Man, I miss country fairs! We used to go to the Bridgewater Fair every year (proceeds go to the Bridgewater, CT, Volunteer Fire Department). My mother won a few prizes for her needlework, though alas, we mostly stopped going before I had done anything I was proud enough of to enter. (something I designed myself as opposed to working up from a kit or instructions)
I can happily sit and watch lumberjacking or ox pulls or sheep shearing or 4-H livestock judging. For hours.
I know, I'm weird for a city person.
Last week we went on vacation to a dude ranch in upstate New York. Every day we played racketball and rode horses. Some days we swam, some days we did archery (which apparently is one of those skills that you don't lose even if you don't do it for decades, which made me quite proud of myself). There was fishing and pedal-boating (and Lazer Tag) and lots of food and horses and more horses and boy was I happy.
There's a county fair in Queens in the early fall but it's kind of lame. No rides, no midway, no "win a cake" booth . . . and the handicrafts, the last time we went, were nearly all from kits.
It made me grouchy, so we haven't been back.
A landmark indeed. A giant upon the earth.
And all those other things one says about someone who changes the way you look at part of reality.
Not to mention being a nice person and generous with newbies.
We met a few times and talked on the phone once or twice a year.
My condolences to all.
DavidS @151 asks: Why don't publishers (or publicly spirited third parties) make Word templates that do this for you?
Snarky answer: Because many people already don't read readily available submissions guidelines so we'd just be providing one more thing for them to ignore.
@112: You're correct, I wasn't disagreeing, simply informing.
Writers are an idiosyncratic bunch and each one has his or her preferred method of work. Some type. Some keyboard. Some write in longhand first and then transcribe, or have the work transcribed by someone else. Some dictate (and then transcribe or have the work transcribed by someone else).
No one method works for all, nor should it.
And some people use different methods depending on what they are writing. My daughter writes poetry in longhand but fiction on the computer.
Apologies for the double post. I've no idea why it did that--I only hit post once.
@94: The Tor slushpile receives every form of words on paper you can think of. Handwritten, typed, fanfold printed, standard printout, overfancy printout, bound stuff, self-published stuff, etc.
The older a writer, the more likely the work is typewritten rather than printer-printed. (Or why my mother still has a working IBM Selectric that she uses for all written communication--which she then photocopies for her files--despite having a 2-yo desktop computer next to the typewriter.)
Handwritten work is sent by older as well as younger writers.
Both typewritten and handwritten work are encountered at pretty much every slush session. I'd guess that they are maybe 1-2% of all physical submissions. As far as I can tell, this percentage has remained constant for at least a decade, though it was higher when I first started in publishing, 30 years ago.
Also note: there are working writers who use typewriters because that is what they are comfortable with. The late Walter Wager owned a bevy of typewriters so that he would always have at least one working machine. His typewriter repair person made housecalls.
@94: The Tor slushpile receives every form of words on paper you can think of. Handwritten, typed, fanfold printed, standard printout, overfancy printout, bound stuff, self-published stuff, etc.
The older a writer, the more likely the work is typewritten rather than printer-printed. (Or why my mother still has a working IBM Selectric that she uses for all written communication--which she then photocopies for her files--despite having a 2-yo desktop computer next to the typewriter.)
Handwritten work is sent by older as well as younger writers.
Both typewritten and handwritten work are encountered at pretty much every slush session. I'd guess that they are maybe 1-2% of all physical submissions. As far as I can tell, this percentage has remained constant for at least a decade, though it was higher when I first started in publishing, 30 years ago.
Also note: there are working writers who use typewriters because that is what they are comfortable with. The late Walter Wager owned a bevy of typewriters so that he would always have at least one working machine. His typewriter repair person made housecalls.
Clifton, my thoughts will be with you.
On the subject of student writing . . . dd is not brilliant at punctuation (drat it, but they don't actually teach that in NYC anymore), but her _thinking_, especially in certain areas, is pretty darn sharp.
Her literacy teacher (7th grade now) argued with her quite a bit during the Poe unit, claiming that dd "couldn't understand" Poe's themes and that someone must have helped her with her essay on "strange illness in Poe." DD, who had read not just the assigned three stories but everything else she had time for, proceeded to pull additional examples out of the rest of the material and was able to prove her case and get her 4 (top grade). But she came home with steam coming out of her ears.
Sorry, in literacy, the kid knows what she's talking about. And in social studies, they only let her debate in about every third debate, because she tends to mop the floor with her opponent even when arguing the "bad" side (she won the slavery debate, arguing "for"--the teacher put her on that side hoping it would slow her down).
Her writing skills haven't caught up yet, but when they do, she's going to be scary.
Fragano etc.:
An Icelandic professor friend of mine reported just yesterday that in grading papers for her ethics in science class, she found two which were largely copied from web sources. The miscreants were both chemistry majors and were friends; one supposes that they knew of each other's misdeeds.
My friend turned them in immediately, of course. They've already been lectured by their doctoral advisor and next will face departmental disciplinary action. My friend reports that most of the time people who commit such acts are given second chances; given that this was an _ethics_ class and that the department chair is livid, that's not likely to happen this time.
One thing that tipped her off was that these papers were better written than these students' usual work.
Back in college, one of my roommates, from PA, had a lovely sari that she wore for music department receptions (she was a physics major with a minor in music and wanted to be an acoustical engineer, though her physics advisor thought this was, well, inadvisable; it was the mid-70s and I suspect he thought a woman couldn't hack it).
How this young woman who had grown up in rural PA had a) learned about saris and b) gotten her hands on one, I no longer recall. I do remember that she could put it on herself though she preferred to have another set of hands available to hold certain things at certain points; I was often her assistant dresser.
I've worn fancy Indian-tunic-and-pants outfits numerous times. Comfy and beautiful.
Re: tipping
More and more places around here, even small neighborhood restaurants (especially small neighborhood restaurants?) have started putting a line on their menus to the effect that gratuity of a certain percentage will be added to the bill for groups of 6 or more.
Re: check-splitting--
Depends on who I'm with, where we're eating, and what's likely to be ordered. With close friends/coworkers/family, we just split the check ourselves, dividing by the # of folks at the table. Most of us eat in the same price range anyway and if one person has dessert but another has an appetizer, it generally works out that everyone's paying their fair share . . . and if not, things will probably balance out the next time we eat together.
In groups where some member(s) drink alcohol and others don't, we sometimes split the bar tab only among those who drink while the food cost is shared by the entire party. Since I don't drink at all and often have little cash to spare, it can be hard to have to pony up extra bucks to cover other people's alcohol consumption, especially when the bar bill is as much as or more than the food bill.
I'm going through a version of this right now, arranging dd's bat mitzvah. We're not a big drinking crowd, especially at lunchtime. Some people may want a drink, but I don't feel like paying $20 per person extra so a handful of people can have a couple of glasses of wine each.
Sometimes one person eats a lot less than everyone else. Like just an appetizer when everyone else is eating a full meal. In those cases, I usually allow that person to pay for their meal directly (plus tip) and divvy the remaining bill among the remaining guests.
I'm usually the one who does the divvying, and I'm not above pulling out a calculator (well, my cell phone) to make sure that things work out and the waitstaff gets a decent tip. I'm teaching dd to do the same, and she's passing it along to her friends, many of whom have never been taught how to tip even though they are all 12-14 year-olds. Lots of them never seem to eat at real restaurants, just fast-food places.
Thanks for the thing on itch; it goes a long way toward explaining that spot just above and inside my left knee, which, thankfully, doesn't itch all the time or as badly as any of the itches felt by the people in that article. I've long thought it was neural rather than anything external.
The NYTimes review, while also finding weaknesses in the book, is kinder:
"'The Indifferent Stars Above' is an Âideal pairing of talent and material. In 'Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894,' Brown showed himself to be a deft and ambitious storyteller, sifting through the copious and often conflicting details of dozens of survivor and eyewitness accounts to forge a trim, surging minute-by-minute narrative.
"He takes more side trips here with snow than he did with fire. In almost every chapter, he steps away from the events at hand to provide historical or medical context. With a few exceptions, it’s engrossing stuff. Brown delves into the primitive morality of feral tribes and the psychology of extreme trauma. He covers birth control and hygiene on the pioneer trail, the latter surely contributing to the former: 'They smelled not just of sweat but also of urine and excrement and menstrual blood and yeast infections and halitosis and tooth decay.' The science of starvation and of hypothermia is well-traveled terrain, but Brown manages to bring new (to me, anyway) offerings to the table. I knew, for instance, that people throw off their clothes in the final minutes of hypothermia, but hadn’t known there was a name for it ('paradoxical undressing') or why it happens (when the body gives up and stops hoarding blood for the vital organs, blood suddenly rushes back into the extremities and skin).
"Brown isn’t a showy writer, and that’s probably for the best. With tragedy of this scale, an unadorned telling of the events speaks loudest. Consider the phrase 'they loaded their packs with their blankets and what remained of their former companions. . . .' The understatement of simple circumstance delivers the wallop all by itself."
I think I saw some documentary on the Donner Party, or maybe an episode of The American Experience. I don't remember not knowing _about_ the Donner Party, though I know few details. The book sounds fascinating if potentially upsetting (I'm a sensitive soul); the Times review made me want to read it already and this only helps.
@5: While it is true that "hundreds" of students and teachers are reporting flu-like symptoms, there are only 28 confirmed cases so far. Two schools have closed, St. Francis Prep in Queens and PS 177, a school for autistic students.
82 students are sick at PS 177 but swine flu has not been confirmed there. More are sick at St. Francis, and 26 of the 28 confirmed cases are St. Francis students or the families of St. Francis students. One of the PS 177 students is the sibling of a student at St. Francis Prep.
The other confirmed cases are on a separate transmission line, via relatives who were in Mexico recently.
The NYC school system is _huge_--one grade is larger than most places' entire school systems. Hundreds of kids are sick every day. When an intestinal upset went through my daughter's middle school last month, I'm willing to bet than on any individual day, 100 or more of the school's 1,000 students were out sick.
I'm paying attention because children in my daughter's grade (not class) went to Mexico over spring break. So far, no one is sick.
My neighborhood scores an 80 for walkability, which I personally think is low, and the listing of shops and amenities omits a significant number of the places I go regularly, on foot, probably because they don't have internet listings.
Like many New Yorkers, I do not own a car (in fact, I don't know how to drive). A few times a year, when I get tired of carrying groceries home from the Trader Joe's near the office, I get someone to give me a lift to the Trader Joe's in Queens, which is outside walking range. I buy fresh produce at the Union Square Greenmarket and carry that home from Manhattan as well, but otherwise I do all food shopping on foot, towing one or the other of my wagons (I have a small one and a large one). We have three shopping strips no more than 15 minutes from home, and one is literally 2 blocks away.
We pretty much live by shank's mare and public transportation . . . .
I've long been fond of "buying local," even if that sometimes means I pay a little more than I might otherwise. For instance, for years I have patronized a particular shoe store because they still have amazing customer service. They measure your feet, help figure out what shoe will suit your foot type, do minor repairs, etc. The store owner/manager replaced a pair of shoes with no argument when we brought them back a week after purchase because one was cutting into my daughter's foot. They remember our names when we go in.
As anyone knows who has raised children, kids go through a lot of shoes--sometimes their feet grow a size almost overnight--so I've spent thousands of dollars in this store in the last twelve years. Now that my daughter is wearing women's sizes, we shop there less, because as expensive as the children's shoes all (and they are) the women's shoes are even more expensive. So for everyday shoes, now, we're shopping in Skechers and DSW. But every time the kid needs a pair of dress shoes or "good walking shoes," we go back to this shoe store. I'm willing to pay the money to get the service and keep this store--which has been in this location for at least 40 years--in business.
Additionally, I just had to order invitations for my daughter's bat mitzvah. _Everyone_ said, "shop on line, the deals are great." But I ordered invitations through a local party store, where I've shopped for decorations and balloons and papergoods for years. And I'm glad I did, because we've had a bunch of phone calls since I placed the original order, double-checking wording, making sure I had not forgotten to order a specific item, etc. Tomorrow I get to pick up the finished product and I know if there are any problems, the store staff will help me get things sorted out.
In the days when I was a young sword-slinger, a bunch of us did an annual May Day performance in Central Park. We were often joined by at least one Morris side. It was lovely to watch.
Brings tears to the eyes, but is good to see.
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