Misc, again

[lederhosen]

da_norvegicus got up yesterday morning with a very exciting-looking full-torso rash. reynardo took him to the doctor and thence to a pediatrician, who asked if it would be OK to take photos for the class he teaches; apparently it's an allergic reaction, but not to anything in particular. Not sure how *that* works, but it doesn't seem to be anything serious. On the bright side, she ended up taking the day off work, which meant we got an evening together.

Benefits Of Androgyny, #11 of whatever: being able to disconcert the evangelicals who stake out the bus stop near my work, without even trying.

Ratboy's school has a honest-to-God bear pit. Two of them, in fact. Just thought I'd mention it.

Zombies! (Since it doesn't have instructions: Shift will swap between revolver and shotgun, but the shotgun isn't really much help. And zombies are easier to kill when they're getting up, either from their graves or a leg shot.)

Department of 'WTF?': Two Star Wars fans were critically injured in the UK when they tried to replicate the light sabres used in the movie by filling glass fluorescent light tubes with fuel...

Edit:


1. Total number of books I own:

Hrmm. Together, Rey and I probably own one or two thousand books (50+ boxes' worth, maybe 20 books per box?) Of those, probably about a quarter come from my collection and three quarters from hers.

2. The last book I bought:

The Vampire in Lore and Legend, by the Rev. Montague Summers. Interesting as a collection of vampire myths, but Summers is rather too credulous for my tastes - he doesn't just believe in vampires, but actually treats Abigail Williams' account of a vampiric attack as reliable.

3. The last book I read:

Am in the middle of the above; the last book I finished would've been Kim Newman's 'Unforgivable Stories', or maybe 'Seven Stars'.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority. Anybody who's been following this journal for a while will have heard me enthuse about Milgram.
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids, or maybe The Kraken Wakes. Wyndham is pretty much the antithesis of the "physics problems dressed up as story" and "cool toys" schools of science fiction; he concentrates very much on the human element, how people and societies might react to a change in their world. And he writes good female characters with backbones, too.
André Maurois, Byron. There may be more scholarly and accurate biographies of the man, but none that did such a good job of making him come alive in my head, warts and all. I borrowed this book from the UNSW library and was delighted, when visiting second-hand bookshops with notasquirrel, to find a copy for my very own.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince. I read this at an early age, and I think it did a lot to shape the way I think about grief and sorrow.

5. I tag:

Anyone who wants to.

Comments

[malloc1024.livejournal.com]

Have they got the bears still?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

No, many many years ago the site used to be a zoo.

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it still is. Adolescent boys and all that...

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

I have Summers' The Vampire In Europe, acquired, I think, after I saw a mention of it in the notes in one of the Hellboy collections (The Chained Coffin I believe - the one with the story "The Varcolac", anyway). I want more of his books, as I have a fondness for that kind of old-school wonky lunatic stuff.