Once Upon A Time the Second

Carl's second annual Once Upon A Time Challenge starts tomorrow. I'm hoping to complete Quest the First--five books from the mythology, folklore, fairy tale and fantasy genres--but it's nice to know that there's a Journey category with a commitment of only one book if I should fall behind.

My five selections:

Gods Behaving Badly. Marie Phillips

The Annotated Alice. Lewis Carroll

Girl Meets Boy. Ali Smith

Summerland. Michael Chabon

The Once and Future King. T.H. White

Easing back into blogging

Four links:

Did They Have Fanfic in the Middle Ages?

Yet anyone who's read the Canterbury Tales knows that the thing needs footnotes aplenty just to begin to get all the inside jokes and pop cultural references. Chaucer may not be obsessed with the A-Team or Strawberry Shortcake, but he's still unable to get through a paragraph without a sly aside that requires you to have read the Romance of the Rose or Boethius in order to understand.

Have you heard about the novelists' strike?

A report published last week by the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication found that the strike has thus far had an economic impact of approximately 0.00 to 0.01 percent. In addition, consumer habits remain unaffected, with 0 percent of those polled saying their reading habits had changed "significantly," 0 percent saying they had changed "somewhat," and an additional 0 saying they had changed "slightly." A significant number of respondents reported no reading habits.

Would you like your tragedy with a side of misery?

It all begs the question: why on earth do I insist on reading novels that make the general public want to jump off a cliff?

But where are all the zombie dinosaurs to be found?

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

Back for sure tomorrow!

All the running you can do

It's Looking-Glass time and I'm feeling a bit pawned. To run fast enough to get anywhere, I'm going to need a blogging break.

If I'm not back by Easter, throw a few dyed eggs through the mirror at me, okay? I promise not to tell Humpty Dumpty.

See you in a fortnight or Ellie's the Red Queen!