Will we call the state 'moon' do you think?

Ugh! I just got finished making cookies and squares for Fernando and his friends on their trip to Quebec City. I mucked up the squares (well I mucked up one layer, and the other layer I blame on the authors) so had to remake them! And now I'm stuck with a fridge full of mediocre peanut butter squares.

I need cheering up, so I thought I'd share some Helene Hanff (84 Charing Cross Road) with you...

March 25, 1950

   Frank Doel, what are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYthing, you are just sitting AROUND.
   Where is Leigh Hunt? Where in the Oxford Verse? Where is the Vulgate and dear goofy John Henry, I thought they'd be nice uplifting reading for Lent and NOTHING do you send me.
   you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out i did it and take my library card away.

October 15, 1950

   WELL!!
   All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop--a BOOKSHOP--starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper. I said to John Henry when he stepped out of it:
   'Would you believe a thing like that, Your Eminence?' and he said he wouldn't. You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don't even know which war it was.
   [...] I want the Q anthology. [...] Why don't you wrap it in pages LCXII and LCXIII so I can at least find out who won the battle and what war it was?

May 8, 1960

   ...Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but i'm just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.

That last line about the fruit really reminded me of Ms. Brownlow's emails. Here's one of her recent missives, for your comparison and enjoyment:
   I read last night that Gingrich is planning to have six space flights a week, and once there are 13,000 people permanently living on the moon he wants to make it a state.
   No wonder he's the leading republican candidate at the moment!  Such a visionary!  Many republicans say he's pretty much the smartest person they've ever met. (That's staggering. But probably not the way they meant it to be.)
   Once again: betcha don't have politicians like that. Bet we're the only ones who have candidates so ambitious they think their country owns the moon. Our 51st state!  Will we call the state 'moon' do you think?  Or something else?  Do we own the whole moon?  We'll have to ask our candidates.

    

From New York

One of the books I'm reading right now is the extremely charming 84 Charing Cross Road. It's a true story, a series of letters between a New York writer (Helene Hanff) and the employees of a London second hand book shop, from whom she orders books.

The style of Hanff's writing reminds me of Ms. Brownlow. And as Ms. Brownlow is in New York, and I used to be a bookseller, and we love books, it's all very fitting.

 Above is the edition I have--good thing I'm reading a second hand copy, which feels right. I almost ordered the second book, where Hanff goes to London, but it's a good thing I didn't--it's included in this volume. Do you see any indication of that? Neither do I. I only found out when looking at the rights page, and had to flip through the volume to find where it starts.

Now I know to get Anne Bancroft when we make a movie of Ms. Brownlow's life.
        

A Humany-wumany Christmas

On Christmas Eve the Space channel showed a whole bunch of Dr Who Christmas specials. (Having special Christmas editions of TV shows is a particularly British thing--they're often longer than an hour, have special guest actors etc.)

A man running around Victorian London calling himself the Doctor! Wha? Wha?

I taped the Dr Who ones and we watched them over two days. They were SO GOOD. I'd heard that the new series was great, and sampled it a couple times, but now I'm ready to be hooked baby!

The Master! And Time Lords!!

When the series was rebooted in 2005 I watched the first episode or so, but was underwhelmed, so I didn't continue. By the time it got great I was in school and didn't have time to watch. (Same reason why I didn't get beyond season 1 with Battlestar Galactica, even though I was loving it.)

Lion, Witch & Wardrobe inspired, so WWII setting - which always makes me weepy!

What's so great about the new Dr Whos is that they're a wonderful combination of imagination, action adventure, strange creatures and robots, humor, and sadness. They're very touching--or "humany wumany" as the latest Dr would say. In fact, they're very much like Connie Willis' books.

A well done play on A Christmas Carol.

I loved them all, but my favorite one took place on a spaceship with a Titanic storyline. If I'd been alone I probably would have let it all go and wept buckets, like I did watching the movie Starbuck (no relation to Battlestar G.) But I didn't want the husbando staring at me, so I just wept a couple silent tears into the non-vegan cheesies, and blew my nose a bit.

It also had a good joke about London's inhabitants all fleeing for the countryside at Christmastime, because every Christmas there's some sort of alien disaster (that is to say, all the previous Christmas specials.)

Hope you guys enjoyed your Christmases too. :-)