I haven't posted a good sword fight in a while.

This one's from The Great Race, an overly long but really very amusing film that is perfect for hunkering down in front of for several hours with people who love to see a good piss-take*. The fight starts at about the one-minute mark, and ends at about 5:15. It's notable for the dash and flair of the villain, played by Ross Martin, whose career apogee may well have been his role as Artemis Gordon in the original Wild Wild West television series (about which it must be pointed out, in order to parenthetically lengthen this sentence beyond all reason, that it may well have been the very first introduction of the steampunk aesthetic to a mass audience — but that has little to do with this clip, so never mind).



*"Piss-take," for those unfamiliar with the term, is an Aussie expression meaning something — a remark, a comedy sketch, a falsely serious op-ed piece, etc. — that is designed to point out someone else's silliness or error, and can range from savage satire to just a bit of jovial mockery. "To take the piss" is the verb form. I consider The Great Race to be a piss-take not only of the The Prisoner of Zenda-type adventure film (note: if you haven't read the actual The Prisoner of Zenda book, I implore you, find it and read it — it's fantastic) but of piss-takes themselves. As such, it's a sort of meta-piss-take. And now this footnote, like the sentence above, has gone on for way too long.

Ada Lovelace Day is approaching!

From the Finding Ada Lovelace website:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.

As my own observance of this day, I've downloaded Frankenstein from Project Gutenberg and will be reading it between now and Ada Lovelace Day. I will then blog about its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She was, obviously, a writer and not a scientist or technician per se. But she had the guts to wrestle with the ideas and ideals of science in her work, and as such is a role model and pioneer for all of us geeky girl writers.

Another image I love.

This one from the American Library Association, found via boingboing.

I LOOOOVE this photo.

My friend Catherine Schieve took it. So moody, so mysterious, so misty and moisty.

I'm a sucker for the Olympics.

I love spending hour after hour glued to the set watching the Olympics. While I'll (obviously by now) never be an Olympic athlete myself, I've spent a lot of time over the past 25 years or so becoming a much more sporty person than I ever thought I'd be. (It's not ability, it's just determination, and the fact that I've learned to love a bunch of more or less weird sports because they make me more like the heroes in the books I read (and write), and because it feels really good to work up a sweat while having some sort of adventure or other.)

I usually don't spend much time or attention on the opening ceremonies. However, today I was glued to the Vancouver opening ceremony. Reason? All the teeeeeeny tiiiiiiiny countries, all the hot countries, all the poor countries, all the sparsely populated countries, who somehow managed to cobble together a team of about three people and scrape together enough money to send them to Canada. I find these people, and their countries, fabulously heroic. "We don't have a hope in hell of winning against the US or Switzerland or Norway or even bloody Australia which hardly even has snow, but by God we're going to send a team and they're going to have the time of their lives." It's so extravagantly bold and insouciant, it practically makes me weep. (This impulse is aided by the fact that so far today I've had half a bottle of wine and one and a half, soon to be two, beers. For me, that's an overindulgence of epic proportions.)

Another day in the writing desert.

It is important to remember that feelings are not reality. Feelings are useful indicators of overall things-are-okayness or things-are-suckyness. Prompts to look a little deeper. But — just as an example — feeling like my writing sucks and all my friends are more successful than I am and always will be because I suck suck suck suck does not mean that that's actually true. It just means that (a) I'm worried about being humiliated if my writing sucks, or (b) the words are coming more slowly at the moment, which has nothing to do with suckitude either way even though I'm always afraid that it does, or (c) I haven't been eating enough vegetables or getting enough sleep lately.

Question of the day: what do the persistent feelings of suckitude actually point to? What am I, at the bottom of all of this, really worried about, or afraid of?

The writing demons love it when I get like this, by the way. They absolutely love it.

I shall play you the song of my people.

(Thank you, Margaret.)