five things
First: I have finally updated the bios on my LJ & DW profile pages for clarity and to provide additional information. (Did you know that SteelyKid's nickname does not derive from the alloy? Or how to pronounce my last name?)
Second:
rushthatspeaks has another great review as part of a 365 days project (reading and reviewing one new book a day for a year):
The best way to describe the reading experience I had with this book [The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow, by Opal Whiteley, ed. Benjamin Hoff] is to say that it resembled what might happen to a perfectly innocent person who does not know much about history while looking up newspaper headlines from 1880s London. Which is to say, there you are researching away, doing nothing particularly ominous, and suddenly all of the scholarship on Jack the Ripper lurches out of its cabinet and starts gnawing on your leg. Up becomes down, dogs and cats start living together, the definitive works on the subject are written by people who do not have a personal interest so much as a personal ideological obsession, and otherwise perfectly rational researchers start yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?"
The gravitational pull of the thing is clear just from the review. So read, but cautiously.
Third:
oyceter has extremely interesting things say springing from a WisCon panel on indigenous American fantasy.
Fourth: Via my reading list, I found what purports to be a list of 111 Male Characters Of British Literature, In Order Of Bangability. Actually first I found discussion of the list, in which people boggled, in this chronological order, at the inclusion of Kubla Khan, St. John Rivers from Jane Eyre, Othello, and Aslan. (Because if someone who loves God more than women and someone who murdered his wife weren't bangable enough, then a Jesus-lion should really do it!)
At which point I looked at the list for myself and rapidly decided that it could not have been conceived in any seriousness. It's in descending order, so I skipped to the bottom and worked up. As I said there, while I approve of Michael Cantrip in the top twenty, no-one has ever in the entire history of the world previously called Tom Bombadil (#21) "bangable" and meant it sexually. Ever. It's just not possible. Aslan at #32 is simply to see how far down people would actually read.
I suspect a random-number algorithm, myself.
Fifth: Tonight on our walk, Chad found SteelyKid two-thirds of a robin's eggshell, which she very carefully held for several blocks while explaining that the bird was going to fly back into the shell, so she had to find a place to put it. Which she did on the second try, and then bid the shell goodbye, told it to be good, and said that it should go to the Egg House. As we walked away, I tried to prepare her for the idea that it might not be there tomorrow by saying that now a bird or a person could come take it. She agreed and added that it also might be taken by a tree or the grass or some dirt or a fire drill (not truck, drill; I think they had one today at daycare).
I have carefully remembered where we put it, and think I may just as carefully misremember tomorrow so I can tell her that someone/thing did take it and head off the possible trauma of seeing it smashed.
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