It pleases me immensely that I seem to be able to turn the BBC iPlayer up to 11.

( Fandoms where the ultimate expression of love and trust is letting someone drive your car? Love. [Spoilers for S&H - The Fix] )

Yeah, SPN, Starsky and Hutch beat you to it!

Okay, so mostly because of calamitycrow, I decided it was time I watched some Starsky and Hutch again. It's been a good few years since I last watched Season 1 through and it's almost *more* awesome this time round. There are certainly fewer wacky disguises, but we don't have to contend with Hutch's season 4 porn star moustache, which I think is a pretty good trade.

Anyway, because I like to share the joy, here's a very short S&H clip. Featuring earnest!staring!Hutch and adorable!smirking!Starsky.

I think I need a Gran Torino icon. *ponders*

On last night's Front Row on BBC Radio 4, Mark Lawson and Mark Eccleston talking about new (cringeworthy-sounding) film I Love You, Man:

LAWSON: Now, we use these categories, Mark, we have rom-coms, chick-flicks, buddy-movies... Um, this is a newer one. This is called a bromance.

ECCLESTON: It is. Or a homme-com I think is the other way of looking at it. And in that respect I think it's quite fresh, basically. And it's a nice marketing tool for getting men who wouldn't be dragged screaming into the cineplex to see sort of traditionally female-centric romantic comedies, by presenting two men--one fat and hairy--on the poster so it doesn't look too slashy."

My response?
O_o ... what?! People on Radio 4 aren't supposed to know what slashy means! *flail*
(though as calliope85 pointed out, he clearly hasn't encountered LotR fandom)

But it's so much fun! And also a little procrastination.
So I stole this off lazy_daze and couldn't resist dumping my latest Word file into it...
I present Country Life Gimlet as a Wordle.

( Unveiling the masterpiece... )

Title: Five Times Copper Didn't Get His Hair Cut
Fandom: W.E. Johns' Gimlet King Series
Pairing: Trapper/Copper
Word count: 2100
Rating: PG-ish I suppose.
Synopsis:

Notes: It is a recurring "joke" in the books that Gimlet keeps ordering Copper to have his hair cut. Copper's excuses are many and varied, this is the reason I like to imagine. As far as I know, this is the only piece of Trapper & Copper (very mild) slash on the internet. I may be wrong, and I would be more than happy to find out that I am :D

Please be warned about Dick Van Dyke-worthy Cockney.
At least I don't think mine is any worse than W.E. Johns'.

( By way of additional information about the series... )

( Five Times Copper Didn't Get His Hair Cut )

So, months and months and months ago now, I signed up to this challenge, and have so far written (or rather, finished) precisely nothing at all. However, something is in the offing and I hope to get it finished this evening- so I thought I'd pre-emptively post the table to remind myself what I let myself in for.

I hope to be able to indulge my Trapper/Copper love with this, although I might sneak in some Biggles/Algy where necessary.

01. Beginnings	02. Middles	03. Endings	04. Time	05. Distance
06. Comrades	07. Enemies	08. Family	09. Loyalty	10. Betrayal
11. It's a lovely war	12. A long way to go	13. Never mind	14. I want to go home	15. Good-bye-ee
16. Flowers	17. Fields	18. Sun	19. Clear skies	20. Storm
21. Pack up your troubles	22. White cliffs	23. Home fires	24. When the lights go on again	25. We'll meet again
26. Journey	27. Chase	28. Capture	29. Escape	30. Author's choice

I'm probably going to be a tremendous bore about my aquarium for ever more, I can see it happening. But but but!

( Rambling about the aquarium. )

Oh, and I might have a job. Maybe. In Reading. Dunno yet.

Sorry that I suck and haven't replied to any LJ comments for ages!

Hooray more snow! This is now directly outside our back door. Oh how I love traumatising my mother.



Also, after the Saga of Aquarium Man, I finally have a fish tank! In which, according to the man in the fish shop, I can actually put fish in a couple of days rather that the couple of weeks I was expecting! Photos later when I've added the incredibly tasteful pottery for planting things in.

There's something quite awesome about waking up in the morning and looking out of the window and seeing this:



And then discovering that there's been a freezing fog and dashing out in your pyjamas and taking photos of everything.
( A couple more pictures here. )

I'm sure you all need convincing that Hawaii Five-O is brilliant. I mean, it's understandable that much of the world isn't as enlightened about it as I am. I won't rant and rave about it, and squee magnificently or anything like that, although I could.

No.

Below the cut guaranteed one image, and three bullet points of awesome.

( Right this way for condensed late-1960s cop show goodness. )

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you SO much for volunteering to write in any one of the fandoms I requested. Some of them have been round for ages, and some are relatively new, but I love them all with the fickleness of my happy little fangirl heart, and any new fic at all is awesome fic in my book.

Generally speaking I chose the pairings I did because they were slashy, but honestly I would be just as happy with something gen that pushed all the same buttons as the original material, namely deep friendship with a side order of banter.

I don't particularly like het, so I'd rather it wasn't there unless it's completely unavoidable. Mentions of ex-wives/wives/girlfriends would be fine, obviously, I've got no desire to erase them from canon, I just don't especially want to have to look at them :D (Except Della Street, omg I love her)

If you *are* going down the slash route, I'm not really fan of kink (although now I come to think of it, Crusoe and ropes would work) so it might be safest to avoid it since I have really rather tame tastes and would choose some sappy cuddling over almost everything any day, no matter how hot it is. One request I do have, please no mpreg, or fpreg, it's a giant squick for me.

Specifically:

Crusoe
As I said in the sign-up, I'd love to read about Friday and Crusoe and their madcap island adventures. I'd really prefer this to be as silly and stupidly cheesy as the series itself, because that's the way I like it. Just exactly how many pulleys *did* wash up from that shipwreck, anyway? Did Robinson Crusoe single-handedly invent orange juice? Why the heck don't they just build their own boat and sail off the island, if they're so good at making things?

Perry Mason
I love almost anything Perry Mason, but most of all Paul Drake. Anything involving Paul and I will be so unbelievably happy. If you'd like to try your take on his backstory, or add a tag to one of the existing cases, it's all good.

The Persuaders
I think my sign-up request just about covers it. Again, cheese-tacular madcap adventures would be *awesome*. I'm not really into the whole angst thing, you might be able to tell. An exotic location, some utterly ridiculous storyline, Danny getting knocked on the head/captured/carried off by pirates so that Brett has to go and rescue him...

Miami Vice
As long as Sonny doesn't come off girlier than he is, I'll be happy. I love him as a beer drinkin' football watchin' Buddy Holly listnin' fishin' kind of guy and I love the way it's him and Rico against the world sometimes, with their little eye-rolls at each other and the way they seem to see things the same unless it's personal. I'd prefer something set seasons 1-3 before it got too Doom Doom Doom Gloom and AAAANGST. Which in itself is awesome, but I do prefer their happier (and mushier) interactions.

Finally, Christmas lunch for me will involve trolling into the next county to visit relatives, so I might not be able to comment on your wonderful wonderful story as quickly as I'd like. That doesn't mean I don't love it and I will comment as soon as I am able to get back to my computer and obsessively checking my email.

Thank you so so much! I will love it!
Love from,
Me.

HAWAII FIVE-O WITH MORE COWBELL
Don't tell me this is not genius. :D

As if my complement of '60s-'70s cop shows wasn't comprehensive enough.
*overdoses on McGarrett cheese*

Title: Bear Valley
Fandom: Perry Mason (1957 TV series)
Pairing: Della, Perry, Paul. Maybe a bit slashy, you know me.
Word count: 1900
Synopsis: Fills in some of the gaps in "The Case of the Angry Mourner". Even on vacation, Perry can't escape his job. Unfortunately that means Paul can't, either.

Notes: For calliope85, because it's her birthday! Extremely mild spoilers for the episode.

( First, some visual aids. )

( And on to the fic )

I like plants. My house is turning into a mini jungle, I have a trellis in the living room with Andy the killer creeper creeping quietly over it, I have ferns in the bathroom and a lily by the washbasin. There's a sedum by the kitchen sink and a giant spiderplant on the bookcase in in the living room.

Unfortunately I'm a bit crap at looking after my houseplants. I've been lucky mostly that I seem to have unkillable species because I forget to water them with alarming regularity - only remembering to do so when the spiderplants go all pale and wan-looking and the lemon-scented geranium goes all limp and pathetic.

My tiny little garden has also been a bit of a struggle. The soil is utterly rubbish, mostly sand and bits of cement rubble (mmm lime). To counteract this, I have a lot of containers full of things that don't mind if i forget to water them, like aloes and succulents, so they're doing fine.

I tried planting out various shrubs and plants into the craptacular soil, but there's virtually no depth, and even with the addition of compost and fertiliser, my precious garden centre plants never lasted long. It didn't help that i was fighting a constant battle with weeds, which seemed to have no problem at all with the crappiness of the soil or the neglect.

A few months ago, after the neighbours had weeded their little patch to within an inch of its life, I realised that I should probably do the same before the landlady wandered by and made sarcastic comments about the height of the growth in my garden like she did last time. When I got out there though, I realised that some of the weeds were actually quite... well... nice. There was one thing that had nice purple flowers, and another thing that had such gorgeous green leaves and yellow flowers that it seemed a shame to pull it up. So I instituted a selective weeding policy.

I pulled out all the ugly things, and the stubborn things which don't come out once they're above knee height. I left the pretty things alone to be pretty. And my garden looked pretty good.

Then the thing with the nice green leaves and yellow flowers got blackfly and the flowers died, so i pulled that all up, along with the ugly and stubborn things that had sprouted in the meantime. I left the purple thing and a new squishy thing with tiny leaves which had decided that it liked the corner by the airconditioning unit where it gets all damp.

And my garden looked nice again. My garden still looks nice. My water plant containers stand in one corner surrounded by my pretty weeds. My aloes and succulents don't look like they're in a desert of sand and cement chippings. It's awesome. I'm gardening with weeds. Best of all, my garden actually looks like a garden. The birds and insects all like my garden best, and the crowning moment came this afternoon when I heard a frog calling from somewhere in the damp leafy greenery of my weed garden. I feel so proud.

Shame I'm moving out in a month. :(

TO LIE - "be prostrate; be in a horizontal position"
as in "I lie down in bed every night".
"I LAY down in bed and stared at the ceiling."
"I AM LYING down at the moment."/ "He WAS LYING down when the phone rang."
"Good dog! Go and LIE down."

TO LAY - "to put in a horizontal position"
as in "Every evening I lay out the clothes I am going to wear the following day."
"I laid out the ingredients for my cake."
"I was laying out the photographs from my trip when..."
"Lay down your weapons!"

THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT VERBS.

How often in the past week or so have I read variants on: "Starsky was laying on top of Hutch...", "I'm going to go and lay down", or "When he woke up, he saw his friend laying there..". Each time I've felt that urge to get all grammar-nazi in the comments thread and have to restrain myself because I don't want to be that person who sneers at other people when I know full well that my punctuation and grammar are far from perfect.

But we all have our pet peeves.

Should I be letting myself get so worked up about things like this, or is it part of the inevitable evolution of the English language? Without it we'd all still be speaking like Chaucer I suppose (which might be fun).

I'm turning into my mother. She would get annoyed every time she heard someone say "bored of". As a result I now take care to say "bored with" and "tired of". But "bored of" is so common in speech these days, and a quick Google search of "bored with it" vs. "bored of it" just now turned up 427,000 hits for "with" and 388,000 hits for "of", so clearly it's catching up. There's no doubt that "bored of it" is easier to say.

I don't know what my point is here. I'm not against the evolution of the English language. I just wish it would do it a bit more slowly so that I didn't have get annoyed by things like lie versus lay, and the appropriation of "sick" to mean really good, and "bored of", while they're settling into their new positions in the dictionary. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that thanks to the internet, things which would have been kept to slang use, such as the aforementioned "sick", are now easily able to enter written English. *eyes blog with suspicion*

'cos, dude, if it's on the 'net, it's totes right. Right?

Love it or hate it, it seems like you can’t go more than a couple of hundred metres in a city centre these days without tripping over a Starbucks. They’re all reassuringly the same. Green aprons (green for calm, calm, don’t hurt the baristas, for they provide coffee), beige and maroon walls, nice earthy tones. Pointless jazz on in the background, because clearly that’s what I want to listen to when I’m Being Careful of my Extremely Hot Beverage.

The sad thing is that while I know that every Starbucks in the entire world will be exactly the same (and according to Wikipedia there are 15,011 branches in 44 countries) I will still go sheep-like unto the baristas for my Chai Tea Latte when I get the craving for some cinnamon.

Which is why we all flock there of course. It’s familiar. In a country like Japan, where both the spoken and written word is so completely different to English, Starbucks becomes a little island of reassuring American calm in a cacophony of kanji.

It’s why I wasn’t surprised, on entering the Starbucks closest to Kyoto station the day before yesterday, to find the entire place packed full of tourists at 9am. Your average westerner, faced with the prospect of a Japanese breakfast of grilled salmon, miso soup and rice, washed down with some green or barley tea, stares blankly for a few minutes and then cries, “… but where’s the coffee?” Desperate for caffeine, they crawl blindly from their ryokan, navigating only by the scent of freshly-ground coffee beans.

Rice for breakfast is also a bit of a leap. Rice for lunch? No problem. Rice for dinner? Sure! Rice… Breakfast? What? Breakfast as well? But Starbucks lures us in with the siren calls of scones, the melodic music of muffins, the call of cake. Hooray for processed wheat flour!

Back to the day before yesterday, and in I crawled, a fellow craver of caffeine. But ho! There was a queue! That selfsame Starbucks had been a breeze the previous day at 5pm. The staff were highly efficient and the process, I think, took slightly less time than my average Starbucks experience (and they all had better hair). So what was going on?

I began to eavesdrop, and it didn’t take long before the reason for the delay became clear.

The people at the front of the queue did not speak Starbucks.

I will just take a moment to explain something about the Starbucks in Japan. The menus are almost identical to those you’d find in a Starbucks in the U.S. or the U.K., only everything is transliterated into the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So I can waltz in there quite happily and order my “gurandei saizu no tazo chai tee ra-te kudasai” and be 100% sure that I will end up with exactly what I want. I’m not sure how it works in other countries, but I do suspect that (as a result of shrewd marketing on the part of the Starbucks chain) they will have followed this pattern with as many of the countries they have invaded moved into as possible. What could be easier? Instant oasis of American; no struggling with the menu. The same baked goods available in every café, the same drinks (with regional and seasonal variations to add interest), all adding to that cosy Starbucks feeling of familiarity.

So it was with shock and a little awe that I realised that the people at the front of the queue were painstakingly explaining what they wanted, in English, using such no-no Starbucks words as “large” and “coffee”. In the same sentence.

“A large coffee,” he said in that slow, careful voice that people use to talk to people of a different nationality. The barista looked a little embarrassed as she got out her demonstration cups with the air of a sex education teacher in her introductory class.

“Tall, grande, venti,” she said, indicating which was which, and modelling the words for the customer much as I would for my class of eight year olds with new vocabulary.

He pointed to the venti cup, and said again, “Coffee.”

The barista looked pained, and raised her menu, which has the Japanese and English names for each of the drinks listed side by side. “Many coffee,” she tried hesitantly, in English, “Which one?”

It occurred to me then, that (at least between English speaking countries and Japan) Starbucks has become New Esperanto; a language of universal expression. An Englishwoman and a Japanese can come together and communicate without barriers in the language of Coffee. Provided both parties are down with the lingo, successful transactions can be made again and again, with satisfaction on both sides. What business language can compare to that? Sure, nothing more complex than, “Do you want that to go?” can be expressed, but what does that matter? What more does the human race need?

I pity those who do not speak Starbucks. I can walk venti because I know that a Frappuccino is cold. I need fear nothing when I can ask for a tall Iced Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte without batting an eyelid. The revolution is coming, and it’s wearing a green apron.

Have you had your caffeine today?

There are a few songs that are just so *perfect* that they make me crazy. In a good way. In a "I MUST LISTEN TO THIS SONG ON REPEAT FOR THREE DAYS" kind of way. I can't even quantify what it is, but some songs just grab me and give me a pure glee injection on the first listening.

Most recently it's "Hey Julie" by Fountains of Wayne, and I think it's the simplicity of it that makes me love it, but there's also something in the lyrics- the way they sort of rhyme in the chorus, but never in the places you expect. And it's perky.

He's got me running round the office like a gerbil on a wheel,
He can tell me what to do but he can't tell me what to feel

Other awesomely perfect songs:

- Hurry Sundown by The Outlaws (but only the studio version)
Southern Rock ghost story that just flows together perfectly- including a change in strum pattern between the verse and the chorus that makes me shiver every time. OH MAN IT IS SO GOOD. (and the resolution from minor to major on the last chord just *makes* it and I will stop gleeing now. :D)

- Train in Vain by The Clash
An inexplicably happy song about getting dumped.

- Walk of Life by Dire Straits
♥Mark Knopfler having so much FUN.

- Fight the Good Fight by Triumph
And how much do I adore SPN for introducing me to this song. Whoooooo. *air guitars and headbangs*

I'm sure there's about a billion more, but those are my top "these songs need no improving whatsoever" tracks. Anyone else have a list of songs that make them drop stuff to air-guitar and sing along? Or am I a freak? :D