One thing to note in your emergency contact planning: make sure whomever you're calling to check in has at least one non-cordless phone on their end. Power was out in my part of south Minneapolis during the event (unrelated reasons--started half an hour before and lasted half an hour after). Since the cordless phones don't have batteries in their base stations, they weren't ringing. Only the standard phones, which draw their power from the phone line, were ringing.
Not that I was anywhere near them, since I didn't know anything was happening until the power came back on and I was reconnected to the world. Still, the principle is sound. Major disruptive events are not unlikely to be accompanied by power outages.
"In the immortal words of Socrates, 'I drank what?'" Yeah, Real Genius definitely. Not that I can quote blocks of dialog wholesale or anything.
I'd also think that the longest running American science fiction series has earned a place on the list. I mean, anytime a single word becomes a badge of fandom...indeed. Sure, SG-1 has its issues (like everything else mentioned here), but ignoring it is silly. Not that we needed more proof that EW is silly on the subject of SF.
Xopher, the section headers and footers from the section after the break are the ones that are kept. Of course, if those are set to "Same as Previous," it will look like something else entirely is happening.
Working for a company that has done quite a bit of customizing templates and other Office features, I have a fair amount of appreciation for what it can do when used well. That being said, it's far more of a tool than most people need or want to use, and I shut most of it off when I just want to write.
I've only talked to Mike a few times at cons, but my reaction to the post this morning was the same as Jo Walton's: "Dammit! I'm not done yet."
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who will miss those eyebrows. They were almost as articulate as the man himself. As long as they were, they couldn't help communicating what he was thinking. The only time they were ever still was when he was about to say something devastating and didn't want to give it away. They made an excellent early warning signal, but I wouldn't have told him so for love or money.
Nope. This is going to be one of the ones that's impossible to comprehend. It's going to keep hurting every time the world tries to make me believe it.
My best to every one who was rich enough to understnd how much poorer they are today.
The simplest method of making thermite I've heard of is storing powdered aluminum in a coffee can in the refrigerator at work. Think condensation. I'm not sure which engineer thought it was a good idea, but I know they had to replace the fridge. And some other stuff.
My husband got to make ammonium triiodide in high school. Samples of it were drying on a shelf just under the classroom bell when it went off. He said they didn't paint over the scorch marks on the wall for a few years. That was the chemistry teacher who was missing at least part of a finger.
Mina, I suspect that the reason you tend to class urban fantasy with science fiction in reading preferences has something to do with the mindset and behavior of the characters. The characters in urban fantasy (the non-magical ones) often take a fairly rationalist approach to magic--not surprising, since they start in a modern rationalist world. They deny its existence until they have proof, and in order to make their lives make sense again after the introduction of magic, they engage in experimentation and classification. They poke at the stuff until they know what it does.
Sound like any sf characters you know?
I was so hoping you'd be back up and running by the time I got to the end of the comments. For what it's worth, may you be having that peaceful (insensate) nap that so often follows one of these.
Be well soon.
I occasionally catch flak from people who don’t feel up to confronting Patrick.
Oh, dear. Silly people. Patrick would have just swatted him. It wouldn't have been with a small newspaper, and it would have hurt, but it would have been over much faster. And I say this not knowing either of you except by your blogs.
While I agree with several posters that there has been plenty to be irritated with lately, it probably is, in part, just you. Well, not just you. Having been sick in January (all of January--no laspes in breathing, just a throat too painful for sleeping sometimes and talking most of the time), I can say that it didn't leave me many resources for dealing with the irritations. Dealing with a Windows box at work almost reduced me to tears some days. Your body may have all it can handle right now just keeping you alive, and you may not, literally, have time for this.
Oddly, that's the good news. That means it'll pass, and you'll be able to go back to hooting (or do you chortle?) at the idiots stupid enough to bring it to your attention this way. Hopefully it'll be soon. Not that this wasn't entertaining.
While I'm pretty sure I understand what it means from the context, "Scheduled Ancient Monuments" just got up off the page and danced for me. The possibilities...
It's -2(F) and windy here in Minneapolis. Trying to reach 0 today. It's the kind of weather in which you have to start being careful how you breathe, lest your lungs sieze or your sinuses bleed. Bleah.
Lois, it's not just you. Heck, I do enough typing that I sometimes find myself mentally going over the key sequences as I'm thinking something. Doesn't happen when I'm speaking, though. That's social, so it uses up all the tracks in my head.
I had a dyslexic boyfriend at one point. It didn't fully dawn on me what that meant until the day we both read some shaggy dog story in a magazine, the payoff of which required unscrambling a phrase. The fact that he got furious over the fact that I could read it and he couldn't told me something else, but that's another set of stories.
Interestingly, his spelling tended to be pretty good if he was motivated. He spelled by successive approximation, changing his words until they looked right. He did tend to make spell checker type errors, though.
I tend to combine reading a sentence or so at a time with that "there's something wrong here" feeling, which means I spend a lot of time reading right over (and over) the top of problems I know are there.
Teresa, why do you even have to question? It's not like any of us are going to believe you didn't look it up. ;)
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