Stuff and Moonshine

Dream Report

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:58:03 GMT

I was looking at a section of park or vacant lot, and a small wild rabbit leapt several times its own height, then flexed its body and sort of bounced off the air to go even higher, eventually landing on a tree branch.

I didn’t know they could do that! I thought, and for the rest of the dream, regardless of what was going on, I kept trying to steer the conversation around to rabbits so I could tell people they can double-jump, you know.

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Yuletide Letter 2026

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:17:00 GMT

Dear Yule Writer— Thanks for volunteering to write a fic for me. I am moon_custafer on AO3 as I am here. Repeating the first part of this letter from past years:

General likes— Hurt-comfort. Conversation. Period-specific details. Ghosts or supernatural. Found family. Casefic or plotfic. I don’t mind explicit sex scenes, but I’m usually indifferent to them. OTOH kissing or touching hands, foreheads, stroking hair, etc, are great, as are descriptions of the characters’ appearance. I also find it interesting when the central character is offstage and we primarily see them through other characters’ PoV or references, so feel free to do that if it works for you.

General DNWs—AUs that deviate from canon to the point of being a completely different premise/setting, i.e. high-school/coffee-shop/ABO dynamics. Kinks involving pregnancy or bodily fluids aren’t really my thing either.

My requests for this year:

Hagar of the Pawn Shop—The book’s happy ending has Hagar and Eustace wed and travelling the country as itinerant book-sellers, which seems a perfectly good set-up for further storylines. Alternately, some of the recurring characters in the main story arc leave room for further development—Larky Bill and Goliath’s time as prison cellmates, for instance. Or Eustace’s reaction when he finally locates them, but doesn’t know of Bill’s previous run-in with the pawnshop.

Every Day Except Christmas—The Man In the Cravat, to my mind, looks like he might be cruising as he laughs and chats with some of the Market workers; but I’m not sure if he’s at the cafe to pick up rough trade, or if he is trade himself.

John J. Malone Mysteries—the two characters who really make this series for me are Malone and Helene; I’d enjoy a story that’s primarily about their interaction. Perhaps Helene’s reaction to Dolly Dove, Malone’s sometime-love-interest in the short stories who, like Helene is a beautiful blonde who enjoys driving recklessly. Additionally, or alternately, I’d like to dive a bit into Malone and/or Helene’s personalities and back-stories: Malone frequently catches the murderer only to offer to defend them in court, and there’s an ongoing subtext that he likes people but hates Society and the death penalty in particular. How much of Helene’s madcap-heiress persona is put on to allow her to get away with unusual behaviour, how much is neurodivergence? Also she mentions in Eight Faces At Three that a few years earlier she was mixed up in something sufficiently serious that her letters could be used to blackmail her—and then she makes this enigmatic comment:

“Mr. Featherstone found them in the safe the day after the murder, and sent them to me with a note of apology for reading them. I don’t think he needed to apologize.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think he understood them. Anyway they’re burned now.”

The Green Hills of Earth—Rhysling comes off as a bit of a benign trickster figure, living off his wits and scruffy charm as well as his talent with words. Plotfic imagining one of his adventures during his decades of wandering would be welcome, points if we get a verse or two.

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Painting Inspo

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:33:28 GMT

Apparently Yves Klein’s parents, Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, were also both painters. I especially like Fred’s work, it reminds me of the kind of stuff I’ve been trying to do of late.

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Weekend So Far

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:29:39 GMT

Crazy Saturday—we were to meet Mom at the art gallery and then have lunch, and while we were running late she called to say she’d fallen in the street and was “in an ambulance” (based on what happened later I think she meant paramedics had arrived) and trying to decide whether or not to go to the hospital, but that we should keep going to the art gallery for the time being.

We arrived and were trying to call her when she walked up, looking frail and shaken and with a bandaid across the bridge of her nose. Also a bruise starting to form over one eye. She said she hadn’t been walking especially fast or carelessly. “Sometimes the pavement just attacks,” I said. I think she was extra concerned because she’s 80, also Dad had Parkinson’s in his last years.

Anyway she still didn’t feel bad enough to go to the hospital, so we skipped the gallery and got lunch. She seemed perfectly coherent, so I don’t think she was concussed. Andrew said she could stay with us if she didn’t feel up to getting back to Hamilton on her own, but she wanted to get home, so we went with her to Union station and made sure she got on the train ok. She texted and emailed later to say she was home. I emailed her again this morning and will keep in touch.

ETA—Mom reports that her eye looks like it belongs to George Chuvalo after a match with Ali, but that it’s not painful.

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Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize for literature

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:10:48 GMT

Link is to the New York Times. I don't have a subscription myself, but somebody quoted this bit, which I love:

On Thursday, Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in a news conference announcing the award that she had just spoken with Carson on the telephone. Carson sounded “very taken by surprise,” Carlberg said.

It was a short call, Carlberg said: All the poet would say was she was “in Iceland,” where she was “listening to the wind.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/books/nobel-prize-literature.html?smid=url-share

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Testing the new create entries page on DW

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:11:25 GMT

Well, seems to be working ok.

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The Ginza Ghost

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:02:57 GMT

A 2017 translation by Ho-Ling Wong of the 1930s mystery stories of Keikichi Ōsaka, a Japanese writer I’d never heard of till this week and still don’t know much about. He died in 1945 in the Philippines; according to his (French) Wikipedia entry, he was a draftee and died of illness rather than in combat. What a waste, especially because his stories are terrific.

They’re honkaku, which means they’re fair-play detective puzzles; most of them also lean very macabre and grotesque. ‘The Mourning Locomotive,’ my favourite so far, includes some pretty detailed descriptions of what it’s like to clear out the undercarriage of an engine after it’s run somebody over—and that’s before we get into the tragic (in every sense) explanation of why somebody keeps stealing pigs from farms near a particular rural railway line and tying them to the tracks to be hit.

'The Demon in the Mine' involves a series of gruesome murders in a coal mine near the coast, where the men scrape at the walls with pickaxes and their wives haul the trolleys, nobody’s wearing much more than loincloths because of the heat, and the sea constantly threatens to break through the ceilings of the outlying tunnels (like a lot of the stories in this collection, it’s really about the human cost of industrialization and profit-seeking).

Content warnings for...nearly everything. I actually may have to take a break for a bit after that last one, with its claustrophobia and chilling end-reveal.

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Nothing Much

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:32:23 GMT

I'm barely on Facebook any more, but I still get email notifications when at least some of the people I'm friended to post anything--except usually they haven't made a post, they've commented on one of their friends' posts. The email, however, leads with an abbreviated version of that original post, so my eye gets caught be news of death or illness only to click thorough and realize my friend is fine, they're just offering sympathies or advice to someone else.
( cut for meanderings about death, mental health, etc )

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I love the Yuletide Fandom Nomination requests for clarification

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:14:54 GMT

MacArthur Park - Richard Harris (Song) - nominated characters are Girl, Narrator, and the Cake, but we're dubious about the cake as a character. If you were concerned that nominating only the humans might give a request the wrong focus, we think it would make the most sense to send this through without characters - please let us know, otherwise we will approve the Narrator and the Girl and leave the cake out ~~in the rain.~~

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I need your help with this case, I don't wanna be lost in space

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:43:15 GMT

While looking into Craig Rice's works, I came across The Invisible Event, a blog dedicated to golden age detective fiction, and also some newer stuff that homages it. I'd known Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a big Sherlock Holmes fan, but I didn't know (or had forgotten) that he and Anna Waterhouse had co-written several novels focussed on a younger Mycroft Holmes. According to The Invisible Event they're really good, too.

adverbian recently posted a fic (possibly the first chapter of multiple) in which Lord Peter Wimsey gets isekai'd to twelfth-century Shrewsbury. Good thing his Lordship and Brother Cadfael are both fluent in Latin.

For a complete change of pace, here's Mojo Nixon telling us why he's the Perry Mason of Love.

OK, fine YouTube. You win. I will fixate on Rory Gallagher for a while. Here's a live version of Bullfrog Blues on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1979 which made me understand what people mean by terms like "guitar god." The rest of the band are fabulous too.

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Eight Faces At Three (1939)

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:42:08 GMT

Some of my guesses in the previous post were right, or at least close.

Imaginary casting for this—I still picture Malone as Thomas Mitchell. Joel McCrae for Jake Justus, and Veronica Lake for Helene Brand, though Helene is described as tall, which Lake was not. As described, Helene is sort of a combination of Lake only tall, and Katherine Hepburn specifically in Bringing Up Baby only blonde. She spends much of the novel wearing a fur coat over blue satin lounge pajamas and galoshes, and ingeniously adjusting these elements to pass as respectable out-of-doors wear for day or evening. This is more believable if you know what "lounge pajamas" and women's galoshes looked like in the 1930s.

Ella Raines for Holly? She could have pulled off the “did she or didn’t she do the murder?” ambiguity.
Franchot Tone, in 1939, would’ve been about five years too old to play Holly's brother Glen, and Farley Granger would’ve been a decade too young.

Ooh, how about Dan Duryea for Dick, Holly's fiancé? He fit the physical description of the character, and it would have been a rare opportunity for him to play a sympathetic character (while possibly misleading the audience into suspecting poor dick, despite his alibi that he was onstage in the city leading his band at the time of the murder).

Not sure who I picture for the rest of the cast. It's a big cast. I realize none of this makes sense if you haven't yet read the book, or at least read a review. i'll try to assemble one later.

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Midway through “Eight Faces At Three”

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:14:01 GMT

…and I’m putting my guess behind a cut for later:

(spoilers and a possibly wrong guess at the solution to a mid-century mystery novel)
( Read more... )

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Midweek Update

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:58:42 GMT

Forgot to mention that the other week, when I was trying to track down “The Tattooed Lady,” I also came across Rory Gallagher’s “Tattoo'd Lady.” It wasn’t the song I was looking for, but I’ve now listened to it over a dozen times and I think I’m becoming a fan. Look how ecstatic this man was when he played his guitar.

I read through a bunch of short stories featuring John J. Malone, the little lawyer from Having Wonderful Crime. Jake and Helene aren’t in these ones--I think Rice wrote multiple series and decided to merge them or at least write some crossovers.

Rice’s plots are ok, but she tends to rush the endings and hand wave some of the solutions; although since Malone’s a defence attorney, not a D.A. or a homicide detective, he doesn’t need to prove things beyond the shadow of a doubt, he just needs to counter the prosecution’s case well enough to sway a jury (in a lot of the stories, he figures out who did the murder, then promptly turns around and offers to represent them.

In any case, there are detective stories I read for the puzzles and detective stories I read for the characters and atmosphere, and the fun in Rice’s stories is in getting to hang out for a bit with Malone and his many friends and associates, including his bartender, Joe the Angel; his frenemy in Homicide, Inspector Von Flanagan; his occasional love interest, fashion model Dolly Dove (at any rate she goes on more than one date with Malone, despite their tendency to get interrupted by discovering murders); gangster Max Hook; Malone’s long-suffering secretary Maggie and her numerous relatives.

Exciting dinosaur news!

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Weekend Report

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:09:33 GMT

Our seamstress Colleen mentioned to me at Thursday night's rehearsal that she was going to the Textile Museum's mini fabric sale on Saturday, so I decided to give it a look as well. I was fairly restrained, but picked up a couple of balls of yarn and some rayon scraps I can make use of.

On the way there, I looked out the window of the Queen streetcar and thought "That man looks just like Tom Scott." I looked several more times and concluded that he was in fact YouTuber Tom Scott. No idea if he was in town to film a video, for TIFF, or just visiting.

Saturday night's painting session produced portraits of Andrew, a reworking of an old painting I'd done of Narly that I'm very pleased with, and this advice to CONSIDER THE CUBE that for some reason my mind thought it important to get down on paper.

Dropped by Sunday's rehearsal long enough for people to try on some things. Brought home some costume pieces to work on, including a kimono that I'm reassembling--its sleeves had been removed, for what stage production, and what reason, i don't know.

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Yuletide Is Gearing Up

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:30:58 GMT

Still in the Nominations stage. I decided I’d nominate some of the stuff I read/watched in the past couple of weeks.

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Rewind to Friday

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:28:18 GMT

More work adventures: Didn’t quite realize we had two meetings lined up for the day, and that the delegation from the French production company were to came in the afternoon, so when two men with vaguely-British-sounding accents arrived, I thought to myself “huh, guess they learned their English from UK speakers? Makes sense I suppose, it’s closer to France than North America is.” Fortunately I kept this thought to myself, not did I try to greet them in French.

Or perhaps unfortunately, as either action would have given two Australians a hilarious story they could tell everyone for years to come.

When later, the French visitor arrived, I did risk my French to ask if he knew whether his colleague would be along soon; but I didn’t know the gender of said colleague, so I couldn’t ask “Votre collegue arrivera-t-il bientôt?” or Votre collegue arrivera-t-elle bientôt?”

So I said “Votre collegue arrivera bientôt?” But he didn’t hear the question mark, and just smiled and nodded. Oh no, I thought. Now he thinks I’ve told him a colleague’s coming soon.

Mind you, the same misunderstanding would likely have happened in English. When one of my bosses came out to greet him, she asked where his colleague was and it turned out there wasn’t anyone else coming.

I think I managed to redeem myself in my own eyes afterwards, when he asked me to call him a cab to the hotel as he was having trouble with uber.

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Saturday So Far

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:07:08 GMT

About ten minutes into Every Day But Christmas (1957), one of the workers setting up the stalls at Covent Garden Market in the wee small hours of the morning begins singing what seems to be a version of ‘The Tattooed Lady’ (not Lydia):

(whistling)

(unintelligible) in Gay Paree
I paid five pence to see
a big (unintelligible) ladee
tattooed from head to knee.
And on her jaw was a British man at war
and on 'er back was a Union Jack
an’ I paid fivepence more
and up and down her spine
were the Royal (unintelligible) in line

(whistles the next few bars)

‘Ow I loved her
‘Ow I loved her
‘Ow I loved ‘er, my mother-in-law
da da da da….

At which point his coworkers start telling him to shut that row up.

It’s a different melody from The Kingston Trio’s version, which was the only other version I could find and uses the melody of ‘Tara-Ra-Boom-Di-Yay.’ It’s definitely not the Skeets MacDonald version.

Pontoon Palace this week played a song called ‘Wonder Boy,’ which was not the Kinks song of similar name. Followed by another song called ‘Wonder Boy’ which was also not the Kinks song. At which point I figured I was onto the joke, and I nodded and said out loud “of course” when the song after that was ‘Wonderboy’ by the Kinks.

And then the song after that was “Boy Wonder I Love You” written and produced by Frank Zappa and

[Guy at the next table just said to his friends “In the sixties there was a thing called ‘acid.’ And a band called ‘Pink Floyd.’” Not sure what rhetorical point he’s making.]

sung by Burt Ward.

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Today At Work

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:23:40 GMT

Finally had my first encounter with somebody saying “oh, just ask the AI!” when I tried to get her to make a decision on something. The frustrating thing was that I already had done all the work for her—spent a half-hour looking up storage bins on various online stores, and double-checking that they really were the right size to fit on her office shelf. All I wanted was for her to pick one of the options I’d brought her, before I went back to my desk and placed the order.

“She doesn’t like making choices,” my co-worker whispered once we were out of earshot.

“OK, I’m getting the beige one then.”

I did get an apology afterwards for her brusqueness, but I’d already decided that in future, I’ll just choose for her, present the results as a fait accompli and if she doesn’t like them, I can claim AI told me to do it.

Which will probably make us both happier, actually.

On the way home, I decided I’m going to be a cheerful cynic about the whole thing: from now on, anybody who tells me to use AI is giving me blanket permission to act, plus a get-out-of-jail-free card.

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Hagar of the Pawn-Shop (1899), by Fergus Hume

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:50:09 GMT

Our heroine, Hagar Stanley, is a Romani girl running the Lambeth pawn-shop of her deceased uncle-by-marriage until her cousin turns up to claim it. In the meantime items pawned at the shop often lead to sensational adventures.

While all this is going on, Hagar’s love interest, a sweet nerd named Eustace Lorn, is mostly offstage having his own adventures while trying to track down her cousin Jimmy “Goliath” Dix, so Hagar can transfer the shop to him and get back to her life; and a plot involving characters with names like “Mr. Vark” and “Larky Bill” is working its way towards a violent end.

OK, first off, this book is very late-Victorian, in both language and attitudes; at the same time, it has stuff like Hagar, herself a minority facing a lot of prejudice, using her detective skills to prove the innocence of a West Indian housekeeper framed for the murder of her employer. Also a reference to an attempted kidnapping of Sun Yat-Sen that I had to look up and can confirm was ripped from the headlines of the time.

The references I’ve found online treat Hagar of the Pawn Shop as detective fiction (the chapter I just described was adapted as an episode of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, albeit with a white housekeeper), but a lot of the chapters are more what I’d class as sensation stories, a bit too late for penny dreadfuls and a bit too early and the wrong side of the Atlantic for pulp magazines.

Moreover, about half the time Hagar is involved in the set-up of a story and then nopes out, deciding (rightly) that the situation is too dodgy and she wants no part of it; or recognizing that it’s past her ability to intervene. At which point the narrative will leave her in the pawn shop and follow the new characters for the rest of the chapter so the audience can watch events play out. They usually end with somebody getting their comeuppance in a supremely over-the-top way. I suspect the Doylean explanation here is that Hume wanted to use up some unpublished stories but couldn’t find a logical way to write in Hagar as the main character.

Anyways, worth a glance if you want some period intrigue and to learn some new Victorian cockney slang terms (my favourite is “rhino.”) I haven’t yet found a copy of the tv episode that doesn’t have stutters and blarps all over the soundtrack.

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Labour Day Weekend, continued

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:56:11 GMT

Having Wonderful Crime (1943), by Craig Rice, turned out to be a screwball murder-mystery with an amazingly complex plot and a trio of detective characters: Jake and Helene Justus, a Nick-and-Nora-type couple, and their best friend John J. Malone, a cynical, hard-drinking Chicago lawyer whose main and possibly only loyalty is to Jake and Helene. I am sad to report he was not played by Thomas Mitchell in any of the series adaptations, but he was in my mental images.

ETA—apparently Rice collaborated with Stuart Palmer on at least one crossover mystery that teamed up Maline with Miss Withers (from The Penguin Pool Murders)

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Labour Day Weekend (so far)

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:30:16 GMT

Friday night I came across this video on YouTube of Dorothy Donegan at the 1980 North Sea Jazz Festival. Full concert, and she’s amazing. Also read about Pannonica de Koenigswarter, “The Bebop Baroness”—as in, she was an actual Baroness (and Rothschild heiress, and WWII Resistance radio operator), and she was friend and patron to many bebop jazz legends, especially Thelonious Monk.

Last weekend’s painting session had produced work that felt a little too unfocussed. I know I’m trying to give myself permission to not worry about whether the art is good or bad (with weed to help keep me from second-guessing myself), but I decided this week to go back to tracing photos with the phantom-liner, and while sober, before getting down to painting.

Oh, Thursday’s Pontoon Palace included “Hot Pants In the Summertime,” which has to be the most 1970s song ever committed to vinyl.

Saturday we got out of the neighbourhood for a few hours to avoid the din of the air show. I picked up a couple of vintage paperback mysteries at BMV downtown: Having Wonderful Crime and another one whose title I don’t recall at the moment, something like Die Any Time After Tuesday.

Andrew put on Zardoz this morning, which I’d never actually watched all the way through. It’s sort of like H.G. Wells by way of Kenneth Anger, isn‘t it? I suppose that midpoint would actually be Aldous Huxley. It’s also rather The Prisoner-ish. May the UK was just Like That in the late-sixties-early-seventies.

Then we had our first Shingrex shots—we’re not old enough to get them covered by OHIP, but I thought it was time we had them; I’m classing this as part of the maintenance and repairs we’re getting done with the proceeds of Andrew’s pre-1940 Weird Tales.

Andrew is currently at home resting after his shot, and I’m at the coffee shop.

ETA—the second paperback was indeed titled Die Any Time, After Tuesday (1969), and it was trashy but entertaining. It had a narrative style that at first made me think of Tumblr’s “she breasted boobily down the stairs,” except that’s a parody of the sort of story where it’s ostensibly from the heroine’s own perspective, but the author can’t stop emphasizing how hot she is. DAT,AT is narrated by a private eye who can’t keep his eyes off any of the female suspects, so lines like “I followed the beige silk bounce of her high-riding bottom, and it kept me entranced all the way to the dressing room” make perfect sense from his PoV. (Not really a plot spoiler; but as things turn out, I’m pretty sure the character he’s describing is asexual, possibly also aromantic)

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Gentleman of the Shade, chapter 45

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:45:01 GMT

I keep trying to wrap this one up, but no, just another short chapter.

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Sigh

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:14:18 GMT

In addition to Dolly Parton, we just lost Tim Curry. I had a look at his memoir that came out last year. It’s quite good.

At least Mel Brooks is (a) still alive and (b) just organized a film festival celebrating his birthday by showcasing his 20 favourite movies (only one of which, The Twelve Chairs, is a Mel Brooks movie.)

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Music Stuff

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:35:03 GMT

Thursday morning I heard a band on The Pontoon Palace who were described as “The Beatles of Hungary,” and whose name sounded to me like “Eels.” Searching on Youtube got me first the ‘90s band Eels, and eventually the actual Hungarian band Illés.

Looking up Illes on Wikipedia led me to Omega, who were more like the Hungarian Pink Floyd. Also the member who wrote most of their songs, Gábor Presser, as a teenager lived downstairs from Rezső Seress, the composer of ‘Gloomy Sunday,’ the song that ostensibly drove listeners to suicide (it didn’t really; the 1930s drove people to suicide—the song was just a sign of the times).

Somebody bring me a cork board and some string.

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Weekend/First-half-of-the-week Update

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:55:31 GMT

Trying not to be over-confident, but new gig seems to be going ok. Yesterday I took over the job of labelling folders and discovered they hadn't till now been using mail-merge to simplify the job of creating sheets of labels; so I've managed to accomplish one thing here at least by streamlining that process.

Saturday I went to my first counter-protest in a while. Feel kind of so-so about it--it's massively annoying to be followed, filmed, and taunted by a right-wing YouTuber who keeps getting in your faces and trying to provoke you into saying or doing something he can edit into a "look how loony the Left is!!!!" video. I kept reminding myself he was at the level of a middle-school bully, or at most somebody who captained his high-school debate team and thinks that still makes him the smartest person in the room at all times.

Sunday, Andrew and I went to Taste of the Danforth, though in practice that just meant going to the Scribe bookstore* and a nearby pub afterwards, which we could have done at any time. We did get gelato afterwards from a booth though.

* He got a teaching edition of Frankenstein, I got a first edition of S.S.O.T.B.M.E.--An Essay On Magic by Ramsey Dukes (aka Lionel Snell, aka Lemuel Johnstone, etc.)

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