pedanther

Fiction books
R Austin Freeman. Mr Pottermack's Oversight (e)
Sharon Lee. Barnburner (e)
Sharon Lee. Gunshy (e)
Alan Moore, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon. Top 10 volume 1 (re-read)
Alan Moore, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon. Top 10 volume 2 (re-read)
Alan Moore, Gene Ha. Top 10: The Forty-Niners (re-read)
Kim Newman. The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (e)
Terry Pratchett. Men at Arms (e) (re-read)
Anthony Price. The '44 Vintage (e)
Anthony Price. The Hour of the Donkey (e)
Anthony Price. Soldier No More (e)
Anthony Price. Tomorrow's Ghost (e)
Dorothy L Sayers. Strong Poison (e) (re-read)

In progress
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire (e)
Terry Pratchett. Soul Music (e) (re-read)

Picture books
Russell Hoban. Best Friends for Frances
Russell Hoban. Bread and Jam for Frances

Non-fiction books
Jung Chang. Empress Dowager Cixi

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Ryk E Spoor. Phoenix in Shadow

1. The season of one-act plays has successfully reached its conclusion. The tradition in the Rep Club is that each director is presented with a commemorative spoon at the after party, but apparently they weren't ready yet, so we were each handed a teaspoon from the tea-and-coffee concession and promised that the real thing would be forthcoming at a later date. I managed to hold onto mine for most of the evening, but the others had vanished by the time I went looking for a second spoon later. (By that point, the party had evolved into a sing-along arranged around two people with guitars and one person with a ukulele, and it was late enough that adding a bit of spoon-playing to the mix seemed like a good idea. When I was only able to come up with one spoon, one of the actors raided the kitchen and found a fork, but it just wasn't the same.)

Each of the directors also got a copy of the official cast photo for their play, and I was also presented by my actors with a copy of the unofficial cast photo for mine (the photographer having had some time on his hands and a photo he'd taken at the zoo of a family of chimpanzees), along with a picture book about monkeys in which the cast had written messages of appreciation and drawn arrows from their names to the three silliest-looking monkeys on the first page.


2. Last week, I managed to lock myself out of the house again. On the way out the door in the morning, I got distracted at just the point when I would have gone over to pick up the keys from the table where I usually leave them, and realised as soon as the front door had locked behind me that they were still on the table. I got the bearer of the spare key to meet me after work, so that was all right, but it being the second time I've locked myself out of the house that way, I decided I needed to rethink where I keep the keys. They're now hanging from a lanyard hooked over the inside doorknob of the front door.


3. I've just started playing Portal 2 again, after a break of several weeks. I hadn't been in a hurry to get back to it, because the plot had been going through another slow patch. So of course it turns out that there was a major plot development about three minutes after the point where I'd stopped.


4. I don't watch much live TV except on Sunday evening, when for reasons that are unlikely to become clear again at the moment it's easier to watch TV than not. Currently that means the new Sinbad TV series. Not terribly enthused about it so far. I'm finding Sinbad himself less interesting than his supporting cast, and they're mostly familiar stereotypes. (He's also leading the field in Failing To Be Convincing As An Inhabitant Of Whatever Century This Is Supposed To Be, which appears to be something of a national sport; it was several minutes into the first episode before I was sure this wasn't a modernised setting of the story.)

This week's episode guest starred Sophie Okonedo, walking off with every scene she was in, appropriately as a pirate queen. Basically, Sophie Okonedo rules.


5. Speaking of which, the Doctor Who online game, Worlds in Time, recently added a new story arc set on Starship UK and featuring Liz X (who, you will recall, was played by Sophie Okonedo in the TV series). One of the first plot points to be revealed is that Starship UK has a king now, which had me worried that something had happened to Liz, but she's still around, and rather annoyed that, after all the trouble she's been to sorting out the old autocratic regime, somebody's stolen the crown with the intention of setting up a new autocratic regime. Somebody had fun writing this story arc: Liz X pronounces her surname differently these days, and her associates in resisting the new order are collectively known as -- what else? -- the London Underground. [ETA: Also, there's an alien starship captain going Ahab on the star whale. And the leader of the Underground? Call him Ismail.]