For those of you in the US: Fight SOPA. Phone calls really do work for Congress, if you can.

Department of “Yes, I see how that could have happened”: An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the title of a segment of “The Daily Show” that featured Colbert. It was “Even Stevphen,” not “Stephven.”

Awesome brush-off poem.

Ilona Andrews, Magic Gifts: ( short Kate story )

Not a particularly fortunate trip. First my credit card is declined (turned out someone attempted an unauthorized $360 sunglasses purchase) and so I can’t check into the hotel—which did get resolved—and now it appears that housekeeping spirited away my comfy flannel PJ pants which were intertwined with the bedsheets. I thought they didn’t change the sheets every day any more as a result of environmental consciousness! Woe.

This poem is relevant to my SPN interests.

The funniest thing about this parody is the Google ads it triggers. But I like the parody pretty well too.

I went to the Sisters of Mercy concert and got home in time to feed the baby -- a short set. Decent concert, neither the worst nor the best I've been to, with high points at Alice and Vision Thing. It's always fun to be in a packed crowd of people who know all the words. Best image of the night: the woman in front of me, in a pinstriped suit, who carefully pinned up her hair, revealing the elaborate tattoo curling around her neck and shoulders.

I just read this anecdote: Near the end of his life, Theodore Dreiser occasionally grew confused. One night he woke and searched for his wife Helen, but he didn't recognize her, and they had the following exchange:

Helen Dreiser: I am Helen.
Theodore Dreiser: Everyone thinks she's Helen.

So true, isn't it?

For reasons noted best by cesperanza, I don't feel comfortable writing about "the story I keep telling." But I have been thinking about themes, and here are four bits of prose that always grab me, that I write around and read around:

1. "Some illusions are worth any price you pay for them ...." (Jane Mortimer, A Bitter Taste on the Tongue. My life would be very different if Jane's The Sin-Eater hadn't been just about the first XF story I ever read. She's also a mensch who answered my fawning fangirl feedback – say that ten times fast. I always remember this line as "Some lies are worth any price you pay for them," but it works either way.)

2. "You don't get to choose who you love. You only get to choose how." (The line so nice I used it twice.)

3. "He'd spent his entire life being offered things that were almost what he wanted, but for the single fatal flaw that made them completely unappealing." (Gigi Sinclair, who hasn't written enough SV.)

4. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living...." (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; don't say Social Studies never did anything for me.)

So I guess the themes are twofold: Fate versus Free Will, and Not Quite.

A grab bag of books:( Read more... )