Miscellany
A chain of associations in the car tonight got me from CVS, to Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, to Steven Brust, to Vlad and Loiosh, to the following mental picture which I feel I must share with you all:
TEMERAIRE
(tilting his head to one side)
May I eat him, Laurence?
(I think Temeraire is more likely to say "May I" than "Can I," don't you?)
Shortly after that, in a very musical-range kind of way, Richard Thompson's "Beeswing" (a sad sweet slow folk song) was followed by Puddle of Mudd's "She Hates Me" (an angry hard rock song; the key line is actually "She fucking hates me," but I guess they didn't feel they could have a title that itself needed bleeping). (Though I suppose they are both about the woman who left.)
On the drive in, the unrated playlist tossed up a song from an album called "There Will Be Blood Tonight," and I walked around with Inigo Montoya's voice in my head for most of the morning.
I was thinking of suggesting a Readercon panel on the Napoleonic Wars, but realized that two data points don't constitute a trend. Besides Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and His Majesty's Dragon, are there other recent speculative fiction novels dealing with the Napoleonic Wars (as opposed to the Regency)?
Finally for tonight (having failed to debug elusive MySQL errors, again), where were you on the night of Thursday, March 30, between approximately 7:45 and 8:15 p.m.? Can you prove it? And what did you do with the sandwich?