"louk" should be a collective noun

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    AWWWWWW YEEEEEEEAAAAAHH  LAW & ORDER UK IS BACK ON

    AND YOU'RE STILL IN IT, UNLIKE JAMES AND GEORGE (sigh)

    YEEEAHHH MANNNNN

    I love this show so much. This show makes me happy and sad at the same time! (But usually the happy wins out.) They should do a DI Natalie Chandler-centric episode. As long as it didn't have a really horrifying or depressing ending, as the episodes often do. It should have a happy ending, and by happy I mean LOUK happy as in the bad guys are found guilty and the good guys walk away with their stiff upper lips still stiff while possibly being very emotionally impacted or damaged but still ambiguously ok.

    With fabulous scarves. All the time.
    (also, have I mentioned you look fantastic for 60?)

lemon sorbet for dinner

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So yesterday I was in the parking lot of a grocery store with my parents, and when I got out of the car I saw a tiny rubbery rhino toy lying on its side in the empty parking space next to us.

    "Mom!" I said. "C'mere! Rhino!"

    She looked where I was pointing. "Oh! Rhino! I think we should rescue it."

    "Yes."

    We put it in our car and went shopping. (Planning, of course, to thoroughly clean it off later.)

    I am now regretting the rescue of this rhino. Because...

 

    This is the creepiest damn rhino you have ever seen. Pictures don't do it justice. My mother says we can paint its eyes to make them all black instead of black with white in the middle, but for now it stares. Wherever one is in the room, it stares at one. Leering.

    The strange horizontal scars don't help anything, either. My sister and I agree that someone must have left it in a parking lot for a reason. (Sister wonders if there used to be a car in that space before suddenly! there was only rhino. However, I was there and saw that the parking space was empty because it was right in front of the store and had potted baby arbor vitae things lined up in it. Perhaps car with rhino in before suddenly! only arbor vitae and rhino?)

maybe I'm racist against gingers

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Firstly I would like to note that this is the first blog post I am writing from my new specially-for-college laptop. It is meant to be a little boys' laptop but I do not care. (The one downside to the little-boys thing was that when my sister and I were setting it up at first, we had to spend about half an hour battling the virtual nanny installation which wanted to rob me of my liberties.) It's awesome, being smaller than most laptops (just like I wanted), having lime green detailing and squishy rubbery ("wipeable keyboard!") keys, and, best of all, pre-installed Lego Batman. Awww yeeeeeaah.

    Secondly, I've finished reading Dear Enemy by Jean Webster and holy cow that book has enough discussion of eugenics to choke a camel. An unfit-for-breeding camel. That's ok, though, as it's a fascinating subject.
    Anyway so in it there was this one bit where Sallie, heroine of the book and superintendent of this orphanage thing, has had to hire a new cook for the orphanage, and the new cook is this black lady named Sallie. Sallie the superintendent is miffed that someone else has her name and is like "but I'm the Sallie around here can you change your name?" and Sallie the new cook respectfully says no ma'am, she, cook-Sally, has had this name longer than superintendent Sallie has and also couldn't get used to being called something else. The issue is dropped.
    I was disgusted with superintendent Sallie, of course. Asking someone to alter one of the fundamental points of their identity for her own convenience. Major points lost. She was probably being racist, too; it was the early twentieth century, after all.
    BUT THEN.
    For the past couple of years up until the past couple of weeks I've been working part-time in the bakery section of a local cafe. It's a fairly small business. Anyway BUT THEN I remembered that several months ago this cafe hired a new cook to work in the kitchen, mostly for weekend brunches, and she happened to have the same name as the owner of the cafe (who is an old friend of my parents', known her all my life). So to avoid confusion we all actually ended up calling the new cook Sam instead of her rightful name. I think Sam was short for her middle name or something. (She's not black, but she is ginger.)

    Guess what the new cook and the owner are both named.

    Guess.

    Guess guess guess guess.

    ...

    Sally.


    (yes I know I am too easily amused. time to go do some laundry.)

summer reading

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I will finish The Book of Merlyn and Claudius the God before I go off to college. I will. I will. I will, dammit.

if i say on my blog that i'll read them, that's sort of like accountability, right?

    (you remember how a few months ago I read The Once and Future King and also I, Claudius? The nice thing was that my mother randomly had the sequel to the former lying around and my dad had the sequel to the latter lying around. And I don't think either of them had the first books. Little bit weird there.)

    Also, speaking of my mom, she herself has started up a blog of her own (hurray!) which I am now going to link to. It's called Roller Derby with the Saints, and she's got a couple posts up and they are beautiful, articulate, thoughtful posts. (she must be so ashamed of me oh gosh) It's heavily theological (Christian, specifically) and is and will be well worth reading.

    Hopefully she does not abandon the thing once she goes back to school in one month. (HEY MOM KEEP WRITING K.)

    EDIT later this same day: One of my best friends has just dropped by and loaned me a copy of Dear Enemy (the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster) after apparently remembering something I had said about thinking about maybe reading it several weeks ago. Oh lawks.

just look at those eyes

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Listening to Schubert's "Serenade" and playing spider solitaire (on the computer) while worrying about which family in my community might be willing to adopt my dog like yeah.

    Also, can I take a moment to appreciate this picture of Mr Peth? eet ees soh beautimous. eet ees so smoky i may soon be diagnosed with lung cancer. eet overheats mi computer. we are flutterbellied.

Wimsey covers: Five Red Herrings

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    oh this is so not the way my blog was supposed to be. it was supposed to have much more Harriet Walter love and much less shouting and much less experimental swearing and much less general idiocy.

    LET US HAVE WIMSEY BOOKS (to fight the late-night blues!)

    Five Red Herrings (1931)

    Olawd this one. Nevermind. But no, it must be got through. Completionism! Is that a word? No. Bah. Thoroughness! Completion-philia! My mother hasn't even finished this book, you know. She's read all the others but couldn't make it further than a few chapters into FRH. The stolen bicycles and train-time-tables proved to be too much for her patience, I think.

    So if one has to come up with a book-cover illustration for Five Red Herrings*, one has the general idea of an artist/fisherman-corpse-on-a-hillside premise to work with. So what's been done with it?

    *(you know you've got Astaire on the brain when you accidentally type "Five Fred Herrings" the first go-round. I would own sixteen copies of that book and read them all to dust and smithereens.)

     I like this picture. It's pretty. It is a dude in a beret and a long coat off to do paintin' things. I feel kinda bad knowing he is not long for this world. (I know the murderee in the story was a total jerkface, but...this guy! this guy is stylin'!)

    Annnd here we have a dude - probably Lord Peter - fishing...fishing in formalwear...which is always such a great idea...
    I still really love the minimalist covers, though.

    Not actually a book cover (again) but Ian Carmichael what are you wearing sir

     I don't fully understand this one but I could only find so many covers so here it is

    Is that fish lying on top of those paintbrushes or being stabbed by them? I am not even sure! But it is definitely bleeding from the corner of its mouth and that is hilarious to me for some reason.

    Preetee. I 'specially like le tree in yon background.

    I am guessing that this came from the same people who did the awesomely trippy six-Harriets-one-of-whom-is-in-a-bottle cover of Strong Poison. I really really like it! It is striking and minimalist and orange and has a very amusingly disjointed tagline. (also why is there a period both before and after the L in Dorothy L Sayers i would like to know)

    I WANT THIS TO BE PRETTY BUT IT IS NOT

    Clear winner!

    WIll add more if I find them. In the meantime, bed.

face/lehtarss

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So, like....

 

    Dude.

    (do you ever?)

    Also, while sorting through my books today (keep-take-to-college, keep-make-parents-store, chuck outright), I found the first letters I wrote to you inside one of my notebooks. They were written on paper with a dullish pencil and they were over a year old, like dude.