In which she reflects on A Christmas Carol

I've never actually read Dickens' book. In fact I'm not sure I've read any of Dickens' books in their entirety. I was assigned Great Expectations in school and I must have soldiered through at least half of it, and I did look at the very end which was my favourite part (I enjoy minor ambiguities like "We never said farewell again"), but it's quite possible I skipped the rest. I've tried Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities and others at various ages, but it just comes down quite simply to the fact that I don't enjoy reading Dickens' novels.

So everything I know about A Christmas Carol I learned from the general societal gestalt, inhaled from bits of TV movies and duck-filled cartoons and fanfic pastiches and the Blackadder parody and YA novels involving children putting on plays and a multitude of slighter references. A Lamb Chop episode once argued that people are born knowing "Three Blind Mice" because who can remember not knowing it? The story of A Christmas Carol is like that for me. A Dickens fan would grimace and say I really should read the book, of course, but there's lots of things that should happen and won't.

Because of my utter lack on fanning over Dickens, then, I was disappointed to see that the title of this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special was A Christmas Carol. We've already met Dickens, y'know? and moreover, the story's been done, in movies and cartoons and fanfics and parodies and novels about plays and and and.

But ( Doctor Who makes everything better, even earthquakes )

In which she notes several things too small for their own posts

In no particular order:

The #eqnz Twitter feed is full of people with amazingly original ideas about earthquakes and volcanoes that could not possibly have already occurred to actual geologists. <head-desk>

In addition to my ordinary hayfever skinrash I get from grass-seeds when weeding, I've discovered that one of the bushes that needs regular pruning gives me an instant rash if its leaves touch my neck. I ended up fleeing straight to the bathroom, stripping, and taking a thorough shower, plus taking antihistamines. All calmed down now.

Having got hold of the local Korean TV channel, I'm watching their marathon catch-up of Queen Seondeok. The protag Deokman has spent 20-odd episodes disguised as a guy (army trainee), looking mostly like a girl disguised as an army trainee. Now for the first time she dresses in a princess's clothes and looks... exactly like a guy dressed in a princess's clothes, 너무 귀엽다.

Google Translate's "did you mean" suggestion is awesome; that's a phrase I only heard spoken so didn't know the correct spelling.

One of my drains is blocked by a dead hedgehog.