Food, Fanfic, Flying Ford, and Dangerous Dai

[Catlady]

The Kobolds and the Nickels are types of wee folk who live in iron mines
and maliciously transform the vein of valuable iron into valueless
cobalt or nickel (thus their names).

Catherine wrote:
> IMHO, the best tea is Twinings, preferably their English Breakfast.

I'm a USAmerican, native of Los Angeles California. I like Twining's
Earl Grey and their Ceylon Breakfast and I like Bigelow's Earl Grey and
their Constant Comment (the flavor ingredients include cloves and bits
of orange peel). In my dotage, I have dwindled to using tea bags.

Doreen wrote:
> We have a laundromat/tanning bed/ice-cream shop.

Laundromat/tanning bed shop sounds a good combination -- you can launder
your clothes while tanning, as after all you have to take them off while
tanning. Tanning bed/ice cream shop sounds like a bad combination: the
people who are concerned about their bathing-suit appearance won't ruin
it with ice cream and the people who eat ice cream aren't going to wear
bathing suits so they don't need to get tan.

Amy Z wrote:
> I'm curious about why people choose to read or not to read fanfic.
Jen Piersol wrote:
> I don't know if I would be so  terribly infatuated with Lupin if it
> weren't for Call of the Wild.

I fell absolutely in love with Lupin when I read PoA. So of course I
wanted to spend more time with him. Which inspired Blaise to direct me
to Call of the Wild. Which I think is a Really Good Fic, but probably
would not have made me fall in love with Lupin if I wasn't already.

I remember from my youth, there was fanfic for Star Trek (Classic Strek,
first run) and other sf shows -- while in junior high, my friend and I
tried to write some ourselves. All I knew about from outside the sf
world was that, not much later,  there was Starsky/Hutch and
Cagney/Lacey slash being written and Sherlock Holmes pastiches sort of
floating around. I suppose the more or less original D&D (Dungeons and
Dragons -- I messed around with it before AD&D came out but after the
three skinny pamphlets were packaged as a boxed set) COULD be considered
to be LOTR and (less directly) Barsoom fanfic, except roleplayed rather
than written.

I seem not to be thinking all that well now that it is 2 in the morning
(and I haven't yet TOUCHED the main HPfGU list, with a week's worth to
catch up on!) because what I thought I was saying is that my
love/obsession for HP, like my love for certain fictions long ago, is
such that I want to play in that world that JKR created, myself.
Analyzing minutiae of canon and extrapolating the economics and
international relations of the wizarding world is one form of playing in
that world, reading, discussing, and writing fanfic is another way of
playing in it.

So of course, once I found that there was HP fanfic, there was no
question whether I was going to read it! And I never worried whether
canon would tainted by fanfic -- I don't particularly *care* if my view
of canon gets tainted.

Rachel Bray wrote:
> But what I meant to say was with Lupin, I have him set in my
> mind as the sexy lady killer (no pun intended on the  werewolf
> thing there) and the idea that he's a lover of one of the other
> Marauders made me pout.

At first I was annoyed at Sirius/Remus slash, because as I said I am in
love with Remus and don't want Sirius to take him away from me ... but
then I decided that I much prefer Sirius/Remus slash to losing Remus to
some other female.

Anyway, the Remus I fell in love with is of course very attractive
(intelligent, gentle, self-controlled, caring), but not particularly
handsome, and not what I would consider a lady-killer. Maybe you have a
different meaning for that word than I do. To me, the lady-killer
deliberately and skillfully seduces women (who might not require much
seducing!). I see the pre-Azkaban Sirius as having been a lady-killer by
my definition (and I can't point to anything in canon as evidence) and
that doesn't stop him from being a nice guy who really cares about
Harry, so of course it is POSSIBLE that Remus is very successful in
singles' bars when he is off-campus ...but that is NOT have I envision
him. I see him as doing that same avoidance of intimacy thing that Harry
does, and would be less surprised to find him still a virgin at 40 than
to find him cutting notches in the bedpost.

Neil wrote:
> Talking of M&S, earlier (that's Marks & Spencer, by the way...
> thank goodness Spencer wasn't the majority shareholder),

In my neighborhood, there is a hardware store named B&D Hardware. Do you
foreigners know what a hardware store is?

>My hometown's football team is also nicknamed 'The Doughboys,"

Yes, but which is your Quidditch team?

Dai wrote:
> Dai is, of course, short for David, which is a very often used (but
> in no way common) name all over Britain. But it was only the Welsh
> who had the refinement and the sophistication to adapt it to my
> chosen pseudo.

My colleague David Saint says he's from Manchester, but he spent enough
of his youth in Wales that one time he said, when he was 12, he almost
was selected for Welsh Schoolboys rugby team but unfortunately he broke
his leg (actually, one of his friends broke it for him) so he missed
out, and had to go to school/college and become a computer programmer
instead... A more recent anecdote is of spending time (every weekend)
with his wife's family, and getting so irritated at all of them speaking
Armenian that he started speaking to them in Welsh, so Armineh got angry
at him for being so rude to her parents, and he said it was pretty rude
of them that no one bothered to fill him in on what was being said in
Armenian, and she said that he ought to *learn* Armenian.... Anyway,
when I started this I had a point, which was that David told me that he
didn't really mind being called Dayffitt but wants to kill anyone who
calls him Daoowie. I was spelling those names phonetically, so I know
they are misspelled.
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