so i'm rereading the wheel of time series in rabid, salivating anticipation of the release of book the twelfth. some things are falling into place and my overactive imagination is reeling with the possibilities, the most interesting of which i shall detail for you:

• verin, you perfect enigma—my explanation for her bizarre behavior is that she has visited the twisted door ter'angreal in tear (fitting for her being brown ajah), and gotten some clue for victory from the aelfinn, and she's working to bring it about; since she's the only one with the answer, her behavior appears to the reader to be secretive or self-serving or contradictory. she's good, just sneaky and duplicitous out of necessity. also, she is (as far as we know) the only one who knows where the horn of valere is (anyone remember the horn?), which may be the root cause of this. the saying it's time to roll the dice, which she got from her father and which mat uses extensively, is what got me thinking on this path.
• elayne will be at the center of a big cease-fire between the seanchan, the borderlands, and the aiel (rand's answer from the aelfinn). this is the explanation of elaida's foretelling that the royal line of andor will be the key to victory in the last battle.
• siuan will feel the distinctive tingling that signifies moiraine's channeling—that's how she will learn that mat and gang have freed her from the tower of ghenjei. this latter will happen very soon (the story line will begin in book 12, i'm certain), though how soon siuan and moiraine hook up, who knows.
• also related to moiraine's return: she gives thom the names of the aes sedai who gentled his nephew owyn, and one of them will be elaida. thom has a rich history of offing leaders who affront him in some way (taringail and galldrian), so it isn't difficult to see where this one is going. the 'one small thing' moiraine knows about her future is that she and thom eventually marry—they will at the series' end, i think. they have a son and name him owyn.
• slayer kills nynaeve in tel'aran'rhiod, and in an attempt to avenge her, lan fights and is also killed by slayer. either lan kills slayer also, or perrin does later.
• rand dies (everyone sees it coming), but it won't be exactly death the way we all think of it. it'll happen at shayol ghul fighting padan fain, and they'll kill each other, and i like three scenarios for rand's not-quite-death:

  1. he hangs out a while in tel'aran'rhiod, either because he has become bound to the horn, or by some other egwene/elayne/nynaeve dreamwalking voodoo. he's called back later when mat sounds the horn.
  
  2. he actually dies, and in this option, it's true physical death. death as the aelfinn see it might be fundamentally different; living in the 'to live, you must die' sense might mean his thread in the pattern still exists, and will later be reborn (just as he is lews therin reborn); or he's healed by nynaeve and everyone is shocked because omg.
  
  3. there's an interesting theme of threes with rand's character—his actions fall into distinct 'categories' of rand al'thor, lews therin, and 'the dragon' persona—corresponding respectively to the naive shepherd, the formidable madman, and the balanced one rand needs to be. in this one, somehow just the rand al'thor and the lews therin partitions of rand's existence die, but the part called the dragon survives long enough to travel to tar valon (recall the funeral bier viewing) to be healed and sent back into the fray. also: if this is what happens, min and aviendha will also die (they correspond to the rand and lews therin slices respectively)
  
  i'm currently thinking #3 is closest to how it'll be, but i'm really shooting in the dark here.

• fain is bad. also, i think some of the forsaken may be loose.

not the cache we had set out to find, mind you. the locations to which the satellites directed us were respectively 1) a copse empty of everything except ants and scrub and various droppings, and 2) unreachable except perhaps by helicopter. so that bit didn't pan out as we had planned. but it's hard to imagine finding something more interesting, or stranger, than what we did find out there: the journal you kept and wrote in during those periods of time when your mind was so dissociated from itself that it may as well have been dictated by the actual invisible pink unicorn.

enough of my rambling. i'll let the best of yours speak for itself:

it goes on.

the empyrean, by john frusciante. if you can afford it, buy it; if not, beg/borrow/steal it.

this album is style with substance, effing sublime, and—as he claims—is best served loudly in a dark room.

i have this thing—this … this condition, if you will—one of the symptoms (though whether this is a symptom or the disease itself is possibly a matter of debate, but i'll leave that alone) of which is that i am not a big-picture person. i understand things by breaking them down into bits as small as possible, and comparing these smashed-up tiny bits against what i already know. it's quite an involved process and i'll spare you the details, mostly because i don't know them. save us both some time and just label me a deductive reasoner; it's a shortcut but it'll do for our purposes.

i'm getting to the point. the above-referenced album by my uncle roger is what they call a 'concept album,' and follows a meandering—and at times, apparently aimless—path, by assumption: it models the dreams of a married middle-aged man, in real time.

under this assumption, it's no surprise that the entire album is disjointed, incomprehensible, and apparently aimless. but only when you consider the parts, independently of the whole. seriously: read the lyrics for the entire album, and you'll see what i mean. but the whole! ah, the whole. as the last track clicked into place for the first time, i was actually close to crying. actually misty-eyed. for the first time, i saw the world as the other half saw it. and yes, i'm talking about you, you bizarre opaque inductive types.

i'm still getting to the point. as opposite as my brain and this album apparently are, i love it, and cannot get enough of it. everything i am, it is not, and vice versa. maybe this is a case of opposites attract? i can't figure it out.

the point is this: i have no bloody idea what the point is; i just want you to listen to the album, and maybe you'll understand me one quantum more.


p.s. the first ninety seconds of track two. i implore you, go forth, trusting me, into the musical bliss that awaits you.

admiral hoshi and president what's-his name lawyer = weird

oh gaius, i knew you had … something … in you.

big guns BIG GUNS OMGs YES

ooh! simultaneous hallucination. i've always wondered what that would be like.

anyone else think galactica ramming into the facility like that is a bit freudian?

cavil still a bastard. check.

right, all it takes is a little hand-torch to cut through the hull of a starship.

OPERA HOUSE REVELEO

yeah, getting hera out was way too easy.

'hera's not a thing, she's a child.' *sigh*

fake-huzzah, a matrix-like 'let's all live in peace together' conclusion. almost word for word. frak.

DON'T KILL TORY NO NO NO

piano song=keypad star coordinates. chelsey saw it coming.

(i'm glad my wife never got drunk doing shots with my brother.)

can it be? earth's evil twin? does it have an evil goatee?

goody goody, high-falutin moral philosophy from one adama to another

'have you ever stolen money from a cash register' … i bet the answer was yes.

tyrol is the father of the vikings! frak yes.

[twenty minutes left; denial sets in]

really trying not to be cynical about roslin, AGAIN

incidental point of order: spaceships don't need wings, no sound in space, and lasers move faster than that

OMGs WHERE DID KARA GOEZ

wrong hand for the ring, dummy. also look where you're flying

apparently all that nonsense about hera didn't mean much? i mean, they could have just jumped away, right?

aaaand definitely going over the alloted two hours. curious.



.. thank you for reading; mattlestar gafraktica has been sponsored by kfc and yet another x-men movie


post-show rumination. apparently the entirety of season 3 was predicated on that one night mooreron got stoned listening to 'all along the watchtower'

1 because 2; 2 because 1. thank a marketer near you.

of course, this year's were not so bad, but not so good as to leave no room for improvement.

also! three cheers and a tally-ho for friends' free hot tub! ask him (or his personal financial assistant) how much this 'free' actually costs. go on, i dare you.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fyX0LK_t_G8

at this point my memory becomes slightly fuzzy

and suddenly it's like a quarter to five the following morning and i'm in my underwear with my old college texts out and i'm scribbling notes about exponential towers and *omorphisms whilst humming 'woman in love.' the internet is a gateway to the darkness waiting deep inside.

this double-variant of chess is perhaps the awesomest thing, ever. four players, and insane strategy-breaking cards. chess is to this … this beast as whack-a-mole is to global thermonuclear war.

oh, did i mention we built the board from legos? we are infinitely adaptable, you see.