Weather forecast

For the sake of people who may be moving furniture tomorrow, here’s the weather forecast for NYC Central Park, tonight and tomorrow, as of Saturday evening, courtesy of Son of Weather Grok:

Tonight:

Mostly cloudy early...then partly cloudy. Windy. Lows in the upper 30s. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph...gusting to 30 mph.

Sunday:

Partly sunny during the morning...then becoming cloudy. Windy. Warmer with highs in the upper 40s. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph becoming west 10 to 15 mph during the afternoon.

Sunday Night:

Cloudy. A chance of rain until midnight...then a chance of snow after midnight. Lows in the lower 30s. West winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of precipitation 50 percent.

A great drab curtain

[...] They had been members with John of the Theosophical Society; they were both in love with Violet. Like John’s, their lives were full of quiet drama, full of vague yet thrilling signs that life was not as the common run supposed it to be; they were among those (it surprised Violet how many there were, and how many gravitated toward Edgewood) who watch life as though it were a great drab curtain which they are sure is always about to rise on some terrific and exquisite spectacle, and though it never did quite rise, they were patient, and noted excitedly every small movement of it as the actors took their places, and strained to hear the unimaginable setting being shifted.

— John Crowley, Little, Big, Book 2, Chapter 1

Cannibalizing past creativity again

A post of mamishka’s has reminded me of some of the poetical parodies I’ve written over the years. I posted one here, the Frost parody with the botched rhyme scheme, but most of them were born in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.fandom:

• One-N Canon is archived on Jo Walton’s Interstichia page, and she seems to have almost consistently misspelled my last name.
• This parody of part of Kipling’s “In the Neolithic Age” was inspired by an argument over software interfaces. I’ve always liked this Kipling, even though the savage wit of the first half (“And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart”) undermines the message it seems to be advocating.
• More Kipling — “A Keebler Song” after “A Pict Song”. I’m not as fond of “A Pict Song” as most sf fans seem to be; it seems to feed into a widespread affection for a kind of kneejerk faux-anti-authoritarianism. (Mind, I have a healthy respect for real, earnest, thoughtful anti-authoritarianism.)
• “Attention all passengers” is a parody of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. For a while I was using the last three lines as a .sig quote.
• “Three quarks for muster Mark”, Tolkein meets Joyce meets modern physics. My favorite thing about this one is that it’s one of the top-rated Google returns for the title phrase, which is a quote from Joyce’s Finnigans Wake. I got email earlier this year from a translator asking me about a song of that title that shows up in a 1992 novel; he wasn’t familiar with the Joyce, and assumed it was a reference to my parody.
• This short parody of “Particle Man” came in the wake of the December 2000 Bush v. Gore decision.
• A one-verse “Modern Major General” parody that confuses even me at two years’ remove.
• A team effort: Pamela Dean and I, cross-breeding “Jabberwocky” with “Witch of the Westmorland”.
• This isn’t poetry. I’m not quite sure what it is. Or this, which isn’t even parody.