realthog

I had the best of intentions for posting here today: a long, snotty essay on something safely incomprehensible like isomorphism in the latter decadence of Greek hermetic philosophy as understood by the Venerable Bede, perhaps. Instead, however, it seems I may have become a delayed victim of The Bug That Never Was.

A word of medical explanation here.

Last weekend Pam and I went to Saratoga Springs, about 250km/150 miles north of here, for the World Fantasy Convention, where a jolly time was had by all. By the Sunday, however, we both seemed to be coming down with a cold. As we gladly, back home, tucked ourselves and a passel of cats into bed on Sunday night we confidently expected to wake up on Monday morning to a world of flu.

Instead, well, not very much, really. That said, all week we've both been feeling a bit low and off-kilter; as a single example, each day by about seven-thirty it's been hard to persuade ourselves that it's not nearer bedtime than the start of the evening. We'd come to the conclusion that we must indeed have picked up some kind of flu bug, but a very mild strain that lacked too much by way of the overt flu symptoms.

Now I'm not so sure. This morning was distinguished by a foray to a huge and very fine book sale in nearby Montclair. I picked up a number of useful-looking items for the reading list of the planned Bogus Science, including J.B. Rhine's own account of his infamous Duke University psi experiments, while Pam got a bagful of goodies including a covetable copy of The Phantom Tollbooth and Madhur Jaffrey's Indian cookbook, which I have self-sacrificingly volunteered to help her test, heh heh. On the way home we picked up a new, shiny, hi-tech kitchen bin, rather swiftly named R2D2, to replace the old one, which had become infested by maggots during our trip to Saratoga Springs. By the time we'd got home and sorted out the book purchases, I realized that I was both shivering and absolutely exhausted. Off I went to cower/snooze in bed for an hour or two.

We're guessing, then, that the Saratoga Springs bug may not have been quite so innocuous after all -- just slow to strike.

I'm still not feeling remarkable, and am beginning to wish I could retreat to bed once more, this time equipped with a hot toddy -- or a bucketful of hot toddy, more like. Unfortunately, we don't have the makings of a hot toddy in the house ... well, we do have the orange juice, but the idea of a vegetarian (as it were) hot toddy somehow doesn't appeal to the heartstrings of this dour Scot. So my plan instead is to wander around quietly in ever-diminishing circles until I end up sitting in front of the upstairs wood stove watching some palatably mindless old movie or other. Call for Veronica Lake!

Hm. Veronica Lake. That might be another curative possibility, sans the option of going to bed with a hot toddy. Of course, there's the drawback that Ms Lake has been dead for quite a few years, but similar disqualifications have never quenched the therapeutic zeal of the proud pharmaceutical industry of America, have they? Whatever the case, Pam had better never be made aware of this paragraph ...

(Talking of the World Fantasy Convention, one of the program items in which I participated, a panel on the subject of taboos in fantasy writing, has been written up in remarkable if somewhat inaccurate detail at http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/267146.html. Countless examples of Shavian wit on my part have been inexplicably omitted from the account. It must be the softness of my tones and the subtleties of my accent to blame ...)

Anyway, because of general malaise, all thoughts of that monumentally intellectual essay on ... on ... well, whatever the heck it was going to be about, well, they've had to go by the board.

I did have one thought today, and that is that the obligation to fill in a Music answer every time you want to post a LiveJournal entry must have a heck of a beneficial effect on people's listening habits.

I mean, it is actually true that since last night I've been listening to Queen (the The Miracle album) and Mahler (a surprisingly pallid D-G recording of the 5th Symphony I picked up on cassette at a yard sale for the car) and Nina Simone (the second CD of her double-CD Anthology set, complete with specially doctored version of her live rendition of Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" to get rid of the introductory crap and the awful two minutes of thank-you-and-good-night music from the band at the end) and Maria Muldaur (a live gig on Wolfgang's Vault that promised much but disappointed greatly), but if I'd been listening to Britney Spears's Greatest Hits I'd hardly be confessing it in public, would I? And, since I try in my demure British fashion to maintain a certain level of integrity while filling in forms, this means that, even if I did possess a collection of CDs by Ms Spears, Ms Aguilera (sp?) and their ilk, they'd have to start gathering dust.

I assume that all over LiveJournal there are correspondents confronting similar ethical dilemmas.

This was, as you will perceive, not much of a thought, but a thought it indubitably was ... and about the best I could do on a drear wet day when the flu seems to be a-comin' on.

Tomorrow, with luck, I'll have the energy to brag here about the BBC Focus magazine's top-notch review of Corrupted Science! My, won't I be insufferable.