Weather Report

It is still hot.

One more week of summer.

Please.

Shanah Tovah!

 Here's the challah I made for the holiday:

The kid and I are going to throw bread in the water after dinner tonight.

My Better World

 Apparently you can win A Better World by making a better world.

Here is mine.

A Better World

I'm obsessed with this game lately: A Better World.

Basically you make changes to history and then see if those changes make the world better. For example, inventing a contraceptive in 1960 that allows anyone (male or female, in other words) to absolutely control their fertility leads to a world population of under one billion in the year 2000, as well as no global warming and longer, better lives for everyone.

But killing Hitler is a disaster.

Kidnapping Genghis Khan when he's 14, so that he never comes to power, improves the world remarkably.

I'm somewhat dubious about the conclusions whoever designed the game draw from various changes; and you can't do whatever you want -- you only have two choices at a given time split -- which is somewhat annoying. For example, when women are fighting for the right to vote, the only two changes you can make are (1) quash the movement entirely or (2) establish a worldwide gynarchy. There's no choice, for example, to give women more political power without killing all the men.

But it's an interesting game nonetheless!

Weather Report

We had a short, fierce downpour yesterday -- the first rain at my house in about six weeks. 

Today it is hot as a griddle again, but the weather guy says maybe cooler weather coming. (Cooler = highs in the low 90s.) Yes, please.

What I'm Reading Now

Ann Patchett, Whistler

I feel like I should read Patchett more than I do. Every time I pick up one of her books, I end up liking it a lot. Somehow I've never read straight through her publications as I do with other authors I like.

Anyway, this is one is good. It's about a woman, Daphne, in her fifties who runs across her former stepfather -- a man her mother was married to for a few months when Daphne was nine years old. They divorced shortly after Daphne and the stepfather were in an accident, and Daphne hasn't seen him since. But she has always remembered him and always loved him, and always blamed herself for the divorce.

Whistler is a horse, which neither Daphne nor anyone in her family has ever met. But his story turns out to be crucial to theirs. No spoilers otherwise.

I love this book a lot. It's also very short, but unlike many short books, it's exactly as long as it needs to be. 10/10, no notes.

Stephen Baxter, Evolution

I read all of this -- well, not every word, because I skimmed some bits where Baxter is just listing plants and various lifeforms in a given era -- so I guess I liked it. Baxter follows the genetic line of a specific human, from back before the Chicxulub Impact (when the ancestor was a small mammal) through 2034, when a volcano finishes destroying the current ecosystem, into the future when the sun explodes.

The main character is evolution and how it shapes one specific line of genetic material, with side excursions into other lines. It's accurate enough, especially as to how random and non-teleological evolution is, but since the main character is a mindless force of nature, it's a little hard to care what happens to any of the 'characters' in the story. It's an idea-not-character science fiction novel.

Baxter mentions but doesn't really deal with the accidental things that make up human/hominid consciousness and identity -- why we grieve, how we can be paralyzed with anxiety, addiction. Those would seem to be non-adaptive, and yet. I do like that he gives hominids these features, though, even if he never confronts them.

I read this one, but I don't think I'd read it again.

Stephen King, If It Bleeds

I think I had read this one before, but it's so hot I was looking for simple reads at the library. This is a collection of long short stories, three of them linked, and one containing our favorite character, Holly. The three linked stories, about a guy names Chuck, are honestly sort of dull, but the other stories are pretty good. Also, nothing too scary.

Worth reading if you just want something engaging that won't make you work hard.

Natasha Pulley, The Salt King

I actually listened to this one. I read it for a review with Asimov's, and loved it, of course. If you haven't yet read Pulley, this is a good one to start with. The audiobook, narrated by Luke R. Francis, is great. 

Like most of Pulley's books, we have a M/M romance at the center, though in this case it's a M/Supernatural Being relationship. And, as with most of Pulley's romance, it's mostly without any sort of physical passion. The two guys love each other, they just don't seem that interested in sex. 

Her previous book, The Mars House, was science-fictiony. This one is fantasy, which is what she normally writes; but not historical fantasy. Anyway, she's great, and this one is almost as good as my favorite book by her, The Kingdoms. Pulley is probably the only author who I buy in hardback *and* in audiobook.

This is Hilarious to Me

And by hilarious, I mean exactly what I would expect out of American "Christians."

As I've stated, I never was a big fan of Dolly Parton. I love country music, but mostly the Steve Earle / Jason Isbell / James McMurtry kind of county music. I didn't dislike Parton's music, it just didn't do much for me.

But Parton was clearly a good person, filled with the loving kindness that a true follower of Christ will have. She did the things Jesus said to do: loved her enemy, cared for the poor and sick, treated everyone as her neighbor. Furthermore, she spoke often about her faith, about loving and following Christ. Not only did she talk about it, she lived that faith.

And yet, American "Christians" are condemning her. I have seen more than one "Christian" claiming she is burning in hell. Why? 

Because she wasn't a bigot. How dare she not hate LGBTQ people? 

That's it. That's the entire reason.

Their "Christianity" boils down to just one rule: hate the right people. Nothing else matters.

Weather Report

Christ:

Eight days in a row of highs near or at 100 degrees. In September.

After that, highs in the mid-90s.

God.

Knee Update

The doctor ordered an X-ray, which shows "joint space narrowing of the patellofemoral compartment" "consistent with degenerative changes." The translates into "a little arthritis," the doctor says, and has prescribed a short course of anti-inflammatories.

If that doesn't fix it, he says we'll send me to an orthopedist.

It's better already, so I'm not too worried.

Surveillence State

I ordered a knee brace off the internet and since then every ad I see on YouTube or Amazon or the puzzle game I play on my phone is about canes, knee braces, knee surgery, and other ways to fix a knee.

(My knee is better today, though it still hurts.)

Knee Pain

I was at the Harps today, just walking like a normal person, when suddenly my knee went wonky.

Sharp pain, and then it started buckling. I could barely walk.

It went away after I sat down awhile, but then it came back. I could only just drive home.

Now I'm in my big chair with the knee elevated, looking up possible causes. My friend in the sciences says it might be incipient rheumatoid arthritis. Ugh.

Weather Report

Another heat dome is on the way. Ugh

Today is almost nice -- 70 degree when I went to the park with the dog at eight a.m.

But next week looks terrible.

Two more weeks of summer.

Anti-Vaxxers

One of the two people that died of measles in Pennsylvania was an infant.

All the anti-vaxxers who inquire (in bad faith) that if we have our measles vaccine, why do we care if others don't get it? Since we'll be protected by our magic shot, right?

This is why. Infants who are too young* for the vaccine can get the measles, and they are more likely to die of it than those of a more robust age. (Like six, which was when I got the measles. Not the shot. The actual disease. I lived before the vaccine was available, when children were still dying from the disease. About 200 kids died of it that year in America.)

“The real vulnerability is in infants between 6 and 11 months of age, as maternal antibody is waning and they haven’t gotten their first dose of the MMR vaccine,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Dallas.

In places where infants have a high risk of measles exposure, health authorities sometimes recommend an early dose of the vaccine for babies starting at 6 months old. That was the case during an outbreak in Texas last year, when two unvaccinated girls died of the disease.

Other people have immunological issues. They too can catch the measles. Some people, like me, lived before the measles vaccine was available and may never have caught the disease. Sure, they're likely to be old, so maybe anti-vaxxers don't care if they die. They didn't care during COVID, when "only" old people and people with immunological problems were likely to die of the virus. (Like my father, who was in his 80s, and had dementia. Who cares if he dies, right?)

These people have shrugged off the bonds of community. They aren't part of the community, they are declaring. Often they have their own insular (and whackaloon) community they have decided to belong to instead. That's their right, here in America.

But they're despicable all the same.

*12-15 months for the first shot, and a booster at ages 4-6

AI in the wild

(1) Guy at the dog park casually commented that he used AI to try to find out what kind of dog his mutt was. I hid my wince.

(2) The kid's husband is being compelled to use AI in his engineering class. WTF, I said. Apparently in the future engineers will use AI, he said, so we have to know how to do it. WTF, I said again. 

Donate to Imagination Library in Memory of Dolly Parton

 Link is here.