Christmas night and for Oi the whole day spent at the hospital. They think she is about 3 weeks pregnant and has to go back in Jan when it gets a bit bigger. They thought it was twins but now they are not so sure. Twins, is a bit daunting actually. I mean, I would never be able to play a video game again if it were.
Anyway, all well and got some time off school too. I am now quite engrossed in The Witcher vid game which is, of course, completely awesome. Frantically ploughing through Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber (book 2). I have been up to the lake at six in the morning which is magical and sets you up nicely for the day, though it has started raining here again which is a bit unusual.
I have been researching Paganism and have decided this is to be my chosen religion as nothing else fits the bill. I put this to John Zerzan who basically agreed, though he mentioned a similar faith known as Animism. Still, it basically suggests the presence of something connected with nature bonding things together. The quest continues....
Well, it seems as though this collapse is collapsing nicely, and shops are closing and umemployment is growing and people are complaining that they can't afford Christmas. Many of you will be pleased to learn I have moved right off the subject now, and am focusing more on my own things, many involving Faf'hrd and the Gray Mouser.
I got the Led Zeppelin discography the other day. Did you know I had none? Well, I got the lot now and was rocking out with Tom and Patrick last Monday night until one in the morning. Poor Oi sleeping upstairs! I was then told the next day that I had to teach! Oi told me her father (now deceased) would get drunk, go to bed and put the radio on which everyone in the house could hear. Coincidentally, I have done the same thing twice now, my naked body unresponsive to prods and nudges from an annoyed spouse.
Looks like I get some ship leave next week and will ride the bikes up to Koh Phang Ngan with Old Man Don for some easy times. Oi has given me full permission. Will be nice to spend some time with the old man.
Ok, that's it. Merry Christmas everybody,
The Dangerous J.
x
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
I loved this so much, I had to ask you to read it. I hope you enjoy and whet your appetite.
For the next three years, the Years of Leviathan, the Roc, and the Dragon, they wandered the world of Nehwon south, east, north, and west, seeking forgetfulness of their first great loves and their first great guilts and finding neither. They ventured east past mystic Tisilinilit with its slender, opalescent spires, which always seemed newly crystallized out of its humid, pearly skies, to lands that were legends in Lankhmar and even Horborixen. One amongst many was the skeletally shrunken Empire of Eevamarensee, a country so decadent, so far-grown into the future, that all the rats and men are bald and even the dogs and cats hairless.
Returning by a northerly route through the Great Steppes, they narrowly escaped capture and enslavement by the pitiless Mingols. In the Cold Waste they sought for Fafhrd's Snow Clan, only to discover that it had been last year overwhelmed by a lemming horde of Ice Gnomes and, according to best rumor, massacred to the last person, which would have included Fafhrd's mother Mor, his deserted girl-bride Mara, and his first issue if any.
For a space they served Lithquil, the Mad Duke of Ool Hrusp, devising for him sprightly mock-duels, simulated murders, and other entertainments. Then they coasted south through the Outer Sea aboard a Sarheenmar trader to tropic Klesh, where they adventured a while in the jungle fringes. Then north again, circling past secretest Quarmall, that shadow realm, to the Lakes of Pleea that are the headwaters of the Hlal and to the beggar-city of Tovilyis, where the Gray Mouser believed he had been birthed, but was not sure, and when they left that lowly metropolis he was no surer. Crossing by grain barge the Sea of the East, they prospected for gold a while in the Mountains of the Elder Ones, their last highjacked gems having been long since gambled away or spent. Unsuccessful in this quest, they wended their way west again toward the Inner Sea and Ilthmar.
They lived by thievery, robbery, bodyguarding, brief commissions as couriers and agents -- commissions they always, or almost always, fulfilled punctiliously -- and by showmanship, the Mouser entertaining by legerdemain, juggling, and buffoonery, while Fafhrd with his gift for tongues and training as a singing skald excelled at minstrelsy, translating the legends of his frigid homeland into many languages. They never worked as cooks, clerks, carpenters, tree-fellers, or common servants and they never, never, never enlisted as mercenary soldiers -- their service to Lithquil having been of a more personal nature.
They acquired new scars and skills, comprehensions and compassions, cynicisms and secrecies -- a laughter that lightly mocked and a cool poise that tightly crusted all inner miseries and most of the time hid the barbarian in Fafhrd and the slum boy in the Mouser. They became outwardly merry, uncaring, and cool, but their grief and guilt stayed with them, the ghosts of Ivrian and Vlana haunting their sleeping and their waking dreams, so that they had little commerce with other girls, and that more a discomfort than a joy. Their comradeship became firmer than a rock, stronger than steel, but all other human relations were fleeting. Melancholy was their commonest mood, though mostly hid even from each other.
Came noon of the Day of the Mouse in the Month of the Lion in the Year of the Dragon. They were taking their siestas in the cool of a cave near Ilthmar. Outside, heat shimmered above hard-baked ground and scanty brown grass, but here was most pleasant. Their horses, a gray mare and a chestnut gelding, found shade in the cavern's mouth. Fafhrd had sketchily inspected the place for serpents, but discovered none. He loathed the cold scaly ones of the south, so different from the hot-blooded, fur-bearing snakes of the Cold Waste. He went a little way into a narrow, rocky corridor leading from the back of the cave under the small mountain in which it was set, but returned when light failed and he had found neither reptiles nor end.
They rested comfortably on their uncurled bedrolls. Sleep would not come to them, so idle talk did. By slow stages this talk became serious. Finally the Gray Mouser summed up the last trinity of years.
"We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness."
"I dispute that," Fafhrd countered. "Not the latter part, for I am still as ghost-locked as you, but we have not crossed the Outer Sea and hunted over the great continent legend will have in the west."
"I believe we have," the Mouser disputed. "Not the former part, I'll agree, and what purpose in searching the sea? But when we went out farthest east and stood on the shore of that great ocean, deafened by its vast surf, I believe we stood on the western coast of the Outer Sea with nothing between us and Lankhmar but wild water."
"What great ocean?" Fafhrd demanded. "And what vast surf? It was a lake, a mere puddle with some ripples in it. I could readily see the opposite shore."
"Then you were seeing mirages, friend of mine, and languishing in one of those moods when all Nehwon seems but a small bubble you could burst with flick of fingernail."
"Perhaps," Fafhrd agreed. "Oh, how weary I am of this life."
Merry Chrimbo
The Dangerous J.
For the next three years, the Years of Leviathan, the Roc, and the Dragon, they wandered the world of Nehwon south, east, north, and west, seeking forgetfulness of their first great loves and their first great guilts and finding neither. They ventured east past mystic Tisilinilit with its slender, opalescent spires, which always seemed newly crystallized out of its humid, pearly skies, to lands that were legends in Lankhmar and even Horborixen. One amongst many was the skeletally shrunken Empire of Eevamarensee, a country so decadent, so far-grown into the future, that all the rats and men are bald and even the dogs and cats hairless.
Returning by a northerly route through the Great Steppes, they narrowly escaped capture and enslavement by the pitiless Mingols. In the Cold Waste they sought for Fafhrd's Snow Clan, only to discover that it had been last year overwhelmed by a lemming horde of Ice Gnomes and, according to best rumor, massacred to the last person, which would have included Fafhrd's mother Mor, his deserted girl-bride Mara, and his first issue if any.
For a space they served Lithquil, the Mad Duke of Ool Hrusp, devising for him sprightly mock-duels, simulated murders, and other entertainments. Then they coasted south through the Outer Sea aboard a Sarheenmar trader to tropic Klesh, where they adventured a while in the jungle fringes. Then north again, circling past secretest Quarmall, that shadow realm, to the Lakes of Pleea that are the headwaters of the Hlal and to the beggar-city of Tovilyis, where the Gray Mouser believed he had been birthed, but was not sure, and when they left that lowly metropolis he was no surer. Crossing by grain barge the Sea of the East, they prospected for gold a while in the Mountains of the Elder Ones, their last highjacked gems having been long since gambled away or spent. Unsuccessful in this quest, they wended their way west again toward the Inner Sea and Ilthmar.
They lived by thievery, robbery, bodyguarding, brief commissions as couriers and agents -- commissions they always, or almost always, fulfilled punctiliously -- and by showmanship, the Mouser entertaining by legerdemain, juggling, and buffoonery, while Fafhrd with his gift for tongues and training as a singing skald excelled at minstrelsy, translating the legends of his frigid homeland into many languages. They never worked as cooks, clerks, carpenters, tree-fellers, or common servants and they never, never, never enlisted as mercenary soldiers -- their service to Lithquil having been of a more personal nature.
They acquired new scars and skills, comprehensions and compassions, cynicisms and secrecies -- a laughter that lightly mocked and a cool poise that tightly crusted all inner miseries and most of the time hid the barbarian in Fafhrd and the slum boy in the Mouser. They became outwardly merry, uncaring, and cool, but their grief and guilt stayed with them, the ghosts of Ivrian and Vlana haunting their sleeping and their waking dreams, so that they had little commerce with other girls, and that more a discomfort than a joy. Their comradeship became firmer than a rock, stronger than steel, but all other human relations were fleeting. Melancholy was their commonest mood, though mostly hid even from each other.
Came noon of the Day of the Mouse in the Month of the Lion in the Year of the Dragon. They were taking their siestas in the cool of a cave near Ilthmar. Outside, heat shimmered above hard-baked ground and scanty brown grass, but here was most pleasant. Their horses, a gray mare and a chestnut gelding, found shade in the cavern's mouth. Fafhrd had sketchily inspected the place for serpents, but discovered none. He loathed the cold scaly ones of the south, so different from the hot-blooded, fur-bearing snakes of the Cold Waste. He went a little way into a narrow, rocky corridor leading from the back of the cave under the small mountain in which it was set, but returned when light failed and he had found neither reptiles nor end.
They rested comfortably on their uncurled bedrolls. Sleep would not come to them, so idle talk did. By slow stages this talk became serious. Finally the Gray Mouser summed up the last trinity of years.
"We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness."
"I dispute that," Fafhrd countered. "Not the latter part, for I am still as ghost-locked as you, but we have not crossed the Outer Sea and hunted over the great continent legend will have in the west."
"I believe we have," the Mouser disputed. "Not the former part, I'll agree, and what purpose in searching the sea? But when we went out farthest east and stood on the shore of that great ocean, deafened by its vast surf, I believe we stood on the western coast of the Outer Sea with nothing between us and Lankhmar but wild water."
"What great ocean?" Fafhrd demanded. "And what vast surf? It was a lake, a mere puddle with some ripples in it. I could readily see the opposite shore."
"Then you were seeing mirages, friend of mine, and languishing in one of those moods when all Nehwon seems but a small bubble you could burst with flick of fingernail."
"Perhaps," Fafhrd agreed. "Oh, how weary I am of this life."
Merry Chrimbo
The Dangerous J.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Santa Claus comes the town
Today, I was dancing on stage, throwing sweets to children, running around in a great suit ringing a bell. It was awesome and it was a great show. I knew I just had to go with it, so I danced about in front of a few hundred people completely acting the goat. I ran into huge rooms full of sleeping children ringing my bell shouting, "Ho Ho Ho!" and "Merry Christmas!". I told them all I had come from the North Pole and caused utter chaos as hundreds of kids went ballistic to the trillions of sweets I threw into the air.
In a rare photo I looked more like a Santa terrorist. Will print when available.
Nearly at a long break which will be lovely.
Time to go. Tom has arrived.
Merry Christmas.
The Dangerous J.
In a rare photo I looked more like a Santa terrorist. Will print when available.
Nearly at a long break which will be lovely.
Time to go. Tom has arrived.
Merry Christmas.
The Dangerous J.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Boots for W.
#
nishville's profile picture nishville
18 Dec 08, 9:41am (about 4 hours ago)
I was thinking yesterday how it must be painfull for W. to suffer all the indignities none of his predecessors had to deal with - everybody thinks he's a moron which probably makes him so nervous that every public appearance he makes cements that opinion, his own countrymen voted him the worst president ever, his wristwatch was stolen in Albania and now they threw shoes at him in Iraq...poor man.
But then I remembered who he is, who his friends are and what they've done and my empathy was instantly replaced by an idea for a multiple dog shit-smeared shoe launcher.
nishville's profile picture nishville
18 Dec 08, 9:41am (about 4 hours ago)
I was thinking yesterday how it must be painfull for W. to suffer all the indignities none of his predecessors had to deal with - everybody thinks he's a moron which probably makes him so nervous that every public appearance he makes cements that opinion, his own countrymen voted him the worst president ever, his wristwatch was stolen in Albania and now they threw shoes at him in Iraq...poor man.
But then I remembered who he is, who his friends are and what they've done and my empathy was instantly replaced by an idea for a multiple dog shit-smeared shoe launcher.
Quotation
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
Friday, December 12, 2008
Retired
The Dangerous J has retired to the world of Nehwon, in the citadel of Lankhmar, where he resides with his friends Faf'hrd and the Gray Mouser.
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