Fifty-Six Minus One

An Upstanding Entertainment for the Masses

55 Words will beat you up, take your sandwich and steal your socks. You will feel nothing but gratitude.

OMG!

Premium cigars with hat and travel case :)
Spamusement rocks.

The Joneses' Goldfish, Take Two

The Second-Best Thing to Having Chuck Jones Reanimated as an Animating Zombie

The full version of Clio Chiang's flash short »How the Joneses' 23rd Goldfish Narrowly Escaped Death« has apparently been live on aforementioned Chiang's site for some while. Get it while it's hot at catfish.cliochiang.com or in large format here.

No, really, go get it. It's got a song in it called »Catfish Fishcat«, for cripes sake!

Yng Nghymru

A Travel Report From Not-So-Far-Away

So. I'm in Wales. And, I've found a WiFi hotspot, obviously. All Is Well, or in several cases Better.
To start with, the local landscape (»local« being in this case the Gower Peninsula) is insanely marvelous: green like fuck — yes, the color green is, in fact, sharper and fuller in the British Isles; you didn't dream that and it's not a lens filter — steep hills tumbling down toward the sea (which has a tide of about ten meters), slathered with Roads And Paths Of Offbeat Curvature, not to mention dotted with ruined castles, Victorian houses etc.
Which brings me to the buildings, oh yeah. Not that there aren't concrete crapblocks here — the city center had the stuffing bombed out of it in World War 2, and the sixties and seventies occurred in Britain as well, unfortunately — but every other building seems to be either a nifty medieval ruin, a grandiose and rambling pile of Victorianisms, or a tiny marvel of architectural pizzazz (Note to self: use word »pizzazz« more often). Even the building I live in, though I'm given to understand it's merely twenty-odd years old, looks nice, and my apartment overlooks an old dock remade into a marina. Even going to the supermarket, I am required to round the marina, and then walk through a tunnel in an old buttress-or-something half overgrown with ivy.
Now, keep this in mind: I hate cameras. Utterly despise the things.
Since arriving here, less than a week ago, I have wished I had a camera at least a dozen times. (And then, inevitably, I think »no, wait, I'd really rather be good at sketching; I prefer the look and it avoids the infernal daguerrotypic devices«. But anyway.)
Things even have better names here: just in the closest bay they've got places like Black Pill, Oystermouth and the village of Mumbles* — site of one terminus of the world's first passenger railway line, no less. (The other terminus was located in Swansea, where I'm staying; the railway line was ripped up in the early sixties in one of the last and blackest acts of municipal vandalism ever performed in the area.)
In fact, so pleasing to mine eye is the country that it induces me to ramble on like a lobotomized Romantic/Tourist for yea unto four paragraphs and some Dramatic Separations™ — as you can clearly see for yourselves.
Work's good too. I get paid for it, just a thing like that. And everything is cheaper. And some people speak a charming and somewhat obscure language in which I myself am somewhat capable. I'm beginning to realize that living in Sweden is essentially just an effect of never having been anywhere else.

Next, we'll talk about products odd and wonderful. Or maybe Genji Monogatari; it remains to be seen what order they want to appear in.


*The lighthouse at the point that closes one end of the bay is called Mumbles Head. I think the position as Keeper of the Lighthouse on Mumbles Head is covetable by virtue of the title alone. In addition, at least one Mumbles shop purveys Great-Uncle Cornelius' Lemon Refresher, the best-named fluid ever. But that's a matter for the next post, or the next but one as the case may be.

His Noodly Appendage

The world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and golden-age pirates are good for the environment. Learn all about it!