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Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

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Link

I have no idea why this was suggested to me by YouTube

Watch on YouTube

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At last, an advice column we can all get behind!

Ask the Algorithm!

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I've fallen down a fractal core rabbit hole straight into the Dark Zone.

I can't tell if this is synchronicity or my hyperfocus just raging out of control, but this video popped up on my youtube feed while on the flight to San Francisco, and I watched it, and now I'm rewatching the entire series and looking at it in the context of current events.

I'm speaking of course of the late 90s-early 2000s sci fi series LEXX.

And if you are wondering if it has aged well: I'd answer that the parts of it which have not aged well were probably written to be deliberately offensive in the first place, as a counter to what one showrunner referred to as the "preachiness" of 90s-era Star Trek. But my response to this is to fall back on the joke, "You couldn't make Blazing Saddles today. Because people would watch it and go, "Hey, this is Blazing Saddles."

Also: while parts of it can be said to have not aged particularly well, there are other parts of it which come off as fairly progressive by today's standards. (For example, I kind of like how the character Zev, after having grown up in an Intergalactic Patriarchy which has denied her agency and bodily autonomy for her entire life, is ready to dismantle that patriarchy 8:00am day one once she escapes. And there are so many metaphors for late-stage capitalism. So many. And I'm still trying to decide if Kai could be interpreted as being Ace-coded or not. I mean, the only other canon Ace character I can think of from that point in my life is...what, Tarma from Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar book series?)

For those unfamiliar with the show, the vibe falls somewhere between "Warhammer 40k and Heavy Metal meet Barbarella" and maybe "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia In Outer Space."

[A title card which reads The Gang Steals A Planet-Killing Superweapon From The God Emperor, meant to evoke the title cards from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.]

So I've been working on this all week, and I can't tell you how much fun it is to just work on a fricking fansite like it's 2000 again, and 9/11 hasn't happened yet. This thing is growing faster than a swarm full of Mantrid drones, and I hope to have the character blurbs and some essays up shortly.

A few unrelated questions

(Some of which I may have asked before, in which case, forgive me.)

1. People often do say that the English subjunctive is in decline. However, literally nobody I've ever heard say this has provided any sort of evidence. Is there any data on this other than "yeah, feels that way to me"?

1a. I've also heard that the subjunctive, or at least some forms of the subjunctive, is more common in USA English than UK English, from somewhat more authoritative sources but with roughly the same amount of evidence.

2. I got into it with somebody on the subject of "flammable/inflammable". I am aware that there are signs that warn about inflammable materials, and also signs warning about flammable materials. Is it actually the case that anybody has ever been confused and thought they were being warned that something could not catch on fire? Or is that just an urban legend / just-so story to explain why the two words mean the same thing and can be found on the same sorts of signs?

3. Not a language question! I've recently found one of the Myth Adventures books in my house. Gosh, I haven't re-read these in 20 years. Worth a re-read, or oh god no, save it for the recycle bin?

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Pink pineapple looks oddly like salmon

but it *is* pretty sweet!

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Astronaut Jim Lovell, famed Apollo 13 commander, dies at 97

It really seems like the deaths are piling up lately.

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I'm back from San Francisco!

I have pics from Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach!

( Pictures under cut! )

San Francisco is so nice. I really didn't want to come back to Texass. I really wish I could move there for good.

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Photo memories

Trying to convert old iPhoto libraries from twenty years ago to a format I can more easily use these days. 50 GB, so taking days to do this! Also as the photos keep popping up I run into friends who are no longer with us, some who seem to have disappeared or decided we are no longer friends, couples who are now mortal enemies of each other... and also friends who still are friends and memories of good times past, so there is that. It all feels quite strange, looking at these snippets of past lives.

Well, today I saw a groundhog

And then tonight as I took out the trash I saw where it's evidently been burrowing, a big hole directly under the retaining wall to our yard.

Now what?

I think I just saw a groundhog

Crossing the street right in front of my house!

I didn't see his shadow, so I have no idea if the current [insert whatever] will be long or short.

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Betrayed by Labi Siffre

Betrayed

To despise your government
To distrust your government
To be unable to respect your government
To know the leader of your country has contempt
for the people of your country
To be angered
not because it’s “Not in my name”
but because it IS in my name

And the senseless deaths continue....

I did manage to get through two more episodes of Voyager with E this weekend!

First we've got Bride of Chaotica!, in which Kate Mulgrew enthusiastically chews the scenery. Mmm! Part of a balanced breakfast!

Also, she's pretty judgey about Tom's extracurriculars. E remarked that her daily coinflip must've landed on "Mom", and I can't say she's wrong.

It's a fun breather episode so long as you forget the fact that dozens of photonic aliens died before anybody on Voyager even realized they were at war. Whoops! Also, they spend almost the entire episode mere inches away from a shipwide epidemic of some sort of gross gastrointestinal illness, but nobody seems to care about that either, it's all played for laughs.

Then this episode I completely forgot where Tuvok and Tom are crash-landed on a time displaced planet for several months or a year with a woman who is deeply crushing on Tuvok. Tom, for whatever weird reason of his own, is adamant that the correct course of action is for Tuvok to get in touch with his emotions and just go to bang city with this woman. E and I agreed that the actually correct and logical course of action was for Tuvok to give Tom that punch in the face that he is just begging for, but for some reason Tuvok refrained. Seriously, I have no idea what bug flew up Tom's butt this episode, but he was so fucking obnoxious for no reason at all. Maybe, Tom, you should get in touch with your emotions before you start lecturing the Vulcan about his. I genuinely have no idea what his deal was or was supposed to be.

On a very different note, I don't know if anybody can make it to London who cares, but Camlann is doing a live prequel episode in September. If you know a bit more about Arthuriana than I do you probably would like the audiodrama a lot. Or even if you only know as much as I do or a little less. The music is amazing.

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Yesterday ended in a headache

Lowkey enough that I felt bad complaining about it, but bad enough that I couldn't focus and had to go to bed early, and then I slept through half of today as well and only woke when I got hungry enough.

So, yeah.

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Current Location: the 88 bus

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A quiet Sunday

It was a very quiet day, lessons cancelled and not a lot of energy to do anything so I just got on the 88 to let it take me someplace. Regent’s Street and Whitehall are more interesting from the top deck of a bus. Got off in Stockwell, walked (nearly eight thousand steps) to Brixton, walked around but there was no market on Sunday so no guanabanas. So went to Kings Cross, bought a slice of Basque cheesecake and had a little chat with the cake stall man, bought a couple of things from the Waitrose and had ice cream from the former neighbour, Ruby Violet. The ice cream was elderflower and prosecco and it was very nice. Couldn’t tell if the alcohol of the prosecco was still there but was quite happy for a few minutes 😃 managed to get the 214 back home just as the drops of rain were starting to fall.

The shooting was on Monday

How're you gonna send your "thoughts-and-prayers" email on Friday? At this point, silence would've been better. (I have no idea how I got on the mayor's email list.)

Speaking of the shooting, my aunt texted me to check in. She, uh, she called me by the name I tried out for like five minutes in middle school. I have no idea how she remembered that. I barely remember that. But at least she didn't ask after Mommy's health this time.

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On thinking about getting British citizenship and related stories

After the little scare when booking the flight back from Miami on the NY, I decided that, expensive and a faff as it now is, I should get British citizenship, after all these years.

Why hadn't I done it before? Well, until 2016 that didn't seem necessary, with me being an EU citizen. But then I learnt that half of this country kind of don't want me here (I know, I'm being a bit melodramatic there). On the night before the flight back the airline wouldn't let me check in online because 'I needed a visa to enter the UK' and I 'needed a return flight' out of the UK. That night, let's say I didn't sleep much. There's been a couple of other things that have made me think I really should look into this.

I tried to fill in the forms online and then I hit what seems a very minor obstacle: they want the _exact_ date of first arrival in the UK. Well, I came here first on a Caribbean Airways (national airline of Barbados) flight in... sometime late June or early July? 1986. You don't keep airline tickets from 38 years ago. Plus the airline went under the year after I came so no-one there to ask. I entered the country as an Italian, EU citizen, therefore no stamps on my passport. I should imagine the Home Office should have the passenger manifest for that flight so I daren't make up a date and then be told that I forfeited the nearly two thousand pound fee because I put false details in -can't afford that!. Later I learnt there is a lot more to that, apparently you should declare even minor parking or traffic fines, etc. So it looks like I need advice but -lawyers are very expensive! I don't think I can afford that and the nearly two thousand pound fee. So I'm at a bit of a quandary, waiting to see whether I can find more information about this. It is clear that at this point in the game I will be spending what's left of my life in this country -unless something really, really major happens. So it looks like I'll be needing advice on this.

Oh thank goodness, it's storming

This should drop the temperature to something livable.

E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.

First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.

I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.

Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.

The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.

At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)

One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.

And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.

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PSA

What even is this fucking bullshit

Go leave a public comment, though I don't even know what to say. "This is garbage and you know it, and you're bad and should feel bad", maybe.