The Kid Goes to the ER

So there I was rewatching the first season of 3% on netflix and trying to decide if I wanted to go on watching the new seasons when my phone rings.

No one ever calls me. Who calls people anymore? But it was the kid, so I answered. He had cut his finger, really badly, what should he do? 

"Send me a picture of it," I said, but this proved impossible, since he and the boyfriend were both deeply upset. "It might need stitches," I said.

"It definitely needs stitches," said the boyfriend.

"You're going to have to go to the ER," I said.

"That's going to cost so much money!"

"I know, but you need stitches. Go to the ER."

"It's going to take so long! This is going to ruin our evening! I was going to cook a nice dinner!"

"Go to the ER."

Luckily the boyfriend is the one who can drive, so he drove the kid to the ER, where it ended up only taking a little over an hour. He got five stitches, and reports that the wound is "so disgusting." Also, the ER people said he had to come back to get the stitches taken out, but I told him this was nonsense, I could take them out, or my SIL the med tech can take them out.

"Will I have to miss work?" he asked. "Will I be able to draw?"

I am happy to report that the answers to these are no and yes respectively.

I tried to get him to send a picture, so I could post it here, but he refuses. It is too gross, apparently.

First Day of Spring 2023

First day of classes and I am here at dawn, as usual. At least this semester I don't have an eight a.m. class.

Because I have a research release (which I'm using to write my novel), I'm only teaching two classes this semester. Only fifty students! This is strangely liberating. Well. Not so strange, I guess.

My first class is Introduction to Creative Writing. I'm starting with Fiction, in the wan hope that the world will end before I have to teach them how to write poetry. My second class is Comp I, which I could teach in my sleep at this point. Our topic this semester is going to be the Decline of Insects. 

I have started using a topic in my Comp classes. All our readings are on that topic, and students must write their papers on that topic as well. This keeps me from having to read endless papers on How Social Media Is Bad and Why Jesus is Real and the Necessity of Not Having Abortions.

Instead I get 25 papers on various kinds of insects and why these insects are important and what is killing them off. A much better read, frankly. Also I can force my students to read scientific papers, which is good for their souls.

What I'm Reading Now

I haven't done one of these for awhile, mainly because much of my recent reading has gone toward reviews for the three science fiction magazines I am writing reviews for. If I'm reviewing things there, I usually don't review them here. (I think there was one exception?) Anyway, you can catch all of my reviews at Strange Horizons, IZ Digital, and Asimov's Science Fiction.

What else have I been reading?

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bringing up the Bodies, the Mirror and the Light

I read Mantel's Wolf Hall when it first came out, but I never got around to reading the sequels. The library had them both, so I took them both out. You probably know this, but they cover the life of Thomas Cromwell, the guy who saw to it that Thomas More was executed, among other things. The first one, which I reread before reading the sequels, is definitely the best. Bringing Up the Bodies is almost as good; but The Mirror and the Light was a slog. Or maybe I'd had too much Cromwell by then.

I would definitely recommend the first two, but only go for the third if you're a completist.

Freya Marske, A Marvelous Light and A Restless Truth

I re-read A Marvelous Light when I saw Marske was releasing the sequel. It holds up! Here, we have Edwardian England but with a secret cabal of magicians. The overarching plot for what I think will be a trilogy is that someone in the cabal is attempting to gain control of all the magic in England, or more specifically all the power that powers all the magic in England. There are three magic items, used to seal the transfer of power from the fairies to the magicians of England, and having those items will allow the bad guys to take control of that power. Our intrepid band of plucky heroes, only some of them magicians, are trying to find and hide the magic items before the bad guys do. The plot is fine, but the characters and the writing make these work. In the first, we had a M/M romance with hot sex, and in this one we have bisexual romance and hot sex. If graphic depictions of hot sex unnerve you, maybe avoid these? But I liked them.

Sarah Miller, Miss Spitfire

Sarah Miller wrote a couple other books I liked, one called Caroline, about the mother in the Little House books, and Marmee, about the mother in Little Women. This one is about Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher, and perfectly readable. But Miller doesn't say anything in this one which I didn't already know, so I didn't enjoy it as much as the other two. 

Also, I didn't grow up loving books about Helen Keller the way I did the other two -- I didn't even see the iconic movie until recently, whereas I read and reread Little Women and the Little House books all through my childhood. (I once joked that everything I wrote was an imitation of Little Men, but I don't actually think that's true.) Anyway, if you love Helen Keller's story, you will probably enjoy this one.

Bel Meadows, Winterland

This is about a gymnast in the 1970s in Russia, and mainly about the abusive system for training young gymnasts. There's also a mystery involving a missing mother. The writing here is good, plus there's a lot of snow. Also, the details about how young gymnasts are trained is excellent. I really liked one place where Meadows has the mother (before she goes missing) warn the father about what will happen if they put their child into gymnastics as a serious contender -- the mother has been a world-class dancer, and warns the father that the child will always hurt, always be exhausted, always have her body policed, that she won't have a childhood or an education, just gymnastics. Then as we follow the child into her career as a young gymnast, yes, that's exactly what we see happen.

There's also some attention given to the labor camps, with one of the young gymnast's neighbors and mentors being a survivor of the camps.

If you're into gymnastics, you might like this one. I think Natasha Pulley did the labor camps story better in The Half-Life of Valery K, which I reviewed for an upcoming IZ issue, but Meadows also does it well.

Leaded Gas

Back when I was a kid, you could still buy leaded gas for your car. 

The additive TEL (tetraethyl lead) helped extend the life of cars, a very important thing for working class Americans, and also improved mileage, making the car run more efficiently. True, the lead then escaped into the environment, damaging the brains and nervous systems of children and adults, leading to lower IQs and problems with impulse control. This effect was especially severe in children. (See here for more.)

Lead was finally phased out in the US in the early 1990s, but remains concentrated in soils near roadways, especially in cities, which saw a lot of automobile traffic. 

During the time this ban was being debated, there were -- you will not be surprised to find -- a number of people, especially conservatives, who insisted that poisoning our population with lead was no big deal, and that the benefits of leaded gas very much outweighed the damage done to people they didn't even know or care about. Plus, producing and distributing TEL was a lucrative business. Why did these ridiculous social reformers hate capitalism so much?

Since TEL was banned, crime rates have plummeted and US IQ levels have inched higher. This is especially true of violent crime levels. (Here's the Wikipedia version of these events.) Also, ways have been found to extend the life of automobiles and improve their efficiency without also poisoning the population. Win-win, wouldn't you say?

Well, some reports have surfaced that show gas stoves and gas heating can cause problems with indoor air, and that can increase the risk of diseases such as asthma, especially in children raised in a home with gas stoves. Refusing to learn from history, today's conservatives are throwing a giant temper tantrum. You can pry their gas stoves out of their cold, dead hands, and so on.

Disclosure: Our house has both gas heating and a gas stove. I love my gas stove. It is so much better for cooking than one with electric hobs. I also love sitting in front of a gas fire. My favorite part about the duplex I rented in graduate school was that it had these little gas fires installed in the walls of every room, including the bathroom, so that you could warm your rooms by these cheery blue flames.

But if these stoves and these heating systems are harming children, not to mention me, then hell yeah, we should phase them out, hopefully a little more quickly than we did leaded gas. I mean, I'm not an idiot.

Putting your identity politics ahead of the health of children is....quite a look, I have to say.

Coughing like I'm in a 19th Century Novel

My cold hangs in there. I am coughing so hard and frequently that sleep is almost impossible. I got the extra strength cough medicine, but it only stifles the cough for a few hours. Ugh.

The potato curry soup helps, though. I am eating that and languishing on the sofa reading old science fiction novels and cursing my fate.

Anyway, my cough is very whooping and dramatic. You would think to hear it that I am much sicker than I actually am.

The Kid's New Comic

The kid's new comic, Un/Bound, has launched.

Start with the cover here.

Start with the action here.

Languishing in Arkansas

Like Pharyngula, I've been battling some virus. I'm not very sick at all, but the head congestion and the coughing make me feel much worse than I am. Last night I was coughing too much to sleep. We had some ancient cough syrup, so I took that, but it only helped a little.

I also have no appetite. I'm going to make some potato curry soup today and compel myself to eat it. 

Meanwhile I'm drinking lots of hot tea and getting prepped for classes. 

Oh, and I still have insomnia.

Hope your new year is going better than mine.

LOL

 

A Fever in the Lungs

Dr. Skull was sick for nearly a week, though he is better now, just in time for me to catch whatever it is. Symptoms: a sore throat, congestion, headache and muscle aches, also a cough. We've both tested negative for COVID (him twice), so I don't think it's that. It's very unpleasant, whatever it is. I'm finding it hard to read or write anything, and I don't want to eat anything at all. I'm drinking tea and hot chocolate, and taking Musinex, hoping I will be better soon.

Hilarity Ensues

This is hilarious:

When your party's brand becomes "Elect the clowns who will give us permission to stay ignorant and bigoted," this is what you get. 

Cat Pictures

Amity on her new cat tree:

She loves it.

The Clown Show You Ordered

This was on Twitter this morning (originally from the Washington Post, I think?) and I could not agree more:

The entire schtick for the GOP since the age of Reagan was that government didn't work and couldn't work. The worst thing you could hear, claimed Reagan, was "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." (Though I will note that this does not stop reactionary voters or Red States from gobbling down all the government help they can get.)

That's their mantra -- government can't work, government shouldn't work, anything the government is involved in fails. It's their excuse for destroying public schools, refusing to allow nationalized healthcare, underfunding state universities and public transport, and selling our national defense to companies like Haliburton. Government can't work. Only capitalism works. (And no matter the disasters it perpetuates, capitalism can never fail; it can only be failed. That's how you know it's a religion and not an economic system.)

So with that as their life goal -- proving that government doesn't work -- how can we be surprised when members of the GOP get elected to government and set about making sure it doesn't work?

Stir in their faithful adherence to anti-intellectualism (which is why many of them voted for Trump, specifically because he knew nothing about how to run a government), and voila! Today's Republican clown show.

It would be hilarious if they weren't taking us down with them.

ETA: Democracy: Where the people get the government they deserve. We could have had a governor with a PhD in physics, but an educated black man terrifies people in Arkansas, so they voted for a Trump Mini-me.

Bread for the New Year

 Since I wasn't sleeping anyway, I mixed up no-knead bread last night, and baked it out this morning.

Here's the recipe, though I messed with it a bit -- added in some whole wheat flour, and let it rise longer than they suggested, once I took it out of the fridge. 

Happy Insomnia!

I am ringing in the new year with the worst insomnia ever. Last night I didn't get to sleep until dawn. 

Oh well. I'll sleep when I'm dead, I guess.

Bonne Annee!

Happy first day on 2023!

I took the kids back up the mountain and now I am going to make a grilled cheese sandwich and read for a while. 

Terrible news, though -- the library does not reopen until January 3. I am going to run out of books.