nudity, obsession, steampunk

Via Smart Bitches Trashy Books, I link you to this highly amusing video of the Australian Rugby Team naked on the streets of Vilnus, Lithuania.( Page in Lithuanian, video NSFW, but funny as all get-out, and willies need no translation )

I had other things to post about, and so I will.
I have been sucked into an abyss these last few days, the abyss of an old and familiar addiction. What is it? Faithful readers, you know what it is.
I read a book.
I know. I know!! I know. I lost four days. Possibly five if I can't get out of it today. It's already noon! God. Down the hatch. It's awful-- ( you don't know what a reading addiction's like, and it's worse if you fancy yourself a novelist )

So what was it that I was dumb enough to read? Well, for those of you without a reading addiction, I can probably link to it safely. Yes, the full text is available online.
Yes, it's got pictures. In fact it's a comic book. Or graphic novel, or whatever. It's available in print, but it's online too. (And yes, I'll probably buy the print version once I'm not quite so poor.)

And I don't know which of you linked to this-- I remember seeing the link from someone's list of things they were thankful for, in an LJ entry. I think it may have been someone I don't know. Obviously, if I was reading some stranger's back LJ entries, I was in need of a good reading binge, but I never notice/recognize these behaviors in myself until I get a good view in hindsight. Because I need these reading binges once in a while-- usually, when I want to write and can't, it's because my imagination has become atrophied by too much real-world stress, and I need a good reading immersion to get it working again.
Hopefully that's what's happened, and I'll be able to write soon. But I'm still in the digesting phase-- though I've moved on to making up my own stories, so that's a good one.

Anyway. I don't mean to detract from the work in question. It's really quite worth a read-- it's expertly-drawn and very, very well-told, a great mix of action, humor, a bit of romance, and lots of mad science. Yes, you guessed it: Girl Genius.
(If you click that link you go to the current comic. I suggest you don't do that, as it won't make a lot of sense. Click here to start at the beginning, but if you want to get a little taste of what you're looking at, I'm going to hand-select a couple of my favorite strips just so you get an idea of the artwork and type of story, hopefully without spoilers. Check out this strip ("Any plan vere you lose you hat... is a bad plan"), [And ignore the stupid accents; they denote a certain type of character who happens to be my favorite. I promise you get used to it and don't even notice. Read it out loud and it makes sense easily.]
this strip ("WHAT am I DOING here?"),
and this strip (The "villain"'s son's "evil ranting") to see if you'd actually like the story or not. But don't click "next" if you're interested-- go back to the beginning, I promise it will be worth it.)

Anyway, that's my plug.
What storylines in this have me so obsessed?
Well, that's a subject for another entry on another day.

Incidentally, I feel that this is a rather inconvenient time to have become infatuated with steampunk, given that the New York bloody Times just did a piece on it-- now I look like a late adopter instead of a girl who's been secretly coveting leather corsets and brass goggles, and stockpiling crinolines for years. Argh, I can't win. I'll have to wait until it's out of style enough that thirteen-year-olds stop wearing it before I can indulge my little fantasies.
Or, just not care. But my problem remains: where am I going to wear a leather corset? That's why in over ten years of coveting them, I still haven't bought one.

dribs and drabs

Now that I've started blogging again I've got a quick backlog.

So, vignette, roller derby practice. Post-workout, we are all lying around in the middle of the track, and Mia is torturing us with twister crunches (with skates on! Brutal!) and various quite difficult yoga poses and stretches. Various porn-like noises are being made, mostly out of that weird viscerally-pleasant kind of pain you get from a good stretch. Traditionally at times like this we make jokes about porn.
Someone says, "B, you look like a stripper." I am wearing a very short full skirt, and spandex bike shorts to the ass of which I sewed black and purple strips of lace in ruffles. We are in a pose where our asses are in the air, and I've realized it's futile to attempt to pull my skirt back down, so I'm just letting my ass show.
"At least I'm not wearing a thong," I answer.
The conversation circulates out of my range of hearing, as these things do, though I can sort of hear it drifting from strippers on to the more normal subject of porn. Suddenly, Sour Grapes says, rather loudly, to the girl next to her, "Well, don't worry! You can always be a fluffer."

This is why we keep Grapes around.

Anyhoo.

The night before last, Chita decided at 4:30 that she urgently needed to tear through the house, purrowing frenetically in her own insane soundtrack as she galloped. She did this repeatedly, jumping up onto higher surfaces as she ran, caroming off of things, running into doors, and knocking things over. She upset her food dish, sending kibbles flying all over the kitchen. She knocked a stack of papers and a glass jar of vitamins off the desk in the office. She scattered every gewgaw and gimcrack on the coffee table.
And she kept going, for a full hour.
At 5:30 in the morning, I got up at the sound of glass breaking, grabbed the cat (who had run into the basement to hide for a moment, but I nabbed her as she came back up, pupils like quarter dollars), and threw her bodily out onto the back porch, and slammed the door.
I left her out there for an hour.
At 6:30 I let her back in.

Last night as I was getting ready for bed she was tearing around the house again, stirring up the debris from her previous flight. (We'd tried to make her clean it up but she didn't. So we left it. That's the kind of dedicated housekeepers we are, especially when I'm book-fugueing.)
I played with her a little, and then she settled down on the bed that's still in the office from when the office was a bedroom. I looked her over, then decided, it being after midnight and Z having been in bed for over an hour, I'd just crawl in there with her and see how that was.
So I petted her a while, and she slept with her feet in the air.
I stayed there the whole night.
So did she.
At 8:45, when Z finally got out of bed, she blinked at him, then looked around almost guiltily. Oh dear, she seemed to be thinking: I missed giving them their wake-up call. She got out of bed and trotted around the house with him, a bit chagrined.
I wonder if it'll work if I do it again...

Incidentally, by my calculations Chita was born around 1 June of last year, but then someone else did the math and said she was born more like 1 May, so I figure we'll just celebrate her birthday all month. But, suffice to say, my kitten's a year old. She still doesn't quite seem cat-sized.
I'd post a photo, but the one I want's still on the camera. So, later.