Morning uneventful, with the exception of a brief episode in which some doofus at the next table was heard to opine that “It’s just a myth that we’re running out of oil” and I practiced my inestimable skills at self-discipline by not throwing a bag of peanuts at his head. Got some writing done on “Pidgin” or “Tardigrade” or “Remus”\u2014 the Sunflowers<\/i> story that the recent fiblets have been coming out of, anyway (any preferences among those titles, btw?).<\/p>\n
Buggered off in the afternoon to attend a friend’s wedding, at which I’d agreed to serve as ring-bearer only on the condition that I be allowed to raise my hand when the Justice of the Peace reached that point about “If any here know of any reason why these two should not be joined” 1<\/sup>. Idle conversation amongst the assembled prior to the ceremony covered a range of topics including gang rape, alcohol abuse, and the TV series House<\/i>. Last words spoken by the bride prior to ritual were “Remember: everybody lies,” which I assumed was meant in reference to her imminent vows until I realized that I had been screwed and the “if anyone has objections” bit had been deleted from the ceremony. The ceremony ended with the traditional “I now pronounce you married”, and a somewhat less-traditional cry of “I change my mind!” from the bride five seconds later.<\/p>\n Went for a gnosh (nosh?) afterwards and met some interesting folks, including the sound wizard who salvaged the mix on Rush’s Counterparts<\/i> album. He tells me both Geddy Lee and Neil Peart are clinical geniuses. (Alex Lifeson, not so much.) Bride wanted to know the spatial radius for allowable infidelity when doing field research; husband pointed out that under Canadian law, someone could be throwing napalm on a helpless victim right in front of you, and you would not be legally required to do anything to stop them or help the victim even you knew the assailant would abort the attack if you asked nicely. This also answers yesterday’s unasked question about accessories. Not only is the answer “no”, but in Canada we don’t even use the word “accessory”, preferring instead the more festive “party to the crime”. (We don’t use the word “felony” either, apparently.)<\/p>\n Also, in this country you apparently cannot legally consent to have your finger cut off.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup>Said objection would have been an in-principle observation that Humans \u2014 in fact, mammals in general \u2014 are not by nature monogamous, and the whole death-do-us-part shtick is more probably rooted in a money grab by religious institutions than in any improbable evolutionary anomaly.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Morning uneventful, with the exception of a brief episode in which some doofus at the next table was heard to opine that “It’s just a myth that we’re running out of oil” and I practiced my inestimable skills at self-discipline by not throwing a bag of peanuts at his head. Got some writing done on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}