No such thing as sandwiches

slithytove @ 2009-07-08T09:50:00

2009-07-08T13:52:41Z

Ugh. I'm not going to Readercon after all. Instead, I'm having a wretched upper respiratory infection, with sore throat, cough, muscle aches, and general lousiness.

Enjoy it without me, folks. Maybe next year.

slithytove @ 2009-07-07T12:03:00

2009-07-07T16:16:53Z

Remember this guy? I sent him to the Psych Crisis Unit that morning. They bounced him. They said his main problem was PCP, not psychosis.

He came back two nights ago.

Neighbors noticed that he was passed out on his porch. Neighbors called medics. Patient woke up and fought with medics. Medics called cops. Patient fought with cops. Got Tasered. Dragged back to ER. Nurses pulled Taser darts out. Patient was sedated with Zyprexa and Ativan, 302'ed (by me, this time), and sent to Crisis again.

Crisis bounced him again. Told him not to use PCP. Patient left Crisis, used PCP, and decided to go down to the local station house and settle matters with the police.

As you might expect, this did not go well. He got Tasered again, and dragged back to ER. Nurses took more Taser darts out, and strapped patient to stretcher in 4-point restraints. Patient flipped the stretcher, and managed to walk around, still strapped to the stretcher, carrying the stretcher on his back. Big guy.

Cops were called again. Patient Tasered again. Patient sedated again. Nurses pulled out Taser darts again.

The police decided they were tired of Tasering this guy three times a day. They summoned a judge to the ER. It was July 5, a Sunday afternoon. Hot day. Judge showed up in shorts. He wore judicial robes over the shorts. He was accompanied by three county prison guards who, the nurses swear, were all eight feet tall. Patient was arraigned by the judge, in the ER. Taken off to prison by guards. The End.

slithytove @ 2009-07-06T09:04:00

2009-07-06T13:06:26Z

And now, cat snatches bat out of the air.

DON'T mess with the cat.

slithytove @ 2009-07-06T02:38:00

2009-07-06T06:44:28Z

Amsterdam plans to bail out prostitutes.

"...We're going to investigate and talk with bankers and try to set up a system in which they can get a loan or credit," the spokesman said.

But, as Eddy Elfenbein says, will prostitutes want to be associated with a profession as unsavory as banking?

slithytove @ 2009-06-30T10:10:00

2009-06-30T14:30:48Z

All of Delaware County had chest pain last weekend. I blame Michael Jackson.

Except for this guy. Narrative section of a 302 form for involuntary psychiatric evaluation, filled out by police:

On Monday 6-29-09 at 2327 hrs [Town] Police found [Name] at the 200 Blk
of [Street]. Running in and out of traffic yelling & screaming & swing a 5
foot stick at passing cars & people. He was just being missed by cars on the
hwy. Almost being struck by a car in Police presents.

When this fellow was bought to the ER, he insisted on being called 'Reverend'. He told us he had just published two CDs of music. And he had a book that he was about to publish.

But first, he needed someone to edit it for him.

slithytove @ 2009-06-25T06:22:00

2009-06-25T10:24:51Z

Uh-oh.

Wait...

'Mac and Linux COMING SOON!'

Whew. Safe. For now.

slithytove @ 2009-06-25T05:04:00

2009-06-25T09:07:30Z

Words OpenOffice don't know: firepit, Albemarle, snaggletooth, redbuds, feedstocks, Franglais, palladian, unexcitable, plough, airburst, extrasolar, Hobbesian, panspermia, loblolly, quartermastering, cockapoo, stumphole, unshoulder.

Huh. Firefox 3.0.11 don't know 'em either.

slithytove @ 2009-06-22T05:06:00

2009-06-22T09:11:45Z

And now, murder cleaners. They clean up after murders, and other random deaths. [NSFW]

slithytove @ 2009-06-22T03:25:00

2009-06-22T07:37:44Z

I have made these cookies: Croq-Télé.

I brought them to work, for a co-worker's birthday. They were generally acclaimed.

They're simple to make, but do require a food processor. I made them in two single-pan batches. Baking two pans at the same time at different levels in the oven is just asking for trouble.

Do what the recipe says. Do NOT over-process or over-beat or over-cook. If you process the nut/sugar mixture much, or over-beat the flour/shortening (you are cutting the shortening into the flour), you will wind up with a greasy mess. You can still bake it, and it will taste okay, but it will have a different texture, and the bits of dough will be harder to handle.

Watch the cookies closely while they are in the oven. Remove them when the edges are slightly brown. If you let them get even a little too brown, the taste suffers.

I want to try them with pecans instead of almonds. Or walnuts. Or even macadamias. A touch of cinnamon might also be interesting. Maybe a little lemon zest?

Vanilla would be tricky. Even a trace of liquid will change the physical properties of the dough, and the finished cookie, perhaps drastically. Vanilla in the form of vanilla bean ground to a dust might be an option.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

2009-06-20T12:41:22Z

See, the Jack Russell terrier tries, and fails. He tries again. He fails. He tries again, and again. Finally, with knowledge and character gained through his ordeal, he exerts all his strength and tries a final time -- and succeeds! Denouement. Now that you feel all warm and cuddly about the Jack Russell, wouldn't you like to buy this unrelated investment product?

Wait, I have another interpretation. The writer sends in his story, but the editor rejects it. He tries a different story. Again the editor rejects it...

God help us, we *are* our characters.

What's marvelous about this video is how the story -- it happens to be No. 1 of Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations -- can be compressed to its essentials. In less than a minute of time. Without words. With action scenes alternating with moments of high suspense. Nicely done.

"Modernity was ending."

2009-06-17T03:13:21Z

Detroit now has zero bookstore chains, zero national grocery chains, zero Chrysler Jeep dealers and only four Starbucks.

The city's 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps...

A few retailers are thriving. Family Dollar Stores Inc. has opened 25 outlets since 2003...

Meanwhile, the former Lochmoor Chrysler Jeep is now Lochmoor Automotive Group, a used-car dealership and repair shop. Gina Russo, daughter of the dealer's longtime owner...has agreed to start selling small pickup trucks made by India's Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

Via.

I don't know what the answer is. The article points out that as population drops, tax revenues fall, and city services such as trash collection, snow removal, and police response suffer. This makes it difficult to lure retail business, which makes it difficult to lure new citizens. Vicious circle.

NYC got into a bad state in the 1970s and 1980s, but pulled itself out. However, there is intrinsic value to living or having your business in NYC, arguably the premier city in the world. Fix the city a little, and people will come back. There is no intrinsic value to living or doing business in Detroit. Detroit has a much tougher job.

I'm a little worried that Philadelphia is headed in the same direction. It is still losing population. It's not an industry monoculture like Detroit was, and the metropolitan area is healthier than Detroit's. Still, I worry.

Gonna Huey, Dewey, Louie all over the room

2009-06-14T13:52:04Z

If you haven't seen it yet:

It doesn't quite work as political discourse. Robertson was criticizing a hate crimes bill, not gay marriage. Still, the song's irresistable, isn't it?

Non-A, Non-B

2009-06-02T06:34:20Z

I've heard it said a couple of times (it came up in a panel discussion at Readercon last year, for example) that in editing your prose, it's a sign that you've reached the point of diminishing returns and should stop if you find yourself changing something (a word, a line, a scene) from A to B, and then changing it back again.

I'm currently editing/revising/flensing a story I'd put away for a year, getting it ready to send out, and I find myself doing this quite a bit. It occurs to me that it may not be a sign to stop editing, but rather a sign that both A and B should be discarded. If one is significantly better than the other, then that one should sing, and the writer should have no compulsion to change it. If the writer isn't satisfied with either alternative, maybe that's because both are bad.

Might both be equally good instead? I don't think this is usually the case. Because then the writer would be happy with either, and wouldn't have the compulsion to switch back and forth.

Thoughts?

slithytove @ 2009-05-31T05:52:00

2009-05-31T10:13:31Z

I complained a few days ago that the movie Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus lacked zombies.

Dead Snow delivers: not only zombies, but Nazi zombies!

Sadly, I see no evidence of pirates, monkeys, ninjas, spacemen, or robots.

slithytove @ 2009-05-30T08:23:00

2009-05-30T12:27:41Z

Congrats to Clarion 2004 alum kimnik, whose novel Turnskin was just voted winner of this year's Lambda for best LGBT Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror! Go, Nikki!

slithytove @ 2009-05-25T12:33:00

2009-05-25T16:35:15Z

From my spam:

"Inflatayble sex dolls to fight Mexican machismo"

It's only another V1codiin advertisement. But, damn. I'd watch that.

slithytove @ 2009-05-17T06:20:00

2009-05-17T10:25:31Z

Gerald Wilde (1905-1986) was an eccentric British expressionist painter, a friend of Henry Moore and Alfred Lord Douglas. Most of his life was spent in public obscurity so deep that even his neighbors didn't recognize him. When a stranger died outside his house in 1970, neighbors told the police it was Wilde, and premature obits appeared in the newspapers. Even Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on Wilde. Gallery owners had a hard time dealing with him, on account of his habit of giving away his paintings to friends. He appears to have been a schizophrenic. He lived on public welfare, and spent most of his money on alcohol. He was a devotee of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff was a Pontic Greek-Armenian mystic, teacher, and writer of the early 20th century. Time Magazine reported that Gurdjieff came across as "a remarkable blend of P.T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx and everybody's grandfather." He tried to synthesize Eastern esoteric and mystical thought with European ideas, into a philosophy which has been called the "Fourth Way." He attributed the origins of his ideas to conversations he had on travels in his youth, during which he claimed to have spoken to members of a secret group of advanced spiritual masters, the Sarmoung Brotherhood.

The Sarmoung Brotherhood is claimed to have originated in Babylon, around 2500 B.C. They are said to have been associated with Zoroaster, and to transmit the esoteric knowledge of 'pre-sand' Egypt. It is alleged that Sarmoung agents, the Khwajagan Masters of Wisdom, secretly control the Northern Sufi. The Sarmoungs are reported to have monasteries in the Hindu Kush and in Tibet.

Sometimes the world seems just chock-a-block with secret societies and hidden orders of wise men. Surely they all must meet and compare notes, just so they don't all step on each other's plans for world domination. I imagine a bar, in Singapore, or New York, Marseilles, or Cairo. The Sarmoung have a table, as do the Great White Brotherhood, the Secret Chiefs, the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, the Nine Unknown Men, and the Skull and Bones, the last represented by John Kerry and George W. Bush. Kerry is drinking white wine. Bush is drinking O'Douls.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

2009-05-17T04:28:47Z

Unaccountably, this movie seems to lack zombies.

The marshmallow diaries

2009-05-15T02:48:47Z

Dept. of Jam Tomorrow

Don't eat that marshmallow!

[O]ccasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters...about their friends from nursery school. "It was really just idle dinnertime conversation," he says. "I’d ask them, 'How's Jane? How's Eric? How are they doing in school?' " Mischel began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. He asked his daughters to assess their friends academically on a scale of zero to five. Comparing these ratings with the original data set, he saw a correlation. "That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously," he says.

It's been noted that there is a pretty close correlation between IQ and success in life, up to about an IQ of 140. But above that that level, the correlation breaks down.

Why? I've always assumed that above some level of intelligence, 'other stuff' becomes more important, stuff that isn't measured (yet) in IQ testing. Perhaps what we vaguely refer to as 'character'.

Maybe the marshmallow experiments are beginning to help us understand what character is.

Well, that's enough LJ posting, I've got to get back to writing fiction. But first, a few more rounds of The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.

I'm here to chew bubblegum and file Chapter 11

2009-05-07T01:26:49Z

Pigs, having failed to fly repeatedly since 1997, give up and go home. Millions mourn.

slithytove @ 2009-05-01T11:11:00

2009-05-01T15:40:44Z

I see the Swine Flu numbers for the US have risen to 109. Still only one confirmed death, and that was in an infant who had just come from Mexico. The BBC's TerrorGraph® now shows that the number of confirmed cases in Mexico is now only thought to be 300, and the number of deaths 12.

H1N1 is going away? Already? I'd like to think, but probably not. Probably what's happening is that cases that were presumed to be swine flu have been proven not to be after actual laboratory testing. How big this thing is going to get remains to be seen.

Locally, there are now four 'probable' cases in the Philly area. Ugh. These are the first for us.

If you're interested in what's going to happen if you go to your doc or the hospital with symptoms, these are the guidelines my department promulgated a couple of days ago:

If you have a patient you suspect of having the flu,
send a flu swab and put a mask on the patient.

If the flu is positive for Influenza A, obtain a second
nasopharyngeal sample and place in viral medium and put on
ice for transport to the lab. Inform the lab the sample is
to be sent for further analysis.

If you feel the patient meets admission criteria (ie also
with pneumonia, hypotension, etc.) then admit. Otherwise,
discharge and inform patient to stay home for 7 days. All
patients should be treated with Tamiflu or Relenza. Home
contacts should receive prophylaxis.

CDC is now recommending prophylaxis for only for household contacts who are at unusual risk, e.g., the very old, the very young, the pregnant, and Other.

Meanwhile, Patient Zero has been identified from an incriminating photograph.

Also, it takes a public health disaster to really know who your friends are.

That day we played no further.

2009-05-01T10:51:46Z

I see that EA will be releasing a game based on the Inferno.

Maybe this will convince me to buy a PS3.

The MeFi thread is amusing. euphorb says, "I'm picturing epic boss battles against the Leopard of Malice and the She-Wolf of Incontinence."

Screenshots are nicely creepy.

Yeah, I know, fighting the minions of Hell with a magic scythe isn't what Dante had in mind. But Buffy wasn't exactly what Bram Stoker had in mind, and LotR wasn't what the writers of the Edda had in mind, and those didn't turn out so badly, so you never know.

If the game is successful, I certainly hope EA will follow it up with Purgatorio, and Paradisio. The final boss ought to be tough.

Oink.

2009-04-27T10:57:52Z

Ugh. Okay, Swine Flu.

I don't know how bad it's going to be. Yeah, this isn't 1918. We have ventilators, and anti-viral drugs, and intensive care of a sort they didn't, and faster communication between nations. But we also have rapid world-wide travel, which 1918 didn't. Mexico's problem is New York's problem and California's problem within days.

I've also been hearing stuff on the news about how bird flu was over-hyped and SARS was over-hyped, so swine flu is probably also being over-hyped, and we don't really need to worry. This idiot, for example. I just heard the same thing from the CNBC hosts.

That's dangerous, ignorant bullshit. Yes, bird flu was over-hyped. It never showed any disposition to spread to humans unless you raised chickens in your living room. I've never worried much about bird flu.

But SARS was not over-hyped. We came horrifyingly close to a world-wide catastrophe during the SARS episode. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis of infectious disease, and it seems that hardly anyone realizes it. SARS was essentially a mutated version of one of the common cold viruses. It spread like colds spread, and in the winter, in the Northern Hemisphere, every other person gets a cold. It had a mortality rate of 10-20%, which is getting close to Black Death levels. If SARS had gotten loose, a billion people would have died, and human civilization itself would have stumbled.

SARS didn't get loose, because of smart, fast, ruthless doctors and public health officials in Hong Kong, Vietnam, elsewhere in SE Asia, and Toronto, and wherever a case cropped up. Draconian quarantines and travel restrictions were established. Man, did I hear people whine about that. Those whiners are alive today because public health officials ignored them and did what was necessary. It all worked. I was surprised, but greatly relieved.

How bad H1N1 Swine Flu is going to be? Even at its worst, not as bad as SARS. For one thing, the two standard antivirals against influenza seem to work against it. (Until worldwide stocks run out, that is.) Plus, the reported mortality rate from Mexico isn't anything close to the SARS mortality rate. So even at worst, it's doubtful Swine Flu will kill a billion people. Maybe only a couple of million. Or tens of millions.

Or maybe only a few hundred, IF WE TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU BRAINLESS PUNDITS. Grrrrrr.

slithytove @ 2009-04-23T09:34:00

2009-04-23T13:36:22Z

Dept. of Hockey Sticks

From this week's Barron's:

The Lost World

2009-04-16T16:51:02Z

A gallery of 1970s-ish pop/rock photos, with a pinch of Jackie O. Photographer: Brad Elterman. Some NSFW.

Ah, to be young, talented, beautiful, wealthy, and hip.

via MeFi.