Atkinson had played Inspecteur Maigret a few years ago—ten years ago as it turns out. I’ve only been able to find two of the four tv movies they did before they pulled the plug. We watched Maigret Sets A Trap, and we’re saving the other for later. Nice work by Atkinson in a serious role. Budapest stands in for 1950s Paris. Very different plot structure from the police procedurals of the last twenty-odd years, in which the murderer is nearly always someone who shows up in the first fifteen minutes—Maigret and his detectives don’t find their suspect till the third act, and then it becomes a matter of how to confirm it.

Mackenzie Crook has ventured further into magic realism with Small Prophets, and I just watched the first episode of…six, I think? The best part so far is Michael Palin as the protagonist’s father, building Rube Goldberg machines in the common living-room of his care home. This is, so far, the kind of show where much of the storytelling is done through the set dressing—there’s a wordless scene that made me say ohh, out loud, because it’s so sad and it also makes it more believeable that the protagonist will (spoiler, but nothing that doesn’t come up in the trailer and most reviews) ( Read more... )