It comes with a Major Award certificate. And a box labeled FRA GI LE. (“Probably it’s Italian…”)
Dear heavens above, how am I going to keep Peter from trying to buy this thing? A Christmas Story is absolutely one of his favorite movies (probably just about tied with The War Lord and Victor, Victoria).
I’m going to hide all the credit cards now.
No, not the fairy tale by Comtesse d’Aulnoy (though that’s on my mind at the minute too). This White Cat is the subject of one of the most famous old Irish poems, found written in the margins of a Latin manuscript copy which its author, an Irish monk, had been writing in a central European scriptorium during the eighth century. (The original manuscript is now in the Stadtsbibliothek in St. Gallen, in the northeastern part of Switzerland, near where it was written.)
Pangur Ban, “[My] White Cat”, is the title of the poem in Irish Gaelic. It’s just turned up in a collection of best-loved Irish-language poems, “The Great Book of Gaelic” or “An leabhar m�r”, published online by Archipelago. The poems in the collection were selected by a group of Irish and Scottish poets, each of whom nominated a poem and a favorite translation: some of the links on the “Great Book” page have sound as well, so you can hear the poem in question being read as Gaeilge.
(Incidentally, there’s a downloadable .PDF version of the whole journal here, if you’re interested.
(Thanks to Languagehat for the link.)
With me, he’s always been tied with Peter Davidson as Best Doctor — PD for a Doctor who radiates compassion, TB for one who is a child in an adult’s body, relentlessly funny but also essentially serious. …Not to mention the scarf. I crocheted that scarf once. Only once. In any case, I favored the Baker Doctor enough that he turned up once in a place he very much shouldn’t have been, in my prose…well, bearing in mind some other writers’ problems in this direction, perhaps the less said the better.
However, something else has come up (as we say). UK and Irish TV-watchers know Tom Baker’s as a voice which turns up doing all kinds of commercial work.
Here are some outtakes from a recent recording session. Says Warren Ellis, that amazing creature, “Tom Baker is legendarily somewhat conflicted about doing voiceovers for ****ty-product advertising. ” (Sorry for the asterisking, but younger readers do pass through here.)
…Uh, no kidding. Warning: the linked .MP3 is not suitable for people who have trouble with the F word. Or hearing a voice like that of a slightly renegade or cranked-off Deity pronouncing it.
Thank you, Warren…
“A ‘moving sale’ sign in front of one of author Anne Rice’s mansions drew bargain hunters and curious New Orleans residents. Susan Roesgen of member station WWNO reports on the vampire novelist’s rummage sale that was not only sequins and black lace, but also Christmas albums and plant stands. ”
…One of her mansions? Ah me… Heaven hasten the day when we can have just a single mansion.
That said…how many rooms is a mansion, these days?
No problem. Herewith Ms. C. J. Beemer (left) and her pet, the irrepressible Bubble.
…Meanwhile, today’s horrible discovery (while watching a DVD of “Read Or Die”): the Intervideo DVD-playing software allows you to run the DVD image as the Windows desktop.
Now I am never going to get anything done…
I owe my old friend a call this afternoon, when it gets to be a Decent Hour in LA. Tom it was who in 1979 or thereabouts read the newly published The Door Into Fire and somehow, unaccountably, came to the conclusion that its author might be someone who would like to write animation. And he was right! He and the inimitable Duane Poole were my story editors on Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, for which they asked me to write some scripts…and with infinite patience they guided me through the process, with the result that I now have sixty or so scripts, various European live-action TV series, and a prime-time live-action project under my belt (presently undergoing its fifth rewrite. Thanks loads, guys…).
Tom has, of course, moved on to (theoretically) deathless fame as one of the two Senior Advisory wizards for the NY metropolitan area in the “Young Wizards” series. But now I see that The Big Cartoon Database has done him and Duane a naughty. Do a search in there on “Diane Duane” and one finds that I have been credited with fourteen scripts for the series, whereas I only actually wrote two. I think we can chalk this one up to the dangers of “gang credits”. Still, it seems unfair to my mentors, who (I’m pretty sure) wrote the majority of the others…
Meanwhile, I see that a rogue apostrophe has crept into the title of the Gargoyles script Peter and I wrote. “I’ll Met By Moonlight?” Pleeeeeeeease!!
Unhurt but hungry and very thirsty, she came in the cat door at 7:15 this morning. Probably she was shut in somewhere.
I’m wrecked, not having slept too well the last two nights…but at least now I can think about other things.
It’s a train I really want to ride with Peter some day, dressed to the nines… 
Put the term into Google and all kinds of things come out. But I think one of the most entertaining is this knowledgeable dissertation by Mark Smith, who runs the website “The Man in Seat Sixty-One”, an incredible concatenation of info about riding the rails in Europe. Comprehensive doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s a true labor of love…and accurate.
“Paper capable of playing videos has been invented at the Philips Research laboratory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. 
“…The invention is the latest version of ‘electronic ink’. Researchers hope to combine the convenience, robustness and readability of printed material with the vast and flexible information content of laptop computers.
“In principle, a plastic sheet covered with electronic ink could display an entire library, page by page. The information would be stored in a portable chip, and the display would be powered by a slimline, lightweight battery. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would weigh no more than a feather.”
“Not only is the country’s leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year.”
“Taken from the Japanese words wabi, which translates to less is more, and sabi, which means attentive melancholy, wabi sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in the things that bear the mark of this impermanence. As a design style, wabi sabi helps us to appreciate the simple beauty in imperfection�of a chipped vase or a rainy day, for example.”
(Oh, boy, I’ve got their rain and chipped stuff right here…)
While I was in LA doing “on-site” work on The Ring, I passed by a restaurant with a banner on it that said “Tokyo-Style Cuisine”. That interested me, so I tried it, and I really liked it. 
The restaurant is called “Musha”; it’s at 424 Wilshire Boulevard. What attracted me — besides the idea of trying a Japanese regional cuisine, even if only an urban one — was that the menu had different sorts of things from what you normally see in a “mainstream” Japanese restaurant. What I particularly liked was the “shichirin” grilling, in which they bring you a little crucible of odor-free live charcoal and some beautifully cut meat or fish to grill over it, piece by piece, at your own speed. A pleasant way to wind down after a hard day’s script-bashing. The staff were friendly and helpful: the place has a comfortable, casual feel.
Here’s Musha’s web page (in Japanese). (A post at this discussion forum suggests that this restaurant is an outpost of an older, bigger branch in Torrance.) For anyone who might be interested, I’ll link to a complete scan of their menu at some point. A .PDF file of its first page is here. (Beware, the file is about 1.2 Mb.)
And by popular demand, here are the other menu pages: page 2, page 3, and page 4.
