The Explorers Club
No. LXXIV – the Questing Beast, a fell creature from Arthurian legend.





There is a dearth of images of the Questing Beast, but it is a monster with a laudable literary pedigree.

The Queue
I am terribly ignorant of all but the broad strokes of the vast body of Arthurian legend, one of many deficiencies I hope to correct in the thirty-one-odd years left to me. In an attempt to surmount the backlog of books plaguing me, I have embarked upon a rigid reading plan. I have a reading goal for each day, and if I do not complete a given day's reading it is simply added to the next day's total, requiring all the more reading to avoid falling yet further behind. In a month of the plan, I have never fallen more than three days behind and never taken more than two days to catch back up. If I exceed the day's quota, the extra pages do not reduce the following day's requirement, they instead a boon toward the ultimate goal. It is a somewhat joyless task, but necessary if ever I am to tame the herd of books on my nightstand.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick ***progress resumed after a sabbatical***
Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise
Nicolas Sarkozy, Testimony
Ernest Shackleton, South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage
Robert M. Soderstrom, The Big House: Fielding H. Yost and the Building of Michigan Stadium ***Fall '09, even if line jumping proves necessary***
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story
Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

And a thousand others, not even counting all the research I want to do for Project TROIKA. Bog, were I do to naught all day but read there would still never be time enough for them all. So many lovely, lovely books, so little and tremendously fleeting time. It is a tragedy of riches.

Perchance to Dream
I had two discrete dreams this morning. In the first, I was at a ball when I was suddenly come upon by an old high school acquaintance, one of many with whom I have "reconnected" since joining Facebook several weeks hence. Oddly, though she looked like th elder of two sisters, she insisted that she was the younger. When I attempted to rejoin my dance partner, the elder-younger sister collapsed in a heap and wept terribly, apparently for love of me. Good job, random subconscious, stroke that ego!

In the second, I was in a thoroughly alien-seeming room, one of a trio of individuals who through a rather disgusting process combined with two others to form some manner of invincible superhero. Think Voltron, only of moderate stature and repulsively organic, replete with gallons of ooze. But as there were only three of us, with nary a clue as to the location of the other two necessary for the horrid conglomeration, we were fodder for the unseen foes intent upon our deaths. I'd have rather reversed the sequence of the episodes, but such is the nature of dreams.

Believe: Red Wings 3-0 Predators
Series: Detroit 4-2 Nashville. Four down, twelve to go.

I missed the lion's share of Friday's game - Red Wings 2-1 Predators (O.T.) - watching the premiere of Doctor Who (the Christmas Special, "Voyage of the Damned"), and today's contest pulled double-duty with live coverage of the Mass at *shudder* Yankee Stadium. I believe I was so easily distracted because I never really doubted the Wings' eventual victory. I give the Predators credit for their effort, but they were simply no match for the juggernaut of the winged wheel. They might very well have been swept had Dominik Hasek not been felled by one of his periodic and puzzling bouts of mediocrity. I love the way the Wings play under head coach Mike Babcock.

Onward ho! Lord Stanley's Cup awaits!

The Pope Conquers America
And speaking of today's nationally televised open air Mass: popelink. C.N.N. betrayed a hatred of Catholicism worthy of the hypocrite Oliver Cromwell when immediately after His Holiness left Yankee Stadium their coverage switched to relentless and tedious hammering of the Church over the sex abuse scandal. Once you take the Church's money as part of a settlement, you lose any right to moral indignation. Want a greater voice for the laity in the running of the Church? Go join the Protestants, their dwindling ranks could certainly use the converts.

Who Used To Own It? West Indies Edition
Scoring tomorrow! Get your answers in while there is yet time!