All Souls' Night

"… beguiling the tedium of the way by describing to him in detail the various exhibits he had that morning seen at Merlin's Mechanical Museum. These included such attractions as a juggler, an aerial cavalcade, Merlin's Cave, and a set of Antique Whispering Busts (very ingenious); but these had not interested Felix as much as a hydraulic vase, a band of mechanical music, an mechanical cruising frigate. … he meant next to visit an exhibition at Spring Gardens, where Maillardet's Automaton was to be seen. This marvel … was a musical lady, who was advertised, rather alarmingly, to perform most of the functions of animal life, and to play sixteen airs upon an organized pianoforte, by the actual pressure of the fingers."
    -- Frederica, Georgette Heyer

Felix, a twelve year old boy and one of the minor main characters, is interested in steam power. Over the course of the story, in addition to the above passage, he looks for (but fails to find) one of Trevithick's railway locomotives called the Catch-me-who-can, visits a Soho foundry with a pneumatic lift, takes a trip down the river in a steam boat, and rides in a hot-air balloon.

The story itself is set in London, 1818.


( This is the ranty part )

The story itself is a trope, but.

The concept of God has as little meaning for him as it does for most wizards, but, as he understands it, Muggle iconography of the Hebrew God bears a striking resemblance to the person of Albus Dumbledore, which lends the phrase a fairly accurate pictorial significance.

Hee.

Due to the large number of independent and secondhand bookstores in downtown Asheville, within walking distance of our hotel, I now have a variation of a particularly egregious song running through my head, to this effect:

99 books on a shelf on the wall
99 books on a shelf
Take one down, pass it around
Find a bookstore and buy some more
117 books on the wall

117 books on the wall
117 books
Take one down, pass it around
Find a bookstore and buy some more
123 books on the wall...

We were supposed to go on a tour of downtown/historic Asheville, but the guide had to go out of town on sudden business, so we wandered instead. Somehow this meant browsing art galleries and shops in snatches between book stores, bead stores, and yarn stores. Not that that's a problem.

Must remember to bring my camera with me tomorrow. Interesting architectures must be captured.

Of particular interest:

• Malaprop's is an independent bookstore along the lines of the Regulator and Quail Ridge, with a café and reading area attached. They have an entire shelf dedicated to Neil Gaiman, and dad found (with my help) three new linguistics books, one of which is autobiographical in nature.

• Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar: yeah, I thought it was an odd combination too, but they seem to make it work. The book part of the store is all second hand, but includes some very rare treasures, and there's a wealth of books you won't find through any other form of casual browsing. There's a selection of books near the door to the basement that have baseline prices and no order, and their cost goes straight to the Asheville Humane Society.

• Also, if you like Indian food and don't mind going for something a little more on the unusual side, Chai Pani is an excellent restaurant, themed around Indian street food. I enjoyed my pizza (naan with tandoori chicken, paneer, tomatoes, and caramelized red onions on a sweet tomato sauce) and pakuras (think tempura, except with a very light chickpea batter and three different sauces to choose between) very much. Yum!

Dammit, I love it more and more each time I read it. The Most Grievous and Lamentable Tragedie of The Death of Lord Voldemort (A Small Play in Three Acts) is a burlesque in the style of revenge plays, in iambic pentameter, and is such tasty, tasty crack.

For some reason, my favorite line is one of Voldemort's, in the first act: "'Twill be a fun and nifty thing to do!"

And then of course there's the Nekkid Quidditch Match (final part here), but that's something else entirely. I don't usually like tales told through letters, btw.

Both stories were pointed out to me by firelizard5 ages ago, and I still love them so much.


[Edit] - Oh hell, why not. Anyone who knows D.Grayman may enjoy You Give Love A Bad Name, though it's not funny in the same way as the two above. But it's veelafic! Actually decent veelafic, at that. You should be aware, though, that it's not entirely work-safe, and the final couple are both boys.

But. It is most emphatically not plotted out as "It turns out that A is part veela, which makes B realize how hot he/she is, they get it on, and everything is happy ever after." It is also not "It turns out that A is part veela, and now they'll never know if B really loves them for themself or not, woe." And it is humorous. Go read it.

Ack, ack, ack. I'm so sorry~~~ I've been ignoring LJ in favor of... uh.

Well, in favor of SCA and singing and SheVaCon and calligraphic AUM-type squiggles and thinking about school and sewing clothes and fumbling back through barely-remembered math and Japanese and story ideas and TRYING TO GET CREATIVE AGAIN, DAMMIT and testing out a stronger dose of my meds and talking to people and reading lots and organizing and cuddling Ruby and coding and cooking and.

Yeah.

( Time for a rushed report! )

Good grief, that's a lot of tags.