The Witching Well

I’ve upgraded to the new WordPress 2.1 and now my links are gone.

They still exist in my control panel, thank all the forgotten gods, but my template doesn’t seem to be able to find them.

And I don’t have time to deal with it right now. So, I am linkless at least for the night. I’ll look at it in the morning.

Oh my Gods, but this is amusing. Not only the sketch itself, which was filmed in 1963 and runs just under 11 minutes, but the fact that it’s traditionally shown every New Year’s Eve on German TV, even though it’s hardly known in the UK, where it originated.

Set up: Miss Sophie has outlived all 4 of her dearest friends but has nonetheless invited them to dinner for her 90th birthday.

Dinner for One

Via Zornhau.

I know people who are huge readers of SFF who have never read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Some of them have tried and pronounced his dense, description-laden prose “boring.” Some have heard this pronouncement from others and shied away because of it. And this breaks my heart, because LotR was an omnipresent backdrop behind my entire childhood. My father read it to my brother and me on Sunday afternoons when we were still young enough to think sprawling on the livingroom carpet, listening to Dad read stories was cool. The family boat was named Gandalf. When I was 12 or so and read it for the first time on my own, I made fun of my Dad for weeks over how badly he mispronounced his Elvish (”Daddy, say ‘Caradhras’”).

But it wasn’t just the fact that it was Dad’s favorite book. It was because Tolkien built a world you could immerse yourself in. And because he described it in a way that sucked you into it and kept you there for the duration. You could feel the midges biting you in Midgewood. You could hear the Elves singing in Lothlorien. You could see the White Tower of Minas Tirith shining in the morning light, standing obstinately in the Dark Lord’s way. (Of course, when I say “you” I mean myself.) This is because Tolkien understood how to use words to paint pictures, how to use their rhythm to set a mood.

And it makes me all kinds of happy that Elizabeth Bear gets it.

Alright, actually they’re gummy bears, but they’re playing orcs for this stunning reenactment of the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

Eric Burns has officially won the award for the most creative and romantic marriage proposal ever.

Congratulations, you two!!!

I think I’m liking this one with the green accents. I’m still tweaking it a bit, so it may jump about some before it settles down.

If anyone notices any wierdness at this point, please do let me know. I’ve tested in Firefox 1.5 and IE 6 on PC, so if it goes wonky in some other browser, especially on Mac or Unix, I won’t know unless someone says something.

I’ve been feeling like the old Well needs a bit of freshening up. Consequently, the place may look a mite weird on-and-off over the next few days, while I try on new themes and do some other rearranging.

Read Orm the Beautiful by Elizabeth Bear.

I’ve just added a new link to the sidebar: Separated by a Common Language. It’s a lovely little blog about the English language on both sides of the Atlantic, written by an American linguist living in Britain, which I discovered via the Language Log.