It is apropos that The Cully Flaug'd, one of the earliest surviving specimens of English printed pornography, depicts what commonly used to be called 'the English vice'. It features a saucy caption below, running What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction! /To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection. / Firk on Fair Lady [,] Flaug the Fumblers Thighs [,] / Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise.

The picture itself is well worth a look (assuming of course that you're into that sort of thing and not presently being monitored by internet prudes), but it's the research into the early flogging scene that really turns me on.

ZooBorns is one of my favorite sources for Internet cuteness therapy, and look who they've featured this week: the sea lion pup we saw at the Omaha Zoo on Tuesday!

Thank you all so much for your kind thoughts.

My grandmother escaped from the hospital -- we threw all of her stuff into plastic bags on Friday morning and ran off before they could change their minds -- and is tentatively living in her own home-like space in assisted living with outpatient physical therapy. She has terrible unexplained inflammation in her hands which is seriously curtailing her abilities to maintain and sustain herself. She isn't suffering from any immediately threatening condition besides a flagging will to live.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for things to do besides read and watch TV that don't require a lot of stamina or physical dexterity or personal mobility? My mom and I have been drawing blanks, although we did hit up the used bookstore for some fresh books, and, of course, visited and chatted while we were there. I wish we were closer.

In more cheerful (?) news, someone's written the Inferno with zombies! Now, why must it be a $50 limited edition?

My grandmother is not doing well. She's in stable condition, but the crippling pain in her hands means that she cannot be released to her assisted living apartment when she leaves the hospital.

If she leaves the hospital.

So, my mom and I are leaving town this morning to visit. Just to let you all know.

I did, in fact, fail the driver's test.

I'm taking off work at noon so I can go fail at my driver's test.

When I had that bad cold/flu/unspecified virus that turned into bronchitis, I was making up laundry lists of all the things that I absolutely required to survive.

Now that Stan has something that sounds vaguely flu-ish, I can't even get him to want anything. He keeps languishing in bed all pathetic-like, but I've barely gotten him to take me up on a glass of water and some ibuprofen.

I'm sure this is indicative of something.

Stan's cat, Clay, is terrified of the Legolas standee in our living room. He pokes his head nervously out of the bedroom and stares into Orlando Bloom's blue contact lenses, unwilling to approach this steely-eyed cat-killer closely enough that he might notice that he is, you know, made out of cardboard.

My mom is so awesome! She found this Legolas standee at a garage sale and set him up in my apartment and made everyone pose for pictures with him.

My dad is also awesome. He and I went to see STAR TREK ♥ ♥ ♥ Like my mom, he only watched TOS, with the addition of some or all of the films, and he really enjoyed it. He remembered back in his Navy days when he was on shore leave visiting some friends and he announced that he had to be getting back to the U.S.S. Enterprise and this little kid was just in awe: "You work on a spaceship?!"

My less awesome plans for tomorrow are to go shopping for shirts, because I don't have enough of them and they all look kind of similar so it looks like I have fewer shirts than I actually do, which is just sad.

I think I really need to/want to get a Wii Fit.

Tomorrow is my brother's birthday and he is in Minneapolis and I will not be making him an awesome cake, alas. I did help pick out his top-secret present.

I succumbed to peer pressure and (*cough*) other temptations and signed up for a kink bingo card. This should be fun. :D

As a person who has bought or looked at or even thought about books ever, Amazon.com believes that I will be interested in the new opus by Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, and I am, oh, I am! But not, perhaps, in the way that they were hoping.

First of all, what in the name of Jesus's sparkly Mary Sue great-great-great (SPOILERSOMG) is a lost symbol? Is it a symbol that you don't understand, in which case, how do you know that it's a symbol? Or is it a symbol that you can't find, in which case, how do you know that there is a symbol?

Second of all, Dan Brown is still writing books? Really? I had thought we were safe from him, with a whopping six years since the publication of The Da Vinci Code. It turns out that it took him all of that time to come up with The Lost Symbol?

I was totally willing to believe that that was the real jacket. In fact, I'm still not totally convinced that that isn't the real jacket, and the text "THIS IS NOT THE FINAL JACKET" running across the bottom is Dan Brown's idea of some kind of a modern-day Magritte-style exploration of symbologism. What can the hold-up possibly be on designing the jacket? Slam the lost symbol in the middle of it and you're done. Unless, of course, not even Dan Brown has figured out what the lost symbol looks like (it's lost, y'see).

Yes, I was really enjoying the new Dan Brown novel until I realized that our library is going buy a million copies of it, and I'm going to end up responsible for processing 500,000 of them, because my team handles titles that begin with the letter L.

Damn you, Dan Brown.

"[...] when I look at the cast listing I can't help but think that the movie will have to end up seeming like an alternate history in which european civilization is all but wiped out, except at the poles, and they are trying to fight off a warring horde of ethnically-diverse but otherwise consistently dark-skinned people (who can shoot CGI fire out of their hands)."

I caught up with the Prince of Tennis National Finals a while ago and ( I really liked the ending. )

As far as I'm concerned, Dear Prince is basically a love letter to fandom in all its gleeful cracky porny obssessive glory, and I just want to say, thank you. ♥

Also! Now we have a nice closed canon to write futurefic in, and the Chinese drama for quasi-AU goodness! Life is good.

I have a couple of Dreamwidth codes! If anyone still needs one, please do let me know.

"I wonder if Davy has come out of the closet yet." --Anne Shirley [cite]

*ships Davy Keith/Milty Boulter*

Sydney Padua has created my new favorite superhero. Meet her in Ada Lovelace: The Origin!, and follow her continuing adventures in Lovelace and Babbage in Economic Model! and Lovelace and Babbage in Economic Model, Part II.

One of the X-Men movies is on some channel or other at all times. I have learned this because of Stan's massive unrequited¹ love for Ian McKellen.

¹Apparently, he met him at a party in L.A. and hit on him reasonably vigorously, but Sir Ian insisted on having a respectful and intelligent conversation with him instead, bless.

I just got back from seeing Star Trek with my mom! She hadn't actually watched Star Trek since the first run of TOS back when there were like two channels and there was nothing else on, but she is a big fan of J. J. Abrams ever since I got her hooked on Alias. Her only complaint was that she couldn't hear what was going on in the Kobayashi Maru scene because the whole audience was chortling so damn hard.

You know that feeling you get when you find this plotty cracky epic fic in a fandom that you hadn't thought much about in a while and you devour the whole thing in a single gulp of fannish glee? Yeah, it was like that. I loved it.

Then again, I got into Trek through novelizations (my brother handed me his copy of Dark Mirror on a family vacation when I'd finished all my books) and fic (I'd been on the internet since I was twelve, but the first time I heard of slash was in an actual dead tree magazine when I was seventeen, and I started googling for Kirk/Spock even though I had only the vaguest idea who they were), so my cred is highly suspect.

I think I just figured out the why of my swan story.

(The Watsonian why, that is, not the Doylian why, which is that I've been batting around the idea of incestuous homosexual swans for the last four months and find it strangely compelling.)

elisem is drunk on shiny things and having a particularly glorious and various sale. I am sitting on my hands because I have to be good and fix my car instead of indulging in more shiny things, but I see no reason why I should not tempt you all!