There's a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge on the hospital across the road from our house: I hear them screaming a lot. (This is a sound hotwired into childhood memories, from exposure to my dad's falcons for approximately the first twenty years of my life). I don't often see the actual birds, but yesterday there were two suspiciously peregrine-shaped avians in the tree opposite our gate. They were dodging behind branches and giving me funny looks, hence the slightly blurry and obscured photos.



(Well, I assume those are peregrine falcons rather than extra-large pigeons in drag. My dad could tell you if they're adult or juvenile, male or female and the state of moult of each, plus quite probably their shoe size and religious persuasion. Me, I just think vaguely, "Look a bit fluffy, don't they?", thus demonstrating that I am not a credit to my upbringing. I attempt to redeem myself by noting, for my papa's benefit, that there are more pics on my Flickr page, from which he may well be able to discern political leanings and social security numbers.)

Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show).

One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.

So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night. ( Vague Commentary Follows. )

Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!

One of my students has insisted on writing her vampire essay on Queen of the Dammed. This is clearly about repression on a scale I have hitherto failed to associate with Anne Rice.

Amusing student errors such as the above are somewhat necessary this afternoon, since I'm menstrual, sore and grumpy as hell, and the continual stream of more than usually lost and hopeless students is irritating me beyond belief. I shall console myself with random photography. There's an Egyptian goose sitting on a chimney on the roof opposite my window, looking somewhat morose in the rain. Every now and then it has itself an enormous conniption about somethingorother, and flaps around honking. Then it goes back to pretending it's sort of weathervane silhouette without the actual vane part.



It's always fascinated me that birds stand on one leg when they're contented. Do you think they like to keep one foot warm, or indicate their basic subliminal trust that no-one's going to sneak up and push them over?

Good lord. Evil moebius dream. In between a somewhat interesting New Year's party simultaneously online and in a series of swanky flats belonging, among others, to wytchfynder, I seem to have spent endless time photographing birds. Specifically, photographing birds which were perched on the fibrous matting liner of the hanging baskets in the courtyard outside my bedroom, stealing fibres for nesting material. (This much actually happens. The starlings love the matting and spend lots of time in pairs and trios uttering muffled "woot!" and "twee!" noises through beakfuls of fluffy stuff, trampling the hapless pelargoniums and giving the baskets a sort of involuntary Afro. The depredations are quite epic: any day now the plants themselves are going to fall through the naked wire in a shower of unsupported dirt).



It was a good New Year's party, with fireworks and everything and that slightly blurry focus which suggests the presence of acceptable degrees of alcohol, but dammit, every now and then I'd click on the wrong button and the whole thing would fade and I'd be photographing birds. Starlings, yes. Then a whole bunch of little glossy humming-birdy things, and several sparrows, and a pair of burrowing owlets (very cute), and a toucan, and a spotted eagle owl, and eventually a gosh-darned ground hornbill, which is perfectly ridiculous as the basket would never support its weight. And as if it wasn't enough to keep ducking out of the party for a new avian vignette, the photos were terrible, blurry at best, and frequently lacking any trace whatsoever of actual bird. (I have to admit that this is also a fairly realistic detail given my general absence of photographic skill).

I variously attribute the endless and baffling nature of this dream to the fact of book club last night (excesses of wine, giggling and drunken sessions of romantic Odious Comparisons); the extreme heat, which is leading me to sleep with the French doors onto the courtyard open for the better admittance of evil hanging basket vibes; and Rupert Everett. I came back from book club with his autobiography, which I incautiously started reading before going to sleep, and from which I had to reluctantly prise myself at about 1.30am when the unnatural headlock exerted on my skull by my headboard rails showed signs of actually detaching my neck from the rest of my spine. He ain't a half bad writer: the book has a sort of fragmented, frenetic energy which is simultaneously revelatory, funny and incredibly sad. It reads almost like a caricature of a promiscuous gay lifestyle, interestingly detached from any real emotional content (I suspect that's self-protection), but with the underlying thread of a continual and rather desperate seeking-out of sexual encounters. The writer seems lost, looking for something, but you're never quite sure what. I can't decide if he's a cynic, a tragedy or a total bastard (possibly all three), but either way the name-dropping is something else. Anyone who can treat a fling with Ian McKellan as a sort of youthful and immaterial passing fancy has to be credited with serious attitude.

I actually did some book-updating yesterday, in a vague, desultory sort of way. Rupert Everett notwithstanding, shall attempt to do better today. Work worky work work work.

'Tis that time of year again! the annual, horrible, always unanticipated stupid big run thing which comes pounding past my bedroom window, two metres away from my head, at 6am on a Sunday. It comes with thumping feet, panting, talking, laughing and other expressions of masochistic dysfunction and the cheerfully sadistic impulse to spread it around to the less energetic. I spend the first ten minutes lying in bed wistfully wishing I was on the roof with a catapult*, and then I give up and get up. Of all the stupid side effects of my stupid body, the one where I can't get back to sleep again once I've woken up is possibly the most annoying.

Sleep was particularly necessary because of yesterday's trip out to the Strandloper, the beach-style fish restaurant up the West Coast, another in the line of Tinnimentum-entertainments with jo&stv. It's a pleasant drive, and a lovely, laid back, make-do sort of atmosphere. Seven courses of seafood and one of lamb, off paper plates, with mussel shells for utensils, sitting on concrete tables on the sand under shelters made from weathered bits of boats. The "shipwreck" ambiance is possibly taken a tad too far, I kept bumping my head on random floats hanging from the ceiling. Which is, incidentally, shadecloth, upon which the shadows of the gulls make lovely patterns. Very relaxed sort of day, with the cumulative effects of sea air, wind, sand, food, wine and sun sending us shambling back to town in a sort of pleasantly zombified state, to fall into bed at about 9pm, zonked.

Am v. proud of my self. I ate mussels! In garlic. By dint of closing my eyes and refusing to look at all the wriggly intestinal bits.

I also stood on a rock and recited Ted Hughes, for additional pretentious academic cred. "Wind", possibly my favourite poem of all time ever. ... The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope ... At any second to bang and vanish with a flap... a black-/ Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. I love watching gulls in a strong wind, they make beautiful patterns in the air. Strandloper has a large population of enormous, glossy birds who live on the pickings from the restaurant, and presumably conduct an ongoing brutal turf war to keep lesser birds out.

* the Evil Landlord's contribution: "Caltrops."

I'm getting too old for LARPing. Or, at least, getting too old, opinionated and set in my ways to really enjoy LARPs written by all but an extremely high-quality few (d_hofryn, this means you and your partner in crime, so get writing, people!). As I am not generally in, as they say, a Good Space at the moment, I seem to have very little tolerance for the kinds of problems and inconsistencies an inexperienced bunch of designers are likely to perpetrate. I become very frustrated, and end up spending three hours gnashing and gnarling at all beholders in a thoroughly obnoxious fashion.

This wasn't too much of a problem in last night's Discworld LARP since I was supposed to be taking upon me the mantle of Granny Weatherwax, probably the character most designed by a benevolent providence to be my role-playing soulmate, and herself constructed with a fair amount of gnashing and gnarling intrinsic to her personality. But I always had misgivings about the idea of a Discworld LARP that used actual canon characters, and in the event, despite the evident care and detail that went into writing this LARP, I don't think the final result was ultimately successful. There are too few surprises, too many ponderables attached to each character, and too great a discrepancy in the extent to which the players are familiar with the history and personalities of the canon.

The risk is also simply too great that the designers, in a desperate search for novelty, will take the characters too far away from the canon as it is perceived by die-hard, read-everything fans such as I unashamedly am. The dual layers of interpretation - designers and players - mean that the LARP comes to read like slightly slap-dash fanfic. This is fatal in the context of Pratchett: I don't personally enjoy fanfic written for any setting which has, in canon, a reasonable degree of complexity and subtlety. (I love Harry Potter fanfic because Rowling's world is basically flat and full of holes, and any embroidery has a high chance of actually improving on the original. I won't read fanfic in any Joss Whedonverse, because they're complex enough that an insensitive reading really stuffs with the canon. Call me picky. I'm picky).

The fact that I was, last night, in Day 3 of a particularly obnoxious four-day headache (possibly more than 4-day, depending on whether or not I wake up with the blasted thing tomorrow) really didn't help. Nor did a major communication breakdown among the DMs about character abilities, leading to a somewhat doomed attempt to play Granny Weatherwax with no actual effective power at all for three quarters of the evening. In fact, bleah.

On the upside, she says, trying desperately not to turn into Schopenhauer, I have fiendishly addicted the Evil Landlord to Season 1 of the new Doctor Who, which is entertaining to watch; he seems somewhat tickled by Christopher Eccleston's Doctor. Heh. I'll make a drooling Germanic fanboy out of him yet.

Also, outside in my courtyard a small flock of white-eyes has found the hanging baskets, the fibrous padding for which apparently makes excellent nesting material. I'm so enjoying watching the little buggers flipping about uttering muffled witterings through a mouthful of fibre, I don't particularly care that the baskets are starting to have that shocked Afro look.

My, but Cape Town is getting its dander up this morning! Bucketing rain, gusting wind, cats plastered affectionately to heaters... except Golux, who is at the vet's having the third in her series of nose-freezing sessions. She's getting wise to this: when I didn't immediately feed the cats this morning (she's not allowed breakfast because of the sedatives), she came all over suspicious and we had to chase her down and corner her to get her into the basket. For a slow, dim, thoughtful little kitty she's amazingly cunning at times.

I am not currently enamoured of my kitties, so much. The other day I wandered vaguely into the kitchen in search of tea, only to find a Cape robin sitting on the kitchen counter.



It looked at me, flipped its tailfeathers a few times in that slightly rude robinnish fashion, and flew calmy out of the open door. I was somewhat enchanted. Apparently they have a tendency to get quite tame, as a species. Who knew.

But yesterday I went into the dining room to find a small robin corpse under the table. All incriminating teethmarks, traces of hair and pawprints had been carefully removed from the crime scene, but I have my suspicions. Am cross.

Despite a mad social whirl again (family stuff, plus d_hofryn's birthday and a jo&stv supper last night), I am stuck into the Absolutely The Last, Final, Ultimate Encyclopedia Entry, and apart from tearing my hair gently at the thought of summarizing the significance of film for fairy tale in 5000 words, am Full Speed Ahead. Go me.

One of the best things about the relaxing of water restrictions - apart from a garden that's actually looking vaguely green - is the birds. I've just put the sprinkler on the front bit, and spent ten minutes watching three white-eyes, a thrush and a sunbird having a whale of a time diving (or running, in the case of the thrush) repeatedly through it, wittering with excitement. Then they take baths in the puddles. I think humanity made a major error somewhere in this whole civilisation business, when our definition of pleasure involves either complex ingredients and major alcohol-producing chemistry, the major death of trees to put little black words on paper, or the entire Hollywood film industry. Even bathing, which I admit is an important pleasure for me, requires hot water and preferably lots of scented additives. See Orang-utans, civilisation, for the use of.

Currently my definition of pleasure involves a day in which my head does not hurt. The last three have been something of a washout, work-wise; if I don't have a headache when I start reading Barthes, I certainly do when I stop. This may have something to do with the weather, which continues hot, but my suspicions are otherwise. Dammit. Matters were not helped yesterday by an involuntary early wake-up: about five ADT operatives (the local security company, who do patrols) chose to park their cars in the corner of the road near our house, and have a loud, Afrikaans argument (including frequent repetitions of the word "poes!", dear me, what can they mean?), starting at 6am and continuing for just over half an hour. Three metres from my bed. In an ideal universe the wall of my bedroom would not also be the wall of the property, or if it was, would be adjacent only to vast tracts of wilderness inhabited only by birds and animals. Quiet birds and animals. Also, while I am generally in favour of the obvious activities of our Boys In Blue And Orange, I would definitely settle for a silent crime-deterrant presence. Anyway, I got up, seething, at 6.30, and went for a brisk walk around Rondebosch Common, which was surprisingly pleasant. Not only everymoment gets to wun! And it says hopeful things for the human race as a species that there is no jogger so out of breath that he or she won't say "Good morning" in passing. Of course, the fact that it was cool and windy and I was striding around with an enormous, silly grin on my face, may have had something to do with that.

In other news, I recommend to your attention wytchfynder's current exercise in imaginary housemates. They are quirky, compelling and beautifully written, enough that they're worth the side-effect, i.e. causing me to search my conscience regarding the actual year I spent sharing a house with him. I don't remember committing any of those solecisms, but my memory is notoriously erratic.

Things Which Make Me Happy, despite minor academic irritations:

• Silly weblinks. The dreaded Mich, veteran of several years in digs with me, but mostly quite sane really, pointed me to this rude article about role-players this morning. It's very funny. And rude.
• Good online comics. Am now addicted to Girl Genius, which is steampunkish and rather endearing, with a nice line in pseudo-German villany, something I enjoy given my Evil Landlord experiences.
• Walking past the UCT fountain (a silly, flat, Chinese sort of thing with concrete trigrams) this morning to see four happy pigeons and a starling, all bathing madly. What is it about birds in bird-baths that's so enjoyable? I think it's the zest with which they splosh around, and all the unnecessary flutter and splash. And the cute punk feather-styles that result. I was all grumpy because of internet withdrawal (Humanities server fell over with a thud this morning), but it cheered me right up.
• Faint signs that my department may love me. I now have a telephone in my office, for the first time in my teaching career. (Extension 5366, for you fellow campus types). It has madly enabled me to phone all sorts of bookshops in order to discover that Player of Games will not, in fact, arrive in time for my students to read it. Ain't technology wonderful.

Bugger, I was going to stop this daily posting thing. I can give it up any time I like, honest.

Much as I would like to blame the Birthday Conspiracy for the fact that I've played ShadowMagic for two days solid (because it just looks so cool on this new screen), I know, deep down, that I've played ShadowMagic for two days solid because I have the approximate focus and self-control, work-wise, of something small and fluffy and ineffectual, probably drawn by Ursula Vernon. Goldarnit. Must ... finish ... Tolkien ... paper! Must also get self off butt in order to take car in for (a) electrical overhaul (random indicator and brake lights have died) and (b) mechanical overhaul (still drinking water like a fish). However, I vouchsafe to all you witterers the unhappy truth that probably I'll sit here all day playing ShadowMagic, possibly with a small break to maniacally practise up my recorder piece for Bardic. I have an exam meeting tomorrow, however, which will drag me kicking and screaming into some sort of activity, whether I like it or not. At the very least, running amok in the meeting with a blunt object, such as the Riverside Chaucer. (They tend to be lengthy and frustrating).

Have discovered two things this weekend, diametrically opposed in terms of value:
1. LiveJournal is disgusting over weekends for us mere dial-up plebes. It takes 20 minutes to load a page. (Probably exacerbated by IAfrica's connection foibles, which are also worse over weekends). This possibly explains the fact that I never seem to post on Saturdays, although conversely it utterly fails to explain the fact that I almost always post on Sundays.
2. I appear to share my birthday with Joss Whedon, if Meg's Boyfriend Page is to be believed. (And thank you, scroobious, for the link to that little time-waster!). How cool is that?

Some of today's slight dreaminess and tendency to revert to ShadowMagic may be because SABC2 chose to show Batman Forever really late last night, and I'm a tad short on sleep. Don't know why I've never got around to seeing that particular Batman movie before, since generally I adore superhero movies. It's a rampantly camp and ham little production, isn't it? (She says, laying on the assonance). It is my considered opinion that, Eternal Sunshine notwithstanding, Jim Carrey should be taken out back and shot in the overall interests of the human race, and that Tommy Lee Jones should know better. I ask you. Even Nicole Kidman was ham. It quite made Val Kilmer's characteristic tonelessness attractive by comparison. Also weird multiple personality tendencies in the dialogue: 90% of it was really bad, and the other 10% was inspired and screamingly funny. I suspect they hired Joss Whedon or someone to salt it with one-liners after the fact.