Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 166

Jiji watches a video of birds and squirrels

I was looking at a Youtube video of birds and squirrels eating peanuts, and Jiji stood at attention, watching. Then he jumped onto the desk and ran behind the computer screen, looking for them. No luck! He came back around. One of the birds flew up. Jiji's head shot up! But no bird! What the....?

It had the ninja girl and me falling down laughing. We took a video of him doing it:

Tell-a-Fairy-Tale Day

mnfaure says that today is tell-a-fairy-tale day. What an excellent day! Here is a gender-swapped version of Little Red Riding Hood.

Big Red


Big Red, they called him, a lanky boy nearing six feet tall already.

“Go make sure your Gran’s keeping warm,” his father told him, one bright winter morning. “Make sure she has plenty of kindling by the stove. And here are two rabbits I snared yesterday for her to stew.”

So Big Red strapped on his snowshoes and set off through the woods, whistling.

Wolf Girl...

Speaking in Bullets

Here is the poem Vigilante Espresso slipped underneath the door for me.

Speaking in Bullets

We spoke in words
In open air and print and bits and bytes
They replied with executive orders
Curfews, arrests, arrests, arrests
Indefinite detentions
So we raised our voices, at rallies and demonstrations
Spoke with rocks and gasoline-soaked rags
And they replied with tear gas, truncheons
Then tanks and troops and automatic fire
So now we speak in bullets
Scavenged rounds, stolen weapons
Power grows, the old chair...

a calligraphy lesson and no-churn ice cream

The town common floods, and there is ice. Some years, the fire department adds to it and makes an ice rink, but not this year.



So, since no one is here skating, we can try to decipher the characters in this . . . poem? Is it a pledge? A meditation? A declaration of love or yearning?

Run your fingers over it, or your toes, or your tongue. Learn the shape of it, and when you know it by touch and taste, perhaps you will have the meaning of it, too.



More tasty, though, is this no-churn espresso ice...

True fact

Just now I'm reading aloud an entertaining thread on the Straight Dope message board about practicality of scavenging ammunition on a battlefield--what's entertaining are the impassioned opinions on the merits or lack thereof of the AK-47 (e.g., "The AK series does not have sloppy tolerances. It intentionally has larger clearances than are seen in the AR series ... The AK is legendarily reliable partly because its clearances make it tolerant of debris that would foul "tighter" guns ... the id...

new one-shot manga from Tinsil on Tumblr

Tinsil writes,

first three pages of my short comic “black ring”

it’s about two kids making friends

anyway you can read the rest HERE

(link is to Dropbox; you can read it there or download it--28-page PDF)




If you're on Tumblr, consider giving it a reblog (Tumblr entry is here )

A Tale of Two Cities

The healing angel and I are reading A Tale of Two Cities together in the best possible way: we're taking turns reading chapters out aloud to each other.

Oh my goodness, if you want to truly laugh at the humor, squeal at the plot twists, and be brought to tears by the romanticism, reading aloud is a must. Now, some of the sentences are quite long and intricate. Sometimes we both get tangled up and have to start over. And yet, when read aloud, the sentences have a way of making themselves clear,...

The Case of Lauren Gray

Lauren Gray is the owner of a fictionalized life, the result of a decision she made on a day in 1973, after overhearing her mother and her nana talking about her nana’s diaries. “I’m discovering all sorts of things from your childhood and before that I simply don’t recall at all,” her nana was saying. “I’ve been reading them aloud to your father. ‘Do you remember being evacuated from a sinking ferry in 1936?’ I’ll ask him. Some things he remembers, others are news to him too. It’s almost like...

blue rails, speaking in bullets

I walked home between the railroad tracks, and right beside me they were brilliant blue, though further ahead they were shining silver-white. My eyes playing tricks? No, that blue was a gift from the bright, clear sky to the rails. Here, wear this, just for the moment And the rails obliged.

I read an excellent (if dark) poem over at Strange Horizons, "Jael," by Nancy Hightower. I traveled over to her website to tell her I'd enjoyed it, and found her biography, which started with some bulleted...

put the documents in the shredder head on next time

My kindly father gave wakanomori the present of periodic delivery of bags of coffee. One came the other day, packed in shredded paper. Nice and ecological!

Except glancing at the shreds, Waka noticed they were actually financial documents--pay stubs and such--the sorts of things you shred so that unscrupulous people don't use them to find out, oh, say, social security numbers and the like.

Oops.

I've blotted out the people's surnames, but as you can see, very identifying information, along with...