I don’t know (well, in fact I do know; post about that later) how I got this earworm about 3 months late or 8 months early; it’s a St Nicholas song. But the lyrics are deliciously complex and I’ll dissect them for fun.

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Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)

A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?

When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.

But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.

They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.

There’s a statue of the boy with his finger in the dyke in Spaarndam. According to this rather good article about Hans Brinker, it was placed there “in order to please the American tourists”, who all wanted to see exactly where the boy had put his finger in the dyke. Also, I recommend reading past the pictures of the statue in the first link.

(Here is my earlier post about Hans Brinker)

From sciamanna; she mentioned it on IRC. I don’t have any one “my novel” at the moment —one fatally stalled, three in submisson-anxiety coma— but I’ll answer for A Voice from the North, colloquially known as “the Frozen North thing”.

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landaulet

It floated into my mind when I was half-awake at 5:45 or so, trying to ignore a headache and to visualise subtle shades of midnight blue because green made me queasy and red hurt too much. A parting shot of the dream engine, I suppose, at the tail-end of a jumble of stuff inspired by the Prisoner of Zenda movie we watched last night. A splendid movie: with effective deliberate over-the-topness and very true to the book.

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Last Sunday, when I had too much of a cold to go to church, the choir was only two sopranos and a tenor: neither of the basses could make it either. Last night, at choir practice, they not only told me they’d missed me, but demonstrated how: they’d had no fundament.

I’ve been told before that I “keep the choir together”, but I never believed it, just acknowledged it as a compliment, perhaps even a left-handed one: not much quality of my own, I’m just the glue. Now I know how. Even if I am just the glue, without that it’s in danger of falling apart. Not that I think I’m indispensable, they did do well enough without me and I don’t think many people noticed, but it’s a nice feeling to be really useful.

After that, we spent most of the practice session working out different ways to cope with incomplete choirs: the bass and I singing melody with the tenor a third above us (in an absolute sense a sixth below me, but it doesn’t sound that way), to which the choirmistress said “you’re doing better than we did!”, various configurations of three parts, ways to fix an awkward pitch that the priest hands to us. Enlightening, bracing, fun.

This is part 2 of the Hans Brinker review, with the names deconstruction.

If you’re actually using this page as a resource —I decided to split the blog post in two when I suddenly realised that some people might want to do that— please comment or mail to tell me if you’d prefer the names to be ordered thematically or alphabetically instead.

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I don’t know what prompted it [ETA: a daughter trying to keep a beer bottle from squirting by plugging it with her finger], but I read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. And couldn’t stop reading it once I was underway, though it’s very dated (that figures; it was published in 1865) and it kept me wishing I had a time machine so I could go and be Mary Mapes Dodge’s copy editor, because she badly needed one. It’s surprisingly gripping.

Note that Hans Brinker is not the name of the boy with his finger in the dike. It’s a story-in-the-story in this book. That story is not, and never has been, something that every Dutch child knows; it’s only known in the Netherlands from translations and retellings of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. I shudder to think that whole generations of children in the United States had most of their knowledge of the Netherlands from this book alone. No wonder so many tourists arrive with serious misconceptions.

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A while ago some people on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup tossed the idea around to have a dedicated IRC channel where people could drop in and out to talk about writing (and, as writers do, about cats, chocolate, and just about anything else), to shout out wordcounts without littering the newsgroup, and to ask “what’s that word again?” in someone’s general direction and get an answer immediately so it doesn’t stop the flow.

This disappeared into the general Usenet nowhere for a while, until it came up again just when I happened to have time, so I went and set it up. It’s been up for two weeks now and it’s started working as intended. People drop in and out and talk about anything that happens to be relevant or interesting (though, at the moment, very much about bread-baking; the other hardcore baker and I have already got two other people to take it up), shout out wordcounts, ask for words and toss around plot ideas.

Some people feared that the IRC channel would take the interesting discussion out of the newsgroup, but that seems not to be happening: the chat is mostly social and practical, immediate, whereas the more thoughtful discussion is still in the newsgroup, and even comes back to the newsgroup from the channel (“that’s a good idea, shall I post it or do you want to?”)

It’s not exclusive, though it’s ex-directory: if you don’t do Usenet, but read this and think you’ll fit in with a loose group of …er… idiosyncratic writers, don’t hesitate to drop in. It’s #rasfc on irc.freenode.net, and if you mention my name (I’m irina_r there) someone will know where you’re coming from.

Because there was no handy bus to where I wanted to go. Also, it was splendid weather for a bike ride, sunny and crisp but not too cold.

Or, alternatively, I decided on the bike because that’s where I happened to be when I made the decision to write what I’m writing now, rather than in a seat near the front of the No. 5 bus to Colmschate.

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