Audiobook squee: I finally convinced Shoemom to let me get those Classic Bob & Ray CDs! Featuring all the McCarthy parody skits and a cameo appearance by Ray's oldest son (aged about three)! Plus lots of other cool early stuff! Reason for yay!

...I'm not that obsessed, really I'm not. It's just that, with these guys, there's so much stuff you tend ( Read more... )

Question: Why are people who are manifestly dressed to get attention generally so upset when they get it? Specifically, people I pass on the street, wearing leopard-patterned hair or wildly mismatched clothes or tees with snarky sayings or whatever other non-conformist behaviour is the order of the day.

I'm not talking creepy stalkerish behaviour, ( Read more... )

The current audiobook is Jane and the Stillroom Maid, one of the series by Stephanie Barron and read by Kate Reading, and it comes highly recommended indeed.

I'm not ordinarily a huge fan of novelists that use real historical figures. Even if the author is skilled enough - which is very skilled indeed - to incorporate fact into fiction without ( Read more... )

So I finally got around to watching Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola's reimagining of the tragic Last Queen of France as an...um...an 18th-century version of a 21st-century Paris, is the best way I can describe it. This would possibly be a good time to reiterate that the French Revolution has been a hobby of mine for about twenty years now, which ( Read more... )

Short answer: In soap-opera terms, Henry VIII's kids were totally The Colbys to his Dynasty...only maybe not so much with the UFO abductions.

Edward VI was nine when dad handed him over the reigns - or, more accurately, handed him over to his uncle, Edward Seymour, the Protector. (actually, Henry had envisioned a co-regency of many nobles, but in ( Read more... )

So you thought I was kidding when I mentioned the French Revolution, didn't you? Hah.

Actually, I thought I'd start off with something a little less apocalyptic, not to say a neat tie-in with the new movie, The Other Boleyn Girl. Not entirely certain if I want to watch that one or not; for the same reasons why I haven't read the Philippa Gregory ( Read more... )