The National Aquarium has a Flickr page on the rescue, rehab, and release of Hamilton the seal, found on a beach in Bermuda.

Title: Young Nobody
Author: sienamystic
Characters: Adelle, Whiskey, some Dominic, minor OC character
Rating: Gen, all ages
Pairings:None
Warning: None
Spoilers: set pre-show, S1
Prompt/Recipient: hariboo_smirks, the story of Whiskey
Summary: Adelle has many ways to recruit young talent.
Disclaimer: Dollhouse and its characters don't belong to me.

( The madam swung the door open with a little flourish, like a game show host revealing a new car )

All of a sudden, this great wave of sadness rolled over me because I miss Dexter. Give your kitties an extra hug tonight, people.

I miss him. I'm so sorry I couldn't save him.

In 1988, our family was living in Singapore. I was attending the Singapore American school, and our class got the opportunity to go see (not really participate, although we did pay our respects at several temples) a festival called Thaipusam, which features a three mile parade of people carrying portable altars called kavidi, after being pierced with skewers through the cheeks, or into the torso, or, alternately, with hooks into the flesh. The rite honors Shiva's son Lord Muruga and, according to a family friend (whose son participated one year) is penitential in nature. The participants are in a trance state that keeps the pain at bay. In fact, far from showing pain, most of them dance and sing as they walk.

I recently found some of my photographs from our class visit. If you're concerned about seeing images of piercings, I don't think these are very graphic - they're from enough of a distance that you can see what's going on but not exactly what's going on.

( The scent of limes and incense and ashes )

Here is an article about the festival and the custom of piercing from Hindu-blog.com

For more images, here's the Flickr page for photos tagged with Thaipusam. Many of these photos are more graphic, but they're also much more beautiful than mine.

So - how many Midol do I have to take before my face does that?

My to-read pile has grown to an alarming height, so I'm combating it by reading three...no, make that four books at once. I usually only juggle two, so this is obviously a step up in difficulty, and to make things even more spectacular - I'm doing it without a net, clad only in a sequined leotard and a big hat with a lot of feathers. My co-workers are agog.

Anvil of the World by Kage Baker. Hilarious story about a passel of people named Smith, demon princes with sibling issues, and magic, all set in a city in an alternate world. Not too much to the plot - it's there to provide opportunities for lots of humor, really.

D-Day by Stephen Ambrose. Reading it after enjoying Band of Brothers, which, natch, was the book they drew from to make the fabulous miniseries. (Have been a bit immersed in the time period recently, and actually just got 10 Ladies Home Journals from between 1940 and 1945. Lots of food porn, lots of admonitions about saving, and vitamins, and not wasting resources. Will post images from them.)

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart. Have strangely lost all the Stewarts I knew I owned, so replaced them cheaply at Yellowed Pages, the used bookstore. Probably will follow up with Touch Not The Cat.

Why Shoot A Butler by Georgette Heyer. Am now making my first foray into Heyer's mysteries. Loved it, although the big reveal at the end was a little lengthy. Why do I love grumpy heroes so much?

Watched a two-fer of movies over the weekend, not realizing that they were both put out in 1985 (er, not that it really matters, given how different they were). Both of them were new to me, but Bemo had seen White Nights and was startled at missing Clue, given how many of his favorite actors were in it.

I picked White Nights because I've had an interest in watching dance movies recently - probably due to my addiction for So You Think You Can Dance. It stars Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, with Isabella Rossellini and Helen Mirren. The plot is a Cold War tale about artistic freedom and how a person may or may not cope with their own homeland: a complicated brew of emotions distilled into some good acting and some very powerful dancing. It's dated, no question...but it's also still a very strong movie. Baryshnikov's smouldering anger and deliberate brattiness plays well against Hines' brighter, hotter explosiveness. I would have liked more dancing - what's there is very fine, but I crave more of it.

Clue, on the other hand, is a silly, slapsticky house of fun. Based on the boardgame, it features a motley crew of people called together to a lonely mansion, and a string of murders ensues. It had been described to me as a very funny movie, and it was, but apparently most of the laugh-out-loud moments come on later viewings, where you can pick up small "background" jokes that get missed on first viewing. I don't know if it's true, but I have no objection to testing the theory, because it was good, fluffy fun. Bemo was delighted to see many of his favorite actors, particularly Madeline Kahn (it's hard to say if he has a bigger crush on her or on Bernadette Peters), and I was busy throughout the movie admiring Tim Curry, who this reviewer states can come buttle her any time.

Hubert the little black netbook has had his first real outing today - and what I mean by that is the first outing where I've been able to access wi-fi, which is here at the laundromat. It's made the time go by a lot quicker. I'm finding that using his small (but not miniscule) keyboard is not so hard. My speed is slower, and I do make a few more typos, but I'm not pecking away like I would have had to do on some of the truly tiny models.

Off to fold some sheets.

You regard the owl, and the owl regards you.

I'M TRAPPED IN A GLASS CAGE OF EMOTION!

No, seriously. I kinda am.

So if a package is being sent to me via media mail, and it's been almost a month and it still hasn't gotten here, do I freak out or assume that the sender is acting in good faith when he tells me it was mailed at the right time? I'm anxious that it's been eaten by the postal demons, but my husband informs me that media mail is notorious for hiccuping every so often and disappearing packages into a black hole, from which they eventually emerge. (He apparently bought a textbook over the summer and had it arrive well into the semester.)

So: do I panic and email the sender? Relax for another week or so? Assume that this journal entry will act like washing my car during a drought, triggering a rainstorm? Lie in wait for my postman and harass him until he surrenders my Cosmo from 1932 and my Harper's Bazaar from 1933? What are the odds that he's sitting at home, reading them and chuckling at the hilarious vintage advertising, or shedding tears over the touching complete love story housed within the fragile pages?

Advise me, before I do something rash.

We're going to be buying tickets for a jaunt back to NOVA/DC in mid-July. Woot woot.

Went for a lovely walk at Pioneer's Park, got some wonderful photos of buffalo, sweated a lot, crooned sweet nothings to a one-winged bald eagle, and I discovered TWO TICKS ON ME AAAAAAAHHHHH ALL ITCHY NOW.

Have watched most of the first season of The Wire (last two eps to go), am completely hooked, and gotten Bemo into it now as well.

Off to obsessively check myself for more ticks.

Thanks to everybody for the sympathy regarding my little fuzzball. I not only appreciate it, but I really needed it. I'm been finding my brain veering away from the subject whenever I try to think about it, so there's been a little detatchment on on my part that makes me feel like there may be something left for me to get through with this, but perhaps not. And typing this just made my brain tiptoe up to the subject again, and then back away, which is a very odd sensation.

The other two cats seem determined to thrust themselves upon us. I think they may have felt a little neglected throughout Dex's illness, but it's a comfort to have somebody insisting on snuggling you at all hours. Gracie is sitting here next to the keyboard, glaring at me for not scratching her ears. Bemo hates it when they lie on his mixing console, because they push the levers all out of position and push buttons that aren't supposed to be pushed, but I don't have the heart to shoo her away because she's purring so ardently.

At any rate, I have been distracting myself like crazy, which was easy given that this week was frantically busy at work. I've been reading Heyers because they're soothing. I just finished The Grand Sophy and The Nonesuch, two of my favorites, and have just picked up Lady of Quality. The last two are in tragic Bantam editions with really soppy covers - I'm glad that they're being rereleased in very elegant trade paperbacks right now.

I think this is the typewritten equivalent of babbling. I will now wander off and try not to distract myself via Ebay, which would be expensive.

Went to the King's X show last night and blew out all my sadness and worry by falling into some deep-groove, hard-rocking music. And got a hug from Dug to end the evening. Small crowd but very devoted, lots of my favorites were played, including "Lost in Germany," "Summerland," "Black Flag," and "Pray."

God, I love these guys.

We put Dexter to sleep last night. His condition went from "bad but stable" to "deteriorating rapidly," and in fact he had lost another two pounds in very short order, plus he wasn't keeping any of the food down that we were force feeding him. We made the decision last night, and took him in.

It was very difficult, even knowing it was the right thing to do. He was just starting to come out of his shell and become part of the family, instead of the former feral who spent most of his time under the bed or behind the sofa. He was a young cat, too - only five - and it's hard not to feel like we failed him somehow at not pulling him out of this illness. Bemo and I cried waterfalls through it all, and I expect the next few days to be punctuated with out of the blue weeping fits. Thankfully I have the office to myself for the next couple of days so I don't have to retreat to the bathroom to sob.

I'm going to miss you a lot, tater.

A friend gave me a ticket to a local community theater's production of The Producers, so we all went on Friday and had a blast. Despite knowing the plot, I've somehow managed to miss both movies and the stage versions, so I laughed through the entire show. The cast was obviously having a blast, and the audience was right there with them, so it was a really great experience. The various singers were quite good, they had a pretty deft comedic touch (occasionally they'd let a joke sit out too long, but that's about it) and some of the set design was adorable (the accountants office, which had showgirls coming out of the filing cabinets). The dancing was...a little shaky at times, and Bemo was not thrilled with the lone trumpet player in the pit band who was a little sour, but both of these were easy to overlook in the general awesomeness of the show.

And now I have "Springtime for Hitler" wedged into my head.