Happiness is a Charles de Lint signing.

shadesong, elionwyr, and I hit the Charles de Lint signing at Chapter 11 at Ansley Mall last night, and it was wonderful.

Of course, Charles started off by reading from Widdershins (which I'd just finished that morning, and was thus extra excited over).

But since this was one of the few stops on his tour attended by MaryAnn Harris (de Lint's lovely wife), we also got a concert! And, of course, a good question and answer period. It was quite lovely, and much longer (a good thing) than I'd expected.

We saw ashlupa (definitely) and bheansidhe and shaddragon (possibly? Thought I saw you guys come in later on), but they were all gone by the time the signing started, alas.

I'd met Charles and MaryAnn a couple of times on previous trips to Ottawa (*waves* to mendoza and ariadnesthread), and they were as wonderful to talk to as I'd remembered. We didn't leave the store until after 9PM (two hours after the scheduled start time, although I think Charles and MaryAnn showed up a little early), and there were still folks hanging around.

Overall, a most wonderful evening.

On Eyes Wide Shut

Courtesy robyn_ma, an interesting analysis/response to criticism of Eyes Wide Shut.

I agree thoroughly with robyn_ma and Kreider that EWS a very underappreciated (and often unjustly savaged) film, although I think that Kreider's response is a little too narrowly focused (the movie is not without flaws, nor was every critic a horny adolescent disappointed that they didn't get to see a hardcore porn flick starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman). Still, it's definitely worth a read if you caught the film.

Jon Stewart v Bill Bennett

From last night's Daily Show.

I guess bigotry and faulty logic are amongst the things one finds in The Book of Virtues. In which case, give me vice any day of the week.

*snort*

"The appeal of traditional word-search puzzles has never been apparent to us. Typically, the solver is given a list of words -- 30 varieties of trees for example -- and asked to locate each of the items in a giant block of letters. This is entertaining only to the degree that finding your car in a parking lot is entertaining, and not nearly as much of a challenge. The words are, after all, right there in front of you, and unless you need practice with letter matching, there isn't much these word-search puzzles will do to expand the capacity of your brain."

From the most excellent (and sadly out of print) Nutcrackers: Devilishly Addictive Mind-Twisting Puzzles for the Insatiably Verbivorous, by Jesse Green and Meg Wolitzer