Amazingly simple tasty 'taters

I really, really, really hope that Obama can win this.
And that he survives long enough to make a difference.

In slightly less important news: eating left-over thai in bed is amaaaaazing.

Too quiet. I've looked up the date to see if it's a Canadian holiday I don't know about, I've listened really hard at my door, I've even looked out the window to scan the streets for signs of the coming apocalypse. Only moving cars assure me that anyone is still alive at all.

I'm not sure, but I think almost everyone is on holiday.

Years ago, Yuki lost her children to winter. Grief took her wandering alone in the snow. Miles passed beneath her and it was a long time before she realised she might die out in the silent hills. One night, starvation stripping her of beauty, Yuki came to find the cooling leg of a man half-concealed between the drifts. Yuki had never eaten the flesh of men, but hunger makes many things easy. Eventually the corpse had been light enough to drag into shelter. Eventually Yuki had eaten his heart, and crawled inside his husk.

Early that spring, Kaito found Yuki living in a cave. Her tongue was blue and she would not speak. Her eyes were gold and her face beautiful. Her roughly braided hair always shone like fire, even though she never lost the hint of frost from her skin. Yuki walked back to Kaito's village. No-one ever found him. That summer, after she had been taken in and clothed, something snuck into the pens and tore the chickens apart. Yuki stayed silent and licked her fingers clean. That autumn, when the cherry blossoms fell like snow, four of the youngest men disappeared among the trees, one after the next. No-one would ever see Yuki eat anything but fruit and berries.

She never settled and never spoke a word. Sometimes, when a woman took her in out of pity, she would be caught on her haunches in a doorway, steaming amber from between the legs. When a man took her in for her beauty, she would spend all day learning from others, how to wear her two braids perfectly, which kimono were best. Yet she always screamed when men entered her. By the next year Yuki took to wandering the hills much of the time. Travelers, when travelers survived the road, would tell of dancing fire out in the same hills, dreams of snow amid summer, falling blossom amid winter, of bones found half-buried, gnawed clean. Some would tell of an eerie wail echoing between the pines, but none of the travelers that told tales had followed it.

According to the great Wiki in the sky:

"In England and Wales 390,127 people (0.7 percent) stated their religion as Jedi on their 2001 Census forms, surpassing Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism, and making it the fourth largest reported religion in the country."

Unfortunately, all religions occasionally suffer internal tension. I can only pray that the church recovers peaceably from this affront, and does not pursue a path to anger, hatred, and suffering.

Also, that Welsh Judges keep up their apparently high level of punnage. Thanks go to the Rocket News Network for pointing this one out.

Edward has the name of the age, and of the King. Which is a waste, really. History will leave him utterly forgotten. Edward is a clerk in almost every regard. Accidents of birth and education have given him a knack for literacy but no real excess of intellect. Edward has only one uncommon advantage on his side. Of a morning, when he looks at himself in the mirror, constellations are picked out across his pale skin. Not dock-side tattoo trophies but a natural coincidence of moles and marks. They make him feel small, but so does everything else in Edward's life. What they give him, that nothing else provides, is a certain contentment at the end of the day. Before sleep Edward can look across his body and know that it is perfectly alright to be inconsequential. He knows deep within himself that no matter how far the King, his namesake, is elevated above him, they are both barely dust on any scale that matters.

When he dreams, he stands in front of himself and orates equations and balances as if from a ledger, 'To be important is to burn with the mass of light. To matter is to fill the sky with glory. How could God value a man, when the stars exist?'.

What Edward does not understand is that the stars have stories only as gifts. He is a quiet heretic. That he exists, and has meaning, is a glory as great as the rising sun.

To cheer up your monday morning (or afternoon if you're reading from the uk), here's a beautiful little movie made from time-lapse photography.

ross:ching » Blog Archive » Eclectic 2.0

I went to the Montreal Planetarium last night, and although I'm nursing a bit of a cold from exposure to too many undergrads on saturday, that experience, and this video together are making my Monday much less awful than it might otherwise be.