Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Din Dins!

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world. ~T'ien Yiheng

posted by Catherine @ 9:08 AM 1 comments

Thursday, May 25, 2006

And now, Shakespeare

This is an oft-quoted sonnet, very moving...it could even be useful in describing love between friends.

CXVI.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

posted by Catherine @ 10:22 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

A Description of London

From Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman:

"Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.
It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheeful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind."

posted by Catherine @ 10:28 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

I can't wait for Jasper Fforde's newest book to arrive: July seems so far away! Here is the preview from his website:



Ever wondered why Mummy bear and Daddy Bear slept in seperate beds? Ever pondered over the real reason Goldilocks was in the bear's house that morning? Ever racked your brains over the thermodynamic impossibilties of simultaneous porridge pouring? You did? Then hold onto your porridge spoon for:

The Fourth Bear
A Nursery Crime

'...However many photos you see of the Gingerbreadman, nothing can ever prepare you for seeing him in the flesh. He was a dark brown colour the shade of mahogany and at least six foot eight inches tall with heavy limbs and a large head. His jacket was open revealing several large pink icing buttons that ran down his chest. He had large glace cherries for eyes the size of tennis balls’and a huge dollop of red icing for a nose. His mouth was two slivers of licorice, the corners of which rose into a smile as soon as he saw them. 'Alan!' said the Gingerbreadman with a deep yet friendly tone, 'What a pleasant surprise! And most timely, too. See here, I have bred a new rose which, in honour of your work to cure me of my criminal tendencies I take great pleasure in naming after you. Behold, Mandible's Triumph! ...'

The Gingerbreadman: Psychopath, sadist, genius, convicted murderer and biscuit is loose in the streets of Reading. It isn't Jack Spratt's case. He and Mary Mary have been reassigned due to falling levels of nursery crime, and The NCD is once more in jeopardy. That is, until a chance encounter during the Armitage Shanks literary awards at the oddly familiar Deja-Vu Club lead Jack and Mary on the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta 'Goldilocks' Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole. She had been about to break a story involving unexplained explosions in Herefordshire, Pasadena and the Nullabor Plain; The last witnesses to see her alive were The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Andersen's wood. But all is not what it seems. How could the bear's porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time? Was Goldy's death in the nearby 1st World War themepark of Sommeworld a freak accident? And is it merely chance that the Gingerbreadman pops up at awkward moments? But there's more. What does a missing scientist with a terrifying discovery in subatomic physics, a secret weapon of devastating power, a reclusive industrialist known only as the Quangle Wangle and Colonel Danvers of the National Security all have in common?
Published on the 10th July in the UK and the 24th July 2006 in the USA.

posted by Catherine @ 10:47 AM 0 comments

Monday, May 15, 2006

We had a kettle; we let it leak:Our not repairing made it worse.We haven't had any tea for a week...The bottom is out of the Universe.~Rudyard Kipling

posted by Catherine @ 12:45 PM 0 comments

Thursday, May 11, 2006

This is kind of my online scrapbook of quotes, poems, pictures, etc. that I enjoy or found interesting. I have two other blogs: one is more of a journal about my life and love of tea, books, cats, etc. The other is whatever poems I've written that I felt like sharing. So this new one will be more of a collection of things I'm not responsible for creating. Hope you like!

posted by Catherine @ 10:58 AM 2 comments