fitness: c25k w5r1

duration: 00:30, pace: 07:31, calories: 389, effort:3/5, feeling: good, distance: 3.99km
Nice. Week 5 reminds me that this is actually running, not a doodleoodle walk. It wasn’t as hard the first time, but my body made it clear that it’s not really as fit as it was.
I’ve been off the antihistamines for a couple of days and I reckon it’s making me feel less lethargic. Or at least the placebo is thoroughly on-track. :D

house keeping

I am, very slowly, making my way through the styles on this site, fixing things up. But it’s a bit annoying because Movable Type really does suck these days. I’m looking at moving over to something else (WordPress perhaps?) but I don’t really think that’s going to happen any time soon. There’s too much backing up and installing and so on involved. Plus I’d have to start again from scratch with the CSS. Argh.
So apologies for the obvious wonkiness and the continuing fiddling.

my concerns about burlesque

I’ve written about this before, but not in a proper post. In this post I try to articulate some of the reasons why burlesque performances at swing dance events (lindy hop and blues) make me feel uncomfortable. This isn’t the end of my thinking, and I do want to make the point, first, that badass burlesque performers are seriously badass.

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new orleans jazz?

I’m interested in the way dancers and DJs use the term ‘New Orleans’ when they’re talking about music. Different dancers use the term in different ways. There, are, for example, a number of dancers who’ve moved to New Orleans itself, and use the term ‘New Orleans music’ (or NOLA music or whatever) to refer to all the bands currently playing in that city. The expression is used to refer to a geographic and cultural grouping of bands and musicians. Not all of these are jazz bands. In this post I’m going to try to explore some of the ways ‘New Orleans’ is used in swing dance discourse, and how it carries so many different connotations and functions in so many ways.

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strange angels

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Strange Angels site
I’ve just finished the third book in this series, ‘Jealousy’. The cover art for the third book is so bad I can barely look at it, so I won’t waste bandwidth with it here. And it looks like I’m having trouble stringing a sentence together today, so bare with me, friends.
I really enjoyed all three of the books in the series (‘Strange Angels’, ‘Betrayals’ and ‘Jealousy’).
I read quite a bit of YA paranormal fiction, usually ones picked out by my mother and sent up in a postpack. That means they tend to be heavy on the romance, and quite often heavy the crapitude. But this series is quite good. The protagonist is female, and while the books fail the Bechdel test, I find Dru less objectionable than most supernatural romance YA heroines.
I’ve just read my way through the first two ‘Vampire Acadamy’ books, and they’re awful. Even though they do pass the Bechdel test.
I can’t really think of anything to say, but I like this series.
Otherwise, I’m also reading ‘Obernewtyn’ (Isobelle Carmody) which I missed as a kid as they came out after I’d moved on to adult books… or they came into our household after I’d moved on. I’m also reading ‘White Mare’s Daughter’ (Judith Tarr) which I _think_ is a grownup book, but is mostly a sort of reworking of the whole matriarchy v patriarchy in ‘ancient times’ device. But with ponies. It’s actually far better than the rest of this trash I’m reading, and I’ve a bunch more of them to burn through after this.

Canberräng report and djing

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Well, it’s been a bit of a long time since I’ve written anything here. Boo to me. I’m really not sure why. I think it’s a matter of being busy with other things, and with simply not writing a lot _generally_. Which is a Bad Thing. But this is a post about Canberräng, the DJing I did there, and the dancing I almost did.
(That’s Terra Hazelton in the pic)

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