Juicy News

Most Underrated Band That Fits Marius' Challenge for a food-themed blog title?

Banarama.

Next?

Hugs,
Alysoun

Blame Sheeps...

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. Well, the bold isn't showing so I'll use PURPLE for the books I've read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. I'll use GREEN for what I intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. I'll use RED for the books I love.
4) Reprint this list in your own Blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And *I* would add..

101. The Armageddon Trilogy - Robert Rankin
102. The Brentford Octology - Robert Rankin
103. The Plague - Albert Camus (Best Book Ever - my OWN PERSONAL FAVORITE. You leave me ONE book to read on that desert island, I'm picking THIS one)
104. The First Man - Albert Camus
105. The Stranger - Albert Camus
106. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
107. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
108. Time Enough for Love - Robert Heinlein
109. The Dark Tower series - Stephen King ("He was a gunslinger.." "Say you true?" "He was.")
110. Alma Mater - Rita Mae Brown
111. High Hearts - Rita Mae Brown
112. Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
113. Why I Am Not A Christian - Bertrand Russell
114. The White Goddess - Robert Graves

Hugs,
Alysoun

R.I.P. George Carlin

What a terrible way to greet the dawn....George Carlin died yesterday at the age of 71, from heart failure.

I *owned* copies of both "Class Clown" and "Operation: Foole," his best LPs from the '70's. He was the first host of the first episode of "Saturday Night Live," and a puncturer of everyone's ego balloons - an equal opportunity curmudgeon. His 7 words you can never say on television ended up spurring a United States Supreme Court decision that made it far less likely that you would get your station fined for broadcasting anything else other than Whitebread Content. (At least until Janet Jackson's Nipple of Doom). The 7 words? Shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. In the original routine, Mr. Carlin advised that these were the words that would "lose the war for the Allies."

The Beloved Spouse and I mourn him today, and he will be missed.

Just for you George: Goodnight, motherfucker. Say hello to Lenny for us.

Hugs,
Alysoun

Knights and Hot Nights

So, Hatboy is now SIR Hatboy, a condition that does yea verily rocketh. The event itself was fabulous and fun, and exceedingly HOT. And by HOT I mean that this Miami native was actually moved to not LIKE the heat anymore.

Here in Trimaris, we are spoiled rotten, what with our temperature-controlled cabins and lack of many events, if any at all, during the Summer months. These things are not true of Hatboy's kingdom. While the event site was beautiful and as I said, the event was WAY fun, staying in an un-airconditioned cabin in the South during a heatwave is NOT fun. But, since HB and (full credit to Marius for ripping this off) Mrs. HB are among my Nearest and Dearest, We Endured and Prevailed, for Their sake.

So, when the heat wave forced the residents of the county wherein the event site was located to all turn on the AC to negative 11, it blew the power grid.

No power on site. Five minutes into feast, with 80 people in the hall dressed in several layers of fabric; and many lovely, well-cooked dishes awaiting, BAM! It really WAS 1453...only 1453 in equatorial New Guinea. But, the crew prevailed and we ate much good food, actually GLAD, for ONCE, that same good food was NOT served to us piping hot.

Now, the water (and therefore, toilets/showers/sinks) on the site is controlled by electric pumps, which meant we risked not having water, or at least, not DRINKABLE waterlater. So, now we had no hope of future water, since we wished to preserve the water we had for Emergencies.

The weaker bailed like rats off a sinking ship....it looked like an Emergency Evacuation Order had been pronounced.

So, about 3 hours later, when the power came back on, and the sound of several hundred fans being turned on at once and a thousand toilets flushing in unison lent a certain, peculiarly Southern music to the air, the site was significantly less populated, but the remaining numbers were at least enthused to be there.

The Party commenced, and moi and Mrs. HB (thanks again Marius) spent many lovely hours talking ourselves hoarse, and also torturing HB in manners befitting his elevated status.

Ah we few, we happy few, to have been there in the glazing heat on St. Hatboy's Day....

------

After the event, I stopped by Mr. & Mrs. Sheepy Turtle's, just to say hi and gossip. They look fabulous. Impy was loving and the house is coming along.

----


Hugs,
Alysoun

Old Friends with New Titles and New Old Friends

So, where to start, where to start.

A very dear friend, we'll call him Hatboy, will accept the accolade of knighthood this weekend, to the very great delight of well....everybody :) The true sign that this honor is LONG overdue is that MOST people, when told of the impending honor, said "But I thought he WAS a knight." well DUH, as HB himself would say...

AND, two OTHER very dear friends, obvious gluttons for punishment, are once again Prince and Princess of Trimaris. YAY!!! Alas, real-world considerations will keep me from being as active this reign as I was the last one, but hey...Cool People on the Throne is *always* a good thing.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!! LAST BUT WAY SO NOT LEAST!!!!!!

The Sheep and the Turtle got MARRIED. AND I GOT TO PERFORM THE CEREMONY!!! YAYAYAYAYA!!!
S & T are, quite simply, and with NO exaggeration or Southern politeness, two of the very finest people on the planet. When I grow up, I want to be just like them. Only with less cat issues :)

Old Friends, New Titles, All Fabulous!

AND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I FINALLY got to meet Marius AND for a brief tiny moment, Mrs. Marius, at the Sheep/Turtle wedding. It was truly fabulous to meet him "live" and to toast the memory of She Who Will Never Be Forgotten. After about the third toast to the Happy Couple, I realized that Marius and I have met before, around a campfire, about a THOUSAND years ago and spent a lovely amount of time commiserating about *other* people. So, I am lucky to have found a new old friend.

All in all, I have to call May and June wonderfully cool.


Hugs all around,
Alysoun

Been awhile, and since last we spoke, I can confirm that magic works and dreams come true.

Aftermath

The smell of you on my wrap
is the smell of us on your face,
wrapped in memories of
the delight that placed it there.

Its soft folds still hold
the warmth of your body in the night.

From then and forever I stay wrapped
in the memory;
and your warmth,
and the aura of joy.

OK - *I* named the Poem...and the ones that followed

I don't write isolated poems - they come in waves....

These three are not, I don't think, the end of this one....but Chastity could indeed be the end of it:

Velocity OR Location

Heisenberg has ruined our souls,
decry the lovers, whose hearts
are breaking at the
interval of time and motion.

Waiting the eternal wait of the
not-yet until the fractions of
pain and patience convert
to whole numbers
and they can Stop and
notice they have finally
been consumated into
the rational equations of delight.

Love is Newtonian in need,
Einsteinian in practice.

And in that Space between titans...
Heisenberg will kick you into pulp.

-----
A Death In The Forest

You are killing me
with your smile; and your eyes
that will hold me and touch me
when your arms cannot;

Your mouth that will kiss me
then leave me to wander
alone in the dark,
Bleeding pain into the grass.

We share a great passion and such
A passion you have for me...
I know it and I see it.

With your eyes and your smile
and your voice you say it.

But in the crowding woods....

beyond a day gone wrong from kindness,
So little of it was allowed expression
So precious sparing shards of it were freed...

that all my rending tears spent the night
Flooding my heart in despair,
and still could not wash you out of it.

So I am stuck here
nailed to my own desire,
left with the certainty
that you love me deeply and truly.

But not madly enough
To have thrown out reason and manners and
Brought me into your bed In the forest
and Loved me out loud.

You were happy with the whispering truth...
and I prayed to hear your shouting.

Shout for me. Shout for me louder!
I am deafened from the heartache.

---

Chastity

How odd a thing
and so rare in our shared
experience that
even the word causes us pause...

but not like the work asks you to pause...

but the Pause of knowing thay
we must but talk
must not walk
down the road in
gentle maddening darkness.

Gently maddening each other
to acts of such unreasoning
and wild magic unchaste in
small deeds as we are denied
a greater and more lasting blasphemy.

So, instead, we are chaste under the trees
and tell each other how unjust such a
construct can be to two whose only
prior experience of the condition
was to pity those in its thrall.

And Chastity bends her head to listen
as we plot her inevitable demise
and sighs for despair
over these not-children but Priests
of delight,
who nonetheless play with matches
in a dry forest of forbearance

And care not at all for the burnt
or for the dead
But only that Chastity Herself
should abandon us as lost
And seek worship instead
from a more placid and arid flock.

And we will We defy Her later
in a place of Our own choosing
and leave Her silently gazing
at Her sister Aphrodite,
who gleefully pipes us away

And into damper, more welcoming
and forgiving woods,
where Chastity herself learns
Forbearance and does not
bring Herself to touch Her hem
to the path burnt black by the heat
She has denied us this day,

but that We have lit
on the Altar of a more gentle
and loving Goddess.



-----

that's all for now.

hugs,
Alysoun