Thursday and all is well, aprt from the ranting.

I seem to be uniformly cast as Sammmy Davis Jnr in the livejournal soaps. Well, at least we're the same height if nothing else.

A rant about a rant
I have a friend who is a very good friend, but can also be a very annoying friend. Being ranted at drunkenly about my reading tastes isn't really a fun way to relax of an evening. I like to read for pleasure, he likes to read for some other reason that I think has to do with some notion of intellectual aristocracy. It's incredibly irritating to be informed that you're reading the wrong books, for the wrong reasons. Although to be fair, he did eventually just about concede that a person may want to read a novel solely for the pleasure of a good story well told, and not for any other reason, and that a modern novel *might* be of some small value, but with the proviso that it's by Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. Aaaargh! I've nothing against those two authors at all, but I spent so much time as a young woman attending
Girlfriend University (partly my own fault for not just shouting 'shut up about Nietzsche already!') that this sort of thing makes me a bit wild.

Anyway, leaving that behind, I have a hot lunch date to day with some friends that I don't get to see very often, so that should serve as an antidote.

Mars

On the 27th of August Mars will be at its brightest since 57,000 BC. So that means the last people to see it like this bright were Neanderthal men. To give some sense of scale, Venus at its very brightest registers -4 on the start brightness scale thingy (technical term there), and Mars will register -2.9. So, oooh!

And also, I need to go to bed.