Well, goodness...

...here's a surprise:

Your Score: The Cat

You scored 74% domestic, 21% gregarious, 17% trickster, and 88% intellect!

Domestic, Solitary, Serious, Intellectual: you are the Cat!

Cat represents a balance of strength in both physical and spiritual, psychic and sensual powers, merging these two worlds into one. Curious, intelligent, and physically adept, cat people tend to live in a world all their own.

Link: The Animal Archetype Test written by crumpetsfortea on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Harry Hoad: no picture is worth a song...

...and for those of you not keeping up, we have a Song for Harry! papersky wrote the words, carandol wrote the tune and recorded it. I am astonished, and moved beyond words...

- but it is not totally impossible that we have a picture.

I said before that there were a couple of photographs in the bible. This was inaccurate, twice over. Before this whole story reaches any further, let me correct my own idiocy: it's not actually a bible. I knew this, I had just forgotten it. It looks like an old Victorian family bible, and it is unutterably filthy; these two together caused me to be heedless this time around. Actually, it's a Victorian illustrated edition of The Pilgrim's Progress.

Be that as it may, clearly it served the same purpose, a repository of memories and loss; and I have now found four photographs between its pages. I had originally meant to give one away, which is why I was being discreet about 'em, but actually I think they should all stay together, so here's the list.

One is a portrait turned into a postcard, as they used to do: an Edwardian woman in her best hat (which is a fabulous confection). I'm guessing as to period, of course, but anyone who knows about costume should find it reasonably easy to place.

The others I guess (there's a lot of guessing here: visuals are not my thing) to be contact prints from glass plates; they are fuzzy and faded, and the one with the car registration plate is clearly reversed.

That one shows a Very Old Car, with a man completely indistinguishable behind the wheel and the windscreen, a woman in the passenger seat and a little girl standing beside, leaning against the door. Another man in the distance, by a wall. An expert would identify the car easily (registration number BB 1632); the people I suspect must be forever mysterious.

The second print (mounted on white paper and black card) shows five men with three motorcycles and perhaps a sidecar. They're got up with waterproofs and caps (with goggles!), but they might just be identifiable, against other known images.

And the last print? Is a round one, clearly meant for a frame; and it's a young man in jacket and tie. At first glance, I'd have said he's older than twenty, but I'm not at all sure. Visuals not my thing, and particularly judging people's ages; and I tend to overestimate young people from long ago particularly, because all the cues are wrong (jacket! tie!). And of course I want this to be Harry, though I really don't suppose it is.

I stress again, these are all old and faded and blurred; it may be impossible to reproduce them in any format worth the posting. But I might try.

Orca attack a seal on an ice-floe

Extraordinary: what will they think of next?

How much randomness makes an LJ post, again...?

Barry likes to sit like a gargoyle atop the fridge. I'm fairly sure he only does this because I am the perfect mark: I never notice, until I am actually taking something out of the fridge and then suddenly I get a faceful of cat, and react most satisfactorily. Every bloody time.

I love it when I commit DIY, and am macho. While I boiled rice for tonight's supper (later: I will fry it, and one should always fry rice from cold), I took out the tools and screwed a shelving unit to the wall. Yay me. It used to be a small bookcase, but I've put it right next to the kitchen and I think I might use it for overflow jars and bottles and such. I get a lot of those, and it would be dead handy to have them right outside the kitchen door, for grabbing. Hence the screw-it-to-the-wall,-Chaz; the cats can't spill it now, and I can't knock it over. And I have used Rawlplugs, which is always good for a Sunday.

Because I have been footling around and doing Other Stuff, I still have twenty pages to revise tonight and I am about to run out of wine. (That is for given values of 'run out', of course; I have plenty of wine, in yet-unopened bottles. But I have Discipline. Ordinarily. I don't open more than one a day, when I'm on my own and working.)(Ordinarily.)

I still have plenty of sausage, though. I will not run out of sausage. (This is the salami-type sausage, that I like to slice and nibble - with wine - while I'm working.) The word 'sausage' has an ineradicable effect on me, it makes me want to smile: when I was young, I had a comic-book annual, can't remember which comic but it had a strip about a failed German WWI pilot who was constantly crashing or getting shot down, and all he wanted was sausage. All through the strip, he kept getting a sausage, and bad things happened to it - one was shot out of his hand, I remember, when he tried to eat in mid-air. And finally he was safely on the ground and he had a sausage and rather than eat it, the fool said "Himmel! I could eat sausage until ze cows come home!" - And there was a thunder of hooves offstage, and suddenly he was trampled by a stampede of cattle, and he picked himself up ruefully afterwards with his utter wreck of sausage and said "Himmel! Ze cows are comink home!"

Which was just so utterly surreal, I adored it. At age eight, or thereabouts. And have quoted it monotonously ever since, to people who know not whereof I speak.