sawyl | The ravings of an invalid

For the record, I'm feeling horribly ooky. A sort of viral bad that involves a nasty throat, a horrible headache, a general feeling of vagueness and the flare up of every single muscle injury I've ever picked up. So, instead of trying to write something that would, on reflection, no doubt turn out to be pure gibberish, I have passed my day mooching on the interweb, re-reading some of my sources and painfully shuffling into town to visit the bookstores.

As a result, I have gained much wisdom; some of which I now propose to share:

That Elizabeth Bear's Tideline is quite the most beautiful thing I've read in a while. If you're not wiping away the tears by the end, then you're a callous, hard-hearted bastard with no imagination and an extremely weak claim to person-hood.
That Neal Asher's The Line War neatly ties up many of the loose ends from his Ian Cormac series of novels, introduces some things much hinted at and doesn't bottle out when the going gets tough.
That the death of Humphrey Lyttelton is a national tragedy. A period of mourning should be declared, everyone should don a black armband for a week and, in place of a minute's silence, we should have a national one minute's game of Mornington Crescent.
That Radio 3 showed its class by marking Humph's death with a recording of Hornarama immediately followed by the Gloria of Josquin's Missa Pange Lingua.
That watching BBC1 in a browser window the size of matchbox still knocks spots off my actual terrestrial TV reception.
That a panthalassa is a single large ocean.
That the first chapter or two of Al Reynolds' House of Suns are somewhat info-dense, but it soon settles into a good rhythm.
That The Wreck of the Hesperus is by Longfellow, while The Wreck of the Deutschland is by Hopkins.
That when we first encounter Elaine Belloc in Lucifer, she's studying alliteration in the penultimate verse of The Deutscheland.
That the words of the poem read out in class hint at Elaine's role in the greater scheme of things.
That the Sontarans are short.