wayward puppy is wayward

[extemporanea]

Bleah. Sid the Sinus Headache is in residence again, causing me to pop Advil like Smarties for the last three days, and bite more students than I really strictly should. It's all very boring. I shall distract myself, as is traditional, with linkery.

• Less boringly, The Roundhouse on Friday night was great. Expensive, but great.
  
  
• This is a very chilling, very beautifully restrained, very, very good piece of writing. Zombies and politics go together surprisingly well.
  
  
• This is a dread warning for smoczek, courtesy of schedule5. Apparently we're in for a potato shortage, and serious potato-fiends may want to think about growing their own. I've now filled all my veggie boxes with other veggies, and am out of space. Maybe I can plant some in the disused wing of the Evil Landlord's bed. The one Fish used to sleep in.
  
  
• I'm motoring through yet another re-watch of The Lord of the Rings, which is proving instructive. Still enchanting and emotional; cast still pleasingly hot. However, at this distance the lame dwarf jokes are a lot lamer and more dissonant with the mood than they were in the heady days of first love, and the whole thing makes me realise, slightly horrified, that in purely ideological terms China Miéville was right. There's truly nasty stuff here in terms of reactionary conservatism, racism, class-consciousness, symbolic reductionism and what have you. However, Miéville appears to have recanted his earlier "wen on the arse of fantasy" comment, and apparently liked the films. He nails, I think, the reason why I could finish Two Towers last night and still love the movie, despite a ten-minute fulmination to the Evil Landlord on the bloody Osgiliath detour and how poor Faramir was shafted: it's because the adaptation takes the text so seriously even when its choices are, to my mind, not entirely defensible. Miéville argues that Jackson "cares passionately, even about something as flawed as Tolkien's work, and commits to it totally. The film is rich with this integrity." It's why, I think, I'll be returning to these movies for a happy re-immersion at regular intervals until the end of my eccentric tea-drinking cat-lady days.
  
  Which, of course, raises an interesting point. When I'm an eccentric 86-year-old tea-drinking mad cat lady, which I fully intend to be, I'm planning to while away my happy sunset years by immersing myself in the vast range of film, TV and books which I'm assiduously acquiring even now. As an activity it will, I'd think, occupy pretty much the same space that knitting or growing roses or climbing the Himalayas1 does for old ladies in our day and age. The question is, what the hell are all the younger generations going to be doing which will make it old and odd and passée for me to be drinking Earl Grey and vegging out in front of the internet or Buffy or Lord of the Rings? Boggles the mind, it does.

1 My view of the probable activities of old ladies has possibly been unduly skewed by my mother, who is going to kick butt when she eventually does consent to actually get old.