Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Well, I let a Tuesday slip by me at last without a blog produced! It was as inevitable as rain. In Scotland.

But I have to say it was a surprise to me. I mean I thought I was going to write one at least twice yesterday, and then didn’t, because I basically forgot due to being busy doing other things.

I’m in a season of self-education, you see – newly bought bound paper pads in different colors and everything. I’ve decided to relearn Latin, a subject I was forced to give up after one year of studying it in school. I found my old textbook online, bought a combo pack of it and the second book in the series (which might go to 8? I’m not sure), and have started doing the exercises in order. I remembered the first. “Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia.” In my memory it was in agris not in pictura, but I was close! A slight fly in the ointment of my grand plan is that the textbooks I have don’t have a key with the correct answers in them. So far I’m pretty sure I’ve got it. I suppose another internet search could provide me the teacher’s companion, or I will eventually have to swap out to something else more helpful. For now it is fun – I’ve got as far as plural endings, nothing earth shaking or confusing yet – those tricksy tenses await me!

My second prong of learning is Italian. More language. I owe my wife this one – I promised to learn it forever ago with her, and managed enough to talk to old men in dusty grocery shops in Florence and hand over what I thought was the right amount of money, but went backwards from there. She did not. This is a slightly more modern (not really) textbook – it has its own audio CD to play! That, my friends, is cutting edge. I had to borrow an external drive to play the CD through my PC. Which is not of the portable variety. When I die I should be lodged in amber, reaching for an old fashioned remote control: an example of tech late-adopterism made flesh – would that not be a perfect embalming technique? Worked for the fictional mosquito in Jurassic Park! Okay – that is now a writing prompt for anyone interested: what would strange futures where folk know nothing of us make of an odd man encased in amber, reaching for a blocky oblong object covered in colored buttons? Go!

Third prong I began a while ago, but am returning to in formal fashion: Sister Miriam Joseph’s The Trivium – Aristotelian (I want to spell that with an ean on the end) logic, grammar and rhetoric. I’d been reading it while on the treadmill until I cast it aside for something new, and I always recognized that for some passages I was going to have to sit down, take notes, and work out. So I’m doing that now. With my restored and only slightly sometimes leaky Sheaffer No Nonsense fountain pen. I have two – one of my originals from school and university mark one, complete with heavily toothed indentations in butt and cap, and another I think I inherited from a friend as a back-up, which has its own reservoir and does not require cartridges. I was saddened to see the pens are no longer made (available on ebay – I am tempted!), but these both still write, and far more smoothly than any fountain pen I have bought or been gifted in the last 25+ years. My handwriting is actually legible (mostly) in them. Bliss.

So really that is three language related things. I plan to revisit high school maths another day. And learning Scots formally, which is long overdue. I have plans for that after I’m not embarrassing at reading and writing it – Mirespeak anyone? Should be nobler than that though.

And the last reason I forgot to blog yesterday is because I was tired and sat down and watched a random fantasy movie that was panned horribly when it came out, flopped completely, and I found fun enough to keep me awake. I did think, as I watched it, that it really wanted to be made in 1987, not 2014, because back then fantasy starved teens like myself would have loved this movie – so many bits we could adapt for our AD&D sessions!

The movie? Seventh Son. It isn’t good. Jeff Bridges is reprising his character in RIPD (itself not a good film) that was a reprise of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. But with a strange strangled accent. I got used to it. It had a hangout and workshop that a fantasy Kris Kristofferson in Blade would have liked (and who Jeff Bridges resembled, right enough), and a ton of throwaway fantasy moments that my teen self would have adored, and my D&D group would have used – be it weapons, settings, spells, or monsters. I loved the first flying visual of the baddies’ lair. They even had a blood moon, before I used one in The Killer and The Dead! It was old old school fun, with a great cast, and some wobbly special effects (apparently the effects company went bankrupt), but by 2014 it was pretty paint by numbers for a jaded audience that did not want plucky young hero goes into world, meets grizzled mentor, faces evil, probably gets girl type adventure.

It was perfect for me when I just wanted to stay awake long enough to sleep well. But I will watch it again – for its retro-with-somewhat-modern-special-effects feel. Hawk the Slayer with production value. After all, they killed Jon Snow and he stayed dead! That was a twist I’ve just spoiled for you! It has way worse ratings than it deserves I think, but maybe I was punchier than I thought last night. It also had franchise opener feel to it big time – which often fails, and I saw today it is based on a series of about two million books, so it absolutely could have gone on, had it not failed so apparently miserably at the box office. I’m not recommending it – just saying it hit a spot for me I didn’t think I still had. And this from a man who fell asleep half way through Solomon Kane two days earlier. Anyway, a longer blog to celebrate the missing blog. A new Tuesday streak will begin next week. Probably.