questioncurl | Reading

when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

*****************

( Read more... )

kaberett

No, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!

(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)

ruric

Halle-fricking-lujah my out of office is on and I am (technically) on leave until 5 January.

I say technically because I have to nip into the office stupidly early tomorrow to pick up some keys and make some posters, and possibly work a couple of hours one day over the weekend. I will also be very swiftly checking email at least once a day most of next week. Then I plan to have some serious offline time as far as work is concerned between 29 December and 5 January.

They're introducing a new "email over 5 years old gets trashed" rule in January so I have some 20,000 emails to check and delete before then (my predecessors did not believing in archiving important stuff) so I'll be scanning/deleting over the break.

And I have my own epic cleaning, clearing, sorting and decluttering project to deal with over the 17 glorious days that I have to get my shit together. I have a master plan and so many lists with a multiplicity of bullet points! And the icing on the cake the ex is at the cottage from 20 December to 6 January so I can make free use of his washing machine.

My hope is to start the first working week of 2026 from a tidy flat with no more chairdrobes or piles of washing to be done or put away.

I'm sure my plans are overly ambitious but I'm looking forward to seeing what I can actually get done before 5 January rocks around.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/12/18/where-her-music-blooms/

oursin

Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.

The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.

Well, we think there is some primeval fertility mojo all ready to support the threatened species, no?

The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)

And in related matters of burgeoning nature and the work of the National Trust, More than 300 seal pups have been born at a colony just a month into the breeding season:

Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals.
The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go.
Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.

***

And another form of conservation: The Digital Future of Stained Glass: Data Standards and Interoperability – Why Recording Stained Glass is Important. (What this sounds like to me is a whole lot of people not talking to one another while doing very similar work and only now getting together....):

Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.

Screaming in archivist been there and done that.

oursin

Hasppy birthday,

nomeancity!

shadowkat

Found on Face Book of all places:

Apparently, I'm neurodivergent - since I have a grab bag of a lot of these:

For those who can't see it? It breaks down visual and audio coordination issues into categories:

1. Dyscalculia - Difficulty with visual/spatial coordination, counting, doing numbers in sequence or sequencing (example? Unable to count by sevens), difficulty working word problems...

2. Dyslexia - difficulty reading aloud, mis-pronouncing words (often substituting words or finding another word), difficulty reading aloud, problems retrieving words, difficulty with writing or spelling, slow and labor intensive reading

3. Dysgraphia - symptoms include cramped/sore hand, poor spatial planning of sentences and margins, frequent erasing, inconsistent letter and word spacing, poor spelling and missing words and letters

4. Dyspraxia
Symptoms include: difference in speech, perception problems, poor hand-eye coordination, poor balance and posture, clumsiness, fatigue.

Better late than never, I guess? But I wish this information was more accessible and prevalent in the 20th Century and early 00s? Along with the advocacy.

kaberett

I realised earlier today that I never actually got around to uploading photos from last year's Glow Wild. Since we'll be going to this year's on Friday, now seems like a good time to remedy that...

lanterns: a group of three badgers

( +6 )

sovay

Last night on a snow-salted suburban road I saw a deer bound suddenly through the splash of the headlights, followed a moment later by what must have been a pair of coyotes because it's been centuries since there were wolves in this part of the world. It was so folkloric, I expected to see riders the next moment, or the moon. After days of sleepless free-fall and headache it hurt to breathe through, I spent much of this afternoon unconscious, which was terrible for my exposure to daylight but produced vivid dreams only occasionally suggesting a surrealist facsimile of same, such as the second-story view onto a green quadrangle where a policeman was bleeding out milk. Hestia is trying to climb through my arms as I type in her best doctorly fashion. In nearly half a lifetime of chronic illness, I don't think I have ever felt this daily-basis bad.

Current Music: Spoon, "Chateau Blues"

conuly

As we all know - or anyway, as most of us know - words are capitalized like names if they're used like names and titles.

This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"

But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.

It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.

The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.

I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.

Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.

oursin

What I read

Finished Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot - teensy pedantic note that a girl who was a teenage WW2 evacuee was not going to have been called Doris after Doris Day.

I read a couple more nostalgic (I literally read these when I was still at school) Elswyth Thanes (also the ebooks are v cheap), This Was Tomorrow (1951) and Homing (1957), and apart from a couple of fortunately brief scenes in Williamsburg (I get the impression is being done up as Heritage Site with Rockefeller dough?) set in England/Europe just before and at beginning of WW2. Apart from the 2 idealistic Oxford Groupers (it's not actually named but it sounds very like) who want to shed love and light on the Nazis, nobody is for appeasement. So unlike e.g. Lanny Budd's first wife and her second (Brit aristo) husband.... There is also weird reincarnation theme going on.

Latest Literary Review.

Some while ago I was looking for my copy of The Goblin Emperor and it was not in any of the places I thought it plausibly might be and then I spotted it while dusting the bookshelves in a non-intuitive spot and have been re-reading that. Have also read the online short story Min Zemerin's Plan (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1.5) (2022), which I hadn't come across before, and re-read The Orb of Cairado (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1.1) (2025). Does anyone know how I can get access to Lora Selezh (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #0.5), which was apparently a freebie for preorders of the Tor edition of Witness for the Dead???

On the go

Have started Dickon Edwards, Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1 (1997-2007) (2025) - possibly a dipper-inner rather than a read straight through, though sometimes diaries that one thinks this about grab one like the Ancient Mariner, I'm looking at you Mr Isherwood.

Up Next

As may seem predictable, I am on to a re-read of Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy.

I should probably also be turning my attention to Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, for the Pilgrimage online book group discussion in early Jan.

oursin

I will concede that this piece on sperm donation is not about dodgy docs or freelance 'donors' but it still all sounds fairly spooky: Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children? Because while, okay, some criteria seem reasonable:

Rules vary across the world, but in the UK you also have to be relatively young - aged 18-45; be free of infections like HIV and gonorrhoea, and not be a carrier of mutations that can cause genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and sickle cell disease.

Errrr: don't I recollect seeing somewhere that the gene that conveys sickle cell, is actually protective against ?malaria so it was/is actually beneficial in certain environments - and it was like haemophilia that you had to get it from both sides for the dangers to show up?

From this small pool of donors, some men's sperm is just more popular than others.
Donors are not chosen at random. It's a similar process to the savage reality of dating apps, when some men get way more matches than others.... "You know if they're called Sven and they've got blonde hair, and they're 6 ft 4 (1.93m) and they're an athlete, and they play the fiddle and speak seven languages - you know that's far more attractive than a donor that looks like me," says male fertility expert Prof Allan Pacey, pictured, who used to run a sperm bank in Sheffield.

And how much of that is down to environment, hmmmmm? Or at least, non-genetic factors.

I am over here muttering 'Morlock Power!'

On men spreading it about, historically speaking: the challenges of illegitimacy when exploring genealogy and how to find that shadowy figure who is not on the birth certificate/in the baptismal register. (With luck he had a bastard sworn upon him when that was a thing, otherwise it's a lot more work and a lot of surmising.)

Let's blame the woman, let's let's let's, she probably did something wrong: Marked: Birthmarks and Historical Myths of Maternal Responsibility - which just mutatates and mutates, no?

A conversation with historian Dagmar Herzog on Fascism’s Body Politics and disability under fascism in her new book, The New Fascist Body

And I think relating to all these sorts of issues: Reproductive norms: stigma and disruptions in family-building:

Our expectations of conception, reproduction, and family-building are imbued with reproductive norms. In our younger years, we may imagine and expect that we will have a certain number of children at specific ages or points in the life-course, and in particular circumstances. We may think that conception will be straightforward, pregnancy will pass without complications, and our children will be healthy and without disabilities or impairments. We may have hazy, dreamy ideas of what our children will be like and perhaps more defined ideas of what we will be like as parents.

sovay

On this particularly bright and sleepless morning which began with a formal call from the career center, events otherwise known as

radiantfracture and Existential Comics having conspired to bring the Tractactus to the forefront of my mind, I have decided that the most cursed translation of Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen is "I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."

Current Music: Tom Lehrer, "Alma"

shadowkat

On the subway this morning - it was hard to find a seat - not because seats weren't available - but that they were occupied by the homeless, who are mentally unstable and can be violent. They also smell. And may carry illness. So everyone attempts to give them a wide berth.

I did sit near one man, who was putting on a ratty old pair of old boots. ( Read more... )

On the way home, after disembarking from the subway at Church Avenue, and climbing the steps to exit near Denny's Pub, I stumbled upon a street filled with pigeons. Their heads tucked under their wings, all sleeping on the sidewalk beneath the overhang. There must have been at least thirty or forty of them sitting there.

**
Whoa. A lot of folks died this weekend, and rather tragically. The news was...depressing this morning, more so than usual? On social media and on ABC.

( What the actor who played Luke Spencer, Rob Reiner and his wife, Brown University students, and Bondi Beach celebrants...all have in common..they died this weekend. )
Damn. No wonder I'm depressed.

***

I don't know if anyone else feels this way? But sometimes, I feel as if I have no control over anything? My art, my writing, my life.

I bought two gifts for my mother, slippers and the Paul Newman memoir - neither have been delivered and both are stuck in transit. I looked up the Paul Newman gift - it tells me that weather delays are responsible. I looked up the slippers - it's stuck with FedEX in Georgia. So frustrated, and worried that Momma wouldn't have anything under her tree - I bought her a Suduko Calendar and a 2026 book of Sudoku puzzles.

I also spent a portion of the day - fighting to get Crazy Org to provide payment for two Union perks owed to me. I succeeded with one (which was admittedly the more important and greater of the two), and am making some headway on the other (which granted is just $100 (post taxes - $50), but that $100 could pay for this month's PT).

Iced my knee. Did exercises. Tried not to overdo.

And at home, worked on a drawing of a homeless man that I saw on the subway, and surrounded him with pigeons.

Me: I feel I've accomplished little in my life. I'm second guessing all of it.
Mother: You've survived

And I suppose that's something? There but for the grace of God go I?

I'm grateful for what I have, every single day, my City reminds me of that. It thrusts those who have far less under my nostrils.

Charisma Carpenter (played Cordy on Buffy and Angel) stated recently on a podcast that she loved New York City, because no matter how down or depressed you felt, you could always see somebody who was worse off - not only that but you could watch them find a way to keep on trucking. Thinking to yourself, if they can do that...then well, so can I.

conuly

Today's temperatures: Started below 20, "feels like" in the single digits. But not to worry, within a week we should be in the 50s!

And they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.

And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.

oursin

[F]irst wild beaver spotted in Norfolk in 500 years and Wild beavers may have spread further than we realise:

It is not clear whether the Pensthorpe beaver, whose sex and age is unknown, was illegally released into the reserve by activists using a practice known as beaver bombing. It is possible it wandered of its own accord into the Wensum – an aquifer-fed chalk river whose name is derived from the Old English adjective for “wandering”.
“It could be a naturally dispersing wild beaver,” said Emily Bowen, a spokesperson for the Beaver Trust, a charity that aims to restore beavers to regenerate landscapes. She said that there were established wild populations in eight areas in England at the moment.
Wild beavers have also been spotted in Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hereford, she said. Norfolk has some captive beavers but none have been reported missing.

Maybe it's a sinister beaver underground conspiracy....

And if we are talking aquatic mammals, see also otters: otters’ revival in Britain. Still rare only 20 years ago, the charismatic animals are in almost every UK river and a conservation success story.

White storks to be introduced to, believe it or not, Dagenham.

A rather different story: voyaging owls: Two burrowing owls stowed away on a cruise ship out of Miami, and are now living the high life at a Spanish resort before returning to the US next month. We think they may have been in flight from being a threatened species in Florida....

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/12/15/cest-nous-les-dieux-ni-yw-y-duwiau/

oursin

Happy birthday,

dancing_moon and

sdn!

conuly

and I had to take a car, which I can not afford. At least the corner store hadn’t shut down and the cashier let me wait inside. Either he’s very friendly and chatty or he’s flirting with me, but the important thing is I still have all my toes.

sovay

For the first night of Hanukkah, my mother accompanied me to None Shall Escape (1944) at the Harvard Film Archive. It snowed into the late afternoon, silver-dusting the unsanded streets. The wind chill feels like zero Fahrenheit.

spatch and I lit the first night's candle for strength.

Current Music: Bruce Adler, "Hu-Tsa-Tsa"

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questioncurl

June 2017

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Page Summary

conuly - Gosh, don't you just hate it
kaberett - fuzzy matching: still a mistake
ruric - Whoopedy Doo - Out Of Office is On - Let the CLEANING begin
chickenfeet - Songs by Saariaho and Livingston
oursin - This could hardly be more urgently phallic, hmmmmm???
oursin - (no subject)
shadowkat - Neurodivergent Rights...
kaberett - Glow Wild 2024
sovay - If it's a moment in time, how come it feels so long?
conuly - Anybody have any explanatory links?
oursin - Wednesday says Happy 319th Birthday, Emilie du Chatelet!
oursin - Maybe seeing some connections?
sovay - It's time to change partners again
shadowkat - Monday is just getting by and that may be enough considering
conuly - Watched the weather report today.
oursin - Okay, nobody has entered the beaver lodges to check for sewing machines - yet
chickenfeet - A new trilingualopera
oursin - (no subject)
conuly - Two buses canceled in a row
sovay - אמתע מעשׂה, אמתע מעשׂה

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