Yuletide recs #5 (miscellany)

Before bed, here is a mixed bag of my last Yuletide recs of this year, right before the name reveal!

• Pursuit. The Fast and the Furious. Brian/Dom, a great sequel - original, plotty, engaging, lovable and very much in the style of the films, with a lot of UST full of manly repressed emotions.



• This Is Not a Chick Flick. Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone. An irreverent, witty and meta-on-many-levels romcom take on my favourite myth with many memorably hysterical cameos from other deities.



• Acknowledgement. Merlin/Arthur, with Arthur being manipulative and clever - which, I gather, is perhaps a bit unusual? A charming, funny story.



• And This Time I'll Remember. Hot Fuzz, Danny/Nick. What I love most about this is the premise (not that anything's wrong with the execution!): that Nick wakes up with a dead body and no memory, and nobly resigns from the investigation because he is afraid that (dun dun) WHAT IF HE DID IT? It's so delightfully classic cop-show, and so delightfully contrasts with the utterly non-classic world of Hot Fuzz's cops.



• A Meeting of Equals. Coupling UK, gen, and obviously, humour. Jane at a party. JANE. ♥♥

And hey, happy new year, everybody.

an occasion for hemlängtan

Perhaps it's because I lack the scientifically-proven gene that makes people have religious experiences, but I've never really gotten the whole New Year's thing. Or the point of making resolutions explicitly at any time, let alone one specific time, although I dubiously tried it out a few times when I was a kid.

New Year's in Finland involves more public drunkenness - generally on the street, in fact, which results in a lot of puke on the sidewalks in the days following - as well as drunkenness in bars, the most traditional place, and of course also drunkenness at house parties, but maybe to a lesser extent.

New Year's in childhood could be counted on to provide an extended family party with all the other kids present, plenty of delicious junkfood and snacks and staying up quite late, if we were visiting my mother's family; or at home, the annual Unitarian Universalist New Year's party, the biggest event of the year after our Halloween campout. And since a UU congregation is generally pretty small comparatively in Alabama, and everyone there quite well known to me, that sort of party is also really fun. (To say nothing of the snacks and champagne. And in my family, the children always got alcoholic drinks - if they wanted them. I never wanted a large enough quantity to find out where my mom would draw the line. I took my margaritas with a capful each of tequila and triple sec on the rare occasions I wanted the liquor part, and not the potent mixture Mom makes for herself.) (Every party is an occasion for margaritas, with my mom ♥.)

yuletide fic: you're the cream in my coffee (singin' in the rain)

Yes, for Yuletide I was rather ironically assigned to write fanfiction for my oldest OTP3, the one canon I essentially know by heart (I'm very glad I was, though)!

You're the Cream in My Coffee is ≈8400 words (or you can see it on the Yuletide site). mecurtin graciously provided a last-minute pinch-hit beta for which she has earned lots of undying gratitude, since she saved my sanity when I was panicking and enabled me to post on time.

Any Singin' in the Rain story must be a musical, of course, and having used up all the excess music from the soundtrack the last time I wrote it, I went to research period music. That research helped shape the course of the story (and provided the title!) and I got quite caught up in it. Which brings me to the real point of this post. I've been dying to share my awesome 20s music for a month! And therefore I present:

• The soundtrack playlist I made on YouTube to provide an audio reference for the numerous songs quoted or name-checked in the story is reproduced with this downloadable rar file: You're the Cream in My Coffee [rar, password "timothy"] (In a few cases, the download is a different version of the song; and there are just a couple of extras that I couldn't bring myself to take off the soundtrack, though I ended up not mentioning them in the text).



• But there were plenty of songs I liked which didn't make the story, so here's a bonus: The Roaring 20s! [rar, password timothy] Also a couple of er, surprises that aren't period-accurate but simply couldn't be excluded from my extended writing playlist.

My most exciting discovery was Helen Kane, who is the original Boop-Boop-a-Doop girl! So called because she coined the phrase in her first hit, which catapulted her to megastardom pretty much immediately, and her signature 'boop-a-doop' style scat is audible in all the songs of hers in those files (which is... quite a few!). Betty Boop was an utterly shameless ripoff of her, with the dude who invented it hiring some other chick to imitate her voice for the cartoon. She sued, but the case didn't make it before a jury because a judge threw it out after the defense dug up an essentially completely unknown blues singer who had also, while singing scat, "booped" (and since she didn't invent it, the imitation of her voice, verbal tics, and even appearance apparently wasn't a ripoff). Methinks (said Wax) that someone paid off the judge. Whatever, I gather (thanx Wiki ♥) that she lived a long and happy life as a restauranteur after retiring from showbiz, so that's okay.

ETA! ( tracklists )