I hope it's better than their last album. I couldn't get into that at all. Too much experimental ambient crap.

( Actual screencap from the Weather Underground. )

I just realized what's been annoying me about Skyrim all this time: They're not proper dragons. They're wyverns.

Which is just as well, really, since by any proper-dragon FRP standards they're pussies.

We had a messy snowstorm last night; it seems to have abated at the moment, but the forecast calls for something like a quarter-inch of freezing rain and then further snow and sleet on top of that for later this morning and this afternoon. Right now the roads here in northern Penobscot County are like one of those idealized-world physics experiments - unlevel surfaces with negligible friction.

As such, though the University of Maine has not opted to cancel classes today, I, after spending half an hour digging out the car and then 15-20 frightening minutes driving as far as Dolby and back mostly sideways, have.

Back to bed.

Today in German II, we began what's colloquially known as the "conversational past tense" (technically the present perfect, which in English is used for stuff that's been happening and may still be, but in German is the usual way of expressing stuff that's over and done with in everyday conversation). As part of the in-class exercise into same, Herr Tozier asked me what I did in my free time last week. My answer - conveniently both true and one of the stock leisure time activities from Part I - was "ich habe ein Computerspiel gespielt" (literally "I have a computer game played").

"Oh, which one?" he asked.

"Skyrim," I said.

From somewhere behind me I heard a classmate's voice say, "Yeeeeesssssss."

So I guess one of my colleagues thinks I'm cool.

It's a little ungrammatical - it should be "lie", not "lay" - but one of the lyrics to Information Society's "Empty" (Don't Be Afraid, 1997) is still the best two-line encapsulation of what real capital-D Depression feels like (when it happens to me, anyway):

Sleep as much as you can
If you can't sleep, then lay there

I am not experiencing this at the moment, but I've been put in mind of it by a few things recently.

I may have mentioned before that my local Hannaford Bros. supermarket has a charity book bin at the front of the store. Sturgeon's Law applies to its contents - there's generally a lot of old dogeared romance novels and the kind of Significant Novels that were hugely popular among Ladies of a Certain Age in the 1970s and are now being disposed of by those ladies' heirs. Every now and then, though, some completely unexpected gem turns up in there. I have, over the years, acquired copies of Alexandre Dumas's Twenty Years After (the sequel to The Three Musketeers), Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (not a good book, but interesting, odd, and important), and a fascinating '60s science book called Getting Acquainted with Comets (among other things) from this bin.

Today, while shuffling through the shoals of romance novels and what I think are the complete works of Louis L'Amour, I ran across these:



These books used to belong to the Millinocket Junior High School library, which is interesting inasmuch as the Millinocket school system has not had a junior high school since, I think, sometime in the 1960s. (Presumably the middle school, which is what it's been called since, inherited the collection and has only recently disposed of these volumes.) The books themselves are older still; volume 1 dates to 1938 and its sequel to 1940, hence the unabashed sexism in the title and this, the first paragraph from the editor's preface:

"This is a book for modern boys in their teens - for those active, growing, adventurous young minds that demand more robust fare than 'children's books.' At such an age boys turn naturally to the detective story. Why not, then, give them their own book - of the best?"

Dubious gender typing and pompous preface aside, the first volume is really an amazing collection, particularly nowadays, when many of the bits collected in it are out of print and quite hard to find. Some of the selections are still readily available today - Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", for instance - but it's trickier to track down, say, any of the works of Jacques Futrelle, or G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories (my local library has an ancient omnibus of all of those that I very much want to have off them, particularly as I'm the only one who's checked it out in the last 20 years and they had to dig it out of the basement to lend it to me), or - particularly exciting to me - an Arsène Lupin story by Maurice Leblanc. Then there's the stuff I've never even heard of, which, given the company it's keeping, I'm quite looking forward to discovering.

Volume 2 looks to be more eclectic still - there's a Hercule Poirot story and a Lord Peter Wimsey, but the rest is even more obscure (to me, anyway). The standout "ooh, I've heard of that but never seen one" in the second volume is a Bulldog Drummond story by H.C. "Sapper" McNeile: largely forgotten now, but often mentioned in more modern book prefaces as an influence on the likes of James Bond and Doc Savage.

All this and the wonderfully nostalgic solidity of 1940s "library binding", proudly described in a box of bold print on the back cover:

"This is the HARPER*CREST LIBRARY BINDING - It meets textbook use-standards and is guaranteed for the life of the sheets. It is reinforced with visible joint muslin around first and last signatures and is cased in with a tight back. The cover is of impregnated 56-square cloth over hard-rolled binders board. It is washable, damp-proof, and soil-resistant."

You just don't get workmanship like that these days, let alone the shameless self-promotion that goes with it. The most recent example of that sort of thing I can think of was the "this is the compact disc digital audio system" blurb from early '80s CDs liner booklets.

So yeah, quite looking forward to these. All this for two bucks. There's a lot of rubbish in the Hannaford charity book bin, but when it comes good, it doesn't fool around.

In high school I was a performing arts nerd.  I was in the concert band and the jazz band, and though I wasn’t a member of the chorus or show choir, I did appear in the fall musical a couple of times, because it was the only student theater option available in that half of the academic year.  My junior year, though, I forget what the musical was, but it was something I wasn’t interested in appearing in, so I spent that fall doing lighting instead.

This is by way of background information so you’ll understand – if you have any background in theater tech geekery yourself – why what I am about to relate has stuck in my memory all these years.  You see, in the spring of my junior year, I was picked to attend one of those state music workshop things, wherein people from the various concert bands at schools around the state gather in a neutral location, rehearse for a couple of days, and then perform as a sort of high school concert band supergroup.  Power Station for brass and woodwinds, basically.

That year the workshop was held at what was then called the Maine Center for the Arts, a big concert hall-cum-museum on the University of Maine campus in Orono.  (It’s now called the Collins Center for the Arts, presumably in honor of some generous alumnus or other.)  At the time the MCA was brand shiny new and something of a showpiece, Maine’s state-of-the-art performing arts venue, and so it was quite a big deal for a bunch of high school bandsters to be given the run of the place for a couple of days.

One day I was moseying around backstage during one of the breaks, snooping around and comparing the facility to the auditorium at my high school (which, he said immodestly, was one of the best in the state), when I noticed the door to the tech director’s office.  It had what appeared to be a brightly colored sign taped to it, but when I investigated more closely I found that it was not, in fact, a sign at all, but a lighting gel.  I have reproduced here a basic artist’s impression of what it looked like.

So I was working on my German homework and listening to random selections from my iTunes library the other night, and suddenly the Beatles were singing in German. I had forgotten that they recorded versions of a couple of their early hits in German, perhaps as a sort of musical thank-you note to all those people who came out to see them in the pre-famous days in, where were they, Hamburg, I think.

One of them has an intro which is not what you would call really complex poesy in English, but becomes a sort of deathless art when rendered auf Deutsch:

Sie liebt dich, ja ja ja
Sie liebt dich, ja ja ja
Sie liebt dich, ja ja ja jaaaaaa

The other one is "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand", presumably because the translator realized that "Ich Möchte Deine Hand Halten" doesn't scan properly.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: machine shop background noise

In the First World War, the official policy of the British armed forces was that British soldiers killed in Europe would be buried where, or nearly where, they fell. They would not be returned to the UK. This was a practical, logistical decision, and given that something like a million British and Imperial soldiers died in the war, it makes a certain amount of mathematical sense. Similar policies were adopted by most armies in World War II. There were just too many people dying for retrieving and repatriating their remains to be feasible.

But I got to thinking: can you imagine a Western government even attempting to adopt such a policy today? Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. America, your boy's going to have to stay in Afghanistan. You'd be able to hear the shriek of public outrage just by stepping outside your house and listening, and quite right too.

Then again: I've learned today that these things were not so meekly accepted as all that back in the day, either. At one point in his Armistice Day documentary Not Forgotten, British broadcaster Ian Hislop reads a letter from the mother of one of the fallen who is not pleased - and not pleased in that eloquent, acidic way that we've mostly lost from modern discourse. Without using a single foul word or even really raising her metaphorical voice, she rips the faceless army bureaucrat to whom she's writing, apparently in reply to the official notification of her son's death, a new one in the least uncertain terms.

"I wonder you have the decency to refer to him as being my son at all, since you consider you have the right to withhold his remains from me. Militarism has destroyed his body, and it seems to me if some people in this country had the power, they would deal with his soul also."

I mean... ouch.

Just saw an announcement for a student discussion at the Wilson Center (campus interfaith chapel thingy): "We'll be discussing the question, What do you want to do with your life?"

Cold medicine dosage is such that I'm feeling a very strong temptation to show up in drag and declare,

"I wanna rock!"

The current outage of the Eyrie Productions website is not because the server is down, it's because the server where the domain's DNS is hosted is down* and I was fool enough not to set up a proper backup after I stopped hosting DNS at home. This has been corrected and should not happen again in the same way, once the primary DNS comes back up and the new secondary (thanks keshwyn) can pick up the zone file from it.

* For those of you not living in the northeastern US, you may not know that we had a freak snowstorm up this way last weekend, and thanks to the wet heavy snow and the fact that a lot of trees still had leaves, there are widespread power outages in parts of New England.

I just got around to watching the Hulk vs. Wolverine cartoon. I have to admire the Hulk's negotiating strategy there. His platform is very simple:

1) Hulk smash little man.

2) Little man leave Hulk alone.

And people say the Hulk has no conception of logic or reason.

This isn't news.

We already knew he's a friggin' liar.

Yeah, I went there.

I'm in the process of reading Richard J. Evans's narrative history of Nazi Germany. This is going to take a while, as the second and third volumes of the trilogy are each around 1,000 pages long. To be honest, Evans sort of got off on the wrong foot with me - in the preface to the first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich, he rather disses my main man William L. Shirer, and as I have long been something of a Rise and Fall of the Third Reich partisan, that hurt my feelings a little. Still, I'm man enough to admit that he has a point - Shirer was meticulous and scholarly, but he wasn't a historian, he was a reporter - and once I got over my pique the first book was a pretty good read, albeit in that looming-dread horror-movie sense. You spend the entire time whenever reading a history of the rise of the Nazis silently exhorting 1930s German voters not to go into that basement, and they always, always do.

Anyway. That's not the odd musing. The odd musing is this: I'm reading the second volume,The Third Reich in Power, now. It's pretty grim reading, as you might expect any narrative of Hitler's consolidation of his takeover and the march toward World War II would be. Last night I put the book down to go do something else - cook dinner, I think - and I happened to really notice the cover illustration for the first time. (That Amazon link isn't there because I'm trying to sell you the book, it's because the "Look Inside" function provides the best scan of the cover I've been able to find online.)

It's a photo of people lining the sidewalk, presumably for some kind of parade or motorcade, and from the angle it appears to have been taken from one of the cars. The people are all holding up little triangular Nazi flags on sticks, as if the Nazis have just won the National Socialist League pennant and they're all looking forward to seeing them take on the Moscow Reds of the Communist League in the World Series.

... That metaphor might have gotten away from me a little bit. Anyway, the point is, for days I had this book and never looked more closely at the picture than that. Last night I did, and it suddenly dawned on me that all the people in the photo are early-adolescent girls, and they all appear to be wearing matching uniforms. They're apparently a regiment, or whatever they called their formations, of the junior branch of the League of German Girls (sort of the Hitler Girl Scouts). And they all look absurdly cheerful. (Well, except for the one on the extreme right, she doesn't look impressed.) Not glassy-eyed, delirious, mob-madness happy like the crowds you see in Nazi films like Triumph of the Will - they just look really pleased to be there. It's... weird. Weird to think of the Nazi movement ever actually being able to make anyone genuinely happy, particularly girls in their early teens, whom the Nazi leadership didn't even really regard as properly human. I suppose they couldn't have known better at the time.

Looking at the cover and thinking about all that, I find myself wondering - with complete futility - what became of these girls. Particularly the one in the middle with the braids, who's leaning jauntily into the street with a rakish grin and sort of combining a little Hitler-salute action with the flag-waving; she's kind of my favorite, in an abstract way. I'm a bad judge of children's ages, but she looks to be 12 or 13 to me (the branch of the League she belongs to, judging by her uniform, was for girls aged 10-14), and I'm guessing - sadly, I can't find any information about it inside the book - the picture was taken in 1933 or -4, early in the Nazi honeymoon. She'd have been 19 or 20 when the war started, around 26 when it ended. Did she live in Berlin? Was this picture taken there? Did she survive to the end of the war? And if so, was that better or worse than not living to "greet" the Red Army?

I freely acknowledge that it's ridiculous for me to be getting sentimental and even a bit worried about things I can't possibly know about that happened 70 years ago to someone who is, in all probability, deceased one way or another now anyway - but that's how I roll sometimes. I have a strange tendency sometimes to regard times more like places; and so I find myself concerned about her in "real time", as it were, like a normal person would be for someone who is contemporary but lives far away in war-torn wherever.

Current Mood: melancholy

I just stumbled across a post of mine on the City of Heroes boards from 100,000 years (well, OK, a year and a half) ago that looks like it's about to fall off the edge of the world, archive-wise, and it amuses me enough quite aside from the context in which it originally appeared (which was a stupid argument about veteran rewards) that I decided to save it for posterity. It was posted in response to someone saying that heroes wear shorts and using the Hulk as his canonical example:

Technically, those aren't shorts. I mean, it's not like the Hulk just rocked up to Chess King one day and said, "Yes! This look right for Hulk. Purple Jams go great with Hulk's green skin! Does puny salesgirl have this in 4XL?"

In this, our national hour of crisis, we can always count on Cable News Network's website to shepherd us through the confusing minefield of the day's events with hard-hitting articles that face, unafraid, the major questions of the day.

"Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
- Tacitus, Annals Book XV chapter 44 (ca. AD 116?)

Today that last clause would be applied to the Internet.

Here's the NEXRAD picture 78 minutes later:



( And here's what it looked like outside at about 8 o'clock. )

And that's what happens when you get a huge summer storm at exactly the right time of day around here.