This is gettin’ creepy…

It’s been my week for tying up loose ends.

I don’t mean the “Oh, bugger, I never e-mailed a follow-up on that one thing six weeks ago,” loose ends, I mean “Hey, so that’s where that song I heard once in high school a DECADE ago that has nagged me since came from!”

The song in question was a filk (although I didn’t know it at the time) and while I have no particular desire to go track it down, the fact that I know I didn’t hallucinate it is always pleasant.

And then there was the books–“Dragons of the Inland Sea” which y’all so graciously helped with, and which I am delighted at the prospect of re-reading again, after nearly two decades.

The two loose ends following hard on the heels of one another was a little surprising–I mean, it’s been years–and I remember thinking ironically, as I fell asleep last night, “Man, wrapping up loose ends in life! Hope I’m not about to die or something!”

And then today there is a show on NPR about an expose that contributed to bringing down McCarthy, back in the day, (and whew, as a sidenote, was he a creepy sounding little bugger or what? I don’t think I’d ever actually heard a recording of him before, so it might just have been this particular speech, but that rapiduninflectedmonotone gave me the willies. ‘Course, I did KNOW that it was McCarthy, so that probably colored my view–if it was Joe the Janitor, I might not have thought anything much of it.)

But anyway. At the end of this broadcast, Edwards (?) says, in that slow, deliberate old-time anchor voice that you just don’t hear any more, a quote from Shakespeare, “‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night, and good luck.”

And I, who had been listening with half an ear while writing up a process on the current page of Digger for this webcomic book, went “HEY! That’s the line from “Helter Stupid!” By Negativeland!” Which I listened to, oh, maybe five hundred times in high school.

Too many loose ends wrapping up. Things like this make me want to get a full physical and check the neighborhood to make sure there are no rogue wildebeests about.

New visitor at the birdfeeder today–a brown headed cowbird. For what is a vile and hated species, it looked oddly innoffensive, a muted little dirty-slate bird smaller than a titmouse, like someone mated a grackle and a warbler. You wouldn’t think they were in the habit of decimating songbird populations. The hulking woodpecker chased it off.

If someone gets me in the night with a sharpened cowbird, avenge my death!