Casting Spoiler for Heroes...

Thanks to raissad, ( I read this article... )

Meeting Lyn's brother...

Lyn has been my good friend since the 1970s, but I have never met her brother Michael or his wife Heli. They have lived in Calgary for a very long time, and have never come to Ottawa - until this week.

Lyn wanted her local friends to meet them, so she rented the party room at her condo building and invited us all over. We made it a pot-luck supper, and had a wonderful time. It was a bit like a Who Cares revisited.... A Who Cares was a kind of party we used to have every second Saturday night in roving locations, in which anyone associated with local fandom was welcome to turn up, and bring their friends.

Those days of easy socializing are behind us, but we had a wonderful time. There was a vast amount of food, and Beulah brought some delicious carrot cake.

I liked Michael and Heli, too. I expected Michael to resemble Lyn's father, whom I'd met, but he didn't. Nor did he resemble Lyn. He was just... himself, I guess, which is fair enough.

Afterwards, Beulah drove me home and we dropped in on maaseru to share some of the leftover carrot cake with her and maaboroshi. (Amazing, that there should be leftover cake, with that crowd!) We chanced on the beginning of the Kenneth Branagh As You Like It which instantly charmed us (and hooked us) with its multicultural melange of nineteenth-century Americans in Japan, Tudor England dialogue, ninjas, and Star Wars ambience. (And, muttered maaboroshi and I to each other, all this and femslash too. Gotta love Branagh.)

I didn't see more than the first third of it; dying to see the rest.

maaseru said that As You Like It was the first live play she saw, and that marked the moment when she fell in love with Shakespeare and with theatre. And she hasn't seen that particular play since, not even in movie form.

I don't think I've ever seen it at all - I've just read it.

Do your friends read?

From Booking Through Thursday:

There was a widely bruited-about statistic reported last week, stating that 1 in 4 Americans did not read a single book last year. Clearly, we don’t fall into that category, but . . . how many of our friends do? Do you have friends/family who read as much as you do? Or are you the only person you know who has a serious reading habit?

Most of my friends read. Most of my close friends read a lot. It says something about the friends I cultivate, and our shared tastes. If I only read four books in a month, I think I'm badly slipping. And I am. There was a time when I commonly read four books a day - back when I was a sick teen who spent a lot of time in bed with no energy to do much else. That, and a serious book addiction.

I even have a handful of friends who read more than I do. Scary, isn't it?

All my family read, whenever they had the chance, and if they didn't get the chance, they made it. I have only one relative, as far as I know, who wasn't a constant reader - a second cousin who was dyslexic: reading wasn't the pleasure for her that it was for the rest of us.

Now, my very best friend through my teens didn't read fiction at all. She read for information, she read for school-work, she read magazines like Canadian Living, but she never read for entertainment as I did. As far as I know, she has only ever read one novel. But we had a humdinger of a role-playing game going for twelve years straight.