Rain Gryphon

There's this strange recurring dream that I've had since I was a teenager. I discover that the skin covering the outside of my elbows is actually just a thick sort of flap. I can work my fingertips into the gap, and pry it loose, and underneath my elbow joints are actually mechanical, made of steel and plastic. This surprises me, every time. I wonder how I never noticed before. I can inspect them, and sometimes oil them (always with silicone) as well. That's the whole thing right there. A curiously inconsequential dream, yet one that has recurred on and off for years.

The obvious interpretation is that it's something to do with my arthritis, but I've been dreaming that since I was in high school. One might argue as well that it represents some fear or hope of becoming mechanical, but it's only the elbows, and never anything else.

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Dreamt just now that I was playing a video game with a friend, one of those sort where you each control a character and they have a martial arts fight. Except all of the characters in this were non-violent. I had Martin Luther King, and he had Mohandas Ghandi. If you were really good with the controls, you could briefly get them to have a slap fight, and that was it.

I recall part of a dream from last night, in which I was a long-legged bird of prey, similar to a Secretary Bird. It was during the Sepoy Mutiny (I've a friend going to India on business soon, so that's not as random as it sounds), and I was the friend or pet of a British officer. I made a night flight (very vivid - flying in the dark is scary, plus I was afraid someone would shoot me ^1) and deposited a small incendiary time bomb through a brick-work ventilation screen in a rebel powder store. Sadly, I don't recall the actual explosion, but I was left when I awoke with the conviction that I had fucked those people up bigly.



^1 Now that I reflect on it, it was almost as though the dream forked at points, and I was aware of other outcomes where I did get shot.

There's to be a movie about Nicki Lauda's 1976 season. I'll probably go see it. I'm sure I'll cry. I recall that still, and what a horror that was.

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Those who've watched Warner Bros cartoons will be familiar with Carmen Miranda, at least as a cartoon character. I've got this fragmentary image of her from a dream the other night (about Syria, I'm pretty sure) as "The Carmen Miranda of Death!" That was her title. Her fruit hat was made out of bombs, grenades and bullets, and she was dancing along a street, with a hundred-watt smile, tossing grenades right and left, while samba music played.

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When I was little (around 3 or 4, or so) I associated Carmen Miranda with the Pilgrims, since she had that fruit hat, and our Thanksgiving decorations featured Pilgrims, Turkeys and a Cornucopia. The fruit hat got conflated with the cornucopia somehow (I suspect that it was around Thanksgiving when I first became aware of Carmen Miranda) so that she always had an associational overlay of pilgrims for me. The Puritans would probably have had mass heart attacks had she shown up, I'm sure.

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The cornucopia has always been a vaguely unsettling image for me, and to this day I'm not sure why. It's something to do with the shape of the thing. It tapers away in back, like it might be leading away into another dimension filled with fruit.

Even when I was very young, I saw the cornucopia not as a sort of basket filled with fruit, but rather as something that generated fruit. I had this idea of the pilgrims putting the thing, empty, on their table, and then fruit would start spilling out of it. A magic fruit generator ought to be a fairly cheerful concept, but somehow that seemed very ominous to me, and I never particularly liked the cornucopia, even though I accepted it as one of the festive trappings of Thanksgiving.

A self-stirring soup pot from Japan. These will start showing up here soon, I'm sure. The simplest ideas are often the most amazingly clever. I wonder if they'll come spiralled the opposite direction for Australia?

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I bought some little plastic greenhouse kits to grow my own cilantro and basil indoors. We'll see how this works. If they do well, I can plant them in my lovely little Blue Willow flowerpot that I found at the drugstore.

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I got up this morning, pottered about the house for a bit (still exhausted from the weekend) and lay back down for a nap. As I drifted off, I was vaguely organizing what I'd need when I went to the store later. Socks and underwear figured on the list.

A fragment of a Broadway song from my dream: "I owned socks, and Hitler owned underwear. I conquered Germany. Now I own them both!"

The disappointing part is that it wasn't FDR singing this, just some generic actor on a stage.

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Mom's having a mouse problem. The cat, although well-intentioned, is perfectly useless. When she was young and strong, I used to catch mice right under her nose. Now she just kind of wobbles along arthritically after them for a few feet and gives up.

Tuesday morning, I caught a mouse, named him 'Hezekiah', and let him go out in the bean field, by the brush line, far enough out that he's unlikely to return to the house. Now, of all the thousands of mice who I'm sure live along that brushline, only Hezekiah has a name.

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Yay! The school is on fire!.

When I was in first grade, we used to sing a song celebrating the idea of the school burning down.

A few days after Findra passed on, I dreamt of him. Oliver Otter had said he might visit me in my dreams, and I didn't know if I welcomed or feared that. In the actual event, it turned out to be quite comforting.

We were both dolphins, swimming together in a dark sea. There was dim light around the two of us, and nowhere else. He was a much stronger swimmer than I, but let me keep up, and kept making eye contact and grinning, just as he always did when we were together. There were no words - we just swam. And he was big, and strong, and beautiful. It was a very short, simple dream, but I felt much better the next day.

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A few days later, I dreamt of birds. There existed some process by which you could be turned into a bird. I had availed myself of that, and had become a Blue Macaw, like the birds from 'Rio'. Blu was going to help teach me to fly. I picked that up quickly, and then we just went storming around in the jungle, playing tag and racing from branch to branch, until I realized that I was lost, and none of the other birds were in sight, and then I had a screeching panic. Blu found me quickly, and calmed me down, and that was about the end of it.

The dream itself wasn't so much about Findra, but the overwhelming burst of despair and panic at being alone came from his loss, I think. The plotline of flying and getting lost was the result of reading "First Men in the Moon", by Wells, while trying to fall asleep. I dropped off at the part where Bedford and Cavor lose sight of the sphere in the jungle, and that was recycled into dream material.

I dreamt that a co-worker was discovered to be the long lost Nega-Czar of Russia. When you're Nega-Czar, instead of telling Russians what to do, you have to do anything that a Russian tells you. He was trying to hide at work, so no Russians could find him.

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So, Michael Phelps has won more medals at this Olympics than 190 entire countries...

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I was poking through pictures of the Iowa flooding, when I came across one of a fireman rescuing a Cat from his flooded house. It was supposed to be a feel-good picture, but it really depressed me. The poor Cat's just terrified. He's not even trying to fight - he's just making a sad face and crying. His home filled up with water, and now this fireman is carrying him out on the roof. Everything's just gone to hell for the Cat, and he doesn't understand what's going on, or that he's being taken to rejoin his family.

I've a general weakness for sad Cats.

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Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger... Otter!

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I saw the best tee shirt ever: "Real Guitars are for Old People". Sadly, they only had it in kids' sizes.

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Old people seem to be conquering at the Olympics so far. The oldest woman in the marathon just absolutely drove the steamroller over the rest of them, plus there's our old swimmer who took silver, and the Germans' old gymnast who got silver.

Okay, Warren Jeffs has gone completely off the rails, it seems. For what it's worth, one of my colleagues is a Mormon, and regards this fellow as an utter lunatic. She cringed as soon as the name was mentioned :)

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Someone's drilling down to the mantle. I'm impressed. One of my favourite old SF movies is 'The Crack in the Earth', which dealt with a similar project that went very badly awry. Sadly enough, it was made just as thinking about the earth changed from the solid to the plate tectonics model, so it ended up looking sort of dated from the beginning. You never see it anymore, for all that it was an afternoon movie staple for many years. This kind of project can still make me shiver thinking of that, though.

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A few geologists are claiming that the recent earthquakes in Indonesia should apply more stress to the fault that runs through the Toba caldera. Toba's probably the largest volcano in the world.

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And I just remembered this odd dream I had last night. I'd discovered some sort of force related to magnetism, the field of which rotated at a different rate from both the earth's outer shell and the magnetic field. Because of that, I could couple objects to that field, and make them have a slight impulse either to west or east, depending on how I did it. I did this to, of all things, a vitamin bottle, and set it rolling westward through this very long room. Everyone thought it had to be some sort of trick, and I let them think that. There was more, including someone turning the bottle around, but it's all hazy and indistinct now.

After that I dreamt about giving General Patton a ride in my car, and we were looking for his HQ, but they'd all gone elsewhere. I distinctly recall that the HQ had a rural style mailbox out in front with a small working gun turret mounted on top of it. We took the mailbox with us since we didn't have any weapons. At least part of that dream was in colour, with Patton having these shimmery pastels that looked very inappropriate for a general.

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And curiously enough, the Pope seems not to be decomposing as one might expect.

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Antonelli seems to be slowly losing ground in the Pope betting. Still, he's the second-place Italian...

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I wonder if this was anyone I know?

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Finally, after about two months, I've won a free coke. The odds are supposed to 1:12 according to what's printed on the cap. I drink about two of these a day at work.

So, last night I was making hard sugar candy for Christmas, the sort that involves dumping oil of peppermint into a 150C sugar solution before pouring it out on a cookiesheet to cool. I make this stuff every year, but I've always been in a much larger house or apartment. The current place is small. I should have taken that into account in my planning. Under the circumstances, I also probably shouldn't have made a double batch.

The kitchen is always unbearably pepperminty after the candy is poured. This time, though, the whole apartment got that way. Flaster ran into my bedroom and hid. Literally every inch of my skin was cool and tingly with that 'peppermint' feeling, the one that you get in your mouth from eating peppermint. This was like whole body immersion, though. It's a weird sensation, and impossible to adequately describe. Today my clothes smell of peppermint :)

What's interesting too is that peppermint oil makes me cough, but cinnamon oil makes me sneeze.

If I ever become an evil overlord, I'll celebrate Xmas by putting my enemies into the Peppermint Chamber....

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On the bright side, if the place ever catches fire and fills with acrid smoke, I now know where Flaster will go to hide.

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Adapted from a reply to a friend's LJ. I think it stands on its own, though:

I think in general Brits and Commonwealthers undervalue the importance of the Monarchy to a stable and civil society. The Canadians I know seem consistently appalled at just how feral and vicious Americans can be, yet these very same people will sneer and turn their nose up at any mention of the Queen, professing (and apparently believing) that the rule of the common man is the sure cure for all evils.

If you look at the United States today, this is where you get with the rule of the common man. We're rich and powerful, but mainly because we never let any consideration of decency or the rights of the weak stand in our way. God help you if you can't defend what's yours. We talk a lot about how rights and dignity derive from natural law, but the concept of the inalienable rights of man didn't really help the indians much whenever they had anything that we wanted; nor does it seem to help the poor very much when they can be exploited for gain.

When you give up the Monarchy, you free everyone to do anything the majority dictates, and is capable of enforcing. Anything. Americans are taught from the cradle to worship that idea without thinking, and way too many Commonwealthers seem to think it's a recipe for Utopia. In reality it's the law of the jungle in fancy dress.

The existence of the Queen somehow protects the weak and exploitable. The indians are Her subjects, just as the poor are. I think that single concept - that your fellow citizens are also answerable to and in the care of the Queen, just as you are - is the single most important difference between the US and the Commonwealth. The Canadians never slaughtered their indians en masse like we did. They don't let their poor die for lack of medical care and housing like we do. They *could* do those things - they elect their government more or less as we do. They don't though, and I think the concept of everyone being the Queen's subjects is why.

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Last night I dreamed that I was riding along in a sort of open-topped jalopy with my mother and my stepfather. We had a flat tire, and stopped at this little service station to get it fixed. The owner was very old, and had some model racing cars on display. These turned out to be models of cars that he'd either driven or crewed. One of them represented a racing motorcycle welded to the side of a modified stock car kind of like a sidecar, except that the car and motorcycle both had an engine and driver. He explained that they raced like this in 1947, but then gave up on the idea because it didn't work too well. He had a kind of hobby store in there too mixed in with the service station, but I couldn't find a model of the car-motorcycle hybrid. I ended up buying some WWI British soldiers in 33mm scale. He also had a glass floor with electric trains beneath it.

I should probably draw the hybrid. I pictured it very vividly, and in colour. It was a late 30s sedan with amateurish sheet metal fairings added on, painted red and blue. Sitting here writing this, I just realized that the colour scheme was based on the Noc-Out Hose Clamp Special from the 1941 Five Hundred, but using darker glitter shades. I can just see this on the cover of some old Lindberg models box.

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I need to finish my model of Dan Gurney's Ford GT40. It was coming along nicely, then everything else intervened. Maybe I'll work some on that over Thanksgiving.

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It's puerile, yet entertaining, to listen to 50s love songs, and mentally replace occurrences of the word 'kiss' with 'kick', then imagine it acted out as a music video.

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Equally, I've never been able to listen to the line about 'raise her head [to give her] one last kiss' from "Teen Angel" without picturing the hero hunting around after the wreck and picking up his girlfriend's decapitated head. Apart from that one unfortunate image, it's a very moving song.