yonmei

11:12 am: A House MD fanfic story as posted on Fandom Secrets
( Though House would actually use Monster Trucks )

Inspired by JuliaBohemian's Sixty Minutes With Doctor Nolan and FourLeggedFish's How Not To Be Boring.




Tags: fanfiction reviews, house md

10:21 am: The kind of fannish argument I like LEAST
Well, technically, I suppose the kind I like LEAST is where it gets linked to on F-W and people start posting stirrer comments in order to get more interesting flames from a banked and dying war.

Or even worse, where people start outing and banning.

But mostly:

I dislike the kind of fannish argument where both (or all) sides are clearly equally passionate about their POV, but one side is - while passionately advocating their POV as Something Very Important - dismissing the other side as a Nugatory Fuss being made by stupid people who just Don't Understand.

In any fannish argument, you can fairly rely that all sides of it will include stupid people who are making Nugatory Fuss. But the rhetorical move which asserts that anyone taking one side in an argument is Just Making A Fuss About Nothing, whereas their opponents are Serious Fans On Serious Fannish Business, is... an annoying rhetorical device, which the Greeks probably had a word for.

In other news: broad daylight, minus 3. So cold that the snow which fell yesterday, is still powdery-white even on pavements which get so much traffic that it usually turns to slush.

In other fannish news, I found a writer I like via Fourleggedfish's favourites, Htebazytook, and three stories I like in particular: Pigtails, which is structured like an episode told from Wilson's POV (second season); Verisimilitude, season 5, which is structured like an episode from House's point of view on a bad pain day, and Quite Contrary, a story about Another Hospital Employee who sporadically runs into House and Wilson talking in the elevator.



Tags: fanfiction reviews, fannish snark, house md, weather

01:01 pm: Fanfiction review for "Sixty Minutes with Dr Nolan"
A response to the latest chapter (C29) of Juliabohemian's 6th season story, Sixty Minutes With Dr Nolan.

( Review contains spoilers for up to C29 of the story, plus up to the Ignorance is Bliss episode of House 6th season )





Tags: fanfiction reviews, house md

09:11 am: House/Wilson: First Shot


A cannon is a large gun, usually on wheels, which used to be used in battles; a heavy automatic gun, especially one that is fired from an aircraft; if someone is a loose cannon, they do whatever they want and nobody can predict what they are going to do.

A canon of texts is a list of them that is accepted as genuine or important: in fannish usage, "canon" is that which defines the universe, and is usually taken to be the episodes of that show as aired, not unaired pilots, or original scripts, or information from interviews, or novelizations or novel spinoffs - though sometimes it simply means "definitely not fan fiction". (Fannish Definitions)

So. House/Wilson: Canoning into each other with great force! Or possibly being fired at each other in battle. You choose.




Tags: fannish snark, house md, i watch tv obsessively

12:48 pm: To do list till April
I have just been working out my To Do list till the end of March. For work, that is, though it includes such stuff as two weeks annual leave over Christmas.

One of my colleagues, USHomosamurai (who went back to the US a couple of years ago) asked me once why the British financial year runs from 1st April to 31st March. I didn't know, but was able to tell her that in Samuel Pepys time, the year's number changed on 1st April - his diary makes that clear. So the habit of changing the year's number on the 1st of January is something less than four hundred years old, but - I was able to work this out from first principles - can't be very much less, because the US cloned its calendar from the UK in the 18th century, and the US (say American friends) has financial and calendar year running concurrently.

But why (asked USHomosamurai) would the new year ever have started on 1st April? I thought about it, and shrugged: "Could be because the Roman Empire's New Year began 1st April, and you know how bureaucrats are...."

I don't care for today's XKCD. It's cruel to physics lecturers.

I did, however, love last night's House episode, even if it was rather cruel to House. Cruelty to House is what makes fanfic fun. ( light spoilers for what's either 6.8 or 6.9 depending how you're counting )

I have finished writing the skeleton of my Yuletide story.



Tags: house md, to do lists, work, xkcd, yuletide

12:25 pm: If I ever use the word "cerulean" to describe House's eyes
Please take away my writer's licence.

Cerulean is not just a fancy word for "blue", though I'd guess from some writers' use they think it is. There is a specific pigment of which the primary chemical constituent is cobalt, which has been used by painters to get a stable blue colour without greenish undertones since it was invented in the early 19th century.

It's also got a specific colour-name use to describe two hues of blue: very light blue (synonyms sapphire, lazulin); or a dark almost purplish blue which is also known as "bright blue", oddly enough. Both can be called "sky blue".

But really. Like most people with pure blue eyes, Greg House's eyes sometimes look colourless (absence of pigment) sometimes you can see the blue colour more strongly. They do not ever look like sapphire, or like potassium, or like cerulean blue paint.

What POV character in House MD would be likely ever to look at blue eyes and think "cerulean!" anyway? None of them are painters. Or photographers. Or even graphics designers.


Tags: house md, write write write

09:06 pm: House, Cottages, and death
( Mildly spoilery for up to Season 6 - Known Unknowns )


Tags: house md, i watch tv obsessively

12:59 pm: How far is it?
( Sort of a spoiler for House 6.03 Tyrant, if you squint funny )

Tags: due south, flashfic, house md

04:06 pm: At sea.
Today, does not exist. We set sail yesterday.

Meantime, I have a dental appointment tomorrow at 2pm, and an ENT appointment at 3:20. Oh joy, where is thy sting?

Also, I finally saw the second half of the House sixth-season opener, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler when I say that while the West Wing season four finale/fifth season opener was more of a let-down between fantastic buildup to disappointingly-flat, that's not saying very much. I mean there was angst and trembling blue eyes and so forth, but other than that, really. It was awful.



Tags: dentist panic, house md, nose of a nose, running away to sea, west wing

11:41 am: Tamarind and Tomato Soup
I decided I would feel better if I had an early lunch.

Since I started getting a box of organic veg delivered fortnightly, and am in possession of a slow cooker and a stick blender, I tend to think of "vegetable soup" as, well, the thing you do with vegetables you can't think what else to do with. I have on occasion made a really bad soup (not nearly as often as I have made a very dull soup) but mostly the soups I make are fine: tasty, nourishing, good for lunch or dinner, worth sharing but not particularly exciting.

Once in a while, though... This is the soup I made last night:

( recipe )




Tags: house md, lunch, my recipes, soup, tamarind, tomato

11:01 am: Five Favourite TV series
Meme gacked from alixtii: Pick five of your favourite shows, in no particular order, before you read the below questions, then answer them!

1. Blake's 7
2. Doctor Who
3. M*A*S*H
4. House
5. West Wing

( Q&A )

Tags: blake's 7, doctor who, fannishness, house md, hugh laurie, lists, m*a*s*h, meme, slash, someone died, tv addiction, west wing

10:35 pm: House and #welovethenhs
Of House, I missed "Big Baby" and "The Greater Good", because in the load of stuff I had to get done before I left for Montreal, setting the video to record House never made it far enough up the list.

I just watched "Unfaithful" and "The Softer Side", on Sky's Saturday night repeat, so: can House fans tell me if I need to seek out and watch the two I missed, or didn't it matter?

At something after midnight this morning, having dutifully stayed awake in order to bring my sleeping patterns back to UK-normal, I fell over something and hit my wrist on something. It hurt and I felt stupid and I got into bed and glanced at my wrist and saw that where I had hit it was a blue oval that seemed to be swelling perceptibly as I watched.

So I rang NHS24 in a bit of a panic and talked to someone helpful who said, more or less, that if I could move my hand about without agony and I wasn't on warfarin, then probably I was OK to go to sleep and take it to A&E the next morning. (The nearest A&E department, thanks to some excruciatingly stupid decisions made by the Lothians NHS Trust in the 1990s, is miles and miles away and the only way to get there and back at 1am is by an excruciatingly expensive taxi: also I had at this point had no sleep for nearly 36 hours and the thought of another delay to going to sleep was actually nightmarish.)

I slept: I woke at 1pm. Still tired. Both cats asleep on me. It took me over two hours to get dressed and get out of the house, and then my neighbor wanted to talk to me about the new washing line: it was nearly five when I actually got to A&E (it's a 45-minute bus ride on the 21, though at least the 21 takes me all the way) and my wrist felt so much better I actually felt a bit of an idiot for walking through the door labelled EMERGENCY, though I would have felt like a bigger one if I'd just gone home again.

I got seen after only 15 minutes or so waiting, and got dismissed in less than five, with instructions to take a couple of days off work if I found typing difficult. I am experimenting. So far it's OK. Of course I just took the last of my paracetamol-with-codeine. Yes, I have a massive bruise on my right wrist; no, apparently nothing is wrong but bruising. Which is, you know, good to know, even at the cost of a 90-minute bus ride and my bus fare.

I got home about seven, having this time remembered I needed fresh fruit and milk (the item 9 on yesterday's list I kept forgetting about) when I was passing Scotmid, which was still open, though Tattie Shaws would have closed. (Somehow, I never felt like going for a walk in the rain yesterday.)

Wolf is no longer sulking. Bob is awfully clingy.

Tags: house md, i watch tv obsessively, my health

12:54 am: Taste, and garden, and House
My friends who got civil-partnered in Plockton came round this afternoon to return some picture cards I bought and to thank me for their afternoon at Taste, so that's a win (they had a lovely time in Italy, too).

Also I had a landscape gardener (the one who did my clover lawn) round to see if she could take down my washing-line pole safely (no, she said, when she took in how tall it is and how heavy, but she knew a guy who could) and about putting in paving for a patio at the back of the garden.

Also I went to the gym. I watched Bremner, Bird, and Fortune remind us all of how everyone smart had been predicting the financial disaster we were heading into for years and years (they used flashback material from Bird and Fortune's earlier dialogues: I remember the one about the Name at Lloyds and the one about the bank manager who liked his customers to go into debt).

Also: House 5.06, "Joy". No spoilers, only; eep, kissage; also, eep, sad baby-plot.




Tags: financial crisis meltdown whatever, garden record, house md, i watch tv

11:51 pm: Sunday, Sunday
I did writing this morning - a good morning's worth: and I baked bread, and mixed up another couple of batches of savoury and sweet bread with buckwheat, and I did laundry, and went to the gym (where I did just on 1 hour 15 minutes of exercise because there was an enjoyable David Suchet Poirot episode on, The ABC Murders, with lots of lovely Poirot/Hastings moments. I like it when Poirot calls Hastings mon ami, and when they do the washing-up together, and when Poirot gets a really good idea he wants to tell Hastings first.

I felt awesomely unfit, though. But I also experimented with Twittering my gymstats, and discovered when I came to check that #gym is actually in quite frequent use.

And watched fifth-season House. This was the "Lucky Thirteen" episode. Why couldn't one of the boy ducklings have turned out to be bisexual? Couldn't Chase come out? And then Chase and Foreman could have sex!

Tags: gym membership, house md, i watch tv obsessively, just my life really

07:12 pm: The character list meme
The list of characters





( Copracat asked: Why do birds sing? )

( Copracat asked: Don't you regret betraying her? )

( Magpyr asked: If 3 could go back in time, what is the one thing they would change about their life? )

( Magpyr asked: What is 5's favorite food? )

( Magpyr asked: If 7 were to be a dog, what breed would they be? )

( MuninnHuginn asked: Number 13, what is the length of a piece of string? )

( MuninnHuginn asked: Number 6, was it 'in the greenhouse with the conductors baton' or 'the downstairs loo with a grand piano'? )

( EileenLufkin asked: 2&11: do they fight each other, fight crime, or have hot sex? )

( EileenLufkin asked: Question for number four; 1, 8, and 9; cliff, marry, shag? )

( Ruthi asked: 1 and 7, how do they save the world, and from what? )

( 12, 14, and 15, on finding themselves ignored )

Tags: babylon 5, blake's 7, books are what i read, dr who, highlander, house md, m*a*s*h, macgyver, shakespeare, slash slash slashity slash, star trek

08:08 pm: Redemption: originality...
I'm sitting in the "It's not SF but I like it", thinking about the past panel (the last one I moderated) on originality - why are there no more original TV series/movies?

And, sadly, we concluded: it's not just the accountants, it's because to a certain extent no one wants all original, all the time: we all want to just veg out in front of something we expect: and this fits surprisingly well into the discussion of what we like when we're not watching SF/F.

Which is: West Wing, House, Due South, The Professionals, M*A*S*H, Spooks, Northern Exposure - genre shows with a big overlap between their fans and SF/F fans.

Time Team, Ajay points out. Mythbusters, Victorian Farm...

(I also said: Have I Got News For You, As Time Goes By, and the novels of Jane Austen.)





Tags: house md, m*a*s*h, redemption, west wing

12:09 pm: House, pilot episode: thoughts about writing and speech
I caught the first episode of House MD on Five last night: I just switched on, saw House, and thought, cool! Second season already? But no: they're broadcasting the whole first season again.

( House )

Tags: house md, i watch tv

12:36 pm: Louiselux asked Fred
1. Platypus or wombat?

( excitement or ice-cream? )

2. What's the most important book to you from your childhood?

( I can never answer this kind of question. )

3. Describe your ideal house.

( Just one?  )

4. Would you rather spend a day with Greg House or Bertie Wooster?

( Depends how fragile I was feeling )

5. If you were going to make a documentary, what would it be about?

( the Botanical Gardens! )

Tags: botanics, c.s.lewis, fred, house md, hugh laurie, leguin, tolkien

01:08 pm: Meme: Five Characters
Five Characters I Want To Punch in the Face. Or rather bitch-slap, since it seems more appropriate somehow. (nicked from snowgrouse)

The one thing all five of these characters have in common is a smug self-satisfaction - a certainty that they're in the right and they are the centre of the universe. *eyes the line-up* Some of them, of course, with more justification than others. And any pain they might cause is nothing because they didn't feel it themselves.

None of them are outright villains. I tend to find outright villains either not interesting enough to slap around, or so painfully interesting I want to vivisect them slowly and in public, not just bitch-slap.

( my five )

Tags: blake's 7, buffy, house md, i watch tv obsessively, lists, m*a*s*h, meme meme meme, star trek

10:19 pm: OMGWTF???
TelevisionWithoutPity is down?

But this is an emergency! I have just seen "Control" and "Mob Rules" and I want to read the episode re-cap!

Hm. Perhaps I should ( do nothing: the site is back up )

PS TelevisionWithoutPity hates me. The site is up: the House page is down. I got to read the first page of the recap of "Control", and then it decided to take it away from me. Without even the decency to offer me a month off clinic duty first. *sulks*

Tags: house md, slash slash slashity slash