"...and so to close the journey."

I just finished Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I liked it, a great deal, and sort of want to kick Oscar Wilde for dissing it. But then, I like my art overwrought and my prose florid. There are a number of passages that stick in my memory.

"...any propagation of goodness and benevolence is no small addition to the aristocracy of nature, and no small subject of rejoicing for mankind at large" is one from today.

Some points:

• The term “convenient ogling distance” is now permanently filed in my mental lexicon.
• People in 1830s London would throw dead kittens at people they didn’t like. Eew.
• I’m pleasantly surprised to read of Mr. Chuckster’s fate. Usually, nasty people in earlier Dickens end up with ten kinds of poetic justice (and dead kittens) piled on them. He just continued on being a snob and eating big dinners, and even stayed friends with…
• …Dick Swiveller. Possibly the most suggestive Dickens name ever.

I had a big post about Orwell, Kipling, Chicken Soup for the Soup, fandom, Dickens, and “graceful monuments to the obvious”, but I wasted all my brain energies on a monstrously long comment on someone else’s journal. So, I close with a random image from yesterday’s lunchtime ramble with commanderteddog.


“That’s nice, the snails use their tentacles to… wait a minute… snails don’t have tentacles! THOSE AREN’T SNAILS!”


These things looked uncannily like the Death Star, at least to me.

Why the world wags...

I need to preface my post with a note!

I realize that school systems are highly imperfect and never will be perfect for everyone. My own experience was far from ideal. They have progressively gotten better in many ways, though they sometimes take large steps back. Children in Britain, for example, are no longer indoctrinated with “the White Man’s Burden,” and children in Canada no longer learn that Riel was a traitor. Things can always get better, and always require change.

My comment is more about the philosophy or ideal of school rather than the reality. I recognize school as an unpleasant social experience for many people, including myself.

I also hope that I don't offend the person whose journal this was drawn from, by re-posting my comment here.

( On learning )

"I say, he's a tallish brute, wot?"

the_vulture asked for a sketch of one the Martians from those fiction vignettes I wrote in August. This is a quick doodle with the mouse in OpenCanvas. It's noticeably smoother and more "sketch like" than the MS Paint thing I did for amarafox. Sorry, Amy!

However, like I say, it was still done with a mouse, meaning its sort of clumsy.

( Also, I'm not an artist. )

We'll watch "Future War" in his honour

Forrest Ackerman died, aged 92.