[links] Link salad thinks this song is about you

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A mixed but ultimately positive review of Mainspring

How to soar when you’re already in flight… — A.M. Dellamonica asks a really interesting question about how writers talk to one another. My facile answer to her is that aspiring writers outnumber established writers by a ratio of thousands:one, so the audience is distinctly different. But that’s a lousy answer. I need to think on this.

Pot, Meet Kettle — Scrivener’s Error deconstructs agent Rachel Gardner’s recent post on rejection. (As well as covering some other issues in publishing.)

Asterisks Justin’s dad says — A funny piece from Language Log on tabu words and US-UK translations.

Vintage ads: Holeproof Hosiery, 1920s — I love this art.

On the History Channel’s unrealistic plots — Hahahaha. Yeah, as calendula_witch says, who wrote this novel? (Via Easter Island Eclipse — Aww, man. One of the most intense experiences of my life was witnessing the totality of the 1991 eclipse in southwestern Mexico. But Easter Island? From APOD, of course.

Arctic genes kill bacteria — Ooh, cool. Temperatures-sensitive genetic self-termination.

The Coming Birth Control Battle — Health-care reform raised the possibility that birth control could soon be free for most women. But not if conservative activists have their way. Yeah, because birth control wouldn’t bring down abortion rates or anything. No, wait. There’s a reason I refer to the anti-choice movement as “forced pregnancy enthusiasts”. I understand principled opposition to abortion, though I am not in agreement. But where’s the principle in opposing birth control?

?otD: Ever seen a total eclipse of the sun?

7/14/2010
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (4,000 new words)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 5.0 (lousy)
This morning’s weigh-in: 232.2
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

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4 thoughts on “[links] Link salad thinks this song is about you”

  1. JulieB says:
    July 14, 2010 at 6:46 am

    They don’t want to fund birth control, but I betcha they’ll fund Viagra.

    1. Cora says:
      July 14, 2010 at 3:28 pm

      Surely. Because men’s right to have sex when they want to is a basic human right. Women’s right to have sex when they want to is either a luxury or presumptuousness.

      That said, this describes pretty much the situation we have here. Universal health insurance which covers viagra (within limits – forget about having sex more than once a week), pregnancy and birth related costs, infertility treatments and artificial insemination (again within limits, I think you only get two tries) and hormone therapy for menopausal women, but not birth control and abortion. Too many Catholic idiots in positions of power here and the bizarre paranoid belief that we are in danger of dying out and must produce kids at all costs.

      Regarding the Language Log piece, I can vividly imagine enraged people writing to the newspaper complaining that the editors are obviously unable to spell “arsehole” properly because they chose the wrong number of asterisks. UK swearing hang-ups are incomprehensible anyway, even more so than in the US, where any sort of swearing is automatically bad (silly attitude, but at least consistent). But in the UK, you can have a magazine interview discussing relative penis lengths of Doctor Who actors yet asterisking out a fairly mild swearword. Or you have a TV show with the most colourful insults and swearwords ever (my inner linguist was rejoicing), yet the word “Fuck” was never uttered on screen, “shit” was uttered only once or twice and the unmentionable c-word was hinted at in a rhyme but not uttered.

      1. Cora says:
        July 15, 2010 at 6:06 am

        Totally forgot the question of the day: I saw a partial solar eclipse in the early 1990s through my Dad’s welding mask. And I very narrowly missed seeing a total eclipse of the sun in 2000, when a thick cloud layer appeared at just around the time the eclipse was supposed to take place. We did go out, hoping for a lucky break in the clouds, but it just got dark, as if a thunderstorm was about to break loose.

        Still annoyed that I missed the chance of a lifetime (the next total solar eclipse in Northern Europe will be in seventy years or so), though I wrote a poem about it and sold it, so I at least got a consolation prize.

  2. tuppenny says:
    July 14, 2010 at 9:36 am

    My late mother (born 1907) told me that she used to use iodine to draw a ‘seam’ line on the back of her legs in the summer when it was too hot to wear stockings – or her budget wouldn’t run to them. The first time she did this -when in high school, my grandmother got a bit snarky, asking *her* mother in law how she liked her granddaughters stockings. My great-gran replied “very nice-aren’t they the ones you gave her”!

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