'Cause what we're not is all we got

1. My initial reactions to the second season finale of Millennium (1996–1999), reproduced from comments with grimmwire:

YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

. . . Seriously, unless someone tells me it is one of the great treatments of the post-apocalypse in fiction, I do not understand how there is even a third season. Does anyone have thoughts on whether it is worth pursuing? The second season was inexplicable enough at times. Went out like Eliot, though.

2. Yesterday was not a Ridiculously Social Wednesday, but I did have two different people compliment me on my hair. The first was a thirteen-year-old kid on the platform of the Orange Line at Downtown Crossing; I heard someone say, "Excuse me, ma'am?" and when I glanced up from my book to see if they meant me, an earnest-looking boy in a baseball cap said, "You've got really nice hair," and then went very quickly back to his friends and there was giggling and high-fiving. (I was meeting lesser_celery for lunch at The Salty Pig. I have a new favorite drink there: the Bitter & Alone. Misanthropy, it appears, is made of Becherovka, grapefruit juice, honey, and Peychaud's. I like it.) The second was a woman in J.P. Licks, where derspatchel and I were repairing for dessert after dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company. (If you put merguez on a pizza with pomegranate molasses, it really doesn't have much of a half-life. Around us, anyway.) Being somewhat on autopilot with scanning the board and frankly not looking for people, I got all the way through a reflexively polite thank-you before I realized she was sitting at the same table as ratatosk, nurrynur, and some other people whose livejournal handles I wouldn't mind knowing if they have them. So we ate dessert with them. It was good. And nobody on the bus home said anything about my hair or the book I was reading, which was fine.

3. Realized in the shower: all musical and lyrical qualities aside, I think what makes Frank Loesser's "I'll Know (When My Love Comes Along)" such an immortal duet for me is that both Sarah and Sky have no idea what they're talking about. It's easier to laugh at Sarah as she lists the required traits of her "Scarsdale Galahad—the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type," knowing as we the audience do that she'll end up with no such person, but Sky's chemistry-based philosophy is equally faulty; he's looking at the love of his life right now and all he knows is that Nathan Detroit really sucker-punched him with this bet. It's an unwitting love duet. They just think it's a difference of opinion.

4. I have been meaning for the last few days to link to this excerpt from the Dictionary of American Regional English, because it contains slang I didn't know. I think I like "slatchy" best.

5. The Harvard Film Archive is doing a series of Alex Cox and a series of Jack Clayton. I expect to spend a lot of June in that theater.

I am hoping this sore throat I woke up with is the result of dryness or allergies, because I haven't really been sick since the hell-cold in February and it's a remarkably pleasant state.

Yet it is not Dionysos who by himself has devised the game like a cruel child

My poem "Tapping the Vine" appears to have placed second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award. Thanks to lesser_celery for the heads-up.

One of the rides at EPCOT Center which I have remembered most vividly for the last twenty-plus years (I was three-ish the first time my parents took me, eight the second and last time; I remember insisting I was tall enough for Space Mountain at Disney World and then being convinced we were going to smash into something in the dark and die) was the now-defunct Horizons, which I didn't realize was defunct until derspatchel told me. This afternoon I found the script and had sort of a simultaneous attack of nostalgia and Weltschmerz. I wanted that kelp-forest future.

I am running a fever. Today could have been a lot better.