bother, likewise blow

Drattitude. Optician's appointment for today revealed that I need both new contact lenses and new glasses. While I am on the contact lens insurance scheme with them (which cuts down on the cost somewhat) and am having the new glasses set into my old frames, which I'm fond of (which cuts down on that cost) it's annoying.

On a brighter note, my mother was late back for supper, so tragically we didn't end up watching Casualty (soap opera set in hospital) and ended up watching (and shouting out the answers to) Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Much better.

I really, really loathe Casualty. I don't know quite why. I mean, it's a continuing series with regular characters and developed plots and stressful situations and angst and all the things which any lover of the above in anime ought to appreciate. Yet . . . gah. They're such twits. Even the sport of predict-today's-tragic-accident-before-it-happens loses its savour.

Bought a Warhammer (fantasy role-playing game) novel today; Beasts in Velvet by Jack Yeovil. Now, normally I would avoid Warhammer novels, but it just so happens that Jack Yeovil is the pen-name (when writing such stuff) of Kim Newman, author of the Anno Dracula series (and certain other books). In fact, Genevieve Dieudonne -- the central character in the first AD book -- shows up in some of his Warhammer novels as an Alternate Universe version of the character. And he's a good writer.

---

Woman? You have painted her, the impenetrable Sphinx
But the enigma lives on before me, confusing me.
Speak, tell what you have seen in the plumbless abyss
Of her eyes, clear like those of a hanged man.

(translated from To Felicien Rops, by Josephin Peladan)

exit pursued by a headless horseman

I have just been watching Sleepy Hollow on the television, and I maintain that it is what Hammer Horror would have produced had they been operating now -- or, rather, a couple of years ago -- and had the money and the technology to do it.

Still, it does wonderful things with fog, and one can smell the leaf mould.

Tonight I whimper that I lack inspiration (or possibly application). Tomorrow I will whimper about work. The change between weekend and week is perceptible.

---

<***> Information does not want to be free. Information wants to be suspended from a pain rack, tied up with a ball gag, and to have the whip and the nipple clamps used on it. And, maybe later, a little blood work, if it's feeling up to it.