Your Saturday moment of zen.
Outer walls of the ruined Buddhist monastery at Kharakhorum, Genghis Khan’s capital. © 1992, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 7:15 am Sat June 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
Street-Fighting Mathematics : The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving — I think I want to read this book. Once I can read new stuff again. Soon! (Via Freakonomics.)
There are some things Mankind was not meant to comprehend — World’s best headline? (Via
Wooden funeral cars in Argentina — Oh, wow…
Vintage Construction Toys — From Dark Roasted Blend of course. Ah, the incidental double entendres.
Bionic feet for amputee cat — The future arrived when we weren’t watching. (Thanks to
Nanotubes Give Batteries a Jolt — Lithium-ion batteries with nanotube electrodes could go longer between charges. One of the things I have always found fascinating about batteries is that, at least until rather recently, how little fundamental technology has changed in the past century. Easily stored, high capacity transportable power with lengthy shelf and service life and minimal heat transfer would revolutionize global society as much as the microchip.
Numerous Nearby Brown Dwarfs? — More fun with brown dwarfs. What missing mass? (Which reminds me, I owe Paul Gilster a package.)
Al Gore and the press, ca. 2000 — A little bit of history for those of you obsessed with the liberal media. That meme has never been fact-based, but it’s one of the most successful pieces of Republican propaganda in my lifetime.
ACORN Totally Vindicated of All Wrongdoing — A preliminary probe by the U.S. GAO has found no evidence of mishandling the $40 million in federal money ACORN and affiliates received in recent years. Another win for the GOP: deliberately fraudulent conservative hit video sparks political mobbing supported fully by Your Liberal Media to shut down a group working for fair housing and voter registration for the poor. Accusations now proven to be 100% fact-free. Also, this just in: sun rises in east.
?otD: What’s the first thing you remember in this life?
Posted: 7:10 am Sat June 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
Apropos of nothing in particular, I was thinking of the “idiots and assholes” theory of driving while I was on my exercise bike this morning. (Yes, even cancer patients need their exercise.) That’s the idea that whatever speed you’re driving at is the one you think is right; anyone driving slower, and therefore in your way, is an idiot; anyone driving faster, and therefore tailgating you or blowing by you, is an asshole.
Mind you, this is not a theory I consciously subscribe to any more, nor have I for years, but I suspect it lurks in there somewhere. This is very much a part of human nature, sort of like the same guy who will cut you off hard on the street outside the bank will hold the door to let you in when he sees you as a human being and not as an idiot/asshole automobile in his way. This analogy has a lot of implications in Internet debates where anonymity is used as an accountability-free platform for all manner of viciousness, but that’s a topic for another time.
The thing is, if you drive a distinctive car, as I have off and on over the years, and as
Writers are the same way. With the recent releases of Pinion and The Specific Gravity of Grief, I’ve published about a million words of fiction over the past ten years. I haven’t done the math, but I’d guess I’m somewhere between one-and-a-half and two million words of blogging in the same time frame. Every last word of it, with a few very rare exceptions, under my own name. The name you’ll hear in the convention bar or in line at the bank.
Am I an idiot? On occasion. Am I an asshole? Also on occasion, though hopefully as rarely as possible. Certainly if you want to prove either thesis, all you have to do is even lightly touch the corpus of my work, and you could prove literally anything about me from written evidence. Strip off the sarcasm in some of my blog posts, and you could prove in my own words that I am a hardcore neoconservative. Strip off the humanism in some of my fiction, and you could prove in my own words that I a cast iron bastard who believes people deserve exactly what they get in life. Neither could be further from the real, nuanced truth of me, but, hey, there I am. With the tiniest bit of cherry picking and a little bit of interpretive gloss, you could just as easily prove I’m a Christian, a Communist, an activist, a reactionary: pretty much anything you wanted to. My brand is backed by a little bit of everything.
And that’s one of the risks of being a writer, of being a public person. You do have a brand. Your words speak for you. People will interpret those words how they will, with whatever needs they bring to the text in the moment. As I’ve often said, “the story belongs to the reader.” Maybe a more accurate statement is “the words belong to the reader.”
Still, it’s incumbent upon me as a decent human being to be as little of an idiot as possible, and as asshole as rarely as possible. More to the point, it’s incumbent upon me as an author to write good, interesting fiction; and as a blogger to right engaging posts.
This is not a career for the faint of heart. Unless you’re very good at either engaging with people or at ignoring them.
Posted: 5:38 am Fri June 25 2010 | Comments(8) |
This week has been pretty hellish at a physical layer. Unsurprising, since it’s the post-processing of my twelfth chemo session. Fatigue has been horrendous.
I’m not sure I haven’t developed a GI bug this week, though. Either than or Shedding Day has been five days long and counting. This is my most vulnerable point for immunocompromisation, though in fairness, my immune system seems to have overperformed throughout the chemo cycle. My guts have sounded like a brewery these last few days. Sometimes I can literally hear liquid flowing for a while, as if someone had turned on the garden house. Not to mention the rhythm section working the tympani and whatnot down there. Of chemo farts the less said the better, but trust me, bad air has been a regular feature as well. And the output has been very high in liquids and relatively scant in solids. Loose stool is pretty much like breathing for me these days, but firehose stuff isn’t normal, even on chemo. To top it all off, there was blood yesterday, which is a huge red flag (pardon the expression) if it recurs.
All of which amounts to an enormous degree of discomfort, some significant social indignity, and a general sense of physical misery which folds right into the horrendous fatigue.
I said last night to
This week should be the bottom. If I can get the GI in line and stay rested, I figure on being flat next week with some noticeable uptick by the time of JayCon, then increasing improvements. Excepting the peripheral neuropathy, I’ll be fine, if still a bit fatigued, by September. And every day, life will go on.
I can see the light, and by damn, I’m going into it.
Posted: 5:19 am Fri June 25 2010 | Comments(1) |
Your Friday moment of zen.
Windowsill detail of abanonded farmhouse south of Goldendale, WA along US-97. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:05 am Fri June 25 2010 | Comments(0) |
A brief reader review of my story “The Dead Man’s Child” — With an interesting set of remarks at the end.
Marty Halpern with more info on the Fermi paradox-themed anthology, Is Anybody Out There? — Check it out.
Controlled Access Lickometry — Language Log compares me to tech spam. :: laughing :: (Via @LeviMontgomery.)
If Men Could Menstruate — A classic reprint from Gloria Steinem. (Via
The 10 Most Important Things They Didn’t Teach You In School
Targeting mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) for health and diseases — Some serious anti-aging science. (Via
Are Your Friends Making You Fat? — The role of social circles in behavioral adaptations. Some thinking in here that reflects my observation that cancer is a social disease. Gives me a lot to consider about social networks, too. FYI, headline is very misleading, the article is about much more than implied. (Thanks to
‘Party of Parasites’ author took $1M in farm subsidies — Ah, that famed intellectual consistency of the conservative movement. Somebody please explain to me why it’s welfare when somebody else gets the money, but a vital government program when a conservative gets the money?
Military Discipline — Elizabeth Moon on General McChrystal. Very well stated.
Lessons of Petraeus’ Iraq for Petraeus’ Afghanistan — It is frequently asserted that Gen. Petraeus “succeeded” in Iraq via a troop escalation or “surge” of 30,000 extra US troops that he dedicated to counter-insurgency purposes in al-Anbar and Baghdad Provinces. [...] But it would be a huge mistake to see Iraq either as a success story or as stable. See also Daniel Larison’s remarks, which I think I largely agree with.
Scrivener’s Error with interesting squibs on McChrystal (and the military-civilian interface in general) as well as a Supreme Court ruling on the right to privacy of anti-gay bigots to have their petition signatures hidden — Because you know, it’s so dangerous to be straight and homophobic in America, what with all the violent gay mobs out bashing straights, and special legal rights for homosexuals and stuff. How’s a Real American supposed to stand up to “San Francisco values” if they can’t conceal their identity?
?otD: Water of life, or spice beer?
Posted: 4:59 am Fri June 25 2010 | Comments(1) |
Having finished up with both Miles Vorkosigan and Discworld, and not being able to find my copy of Ringworld, I am currently re-reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’ve read it, but the first in at least ten years.
Wow, is it a different book to me now. I may wind up wishing I’d left it alone with my memories. The intense SFnal crunchiness is still there, with all the fun and delight of that, but I keep getting distracted by the unselfconscious sexism (with all due credit, he does have a number of strong female characters, but the casual treatment of female servants, wives, and women-in-the-background is wince-inducing to my contemporary eye) as well as the prose bordering on the clunky, and sometime incursing well into the land of clunk. SF these days tends to place a strict rigor on point-of-view control, but POV in Dune flows like sand down a slipface. Different times, different styles, and nothing is immutable in literature. These things I all know. But the head hopping is distracting me somewhat from the story.
I’ll enjoy it, but (once again) I have to say reading this book as a writer is very different from when I read it as a reader.
Posted: 5:49 am Thu June 24 2010 | Comments(10) |
Yesterday was the roughest Wednesday I’ve had yet during all of chemotherapy. On the week after infusions (ie, this week), that’s usually the day I start feeling a bit like myself. On the week before infusions, it’s usually one of the best days for energy and focus. Yesterday I was so exhausted I couldn’t climb the stairs inside the house without significant effort and a five-minute rest afterward. My lower GI was behaving abominably, even by chemo standards. In fact, it was amazing I could get to sleep last night, given those issues.
Also, the peripheral neuropathy is worse this week. I had to switch to full-fingered gloves last night instead of fingerless. My temperature sensation continues to be very odd. Once I had the full-fingered gloves on, my hands were simultaneously too uncomfortably hot (sweaty, clammy, itchy from the wool) and freezing cold to the point of debilitating (neural signalling errors from the peripheral neuropathy). The rest of my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be deep in blankets or out in the evening air of my bedroom. Like my hands, both at the same time, apparently.
However, sleep I did, almost ten hours.
I just want my hands to feel normal, though.
Posted: 5:43 am Thu June 24 2010 | Comments(0) |
Your Thursday moment of zen.
Abandonded farmhouse south of Goldendale, WA along US-97. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:36 am Thu June 24 2010 | Comments(2) |
Colon cancer resources — A very helpful list if you, a family member or friend is facing this.
A second Laplace resonance — [T]he Galilean satellites of Jupiter constitute the original exoplanetary system. Awesome article. (Via @Exoplanetology.)
A legal defeat for the Institute for Creation Research — So for now, they can’t issue master’s degrees in nonsense? The funny part is the reasoning — nothing to do with the intellectual bankruptcy of Creationism, everything to do with the ICR’s lack of ability to follow a simple process. Which is apparently religious discrimination, according to them. (Via Bad Astronomy.)
For Jeb Bush, Life Defending the Family Name — An odd puff piece in NYT about Jeb Bush. Both Jeb and the reporter seem to have lived through a very different 2001-2009 Bush administration than the country at large did.
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost — In Charts — This jibes which what I’ve always thought of Reagan, and reinforces my lifelong bafflement with his status as a hero to fiscal conservatives. Much of what is said and believed about him is simply not true on the face of the facts. (Via Dispatches From the Culture Wars.)
?otD: Where must the spice flow?
Posted: 5:32 am Thu June 24 2010 | Comments(8) |