Some nonexistent entries

Since Friday, I've been spending all of my livejournal time reading and commenting.

Here are some topics of entries I thought about writing the last few days, but which I haven't, and probably won't:

-- That on Friday night, while walking over to the home of xanyboi and futurenurselady, I was accosted by a woman who asked me whether I was afraid of spiders. I am, as it turns out, thanks largely to that Top-Bunk-and-The-Terrible-Hatching incident, but not so much that I couldn't assist her (obviating the need for her to convince the poor bastard on the other end of her cell phone connection to come to her rescue) by removing one, by means of a cunning credit-card receipt, from the top of her car roof; the creature apparently projected some sort of force field that prevented her from approaching the vehicle, and no doubt once she put key to lock it would have leapt onto her shoulder and eaten her head.

-- How, this morning, memory of this incident spurred me to bold action, opening the screen door to leave the apartment for work, even though there was a large spider that had webbed over part of the door; while I knew the door would be between me and it the entire time, only flimsy wire mesh prevented it from leaping onto my shoulder and eating my head. And yet I persevered.

-- How on Monday morning I watched in useless shock as a man two seats down from me had a heart attack or a stroke or something on the subway and fell to lay twitching in the aisle. EMTs walked him off the train (as opposed to carrying him), but he seemed rather zombie-like. I hope he will be all right.


Other highlights of the past few days, which could possibly have been discussed more fully in real entries of their own, include a rockin' Arcanum LARP, dinner with the landlords at a to-be-recommended Guatemalan restaurant called Quetzal on route 107 in Lynn, reading lots of French (but not as much as necessary), making ginger/pear cobbler, talking to a friend from college on the phone (and how I almost never do that sort of thing anymore, limiting my contact with other people to the not-quite-interactive medium of mailing lists and journals and weblogs -- not even direct e-mail!), reading Algernon Blackwood on the train, and uploading some new userpics.

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I have just had a sudden and fleeting phantom memory of Doritos -- the flavor more than the texture -- on my tongue. Weird.

Dressing up sheep and so forth

Because our journal's website contains a mention of the writer Macrobius, we received an e-mail message from some Dutch guy asking, could we provide for him an English translation of such-and-such a Macrobius passage so he can use it in his book about an old Dutch saga concerning men who dress up their sheep as a child to avoid livestock taxes?

(Presumably there's more to the "saga" than that, but I can't be sure.)

Google searches reveal that the man is active in Ace-of-Bass fandom.

I'd help the guy out, but no English translation exists online, and I'm not going to pop over to the library and type it out for him.

Maybe I will send him the Latin -- ( which is this. )

It's about how some guy named Tremellius obtained the nickname "Sow" by hiding his neighbor's dead pig under his wife's bed and then telling the neighbor, who had come seeking the pig, that the only sow he had was the one lying in the bedroom. But don't ask me to translate it fully because I'm just not going to do it.

A couple of weeks ago, I may have mentioned, a grad student wrote us asking for a copy of an article we published. As his university library subscribes to the journal, we politely suggested he copy it himself, and, moreover, that if he provided us with a mailing address we'd be happy to send him a back-issue order form. Haven't heard from him, though.

[Update: Well, the boss thinks, no harm in helping Ace-of-Bass guy, so he's going to bring the translation from home and I'll have to type it, alas. And then we'll mail him an information packet with subscription form.]

Weirdity

Mr. Sarcasm suggested writing this..

Last time I tried to do a meme, it was one I saw on amberspyglass's journal about how one met all of the people on one's friends list. Proceeding alphabetically, I got as far as "E" and then realized it was going to take me for-fucking-ever, and that there were really only so many ways to say "we met through a mailing list / in a Vampire LARP," so I never posted it.

This one's easier.

( Five weird things )