A random but fascinating Flatiron fact I just stumbled across: I've been meaning to read Pat Pflieger's article about the letters to Robert Merry's Museum (An "Online Community" of the Nineteenth Century) -- a link from here, actually -- for some time, and lo, a book is now out with collected letters.
Daniel H. Burnham was listed as one of the participants. And according to this, he grew up to design the Flatiron Building.
I'm sure computers would have looked rather strange to him, but if he was one of the Merry Cousins he would have been very familiar with the trappings of virtual communities. And there's something strangely appropriate about that.
I'm getting really suspicious about the mountains of heavily discounted canned salmon and tuna in the stores lately. Is it reminding anyone else of Tunagate?
I'd like to think that the tuna discounts, at least, have something to do with the mercury standards. Slate has a good roundup of info on that issue here, with lots of links to other places. One table from the FDA shows canned salmon as having no detected mercury (nifty table here), but salmon gets grouped into the seafood mercury warnings nonetheless. So perhaps that's it -- the warnings have led to reduced consumption, and from there to cut prices on tinned fish?
Hmmm. Now I want to go find fish to cook for dinner.
Mary Kay -- is it the inclusion of the peel that you dislike about marmalade? I'm not sure about altering a marmalade recipe per se, since the lack of peel would make the proportions all wonky, but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to switch a grape jelly recipe to use fresh-squeezed orange juice instead of grape juice. You might need a tad more sugar, but the pectin proportions would probably be comparable. (Or alternatively, the original Fannie Farmer from 1918 has a recipe.)
(I actually dislike jams and jellies and marmalades, and prefer lemon curd, but despite that spent quite a bit of time over summers working out jam and jelly recipes. For some reason I enjoyed canning them a great deal more than eating them.)
Of course, none of this answers the question of why orange jelly never caught on as marmalade did. And now I'm wishing I had something useful to say about dreams, but I don't. I only remember my dreams when I'm ill or otherwise not well.
Seth: good point -- mea culpa. I should have separated out the phenomenon of those interested in science being picked on in general, regardless of gender, from females interested in science being looked down upon. The main difference (which I should have paid more attention to) is that females, also get to put up with the cultural denigration from the gender bias -- including a gender bias from those who are also in science -- as well as the baseline denigration from those who are in the general pick-on-geeks population.
*nods* Thank you, Paula.
I keep telling myself it's getting better, but I don't know. Six years or so ago I told a college recruiter I was interested in going into physics. He told me I'd be more comfortable at his school than at a techy school like MIT, since his school had a humanities program and would therefore be much nicer for a girl like me. (A girl like me being, I assumed, a female. Needless to say, I chose not to apply to his institution. Harvard has its problems, but the departmental representatives in the areas I was in tried, and the geology department was lovely.)
I suspect I may have had the female physics professor who was cited in JVP's link as an undergrad advisor, actually, albeit not for very long. (And here I elide the continuing rant I started to type out about my experiences, because I've written about it in other places and really, it's not particularly relevant.)
I don't remember wanting to be a little boy, but I was raised by parents who were progressive in those matters. I do remember getting to school, however, and getting called ugly (and far worse) and being hit with chairs for being interested in science. The boys who were interested in science, as I recall, were mostly called dorks and left alone. Society likes to assert itself, even on the younger levels. Or perhaps especially.
Please, please, please say the "Fanfic" section on the Travis Tea homepage isn't just some cruel joke. The songfic and crossover possibilities alone are simply -- breathtaking.
(And now I have a horrible image of a Travis Tea fandom developing its own beta readers and prestige archives, with a daily TravisTeaSues report on LiveJournal....)
Yep -- the above comment was, in fact, me. Er -- and perhaps I should add that I'm not a figment of a database's imagination. (To the best of my knowledge, at least.)
I did, however, run through the prior comments and notice that you wrote But why dogspam? Why not hamsterspam? on Christmas, 2004. Perhaps it's a case of great minds thinking alike?
Now accurate and reliable hamster care spam might make more sense.
CHip wrote: Jules: AFAIK, guaifenesin (spelling per the house-brand bottle in my medicine cabinet) is not a decongestant; it helps clean up sticky lungs but not stuffy heads.
Well -- partly. It's not a decongestant like pseudoephedrine, certainly, but the way it works to ease coughs and clear the chest is by loosening mucus -- thinning it out (cf also the above comment about the theory of it thinning sperm-blocking mucus). I'm sinus infection prone, but can't take the good stuff, so a doctor recommended the guaifenesin to me a few years ago to break up and clear out the mucus in my sinuses during colds and stop them from turning into sinus infections. The same mucus-busting powers that let it clear up a chest cold also help clear out other forms of mucus and get your nose running.
It's certainly not as immediately effective as the little red pills, but then those leave me with skyrocketing blood pressure and an inability to focus my eyes properly, so for me, at least, it's a significant improvement overall. And I have noticed fewer sinus infections since I started taking it, although of course YMMV.
The problem, I find, is finding a product that's *just* guaifenesin in pill form. I mostly seem to end up with the bottled syrup form, which is just nasty.
1. what are people drinking these days?
Usually hard cider, if I'm drinking alcohol. The best brand I've located is Woodchuck, but I haven't been able to find a source near my new apartment, and Magners or Cider Jack just isn't worth it, IMO. (I'll have to look for Spire Mountain.) The other cider drink is hot cider with the addition of homemade lemon-cinnamon liquor.
Question 2: I just had the vaguely surreal experience of reading the reviews when an awards ceremony I help out on was slashdotted. The reactions and information ranged from very positive to curious to nitpicking and nasty to just plain, well, wrong, as in the guy who came up with this very complicated explanation for something that was, to the best of my knowledge, a simple change in scheduling. My guess is that the hard thing (especially online) is stopping yourself from writing back. (Note the lack of a comment involving the name Rice.)
Has anyone else noticed the new sidebar ads over at nytimes.com for iUniverse? I ran into one earlier today and was, well, aghast might be an appropriate phrase. The first one started out with a pile of paper and the words "Other writers collect rejection letters." Cut to a man in a beach chair and the words "Our writers collect royalties." And apparently, if you publish now, they'll even toss in author copies. Seeing publication advertised like toothpaste-- urgh.
As for seeing other authors run into fee-charging agents... man. It's like watching puppies get kicked, but sadder. I've seen some people who nearly knew better but still didn't want to turn it down just in case it was the real thing. And then I've known of people who gave out advice on agents themselves and still fell into the trap.
It's not possible (and many of us have tried) to explain just how bad slushpile writing is; no one in civilian life ever sees so much faulty grammar, creative spelling, and non-Euclidean syntax. There's a frequent question that goes something like "How bad can it really be?"
As a member of said civilian life, this is something I've been curious about for a while, and while I know it isn't possible to explain... How bad is slush compared to, say, the experience of reading the first twenty randomly chosen fanfics I find on fanfiction.net? Or (at least in terms of spelling and grammar) the experience of reading three posts each on ten randomly chosen livejournals? Is it that bad? Is it (shudder) worse?
Among other things, she told me she'd refuse anything less than a 500K advance.
I need a new keyboard. This one has somehow been sprayed with selzer.
I must have lucked out as a kid. Growing up I learned (among other things) that (a) "Dune was rejected 14 times, so send the dmn manuscript back out;" (b) when someone says "read this chapter, kid" as they pick you up from school they generally mean it; and (c) if you actually get a royalty check, you get to have a nice dinner out, provided you don't go crazy on the drinks or order lobster.
A long time ago, when the Internet was young and quite possibly squamous, a friend of mine helped out on the Cthulhu For President webpage. Lo and behold, nine years later, it's still here, or something remarkably similar is. Cthulhu For President, bringing "Why Vote for the Lesser Evil?" to the electoral process for the last nine years of presidential elections. I suppose it's something.
Adding in to the laser printer pile-on, I broke down a while ago and bought a Brother 1440 laser printer. At the time, I had a inkjet that went through hideously expensive ink like alcohol at a room party, and moreover sounded like it wasn't going to make it through a complete print-out of the edited version of the then-current novel. (The squeaking was horrific.)
I decided to step up to the laser printer for the price difference between it and the new inkjet I'd have had to buy anyway. I've since printed out six copies of one novel, two of another, about 17 copies of my thesis (40 pages), numerous short story subs, an unknown number of pages of things I printed and critted for other people, and assorted other miscellaneous stuff, and the toner's still in the green. The price (including original equipment costs) is comparable to favorable as compared to printing large jobs at Kinko's, and significantly less expensive when compared to printing smaller jobs and ongoing novel progress hardcopy backups with my inkjet. And the pleasure of printing without leaving my apartment certainly makes it worth my while. And it can handle large jobs, as I know from printing four beta-reader copies of a novel in one night.
Overall, I'd say I'm a fan.
I fly quite a bit, and to date I've only been pulled over for special search twice. Once when I was flying through New Zealand back to the States from Australia, and they were pulling over every third person or so-- it was a re-screen of the entire plane, since we went right back on the same flight to go to LAX. (This was last summer, right after the tip that terrorists were trying to get in through Australia, which I naturally didn't hear about until afterwards. Aparently the Americans didn't trust the Aussie screens and were repeating everything.)
The second time was when my flight got rebooked on a different airline and I had to go through the full search because of that-- must look like a one-way ticket on the screens. And I once had to get one bag searched when the screener got nervous about my metal hard-shell glasses case I carry. (I come from a family that's managed to run glasses over with desk chairs and cars, as well as drop them from a (small) airplane during takeoff. I take no chances.)
But overall, my experiences haven't been bad-- due in large part, I suspect, to the fact that my name isn't on any watch lists. (I'm scared to think what my job, which involves a great deal of travel, would be like if I were.) Security screeners are almost always nice to me-- but then, I look significantly younger than I am, and I try to look even younger when I fly, and ever-so-slightly clueless. In my experience clean-cut all-American female teenager types generally don't get hassled.
Of course, having said this, I'll be two hours in Security full search tomorrow and miss my flight....
*headdesk*
Right after writing that previous comment about how nothing's flooded in my neighborhood of Boston, I went down to the basement to put in some laundry.
It's flooded. (Yeah, only partially, and the only stuff I had down there was on palettes, and I'm a tenant, so it's not a problem for me so much. But the timing was rather... apropos.)
I'm in Boston, and woke up this morning to winds and heavy rain slashing down outside. It's slowed just now, but the radar's making it look like we'll be getting heavy rains on and off for the rest of the day.
No Ivan-related flooding here in my neighboorhood. Of course, we had the flooding in the Central Artery tunnel, but that was something else entirely.
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2004 | 11 |
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