It seems like it's rainin' all over the world

It started raining about 11 am, a good, heavy rain that carried on all day. I took my umbrella, sure, and went from my place, to the bus stop, the MRT, to downtown, to Suntec City and Millennia Walk (spaceroo's been there -- it's the place with the Outback steakhouse), and back again. Despite never unfurling my umbrella I didn't get wet; I was just able to go under cover the whole time. I had to wonder, if I walked in through the pouring rain, with a perfectly dry umbrella and nothing about me wet except my sandals being a bit damp from walking through other people's wet footprints, what Sherlock Holmes would conclude about me. I grant this is an odd thing to wonder about, but I don't pretend not to be an odd person.

Oh, and in absolutely giddy news, DangerMouse series three and four are out on DVD. The jacket material mentions how it's from the same studio that produced Count Duckula, which is true but seems like mentioning Star Trek was created by the same guy who created The Next Generation. But it's an apt comparison because Count Duckula, series one, is out too. All I need is The $100,000 Pyramid to be released and I can curl up in 1987 and not leave again.

Trivia: Ko-Ko the Clown received his name in 1923, four years after his first cartoons. Source: The Fleischer Story, Leslie Cabarga.

Currently Reading: A Few Acres of Snow, Robert Leckie. You know, if this were a science fiction book (it's a history, about the English/French colonial wars in North America -- King Philip's, William/Anne/George's and the French-and-Indian Wars), I'd suspect Leckie of being a victim of the Brain Eater. Past the 70th page a lot of phrases get reused verbatim, as if he didn't have an editor catching this stuff (I checked the copyright note to see if the book was originally separate articles stitched together; it seems not to be), and there's a tone of ``Why won't you fools LISTEN to me!'' running between the lines (most notably in a footnote that, somehow, tries to address the issue of whether to allow women in combat roles in the military -- and putting aside the density of logic errors that would make bunny_hugger tell him to stay after class, then drop her section, how can you get from Queen Anne's War to whether a woman fighter pilot could beat Erich Hartmann?). Does every reference to Oliver Cromwell, even in sections discussing 1763, have to mention he was despicable, a regicide, a swine, and a hymn-chanter?

And Leckie seems more worked up about the depositions of the Stuart monarchy than the Stuarts were. He goes on, at length, about the German stupidity of George I and II like he was writing Black Adder fan fiction. He cites as proof that James II could not have had syphilis that his son (allegedly) declined an offer by Anne to abdicate in his favor if he became Protestant (which, likely, would have been quite troublesome politically anyway). And after the first mention of Elizabeth I he never refers to her as anything but the Pirate Queen -- reasonable if the section is written from Philip of Spain's point of view, but outside that just weird, like Robert Heinlein after he discovered sex. Also there's no footnotes, even for paragraphs allegedly reproducing dialogue or individual thoughts, and only a two-page-and-change Selected Bibliography, but that may be a softcover edition thing. The index is a reasonably healthy 15 pages of 368.)