(no subject)

I get very annoyed sometimes with my intermittent migraines, not only when they come, but when they sort of hover without actually kicking in all the way. I was going to Picocon today, but there is enough distant thunder in my head that I clearly would not actually enjoy it all that much.

It does seem to be the case that radical changes in the weather destabilize my brain - we have gone in the last two days from cold and gloomy to definite spring and back to c&g, and sure enough I am feeling crap even though I had a migraine full on as recently as Tuesday.

(That was partly triggered by tiredness, of course - I had been speaking at an LGBT History Month event in Liverpool on Monday, and, even with fast trains, that trip is disorienting done in both directions in a single day.

So a quiet day with music.

I did make it to the market this morning, only to discover that my greengrocer was unable to sell me several things I wanted like rainbow carrots and fresh chilis - his early morning delivery had been snatched, he told me as I bought a bag of kumquats to eat in the course of the day. (I love kumquats when I can get them - bitter little citrus fruits whose peel you eat and whose pips are easily spat out...)

So I told him the story about how my father, in his teens in the 1930s, graduated from being a barrowboy to being one of the smart young men with stout sticks who randomly rode in the back of fruit and veg lorries to deter/punish hijackers.

(This in turn led to his being encouraged to join up the moment war started, which led to his being stationed in Gibraltar for his RAMC training as an NCO paramedic, which led to his being one of the people with guns who rode in the back of the lorries that rode up through Fascist Spain to deliver supplies to, and collect dispatches from, the Embassy in Madrid. This led to his being on a list somewhere in Whitehall, which is how he ended up being part of the other ranks in the mission to Tito.

My father rarely talked about the war - we got that out of him because of his spontaneous rage at watching an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour which of course novelizes Waugh's time with the mission. From my father's quiet grim explanation that he was going to go and sit in the garden shed if we insisted on having it on, we gathered that he had served under Waugh and had not liked him one little bit...)

O Tempora! O Mores! O Porous Textuality!

Of course, a lot of us have been writing crossovers for years, because those of us who write fanfic like stealing and you may as well steal from more than one creator and because when you jam improbable canons together, they make loud bangs and pretty colour...But sooner or later, we were bound to bring this infection into the shows we watch - in the UK, we have already had, a couple of years ago, a canonical Footballer's Wives/Bad Girls cross-over and the other week, in Grey's Anatomy there was a man who had been injured trying out a sexual variant he and his wife had read about in Mode. Thereby confirming that Grey's and its spin-off Private Practice take place in the same universe as another ABC show, Ugly Betty. I don't know whether anyone has written GA/UB cross-over, but they just inched closer to canon.

Which brings me to Battlestar Galactica and the possibility that its ending could potentiate the biggest crossover ever. ( Not wholly serious speculation involving some spoilers. )

I meant to post this earlier

My friends in Liverpool are rightly quite appalled by this.
My trip up there to speak at the LGBT history event sponsored by Spectrum - to whom many thanks for a great day - was chastened by the fact that the friends I met for breakfast and tea were all more or less shattered from the previous day's demonstration.

An end to violence. Equality now.