http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2012/05/s
European stem cell research consortium OptiStem yesterday launched Hope Beyond Hype, a short educational comic that tells the story of stem cells from discovery to therapy. The comic, now available online and as attractive hard-copy
'starts with the true life story of two badly burned boys being treated with stem cell generated skin grafts in 1983. We then follow the successes and setbacks of a group of researchers working together to use stem cells to cure blindness, whilst being introduced to knotty issues that are part of the process, including stem cell regulation and the controversial ethical issues surrounding the subject. Whilst some of the story lines sound like science fiction they are in fact all true, despite the fact the script was written by the well-known Scottish Science Fiction writer, Ken Macleod. Comic book artist Edward Ross illustrated the script with his clear, friendly and attractive artwork, whilst stem cell researchers from OptiStem provided the real-life examples of their research and experiences.'The comic was produced by a team led by Cathy Southworth, Optistem and EuroSyStem's Public Engagement, Outreach and Communications Manager, who works at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine. She came up with the idea, recruited the team, showed us around the marvellous building in which the Centre is housed, introduced us to her colleagues, and arranged the immense privilege of an hour for us all with stem cell pioneer Professor Michele De Luca.
Cathy and I consulted graphic-novel guru David Bishop at Napier, who explained how comics scripts are written and suggested books to read. I went off and read them, then wrote the script. Comics artist Edward Ross and his colleague, Glasgow University PhD student Jamie Hall, did the design and artwork. Meanwhile Edward and Jamie were just finishing a rather longer comic on malaria, and Edward and his wife were expecting a happy event (now happily eventuated, as you can see from the pram handle in the picture below), but they took it all in their stride. The script (and some panels - none of us will forget the blastocyst picture) went through several iterations, as we and some of Cathy's colleagues tore successive drafts to shreds.
For all that, we finished on time and in budget, and it was a proud moment when we all got the finished article in our hands.
I had a wonderful time at the Children's Books Ireland conference yesterday. I shared a podium with some fabulous writers in front of a friendly and expert audience. Sitting in the high seats, in no particular order, were:
Conor Kostick (moderator)
Sally Nicholls,
Mise
IN MEMORIAM
I often bring up my current enthusiasm when I'm on a panel. This time, I couldn't help burbling on about the late Brian McNaughton. Lore Magazine (in which, I too, have a story called "Fairy Gold") has printed his final, never-to-be-completed novella, "The Deposition of Leodiel Fand". It is set in the same world as the World Fantasy Award winning, The Throne of Bones (TToB). I thought the editors were just publishing it for reasons of nostalgia, in memory for a lost friend. How wrong I was. It's fantastic, even without an ending.
BLUE VELVET
Once upon a time, when I was, maybe 18, my cousin and I went to the cinema to watch a movie together, called Blue Velvet. For the first half an hour, I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen. Horrendously wooden acting; ridiculous melodrama; special effects that a child would find offensive. But then, I noticed something. My cousin (of similar age) was almost dying with laughter beside me. He said the whole movie was nothing but an elaborate, deliberate joke*.
The scales fell from my eyes and I SAW. It clicked. I too started chortling until the tears were rolling down my face.
The writings of Brian McNaughton are like that.
When I read TToB years ago, I found it haunting and sad and horrific. My only gripe was that the author always went too far into the GrimDark. It seemed... well... adolescent to me and I forgave it because of all the other talents he brought to the table. But with this new story, I experienced another Blue Velvet moment. The parts I found stupid, are so obviously intended to be humorous, I can't believe I never saw it before. He has an AMAZING turn of phrase, and the jokes are, now that my slow brain has allowed me to see them, brilliant.
I've got to reread The Throne of Bones as soon as possible, except...
HUGO PACKET
...it's that time of year again and all those books and stories nominated for the Hugo Awards are available to anybody with the vote. $50 will get you that vote, so it's well worth it. I've read a lot of the nominees already, but not Jo Walton's Among Others, which I started last night.
More soon.
*Actually, it's more than that, but that's another story.
- Mood:
cheerful
- I give up
Jon Worth decides that he cannot bear the prospect of running for the European Parliament as a Labour candidate in the UK.
(tags: ukpolitics eu ) - Blue Peter is Who I Am
The difference one TV programme can make.
(tags: autism television children )
Thinking further about that article I linked yesterday apropos of the virtues of "deliberate mediocrity" as a strategy for beating perfectionism and related issues because of various other stuff coming up.
While no or too low expectations may indeed be a bad thing, high expectations can be pretty awful as well. Looking back I am perhaps glad that my background was such that just getting into university, any university, and getting a reasonably good degree was pretty yayful (even if the institution I attended now occasionally emerges as the butt of mockery). (And quite stressful enough, thanks.)
Returning in later years to do a PhD part-time, there are significant props involved just for staying the course and submitting a thesis (and unlike certain people who got postdoctoral fellowships to turn theirs into publication/s that never happened - wot, me, bitter? - publishing The Book of the Thesis).
I think also of Boring Old Fart whom I may have mentioned in previous posts, who started out as Golden Boy of Outstanding Promise and never really did anything much at all in terms of fulfilling that promise, which may well have been down to the burdens of being expected to be utterly brilliant and making groundbreaking contributions to the discipline, etc. Or just having peaked early and then slumped.
I may also have mentioned heretofore the benefical strategy of concentrating on one's specific strengths to the extent that people do not notice the things one is not doing.
I wouldn't deny that I had significant support enabling me to do the things I've done, but I didn't have people gazing at me expecting me to Do Something Remarkable, which must be fairly paralyzing.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1653392.htm comments.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/giveawayo
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/?p=31557
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More tomorrow. That was a lot of
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3
Reader PN wrote to comment on the first sentence of a story by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, "US unlikely to condemn Argentina’s ‘outlaw behavior’ — yet", Miami Herald 5/16/2012:
A U.S. congressional proposal aimed at expelling Argentina’s populist-leftist government from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies faces an uncertain future, not the least because it lacks significant support from unexpected quarters — conservative Cuban-American Republican lawmakers.
PN's comment:
From the rest of the article — and typical attitudes of Cuban-American Republicans to leftist Latin American governments — it seems clear that they are trying to say that the *lack* of support was unexpected. But what a strange way to put it.
A Google Books search for "support from unexpected quarters" turns up plenty of examples — but all are cases of getting, receiving, finding such support, not lacking it:
From information which I have received, I shall get considerable support from unexpected quarters.
Ukrainian soviets are receiving support from unexpected quarters.
A main claim of the movement, which is now finding new support from unexpected quarters, is the perniciousness of neoliberal policies.
Such sombre observations have received support from unexpected quarters.
The dock owners and the ship owners refused to negotiate, and the strike might have collapsed had it not been for support from unexpected quarters.
[T]hese attempts by Feuerbach, Freud and Sierksma to discuss religion at the cultural level as well, which in this interpretation are to be rejected, have recently received support from unexpected quarters.
Phillips's argument that the plantation economy was unhealthy for both individual planters and the southern economy as a whole received support from unexpected quarters in the 1960s.
They can expect some support from unexpected quarters for the twin slogan— education and atomic power.
There are just two examples of "support from expected quarters", both also involving getting or receiving such support:
The debate continued — Shaw repeating verbatim some of what he had written in the preface to The Doctor's Dilemma — with each party to the dispute receiving support from expected quarters …
The BJP had hoped to reach the magic number of 269 by getting support from 'expected quarters'.
So there's a sort of idiom or collocation, "support from unexpected quarters", which is something that one can get, receive, or find. Curiously, one can also expect support from unexpected quarters. And can also, of course, get, receive, find, expect, or hope for support from expected quarters. And finally, support, expected or otherwise, can fail to materialize.
We can tell that this is a sort of idiom because this sense of quarter(s) has a rather limited distribution — we don't see things like "*The usual quarters supported this measure", or "*A certain quarter argues that all such regulation should be eliminated."
Anyhow, you could certainly negate a phrase like "receive significant support from unexpected quarters" to get something like "It's not the case that the bill received significant support from unexpected quarters", or "The bill did not receive significant support from unexpected quarters". And you could merge "not receive" into lack: "The bill lacked significant support from unexpected quarters".
What's a bit odd about the Miami Herald's lede, as PN points out, is that the support of conservative Cuban-Americans for moves against aleftist government in Argentina is expected support from expected quarters. What's unexpected is that this expected support has failed to materialize.
This implies a semantic structure that's informally
[[lacks support] [from unexpected quarters]]
rather than the expected
[lacks [support [from unexpected quarters]]]
If we merge the "lack of support" into a single noun, e.g. opposition, then we wouldn't give the construction a second thought, as in these Google Books examples:
The Gilbert bill met with swift opposition from unexpected quarters.
It is a well-known fact that the CLS critique of rights (and concomitant focus on needs) met with opposition from unexpected quarters, including critical gender and critical race theorists, …
So it's plausible that the analogous use of "[lacks support] from unexpected quarters" is grammatical — but just hard to process, due to the quasi-idiomatic character of "support from unexpected quarters".
While this is not an example of what we've come to call misnegation, the processing difficulty is certainly increased by the presence of multiple lexical negations along with the scalar predication implicit in unexpected and not the least because.
Symphonia-- ah, who knows?
Glassichord -- different from the glass harmonica in that it is played like a spinet and little hammers hit glass rods.
Marimbaphone -- which could be used with a bow.
Lithophone -- yes, a xylophone made of rocks.
Crotales -- little bowed cymbals.
nail violin
Daxophone
friction harp
Ball point pens now, go surfn the pen tapping
- Location:Minneapolis, Baja Manitoba
But here I am in California, and I don't even need to leave my garden. There hasn't been a cloud for weeks; the sun is still high enough to make observations easy; I am playing with sheets of paper and pinholes. Something has licked half the sun away already. Anyone seen A'Tuin recently? *glowers suspiciously at turtles*
What the boys will do when their sunshine disappears, I do not know. That also might be fun to observe, but I shall be outside. Am acquiring last-minute tan, just in case it never comes back again.
One of them, one I remember from my childhood, one I listened to over and over and over again, one I loved deeply, was this:
I always sang along to that fading "I will remember Massachussetts" at the end of it, and Massachussetts was a magic place for me back then, just this weird long word with lots of double letters which might as well have been in Fairyland or on the Moon as far as the young me was concerned, growing up in a different culture, on a different continent.
But today... today, I will remember Massachusetts - not the one I finally did get to visit, all those years later, as an adult, but the one that was so magical to me back than, back when I lived in the world of my imagination and Massachussetts was a place of magic. Because Robin Gibb is dead.
And so it goes. It drifts away further and faster every year. The memories of my childhoon seem even to me as though I am talking about a differnet era, a different lifetime. And those who peopled the greater sphere of my life are starting to fall away. The writers I read when I first took flight in the worlds of fantasy, like Anne McCaffrey. The singers of my youth, like the Bee Gees (of whom now only one, Barry Gibb, remains - dear GOD I went and saw these guys in concert once, and even THAT now seems like a dream).
My hair is silver gray.
When did that happen?
When did I blink and find myself looking over my shoulder and childhood, and youth, and even the early adult years - when did I step into middle age, when did the world change around me?...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlways
http://notalwaysright.com/?p=20033
(Roundups | Not Always Right)
Your Drive Me Crazy! This week, we share five stories of customers who drive employees nuts—and the brave workers who are driven to serve them just the same!
- Drive Hoo:
Woohoo! Drive-thru customers can really drive you crazy! - Preserving Life, 1-Up At A Time:
Proof that Pokémon-players take “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” VERY seriously. - Copycats…and Copy Dogs, Copy Sheep…:
A customer wanting to clone his dog? Just another day at the bookstore! - That Was Random:
One coffee shop customer takes a random walk on the weird side. - We Can Thank Hollywood And “Hacker” Films For This:
Tech support can fix your hard drive, but not the car you drive!
PS #1: check out our new Extras section, with pictures, videos, and news galore!
PS #2: Read more roundups here!
Someone in my daughter's after-school program spilled milk on her stuffed penguin. (my daughter's penguin). I was there, and ran it under water right away, and took it home to dry. Unfortunately the milk must have gotten in farther than I could rinse, because it still smells bad. I hate having to put stuffies in the washing machine because they never quite dry out the same texture.
But I think it's time for Penguin to learn how to swim.
Got in rather too late on Friday to set to and start making rolls.
Today's lunch: plaice fillets, brushed with melted butter and lemon juice, seasoned with salt and pepper and crushed coriander seeds, rolled, the remains of the butter/lemon mixture poured over, covered with foil and baked, served with new potatoes halved and roasted in goose fat, leeks brushed with olive oil, healthy-grilled, and sprinkled with redcurrant vinegar, and steamed samphire with butter.
This week's bread: the basic recipe I use for buttermilk rolls, made up in rather greater quantity in wholemeal, strong white and white spelt flours. I possibly baked it rather too long by neglecting to set the timer, but has turned out nicely nonetheless.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1652833.htm comments.
The 100 things blogging challenge.
Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give me back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1652497.htm
THE OLD RACES: ORIGINS
Before the Negotiator, there were the long-held covenants of the Old Races: Do not mate with humans. Never tell them of our existence. And never kill one of our own. For time immemorial, these laws were adhered to…
…except when they were not. Delve into the secret history of the Old Races and discover the truth behind Saint George and the dragons, the origins of the mysterious selkie race, and the djinn betrayals that shape the world of the Negotiator Trilogy.
These stories and more are revealed in this collection of five Old Races short stories, coming June 1 to an e-store near you!
(This collection contains 5 of the 6 Old Races Short Story Project stories, so if you were a patron of that crowdfunded project, you don’t need to buy this one. I mean, IF YOU WANT TO it’s fine with me, y’know? But there’s no new content. Except the cover. :))
Cover art by Tara O’Shea. My head is just going to explode of excitement when I get to see ALL THREE short story collection covers together. :)
(x-posted from the essential kit)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-sta
I collect conspiracy theories. The nature of what people are willing to believe about their neighbours tells us quite a lot about our attitude to the society we live in, our fears, our worries about deception, and so on. And the past half century has been a boom time for conspiracy theories, from the JFK assassination through the moon landings to the CIA introducing LSD/crack cocaine/AIDS/insert threat here into the USA, to Louis Mountbatten and MI5 trying to stage a coup against the British government in the 1970s ... wait, the last one was real. And, now I think about it, so was one of the CIA ones. That's the trouble with conspiracy theories: true history contains such weird lacunae of surrealism that it's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff.
I ran across a new-to-me conspiracy theory today; on balance I think it's an urban legend, but it appeals to my credulity very neatly and I can't rule it out for sure. Let me explain why below ...
Hip hop, rap. They're not my preferred musical forms, I will freely admit. I like some, but dislike most: and I really don't like gangster rap, both for its form and for the whole lifestyle and aspirational model it's associated with. Misogynisticre, violent, crude, angry: well, what if it was all a conspiracy inflicted on us, not by the music industry, but through the music industry? And what if the motive behind it was to provide a social model for poor black urban teenagers that would land them in jail and thereby create money-making opportunities for the private prison industry?
Far-fetched?
Well, that's what this conspiracy theory would have you believe. And it ticks all the checkboxes. Pick a group everyone considers to be unscrupulous and corrupt, like the RIAA: check. Come up with an even nastier Big Bad, a shadowy cabal from the private prisons industry: check. Invite industry insiders to a private conference and bind them to strictest secrecy: check. Our leaker is anonymous: check. Dissidents are ejected at gunpoint and threatened: check. This all stays under wraps for nearly two decades but is leaking now due to an attack of conscience ...
Which is where it fails nearly fatally to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Here's one smackdown pointing out that the crime rate went down from 1991, not up. (Which tends to undermine the conspiracy's effectiveness, if not its existence.) And then there's the content. Conspirators with guns let a witness with a conscience go? More crazily, we're expected to believe that conspirators with such a large project in mind didn't pre-screen the names on the invite list for the conspiracy?
Naah, doesn't work.
Nevertheless, hip hop did turn gangster-obsessed around that time, and the private prison industry in the United States is a gangrenous moral ulcer rotting away that country's judicial system. Linking the two in a superficially simplifying conspiratorial relationship is ... well, it appeals to our instinct to reach for consistent causal links between parallel phenomena in a complex world. It's the modern equivalent of ascribing bad weather or crop failures to the gods being angry (an activity still popular today among the superstitious).
Meanwhile, if you want to see a real life conspiracy unfolding, you need to look no further than this.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlways
http://notalwaysright.com/?p=19997
(Bar | New York, NY, USA)
(We have a Foursquare check-in special for a free shot. A customer comes up showing that he has unlocked the special.)
Me: “Could I see some ID?”
(I check his ID and he’s a few months short of being 21.)
Me: “Sorry, but you’re not 21, so you’re not getting a shot.”
Customer: “But it says ‘free shot’ right here.”
Me: “But, you’re not 21. You can’t get a shot.”
Customer: “What is the mystery shot anyway? Could I get a virgin version?”
Me: “Not really possible.”
Customer: “I checked in. It says I’m eligible for a shot and a shot I shall have!”
Me: “Well, a shot is, what, like an ounce? You want an ounce of Coke?”
Customer: “Oh, yes, that’ll be lovely.”
Me: “Okay.”
(I take a shot glass and manage to fill it with Coke, despite the pressure of the soda gun making almost all of it spill out.)
Me: “Here you go.”
Customer: “Thank you!” *walks away happily with his ounce of Coke*
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NotAlways
http://notalwaysright.com/?p=19994
(Pool | AB, Canada)
(I work at a pool as a lifeguard. We always have problems with children running, even though it is the number one rule at the pool to walk on deck.)
Child: *runs across deck*
Me: “Walk please.”
(Five minutes later, the same child runs the other way.)
Me: “WALK!”
(Five minutes later, the child runs in front of me. I stop the child to make sure she understands me.)
Me: “You need to walk, okay? If I need to ask you again, I will sit you out for three minutes.”
(The child walks away and gets back into the pool. The mother approaches me.)
Parent: “She’s not running. She just walks on her tip toes.”
Me: “It’s not the manner of her movement. It’s the speed she’s moving.”
Parent: “But she’s not running.”
(Her child runs past again.)
Me: “WALK!”
Parent: “But she’s not run—”
Child: *slips and falls*
- Sun, 04:21: RT @Hollysmither: <3 all feminist groups who've said this: RT @BrightonFemCol: Why Brighton Feminist Collective don't support #radfem ...
- Sun, 04:30: Photo: kamikazekurt: A short experimental line built over a siding at Milngavie. There were plans to extend... http://t.co/oCOOCZpo
- Sun, 11:33: Photo: The plaque on the site of the Bennie Railplane. http://t.co/moa30unq
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mahablog/X
http://www.mahablog.com/?p=17384
You’ve probably heard that a sting operation caught three young men who allegedly planned terrorist activities to protest the NATO summit in Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the three “allegedly plotted to firebomb President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s North Side home, as well as police stations and squad cars.”
Whether the three are guilty or not I do not know. What’s fascinating to me is the way this little issue is being portrayed by bloggers.
At Firedoglake, we read:
The NLG [National Lawyers Guild] attorneys representing the arrestees have not been shown any police records on any “month-long investigation.” The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. Yet, the press get to see the records on arrestees so that the police can be sure people take the charges against the activists seriously and do not suspect police abuse or repression of activists. …
…It is important to recall that back in 2008, prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, eight activists were preemptively raided and ultimately charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.” The national security state has a script, and when it comes to “National Special Security Events,” they stick to that script pretty well.
So that’s one perspective, which I neither endorse nor dismiss. Certainly there is a long history of police-state tactics targeting demonstrators, especially around large conventions and summit meetings. There’s more than a whiff of entrapment in this story.
Of course, there’s also a long history of hot-headed young men who want to blow stuff up. I’m making no assumptions here.
Rightie bloggers have another view, which is that the three indeed are deranged terrorists working on behalf of the Occupy movement. Per the Sun-Times article, the three found each other through an Occupy Chicago housing board. In the simple world of James Hoft, that makes them “#Occupy NATO terrorists.”
Hoft doesn’t mention the three alleged terrorists were allegedly planning to bomb Obama campaign headquarters. However, commenters brilliantly deduced Chicago + terrorism = Bill Ayers (example).
The Breitbrats also forgot to mention that the alleged terrorists were going to firebomb Obama campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel’s home. But the commenters wasted no time in deciding that Obama himself was behind the plot:
Hold on to your butts. Ask yourself, “Why did they decide to have NATO in Chicago, anyway?” Ya all are gonna have a knee-jerk reaction to these kids. “Stupid hippies,” and i don’t disagree. They’re responsible, yes, yes, of course, but THEY ARE ALSO BEING PRODDED TO VIOLENCE AND PROTEST BY THE INVISIBLE HAND. Obama cannot have his revolution without division, chaos, and flame.
Just another way for the Obama admin to launder (our) money for his homeys in Chicago.
Here you get the best of both worlds — it’s police oppression creating false terrorists, and the Obama Administration is behind it:
So, now our federal government has given up on the muslim terrorists and are going to create fake domestic terrorists at home? And you’re right!!! Why even have this in Chicago in the first place? Have you ever heard of “FALSE FLAG?” Just wait… something crazy is going to happen and Obama is going to try to emerge as the HERO to give himself an election boost… The fix is in for this NATO Summit. I’m so sick of this crap! These people (the feds) are so predictable!
BTW, I find the video highly annoying. There’s nothing productive about yelling the “F” word at a police station.
The “get a brain, moran” award has to go to the commenters at Weasel Zippers. Here at least the blogger headlines the part about blowing up Obama headquarters, and the commenters still think Obama was behind it. Sample:
thank you barak insane obama,
mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
you and ayers are great leaders
teachers, or terrorist tactics
jackass
The Weasel Zippers crowd are not famous for eloquence. All the comments are pretty much on that level.
See also Cannonfire.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/arc
Novel
Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
Novella
"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson (Asimov's, October/November 2011)
Novelette
"What We Found," by Geoff Ryman (F&SF, September/October 2011)
Short Story
"The Paper Menagerie," by Ken Liu (F&SF, March/April 2011)
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Doctor Who: "The Doctor's Wife," by Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult SF and Fantasy Book
The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Connie Willis
Solstice Award
Octavia Butler (posthumous) and John Clute
Service to SFWA Award
Bud Webster
Above: Jo Walton, Delia Sherman, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman. Blurry figure of Liza Trombi in the background, herding cats winners to be photographed.
Above, seated: Jo Walton, Bud Webster, Cynthia Felice (for Octavia Butler), Connie Willis, John Kessel (for Kij Johnson); standing: Delia Sherman, Geoff Ryman, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman (for John Clute), Jamie Todd Rubin (for Ken Liu).
Review of the long-awaited Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London by Judith R Walkowitz by a reviewer who, we may possibly surmise, has their own book out on similar topics but with a rather different approach...
The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan.
Two, count 'em, two reviews of the V&A exhibition on ballgowns since 1950: Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian and Rachel Cooke in The Observer.
And further afield: The Buddhas of Bamiyan by Llewelyn Morgan.
Oliver Burkemann on the possible benefits of under-achievement, or at least of recognising limits.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1652435.htm comments.
It's mutual challenge time -- let's do the 15 minutes/day of decluttering. Yes, 7 minutes twice a day counts.
I haven't decided what my reward will be at the end of the week.
So....my weekend so far.
We conked out before the end of yesterday's SCA event (fun, but hot weather & tiring). I tucked V in to bed around 8 and she asked me to cuddle for a little before I went out of the room. I got in with her and rubbed her back and... yeah, I fell asleep too. That lasted about 20 minutes because she kicks like a mule. But I took the hint and brushed my teeth and headed for bed. I kept waking up, and around 10 realized that Rob was still down playing videogames. I went down to point out the time, and had trouble falling back asleep -- realized that I'd had a migraine kick in so took the medicine and lay down on the sofa under the open window and BAM. Strangely enough I woke up in my own bed, with no memory of getting there.
And oh what a way to wake up.
"Mom? Mom? I wet the bed. I pulled off the blankets but I can't get the sheet."
She's 5. It's awesome that she tried to strip the bed. But now I get to wash the rug too. I'm so very glad I chose a throw rug for her room not carpeting.
Oh and this comes after having realizing that I must be recontaminating myself with poison ivy because I am still having new spots come out SIX DAYS after exposure. So I was already planning to wash all *my* bedding and all the sofa throws and my jackets. Now I get to add *HER* bedding and it is looking like a tedious day of laundry.
My new Irish(American) blessing: May you never have poison ivy on your face, ear, and nose...and REALLY never along the waistline where you hiked up your pants.... 'Nuff said.
In other news, I finally got off my duff and called Rob's sleep-apnea doctor. I've had the consultation and have scheduled a sleep test -- spending the night with things attached to me and people watching is not my favorite idea, but it's a lot better than choking myself awake. Rob says I'm gasping in my sleep -- and I know I've woken up feeling semi-suffocated. Bad news, needs fixing.
( Chores today to make up for yesterday's day off. )
And
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katexxxxxx here's something for you: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4[EDIT: I added >new items. I crossed out some. I am astounded at how far behind I got in just one week of skipping out laundry. I am also pleased to have done so much because...drumroll...Victoria did NOT Have food poisoning this week...I know this because *I* HAVE IT NOW. And yes, it really IS nice to have a freshly cleaned toilet when you're sick. Thanks flylady!]
- Mood:
cheerful
Page Summary
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better_nation : Stem cell comic hits the spot, say scientists [+0] - peadarog : Children's Books Ireland, Reading, Multiple Variosities [+0]
- seawasp : New Post on my Site... [+0]
- nwhyte : Links I found interesting for 21-05-2012 [+0]
- oursin : 'Adequate' and 'competent' are not, in fact, pejoratives [+0]
- givawayoftheday : Wondershare PDF to Word Converter 3.6.0 is an accurate and powerful PDF to Word utility created to h [+0]
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sinfest_mod :: haloedone : Worry Beads : Your Zen Buddy [+0] - xkcd_rss : Old-Timers [+6]
- girlgenius_feed : Girl Genius for Monday, May 21, 2012 [+0]
- pantryslut : (no subject) [+0]
- languagelog : Lacking semantic support from unexpected quarters [+0]
- ritaxis : As usual, while looking for something else . . . [+3]
- dsgood : (no subject) [+1]
- desperance : Big yellow eye is blinking [+5]
- ritaxis : liveblogging the eclipse [+1]
- anghara : It drifts further away every year... [+1]
- notalwaysright2 : Weekend Roundup: You Drive Me Crazy [+0]
- flylady :: galingale : Cleaning toys [+5]
- oursin : Culinary [+0]
- oursin : 100 things blogging challenge: 34 [+0]
- mizkit : OLD RACES: ORIGINS [+2]
- charlies_diary : Fun with conspiracy theories [+0]
- notalwaysright2 : A Shot In The Dark [+0]
- notalwaysright2 : Traveling At The Speed Of Stupid [+0]
- supergee : And they dress cool, too. [+6]
- feorag : My tweets [+0]
- mahablog2 : Obama Behind Plot to Blow Up His Own Headquarters! [+0]
- makinglight : Nebula Awards 2011 [+0]
- oursin : Linkspam goes to London [+0]
- flylady :: galingale : Road to a home... is sometimes paved with poison ivy [+2]
