Liadnan

Thanks to kixie: I've always wanted to go to Kamchatka, a place I heard of years ago, because it is a famously splendid wilderness, but also because there are rumours of there being giant bears, there. I think bears are one of the scariest animals I can think of (probably on a par with sharks, hyaenas, leopard seals and lions, on my list of "stuff I really will go a long way to avoid running into unexpectedly").

Much as with tigers, I don't necessarily want to see a giant bear, but it would be great to be in a place where seeing one was a theoretical possibility. You know. From a distance. However, the place is being cleaned out of the vast salmon population that sustained them, and the starving bears are now reduced to eating people.

While I have a certain amount of sympathy for the bears in this situation, I spent a misguided moment contemplating how absolutely terrifying it would be, to be stuck in a remote mine, under attack by 30 starving bears. Brrr.

*scratches Kamchatka off the list of possible holiday destinations*

Newspaper misspells its own name on front page.

Profeeder needid immmad inmedia immediattly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7523313.stm

I'm looking hot and frowny in the background! Court was fun. Very glad I didn't follow my childhood plans and become a barrister though - snooooooore. Much more fun being a badly behaved journo :)

#55 The Greast Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Thrillingly modern novella. I very rarerly read pre-war literature but this wasn't like reading pre-war literature at all.

I seem to remember much discussion of this on my F-list at one point but I can't find it now. Any ideas?

#56 The Heritage by Will Ashon

Read for review for Strange Horizons.

#57 Death Of A Murderer by Rupert Thomson

The titular but never named murderer is Myra Hyndley. As PC Billy Tyler guards her corpse he thinks back over the events of his life, watched by her ghost.

This is the Thomson novel that took me the longest to get into, even more so than The Book Of Revelation, and I don't think this is unrelated to the fact it is the most mundane of his novels. This is the story of an ordinary man, a slightly dull man who has stayed a constable all his career simply because he doesn't want to become a sergeant. It gradually builds up a portrait of the extraordinary nature of an ordinary life. Death Of A Murderer isn't one of my favourite Thomson novels because it is just too simple. This is the point and it makes a virtue of it but it still doesn't give you all that much to get your teeth into. On the other hand, this does make it an extremely quick read.

communicator has some thoughts here.

Ah! Something new I've been doing has been puzzling me for the last few days (doesn't matter what it is, it's just a minor new hobby I couldn't explain), but it has just slipped into context in my head. Despite the two amazing and endlessly touch-and-attention-hungry oriental cats, the fish, the new, more labour-intensive fish, the book (actually, the book takes a lot, but it's all head-and-heart love, not all-of-me love where I spend ages making things for the object of my affections and planning things that will delight them, and washing their hair and cooking for them and giving them many kisses &c), the house, the garden, and my work, upon all of which I lavish a truly obscene amount of devotion, I do not have sufficient tangible outlets for the amount of full-on adoration in me. Not even close.

This causes a dangerous build-up of unused adoration.^[1]

I need to adore something with all of me.

There is nothing to hand that requires what's available. I feel spare, unnecessary to the world.

Suggestions? Before I randomly adopt a bunch of orphans.

^[1] Devotion is great stuff and can fuel entire nations, but it's powerful strong, and I definitely don't want unoccupied piles of it lying around the place, or eventually it makes me go batty^[2].
^[2] Not that sort of batty. E e!

Came across a nice little fic on the Pit of Voles (I know!); Bagheera's Five Moments of Doubt - missing moments from Deadly Hallows, in which five people at Hogwarts look at Snape, and briefly wonder if things are quite what they seem. I particularly like the Ginny one, and the last one, with McGonnagal, has a bit of a sting in the tail...

In other news: copy-typing references = really, really boring.

Quite an exercisey day yesterday. As well as having a morning run, I went for a game of golf after work. The weather co-operated, and it turned into a nice evening with a couple of drawbacks. Paul and I had headed off to Bearsden Golf Club, a nice wee 9-holer we've played a couple of times recently along with two of our Spanish colleagues. We got there nice and early, just after 6, only to be told that women can't tee-off after six on a Wednesday. No, really.
So we hastily rearranged and headed off to Hilton Park instead, which is Paul's old course and about 15 minutes away. The course is well kept but very, very hilly. I doubt there's a piece of fairway where you could drop a ball without it running away from you. And it's home to every type of flying insect, and some which can hop. Despite the Skin So Soft I was slapping away bugs on almost every hole.  I was playing ok, but because of the hills and trees (presumably put there to stop your ball running downhill to the sea, 5 miles away) managed to lose 3 balls.
We played half a round, and then sat down outside the clubhouse to enjoy the view and have a well deserved drink. 

Had a night of strange dreams - I was spending the night in a railway waiting room with my ex and our son, and she turned out to be a hustler at some European-wide business game. 

I woke up with sore legs (presumably from running away) so Merlin got a stroll instead of a jog. Which gave me an excuse to use my new camera on the walk...

From brown_betty:

The National Film Board Of Canada hath an online archive!

I am presently feeling enchanted by The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar, not least because the credits contain the immortal words "And Introducing Margot Kidder".

Or there is this much shorter piece of semi-animation about Vimy Ridge.

Also the excellent damned_colonial has launched the Geek Feminism Wiki

... to discuss issues facing women in a range of geek communities including computing, open source, science fiction fandom, online gaming, and so forth.

I set this up in response to the Open Source Boob Project stuff a couple of months back, because I saw people talking about common experiences shared by women at SF cons which sounded a lot like some of the things I'd experienced on geeky IRC channels, and, well, I figure we all have a lot in common and might benefit from getting our experiences down in one place and having something we can refer to next time something comes up.

If you're a woman in a geek community, or someone who'd like to support women in geek communities, please come and contribute. And please also feel free to spread the word.

chaucerhathblog is right merrie today.

The media will dine off this trust vote for weeks to come. And, boy, am I glad for I am enjoying the drama. :)

I'll leave aside the obvious developments - the CPI [M] expelling Somnath Chatterjee for disobeying the party whip and refusing to resign as the Speaker, BJP and the rest of the opposition expelling the MPs who voted for the govt, or abstained - and focus on details I find interesting.

First and foremost, the change in the media's perception of the PM. He is suddenly being shown a lot of respect as a lot of people have suddenly caught up with the thought that the PM has a backbone of steel. I am surprised why people thought of him as a wimp - no one rises that high, and that too consistently, by lacking courage and conviction. Still, I am very glad that Dr. Singh finally reached the end of his patience, and took on the Opposition in his trademark style - politely, intelligently, and effectively. It was a pleasure to watch and I thank him for the privilege. :)

Moving on to the cash-for-votes scam, if the PM's non-involvement was clear on his face as the drama was unfolding, Advani tips his hand more and more by making shockingly revealing statements to the press. ( Read more... )

In other news, the Sangh Parivar is likely to launch another stir soon. The govt has said, shock! horror!, that it wasn't breaking any bridge where Ram Setu was supposed to be, simply because no bridge seemed to exist there. And if we need to consult religious scriptures for evidence, then Padma Purana says that Rama Setu was destroyed by Ram on his way back after killing Ravana, and so it is hardly a place of worship...

ETA: I am amused by the conflict within the govt over the decriminalisation of homosexual activities between consenting adults. It just strikes me as typically Indian - the fact that two different ministries can not only hold opposing views but present the same to the High Court. Here's hoping that the Health ministry prevails. A sensible approach will go a long way towards combatting the AIDS epidemic and it is not as if the Home Ministry is bound to run out of reasons to charge people. Why look at what happened in the Parliament the other day....

Kang Eun Young, Yaya (shōjo manhwa, year unknown; 1-2 of 6 vols): Kang Hyu Na has recently concluded that she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she tries to override. She makes friends at her new high school with Kim Shin Hee, a pretty girl with secrets; her young homeroom teacher, Joo In Nam, has secrets, including a secret internet friend; Rain Lee, the transgressive boy who’s around all the time for no apparent reason, has secrets.

Yeah, no. Random selection of manhwa is unproductive. After Replay I was going to avoid sequential art in which a high-school girl chooses between a boy her age and a teacher. And now the theme song from Jem is stuck in my head because the characters in Yaya are drawn with that kind of eyes, though to be sure, no glamor, glitter, fashion, or fame is evident…. The Jem characters have more depth. Enough said.

Though all the characters in Yaya are Korean, two are blond, an artistic choice that baffled me till I remembered reading something on representations of race in manga.

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

Underwear chicken dare puts man in hospital

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080723/od_nm/chicken_dc

In September, right about when I get back from my last conference of the summer, I will be eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR, also known as "settled status") in the UK. One requirement for this application, which is a fairly recent change, is that I take and pass the "Life in the UK" test. The primary point of this is to demonstrate that I know enough English (normally I'd say "or Welsh", but I'm not convinced that the test is offered in Welsh) to be allowed to stick around. I finally remembered a week or two ago to book a test appointment, and I'll be taking it on Friday.

I know that my own homeland also tests its immigrants. The major difference is that, where the US seems to test its prospective citizens on the sorts of things that we-who-were-raised-there learned in Social Studies and promptly forgot when we received our high school diplomas, the UK test seems to have an even mix of questions that are mostly there to test your English and that you have a basic clue about British society, and questions about bizarre and mostly useless facts that many native Brits have never known. It's a wonderful mix of the inane and the irrelevant.

All questions are multiple choice. Example questions in my practice test book are:
- When is Valentine's Day?
- What percentage of Christians in the UK are Roman Catholic?
- What proportion of young people who became first-time voters in 2001 actually used their vote?
- Newspaper owners and editors do not try to influence public opinion. Is this statement true or false?

The test has 24 questions; I have to answer 18 correctly to pass. I'll have 45 minutes to take it. At least the test guide is honest enough to point out that 1 in 3 test takers finish the thing in 15 minutes.

I've just realised I haven't written about any books since May, which is mad as I've been reading quite a bit. I may have forgotten a few between the end of May and the middle of June.

( Books 21-29: a Kathy Reichs, The Spider's Bride, The Tiger In the Smoke, The Little Sister, The Long Way Round, Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, The Dragons of Manhattan, Enchantment Place, Temeraire )

Comics: Spellbound, Strange Tales. ( Free comics and requests )

*Assuming of course they're a pinko liberal who thinks George W Bush is not a fantastic, divinely inspired president we should all support wholeheartedly in whatever plan his puppeteers come up with next.

I graduated with a Ph.D.  and got a one-year teaching position. Thus, I will be back on the job market this fall, and a lot of applications for postdocs and some of the applications for jobs are due as early as August or September. Two questions arose, for which I would appreciate your ideas:

1. I will not be applying making much of an effect at the university where I teach this early in the year, and it seems absurd to ask my supervisor to comment on my teaching ability before she has seen any of it. :) But is it appropriate for all three references to be from the grad school program that I attended? Would this look strange?

2. Is it likely that the faculty who select postdocs at a research university would look down on someone who went to a good research university for the Ph.D. and got a one-year visiting position to teach intro classes at a distant state university, as opposed to someone who is just graduating with a Ph.D. from a research university or didn't get a job at all?

Thank you for your insights.

Stimulated by this post by jonquil, I was thinking about the things about which I am a geek, and there certainly are some, because one does not e.g. accumulate by accident an almost complete set of the works of Rebecca West (including really obscure disowned stuff like War Nurse and the unfinished unpublished in her lifetime early novel The Sentinel) (the one thing I know I'm missing is the collaboration with David Low The New Rake's Progress, should anyone spot a copy at a reasonable price) plus an impressive collection of biographies, critical works etc.

This definitely has its pleasures

But I sing also the pleasures of dilettantism, of not feeling obliged to go that deeply into anything. Of having my small and rather random collection of books on the Bluestockings without feeling I have to acquire biographies, collections of letters, etc of all of them. Of idly flaneusing around art galleries. Of haphazard and undirected attendance at concerts of classical music. Of picking up stuff at random in bookshops because it looks interesting and not because it's part of a large project or fits in somewhere in the existing collection.

Sometimes it's good to take passions easy, as the leaves grow on the tree.

Tor.com has put up all the ebooks they've been giving away over the last few months. This week only, so what are you waiting for? If you fancy a free electronic copy of Spin, Farthing, or Old Man's War, among others, get over there now.

I've put my bread in it.

At ten pee emm exactly, ish, I measured 1lb flour in the scales. Then I did it again. I mixed two batches of bread dough, covered them with dinner plates, stacked them, and chopped sundried tomatoes and garlic and fresh basil, stuffed those in a ramekin of olive oil, and sat down to eat an avocado. Then I kneaded the dough again, split the first lot in two, oiled it with plain olive oil and put it in two little loaf tins, which I put in the top oven over the preheating main oven. Then I kneaded the second lot of dough and when it was good I put gobbets of the tomato-basil-garlic mix in and kneaded that through too. I sort of squeezed out excess oil, flattened it into a larger loaf tin, and put it to rise.

And a few minutes later I put them all in the main oven to bake. I have great hopes.

1. I’m curious whether those of you not in media fandoms or sf fandom have heard of Laura Hale or her Fandom History wiki. If you haven’t, start with a negative impression! (I’m serious.) Links: cofax7, liviapenn, untrue_accounts. Short version: Hale wants to make money off of fandom, really badly—her desire is strong, her methods weak. I won’t link to FH, since her monetization scheme is based upon # of unique visits, in order that she may show a potential investor that her site receives a lot of traffic….

2. jonquil has a post today about things about which she’s a geek, with a handy definition prefixed:

I define “geek” by passion, not expertise. You’re an geek if you do a lot of spare-time reading about the subject, if you’ll neep about it in person or online, if you’ll listen happily to people who know more than you do, if you have Strong Opinions.

To this she attached two lists: things about which she considers herself a geek, and things she’s fascinated by but not a geek about (lacking the knowledge base).

I started listing things for myself. The second list grew tediously long and awkward. Neither is worth posting.

3. Last week and two weeks ago, I had spinal idiocy. This week I am sick. ffs.

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

From casapazzo, a link to a collection of 2400+ free mp3's recorded from 78rpm records.

For those of you who have no idea what a gramophone record is, read this.

I haven't downloaded any of them yet. Hopefully the quality is decent.

beezari posted a copy of the leaked Matasano explanation of Kaminsky's new DNS attack. I believe the explanation isn't quite right. In his interview in the WIRED Threat Level blog Kaminsky mentions that the attack relies on CNAMEs. This means that it does not depend on glue nor on additional section processing, which is what Matasano described. I believe the real explanation is...

$ md5 <~/doc/kaminsky
ef96f2d9e973a36e825793ddeff48ae5

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm


a link from a friend, VERY interesting. A female early-electronica pioneer, and the orchestrator (or what we now call synthestrator, though she did it before synths) of the Dr Who theme tune.

On a mailing list I'm on, someone just talked about their holiday plans.

They are intending, apparently, to go "island hoping in grease".

Yes, it's the turn of VSI: Feminism in the pick-a-book-off-the-VSI-shelf endeavour (well, not an endeavour, just whenever I feel like it). Another good one, this one; well-written, with lots of personality on the part of author Margaret Walters, and it gives good quote. I didn't necessarly learn a huge amount from it, but then I know much more about the subject than I did about Dinosaurs when reading the Dino VSI.

Having said that, there's plenty I didn't know about early feminism - not that the word was used until the 20th century anyway. Chapter one covers religious roots of feminism: women defying the weight of woman-negative scripture to argue variously that women are superior to men because Adam was made out of filthy clay and Eve was made out of Adam, or that Christ was born of a woman so they can't be as bad as all that, now can they, eh eh eh? Chapter two covers secular beginnings of feminism - the Duchess of Newcastle and Aphra Behn featuring - and chapter three dives into the 18th century 'Amazons of the pen', with the famous name of Mary Wollstonecraft rating the lion's share of the discussion.

I should say that upfront the book clarifies that it will be mostly talking about feminism in England, exploring its development through time. It still touches on second-wave feminism and the US, and topics arising from clashes of focus at that time and subsequently (lesbian feminism, body issues, global feminism, racism and feminism). A lot of that is skimmed over or sidelined into little standout boxes, but I don't think a VSI can give more than a broad hint of the current debates. (If even that - obviously there are various areas I could wish were even mentioned at all that were skipped over entirely.)

One quick example of her giving good quote - the chapter on second-wave feminism ends with a mention of Dworkin and McKinnon's view that hetero-sex equals pornography and rape. McKinnon "constantly evokes the image of a once-violated child who can never grow up. . . This is melodrama masquerading as feminism."

Actress Estelle Getty passed away yesterday, at age 84. Lifetime TV will be airing a Golden Girls marathon on 7/25 of viewers' favorite Getty episodes.

Fareed Zakaria: The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest. WSJ Analysis: Competition and the rise of America's Business Icons

Ready to learn everything you need to know about the economy in less than two hours? The Crash Course is a condensed online version of Chris Martenson's "End of Money" seminar.

Why You Should Let Your Kids Play - The Importance of Unstructured Playtime (from quixotickitten)

The Democratic Convention will be held in Denver. The city is planning on sending the homeless to the movies or the zoo, in order to keep them out of the way.

MedPedia is a new beta project that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. Content editors and creators must have an MD or a PhD, and several American medical colleges will be contributing content as well. The project will receive support from the NIH, CDC and the FDA.

The "Bad Sign" pool on flickr.

Girl-Wonder.org was "created by comic book fans in response to a rising level of frustration at the treatment of female characters, creators and fans inside and outside the comics industry. A feminist activism website devoted to fighting misogyny in comics, the comics industry, and comics fandom. (from maggiesox)

Iain Banks email Q&A with readers (from iainbanksdotnet)

50 Useful blogging tools for teachers

IFC: The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema (I haven't looked at the clips, but I assume they're NSFW)

I've been getting a lot o questions, so here's the Official Word


Friday, 3:30-4:30 pm: Book signing, at the Bantam booth, as far as I know. Last year there was quite a line, so you might want to get there early.

Saturday, 5:00-6:00 pm: Autographs/book signings in the Author Autograph Area, where ever that is. Bring any book you like, so long as it's one of mine. I don't know if there's a limit on number; just be reasonable. If you've got both series, I'll sign all of them, but no crate loads, please.

Saturday, 6:00-7:00 pm: "Playing God" panel. Not exactly sure where, but if we both figure it out, I'll see you there. ;-)

Getting ready for ComiCon. Just a snack today.

Top medlcatlon Professlonals

medl . . . cat . . .lon . . .

Pro . . .fess . . .lonals . . . .
Why does that seem vaguely obscene? Must be all the Ls.

You don't need to have a GP to get the prescriptiondrugs you require.

That's right Yesenia, you need an MD to prescribe the prescriptiondrugs you require.

Entrance

Abandon all identity protection, ye who enter here.


Yesenia Webb

Nosenia, but thanks anyway.

Sprawly Campion.

Campion has Important Business In His Tree and cannot presently attend to you.

(See also the next one.) Coming soon: Campion Is Sulking In His Tent.

We saw The Hold Steady the other night - it was a fantastic live show. Highly recommended.

I did feel pretty old, though. Even with the fogies in the audience. There should be a federal age cut-off for belly shirts.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

** Crossposted from http://www.brelson.com/blog **

I recommend reading this blog post from Jeffrey Veen, author of “The Art & Science of Web Design”.

You may be familiar with Dr John Snow and his groundbreaking work in identifying the source of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak. A pub on Broadwick Street in Soho is named after him, and the water-pump that started it all is preserved as a monument outside it.

This post discusses the way the in which Dr Snow helped to ’sell’ the results of his research, adapting an existing visualisation to create an overlaid map which communicated, in a far more immediate way than raw data or polemic might have done, the central thrust of his argument.

It’s an interesting and early example of how well-designed data visualisations can quickly convey information which could otherwise be comprehensible only to experts and adepts.

I can't actually imagine what life was life:

a) before mobile phones; and
b) before the internet; and
c) specifically, before eBay.

Things I have noticed that the above have changed about me:

a) I am now very relaxed about social arrangements (which is not the same thing as saying I turn up late. I never do).
b) I am now terrible at spelling.
c) I am now terrible at waiting for things, and have the patience of a fractious toddler.
d) I have an attention span so short, I can't even finish this se
e) I expect to be able to get everything I want.
f) All the things I own are now precisely the things I wanted to own, instead of being whatever vague approximation I could find and lug home, using the bus.
g) Many of those things are unusual or unique, rather than mass produced.
h) Many of those things are second hand or restored, rather than new and mass produced.
i) I can do 150 things at once, without missing a beat.
j) My short term memory is absolutely appalling.

Some of the above is good, and some is not good. In both cases, many of the points above have to do with quick personal gratification, and have an infantilising undertone I am not very comfortable with. I have enough.

After Aug 1, I am going on a gratification fast for 30 days. If I want something, I can wait for it, or make it. I will also learn one decent-length poem by heart, per week, to begin to get my short term memory back to fighting fitness, after years of it sitting on the metaphorical BRAINSOFA, eating crisps.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

The Villa Gillet has been asking writers who attend the International Forum on the Novel to select a word which underpins their work. Jonathan Lethem picked "Furniture":

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the whole duration of the story. For that matter, when night falls, whether it is depicted or occurs between chapters, characters must be permitted to sleep in beds, to rinse their faces in sinks, to glance into mirrors, and so on. (It is widely believed that after Borges mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels; however, it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces, hence mirrors must be provided.) These rules attend no matter how tangential the novel's commitment to so-called 'realism', no matter how avant-garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois. Furniture may be explicit or implicit, visible or invisible, may bear the duty of conveying social and economic detail or be merely cursorily functional, may be stolen or purchased, borrowed, destroyed, replaced, sprinkled with crumbs of food or splashed with drink, may remain immaculate, may be transformed into artworks by aspiring bohemians, may be inherited by characters from uncles who die before the action of the novel begins, may reward careful inspection of the cushions and seams for loose change that has fallen from pockets, may be collapsible, portable, may even be dragged into the house from the beach where it properly belongs, but in any event it must absolutely exist. Anything less is cruelty.

(Adam Thirlwell picked "Hedonism". Because he is a nob.)

Today I received a copy of an announcement that was sent to the university community via the mass e-mail system. The announcement was for a proofreading workshop. The subject line:

INFORMATIONAL: Your subject line goes here.

PS I'm thinking if they're smart, they'll make it work for them in the session -- "See, it can happen to anybody!"

yes, i'm back.

still trying to get back into the swing of things. i'm weepy at the drop of a hat. i have a ton of work still to do with my mother's estate. our new cats seem to be adjusting ok, but i still wish the older one (aka "booger butt") would come out and play a bit more. time will tell if she ever gets used to it. the baby (aka "LB") is doing very well - he seems to get that this is his new home, and is exploring it.

if you see me in the next couple of weeks, please don't ask me how i'm doing - the answer will not be positive right now. talk to me about other things - the cats, djing, job, etc. just don't ask me about my mom, her estate, and how i'm getting through all of it.

the answer to that question is "not well" and "i'm doing the best that i can".