My writers group is awesome.

Playing on the iPod: I know it's David Arkenstone, but I can't even tell ya what album.
Meters swum today: 1750

So the gang and I met over at Aunt Sally's yesterday to discuss mental illness, "Lifetime" Movies of the Week, British comedy, the foolishness of suing massage therapists for damages, and of course all things literary. I'm reminded again how totally outclassed I am. Kellum brought part of the index to his dictionary of mythical beings (yes, folks, we read the index to a dictionary). It was fascinating. I kid you not, it really was cool. He's indexing concepts, such as "tree of life" (26 entries) and "pocket full of sand" (okay, I made that up, but it should be in there) as well as groups of people (the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, just by way of example) and the various deities and folklorish permutations that tend to hang around with them. This is the 4th edition, by the way, and will be available through Lulu Press shortly. Details here as soon as I have 'em.

Jackie, on the other hand, is morphing into the female Gordon Lightfoot I wanted to be in high school. She brought her guitar and sang a couple of new songs for us. One of 'em was about lonely college girls who go looking for studly Renaissance men who can quote Shakespeare while skinning freshly killed grouse. There was another one about "this game I play in my head until I get over you" which I'm not going to quote because it's sad. She's got an amazing voice, she can actually play that thing with the six strings, and now she's composing on top of it. Good God, people, after all this I gotta drag out the latest chapter of Spellbinder and leave everybody, uh, spellbound. I say it again, I am totally outclassed.

I never thought I'd be saying this, but thank God the Olympics are over. I don't think I've worked on the book in three weeks. It's a good thing I already had a chapter mostly finished or I'd have been Spellbinderless. Or it fell out of my binder. Or something. Anyway, looking forward to things going somewhat back to normal, or as normal as they ever get around here anyway.

Just one more thing about the Olympics though: Whose idea was it to sing "Whole Lotta Love" at the closing ceremonies? I mean, okay, the next Olympics is in London, Led Zeppelin is a classic British band, at least one member (Jimmy Page, who's not aging well) is still alive to show up and play the guitar, the title is nice, but did anybody on the committee actually look at the lyrics?! Or does "Way, way down inside, I'm gonna give you my love/I'm gonna give you every inch of my love/I gotta whole lotta love" translate into Chinese as, "Peace, love and understanding"?

Seriously, if you were the city of London, and Beijing was singing to you, "Shake it for me girl, I wanna be your backdoor man," wouldn't you be a little worried? I'm thinking as long as they're trying to present the new host city in such a good light, why not sing "London Calling" by the Clash? Or "London You're A Lady" by the Pogues? Okay, the Pogues are Irish, but there's always "No Place Like London" from the Sweeney Todd soundtrack (the feel-good movie of the Christmas season, make no mistake). In fact I can't think of too many songs by great London acts that would be less appopriate, except maybe "God Save the Queen." Or "Hungry Like the Wolf". Or, hey, how about "Honky Tonk Woman"?