Cold Comix Turkey

I bought and read a number of comic books while growing up.  (And had to sneak them into the house past my Mom, who thought they were the next-worst thing to porn.)  Quit when I started college, and didn't start again until 1985, when the bookstore Hilde and I frequented added a comics section and several titles caught my eye.  (WATCHMEN and the Ted Kord version of BLUE BEETLE, in particular.)  I've continued since then, usually buying 3-4 titles per week.  That bookstore went under, eventually, but I continued buying comics, now at comics specialty shops, and have been shopping at the same vendor for over fifteen years.

DC Comics announced a few months ago that they would be relaunching their comics line, with new #1 issues of 52 different titles.  The stated purpose of this was to give a new generation of readers a jumping on point to start reading comics.

But this also meant that a bunch of the old titles were suddenly cancelled in mid-storylines.  That hasn't made the old generation of readers happy.  The last conversation I had with David, the owner of the comics shop I shopped at, I said, "This could just as easily be a jumping off point for the current readers."   He told me that a number of his customers had already cancelled their standing orders for DC titles.

Another reason for DC's relaunch was to start promoting increased digital sales of comics, rather than the old-fashioned paper-and-ink versions.  Not good news for comics shops owners.

David's shop had already been hanging on by its fingertips, with a lot of customers cutting back or stopping completely in the wake of the general economy's weakening in the last several years.  When you cut back on non-essential spending, things like books or movies or comics are among the first to be cut.  He'd come close to losing the shop about a year before, only staying open when he'd been able to renegotiate the shop's lease at the last minute.

So I wasn't too surprised when I went back a few weeks later to find the store's lights out, the doors locked, and a notice from the landlord taped to the door.  (Man, that's gotta hurt for David.  He's started working for the store's original owners as a teenager, then bought the store from them about ten years ago.  Hopefully nearly twenty years of retail experience will let him find another source of income soon.)

So there I was, suddenly cut off from my usual source of comics.  (There are other comics shops, but all considerably farther away and in the wrong direction from my usual travel patterns; David's shop was less than a mile away.) What to do?

What I've done is... nothing.

I have to admit that I've thought for a long time that the cost-to-benefit ratio of buying comics is a negative one.  I can buy a comic that costs $3 or (usually) more, and get ten or fifteen minutes reading pleasure from it.  Or I can buy a paperback novel for about $8 and get hours of reading from it.  (When I bought my very first comics, as a kid, they were still twelve cents apiece; they've increased in cost 25-fold.  My first paperbacks, a couple of years later, averaged sixty cents; they've only risen 12 to 13-fold since then.)(Yes, I'm old.)  I've kept up the habit of buying occasional comics mostly from... habit.

So I've gone cold turkey on comics.  So far I haven't missed many of the titles I was following all that much.  And I'm saving about $40 to $50 a month in expenses.

(The one title I've missed the most has been T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, one of the titles cancelled by DC in their relaunch.  It's been an interesting update to the original series from the 1960's, with some unexpected twists.  Googling for this post, however, it seems enough people objected to losing that particular title and story arc that DC may put it back into production in a few months.  I'll have to think about that one....)

(I also wanted to note that the relaunch of Superman reportedly involves some changes to his costume; it's now going to be a type of "Kryptonian battle armor".  Say what?  I say, "Bullshit!" to that.  Everyone knows -- KNOWS -- that Supe's costume was made by Ma Kent unravelling the blankets that swaddled Kal-El inside that rocket and weaving the uniform from those threads.  These are immutable truths about Superman:  He can fly.  He has super-strength.  He's invulnerable.  And his mother dresses him funny.)

Fuzzy Thinking

The first panel Hilde and I did at CopperCon was on H. Beam Piper.  The programmer for CopperCon wanted to have some panels on good writers of previous generations, and we suggested Piper because John Scalzi's recent "revamp", FUZZY NATION, of Piper's first book in the Fuzzy series, LITTLE FUZZY, had brought some attention back to Piper's work.  Small audience, about half a dozen, but it seemed to go well and stayed on track.


My take on FUZZY NATION:  This is the novelization of the screenplay for the Hollywood adaptation of LITTLE FUZZY.

Keeping in mind that Scalzi is a long-time film buff & critic, the changes he's wrought from the original novel seem very much to be changes that would be made for a film adaptation of Piper's novel:  The protagonist is younger, with a romantic sub-plot.  His version of Jack Holloway is also a bit of a scoundrel, whose motivations aren't always noble.  Scalzi's narrative flow is faster, with leaner dialogue.

(Skimming back thru the original LITTLE FUZZY, I noticed that there's a lot of talking in Piper's book, a lot of discussion of what sapience is and how it might be detected.)

Significant parts of both books take place in courtrooms.  I think Piper's original wins out here; his presentation of courtroom wrangling is larger and messier than Scalzi's; it's more complicated, with more factors and players involved.  In short, more realistic.

One of the elements in LITLE FUZZY was the veradicator, a lie-detector with 100% accuracy, used in courtroom testimony.   Much as I love the idea of a veradicator (I want one, dammit!), Piper's machine only give a postiive or negative response; there's no gray areas of half-truths or delusional thinking allowed to it.  That was never realistic (dammit!  I still want one), and Scalzi leaves the veradicator out of his version.  A good change, I'm inclined to think, on Scalzi's part.

[spoilers below the break...]

Hilton Garden Inn gets it right

The Hilton Garden Inn in Avondale, Arizona, where we're staying for CopperCon, has one of the best wheelchair-accessible rooms we've ever stayed in. Some hotels think putting a grab-bar on the wall above a tub equals "accessible". No, it doesn't.

Wide traffic paths and doors, and things like a roll-in shower stall, that's accessible. Thanks, Hilton!

posted from Bloggeroid

CopperCon 31 this weekend

CopperCon 31 will be held this coming weekend, September 2-5th, at the Hilton Garden Inn in Avondale, AZ.  Hilde will be the Fan Guest of Honor.

Hilde was an active and important figure in the early days of Phoenix SF fandom, from the early 1970's on.  We'll both be on a fanhistory panel, along with Mahala Sweebe and possibly others, to discuss those early days.  (The agony and the ectasy!  The Sturm and the Drang!  The angst and the texture!)  Plus other panels about books, reading, H. Beam Piper and other topics.

(This will be the first time I've been on programming at a local convention for about a decade.  I used to be a fairly frequent participant, but the person who planned most of the programming before that got burnt out and was replaced by someone new.  When the new person took over, my name apparently got dropped from the list of local writers and knowledgable fans who tended to be invited onto programming.  And I just never got around to beating the drum to get back on that list.)

More Tweaks

A few changes to the sidebar over on the left.  I've added a "Followers" section for people who, umm, follow what I write here.

I also finally got around to rebuilding the list of blogs I read regularly.  The old list got deleted in the changeover to New Blogger a while back, and it's only now I've put it back together. 

On that blog list, I particularly recommend D. Gary Grady's Fusion-Powered Mediocrity. I've enjoyed Gary's writing for years in a private apa (one of those things that still use that paper stuff), but it's only recently he's started an online blog. He does both serious and funny with non-mediocrity.

Stalking The Wild Child

For some reason, this photo from 1930's Australia strikes me as just a little creepy.

(via Flickr Commons)

You Will Believe A Tree Can Fly

A restaurant under construction at work is including a rooftop dining area. Getting the landscaping upstairs took some extra effort.

posted from Bloggeroid

We Get Fan Letters. Yes, Really!

This showed up in the comment moderation queue a few days ago:

Hi there! This isn't actually a comment (so you can delete it, since I'll be putting my email address in it, please) but this is the only way I can think to contact you. Oh, the wonders of the internet.

I'm trying to find a short story of yours -- The Skycastle -- which I read many, many, many years ago in the first issue of MZB's Fantasy when it came out, and still remember to this day. Of course you can't find back-issues of the magazine anymore and, really, I don't remember any of the other stories in it. But your story I remember, and must have reread at least a hundred times.

I suppose I should say "thank you" while I'm at it...!

Anyway, I've long since lost the magazine, of course, but I was reminded of the story tonight and found myself wondering if it ever made its way into an anthology? Or, hell, if not: have you got a copy you'd be willing to email me? I'd be happy to paypal you something for it...!

And, well, if not: at least 23 years on I can finally say "hey, that was a pretty good story you wrote.

Thanks so much,

Ariana Osborne

Well, that's pretty damn cool.  I responded:

Dear Ariana,

Thanks! I don't hear from fans of my old stories all that often anymore. (Real life has kept me from writing much, and the last new story I had published was in 2006.) Glad you enjoyed it, and still remember it.

No, "The Skycastle" has never been anthologized. I was a bit disappointed when DAW Books published a BEST OF MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S FANTASY MAGAZINE collection, and my story wasn't included.

I've been thinking of making some of those old stories accessible again, either by e-pubbing, POD, or just posting online. But that will probably (real life...) take a while. (I'd have to dig out the old disks, then an old disk drive, then convert them to a different wordprocessor... it would take a while.)

If you don't mind sending a physical or PO Box address, the quickest way to get the story would be for me to xerox it from my old copy of the magazine and send it to you by mail. (Mail? In an envelope? How quaint.)

If you liked "The Skycastle", you'd probably also like "Death and the Ugly Woman", published in SWORD AND SORCERESS #4, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, DAW Books, 1987. That's the story of mine that's gotten the most fan reaction, including a movie option by a small (really small) production company. (But it's never been reprinted, either. I scratch my head in puzzlement.)

Your comment to my blog ended up in the moderation queue, so your email address never went public. I'll go ahead and delete it.

Thanks again
-- Bruce Arthurs

So, yes, I really have been thinking of making my old stories available again. Certainly wouldn't hurt.

(I've also been thinking of self-publishing some of my unpublished fiction. Some of those old unpublished pieces I re-read nowadays and cringe, but there are some that I still think are pretty damn good, but just never sold for some reason. I'm particularly thinking of a 29,000 word novella titled "Junker Tommy", whose major fault seems to be an awkward length and a lack of markets for stories of that length.)

Here's an image of George Barr's cover for that first issue of MZBFM, illustrating "The Skycastle":

Thirty Four

As of yesterday, Hilde and I have been married 34 years. Yes, I'm astonished, too.

Flowers were provided.

posted from Bloggeroid

Broken Chain Reaction

The Borders bookstore chain abandoned all hope of reorganization or sale this week and announced it will be closing its 400 stores.  Liquidation of inventory will begin Friday.

This is a shame.  It will mean fewer and fewer places where bookreaders can go in and actually see and handle and browse thru thousands and thousands of titles, all of them written by James Patterson.

- - - - -

Surely it was only a coincidence, that Borders' announcement came only a few days after I had -- abandoning years of standing firm on noble principles and long-ingrained habit -- installed an eReader app on my cell phone.  I start reading one friggin' digital book, and suddenly a billion-dollar chain of brick-and-mortar bookstores falls into ruin, putting thousands of people on the unemployment line and sending shock waves thru the entire publishing industry.  I'm sorry; this was not one of the mutant superpowers I've always wanted to see manifest.  It's like dreaming of being Superman and waking up to find you're actually Lex Luthor.

I suppose I can share the blame with George R.R. Martin, since it was one of his books I loaded onto my cell phone.  No, not A Dance With Dragons.  The previous book, A Feast For Crows.  Since Feast and Dance were essentially supposed to be two halves of one big book, I had thought to wait until Dance was published before reading both of them one after another.  Five years later, with a copy of Dance finally in hand, I'm not sure where, or how deeply buried, the hardcover copy of Feast I bought back then has gotten to in the house.

So, I loaded Overdrive Media Console into my Droid, and checked out a copy of A Feast For Crows from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library.  (GPDL is a central eBook source for the Phoenix library system and the library systems in the surrounding towns and suburbs.)

Getting the software installed and signing up for GPDL access was pretty smooth and straightforward.  And I'm impressed with how the book presents on my Droid's screen.  The text is crisp and clear (and adjustable in size), moving around in the book is pretty easy, and it's certainly easier to carry around my cell phone (which I do all the time anyway) than a thick hardcover.

It does suck up quite a bit of battery power, primarily because it's in use for longer periods than most of the other phone apps I use on the Droid.  I may have to start remembering to use the phone's car charger when I'm driving around town.

This may be the start of a beautiful friendship.  Or a horrible addiction.  (Omigod, the first one really WAS free!)

- - - - -

In case anyone think's I'm snarking on James Patterson up above... well, yeh, you're right.  I read the first Alex Cross mystery, Along Came A Spider, when it first came out.  My reaction was "Meh," and I've never bothered to read any of his other books.  So I'm always a little surprised to see how many books he's published since then, and how well they sell.

The puzzling thing is that there's no "buzz", insofar as I've encountered, about his books.  People can stand around the proverbial water cooler and talk about a Stephen King book, or a Dan Brown book, or a Stephanie Meyer book.  They talk about the plot, and the characters, for those writers' books.  But I've never heard a conversation like that about any of James Patterson's books.  What I keep hearing about Patterson is that "He's a page-turner" and, repeatedly, "His chapters are short."  So I guess Patterson is writing for the short-attention-span crowd, and it's turned out to be a pretty damned big crowd.

- - - - -

(Photo credit for the empty bookshelves goes to the Smithsonian Institution, via Flick Commons.)

This Cat Is Not Dead

Rikkus

But it was a close thing.

This is Rikkus.  He's the "foreclosure cat" we rescued a few years ago, when his owners moved away and left him behind.  We found out he had a microchip, but it was to the Seattle shelter he'd been adopted from in 1998, and his owners nevr updated the chip's records from that shelter address.  We think he might have originally belonged to an older person who passed away, and while the younger generation took him in initially, when they encountered their own troubles Rikkus became an option, not an obligation.

We don't know what his original name was.  "Rikkus" is the word for "lion" in the invented language our housemate Tabbi uses for her online persona and writing.  He was informally known as "Stalker Cat", because when our friend and back fence neighbor Anne was alive, he'd come up to the patio door or bedroom window ledge and get Anne's cats Aliera and Sethra all flustered and upset.  (We took in Aliera and Sethra when Anne died, so now they're actually all living in the same house.  They've never been friendly, but they don't fight or throw hissy-fits.)

Rikkus was a big ol' guy, fairly stocky under long black fur.  When he was still a street cat, he pretty much owned the street.  But about a year ago, he started losing weight, fairly drastically, and getting stiff and slow-moving.  Blood tests showed hyperthyroidism, so he's been on meds for that for about a half year.

But he's continued to decline, eating poorly and getting gaunt.  Recent developments included pulling out chunks of fur, treating the litter box as an option, and throwing up a lot of what he reluctantly ate.  He was being a pretty miserable kitty.

So we'd been thinking that it might be time to have Rikkus put to sleep, and made an appointment for earlier this morning to have it done.

Rikkus has never been an enthusiastic pill-taker, to put it mildly, and I didn't see any overwhelming need to continue his meds for the last few days before his final appointment.  So I stopped giving him the hyperthyroidism meds.

And... he began to improve.  He started eating again (and in decent amounts) and keeping it down, he seems to have stopped pulling out fur, and he's been using the litter box again.  He also seems more alert and engaged.

This made me wonder if the meds he'd been taking might actually have been part of the problem.  When I checked online for hypothroidism (underactive thyroid), the list of symptoms were almost a complete match for what Rikkus had been showing.

So it seems possible that he's been getting too high a dose of the hyperthyroidism meds.  I consulted the vet, and we'll try cutting back on that dosage and see how he does.  (Also start giving him something to try and help with his stiff and creaky old joints.)

I'm frankly relieved to be able to give him a reprieve.   Losing Tia and Gremlin -- bam! bam! -- one after the other was hard enough.  I really don't want Undulant Fever to be "All dead cats, all the time."  (I have visions of walking down the street and having people shouting "It's that guy with the Dead Cat Blog!  QUICK!  HIDE THE KITTENS!")

Died On The 4th Of July: Gremlin, 2000-2011

We have lost another of our cats.

Losing Gremlin was harder than Tia.  Hilde and I are both compulsive cat-lovers, but Gremlin was definitely a "favorite son" among the herd.

He was also the only non-rescue cat.  Hilde used to breed Siamese, for several years before she and I got together, until the combination of rheumatoid arthritis, becoming a parent, and a divorce forced Hilde to close the cattery.  But she's always had at least one pure-bred Siamese as a pet since then (and a fair number of our rescue cats have been part-Siamese).

Hilde likes Siamese because they tend to have a strong personality.  Gremlin took that trait and double-downed on it.  He got his name when the cattery we were negotiating with, back in 2000, sent a photo of a Siamese kitten with hu-u-u-u-uge ears and a wicked expression, causing me to exclaim "It's a gremlin!"

(Yet one more proof that you should be careful what you name your cats.  Sometimes they live up to it.)

Gremlin was a cat for whom rules, guidelines and acceptable behavior were optional.  Counters and tabletops were one more roadway.  He was usually the smallest cat in the household, and at the same time the almost-alpha cat of the pack.  (He could have probably been the alpha cat, but he didn't have any interest in leadership, being much more into the "instant and unquestioning obedience to my slightest whim" thing.)  But he was also the cat who would spend hours on Hilde's lap, and snuggle up to her legs in bed at night.

Gremlin's final illness was unexpected and sudden.  Late Saturday night, June 25th, our housemate Tabbi called out "I think Gremlin's choking!"  I found him on the dining room floor, frantic and making retching motions, head and jaws extended, as if something was blocking his airway.  When I tried to hold him, he bit one of my fingers deeply, something he'd never done before.  (There'd been a few "play bites" over the years, but this one went deep, nearly to the bone.)  I grabbed our cat carrier and had Tabbi and James, one of our other housemates, get Gremlin into it while I threw some clothes on, grabbed the loaded carrier from them, ran out to the car, and sped off to the closest Emergency Animal Clinic.

"sped" is not an exaggeration.  I've had the Outlander up to 80 mph on the freeway occasionally, but this was the first time I've ever driven 80 mph on city streets.  Gremlin thrashed and made strangled throat noises during the ten-minute dash, but the noises slowed, then stopped about a half-mile away from the clinic.

How bad off was he?  Bad enough that the emergency vet's first notation on the medical chart was "DOA".  Chest compressions and oxygen got Gremlin breathing again.

While x-rays were taken and bloodwork done, I tried to think what might have caused Gremlin's choking.  Eventually I realized that he'd been occasionally acting, for about the previous week, like he was trying to cough up a hairball.  (Gremlin never coughed up the type of Big-Momma, "Oh my God!  What IS that thing?" hairballs our long-haired cats sometimes produce, but he'd bring up an occasional thin, streamlined version.)  He'd also acted like he was getting the beginnings of a head cold.  With hindsight, these might actually have been the early symptoms of whatever was causing his respiratory distress.

Which was uncertain.  X-rays showed no actual blockage in the air way, and the lungs looked pretty clear.  He'd been placed in an oxygen cage, and had recovered dramatically, regaining consciousness and alertness.  Throughout the night, the oxygen ration was stepped down to normal levels, and the vet thought Gremlin able to go home Sunday morning, to be followed up on by his regular veterinarian on Monday.

Except Sunday night was a repeat of Saturday night, but catching the early choking signs soon enough to get Gremlin back to the Emergency Clinic and the oxygen cage while still conscious.  An internal medicine specialist performed an ultrasound and endoscopy the next morning, and drew some fluid from the lung for further testing.  The fluid in the lung was not a good sign, and Gremlin was started on an antibiotic and bronchodilator while the fluid samples were being tested.  This time Gremlin was kept until Wednesday morning, when he again seemed to be okay without oxygen.

At least until late Thursday night/early Friday morning, when he went into the scary HEY!-CHOKING-TO-DEATH-HERE! behavior for a third time.  This time I was at work, and it was James who got to make the mad dash to the Emergency Clinic.  (Thank you, James.)

Back to the oxygen cage.  By this point, we were waiting for the final test results from the fluid samples.  The fluid and mucuous in Gremlin's lung did NOT appear to be coming from a bacterial infection, we knew by this point.  One of the alternate possibilities raised by the internist was Valley Fever, and it was that test we were waiting for the results on.

In the meantime, Gremlin became a full-time occupant of the oxygen cage, and despite medication, seemed to slowly be getting worse.  When the door would be opened for cleaning or feeding or visits, and regular air replaced the oxygen-rich environment, he'd start showing beginning signs of distress within a few minutes.  He never got weaned back to regular air this time.  (Part of this may have been because after three episodes of choking and agonal gasping and straining to breath, the internal stress and strain he'd gone through would have been like being in a bad fistfight with your own insides.)  The fluid in his lungs did not improve under the antibiotic treatment.

The Valley Fever test came back negative.  At this point, the internist thought there were two possibilities: Gremlin might have aspirated something foreign into his lung, or there might be cancer.  In either case, surgery to remove the affected part of the lung would be the next step.

And that was when Hilde and I had to make a decision.  I thought it was most likely the cancer diagnosis was the correct one.  (The first visit's emergency vet had raised cancer as a possibility.)  So even if Gremlin survived the lung surgery and rallied back to health, there was a possibility the cancer had metatasized elsewhere in the body and the surgery would only be a delaying tactic, not a cure.

And there was another factor, the factor no one likes to think about.  Gremlin's medical bills had already cost nearly $8,000.  Surgery and aftercare would be at least another $5,000.  We would have maxed out our primary credit card and had to move to using a second one, something I'd never had to do before.  And there was a significant possibility that all those extra efforts and expenses wouldn't save Gremlin, or save him only temporarily.

That's something you don't want to think about.  It's something you don't want to have to think about.  Thinking about it gives you feelings of guilt, of betraying your beloved pet.  You don't want to be "reasonable".  You don't want to be "pragmatic".  You want the financial costs to be irrelevant, to not be a factor in your decisions.  But there's a point when those costs become so overwhelming that they have to become a factor.

So we made the decision, to stop Gremlin's treatment and have him put to sleep.  This was tough, and made tougher because, just so long as he stayed in that oxygen cage, he didn't seem sick.  He was active, and alert, and annoyed that he was being kept in a strange place and in a cage.  (That was another factor to consider: Even if we could afford to continue paying hundreds of dollars a day to keep him in that oxygen cage, how did it feel to Gremlin to go from having a territory of several thousand square feet to being restricted to one of less than a square yard?

We were put into one of the examination rooms, where the doctor brought Gremlin to us a few minutes later.  We gave him petting and chin-critches and held him for a little while, until he began to show early signs of having to work at drawing breath.  I held Gremlin in my arms while the doctor put the syringe's contents into the injection port in Gremlin's front leg, and then he was gone.

We had Gremlin cremated, and the box with his ashes is on top of the A/V cabinet in our family room.  We've always buried our pets before, but it's gotten harder to go through that again, especially after burying Tia just a month or so before Gremlin's illness.  (And it's probably not going to be too much longer before Rikkus, the frail old man of our cat herd, passes on.)

I'm not a believer in Heaven or Hell for humans, but I'd like to think there's a Heaven for cats, where the food and water dishes fill themselves, where you can actually catch that damned red dot, and where there's always a sunbeam to sleep in.

Requiescas in pace et in amore.

Testing, Testing

I'm seeing if this Bloggeroid app lets me make posts from my cell phone.

posted from Bloggeroid

A Few Adjustments

Tweaking the layout and design of the blog just a bit.  Not sure I like the font for the main text, may change it again later.

More posts to come, eventually.  Probably subjects: Dieting, job-hunting (I'm still employed, but trying to find something/somewhere else), and Those Darn Gorillas!

Coming Soon To A Planet Near You

.

*knock knock*

"Who's there?"

"The Rap-Rapture!"

So I hear this Rapture thing is supposed to be happening tomorrow, when God lets down the velvet rope and the celestial doormen let the people on their list into Heaven, leaving the rest of us standing out on a cold sidewalk, in the rain, with dogshit on our shoes.  Or something like that. 

But that's okay, because the people who believe in the Rapture most strongly seem like people I really wouldn't enjoy spending time with.  Apparently, God loves suck-ups.

Oh, wait a minute, though!  Aren't you also supposed to qualify for Rapturing if you're a really really really nice person?

Well, I've always tried to be a nice person.  Or, at least, not-an-asshole.  I don't think the super-nice people get a choice when the Rapture happens, though.  It's just *snatch*, *whoosh*, and there you are in Heaven, surrounded by crowds of annoying people, forever.  What if I've been just nice enough in my life that God includes me on his to-be-Raptured list?  I don't think I really want that, thanks.

I'm not even sure Heaven has cable.  (I mean, hey, Game of Thrones is only halfway thru its first season!) 

I think I need to run out and steal some candy from a baby or something.  I need to pile up some Sin Points pronto.

The Daily Train Wreck

[The first part of this, before my night at the sleep lab, was drafted back on April 24th.  I added an update today, May 14th.]

I've referred to my sleep patterns as a "train wreck" before, but it's gotten worse the last few months. There are a number of reasons for this.

I don't sleep a continuous eight-hour stretch, but in scattered shorter sections, which only rarely add up to that recommended eight.

I can't really blame too much of this on working graveyard shifts, midnight to 8:00 AM, five nights a week. Lots of people work graveyard, and arrange their lives to where they sleep soundly during the day.

But that daytime period is also standard business hours for most people, and sometimes you have to be up and awake to take care of business. Doctor's appointments, phone calls, shopping, etc. So I can usually depend on staying up after getting home from work, or having to get up after a few hours sleep, at least two or three days out of those five.

There are also my other jobs, beside the one that actually pays. As Hilde's become progressively more disabled over the years, I've had to take on more and more of her care-giving, of being her hands and feet. That usually runs about five to six hours per day, and those are hours that really can't be cut back on. (I love my wife like crazy, but I hate her disease.)

(We have Tabbi living with us, who takes care of Hilde while I'm at work, but considering the pittance we pay her -- a babysitter would get paid more -- I'd feel guilty asking her to take on more work.)

In amongst all that, my third job is struggling to get things done, to keep up with paperwork and housekeeping, with shopping and yardwork. And the only category where it seems I can cut back on to make time for everything is by cutting back on sleep. Which leaves me in a walking fog half the time I'm up, which means I don't get as much done in that waking time as I would if properly rested, which means I end up trying to stay awake longer to try and get enough done, which means... well, just Google "diminishing returns".

(Which all makes writing my fourth job, at best.  I suppose for a fourth job, I've done pretty well, but it help explains why I haven't finished or sold a story for over four years.)

A few weeks ago, I took a treadmill stress test. This happened to be at the end of a workweek, so I'd only had about 20 hours sleep the previous five days. (That was less than usual, but not by much.) Have you ever ("Keep your eyes open, Mr. Arthurs!") started to fall asleep ("Keep your eyes open!") on a treadmill?  That kinda goes beyond "walking fog" into "situational narcolepsy".

(You might wonder, how do I ever manage to drive a car without falling asleep at the wheel?  Because my doctor's aware of my sleep pattern, or lack of same, and prescribes Provigil, an anti-drowsy drug that turns off the "sleepy" switch in your brain for a few hours.  I try to take it at times when I'll be able to drop into bed after it wears off, so it doesn't keep me awake in bed.)

In all, I'm kinda feeling like there are no good options to improve this situation.  I'd like to be able to ditch the outside job, but we still need that to stay in a positive cash-flow status.  I can't cut back on the time spent with Hilde, or on the time spent handling the day to day tasks of living; I barely keep up as it is... and far too often I'm not keeping up.

Except for sleep, the only place where I could cut back is the time I spend on the Internet... and I'm reluctant to do that as well.  I browse about a half-dozen blogs daily, and about another dozen less frequently; I check my email; I check my bank account and pay most of my bills online.   I try to keep my online time to 90 minutes or less daily (not always successfully, I admit).  But if I gave up those social aspects of being online, I'd feel like there wasn't much of me left.  Gaining extra time for not-fun stuff isn't a trade-off I want to make.

I'm having a sleep study done at the end of this week, but I don't really expect too much out of it. I had one done about five years ago, which came back with completely normal results.  Probably because having that sleep lab was one of the rare times when I was able to get an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep.  If they really want to test my typical sleep period, they'd wake me up a few hours in, have me perform a variety of tasks for a few hours, then have me get back into bed and try to go back to sleep again. 

(That's another thing:  Sometimes I can be bone-tired, barely staying on my feet, but when I get back into bed, sometimes I lay there for hours before I actually get back to sleep.  This is incredibly frustrating, to say the least.)

- - - - -

Update, May 14th:  Somewhat to my surprise, the results from my night all wired up at the sleep lab were... informative.

I originally went to the sleep lab, not because of my broken sleep patterns and overall lack of sleep, but because there had been scattered occasions when, first laying down to go to sleep, I would suddenly be unable to take in a breath.  It was as if the autonomic breathing impulses were suddenly turned off.  Kinda alarming.  But when I'd react by rolling over from my back to my side, I could suddenly breathe again.  This wasn't common enough to be considered an emergency -- it happened about five or six times over about a two-month period -- but often enough to be of concern.  I described it to my regular doctor as "It's kinda like what sleep apnea is supposed to be like, only without the sleeping part." 

To make sure I didn't have a tumor or growth starting in my throat, my doctor first sent me to an ENT specialist , where I got to watch a scope-on-a-rope send back images from my sinuses down to the top of my esophagus, with normal results.  After that came the appointment with the sleep lab.

This time the results were not "completely normal".  The results showed I was having the scattered stops in breathing during my sleep as well.  Overall, I was diagnosed as having mild sleep apnea; however, whenever I was on my back that night, instead of on my side, the number of incidents-per-hour jumped, from about half-a-dozen to over forty.

The recommendation was for me to start using one of those CPAP machines while sleeping, where a breathing mask over your face keeps a continuoous pressure in your airway, preventing it from closing during an apnea incident.

However, the data shows that a lot of people prescribed CPAP machines have trouble using them regularly, or stop using them after a few months.  So I'm trying "Positional Therapy" first, arranging things where one spends sleep on their side, instead of on their back.  The basic methods are to either block oneself in, or to wear a snug t-shirt that has tennis balls or other obstructions sewn into pockets along the spine.  One keeps you on your side, the other wakes you up if you roll onto your back.

Since getting the results, I've been sleeping with Big Kitty, an extra-large stuffed animal which has doubled as a body pillow in the past, behind my back at night.  (I've also bought a "Sidesleeper" pillow, shaped with an extension along the back, but it just arrived yesterday and I haven't used it enough to say how well it works yet.) Staying on  my side doesn't solve everything, but there does seem to be some improvement, waking up feeling better rested and with a bit more energy during the day.

It would probably also help to lose those thirty excess pounds I've picked up over the last five or six years.  Getting back to exercising regularly would help with that, and it would really help if I stopped snacking and "grazing" so much.  (But it's hard to resist the siren call of the Doritos, or the "yip-yip-yip!" of the Cheez-It herds as they roll across the plains.)

Tia, our Ghost Cat, 1997-2011

Tia, in a rare public moment

We came back from spending Saturday at LepreCon, one of the local conventions, and were starting to get ready for bed.  Part of the checklist for that is giving some of our cats a few kitty treats.  Which is when we realized that Tia, our older Ragdoll mix, not only hadn't come out for her treats, but hadn't come out the night before as well, and possibly longer.

Tia (short for Tiamet) has always been our "ghost cat", very much a solitaire who didn't interact much with the other cats and who was extremely shy about people in general and especially when there were strangers in the house.  We've had friends who've visited dozens of times, over years, who would finally get a glimpse of Tia and ask, "Oh, did you get a new cat?"  Until the last few years, when she got a little more outgoing, she'd spend almost all of her time in one room, our bedroom.  So it wasn't at all unusual -- in fact, the default -- to not see Tia.  When we realized she hadn't been seen at all for several days, our fear was that she might have slipped out the back screen door -- we've had people going back and forth to the backyard more often than usual the last few days -- even though that would have been extremely unusual for her. (Except for watching an occasional episode of Bird TV, she showed little interest in the outdoors.)

But we found her under our bed.  Our mattress is on a multi-drawer pedestal, which most of the time means the bed is effctively a solid block.  But if you get down on the floor and wiggle and shimmy around like an urban spelunker/contortionist, there's a crawlspace under the headboard (the headboard is a bookshelf attached to the top rim of the bed itself; we are so predictable) that leads to an area under the bed between the drawers on each side.  A quiet, private place.

Tabbi, who's younger and far more limber than me, was able to bring Tia out.  Tia was very dehydrated, thin, and obviously in distress.

This was a shock, because while Tia is actually our oldest cat, adopted from a rescue organization in 1997, she's always been exceptionally healthy.  Our next oldest, Rikkus, the "foreclosure cat" we rescued after his owners abandoned him a few years ago, was born in 1998 and has become a frail, slow-moving old man who'll sometimes sit on the floor and stare at you until you pick him up and put him in the high spot he wants to go.  Tia...?  Except for routine vaccinations and the bad case of ringworm she had when we adopted her, I don't think Tia has ever had to have a vet visit in her entire fourteen years. It was only a couple of weeks ago she was trying to catch a laser pointer's red dot.

This happened past midnight on a weekend.  So I drove her to the closest Emergency Animal Clinic, rather than waiting a day and a half for our regular vet's office to be open.  Findings: Besides the dehydration, Tia had an irregular heartbeat, her blood oxygen was poor, and she was very, very anemic.  The doctor's prognosis was pessimistic; aggressive treatment might bring some improvement, but even with that, the odds of Tia dying before Monday morning were probably over 50%.

And that was just to treat the current crisis; it didn't address the original, unknown, cause of Tia's sudden downslide.

(Speculation: Tia might have had a slow-growing tumor that didn't produce obvious symptoms until it caused internal bleeding, leading to the severe anemia leading to the heart problems leading to all the rest.)

It was a hard decision.  But after talking with Hilde on the phone, we finally decided euthanasia was the best choice.  The vet had already installed an injection port during the critical care after Tia first arrived at the clinic, so there wasn't the ignominy of a final needlestick.   I petted her while the injection went in, and she went quietly and quickly (and with, I suspect, relief).

Tabbi and James, one of our other housemates, dug a hole in the side yard and buried Tia for us.  We've lived in this house for over 25 years, so there are about another four or five cats buried over there from years past.  It doesn't get any easier.

I said that Tia didn't interact often with the other cats.  Oddly, though, she seemed to love our Welsh Cardigan Corgi, Madame Mim.  When Mim would be laying on the floor in the bedroom, Tia would sometimes come up and start washing Mim's face and ears, and doing the head-butt PURR-PURR-PURR thing.  ("Tia," I sometimes told her, "you are a traitor to your own species.")  Mim, to her credit, would lay there and take the washing and loving without objection, albeit always with a horribly embarassed expression on her face.

The Ethics of Earworming

Ever hear a song on the radio or wherever, that sticks in your head and just won't stop? That's an earworm.

The quality, or lack of, isn't particularly relevant to the, umm, earworminess of a particular piece of music.  Recent case in point: Rebecca Black's "Friday", which (so I've heard) is pretty unforgettable, no matter how desperate you are to do so.

But sometimes the earworm can come from a good piece of music.

Hilde and I, when there's nothing we want to watch on tv, sometimes turn the channel to one of the "Golden Oldies" music channels as background noise.  The 1960's had a lot of suckitude, but it had a lot of great music.

But even great music, after the third or fourth day of having it play in the back of your head, gets a little... wearying.

They (the ubiquitous "They") say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to share it with someone else.  So:

The main reason "Have I The Right" makes such a strong earworm is the especially strong beat.  In the original recording, besides Honey Lantree's drumming (one of the few female drummers in rock), the rest of the band was foot-stomping on wooden stairs, and the tambourine was being beaten, not by the player's hand, but directly onto the microphone.  The resulting triple-threat THUMPA-THUMPA-THUMPA gets right into one's midbrain; your heartrate speeds up and adrenaline starts to flow.  This is a great piece of "stay-awake" music.

Latest LoL

One of my recent contributions to Historic Lols got picked for the front page there, and has picked up about 270 votes so far:

*Coff* *Hack* *Wheeze*

Today's strip from Sinfest pretty much nails how my last few days have been.  (Well, except that when I'm fighting giant spiders with a sword, I'm generally not wearing a cute little blouse-and-skirt outfit.)

A new twist to this latest flu, mega-cold, or whatever it is, is that the associated fever and inflammation seems to have set off a reoccurrence of the hip bursitis I had about five years ago, on top of all the other symptoms. Not fun. Not fun at all. I don't like to take narcotic pain-killers except as a last resort; for this, I ended up taking T-3's (Tylenol with codeine).

I happened to have an appointment with an ENT doctor on Friday, for unrelated reasons, but he prescribed antibiotics for the crud I was having, and there's been vast improvement since then. I'll probably be back at work tonight.

A Fistful of Panthers



(via Flickr Commons, a 1968 photo from the Amsterdam Zoo.)



A Death In The Family, Part 2

On Thursday I got the news that Tom McGril, my stepdad (he and my mother had been together for about ten years), had died. Unlike the death of Hilde's brother Greg, this wasn't unexpected; Tom had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a six month prognosis about five-and-a-half months ago. Still, hard to hear, especially coming on top of Greg's death last week.

Tom and Mom met when Tom was recovering from hip surgery, and hired Mom (she was living in the same trailer park community) as a caregiver until he (literally) got back on his feet. Things developed, they moved in together, and eventually got married.

Tom was a good guy, who reminded me a lot of my father (who passed away in 1980) and made life better for Mom while they were together. He was also an accomplished painter, who was still giving classes when Mom met him. (He'd stopped painting in recent years, having lost enough fine control to feel he could continue. That was a loss.)

I'm of mixed mind about Tom's death from cancer. Yes, it gave time to make some preparations and planning, but the last couple of months of Tom's life varied from Pretty Bad to Really, Really Bad. Greg's death, shocking and unexpected as it was to his family and friends, at least meant that Greg went quickly and relatively painlessly. (And it also, speaking pragmatically, saved the expense of a long drawn-out illness. Tom's care and treatment over the last months means Mom is left with little in the way of savings anymore.)

(I also want to give a shout-out to my brother Denny and his wife Debbie - especially Debbie - for extraordinary expenditures of time and energy caring for, arranging care for, transporting to medical appointments, etc, for both Tom and my Mom these last months.)

A Death In The Family

Hilde's brother, my brother-in-law, Greg Hildebrand, died unexpectedly last night.

Apparent cause was a heart attack.  He'd complained of aches in his shoulders and back, and went to bed early, about 9:00.  When his wife Deb checked on him about a half-hour later, he was non-responsive.  She called 911, and he went into full cardiac arrest in the ambulance and couldn't be revived.

Totally unexpected.  There's no family history of cardiac problems; the Hildebrands almost invariably die of various abdominal cancers, and at a considerably older age.  (He was 57.)  Greg had been losing weight and reducing his blood pressure in recent months, so to all appearances he was getting fitter.

We'd been over to Greg & Deb's Friday night, and there were no signs of what would happen 24 hours later.

Hilde's being hit pretty hard by this.  Greg was her only sibling, and he was seven years younger than her; she'd more or less helped raise Greg while her mother worked to support the family.  With all of Hilde's health problems, she never expected to outlive her brother.

Besides Deb, his wife, he leaves behind his two daughters, Lea and Gwen, from his first marriage, and a lot of friends.

He was a pretty good guy.  (If I tried to say he was a saint, he'd have guffawed.)  He was always there for family and friends.   Our politics tended to be pretty far apart a lot of the time, but he was always good-natured about it.  I'm going to miss him.

(Just for the record, I should point out that Hilde's brother, Greg Hildebrand, should not be confused with the fantasy artist Greg Hildebrandt.  It's happened a time or two.)

Google Gets Its Priorities Straight

Google, in its practice of having special logos for special days, celebrates Wil Eisner's 94th birthday:

A little music to pass the time until I write a real post.

I've had a number of posts I've wanted to write in recent weeks, but have been extraordinarily busy (and "ordinarily busy" is already pretty hectic). Maybe later.

In the meantime, a little music. Hilde and I first heard "Concerto Antico" on our local classical station, KBAQ, while driving to a doctor's appointment, and liked it enough to check the station's playlist after we got home and identify the work. This YouTube video of the work's first section also coordinates music and images nicely. Enjoy.

Nouveau Robotica

Artist Chris Kawagiwa has been producing a very cool series of "Nouveau Robotica" works. Think of them as high-tech Mucha.

Gallery of the full set can be found here.

Nothing To Do With Today's News, Nope.

A Tea Partier went to the movie theater.

He didn't like the movie. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

But nobody burned the theater down. A week later the Tea Partier went back to the theater and watched a different movie.

He didn't like that movie either. So he shouted, "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!" again.

But nobody burned the theater down. So he kept going back to watch other movies. He was a pretty crabby old guy -- he'd yell "Get off my lawn, you spic!" at the guy he'd hired off a street corner to mow his lawn, that's how crabby he was -- and since John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were both dead, there weren't really any movies he liked anymore, so every time he went to the theater. . . "THIS MOVIE SUCKS! SOMEONE SHOULD BURN THIS THEATER DOWN!"

Then one day he went to the theater, only to find the parking lot crowded with police cars and ambulances, and a line of blanket-covered corpses laid out on the asphalt. The theater building was in flames, its walls collapsing inward, showers of sparks climbing into the sky.

Someone had burned the theater down.

"Oh, my god! This is horrible! Horrible!" the Tea Partier cried in anguish. "Now I have to find a different theater to go to!"

It's 2011

Still no jetpack, dammit.

2010 passed away quietly at midnight, and 2011 snuck into the room just as quietly.

This in spite of some varieties of fireworks having been made legal in the State of Arizona, and Glendale being one of the few cities that didn't institute their own local ban in response.  (Glendale allows them, but only on private property.)  Probably because the varieties allowed are only the sissy-foo-foo types that sit on the ground and shoot off a feeble shower of sparks.  Because what good are fireworks if you can't use them to blow a few fingers off or an eye out, or set an entire neighborhood ablaze?

My resolutions?  Pretty much the same as previous years.  Lose weight, reduce debt, try to write more.

I'm actually pretty good at reducing debt.  It's just that by the time I've reduced the old debt, new debt has come along.  Besides recovering from the cash-flow imbalance while off work these last few months, and the medical costs that weren't covered by insurance, it looks like we'll have some major dental expenses to deal with in 2011.  (My insurance is generally pretty good -- it's paid about 90% of the cost for shoulder surgery and the subsequent physical therapy -- but the dental coverage is feeble.)

As for the writing:  I have no idea if I'm going to write fiction again.  It's been over four years since my last completed story (there have been ocasional fragments since then), and that was a story far too autobiographical and not safe to market until at least several people have passed away.  The drive, the at-least-occasional fire in the mind that produced earlier stories, doesn't seem to be there anymore.  (Possibly it was because I finally wrote that too-autobiographical story, which I'd been wanting to do -- and skittering away from -- for thirty years.)  If I write fiction again, it will be by means of perspiration, rather than the mostly-inspiration stories I've done until now.  Craft, rather than art.  (Am I a craftsman?  I don't know.)

In the meantime, I've put together a bibliography of my published fiction.  There's a new link to that page over in the sidebar.  Rather slight, for that long a time, but there are stories in that list I'm proud of, so hey.

And there are stories I wrote before that last one, good enough I should try to get them out to markets again; I think they'd sell, if they just hit the right editor at the right time.  There are a few that don't seem to be marketable, or marketable enough; I might go ahead and put them online here.

And I'll continue to post here with the occasional comment or news, of course, leavened appropriately with snark or outrage. Bcause I am snarkish and outrageous, that's why.

Christmas Snowpocalypse -- the view from sunny Arizona

Here in Arizona, I had to brave temperatures in the 70's while running errands earlier today.  Life is tough.

But I've been looking at pictures from the big blizzard that's been dumping snow on the Northeast states.  That's some pretty cold-looking stuff you got there, people!

A photo gallery at Talking Points Memo led me to Dan Nguyen's Flickr set from New York City, which has some particularly nice shots.  This is my favorite, of Union Square:



Union Square - New York Snowstorm Blizzard 2010

 I like the sense of calm in this photo, at a location that would normally be filled with traffic moving in all directions.  The emptiness of the vista, the lack of vehicles and the wonderful old buildings (the snow-haze gives the buildings a layered effect not unlike that seen in Chinese mountain landscapes), make it almost seem like one has dropped a century back in time.  (Just put your thumb over that McDonald's sneaking in on the left edge.)

UPDATE: Here are a few more outstanding photos I've found on Flickr.  One that could be titled "New Yorkers Are Crazy" by O62, and a lovely self-portrait with snow by esparist.

One Word

Via Jay Lake, Daniel Abraham is having a discussion on story vs. sentence in fiction over on his Live Journal blog; Part of the discussion has been about how a story can change when the choice of words is changed.

As it happens, I can give an example where one word, being changed, changed a story:

One of my own stories, "Angel's Blood", published in Heaven Sent (ed. by Pete Crowther, DAW [US] and Signet Creed [UK] 1995).

The Big Reveal in that story came in the following sentence:

"There is war in Heaven, and God is losing."

For whatever reason (it showed up in the galleys without explanation), Crowther decided to change that to this:

"There is war in Heaven, and the angels are losing."

I think that both versions are effective stories. But they're not the same story.

- - - - -

In that same discussion, Daniel brought up the loss of accessibility to written language over time, as the language of later generations changes in usage and meaning, gaining new vocabulary as well as losing the old.  Chaucer and Shakespeare were brought up as examples (outliers?) whose work is still read today because of their sheer strength of story, rather than their now-difficult language.

Language-change is only part of that, however.  Culture as a whole changes over time.  So there's less and less overlap between the culture of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time and that of a reader fifity or a hundred or five hundrd years removed.  The context is lost.

So, in the context (*ahem*) of reading classical literature, to better understand that literature one needs to learn at least some of the historical context.  For that, things like annotated editions are useful.  But then your understanding of that context is dependent on the understanding and style (their own word-choices) of the annotations' author.  So ideally, the author of such an annotation would be a capable historian, linguist, archaeologist, anthropologist AND author.  And even then, your own brain is getting only a second-generation xerox of that author's understanding.

So it shouldn't really be a surprise that "popular culture" is, well, popular.  There's a "common context" that the reader can share, being a resident of the same culture the author of a modern work lives in.  The context of a work of classical fiction has become an uncommon context.

I think this may be why "historical mysteries" are popular.  The context of the historical period used for the mystery may be uncommon, but the meta-elements of mystery and detective fiction are part of the "common context" an average reader will be familiar with.  That gives the reader sufficient grounding in a work to give the author a chance to present the historical and cultural context clearly enough to give the reader a grounding in that aspect as well.

Conversely, even in a modern work, context can be relative. Why is fiction from other countries rarely popular in the US? I suspect it's because the cultural context is different enough to become part of the "uncommon context" I've mentioned above. Off the top of my head, it seems that the further away from the US (or the UK) a work of fiction originates, the less likely it is to gain a readership here.

And this can even apply to modern works supposedly set in a culture common to the average reader.  Back in my early 20's, I found myself reading Roommates by Elsie Lee.  Lee was a romance writer whose readership overlapped to some extent with SF readers.  (I think I first saw her work mentioned by Juanita Coulson in YANDRO, though I may be misremembering.)  At any rate, I came across and read the book.

I'm pretty sure I was not the audience for that book.  I was a young, socially awkward, inexperienced (worrying about getting laid wasn't a big concern back then; my state of general despair was more about just getting a date!).   And when I read Roommates, I was pretty thoroughly aghastified.  The lead characters in Roommates were... "husband-hunters" is the best term I can come up with.  To become someone's wife was the #1 goal in their lives.

I didn't have the context to understand those characters, or to sympathize with them.  To me, Roommates wasn't a romance novel, it was a horror novel.

(The website where I found the cover image, Fantastic Fiction, also quoted the backcover blurb to Roommates: "They were roommates happily sharing expenses and men, secrets and strategies, until they discovered the real meaning of womanhood--and love."  And underneath that was a "Similar Works By Other Authors" section.  The work cited as similar was Oath Of Fealty, by Elizabth Moon.   Wait, what?)

On the Subject of Beards, With Visual Aids

I'll be going back to work in early January, having recovered from shoulder surgery sufficiently. Which means I'll have to once again shave off the beard I've been growing back these last few months, and which I prefer to have.

A lot of people have said I look younger without the beard. I think they're wrong, but it's actually a matter of how good you look, not how young you look. Here's a piece of evidence to that effect:


The Most Interesting Man In The World

 Not convinced?  Okay, how about this?





with beard





without beard



I trust I've made my point.

Naughty or Nice?

Moonwalking Zombies of 1921



found on MagazineArt.org



A Questionable Christmas

Every Christmas season, there come along various seasonal items that make you stop short and say, "What?  Really?"  Here's a couple.  (I'll probably add more as I come across them.)

From the Toscano catalog, the Christmas Yeti ornament:

And from a Park Seed email, something to do with those overgrown, woody okra pods from your garden:

Every nativity needs a dragon, doesn't it?

You might think someone thinks dragons are just too damn cute to leave out of a Nativity.  But this particular setup was put together by someone basing it on the Book of Revelations, rather than the earlier parts of the New Testament.  That sounds like a fun family to be part of.

The Paris Exhibition on Flickr

I've been reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.  Very good book, but I was especially struck by the section set in and during the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (think World's Fair), with lush descriptions of the buildings and exhibits.

Thought to take a look on the Flickr Commons pages to see if there were photos from the Exhibition.  Turned out there was not only a set of photos, it was a big set (271 photos), and they were even in color! (Hand-colored, but still....)

The full set here.

Two-Fer Teapots!

I occasionally browse around for teapot competitions online.  These are usually for ceramic artists, working within the constraints of teapot design; sometimes those constraints are stretched way-y-y-y beyond what one expects, and the results can be astonishing.

Saddleback College in California has an annual competition along those lines, and past years have produced fine work.  Alas, for 2010, Saddleback decided that rather than a gallery with individual photos of each entry, they'd only post a PDF of the winning entries and honorable mentions.

But wait!  Browsing a bit more, I came across this gallery from a teapot-themed competition/benefit-auction held by the AAW.  That's the American Association of Woodturners.  All those teapots are made of wood (or wood-like materials; one is made from corrugated cardboard).  Woodworking is another area of interest to me, so, hey!, I get two-for-one pleasure from these.  Here are several examples:

Some or most of the AAW teapots are purely decorative (I'd imagine you'd need to coat the interior with a food-safe varnish or polyurethane to actually brew tea in them).  Some are more than obvious about being purely art pieces, like this one, and especially this delicate little number.

And then there's the piece shown below, by artist Binh Pho, made of maple and decorated with glass beads, pearls, and 14k gold; detail photo here:

Yowsa!

Latest LOL

Gary Farber reminds us that there aren't enough cats on the Internet. So:

The Way To A King's Stomach?

Browsing the selections over at the Science Fiction Book Club, a two-book combo selection popped up:



The Way of Kings/Best of the Year Cookbook Recipes



O-kayyyyyy....  

I'm scratching my head, wondering how someone made the decision that a Big Fat Fantasy and a recipe collection have sufficient appeal to each other's audience to be offered as a set?

Publishers work in mysterious ways....



Look, Ma! No Sling!

I had my first follow-up appointment with my shoulder surgeon on Monday. The good news is that he told me to start leaving the sling off my arm.

The bad news is he thought I should have a better range of motion at this point, so he wanted the sling dumped to let the arm move around more and get more flexible.

Yes, I have been wearing the sling pretty much 24/7 since the surgery, because that's what I was told to do. The first month following surgery, other than the passive therapy when the therapist moves the arm around while I try to keep it limp, was supposed to give the incision a chance to heal, and not to stress the sutures and repairs to the rotator cuff.

But the second month (as in, now) is when I'm supposed to get more active with the arm, including home-based exercises to stretch the shoulder as well as more-physical appointments with the PT people.

I'm kinda happy to have the sling off. "Kinda", because I still have to be careful not to overextend or overuse the left arm, and because it does ache some just from being out loose. But I can use that arm a bit more than before, with care, and I appreciate that. (Typing one-handed has been, umm, dreary.)

The stretching exercises started today. I figured they'd probably hurt. I was right. (I was saying "Owch! Owch! Oooch! Owch!" when another patient in another room gave a sharp, loud scream from thir own therapy. "Hey, someone's having a worse day than I am," I said. It's very, very bad of me, but that made me feel a bit better about the whole thing.)

Besides the appointments for physical therapy, I'm supposed to do the stretching exercises at home two or three times a day, using a stick and a set of pulleys to help push and pull the arm past it's comfort zone and into larger extensions. This hurts, too, but it does help get the range of motion slowly back to normal. (Right now I can only raise that left arm up to about shoulder level without an assist from the stick or pulleys. That's not sufficient, so I need to do the exercises, regardless of how much they hurt.)

After a month of stretching and extending the range of motion, the third month will be when I start working on getting that arm's strength back, because between not being able to use it fully before the surgery and not being able to use it pretty much at all since the surgery, the strength on that arm is pretty much punked out. Something tells me that's probably going to hurt too.

New Face, Same As The Old Face

I've complained before (bitterly, with much rending of sackcloth and angst-ridden wandering about fog-shrouded moors) about having had to shave off my beard -- my awesome, AWESOME beard! -- when I hired on as a security guard a few years ago.

Being off work for the next several months following the rotator cuff surgery, I've taken the opportunity to let the beard grow back.  After four weeks, we're at this stage:


Past the skeazy-bum stage and starting to fill in nicely.  Could even use a light trim on the lower edge of the moustache.  This is much more what my real face looks like.

Sure is grumpy lookin', though, isn't he?  That's probably because I know I'll have to shave it all off again in a few months.