Dog is a good old cat
My afternoon blew up on me. At least I spent the remainder of it with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man, drinking iced herbal chai and learning about Sam Houston and the gonzo run-up of Texas to the Civil War; I got to meet his [not Houston's] daughter's French bulldog and eat homemade biscotti and I had to borrow an umbrella to wait for the bus because the weather in Cambridge had by then returned to its regularly scheduled monsoon, but I am reliably informed there was a rainbow afterward. In the evening I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) with my mother. spatch brought me coconut-lime ice cream when he got out of work. Autolycus has been attempting to distract me from the composition of this post with earnest headbutts and a purr that would put bandsaws to shame.
1. I am charmed by this comic about the Julio-Claudians.
2. I am really charmed by this epic hockey cross-stitch, whose perpetrator I am proud to know.
3. Courtesy ofumadoshi: the woman who invented slash.
4. This is some excellent sociopolitical jewelry analysis.
5. E. M. Forster famously thought that Dickens hardly ever wrote three-dimensional characters, the kind he called round; instead he thought Dickens had a genius for flat characters presented so cleverly that the reader could be fooled into recognizing them as human beings as might be found in the reader's own life when they were nothing but vivid types in two dimensions.
I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.
"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."
"And why not?"
"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
a_reasonable_man, drinking iced herbal chai and learning about Sam Houston and the gonzo run-up of Texas to the Civil War; I got to meet his [not Houston's] daughter's French bulldog and eat homemade biscotti and I had to borrow an umbrella to wait for the bus because the weather in Cambridge had by then returned to its regularly scheduled monsoon, but I am reliably informed there was a rainbow afterward. In the evening I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) with my mother. spatch brought me coconut-lime ice cream when he got out of work. Autolycus has been attempting to distract me from the composition of this post with earnest headbutts and a purr that would put bandsaws to shame.1. I am charmed by this comic about the Julio-Claudians.
2. I am really charmed by this epic hockey cross-stitch, whose perpetrator I am proud to know.
3. Courtesy of
umadoshi: the woman who invented slash.4. This is some excellent sociopolitical jewelry analysis.
5. E. M. Forster famously thought that Dickens hardly ever wrote three-dimensional characters, the kind he called round; instead he thought Dickens had a genius for flat characters presented so cleverly that the reader could be fooled into recognizing them as human beings as might be found in the reader's own life when they were nothing but vivid types in two dimensions.
I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.
"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."
"And why not?"
"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
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I mean, the thing is my ancestors that I'm looking into lived in Seven Dials aka the place that Dickens went into to write slum tourism stuff for the papers. This was following a bankruptcy and decline into poverty, unlikely marriages and early deaths, before recovering to become East End cliches instead by the end of the century, but basically my early/mid 19th C London ancestors were all walking Dickens cliches (probably still visible if they turned sideways). The other London branch have turned out to be middle class sorts who lost their fortune in Chancery via a drunken excise officer and wound up in the workhouse, so short of an incident of human combustion, I'm not sure what I'm lacking on the Dickens checklist now, but whatever it is, I'll probably have it before I'm done. Oh, wait, one of the houses they lived in was formerly owned by a famous old miser, whose sister later suffered the delusion she was the Queen of England.
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I'm impressed.
Oh, wait, one of the houses they lived in was formerly owned by a famous old miser, whose sister later suffered the delusion she was the Queen of England.
All you need is someone to quit their long-suffering terrible job in a dramatically satisfying fashion and you've collected them all!
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Me, too. Until last year I didn't have a single ancestor above the rank of yeoman anywhere, and then it turned out I did. In chancery! 0_o
All you need is someone to quit their long-suffering terrible job in a dramatically satisfying fashion and you've collected them all!
Well, they might have done! That kind of thing is pretty much impossible to find out, unless it was so dramatic it got in the papers.
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