Protect my bones, but everybody makes their own damn choice

Not only did we make the borscht last night, I improvised a pseudo-stroganoff with a couple of cans of mushrooms and the rest of the sour cream. We watched The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), which was nuts in occasional two-strip Technicolor; the famous sequence is Cliff Edwards introducing "Singin' in the Rain," but my favorite was Bessie Love looking her damnedest like the parent and original of Sutton Foster not wanting to show off. Temperatures below zero on Mount Washington appear to have broken the national record, including Alaska. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of selkie: Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming visit the Pink Peacock in Glasgow. The shofar!

2. I had not been particularly aware of Michael Nelson's A Room in Chelsea Square (1958), but having read this review of the Valancourt reprint, I am now extremely sad that they did not or could not use the original cover art by Edward Gorey, because it looks like an outtake from The Curious Sofa (1961).

3. I don't think that I ever saw Sylvia Syms as a lead; in fact with the exception of The Queen (2006), I think I saw her exclusively in wife or girlfriend parts early in her career, paired with John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex (1958), Dirk Bogarde in Victim (1961), Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo (1959). And yet I don't remember her as arm candy, shoring up her men; I remember her cool head in the desert, her half-complicity in her marriage that isn't, her wonderfully choreographed cat's scratch at a hanging line of laundry after her boyfriend dashes out of their anniversary into another wheeling deal. I'm longing to loathe your lovable laughter, I want to be footloose, fancy, and free. But when I'm footloose and free, it's you I fancy. Oh, worry-go-lucky me! It was enough to grab me with the news that she had died. I played that little musical scene over and over on YouTube. I should find something else she was in.

4. I do not customarily interact with Neil Gaiman's Tumblr, but I feel the punch line of this thread is the exactly necessary amount of explanation for anything in a piece of art which persons not the author find obscure.

5. I just really like these comics about Alexander the Great.

Gemma Files' Dark Is Better (2023) celebrated its book birthday yesterday, for which I wrote: "Gemma Files writes a brilliant darkness. Some of my favorites of her fictions are collected here, weirdness in its true ornament, revelations from outside the walls of the world no worse than the truisms of the human heart. You should spend some time looking into their abyss. They are already—you have heard of mirrors—looking into you."

Each other's plans, each other's dreams

The wind chill has reduced to above zero, but it is still so bitterly cold that we inagurated the cast-iron skillet in its new home with a spider cake. A particularly delicious example of the species, too.



I do not actually wish to purchase the shooting script for The Mind Benders (1963), although I think it's neat that it's available, but I would like very much to read it. I wish this sort of thing were easier to track down. I have been wanting the screenplay for The Long Voyage Home (1940) for years.