Let’s dance!

As of yesterday evening, I have a cat again!

Well, I have a purring noise under the sofa, disappearing cat food in the kitchen and wet spots appearing in the litter tray, anyway. Occam’s Razor suggests the presence of a cat.

His name’s Spike, he’s black and white and fluffy and his previous owner left him behind when she had a stroke and moved to live with her daughter. So he’s been living rough and has horrible solid blocks of matting on both hips. He’s got an appointment with the vet tomorrow, so shaved cat pics are in the offing if they decide he’s healthy enough to be sedated and go under the clippers….

Celebratory Catgroove:

There’s an emu at the bottom of my garden

Well, not mine. But someone in the Crayford area has an emu in theirs; I saw it from the train.

This makes me very happy.

Such stuff as creepy slashfics are made on

Guess what.

Go on, you’ll never guess.

Orson Scott Card has rewritten Hamlet. ([SPOILERS] after this point!)

To make the king a big gay paedophile who’s murdered for turning most of the cast gay with gay kiddy sex and comes back as an Evil Gay Ghost to trick his (Totally Not Gay) son into murdering innocent non-gay people so he’ll spend eternity being gayed up in Hell (where all gay people go of course). There may well be more gay I forgot to mention.

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011summer/card.shtml

Now, I’ve seen some bloody awful “re-visionings” in my time, but that has to win some sort of prize for utter WTFery. Shakespeare’s corpse is, with any luck, rotating fast enough to drill his way to Salt Lake City and take appalling zombie vengeance on the twit, the twit who published his twittery and anyone who ever thought it was a good idea.

Though I admit I’m morbidly curious about what he might come up with if you fed Titus Andronicus through him. But considering he thinks Taming of the Shrew holds “a legitimate moral lesson about the relationship between man and woman in marriage” my puny mind probably couldn’t take it.

The First Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club

It’s been an… interesting few days, especially since I live in Woolwich and work in Clapham Junction. I left work late on Monday, so it must all have been kicking off a hundred yards away as I bleared homewards through the nice new station entrance. I didn’t notice a thing. So much for my observational skills. I didn’t find out anything was wrong until I eventually got home and hit up the internet to find out why Woolwich Arsenal station was closed.

Blimey.

From the SF nut PoV it’s been fascinating to watch this – riots purely for the purpose of looting, co-ordinated by social networking. Larry Niven wrote a short story called The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club in the 70s, set in a world with teleporters on every street corner, where the news of any sufficiently large disturbance would bring “flash crowds” teleporting in. Which reminds me of what we’re seeing in London and other UK cities; the technology is different but the effect is very similar. We’re seeing the dark side of flash mobs. Are flash riots going to become the next big thing?

Kittens!

I have a new favourite picture

The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire.

Click on it to enjoy the huge version – I love how much they’re all enjoying themselves!

And what are they doing? Well, wikipedia explains it, but basically they’re writing one of the rudest letters in history to Sultan Mehmed, who’d sent them a letter ordering them to knock off fighting him and surrender. So they gave him a long and loving earful of Piss Off, Stick It Up Your Arse Sideways and Your Mum, winding up with the glorious:

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. Thou wilt not even be herding Christian pigs. Now we shall conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t have a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year in the book, the day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!

Now that’s the kind of political discourse I want to hear more of!

Or maybe I timeslipped

We have a local rag-and-bone man.

I honestly thought they’d disappeared in the 70s, but no, he drove very slowly down my street this morning ringing an old handbell out of his window and yelling “RAAANBONE!”

Blimey.

Pity I was too startled to remember I had stuff he could take; I’ll have to hope he comes back.

Beauty and the Mononoke

A really lovely thing here, via BoingBoing: a fan translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s storybook take on Beauty and the Beast: Mononoke Hime (not related to Princess-Mononoke-the-movie). Read and enjoy!

It’s missing the cover page though, which I found elsewhere – you don’t get a good look at his method of transport when he comes to collect the girl other than this, so admire his mighty mouse-powered monowheel!

Run faster lads! He's gaining!

If only it were a film….

Hollywood history

Saw Solomon Kane last night; yes, I was warned about how bad it was, but the warnings hadn’t got over how pointlessly bad it is.

Why on Earth did they set it in England, for starters? In a specific year at that, so nitpickers like me can sit through the yelling and the CGI and the aaangst wondering precisely what Elizabeth R thinks of wizard-controlled armies devastating Devon and why there aren’t hordes of refugees heading for London (or the nearest large town) demanding to know what they pay their bleedin’ taxes for, eh? My Johnny lost his leg fightin’ the Spaniards and now there’s all this turnin’ people into ghouls; they say it’s the Devil but I bet it’s them wicked Papists tryin’ to invade again! What’s Her Majesty goin’ to do about it, hey?

Though it’s sourly amusing to realise that the emigrating Puritan family our hero falls in with on the road are most likely leaving England because they’re not allowed to battle the unrestrained evil of… well, not being allowed to stomp every Catholic or suspected Catholic or somebody-acting-a-bit-Catholic flat. Adds a spin those responsible no doubt didn’t intend.

Very nice Beksinski-esque mirror demons at the beginning though, I must say!

(Ed: any film that doesn’t give its Puritans names like Charity, Devotion, Praise-God or Fly-Fornication is just wasting everyone’s time anyway.)

And it is SF, so there

Ha, found an old review I wrote of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:

Bridget Jones: The Fundie Years.

Breakfast 2 pieces toast, saved butter for face, vv good. 2 sessions with boss. Still not pregnant.

PM: watched woman being stoned. Her bum didn’t look at all big in her decency robe, even when she crouched. So not fair.

God, Offred was boring.