Brass Warfare
Mood:  on fire

Cable TV is just about the greatest invention ever.  Last weekend, Mr. DC and I caught part of the National High School Percussion Championships on late-night cable.  There was this one drum ensemble that was doing a gladiator theme, all dressed up in Roman costumes and marching around a set done up to look like an ancient combat arena.  Except, they were carrying genuine "300" shields (you know, the brass ones with the chevron design on the front) and using them very effectively as props.  The judges should have awarded them a thousand points for coolness.  After deducting a few hundred for historical inaccuracy, of course.

Then, a few days later, I was a little startled to overhear someone at work bellowing "Then we will fight them in the shade!!!"  I wish I knew what the context was.  Electronic payment processing software isn't THAT life-or-death.  Maybe I'm in the wrong department.  We never get sun-darkening volleys of arrows unleashed at us (except, maybe, metaphorically).  It's strange, to say the least, that I keep encountering allusions to 300 in the most unexpected places, years after the movie came out.  Do any of you run into the same thing?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make a protest sign:

1% OF THE DAVID MOVIES HAVE 80% OF THE POP CULTURE REFERENCES

WE ARE THE 99%

#OCCUPY300

 

*****

Twin update:  At 35 weeks along, I have the unnerving sensation that gravity has been turned way up.  Mainly because I'm carting around approximately 12 pounds of baby, not to mention several metric tons of fluid, placentas, anvils, grand pianos, blue whales, aircraft carriers, and God knows what else they've got stashed in there.  Every time I think I can't possibly expand another millimeter, the twins find another internal organ to squash.  At least they haven't gotten to my thorax.  Yet.

Yukon is still head down, but Russet remains stubbornly breech (in fact he's sitting on Yukon's head), so a twinectomy...uh, c-section has been scheduled for November 14th.  That's only 18 days away.  But who's counting?  Not me!  Hey, another ten seconds ticked off the clock just now!  Super!

What trumps the discomfort and the slow passage of time, though, is my excitement and eagerness to meet the boys after all these months.  You remember from biology class the whole ontology-recapitulates phylogeny theory, how fetal development closely parallels billions of years of evolution.  How the embryo divides and develops gills and looks first like a tadpole, then a fish.  Then a backbone and a tail emerge and then the tail recedes to form the coccyx, and towards the end a complex brain structure appears, and finally the cerebrum develops.

And then, at last, the baby is born, fully human, fully itself.  And the clock resets from 3.5 billion to zero.