How 'bout a monster for breakfast today?

Misread loose sheet of paper laying on the couch for no good reason except my father refuses to have the entire couch clear for sitting uses of the day: I thought the flyer said ``1996 World Champion New York Vampires.'' It was actually about a different team, as I learned when I looked closer to figure out the context for that. Still, if I had any talent as a storyteller, I'd think there was a story in there. Maybe several.

A little other footnote about my car. When I finally secured a ... job isn't quite the right word, since I'm not actually doing work, but it's something job-like ... I wanted to fix something my car was missing. The radio reception for the channels I like gets a little too staticky to be really pleasant on the ride to my extruded office product, so I thought I could use a CD player and enjoy books-on-tape and thus in an odd fashion double my ``currently reading'' work. But as the car comes to me from the mid-90s it has a cassette player, not a CD player. Given the library selections that's not too limiting. I started out, for example, with the tape version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I thought would be a puckishly amusing thing to ``read'' on tape (I never read the book, though I've leafed through it many times). I was shocked to learn the scene I remembered best from the movie, of the book people wandering around a sylvan glen, was an invention of the movie and has only the vaguest relation to any scene in the book, so my joke was spoiled.

I also got a tape adaptation of Shakespeare's King John, which is one of those plays you never hear anything about because it's not really all that interesting, since it's one of the English History plays and it doesn't have Falstaff and it isn't Henry V. Plus the only quote anyone remembers from it is that one about gilding the lily that everyone misquotes anyway. On top of that in Elizabethan days everyone on stage talked like an exceedingly detailed lease agreement, so in the lack of any really stirring speeches to rally to it just staggers along.

Trivia: The United Kingdom's 1714 Longitude Act was drafted by 17 June, when it had its first reading). Source: The Quest for Longitude, Ed. William J H Andrewes.

Currently Reading: A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, Edited by Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby.