[links] Link salad says Happy Father’s Day
Sidewise Award Nominees — Yours truly is up for a Sidewise award for my novel Pinion.
Movie neon — Some awesome signs. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1)
willyumtx.)
Why Do Firefighters Take Such Risky Jobs? — Fascinating article. To misquote Willie Sutton, “Because that’s where the money is.”
The Gravity of Life — Whose well-being is threatened by our changing relationship with the myriad organisms that shaped the evolution of our species?
The Regolith of Asteroid Eros — A nifty close up from NASA’s APOD.
Lop Nur, Xinjiang, China — A striking image of salt evaporation ponds in the desert of Lop Nur, China.
Breakthrough Batteries? — Considering that Alessandro Volta would recognize most modern batteries, this kind of scientific and technological progress is critical.
The supernatural does not exist — Bad Astronomer Phil Plaint on the supernatural and testability. As I’ve said a million times, just because you believe it doesn’t mean it’s true.
Don’t know much about history — A conservative complains about ‘politically correct’ history. A conservative complaining about historical distortions is a like a dog complaining about barking.
?otD: What do you remember most about your dad?
6/19/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemotherapy)
Body movement: n/a (chemotherapy), possibly a short suburban walk to come
Hours slept: 8.5 hours (fitful) plus 4.0+ hours of napping
Weight: n/a
Currently (re)reading:
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Tags: Art, Awards, Books, Cool, Culture, Links, Personal, Photos, Pinion, Politics, Science
Posted: 7:55 am Sun June 19 2011 | Comments(0) |
[help|travel] Portland to Seattle and back
Anyone reading this in PDX planning to drive to the Locus Awards next weekend? What with my chemo schedule slip and all, I can probably make it.
I have a tentative ride up Friday afternoon, but no ride back on Sunday. If possible, I’d rather ride up first thing Saturday morning, and I need to come back Sunday morning/midday.
If you’re coming or going with an extra seat in the car, please let me know.
Tags: Conventions, Help, Seattle, Travel
Posted: 4:49 am Sat June 18 2011 | Comments(2) |
[cancer] Chemo session three, day one
Thursday night I took the new drug regimen of Zyprexa plus Lorazepam. This was because while I’d been on Zyprexa for nausea control during session two, the medication succeeded but had the side effects of making me irritable as well as a strange combination of very drowsy and quite sleepless. Apparently the two together are a double whammy on sleep. I slept twenty hours between 9 pm Thursday night and 4 am this morning, and drowsed or dozed much of the time I was awake. Freaky and frustrating, to say the least, but it seems to have gotten me over the worst of the chemo hump, including very minimal nausea.
Frankly, I feel better this morning while on the pump than I maybe ever had. My mental acuity and fine motor control are off, judging by the high rate of typos while blogging this morning, but that’s part of chemo.
One of the low points yesterday was a borderline crankygram from someone who really should have known better. Hey, people, while I’m on chemo, really, is not the time to initiate or resume discussions your issues with me. For that matter, neither is it time to initiate or resume discussions of good stuff with me. I am not thinking straight.
Spending the weekend at my parents’ house as none of my rota of primary caregivers was available for the last minute reschedule necessitated by the bump in my chemo schedule. I’ll probably be back at Nuevo Ranch Lake on Sunday morning. There are recreational activities planned today that involve my head. Photos should be forthcoming. Meanwhile, I continue fuzzy and muzzy.
Be well.
Tags: Cancer, health, Personal
Posted: 4:46 am Sat June 18 2011 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Saturday moment of zen
Your Saturday moment of zen.
Lichen, Moses Coulee, WA. © 2007, 2011, 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.
Tags: flowers, Photos, zen
Posted: 4:19 am Sat June 18 2011 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad is back on the chemo pump
Aerotropolis: An Interview With Greg Lindsay — A fascinating bit of futurism. (Snurched from Tobias Buckell.)
English V3.31 &mdash Some funny language neepery.
American Concept Cars Showcase, Part 1 — From our friends at Dark Roasted Blend of course.
Lightning Eclipse from the Planet of the Goats — Another awesome APOD image, this one with a hilarious cutline.
Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade — Bad Astronomy rebuts.
Herman Cain on Why ‘The Black Guy Is Winning’: Jeffrey Goldberg — Look, he was raised in Kenya, his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan, and when he was going to school he got a lot of fellowships, scholarships, he stayed in the academic environment for a long time. He spent most of his career as an intellectual. While Obama was neither born nor raised in Kenya, such blatant counterfactuals (we used to call them “lies” until 35% of the population decided that anything they believed must be true) makes a great line for conservatives looking to legitimize their Obama hate. But Cain’s clear-cut implication that going to school and becoming an academic or an intellectual is a bad thing… that’s one of those lines of conservative thought that that I utterly fail to comprehend. On the other hand, as educated liberal-progressive, I’ve never found reason to be proud of my areas of ignorance. Listening to people like Bachmann, Cain and Palin, it’s easy to that think ignorance is something all too many conservatives are very proud of.
?otD: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
6/18/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemotherapy)
Body movement: n/a (chemotherapy), possibly a short suburban walk to come
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (solid) plus 3.5+ hours of napping
Weight: n/a
Currently (re)reading:
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Tags: cars, Cool, Culture, Language, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, race, Science
Posted: 4:16 am Sat June 18 2011 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Friday moment of zen
Your Friday moment of zen.
Columnar basalt, Moses Coulee, WA. © 2007, 2011, 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.
Tags: Photos, zen
Posted: 6:44 am Fri June 17 2011 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad is muzzy
A Fast Life and Success That Starts in the Pouch — The life and times of North America’s only marsupial. (Via Dad.)
POOP BURGER: Japanese Researcher Creates Artificial Meat From Human Feces — Mmmm. (Thanks to garyomaha.)
Rings — This video is just freaky. (Via willyumtx.)
Secrets From Apple’s Genius Bar: Full Loyalty, No Negativity
After an Apocalypse, What’s Left of Digital Stores of Knowledge?
The Golden Fleece redivivus — Language Log on Senator Coburn and the NSF.
The conservative media’s pay-for-play deals — But it’s fair and balanced!
After GOP debate, feeling nostalgic for George W. Bush
When Your Base Is Nuts — In today’s Republican Party, the truth shall set you down, and out.
Our Abortion Was Different: When the Anti-Choice Choose — Rick Santorum is the face of the profound hypocrisy and inhumaneness of the forced pregnancy movement. Something much like this happened in my life years ago, and all the happy Christianist baby-savers out there hadmade it difficult for my wife to find a hospital that would perform a DNC to remove our nonviable fetus from her body when it would not spontaneously miscarry. Because it’s an abortion procedure, and all abortions are evil. So to all you right-to-lifers who are so certain you have the moral answers, I offer a big hearty “fuck you”, and refer you to candidate Santorum and his wife, who oppose all abortions except their own. The real world isn’t simple as your cartoon theology tells you.
?otD: Muzzy, was he?
6/17/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (
Kalimpura revisions)
Body movement: 30-minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.5 hours (solid)
Weight: 234.2
Currently (re)reading:
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Tags: Food, gender, Japan, Links, media, nature, Personal, Politics, Science, Tech, Videos
Posted: 6:43 am Fri June 17 2011 | Comments(2) |
[personal|cancer] Updatery
First of all, I feel pretty good, physically. (This is a relative statement, of course.) Skipping chemo for an extra week will do that to you. However, the consequences of that skip are already starting to cascade. If I pass my blood test today, I’ll have chemo tomorrow and through the weekend, and the bulk of the scheduling problems will be recoverable. If I flunk my blood test today, then all hell breaks loose in my schedule. This is a source of irritation to me, though I have absolutely no control over the issues governing the problem, therefore the irritation is decidedly a dead end. On the plus side, if I do make chemo this weekend, there’s a decent chance I’ll make the Locus Awards next weekend, assuming I can find a ride to/from Portland.
Mother of the Child, the_child and I spent several hours yesterday afternoon doing some Important Stuff regarding her education etc. That was time very well spent, but given my spoon management issues, I got no writing done. Which in turn is another mild irritant, regardless of the rightness of my cause in skipping writing time.
Workie bits are proceeding nicely at the Day Jobbe, my house is clean(ish), the grandfather clock chimes the hours and the lava lamp in my bedroom provides a pleasant glow. Really, life is okay.
Tags: Cancer, Child, Conventions, health, Personal, Seattle, work
Posted: 4:56 am Thu June 16 2011 | Comments(2) |
[photos] Your Thursday moment of zen
Your Thursday moment of zen.
danjite and columnar basalt, Moses Coulee, WA. © 2007, 2011, 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.
Tags: friends, Photos, zen
Posted: 4:48 am Thu June 16 2011 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad wonders if it should have been born a Cancer instead of a Gemini
Don’t forget to enter the new Endurance caption contest: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — I’ll probably be closing it this evening and constructing the voting poll.
A reader reacts to Mainspring — Much with the liking.
METAtropolis reviewed in Romanian — Not so much with the liking of my novella, “In the Forests of the Night”.
Fantasy Literature reviews Green — Not so much with the liking here either, I am afraid.
Scientists predict rare ‘hibernation’ of sunspots — (Thanks to lillypond.)
How to Have Fun Like Monkeys, Whales and Foxes — I’ve been on dates like that.
How to Switch Off Friction In Nanomachines — A new technique could reduce friction with the mere flick of a switch, say physicists. I’ve been on dates like that. Also, I have to ask, what is a “one dimensional surface”?
Deep sewer diving under New York — Wow… (Thanks to danjite.)
Are All Gay Girls Secretly Men? — Julia Rios blogs at The Outer Alliance on this difficult and disturbing story of appropriation.
Tea Party Summer Camp: The Experience of a Lifetime — Freaky. (Thanks to shsilver.)
Five myths about the American flag — Ah, reality. If this were a Wikipedia article, Palinites would be editing it right now to remove those biased facts in favor of conservative “truths”.
Why Do Republicans Hate Clean Water? — The EPA does a lot of really good things for every American, regardless of political affiliation. And free market corporate self-regulation didn’t exactly keep our rivers and air clean. In fact, forming the EPA was one of Richard Nixon’s better moves.
The New Religion of Global Warming — Conservative ideological resistance to reality is observably hardening. As I’ve said before, no one comes to global warming denial on the merits of the data. They start there for ideological reasons, then look for data to support their beliefs. It’s a lot like Christian apologia.
The G.O.P. Debate — Eventually, the winner of the Republican nomination will move away from the Tea Party’s anger to try to appeal to a broader electorate that has higher priorities than interfering with laws on same-sex marriage and upending Congress’s decision to welcome openly gay and lesbian soldiers. I know! Let’s put the GOP back in power to fix the economy they ruined in the last decade!
?otD: What do you get if you multiply your blood type by your zodiacal sign?
6/16/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (Dad time instead)
Body movement: 30-minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (solid)
Weight: 234.4
Currently (re)reading:
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Tags: Books, Contests, Endurance, gay, gender, Green, Links, Mainspring, Metatropolis, Personal, Politics, race, reviews, Science, stories, Tech, weird
Posted: 4:48 am Thu June 16 2011 | Comments(0) |
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