One of my hobbies is volunteering for Librivox.org. (Its mission is to produce free audio recordings of all literature in the public domain in the USA.) At the moment, I'm recording a little-known children's book by Lewis Carroll called Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Sylvie and Bruno are a pair of children from Fairyland, whom the mortal narrator occasionally comes across in the course of his day-to-day life. In one chapter, little Bruno is sleepy and wants a lullaby:
"[Bruno] turned a loving look on the on the gentle old man who was sitting on the other side of his leaf-bed, and who instantly began to sing, accompanying himself on his Outlandish guitar; while the snail, on which he sat, waved its horns in time to the music."
Anyway. I heard the tune in my head, and (worse) heard the guitar as well, and the resulting song became my summer project. Carroll provided the words and illustrations in the video below (which is a rough draft - there's some issues, and I'd like to include all the words in a later version), I sang, and my computer played the guitar. Enjoy!
A friend lent me a copy of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that shaped the World by Tom Zoellner (). Zoellner makes no secret of his overall opinion of uranium, but once you get past that, it's an interesting read about uranium's discovery as a radioactive element, its early reception as the best substance on earth (even better than radium!), its development and use as a weapon, and US society's reaction to The Bomb. There's more than that, but I'm only about halfway through the book, being busily fascinated by such tidbits as Bert the Turtle's song about ducking and covering back in the 1950s.
Finally, as I'm nearly done with Zelda: Skyward Sword (only the very last boss battle to go!), I started Fallout 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3), one of the games that came with the PS3 we bought a couple of months ago. Why Fallout 3? Why not the original Assassin's Creed, which also came with it? I think part of it was wanting to play a completely different game from just about anything else I'd played or seen; I think the closest I'll have come to it in style is probably Metroid Prime (which, I will note, I quit partway through). But from what I've read about Fallout 3, it's much more of an RPG than it is an FPS - you can get your wrist computer to auto-aim for you, you have stats and skills... and, yes, it's set in an alternate 1950s, after the nuclear holocaust.
Anyway. Me and the end of the world. What gives, self?
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ladybird 's writing. While I don't remember this specific book, it certainly sounds like it's one of the series. You'll get a good idea of whether you'd like the Moominbooks by reading the summary/commentary.nezumiko - hopefully next time she won't have the flu!) Friday we both had off. Um... we went skating, and I think we just hung out. Saturday I did a pretty thorough vacuuming of the bedroom, which badly needed it. Privet trees/bushes, to which I'm horribly allergic, are just starting to come into bloom, so anything I can do to lower the amount of allergens around is a Good Thing. We spent the evening indoors with the kitties with the doors and windows closed, so the noise of the fireworks wouldn't freak them out too much. Sunday I went to church, we skated again, I cleaned the living room/dining room, and finished Phoenix Wright 2. (If you make the last couple of in-court choices wrong, you get a surprisingly detailed 'wrong' ending; much more interesting than the usual simple slamming of the courtroom doors. The 'right' ending is, of course, even better.) nezumiko , orichalcum , cerebralpaladin , and other non-LJ friends. While the two 3-year-olds were around, we read picture books. Selections included Two Bad Ants (in which (a) the author had clearly had an ant infestation and took revenge and (b) the moral of the story is that if you do your own thing you'll get into big trouble), the slightly surreal Pete and Pickles (in which a pig and an elephant come to be great friends - the idea was based on a sketch done by author Berkeley Breathed's five-year-old daughter), and the incredibly surreal Hedgie Blasts Off (in which all the scientists are dogs who dress in hazmat suits even when writing entirely accurate orbital equations on blackboards, all the reporters are birds, and Hedgie the hedgehog goes up in a spaceship and saves the day). Those who could stay later started on Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which will probably be the semi-official post-bedtime long. Great stuff.
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timeasmymeasure
