Today’s otter comes courtesy of Donald Clark on flickr.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a great book? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
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Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Hello from the South Island of NZ! *Waves*
It’s bloody beautiful here.
Now we must exit this internet cafe and get back into the sunshine!
Hope you’re having a lovely holiday, Helen. I love the South Island – time to plan another trip there.
I’m back in Malaysia!
I ALSO brought my Sookie Stackhouse books! Plus a few others I need to devour. Yay!
Oooh, South Island of NZ — I love it too! I think the glaciers are the most amazing landscape I’ve ever seen. I thoroughly enjoyed the two weeks I spent there in Feb 2007 (which luckily for us turned out to be the only two weeks of real summer that the South Island got that year).
My tigling just sent me this link – Chinese acrobats doing Swan Lake. It is possibly not the most sensitive artistic interpretation of the work, but any Lake where the lead swan balances en pointe on a single foot on the prince’s head has got to be worth checking out.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/4sMc-p19FIk?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
I’m going to the beach for a week. No interweb… which could be very, very bad, or very, very good.
An interesting response to the Jennifer Hawkins magazine cover (via Mary elsewhere). Picture of artistically arranged naked middle-aged man possibly NSFW.
He looks cute and cuddly.
This just gave me a total “D’awwwwwww” moment (even if Starbucks is mostly evil):
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Nh7D2g5v-Sg?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
No-scale method of cat mass estimation: Take a container of known volume into which the cat fits snugly without overflow, eg cardboard box. Fill interstices with foam packaging balls (this can be done before cat gets in, just be sure to ‘level’ the top of the container as you would level off a tablespoon of flour to get rid of excess ). When cat gets out measure volume of foam, subtract from volume of container, assume density of cat = 1, remainder volume in litres = cat weight in kg.
Lauredhel – you’re the soap-making expert – if you put a bell into a plastic ball, and baked it into the middle of a soap bar, would you be able to hear it ringing? I think it would be brilliant to have jingling soap. And at the end of the soap, you’d get a free bell, instead of a useless sliver. My mornings would certainly be cheerier.
Just wondering.
Dammit, Kim, I’m a soapmaker, not a physicist!
I don’t know. I imagine you’d hear it muffled, and it wouldn’t be quite so cheery as you imagine. But tell you what, you can find out for yourself – just order some clear Melt And Pour soap base, and give it a go.
Forgot to mention that I finally got around to seeing Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Meerschaums aka Steampunk Ironman aka Sherlock Holmes.
I rather enjoyed it. Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr made a very strong pair as Holmes and Watson, the costumes and sets were top-notch (especially in showing Victorian life as grimy and grinding for most), and I found Ritchie’s take on Holmes vastly closer to Conan Doyle’s original stories than most “classic” adaptations have been. I’m looking forward to the inevitable sequel (s).
I have to say, one of the things I loved about Steampunk Ironman was that they managed to build the Holmes/Watson banter/chemistry without the stockstandard bromance-y “LOOK! Our homosocial relationship is much more important that those silly ladies”. I think the best way to describe it, for the fanfic-inclined, is that it’s less Holmes/Watson slash, more Adler/Holmes/Watson/Morstan OT4 polyfic.