If You Need It, So Do I

Not too long ago, I was looking up the lyrics to the Rosebuds' song, "El Camino". It turns out I couldn't find them, which was a shame. It' s one of my favourite songs and has been for yonks, so I was surprised I couldn't locate them on teh Interwebz. So here they are.

The first time I heard the song was live. It was called "El Camino in the Night"then, and the first recording I have of it is on a split album from the Rosebuds, My Dear Ella and the Sames called "A Show With..."

Probably because of all those live shows, my hearing isn't what it could be, and I can't quite be sure of all the lyrics. Anything I'm reasonably uncertain of is in brackets [].

Don't ask me what the second word in the third line is. It sort of sounds like "box-a" to me on the first version, which kinda, sorta makes sense, but in the other recording sounds more like "boxer", which even if it sounds more distinct, makes even less sense.

Mister Fun, what have you done?
You took our toys and left us one
Shiny [boxer] filled with tears.

And in the haze, you've gone too far
In all my ways a perfect car
No rust, [not common] dear.

And through the field light appears
Please hold on close and know my dear
The El Camino is burning tyres.

The El Camino's in the night
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, it disappears.

But if you need it, so do I
Away from the traps and the lies
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

And through the fields he's coming [my dear]
Shining brightly from our rear
The El Camino is burning tyres.

The El Camino's in the night
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, he'll disappear.

But if you need him, so do I
Away from the traps and lies
We could ride away and have no pain, my dear.

The more produced, shined-up version that appears on The Rosebuds Unwind is entitled just "El Camino" and the lyrics are slightly different:

Mister Fun, what have you done?
You took our toys and left us one
Skinny [boxer] filled with tears.

And through the haze, you've come so far
In all my ways, a perfect car
No rust, [not common], dear.

And through the field, the lights appear
Just hold on close, Let's go my dear:
The El Camino was burning tyre.

The El Camino in the Night,
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, it disappears.

But if you need it, so do I,
Away from the [traps] and the lies.
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

And through the hills it's coming near,
Shining brightly from our rear.
The El Camino is throwing fire.

The El Camino in the Night
Fighting Crime and saving lives
And like that, they re-appear.

So if you need it, so do I
Away from the traps and the lies
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

Vapid Prettyboy Seeks Horse-Faced Bitch with whom to Flog Ugly Fashions.

I don't hate /all/ TV ads. In fact, I don't even hate most TV ads: thanks to the wonders of Tivo, I don't even see all that many. For any ad to come to my consciousness, it needs to a) be repeated roughly 100 million billion times and b) pose some manner of inscrutable question.

Take, for example, Future86's caterwauling about the boons of bundling cable, phone, and internet, or Interactive Male's odd service*.

Or the above ad.

First of all, just who is this guy trying to kid with the "I can't get a date" routine? He's hott. Dullness comes off of him in waves like heat from the sand, but still... One expects some excitement when talking about how one fell in love. Except she's not much better. More bitter, but not more better. It looks suspiciously like she's been using her own features to grind whatever axe she's got going against the rest of the world. Perhaps -- like Mynheer with Vrouw van Winkle -- Joshua's emotional response to her is just to turn low-key and 'bide it out. I can only assume some incipient Carmelita Spats awaits us all in Utero...

Anyway, the Joshua "I can't connect" bit the ad is predicated on: I'm not buying it. I'm certainly not buying it if he has cojones enough to spread his legs like that and show off just what Tanya Lee is getting on a regular basis now that they're married.

Presumably. I mean, eHarmony.com has thinly-veiled Christian fundamentalist leanings -- they wouldn't match up teh Gays till the courts pointed out the 14th Amendment to them and suggested they open up a same-sex sister site** -- so one can only assume that Joshua's visible assets notwithstanding they pulled a Twilight and just held hands till they got hitched.

It makes me wonder how just pathetic the other 87 million people they claim to have connected are, since they won't let any of them on the air to describe the process. Cue Mort and Muriel Goldman's testemontial, I s'pose...

*Have you seen their new ad that covertly replaces the Hispanic guy (but nothing else) with yet another little white thing?

**Chemistry.com made great ad along those lines.

A Conclusion:

For some years I've been wrestling with this question, since the lovely Helen (ever so lamented in her absence) recommended The Mighty Boosh to me*, but I have decided.

Vince Noir is fucking hot, right down to the (admittedly) incredible hair. Noel Fielding, on the other hand, who has more than once been sighted in the company of Amy W(h)inehouse, is not.

A contributing factor that is by no means exclusive to him is the hipster belt that wraps oh-so-clingingly-and-oh-so-inviting-of-the-rimming 'round the lower part of his arse. Frankly, it does wonders for anyone height/weight proportional, but he can work that shit, down.

The whole post-modern-awareness bit is almost but not quite gilding the lilly.

And I'm happy with this sort of dichotomy, as the exact opposite (actor v. character) holds true for David Tennant, and comes damn close to working for Chris Eccleston.

*The reruns of The IT Crowd on IFC have helped in this as well, as well as complicating my idea of just how cute Richard Ayoude is after Garth Marenghi's various incarnations (but that can be tied back to the Emotionally Feckless Fucker...). Turns out he's straight, but still... cute is as cute does.

I don't like Christmas.

It's not that I hate it, as such -- though I occasionally I am driven to that -- I just don't care for it. And this pisses people off. More often that not, it's like an affront to their very existence. Every year, I have to listen to someone go on and on about how special and wonderful it is for them. And this is fine. I just wish they'd go be special on their own and leave me the fuck alone.

It was best when I lived in Durham. I somehow got in the tradition of driving my friend IGP to the airport to catch a red-eye flight on Christmas Eve. We'd spend the night before drinking and watching bad movies, often in the company of another friend I'll call Roweena (spot the Romantic-era joke there, folks!). That would descend into inebriated debates over local scenesters' sexual proclivites over The Sound of Music.

I still don't know about Neil and that was always a hot topic. As it were.

The next day I'd head over to the radio station with Roweena and refuse to play Christmas music for a huge shift. It was prinicipal: I was atheist and R. was Jewish. And we both felt like the world needed far more girly pop played in Decemeber.

I'm not sure exactly why I dislike Christmas. (Other than, you know, the atheism...) The only really nasty Christmas run-in I've ever had was when the person I lived with felt obligated to put up a string of lights and was stupid enough to do it on the stair railing. A few mornings later, dashing to work at 5 am, my foot got caught in it and I fell down the stairs.

That was no fun.

I think it mostly comes from indentured labor in my youth. For a period of ten years or so (inclining towards 15), I was forced to be in my parents' church's Christmas play. This meant the wasting of four or five perfectly good Sunday afternoons in Advent* watching a bunch of awkward, poorly-educated children mumble the same tired sing-song Bible verses.

For years, I didn't even have to learn the words since I had the same verse**: "Unto Us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And the government shall be upon his shoulders and he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Unlimited Rice Pudding*** etc., etc.

When I finally was old enough to complain about this -- my father was the Sunday School Superintendant and I was therefore an example -- I got cast as a rock. A rock.

This is separate from the obligatory family Christmas tree decoration. The least said about that the better; suffice it say I was once beaten and told "You will come hear and you will have a good time. Or else."

So I have no love of the Yule. The only thing I /do/ like is music. But only a certain kind. My parents are old; they almost were when I was born, and their taste in music betrays that. Growing up, the Christmas music they played was from the eeaaarrllly 1960s: The Living Strings. Andy Williams. Laurence Welk. Johnny Mathis.

To this day, it ain't Christmas till somebody breaks out The Andy Williams Christmas album and plays "Kay Thompson's Jingle Bells"****. And my favourite single Christmas collection is the one album of their multi-disc Laurence Wellk Christmas Set they disliked enough to let me ruin. I still have it.

Naturally enough, when I'd been gone a few years, I got a hold of some Esquivel and it suits me perfectly.

So... after bitching about the holidays for a while, I am now going to deliver some goods. Good, free Christmas music:

The Real Deal:

The good folks over at Ultra Swank still have available their Retro Christmas album. For Free!

Over at Pyschotic Leisure Music present you with a whole album of Senor Esquivel. Also For Free!

And last but not least -- and also gatis -- our benefactors over at Romantic Air Records have their Christmas album up, and it's a modern take on the same sort of sounds. It's keen!

So take that Christmas cheer and stick it, yo.

*Yes, I know perfectly well there are only four Sundays in Advent. I just don't care.

**Lutherans love memorising things almost as much as they do not changing things.

***Obligatory Doctor Who reference. See how I sneaked that in effortlessly with Isaiah, Chapter Nine? See, I /told/ you Lutherans were into memorising.

****For years, the whole album was unavailable on iTunes. Now it is. Merry Christmas to me, iTunes.

This Isn't a Common Lament of Mine...

... if anything, I tend to think the exact opposite of this, yet oddly, today was the second time in as many weeks it's run across my mind: it's always very sad when the very pretty aren't very bright.

I am -- properly or not -- deliberately conflating bad taste and militant inexperience with "not-very-bright"-itude.

One of tonight's Jeopardy! contestants* (not the champion, obv.), Daniel, was very pretty and handled himself reasonably well. Through the wonders of Facebook**, a man might be privy to his likes and dislikes and such, and they are disappointing to say least. You really should have a decent book as a favourite before you go on Jeopardy!(.)

:(

The other instance, which I'm not sure I ought to mention, happened when I was in Durham recently, when someone quite fetching said something more or less deeply stupid.

*Yes, another Jeopardy! contestant. Shut up.

**Oh, do the hard work yourself.

They've revived those ads for Britney Spears' perfume -- "Fantasy: Everyone's Got One". I suppose my fantasy would be finding out just who would want to smell like /her/.

(Or more to the point, who would pay $40 to do so when all you really need to do is wake up on a stranger's floor after pack of smokes, a pint of Jack Daniels and a broken condom...)

But this defies me even more. If it's a gag, then it doesn't work; if it's real, it's far more terrifying than smelling like Britney. *

It sort of backs of my theory that American culture is Teh Fails.

*Although really, the Obesity epidemic being what it is, this oughtn't to be as shocking as it is.

Happiness Is...

Hearing one of your favourite bands on one of your favourite TV shows, like when I heard "Keep it Clean" by Camera Obscura on Skins last night. (Or, indeed, when they were on Gilmore Girls.)

Sadness is when you realise they were saying something mean about that song and the kinds of people who listen to it.

Bad Skins writers. Unfortunately, short of bitching about it here, my only other form of protest is not to watch the show any more, and *that* is unlikely. So I'll just sit here and stew.

In Which We Learn That The Recitations Of An Asthmatic Hamster May Be More Salubrious Than The Entire Corpus of William Faulkner

I am very susceptible to suggestion. Virtually anyone who knows me will agree to that. Part of it is just natural... gullibility, I guess. But part of it is training.

Any sort of criticism is essentially a response to the stimulation a work of art gives; formal criticism is just putting that gut reaction into a more informed context.

And while this is true for all art, I think it is even more so for the drama. Most modern acting in the US is more or less based on Stanislavski's System, and all that boils down to is a schemata for making yourself extremely open to the imaginative suggestion of an author's script.

Dramaturgy and directing are even more so, in that dramaturgy is preparation for the more literary, theoretical suggestions underpinning a script, and direction is dealing with the the concrete realities of working actors and their inter-relating physical and mental positioning.

So where is this going?

I finished reading Faulkner's Go Down, Moses not long ago, and it's made me want to go hunting.

This is, of course, ludicrous.

I have none of the necessary skills, nor (really) any of the necessary desires. I mean, sure, I hate deer. I /really/ hate deer, and it must be loads of fun to take one down, but the whole sitting half-way up a tree at 4.30 in the morning of the off chance one might stroll by is pretty much the opposite of how I'd like to spend my time.

And the idea of giving me a firearm ought to appal everyone. I mean, technically speaking, I can fire them -- and have been licensed to do so in front of people in state-run institutions, even -- but my knowledge runs out for anything produced after 1580 or so.

Had I spent more time learning to shoot in Boy Scout camp instead of learning to kiss from the instructor, this might not have been an issue. (And no, for the record, it was not some gross Scoutmaster. It was some over-eager older scout.) In an amusing twist of fate, the state of South Carolina got rid of sales tax on guns the weekend after Thanksgiving. And my brother was going to be there. I asked him to pick one up, but he (wisely) laughingly refused. He was in the army and knows the danger of me packing heat.

But for a few weeks yet, I'll still think the whole hunting thing is something I ought to try. I even learned all about seasons for various game, and the licenses required and bag limits and so forth. One might even hunt bears in the vicinity of where my parents live, which I find equally fascinating and appalling. I didn't know there were bears left there to hunt, but next time I'm there, I'll be more aware of the dark.

Perhaps fortuitiuosly for everyone involved, I've started reading a collection of the works of Washington Irving, an author with whom I have no familiarity. (Other than he used to hang out with Walter Scott and that Mary Shelley carried a torch for him...) I quite like it so far, if for no other reason to find out what Isobel Campbell was going on about in "I Could Be Dreaming".

Yarr.

As I sees it, few there be with better claims to piracy than me. I knows my way around a sword; I've worked upon an antique sailing vessel, I've studied up on me history. I can do the funny talk with authority.

And I has me a pirate name, now:

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

!!!

I love pirates.

I love Weebl.

I love topical news references made into satire.

I love THIS:

Dear The (Twilight) World:

Concerned as I am over The Curse of the Cullen Hair* -- it's moved into poor Kristen Stewart's real life, and it seems the film version of poor Jasper has been hit upside the head with the clown-hair stick -- I have to take more drastic measures.

Today I saw pictures of Jackson Rathbone in real life. Let it be known: to hell with Team Edward. I'm defecting to Team Jasper. Actually, make that Team Jay** to ensure Beautiful Green Eye Continuity.

*A Horror Movie in its Own Right.

**So says IMDb.com: who am I to judge if fate has destined this?

Sic Probo, or Q.E.D.

This is a Fraggle (Wembley, to be precise). Note the resemblance to the picture below, specifically in the hair area. This should end all disagreement with my pronouncement.

In Which Our Author Is Pointlessly Catty

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised (given the contents of the novel) that a Twilight personality quiz would be almost painfully sexist, and certainly not gender neutral. So I played along and took the "Which Male Character Are You?" to this result:


Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Reasonable, I suppose, although the picture reminded me of a jovial bisexual Bavarian tourist in 1930s Berlin the morning after one too many absinthes.

Out of curiosity, I also took the female version and got this:


Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Which I objected to. Not because she apparently warrants an exclamation point and Carlisle doesn't(!). Not because of the result. But because of Alice's hair. As I've said before, just because she received electro-shock therapy in the '20s is no reason to feather her short hair to give the impression her toe's permanently wedged into a light socket. I mean, she looks like a Fraggle.

(I've also pointed out that, judging by how Edward's pompadour cut gets bigger in each new ad, he'll be able to go Pom to Pom with Liberace in a 'Who's the Gayest Corpse in Hollywood" by the time the film's released...)

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

--Robert Graves

No reason for posting this other than it's quite lovely. It's exactly what lyrical poetry is supposed to be.

(Okay, I've been reading the Patrick Troughton Doctor Who Annuals, which insist on showing him with that hat from his first few stories and it always makes me think of this poem... And bugger all if you can find a picture of the dratted thing)

Edit: oops! No weird agenda with the wrong colour scheme. Just an amusing mistake!

Another quick thought...

A passing reference a friend made in conversation the other day made me remember some thing. Something that that pricked my conscience.

I never slept with any of teachers*. I was never even tempted (although lots of people thought I had**). One of my stage-managers in college, whilst attempting to get me drunk***, told me she'd slept with her PE TA.

At the time, I thought this was a low mark in sluttiness -- this was before Carolina made you do things like write down your daily calorie intake for a week in your PE classes, so all you really had to do was show up once a week for class and not be dead. I even got credit for an advanced fencing class without ever having been in it. That's how easy they were.

So, at the time, sleeping with the TA just seemed like ultimate in pointlessness and wanton promiscuity.

This is, of course, stupid and very naive. Of all the TAs you'd have, the PE one is the one you'd most want to sleep with: the grade thing is only tangentially related, if at all.

So dear Sarah, I apologise for several years of falsely ascribed low morals. You were clearly more sexually aware than I was.

*Which isn't to say I didn't sleep with people who were TAs, just not my TAs.

**Story of my life. Always the blame for the thing I didn't do, and never any credit for what I did. Except possibly in the stalls of the Greenlaw Hall.

***Talk about causes for St Jude. We found a bottle of white wine in the prop closet. She had one glass, I had three and I practically had to her carry up the stairs of Graham Memorial. Whatever it was she wanted, she didn't get it.

Sundry Observations on Doctor Who

David Tennant announced he's leaving Doctor Who after the run of 2009 specials. I am surprisingly okay with this. (Not that it would matter if I wasn't...)

It'll be four seasons of him as the Doctor, which makes him one of the longer-lasting incarnations (only Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker lasted longer*) and he's had a good innings with stories like "Blink" and "Human Nature". And he's doing the lovely thing of quitting while he's ahead. He's certainly one of the best Doctors ever, and he -- or the new production team -- won't bugger that up in his time left (*fingers crossed).

Soon, I'll be able to go back to fancying him, which is impossible to do with someone playing the Doctor.

And I'm excited to see who the new Doctor is. If I were as famous as Brian Blessed is, I'd just /say/ it was me and the papers would publish it. But I'm not.

I'm not quite as excited as everyone else seems to be about Steven Moffat taking over as executive producer. I haven't mentioned it because I'm still pondering it over. Lawrence Miles posted his thoughts on the subject, and I was inclined to agree. He may be mad, but he is a very good critic**, and he pointed out that this season's "Silence in the Library"/"The Dead Forest" two-parter is a fairly weak retreading of Moffat's previous stories. However, all the rest of his stories are top-notch, so I'm keeping a sort of guarded optimism. His casting of the new Doctor will be very telling...

By a weird coincidence, I managed to get a hold of the Trial of a Time Lord box set and The Brain of Morbius release both this week, and have been drowning in a sea of stories I haven't seen since... well, since the VHS of Trial came out and... a long, long time for Morbius. The older story is a bit better than I remember; Trial is... well, Trial.

Some observations:

1) Joseph Lidster (Who writer and audio playwright for Big Finish and screenwriter for Torchwood) is way cuter than I expected. He appears on an extra for "Terror of the Vervoids", a special that talks about cliffhangers. Could maybe somebody stick him in front of the cameras for the roughly 800,000 spots BBC America needs for ads shilling their up-coming broadcast of Series 4 instead of Moffat?

2) Apparently, the production team of "Vervoids" asked Bonnie Langford to scream in the same key Dominic Glynn's Season 23 arrangement of the theme tune stings in on. This is, unintentionally, hysterically funny once you know. It gives visions of the Mouse Organ from Monty Python.

3) I have all three novels of the extant "Missing Season" published by Target. Now I want to read them again, although they seem pretty fishy.

4) Brian Blessed is god.

*There's an argument to be made that both McCoy's and McGann's tenure was longer (both at 9 years apiece, 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, respectively, since work featuring their Doctor came out, but it's non-TV work.

**I'd link to it, but like most of his more... contentious posts, it's been taken down.

You know, I was never a big fan of The X-Files. Largely because the acting was (well, is) pretty awful: the only really good episodes were the jokey ones that sort of went with that. Even Duchovy is under no illusions about his talent. And I can go with that.

But for a good four or five seasons, the character of Dana Scully was one of the stupidest characters in TV (up there with Lois Lane). And Gillian Anderson's performance was about 180 degrees where it should have been, which called more attention to that fact than was strictly necessary:

Dalek Th... Scully: No, Mulder. You are wrong. Even though you have been correct in every mystery every week now for four years now, the Yeti/teh Saucer Pplz/intelligent viruses cannot exist.

I mean, old school Doctor Who girls never believed, either, but then no one mistook them for the brains of the operation. (Except poor Liz Shaw, who got booted out after 25 episodes...)

So imagine my joy in finding Anderson in a bitchy little article for MSN:

It's possible that Anderson doesn't have any dramatic ability. However, it's more likely that she tried for nonchalance, but overshot and achieved nonliving.... more.. She and David Duchovny went together like peanut butter and cheese (or is that macaroni and jelly?).

Au plaisir d'un gentlhomme

Sounds like a Bond title, doesn't it?

But I'm thinking "Property of a Lady", one of the sources for the film Octopussy.

Anyway, I've be positioned into... No.

Set up to... Grrr.

Put up to... Jeez, isn't there any way into this that isn't vaguely slutty sounding? Apparently not.

So, I've been asked to either a) put up a Sinister post here that I wrote not long ago so a non-Sinisterine can read it or b) relate a story of how I was compared to a certain race of little, blue cartoon... I'm not sure what a Smurf is really, but whatever it is a Smurf is, and how the name stuck.

I'm choosing a), since as sole prop. of this site, I have forbidden all reference to me/Smurf comparison.

"My First Time"!

Sounds racy, doesn't it? Of course, unlike other Sinisterines (looks in askance
at Ken Chu and pines -- pines! -- at the memory of Markelby) I'm
not actually tarty. I just like to pretend I am, sometimes. And I've no idea
why, but in my head just now, I sounded just like Tevye the Milkman
saying that. Anyway.

I want a go at telling my "First time I heard Belle and Sebastian" story!

It's a bit of a long story, so you'll have to indulge me. And it's long
because it's part of a much longer story about a boy (one of /those/ kinds
of boys) and I have to tell at least a little of it for the B&S story to
make much sense.

The boy's name was Daniel. I met him my first year of college, back in the
mid 90s. When I think of him now, I think of him all in corduroys and
Argyle sweaters, but I think most of that is sort of layered on, memories
filtered back through TV and movies. Or maybe this time of year just lends
itself to thinking of people in browns and greys.

He was a year older than me, and I since I was still so fresh out of high
school, I still thought that was a very big deal: in addition to being
very pretty -- all dark curls over bright green eyes and snowy skin -- he
was that much more older and sophisticated. Or so I thought.

I'll spare you all the tedious details of how I actually met him (shoved into
him by the proprietress of a charity shop on Franklin Street that liked to
bill itself as a "vintage" store) and how we got to know one another, and
skip to the part where he decided to go to a Study Abroad semester in London
the next Spring. He was away all that semester, and when it ended he
decided to stay in London through the summer, too, loafing, in my
opinion, in a sort of louche hipster grandeur.

I, on the other hand, spent the summer dressed as an Elizabethan soldier
for tourists at the seaside and tried not to pass out from heat exhaustion


We met up again, of course, that Fall. We were lying together on my twin
n bed in my dorm room, comparing stories about our summers and listening
to the musical treasures he had brought back with him. We were talking about
t something trivial when he remembered something. "Oh man," he said,
"You have to listen to this. You'll love it."

He dug around in his bag and fished out another cassette. It was a copy of
a record he'd heard. He took out the tape we were listening to and put another
one in the little boombox we were listening to, and then cued up the
song he wanted to play. It started, and he looked at me, his eyes shining
with expectation. (Or was it Expectations?)

I listened.

I thought it was crap. I said so. He sort of visibly sank and looked
disappointed. "I'm no big fan of techno," I said. "but that isn't even very
/good/ techno."

To this day, I have no idea why, out of all the songs on Tigermilk, he
picked "Electronic Renaissance", or why he didn't give me some prep for
it, like "Wait, listen to the lyrics!" or "The next song is better!"

I felt really awful, because he had been so excited to share this. I mean,
I know: I've felt exactly that sort of evangelistic glee, too, before
and since, and for the exact same music. But I didn't get it that night.
Not at all. And I really liked him, too, but I was too dumb then to
even try to give it another listen, just for him.

In the end it was all right. He had brought back a ton of music, and we
listened to most of it that night. We ordered awful pizza and stayed up late,
annoying my roommate, laughing and trying to correct the faults in each
ch other's musical tastes, till we found other ways to occupy ourselves.

And clearly I managed to hear some other Belle and Sebastian not much later
and liked it. A lot. But that's another story.

So there you go. I'd've done this for no other reason than ce certain gentilhomme inspired me to break out my old Go-Betweens albums. I had almost forgotten "Love Goes On!" is one of my favourite songs. (Am... Em... Bm... C... G... Em... D... C...)

If all goes to the good, I may not post again this week.

;)

You know, nothing will make you think twice about stupid, off-the cuff tweets like the sentence:

"Stephen Fry is now following you on Twitter!"

I did something quite sad this evening. It's finally gotten cold in these parts -- well, cool. For a long time, it's always been my tradition to mull some wine the first really cold night of the year.

I started doing it in college. I remember the first year I did it, I was in a dorm -- Stacy Hall -- doing it for a load of friends crammed into my room. We had chased The Idiot Steve out by telling him we were having an orgy. It almost backfired because he apparently fancied one of the girls, but then Daniel smiled and put his hand on The Idiot Steve's shoulder and he was off. I was greatly complimented when my English(/Greekish/Frenchish) friend Lucie said it was 'just like Fireworks Night!"

I think that may have been one of the nights we went chasing after the Gimghouls. If it was, then it would have been the midnight on 31 October, so a few days later than now.

After I graduated, I remember doing it a couple of times with my friends Christina and Jamie, at Christina's little duplex. And at least one of those was a party (very possibly her birthday party) with at least a dozen DJs from 'XDU jockeying to spin.

It was always a trip in New York, too. It was one of the first things people I started with did en masse. There was -- is -- a liquor store just across the street from Hunter, so w, dropped in and bought several bottle of cheap red, then went back to somebody's Manhattan place. There were five or six of us crammed on somebody's fire escape, smoking and drinking and actually talking for the first time.

Well, anyway, I did alone by myself tonight for the first time. I couldn't go out and get any, but there was a bottle of something alarmingly labelled "Indiana Grape Wine". I used it without trying any. I added the spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and a dusting of allspice) and the rest (lemon juice, a touch of vanilla, and more sugar than is seemly) and heated it accordingly.

It was just as bad as something labelled "Grape" Wine should be. For tradition's sake, I forced a few gulps down my throat, but it was so bad I wound up pouring most of it out. I poured it down the sink lest it kill the grass in the yard.

I think I'm glad of that, actually. Had it been good enough to drink, I'd have drunk all of it and gotten pointlessly maudlin. As it is, I can (just) manage to sort of cheerfully reminisce without falling prey to nostalgia. Although if I brood, I may just fall prey anyway. So I'll stop.