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Congratulations! Yeah, battening down the hatches and wondering which username/avatar will live past Kinjnarok.

I just knocked off Step Aside, Pops. She's wonderful.

See below. That said, I think they were the only two I caught, which is, looking back, pretty impressive for a book this size.

I've got a great deal of affection for Middlemarch. It was striking to me, on a reread, how Eliot completely flouts the "show don't tell" philosophy that would later be taught in so many creative writing classes, with Dorothea or Will going through complete mental evaluations of how they felt or what they wanted to…

I just got done with the BP triple feature; good stuff looking at the world outside the NC facility, and I think I like the art (at least with the first two), better, though the original art's compelling enough.

He states that the Barbary States had been subject to the Ottoman Sultan since the Muslim Conquest, which is something like an eight-century-long record scratch. There's another even more minor one I caught towards the end, when he mentions the 93rd Highlanders at the Battle of New Orleans as one of the British Army's…

If that's one of the Penguin collections, it's a great place to start.

Evans is awesome and that Third Reich trilogy one of the best histories written yet this century (hard, too, not to love a man who has high profile dustups with both David Irving and Michael Gove); he's written a book on historiography, too, which is really good (and I still need to read his Pursuit of Power, his…

Heading into a summer reading fast (probably to last until August) so I can concentrate more on my drawing (and, once I return, long-term projects like The Arabian Nights and Proust). That said…

Discovery Canada expects nothing less!

"That was close, friend."

"I just fell on my twenty-sided die!"

I've actually seen it "cold" (reviewed it for a book on British horror films) and the only two good things about it are the Istanbul location shooting and the fact that Blood of Fu Manchu is actually worse.

It was weird seeing Kerr Smith show up on the short-lived (but weirdly compelling due to a cast selling the hell out of it*) patriotic post-9/11 Defense Department agitprop NBC show The E-Ring. He'd grown a beard and looked like an extra in an El Greco painting.

Masabumi Hosono was the only Japanese passenger on the ship, and instead of being
celebrated for surviving the disaster, he was soundly condemned. We’ll find out why next week.

"And I didn't see 47 Meters Down, but did have it spoiled for me by someone."

You're doin' yeoman work, sir. Good luck with it. Y'all don't carry Pluggers, do you?

"Annie has always knocked my socks off, even though now I’d like to keep them on."

The Last Kingdom, Series 2: Unh. So good. Things get more complicated and polychromatic as Uhtred accustoms himself (or tries) to life as Alfred's vassal even while loose ends from his past (Bebbanburh, Viking siblings of various kinds) threaten his future. Series 1 was one of the most pleasant TV surprises of the…