Off the Cliff

Mug, mug, mug. Went to the super two blocks away, came back, dropped groceries in blissfully cool by comparison house, went up to physio three blocks away and was *sopping* when I arrived. Yes, good thing I showered before leaving, but now must shower again before going to bed. And frankly I see no evidence that sweating actually cools you.

Temps should drop in tomorrow's storms but they're still calling for humid weather. A humid 26 isn't that much different from a humid 30 in my experience.

The linden is shedding its secondary leaves or whatever they are. Some day will get around to sweeping them up. Some day will attack the backyard vines that totally cover the walkway and are trying to seal the garage door shut. Gardener emailed me asking would I like some work done. Yes, but can't afford it. It's not that she charges $75 an hour, it's that she takes two hours to cut the backyard vines.

I have The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes from the library, John Dickson Carr and Adrian Doyle's missing cases. Have read Adrian's before, haven't read John, am actually not that impressed with him. But dissatisfaction may be due to the weather and the aches as much as anything else. Roll on mid-month when autumn is supposed to start.

Ache ache ache. Slept 11+ hours last night, making up for Saturday's curtailment, but hurt all day anyway. Saw Prof&Mrs Islamic Studies as I was having a latte at the Yuppie Café (yuppie because it was closest, bar the one that doesn't have pastries). Mrs I.S. reminds me that we're getting smog from the Alberta wild fires which might explain some of the malaise, but I ascribe it mostly to damp and humidity and lack of acupuncture. Should have grabbed that Friday noon appointment but didn't want to have to set an alarm, which will learn me. Anyway, that was my human interaction for the day. Loneliness kills as much as smoking, I'm told, but extreme introverts can survive on very little, and I do quite happily. 

Otherwise, The Angel of the Crows is an absolute delight. I have no problem envisioning Crow as an albino Cumberbatch, mostly because I like Freeman's Watson better than any of the others I know of (which RP-wise is actually very few: know neither Brett nor Rathbone's settei.) And the colander mind has forgotten most of the original stories, so I really don't know what will happen. My rereading of canon a dozen years ago may well have skipped The Sign of the Four entirely because it might as well be The Moonstone for all I remember of it. Anyway, a lovely read and so much easier than chewy Craft novels. Which I love, but dear god I want a map so badly. It took me three times through Three Parts Dead to finally, finally, grasp what the God Wars were about. I know I'm slow, but some writers are so close to their worlds that what's stunningly obvious to them is pitch black night to the rest of us, and that includes the basic question of what's where.

There are days I think I'm getting better or stronger or whatever, and then there are days like today. But today I walked four blocks and raked two bags worth of leaves and so maybe no wonder if I hurt? It's not the knees so much I worry about, though they were singularly uncooperative, but the back and hips. They're what I want to stop hurting because they're what make walking difficult, and I don't think a knee replacement is going to help there. And they were getting better there for a bit: no cramping in the morning, no lower back pain when I walked the bike to the corner. Ah well.

Wimp that I am, I caved and turned the heat on this evening. Just enough to take the refrigerator chill off the place, because outside is still in the teens and it shouldn't go below 10C tonight, a perfectly reasonable temp. But I'm laid low by allergies and the remnants of gut unhappiness and the aches that recurred in spite of yesterday's massage with the splendid Naoko, back from vacation, so I shall indulge me. Besides, it's going to rain for the next three days, so indulgence is warranted.

Naoko actually managed to stop my knees hurting for however short a period, which was amazing. Press in certain spots and the bones open up; I need only find which spots those are.

Weekend was necessarily quiet and FWD, reading Christie stories on my tablet. Today I managed the regular Sunday laundry and accumulated dishes, and also cleaned out ancient vegetables from the fridge and took them into the overgrown backyard and dumped them in the composter. The fridge crispers are now clean and empty. Then I cleaned the humidifier from the bedroom and soaked all parts in vinegar, ready for winter. So that's two little foot-dragging chores accomplished. I could make a list of all the others but then I'd never do them: it works better if I have a spare loose-ended moment and do it then when I'm not aware that I'm doing it.

Back to the Rainy Willow Store, because I'm not sure I want to read Mercedes Lackey's psychic whatevers being Smrtrthnu ie Sherlock Holmes. Possibly A Study in Sable gets better, but somehow... I doubt it.

I find the rat-tat-tat of woodpeckers annoying. It sounds like my lungs when I'm croupy.

Turs out I needn't be blind after my eye exam. 'Put your lens back in' the optometrist advised, and indeed the world does focus wonderfully if you do. I needn't have taken transit and bled more money from my presto card that already bleeds enough- top ups needed almost every week- but then I would have been biking in the light but persistent rain that, well, persisted all day yesterday.

Further advantages to having no tastebuds: I no longer drag my feet about brushing my teeth because of the vile aftertaste of toothpaste. Not being able to taste also cures the slight stomach quease that I get from both toothpaste and mouthwash.

Haven't done reading Wednesdays for a while. The sleety weekend saw me finishing two books: Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Inncence because someone did a TV adaptation which I'll never watch. I understand they changed a lot for the adaptation including Who Done It. Probably to Gotcha! the audience who thought they already knew. Then Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was pleasant, though I wish someone else had written it because Salman Rushdie is an unlikable little git.

This last weekend it was L.M. Montgomery's The Road to Yesterday, not quite as twee as The Chronicles of Avonlea but making me oh so grateful that I'm not a Presbyterian growing up in the insular haha world of PEI a century ago. Actually, growing up anywhere in Canada prior to oh say 1965 was a pretty grim experience. There's a smallness and smugness to white Canada that's most unpleasant and always has been.

Currenly reading Holmes pastiche, edited by George Mann whom I keep telling myself to avoid. In fact it's the actual collection I keep telling myself to avoid, the one with the Ms B--- in it. Except for that story it's no worse, even if not much better, than most Holmes pastiche. Have also a selection of short stories by Rose Tremain, an author I'd never heard of, who had a glowing writeup in the Guardian a while back. She writes historical fiction as well as modern, and of course our library has nothing available in paper but these stories.

Since I started doing acrostics and stopped playing online solitaire, my tendinitis has... improved, at any rate, and my sense of futility has decreased a little. Acrostics take longer than solitaire, but there's an ending to them, unlike the mindless misery of one game after another.

The effects of cortisone shots is usually: month 1, free as a bird, I fly; month 2, twinges now and again especially on achey days; month 3, back to normal levels of crippledness. I am a week from my next shot, and the month 3 symptoms have only just started. This makes me happy. OTOH, they *have* started and the bike that allows for mobility at such times is not usable: so it's going to be a long and activity-curtailed week.

Woke at 8 this morning from ativan sleep (needed for the unpleasant things I did to my leg yesterday, wearing grippers on the wrong boot) turned over and went back to sleep until 10, in which time I dreamed I was at an Italian hotel in the mountains on a group or family tour, and there were no toilets in the bedrooms or the public washrooms. Other guests didn't seem to be bothered by this, but I was growing increasingly perplexed by the vanished facilities. Turns out the owner had hidden them all from us because the last time our business co-ordinator booked rooms for a staff holiday, back in 1990 when C didn't even work for us, she'd cancelled some reservations without notice or shorted him on something, and this was his revenge.
( Meme )

This is the crazy time of year when new babies start one per fortnight: which, yes, is better than one a week. But we're getting little babies, five or six months, and they teethe and fall sick and hate their bottles and cry piteously because the Boob has gone and everything hurts oh oh oh. Thus I spend my days patting their backs and rocking them to sleep and am sometimes paid for my labours, and come home knackered.

Possible the fatigue causes brain rot, but in fact I'd had it in mind for a while to call the gas company to ask if I'd booked my furnace check-up and if so, for when. Came home last night from two Long Island Ice Teas and a salad, to several calls on the machine. First from the gas guy to ascertain if I was at home that morning, which I wasn't; then to say he'd have to cancel because his car had broken down; and a third silence, which might have been him or, equally likely, some call centre. Dodged a bullet there, whichever. And now I *must* call the dentist to ascertain if my appointment is Oct 10 or Oct 19, because both are marked on the calendar.
( Wednesday )

Discovered that when trying to free up space in perpetually 'not enough space' phone, 'empty cache' is good for all apps. 'Delete data' is fine for everything but browser. Since no manufacturer these days will tell you anything about phones, tablets, laptops or desktops (instruction manuals, oh yes, I remembers them) one must learn by trial and error; and occasionally that involves deleting all your browser's bookmarks.

Evening with the Young Ladies last night. We watched a Percy Jackson film. Discover that Percy Jackson works infinitely better as a movie than as a book.

I don't say that all recent Holmes pastiche is ridden with vocabulary near misses, but certainly Paul D. Gilbert's stuff is. Not the true howlers, but a string of niggly Wrong Words that eventually begin to grate. "Holmes' long, sinewy fingers reached out greedily for the wire and he began to read it with urgent intent." "...I believe that our client is sincere in her interpretation of the events she has witnessed. As to whether my investigations validate that construer is, of course, an altogether different matter." "...Daxer's hold over Douglas had its roots in Dundas' handling of the Prussian Crisis, the event that precipitated his meteoric rise to political imminence." And on and on.

Monday's optimistic expectation of blissful early slumber was foiled by malign astronomic influences: the conjunction of full moon and eclipse resulted in such next-morning parental notes as 'bad night', 'didn't sleep much', 'restless sleep', and so on. I was corralled for an early shift by an 11 pm phone call and so, naturally, couldn't fall asleep until 1, with, yes, frequent wakings. The resulting 8:15 to 5:45 day passed in a sweaty haze.

But then the wind blew Tuesday evening and suddenly we're in a different world; which is a relief. I was still plagued with leg and ankle and thigh cramps all through last night. They eased off when I finally put my woolly bedsocks on, and I shall hope today's acupuncture has helped. Shall go back to twice a week sessions of same, because once a week has led to five days of lumbar twinges and spastic leg muscles.
( Once again Wednesday )

1. Moths are as stupid as flies about getting themselves in and not being able to get themselves out, but they're easier to take. Flies buzz stupidly; moths just sit there in placid contemplation. Which said, coming into my side bedroom and finding three moths sitting on the wall is not a happy-making experience. If they'd just perch low enough, I could glass-and-paper them out the window, which trust me, you cannot do with flies. Then they'd probably come back in again. But why, when the room is in darkness and the lovely sun is shining through that slice of open window, do they not fly out to the light?

2. Am not sure what criteria were at work in assembling The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes because out of six stories so far, one stars a detective and five star various criminals, thieves, conmen, and grifters.

3. If I have PTSD it's from the blackout of 2003. Any morning outage that lasts longer than five minutes makes me anxious and unhappy, especially when Hydro's 'report outages here' link turns out to be broken. This is why one makes friends with one's neighbours: shared problems are lighter problems, and someone else on the block obviously got through to Hydro and rousted the trucks out. But this might be last straw that gets me to either buy a tablet for easier web browsing, or go halfsies with my bro on getting a generator for this place.

4. A quarter past July and I have yet to finish a book, though I've abandoned three. First for the month will probably be Gaiman, unwillingly, because this collection of stories is him in 'far too clever for his own good' mode.

5. There's a new 100 Demons out at the end of August and the new Peter Grant and Craft novels at the end of September. They all should have come out *this* month, says the traditionalist, but I'll take what I can get.

There's a black horny bug-type insect that flies. I have no idea what it's called but it flies into my side bedroom on a regular basis and buzzes about the light. I stun it and drop it back out the window, and next night either it comes back again or one of its friends does.

I have lost my fuchsia bra. For a time I thought it was just masquerading as a pair of underpants, as the turquoise one was: or rather, tonight I washed the underpants instead of the bra; but I've been through the laundry basket and my chest of drawers and no. Not there. Granted, if one person living alone can lose two dozen single socks, I suppose she can lose a bra. But it's irksome nonetheless. Not as irksome as it might be: having shelled out for postage and price to get those things from China, I happened to compare them to the pink bra I bought at the dollar store several years back. Exactly the same.

One reason for wishing for a sig.oth is trying to apply Afterbite to those itchy mosquito bites in mid-back. Afterbite doesn't work as well as it did: I suspect the absence of 90% ammonia. Try ammonia instead and it works.

Three day weekend with rain forecast at least one of those days- tomorrow, the actual holiday. I have the three-vol compendium of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and another book of Holmes pastiche. We shall see if I succeed, ever, in my much-dreamed-of pastime of 'sit on sofa and read.'

Nice day, nice weather, sun and wind, great cumulus clouds from a Baroque painting at evening. Tell you, Pride weekends are different than in my youth: though the crowds downtown probably sizzled in the sun, it was a low 70sF sun, not 95 in the shade.

Walked to coffeehouse and supermarket without excessive twinges. Ate an ice cream cone. Read a Gaiman-edited anthology.

Last night ate a Juicy Burger at an Annex institution, By the Way, still there after 40 years though the service is at least faster these days. Their Cosmopolitans are larger and cheaper than at my raucous regular, their burgers no more expensive and chips better, and their decor is infinitely preferable to Pauper's patterned carpet and booths and spots TV. By the Way redecorated recently and no longer have the dark wooden tables and chairs that hold some of my happier 90s and oughties memories- as seen here if you click enough- but the mural remains, with its portraits of bygone Toronto celebrities, seen to better advantage here. Afterwards I went and bought Holmes pastiche and Conan Doyle weird tales at BMV and it was all very time-travely to an early part of the decade that we are somehow in the last years of: and when did that happen?

There's an up side to tizzies, and that's the roiling stomach. Roiling stomachs do not want food put in them and will contrive to be rid of it in double plus time. The last time I had a month of tizzies I lost ten pounds. Mindfulness and metta have stopped the current taking well short of that, but I find myself quite happy to have half a bowl of brown rice for lunch and half a cup of keffir for dinner, and look forward to seeing what the scale says in a few days time.

Everyone's flight to DW doesn't affect my LJ reading much, but oh will it put a crimp in my reading of other people's FLs, which is one of the joys of my life. Reading other people's DW circles isn't the same, mostly because the fonts and layouts are so uncongenial, and always have been.
( Reading meme )

Aware of a certain bodiless, causeless, happiness all day, which is either the Novemberish weather- grey and brown and open-coat but coat still- or a harbinger of this virus entering its final phase. Three weeks, my doctor said: one to get, one to have, one to get over; and if she's right, 'get over' week begins tomorrow. This feels like a very 80s illness in its length, though I know I've had other phlegmy coughs with exhaustion since. But those inevitably turned to sinus infection inevitably followed by antibiotics, and this... just goes on and on.

Finished?
McCrumb, The Rosewood Casket and Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown. You might add The Scandal of Father Brown to that, but there's one last story to read and I'm perversely dragging my feet on that one. Father Brown doesn't belong in the '30s, any more than Holmes belongs in the '20s. It should always be 1895 for them, and I'm sure their authors were as depressed as I to find them in an age so suddenly uncongenial to their intrinsic natures.

Now?
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. Read decades ago and totally forgotten. Part of 'get it off the shelf' movement. Preferred to the two other close candidates, Til We Have Faces and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes as having a female author.

Next?
Another Nora Bonesteel, a novella this time, just because.

Abandoned
McCrumb, The Ballad of Frankie Silver.
-- Not interested in miscarriages of justice

Vyleta, Smoke
-- Aiken, not Dickens, but still the same unpleasant Victorian world as the latter. Not at all genial.

Last month's reading was pretty forgettable, so I shall forget it.

Yes well, I rested a lot and read a lot and dropped a couple of pounds because hacking coughs do not conduce to appetite. But I'm about ready for this virus to be over, because those first morning lung-clearings are bloody painful, and it makes my joints hurt as well.

If I'm lucky, the stabbing knee is also virus-related; if I'm lucky, it will be cured by more prescription meds (doctor tomorrow, finally); if I'm not...

Why are the Mammoth Books of Whatever such fail? The Mammoth Sherlock Holmes, all written by the same guy, had Victorian cooks addressed as Miss Rosemary. The Mammoth New Sherlock Holmes by various authors has inexplicable typos: 'At the cost of her life she must not be identified as the treasure's finder. She needs an untermediary.' (Also forgive me if I don't think the royal regalia of Charles I legally belongs to the person who found it, and who murdered to keep it.)

Finished Bledsoe's The Hum and the Shiver which was... not what I expected from its provenance. I can't remember the chain of causation but I'm pretty sure it began with a Holmes pastiche by Sharyn McCrumb who wrote a series of Appalachian-set mysteries. They're in the library system: how I came to put a hold on an Appalachian-set err 'urban' fantasy instead I don't know.

As such it's well enough, though I wish he hadn't told us outright just who these mysterious black-haired Appalachian people are. And in a minor niggle, I dislike people arbitrarily mixing up Irish and English traditions of [redacted], the way Japanese mangaka mix up Jewish and Greek legends, just because they look purty together.

Finished also David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero, the first step up Mt. TBR. Yes, the style is irritating, but it does stop the book from being pure genre, and it does give an impression of internal chaos to match the external chaos of 1946 Japan. It shouldn't give me flashbacks to bustling 1991 Tokyo in quite a different August, but it does.

Much of the plot remains obscure, as books about conspiracies and politics generally are for me: "who is doing what to whom and why?" is one of my reading bête noires. Why did this file go missing? 'For blackmail.' But what was in the file that could be used for blackmail? 'Dunno.' I suspect that much of the action never actually happened but was a figment of the possibly-deranged narrator's mind. If I were the kind of person who happily picks apart the modulations in a Bach fugue, instead of being unable to tell what key we're in, let alone when it changes, I might pick apart the various conspiracies and double-dealings and double identities in this book. But as with music, to 'laboriously unwind the twined chains of melody link by link'- enh, ご免です: I can't be arsed. If intellectual activity is your preference, by all means go ahead. But for me, reading and music are sensual, not intellectual, exercises.

Which brings me to Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. I read it thirty years ago as a memoir. Now I read that it's a novel. And really, it doesn't matter. It's a lovely luminous work, describing a bunch of people who were probably appalling in reality, but who come through in the work as part of the myth of New York, a well-to-do intellectual's myth, not a popular one. Less Guys and Dolls than

And those were the reasons
And that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song-
probably still is for those of them left.

Finished since last week?

Queen Victoris's Book of Spells, Windling and Datlow eds
-- Library book; provenance: found perhaps while searching for steampunk entries in the catalogue? Is not steampunk, which takes the worst parts of Victorian society and glorifies it. Is gaslamp, which is fantasy and possibly more congenial except that it's still 19th century, a pretty suffocating time by me.

Must note best of field, because I never remember stories:
The Unwanted Women of Surrey by Kaaron Warren, oddly surreal
Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown by Jane Yolen: gaslamp and steampunk need more jewish voices
Estella Saves the Village by Theodora Goss. Because of course I *would* love a village peopled by fictional Victorian characters.

Cogman, The Burning Page
-- provenance: gift of the author. Nice to read in one place and on paper. And erm yes- Irene really should not have been able to do what she does at the end.

Okorafor, Akata Witch.
-- Library book; provenance: something online comparing it with Harry Potter and Hermione. (shrugs) Felt more like The Library to me. Had a hard time getting into this: possibly I can't read YA anymore. Possibly Nigerian methods of discipline curl my very straight hair.

Also: Harry Potter gives me the oogies now: lowering, depressing, reminder of a painful past. Had to google horcruxes the other day, because I never read the last book, and felt lousy afterwards. Rowling has an irritating water-colour style and her ideas are... not of the first rank, shall we say? Not as bad as Dan Brown, I'm sure, but such a tedious chore to read. And the fandom was deplorable.
( Tsuzuite )

Finished in the last two weeks?
Damned little.

Laurie King, Dreaming Spies
-- King's Holmes, like Cumberbatch's, is convincing enough until one returns to the real thing, or even a pastiche of the real thing, and then just no. This book had Japan and Japanese and the crown prince Hirohito in it, but the plot-- well actually, the plot reminded me of a university friend's first novel, influenced by Pyncheon, that had unlikely conspiracies and obscure cabals formed for unclear reasons, which somehow required making the author's *ahem* self-insert believe something or other so he would go do something else (have sex with one of the plotters, was it?) The mastermind said the self-insert was indispensible to the conspiracy, but his actual role was so tangential he could have been left out altogether- a fact the author naturally didn't twig to. Here Holmes and Russell prove quite unnecessary to unravelling the mystery they're hired, under very unlikely circumstances, to solve. (Two large English people dressing as Buddhist pilgrims in Taishou Japan and being greeted enthusiastically on their pilgrimage route stretches my belief to the limit.)

But up to that point it was at least fun.

Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch
-- mystery set in '70s Communist revolution Laos. Had heard this and that about the series, but had not heard that mid-book it turns into Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I am enchanted.
( Continuing )

Which is worse: listening to 90 minutes of jazz radio or listening to 90 minutes of jazz radio fundraising? 'If you pledge $20 a month you become eligible to be one of the guests on our two hour airplane cruise over southern Ontario!' No wonder they're falling short. (My physiotherapist stays tuned to JazzFM and today I had the full treatment.)

The highs and lows are those of a nice summer day- 14 and 24. We had a few days like that in July, but then I didn't feel the need for long-sleeved sleep shirt and flannel pants and bedsocks and sleep hoodie, and flannel sheets over the summer duvet I sleep on, and under the winter duvet I sleep beneath, because I was so *cooold*. Clearly my body thinks it's fall even if the weather doesn't agree.

Reading someone's LJ who notes she's reading The Invisible Library but wonders parenthetically why all steampunk/ AU Londons require a Sherlock Holmes figure. They don't, actually, but the ones I've read without one feel a little lacking. The fact is that Holmes *is* the embodiment of that London which is most easily assimilable into steampunk. So are Oscar Wilde and, alas, Jack the Ripper: not the real people of that name but the fictions of themselves they either created or had created for them.

I suppose this is all Alan Moore's fault. Except that long before Moore there was "In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road." Holmes defines a place and time that exists in fictional history, where gas lamps burn and hansoms run and it is always 1895

(His opposite number I think is Queen Victoria herself, an iconic real person who carries naturally over into fiction. Or maybe she too is a created personage like the Ripper? except the figure her umm publicists created then- the revered Queen and Empress- isn't at all what shows up in books where no one actually reveres the monarchy.)

Oh central AC and ativan, how delicious the sleep you bring, how sweet the dreams, how gentle the wakening into a civil dry world that smells of nothing at all. One feels like a human being- one registers the way it 'sposed to be- for a half hour or so, before one leaves the house at Fartooearly.am and goes into the hazy sun and muggy polluted air, bound for a 90 minute dentist appointment.

But all things pass, and the evening wind blows, and it's currently cooler than it was last night (is why the AC was on.)
( Cut for book and RL natter )

In the middle days of winter, I put two of incandescens' jewel-coloured quilts on the side room bed and lay on top of them to read. It was warmer than lying on top of the duvet, and the bright patches were immensely cheering. When the temperatures started to climb into the mid-20s I had to put them away: too hot, and I'd no wish to saturate them with my sweat. But it's cold again, however briefly, and I've put them back on the bed, however briefly, and rejoice in my warm cheerful cozy room again, however briefly.

And A/U Sherlock Holmes, while not at all outstanding so far, makes for light and pleasant reading. So I am content.

poliphilo talks about familiar-feeling people in dreams: "It's like these people are my homies- only I can't put faces to them." Yup, know that one.

Two doors down's cherry has an enviable quantity of blossoms, seen now against a medieval grey and white sky. I suppose I must be content with that.

The Martha Grimes was fine but lord, the number of typos. Some previous reader went through with a pencil correcting them and still missed a bunch. Here's a mother telling her child a familiar story:

'A stranger was standing there at the end of the garden. He was not a vagrant, that was clear from his overcoat and his bat.'
'His bowler hat', I said. 'You left it out.'
Which confused me for pages, since bats were never mentioned again, until I realized the second speaker (the child) meant his mother had left out the word 'bowler.'

I know why I gave up on Inspector Banks and Inspector Dalziel (same reason: womanizing sexist pigs) but looking at Ian Rankin's oeuvre I can't discover the title that made me give up on Rebus. The wiki article rings vague bells about him (womanizing sexist pig) but it seems I've never read a thing of his. Maybe I'm thinking of another Inspector who's a womanizing sexist pig, and whose covers have misty grey pictures? (wiki's list of fictional DIs is useless, since it omits the last two series I read- Booth's Fry and Cooper, and Charles Todd's Insp Rutledge.

Not that I need new book/ library mystery reading. I'm supposed to be emptyiing the shelves here.

Soares' A Samba for Sherlock is to the Holmes-fandom-canon as JET's London Mamougai, right down to the great detective who can't deduce for beans and who breaks things in his clumsy rompings. Possibly useful the way London Mamougai is, to register how a foreign culture thinks (or doesn't think) of our pet literary archetype. Soares and his six pages of bibliography is doubtless talking about 19th century Brazil, not Holmes, which is fine if you're interested in 19th century Brazil. If not-- too many similar names of too many insufficiently characterized characters, so that I had to be reminded at the end of just who the murderer was, because his name sounded like that of two other characters who wander through the story.

And I have no use at all for sexually hysteric serial killers who murder young women. Why does no one ever write serial killers who murder millionaires?

However, semi-mobile again, I had x-rays of my knees and then, on a whim, ramen at the upscale ramen place that opened last year; which was pleasant enough, though I have no standards: I was not one who queued for an hour to get into those famous ramen houses in Kouenji, even when I lived there. Also the noodles were underdone for my tastes; shall stick to instant Thai rice noodles in future.

Happy birthday, incandescens! I hope it is/ was excellent, and that the continuation of it at work tomorrow at least partially soothes the fact that it's Monday (and that you have to provide your own birthday cake, which seems to me *all wrong*.)

Is cold. Is not cold enough to kill off the ragweed or whatever causes the itchy eyes and itchy throat. Passing Blawblaws y'day, saw they were having a tax free day and so bought two bottles of my lens solution for a scant $20. And then thought, 'I've worn my lens maybe one afternoon out of the last month and even then it wouldn't stay in. Why am I buying this stuff again?' My brain seems to have happily settled to this 'left eye short-sighted, right eye long' thing; unlike mvrdrk's husband, I have no difficulty with middle distance.

Years back paleaswater lent me Martha Welles' The Death of the Necromancer, pointing out the vanishing m/m subtext ('it was there when I read it the first time and then it wasn't.') I found it well enough but not grabbing; bought my own copy intending a reread some time but never did. Now someone on my FFL says 'isn't tDotN sort of Sherlock Holmes but from Moriarty's point of view?' That plus hints of steampunk (a word I didn't know in '05) suggests the reread should be soon.

Why I think I will not be watching the third season of Sherlock.

"Moffat's writing has always been characterized by a desire to hit the big emotional payoff without doing any of the work of earning it-" Yup, was my impression. "Sherlock still suffers from its perennial, frustrating flaws. Its plots are still tissue-thin at best, insultingly stupid at worst. Its pacing is still awful. It is still, despite spotty improvements like Molly... vilely misogynistic." That too, though I watched the first seasons more for the sense of place (my kink; don't knock it), Freeman's acting, and the sheer WTFery of Sherlock's conception itself. Sad that the last seems to have become either cliched or abandonable at will. I blinked when I first read the line "the one person he thought didn't matter at all to me was the one person that mattered the most"-- *Sherlock* said that? Out loud? To *Molly*?? Sheesh.

OTOH what she says about the Mycroft/ Sherlock relationship is intriguing. Brothers: my other kink. (But why did they thin Mycroft? Couldn't possibly have a fat hero, is it?)