heliopausa

For me, in summer, it's the longest day, and shaping to be another long, hot one; I love summer, or the thought of summer, but one can have too much of a good thing. 
Still, one good thing summer has been bringing has been the mangoes from next-door-but-one's tree, thudding down into the front yard here - it's a big tree, and the houses are built very close together, so they fall into several yards, as well as into the lane..
I have been thriftily picking them up, the ones in the yard, not in the lane, and eating them, unless the ants have got to them first - or else when there's too many accumulated, I've been slicing them up and freezing the pulp.  The ants get to quite a few, though, because a ripe mango falling on a brick-paved courtyard - well, you follow.  But this morning, hooray!  There were two, and with skin unbroken.  :)

I am deep in the throes of gingerbread house-making.  Yesterday I was in genuine fury about our horrible government, stymyieingly so,and I still am.  This morning for the first time in forever I didn't even want to look at the morning news, so you can guess how unsuited I am to be making gingerbread houses.  But... tradition is there, and there it is, so I'm deep in the throes of making multiple gingerbread houses. 
Supposing they stand up this year (one year there was a distressing case of subsidence) I'll post a picture in a day or two.

In between times I've been catching quick glimpses of the Three-sentence Ficathon being run by rthstewart  on Dreamwidth, and have managed a couple of fills - one about Narnia's Peter, as Emperor of the Lone Islands (great prompt, priscipixie !) and one offering a spot of literary revenge to Mary Bennett (thank you, anonymous, for that chance!).

And there's been some great fills for the prompts I've thrown out -

A lovely Wodehousian moment at a pawn-shop window, and two terrific meetings between two Susans, Timelady  and Queen - here and here.

Many wonderful prompts remain (not mine!  I've only put up a few - of those Consort Jing and Philotis are left :) ) covering a multitude of fandoms - anyone can play, so...  :)

But the sides of House #1 (with heart-shaped 'stained glass' windows!) are just about due out of the oven, so I'd best get on with cutting out the front and back.

The fish were released into the rivers and lakes last week, and branches of peach-blossom have been going by on the backs of motor-bikes - even biggish whole trees, though those are more often for renting than buying.  And of course the little cumquat trees are all about, with golden fruit; the best trees, the luckiest, have fruit, and fresh green leaves and blossom, all three, to indicate three generations of family all prospering and well.
And Thursday night will be the night of most intense anticipation, and midnight will see the year roll over, and fireworks, and people walking through the streets (not a parade, just going home or wherever) carrying long stalks of black sugar cane, and the Year of the Earth Dog, Mậu Tuất, will begin.  May it be a good year for all of us.

This year has flashed past, and I've read hardly anything in the way of serious whole-book reading, and now I'm turning to in an attempt to better that poor record.  The book in hand (ie on screen) is The Prime Minister spurred thereto byblueinkedfrost 's comments on some preceding Trollope novels, most recently The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux.  I've enjoyed her thoughts so much!  And the interesting scraps of side-knowledge she finds, as for example that Trollope's publishers jibbed at the title of Phineas Redux, thinking that the novel-buying public wouldn't understand it - which shot to ribbons my notion of how much Latin middle-class Victorians would know.  (I thought lots, but evidently not.)
One of my plans for this year was to read all the Palliser novels right through in order - a plan which blew away like leaves before the wind, but which now I can at least part-meet, with this one book.)  Trollope - he barely makes it into the Big Victorian Novelists list (Dickens! Thackeray! Eliot! and oh, okay, maybe Trollope if you insist).  Maybe because he's too comfortable a read?  Or maybe I just haven't read the tougher Trollopes - though the end of Sir Roger Scatcherd is pretty grim. And Sir Louis, too.  :(

My reading has of late just been posts here and on LJ - and thank you all very much for such interesting posts! - and in newspapers, which I check every morning to see if things have blown up yet.  (That's probably a joke.  Or might as well pass for one, anyway.)  But excitingly, I found the other day this item of news, announcing that an examination of cicada wings has revealed that the wings' physical structure is an effective destroyer of bacteria, that the "wings represents the first example of a new class of biomaterials that can kill bacteria on contact based solely on its physical surface structure" - i.e. possibly all sorts of things, but in amongst others, a counter to antibiotic-resistant golden staph, which I think would be brilliant.
(I was never the alert, scientific Australian child they mention, who took different species of cicadas to school, though; I was the regrettable kind who found the wings and pretended they were fairies' wings.)

So that's reading.  I've been listening to things as well, though.  Lots of Lord of the Rings, which has alerted me to:
( Meanderings about LOTR )
And I've also been listening  to Paradise Lost.  I was hoping that a long Miltonic poem would be just the thing to lull me to sleep, but the Youtube version I found has dramatic growly demonic voices, punctuated as appropriate by bursts of high wordless heavenly song, not at all the mildly interesting drone that was needed for my purpose.  Even so, I did manage to fall asleep, or asleep enough to think I was hearing bits of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan..."; I thought I heard "sinuous rills" and "fertile ground" and more, but it was just a semi-dream.  "Fertile ground" is there, actually, but nothing else - though there is mention of: "the destined walls/ Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can", which I was pleased to find.

We have been having very heavy rains of later, in short bursts - so heavy that it seems amazing that so much could have been up there to start with.  Of course, this means floods and landslides and much loss and sadness in the mountain areas, but here in the city there's very little flooding, and blessedly no buildings collapsing that I've heard of (not that I'd expect them to, but the city is built on river delta land, not on solid rock, so it's possible, especially where people might have built their home themselves, piecemeal). 
The wetness has been a pleasure to the three quiet toads who live in our garden, at least.  They are Big, Middle and Little, and like to lurk under damp things - leaves or the edges of the old lily-bowl.  (Garden is a bit of exaggeration - there's a small paved yard, and in the corner a quadrant of earth, about a metre/four foot in radius.  Not big, but big enough for three toads.)

There was a break in the weather on Sunday, and we took advantage of it to take a walk through the back lanes, and as it happened, found ourselves passing the Water Temple complex - it's not a big complex, but one with a long history, and with two temples, and multiple side-altars and shrines.  It was marking a great day of some sort - the day wasn't in itself especially auspicious in the general calendar, so I think possibly the festival ceremonies were for particular community or family occasions, such as an upcoming marriage - there was a young couple front-and-centre in the side temple - but then again it's just over a week since the birthday/translation day of Princess Steadfast Jade, who is linked (if I've got my history and translations right) to this temple, and possibly it was just her celebration happening late.  (It may have been two different events just happening in both temples at the same time, too.)

Anyway, everything was very splendid, with big paper horses and paper elephants and slightly smaller paper boats with dragon prows, and multitudes of paper guards and attendants, some with swords and some with cymbals, and of course real people as well...  :)   Most of the horses were lined up in front of the central temple, but the side temple had one horse and one elephant and one boat; the paper attendants were too many to count (ie while behaving properly, as opposed to standing up and craning!) in both places.  In the central temple there were preparatory prayers going on when we first arrived, and then later the shaman/priest began to embody different personas, with different costumes and characteristics - the Forest Princess who dances, the General who declares, with swordplay, his determination to see justice, and so on.  Meanwhile, in the side-temple, a scholar/priest was reading and chanting and striking a wooden bell, while people sat quietly and listened. 

And here are some photos!  :)


The elephant stands proudly with eight horses in front of the central temple.  Every horse has a groom, but the sage elephant stands alone. :)





Mandarins and Generals and advisors as attendants in the side temple.  (The thing that looks like an airconditioning duct is a snake - snakes wind around through the rafters.)




Musicians and ladies-in-waiting and a Queen (?) stand in attendance on the left-hand side of the side-temple; the side-altar is like a cave because the Mother-Goddess devotion is very nature-linked, very much seen in terms of mountains and forests.

We get two Junes this year!  Or something like it, anyway.  ( Mildly complex arithmetic-astronomy under the cut )
So that's how come there are two Junes this year, and why I'm justified in calling this entry Endless Summer.

For your refreshment after all that, two pictures from the endless summer - glorious bang lang trees in flower, and appropriately (since the flowering of the bang lang signals exam time for tertiary students) flowering above open-air bookstalls.

I'm struggling a bit to get back on top of things, so this is not a very long or learned or real post... but then, what is a Real Post?  Oh well - very quickly then,in the department of things I've only just found out:

With reference to the song 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite' (video, about two and a half minutes) - there really was a Pablo Fanque, running a circus in Britain over several decades in the nineteenth century. 
His birth name was William Darby, he was black, and very successful - which is all pretty interesting - but even more interesting is the story of how his circus employed an Irish contortionist (I think - the source says "posture master")  disguised as a Chinese man, (to be excitingly foreign and mysterious? - which I suppose is the reason for Darby's own name change) which provoked two other genuine Chinese men to investigate, fearing - after the circus refused to let them speak with the disguised man - that a countryman of theirs was being held in forced labour conditions - and they brought, successfully, a suit of habeas corpus against the circus. 
I find this wonderful and fascinating - the awareness of possible forced labour (and implicit possible human trafficking) at the time, and the brilliance of the habeas corpus law being used to fight against it. 

I love the gumption of the two Chinese men going in to bat for a possibly kidnapped and enslaved countryman.  I really want to hear of other such cases, where a real trafficked person was freed this way.

The banners in the street tell me it's the 107th annual International Women's Day - warm greetings, all international women! 

To mark the day, I went to a theatre show last night based on the eighteenth-century Story of Kieu - or on part of it, because it's a long story, covering fifteen years of the protagonist's various struggles against a very oppressive and anti-woman society.  ( Cut because of spolier! )

More sombrely, an article about the real-world continuing oppression of women:
The Handmaid's Tale has already come true, just not for western women.

I didn't get to see Arrival over the weekend, as hoped, nor have I yet managed to return to Nirvana in Fire.  :(  And things don't look like letting up for the next two-three weeks.  (I did manage to return to the Narnia Prince Caspian read-through, after a very long absence.)

****

And now I've checked some of your posts, and found news of the decades-long campaigner for human rights in Manipur, Irom Sharmila Chanu!  Wonderful!  Brilliant!!  More power to her, and achievement of her goals, which are not just for her, but for everybody in Manipur (even the oppressors, who are without question damaged by the wrongs they inflict).  And for women everywhere working for a better world!

This gadget sounds really useful!  I have a coconut scraper made like a small stool, with the scratching part sticking out one side.  This is fun (in a mild way) but the sharp teeth sticking out at shin level aren't the best plan for kitchen furniture.  A bench-mounted, relocatable, had-whirled scraper sounds just the ticket!

I've been reading quite a bit, here and there -

• reading the book Nation by Terry Pratchett, and thinking (so far, three chapters in) that it's very good, but erratic and a bit patchy.
• have read the book Olive, by Mrs Craik, which interesting as a record of thinking on various matters (women's art being marginalised/suppressed, physical "deformity" cutting a woman out of the marriage market, race, religion) - but is not particularly worth much as a novel.
• reading The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which sketches out much fascinating material, so far, but isn't really catching fire (bad metaphor, in the circumstances).

And beginning to brace myself for March, which is shaping as a pretty full-on month.

This was also a test-post on cross-posting to LJ; it seems to have worked fine.