Last Christmas, my brothers gave me the 2008 Dragonology calendar, which I assure you has been a great help this year in learning to identify dragons, read dragon script, and evaluate dragon treasure. The June page is a lesson on “Elementary Riddle Work,” though I hadn’t really noticed until I took the calender down this month — with all my moving about last summer, I didn’t have the calendar up anywhere during the month of June.

Anyway, the page is covered in riddles, some of which I’d seen before and some that I hadn’t.  I know a bunch of you are riddle fans, so I thought I would share.  I’ll put the answer in white text below the riddle so you won’t see the answer unless you highlight it.

What does man love more than life,
Fear more than death or mortal strife,
What the poor have, the rich require,
And what contented men desire,
What misers spend, and spendthrifts save,
And all men carry to the grave?
Nothing

Weight in my belly,
Trees on my back,
Nails in my ribs,
Feet I do lack.
A ship

The wave, over the wave, a weird thing I saw,
Through-wrought, and wonderful ornate:
A wonder on the waves, water become bone.
Ice

Oft I must strive with wind and wave, battle them both when under the sea.
I feel out the bottom, a foreign land. In lying still, I am strong in the strife;
If I fail in that, they are stronger than I, and wrenching me loose, soon put me to rout.
They wish to capture what I must keep. I master them both if my grip holds out.
If the rocks bring succor and lend support, strength in the struggle. Ask me my name!
An anchor

The part of the bird that is not in the sky,
which can swim in the ocean and always stay dry.
Its shadow

What gets wetter the more it dries?
A towel

The Riddle of the Sphinx: What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?
A person

Only one color, but not one size,
Stuck at the bottom, yet easily flies,
Present in sun, but not in rain,
Doing no harm and feeling no pain.
A shadow

What force and strength cannot get through
I with a gentle touch can do,
And many in the street would stand,
Were I not a friend at hand.
A key

Round like an apple, deep like a cup,
Yet all the king’s horses can’t pull it up.
A well

Old Mother Twitchet had one eye,
And a long tail that she let fly,
And every time she went through a gap
She left a bit of her tail in the trap.
A needle and thread

Long legs, bandy thighs,
A little head, and no eyes.
A pair of tongs

In marble walls as white as milk,
Lined with skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal clear,
A golden apple does appear.
No doors are there to this stronghold–
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.
An egg

Black we are, and much admired,
Men seek for us if they’re tired.
We tire the horse, but comfort man,
Tell me this riddle if you can.
Coal

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits,
Kits, cats, sacks, wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?
One

A hill-full, a hole-full,
You cannot catch a bowl-full.
Mist or fog

Little Nancy Etticoat,
In a white petticoat,
With a red nose,
The longer she stands,
The shorter she grows.
A candle

Black within and red without,
With four corners round about.
A chimney

Categories: miscellany
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Looks to me that Masterpiece Theater is going to be good for the foreseeable future.

They’ve been doing Tess of the D’Urbervilles the last two weeks, which I missed, though apparently they’re now putting the episodes online, in a limited-time-only kind of way.  So that one is still available, though it’s also four hours long.  I read Tess a few years ago, in the quiet evenings of my summer in New Hampshire.  I remember being captivated by it, and then somewhat frustrated by the ending.

This week and next are Wuthering Heights (clocking in at a total of a mere two and a half hours).  That was one of my big reads this summer, so I’m interested to see what they did with it.  I’m a little confused about how the book makes it onto lists of “greatest love stories of all time” when the main characters seem to resist all attempts at being made likable.  He’s a brute, she’s neurotic, everyone’s miserable.  Amusingly, in some ways it was the inverse of Tess, in that I liked the way it ended.

After that, MT is running the Sense and Sensibility that they used as part of the Jane Austen love fest of last year.  My preferred adaptation is still the Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet one, but this one’s good too.

And we’re getting Dickens adaptations for the rest of the spring!  Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and The Old Curiosity Shop.  I’ve seen Oliver! (the movie musical) and I’ve been to the “Old Curiosity Shop,” but otherwise this is all new to me.

Looks like when the show turns back into Mystery! for the summer, we’re getting a few more Miss Marple stories, too.  I always enjoy those — the little old lady sleuth is so delightfully unexpected.

Categories: books, television
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Well, a happy new year to you all!  Pug and I were fortunate in that we were able to spend a nice long time at home over the holidays and got to spend time with many of you!  (…she says, having only a vague idea of who might actually be reading this.)  And having been sufficiently poked about having not posted here since Halloween, here we go again!

It’s sunny and gorgeous here in the lovely southwest — cool enough to pull out jackets and maybe some sweaters, but warm enough to enjoy the outdoors.  This is great.  I love cute jackets.

Since late September, I’ve had a freelance writing/editing gig going with a company that produces vacation planning materials.  I’m still hoping for a local, full-time publishing niche to open up, but having this for the time being is very nice.  It keeps me from sitting here bored, it keeps me from getting rusty, and of course the pay is appreciated as well.

Wedding planning is moving along smoothly.  In addition to the ceremony location and the reception location, we now also have a minister and a pair of classical guitarists to play at the ceremony.  I have my dress, shoes, and veil in my closet, and Poke even has her bridesmaid dress.  (We settled on a shade of burgundy that the dressmaker decided to call “wine.”  It’s pretty.)  Next up are tux rentals and invitations, and after that, we’ll get to flowers and cake.

Pug and I are continuing our leisurely re-watch of the ever genius Babylon 5, in which we’re ready to start season 3.  We’ve also been watching the season 1 DVDs of The Big Bang Theory, which were a Christmas gift — his parents’ way of insisting that he really would enjoy it (and, of course, he does).  And one of these days I’m going to get him caught up on the current season of How I Met Your Mother.  I’m not usually much for sitcoms, but those two I like a lot.

Speaking of which, I have been “moonlighting on another blog,” as Courtney sneakily pointed out on my last post.  Courtney, my Boston roommate, has been keeping a TV review blog called Raked for about a year and a half, and I sometimes get in on the fun through ridiculously long comments on the Heroes posts and guest-blogging about How I Met Your Mother.  We enjoy it, and apparently other people out there read it too!  Amazing. I don’t use the same handles I use here, but you’d recognize me.

On the literary front, once I finished the pile of various vampire books, I moved into a category of “other people’s extra copies” — many thanks to the generosity of my friends!  I finally went back to Dune, which I  started (barely) months ago, read on the plane at Christmas time, and finally finished shortly after getting back.  It’s a neat book and I enjoyed it a great deal, but the story didn’t really start to move for me until Stilgar and his group find Paul and Jessica in the desert.  From there to the end, I was hooked.   I would ask those of you who’ve read the book, though: is it just my preference for micro over macro, or did you find Herbert’s descriptions of hand-to-hand combat more effective than his large battle scenes?  It was clear to me from the first description of training exercises in the early chapters that Herbert could write a duel, and I thought the later, higher stakes ones were captivating. Regardless, I enjoyed the subtle machinations throughout, and was very impressed by the …unique-ness of the world Herbert created.

After Dune, I flew through The Eyre Affair, a book-lover’s sci-fi mystery madness, if there ever was one!  Set in the England of an alternate universe in which the Crimean War has lasted over 130 years and French revisionists seem to be altering not just the history but the actual past, a woman named Thursday Next works for a branch of detectives who solve literary crimes and briefly gets trapped inside the story of Jane Eyre.  Hilariously good fun! I figured out the parallel between an aspect of Thursday’s life and of Jane’s well before Thursday did, which I enjoyed.  Perhaps the only weak spot in the book is that the bad guys (an unsophisticated term, but utterly appropriate) are far less intersting than the good guys.

My next read is Bleak House, by Dickens, because January seems the right time of year to read it.  (I intended to last year, but there was the whole grad school plus full-time job madness going on at the time.)  I picked up a second-hand copy a couple of years ago and it’s been calling to me to read it…  I haven’t read any Dickens except for picking up A Tale of Two Cities in high school (I’ve never even actually read A Christmas Carol) so it’s high time I started filling in some of those gaps.

Categories: books, desert living, home, television
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