For the past few days, I've been living about 2.5 lives, and not had time to catch up on it. Until now (?) We'll see how far I get.

( click at your own risk )

Sax Rohmer's novel is at least 75% less racist than the film. It's also interesting that while the film Fu Manchu is trying to revive the legend of Genghis Khan, in the book his goal is to gain control of Islam (or at least an Islamic sect) by impersonating the Mahdi. Fu Manchu is portrayed as an honorable gentleman (if a ruthless criminal ( Read more... )

Went to an estate sale in Beverly Hills yesterday, primarily the belongings of silent film actor/director Hobart Henley, as well as those of his wife and boys. It's like they all went off to the other house in Florida in 1940 and just left a house full of possessions behind. Lots of great stuff, but with antique store prices on them, even at 50% ( Read more... )

I played D&D this past Saturday. Although I probably could have truthfully uttered that sentence on many occasions during my life, I'd be willing to stake a Franklin that this is the first time this millennium. notjenschiz got the ball rolling with his impressive plan to create a MMRPG with multiple GMs in a shared world setting. Then a thousand cooks ( Read more... )

For the none of you who are interested, I think I've pretty much reached my level of incompetence. There are maybe a few songs that I can wring one more star out of, but they're pretty few. A recent highlight was 4-starring Institutionalized on Expert. It continues to bug me that I cannot 5-star Woman. I've five starred everything else up to ( Read more... )

We received our first Christmas card on the same day we sent out our first couple cards.

Now for the delicious pork-containing links:

If you're interested in carrying out your own Indiana Jones/Last Crusade-style epic adventurous quest to attain the Holy Grail, you could do worse than to start by acquiring Arthur Machen's Grail Notes. It's ( Read more... )