Today's desk-clearing Post o'Doom

Because I have too many browser tabs open with things to remember!

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First of all, some birthday good wishes -- to enchantedteacup for today, to teleskopos for the 21st, and to citharistria for the 19th.

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My fic for the last Checkmated challenge has finally been polished up, betaed, and posted on my fic journal -- link below. (Scrambling to write the second half of a 9,000-word story on the last day before the deadline and submit it inside the last hour? Not a great idea.)

Title: In The Bleak Midwinter
Rating: R, just about? Probably get away with PG-13, actually
Length: 9,350 words
Pairing: Ron/Hermione (this being Checkmated)

Summary: Hermione Granger had grown to dread the winter. The season seemed almost to have a grudge against her. And so as she and Ron flew from summer in Britain to winter in Australia to search for her parents, she had both old and new issues to resolve.

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Have enough of my Remix entry remixed to post if necessary. Do not have more than brief outlines of all the other scenes I had planned. Gah.

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A couple of links that are two of the funniest things I've seen recently.

First, sam_storyteller's Trying to Communicate (Torchwood, PG), one of those almost-but-not-quite crackfic stories. Ianto is perfect in this. (Then again, it's got about 18 pages of comments, so you may already have read it.)

Second, The Platonic Blow (RL, definitely not PG) which is alleged to be a poem by WH Auden that was too dirty for the New York Times Book Review to print, although he denied authorship. I don't blame him really -- as quite apart from the subject matter some of the imagery wouldn't be out of place on babb_chronicles! Example stanza:

Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.

Hey, I make no claims to be a great smut writer, but I solemnly declare that I have never even considered using a phrase like 'herculean eggs'. :) (Whether it was Auden's, I don't know. Then again, although it's probably heresy for a postal historian to say so, I thought his Night Mail tended to clunk too.)

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If anyone wondered how the Paradigm of Uncertainty series was going to end up -- i.e. a famous early H/Hr HP fanfic series that long ago disappeared into a 'verse that bears no discernible relation to the Potterverse -- the author has now finally officially abandoned it and posted what's written and a summary of how the last fic would have ended on her Livejournal after a hiatus of about two and a half years ...

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Seen in passing, an image in Mike Selvey's report on the Third Test in New Zealand for The Guardian: "Stuart Broad, blond hair slipstreamed back so that he looked like Malfoy on stilts ..."

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CBBC are reshowing SJA Invasion of the Bane on 30th March (5.30pm), and BBC3 are reshowing DW The Christmas Invasion on 1st April.(8pm). I wonder if either of those presages a series rerun?

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Lyrics: The last one was of course David Bowie's Rebel Rebel from 1974, as spotted by such_heights, golden_d, and maple_clef.

And because I recently heard a classic song from 1962 1976 for the first time in ages:

We weren't in love, oh no, far from it
We weren't searchin' for some pie in the sky summit
We were just young and restless and bored
Livin' by the sword
And we'd steal away every chance we could
To the backroom, to the alley or the trusty woods
I used her, she used me but neither one cared
We were gettin' our share (1970s)