Rosemary Green's Library

It has been two years, so I guess it's time for another post :)  This month's fandom reading seems to be Captain America stories, along with random selections from my Delicious bookmarks (recently, Due South, Rosemary Sutcliff, Professionals...).  Amused to discover that over the years I have accumulated about 3600 bookmarks!  But, I love to re-read stories -- if I enjoyed it the first time, I'll probably want to return to it again in the future.  Now to work on leaving comments on those stories I've read 10 times...

tree_and_leaf posted a link to a "put yourself in the story" romance novel plot generator.  When I saw that one of the options for "If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?" was "the unknown reaches of Mars," I couldn't resist:

Life has been tough on super successful businesswoman Gedge, who has constantly been at someone's beck and call. So when she journeys to the unknown reaches of Mars with magnificent military man Bracy, it feels like a dream! Charisma. Power. Danger. In just days, Bracy has taken Gedge's world and changed it. He can't ever be hers, but what she is feeling is as old as time itself.

Shy Gedge came to the unknown reaches of Mars to relive her great-grandmother's adventure. But as the fairy-tale trip draws to an end, her adventure—with Bracy—has only just begun...

Borrowed from tree_and_leaf:Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

My mp3 player only has a couple of short stories on it at the moment, so I tried it with my "Music for Canning" playlist on the computer. (The fact that I have such a playlist says a lot about how essential music is to Getting Anything Accomplished in Our Kitchen!)

Is There for Honest Poverty

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
To the heavens above us O look and behold
Come all you jolly fellows, come listen to me song
Farewell we call to hearth and hall

He was the captain of the Nightingale
The standard on the Braes o' Mar is up and streaming rarely
There was no one like him, horse or foot
Shepherds, arise, be not afraid

I'm a forester in the woods and ye're the same design
I do not look for holy men to guide me on my way
Wha will ride wi' gallant Murray, wha will ride for Geordie's sel'
A damsel possessed of great beauty, as she stood at her own father's gate

And can it be that I should gain an interest in my Saviour's blood?
Come all ye jolly shepherd lads that whistle through the glen
Light of the world, thy beams I bless
Who would true valour see, let him come hither

There is a land beyond the stars
Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me
There were six and six nobles rade roon Banchory fair
As we marched down to Fenario.

***

Hmmm...well, it's no worse than some of my teenage poetry-writing attempts, anyway :)

( Sources for the lines )

(Hope I'm not falling into the habit of only posting near major holidays...)

We recently finished watching series one of Torchwood on DVD, which we really enjoyed, for the most part (we really did not take to "Random Shoes"!).  The "Captain Jack Harkness" episode in particular was all of my historical fiction dreams come true :)

Somehow, contrary to my usual behavior, I have not delved into Torchwood fanfiction -- because I find myself too busy wandering around in Professionals fandom!   Now, mind you, I've never seen so much as a single episode of this show (*note to self - get busy researching DVD region converting technology!*), but that has never stopped me before -- I spent many hours in college reading Starsky and Hutch fanfiction before I had access to a television and some episodes to watch.  And then there were all of those Sentinel fanfics (although when I actually watched the show I was awfully disappointed -- I just don't see any chemistry between those two)...

This is making me behave like more of a lurker than usual, since I feel odd commenting on stories when I have no idea how true to character they really are.  Also, I feel like a kid in a candy shop --  for the last few years I've been reading mostly in wonderfully-written but miniscule fandoms.  A big, long-established fandom is rather overwhelming!

All this rambling here is taking up reading time -- enough! 

Two "online radio" websites I've been enjoying lately:

Radio Britfolk
"Traditional and contemporary folk music of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England."  Includes lots of great artists who are relatively unknown in the US.  My favorite part is the The Britfolk Billboard, which is a 3 hour block of music.  The order of the tracks changes every time you start up the page, and they rotate on and off every few weeks, so you can hear your favorites again. 

Pandora Radio
I heard about this a while ago, but just tried this week and am already hooked.  You type in a song or artist you like, and it tries to create a "radio station" of songs it thinks you will like based on the attributes of that song.  You then tell it whether or not you like the songs as they go by so that it can refine the selections.  This is part of the Music Genome Project.  I've been quite pleased with the songs it's given me so far (the theme of my station seems to be "lots of harmony singing"!) -- it went from the Watersons to Stan Rogers to sea chanteys to Ralph Stanley and then back to English folk again.  Don't know that I would have ever combined them together in one set, but in fact I do like all of them!

Enjoy, and happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it!


ETA: Poking around in the documentation for Pandora Radio -- looks like their licensing doesn't allow it to be heard in most countries outside of the US.  So that might not be so useful to some of you, sorry...  Radio Britfolk at least seems to work internationally -- it comes from the UK and I have had no problems playing it here in the US.

Eeeeeee!!! 
My library has finally purchased the Ian Carmichael dramatizations of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries!  (As you see, this news is sending my punctuation into full Miss Climpson mode.)
I'm hoping to make time next week to see "Murder Must Advertise" (& then to see "Clouds of Witness" again -- one of my favorites).

Hooray!

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( Four Lives of Jane and the Gallant Hussar )

Some of you might enjoy this discussion about different types of AUs in fanfiction:
"So, let's talk about AUs, and what makes them work (or not). "

Without going into the usual footnoted detail that causes me to put off posting things here...Willow and I and a few of our friends have been having an ongoing discussion around natural/local/organic/seasonal food for the last few years.  Last year we tried a Community Supported Agriculture (farm share) program for the first time, with reasonable success and many learning experiences (this year, I hope, will be the year we learn to put up tomatoes in jars).
This week I've spent a fair amount of time sitting on the sofa nursing a cold and following various leads around the internet.  Today I have been reading the blog of Cathleen Hockman-Wert, who is the co-author of Simply in Season, a cooking-with-the-seasons cookbook I'm hoping to look at (as soon as I find a library system that has it!).  One of her entries dealt with a simple meal of dried pears, oatmeal bread and cheese that she brought on a plane trip...the part that caught my eye was this:

"But munching on my bread and cheese and dried pears en route to Baltimore, I had to think about why that meal was so much more satisfying to me...The heart of it is this: I knew and liked the story of my food."

This is something that appeals to me as well.  When we eat the bread that Willow just made and brought out of the oven...when we enjoy the spaghetti sauce from the CSA tomatoes we froze last summer...when we eat the apples from a local orchard..we enjoy having a connection to our food.

This looked fun...

( my xmas stocking )