handful_ofdust | Reading

I seem to have spent much of this day driving in a nor'easter, when all the potholes overflowed and every other driver in between the streaming gutters drove like a hydroplaning yak. I got to see

rushthatspeaks and secured a new inhaler and an appointment with a pulmonologist. Foods of the hour look like pastrami, scones, and a Zagnut.

Last night's shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum is still going around in my head, even if I didn't have people in the Jewish professional community of D.C. I don't want to entertain a referendum on the politics of the victims any more than I want to hear it about detained students or deportees, but it feels too cheap for irony that the shooter targeted an event with a focus on humanitarian aid in Gaza: all that mattered was that it aggregated Jews. The word antisemitism should be like hot iron in the mouth of the man in the White House. What he has to offer, none of us need.

In stark contrast to the mishegos with FB, when Criterion's website refused to honor a gift certificate I had received from them in the last month, I was able to get a real live person on their customer support staff who solved the problem for me so that I could ship a DVD of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) to a relative who really needed it. Maybe I should try to bribe them for editions of my favorite films.

Current Music: Matt Berninger, "Bonnet of Pins"

conuly

The comments rapidly go off the rails, but there are three links there to go through.

There's more linkage here.

I genuinely do not have the energy to read all of this. I will be sending out an email to my senators, I guess.

aurumcalendula

Libby now has volume 2 of Meng Xi Shi's Thousands Autumns, so I'll probably end up checking that out once my hold comes through (and it looks like they've added more danmei series too).

Rosmei has released cover art for The Creator's Grace, which hopefully means preorders aren't too far away. I wish I liked the art more - it feels a bit generic to me (it might just be that I'm comparing it to the cool looking art I've seen for the audio drama).

I seem to be bit and miss with novellas at the moment - I'm kinda sad Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang didn't really work for me (especially since I enjoyed their Tensorate novellas), but I did really like The River Has Roots by Amal El- Mohtar.

conuly

but Paramount Plus won't cooperate at all. So I finally convinced E to watch some Prodigy with me!

Man, I really love that theme song. Also, I'm gonna just say, maybe it's because it's aimed at a younger audience but this show does the best technobabble - just enough to explain, not enough to confuse or bore.

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sovay

Despite spending rather more of the afternoon at the doctor's than planned, I do not consider the day a total loss because it contained an unexpectedly successful nebulizer treatment, the acquisition of bagels and chopped liver, a cinnamon cake donut, and

ashlyme introducing me to Idris the Dragon. I have now seen what a gas station looks like when the fire suppression system has been deployed. Fell over in the evening and went down a rabbit hole of Boston vintage radio. Read some film criticism by Graham Greene. Am still not really watching movies myself. My brain could come back online any time.

Current Music: Pulp, "Spike Island"

conuly

The clowns running the FDA have proposed restricting access to covid vaccines, to people over 65 or who have certain medical conditions. There's a public docket for comments on the proposal.

Your Local Epidemiologist has a good post about the proposal, including that the people suggesting this know that nobody is going to do the placebo-controlled tests of new boosters they want to require.

Possible talking points include:

Families and caregivers wouldn't be eligible for the vaccine, even if they share a household, unlike the current UK recommendations.

Doctors, dentists, and other medical staff wouldn't be eligible either.

My own comment included that the reason I'd still be eligible for the vaccine is a lung problem caused by covid.

Seriously, this is just exhausting.

conuly

We're pretty clear on the cause, she got tangled up in some vines, and we've washed her foot carefully with soap and water. We'll wash all of her later and maybe soak her foot with some epsom salt, that should help. Well, I mean, the bath will just make her smell better, but the soak should help. I really, really don't want to go to the vet this week if I can avoid it, but if the swelling won't go down we may have to.

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sovay

While it seemed the most natural thing while dreaming to collect

moon_custafer and

thisbluespirit for the second such road trip we had taken together, when awake my brain's notions of geography seem positively Paleozoic.

Current Music: The Beths, "Metal"

sovay

How I am doing at the moment is extremely not great.

spatch took a picture of me craning into frame like a cat. I took a picture of a blinkie my father made for me.

( I've opened my doors and I've closed all my windows. )

I was unironically charmed to discover The Wonderful World of Tupperware (1965). The hard sell can get a little hard to take, but the technical details are as good as all those short films from the Children's Television Workshop about the manufacture of peanut butter or saxophones.

The rediscovered 1983 Thomas the Tank Engine pilot which I had seen linked around my friendlist turns out to have been more like a screen test for the model work, which honestly makes it even neater to watch. I wrote a letter once to the Island of Sodor. It did occur to me years after the fact that my parents answered it.

If Richard Brody would just edit the collected film criticism of Virginia Tracy and Andre Sennwald, I would buy the books like two shots and consider it a service to art.

Current Music: A Riot of Colour, "Skink"

conuly

I named her that, not the company. I thought it was a pretty, old-fashioned name, something buoyed by the fact that Charlotte in Charlotte Sometimes is told by her 50-years-ago counterpart's younger sister that it's funny that she has such an old-fashioned name - and that book was written in the 1960s!

Take a look at how often the names "Emma" and "Charlotte" appear on each state's top three names for girls.

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conuly

With or without feet.

There's a few people in that thread adamantly going up and down asserting that, duh, how could the rest of us be so dumb as to not know that certain types of toilets are specifically designed to be flushed with the foot. None of them have provided any sort of evidence for this claim, which makes me think that their evidence boils down to "Mommy told me when I was a kid" or "Well, I flush with a foot so I just sort of assumed", and - man, I hate when people do that. Fucking back up your claims, or at least qualify them. "I was told by my preschool teacher, but I've never verified it" would be a lot more honest and less annoying.

Anyway, I have emailed the manufacturer most often mentioned in the comments to ask for their opinion. Mostly because that is how things ought to be done, but also because if these flushers are designed to be flushed with the foot, great, but if not then we have to ask if the other contingent, which is equally vociferously asserting that foot flushing increases wear and tear on the mechanism and causes breakdowns, needs to be taken seriously. Because what's really not okay is breaking the toilet for everybody who comes after you - and sure, you'll say that you are not the sole person responsible for breaking the toilet that much faster, but c'mon, everybody says that.

So let's see what we see, and in the meantime, let's also all wash our hands. With soap and water, thanks.

conuly

but we've got a new semi-feral slipping into our house, one of last year's kittens. So, uh, I'm still not allowed to fix that basement window I guess?

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conuly

in a pot, not in the dirt, but still.

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asakiyume

The first woman

At an intersection in my father's town, there was a woman with multiple signs. She cycled through them, holding them up. One said something along the lines of don't-throw-away-the-constitition, another said something like no-grift-jets. There was another relating somehow to 9-11. Her clothing made me think of a bee or a hornet: she had on a black T-shirt, a yellow jacket tied around her waist, a yellow baseball cap, tawny shouder-length hair, pale-ish freckled skin.

"You have a lot of signs there," I said.

"Oh, these are nothing. I have like twenty at home."

"Do you come here every weekend?"

"Every Tuesday. And sometimes on the weekends. And yes, I have a job! Sometimes people shout that at me, 'Get a job.' I'm a physical therapist. And a swimmer. After I finish here, I'm going to swim a mile."

"Wow," I said. "I couldn't swim a mile" (vast understatement).

"Yep. I'm going to be in a competition in a few weeks. A two-mile swim. I've got stamina and endurance. I'm perfect for this." She indicated herself, the signs.

The second woman

The second one was more like a flower. She had a magenta T-shirt and bright violet-purple hair cropped close to her head, and dark brown skin. She was with a boy with undyed hair. I saw them walking up one side of a street when I was walking down the other side, and then I saw them again when we were both going the opposite way, and a third time when I was in my car and they were waiting for a bus.

If we'd been walking on the same side of the street, and if it seemed like she wouldn't mind a random remark from a stranger, and if I had a surfeit of temerity, I would have told her how much I loved her hair. But we weren't. So I just enjoyed her hair and T-shirt silently.

sovay

I am spending much of my time very flat, mostly reading, sleeping enough to dream, not necessarily enough to think, but in the usual fashion managed to take a walk around my neighborhood late in the afternoon.

( When one world ends, the other worlds keep spinning. )

I was so entertained by the avowedly partisan entry on Kay in Phyllis Ann Karr's The Arthurian Companion (1983/97) that it finally occurred to me to try to track down some of her Arthurian short stories and thus encountered a canonical description of her favorite churlish knight in "The Coming of the Light" (1992): "a sharpfaced dark man, also with hair more silver than black, who sat far to one side but spoke with more authority than his distance from the king would have suggested." Yes, look, I've loved his terrible personality for ages, I didn't need confirmation he has an interesting face, too.

After several years of not getting around to it, I really enjoyed C. M. Waggoner's The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry (2021) just in time to hear Lucy Dacus' "Best Guess" (2025) on WERS and get the song fixed in my head to its plot: If I were a gambling man, and I am, you'd be my best bet.

selkie sent me waves in the Drake Passage.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Bullseye (with Hozier)"

sovay

I record-scratched out of this article on the signaling of political vibes early on with the assertion:

And in the 2010s, in online forums, fans of the TV show "Steven Universe" gave the word "coded" its modern meaning, talking about how cartoon characters could be "coded" as gay.

What modern meaning? "Queer-coded" as a phrase as well as a concept goes back to the '90's off the top of my head, meaning it's almost certainly older and predates by decades no matter what the internet fandom of Steven Universe (2013–20), which may have popularized the academic usage but cannot have invented it. I'd have to check if it was part of Vito Russo's vocabulary, but Richard Barrios and Alexander Doty certainly used it. So did people I know. I am aware that shallow etymologies are least of the problems of the New York Times, but it is the sort of thing that I complain about on the internet because it is the sort of thing that will cause me to distrust the rest of the sourcing. More pleasant features of my evening included the first two episodes of Murderbot (2025–) which

spatch and I watched in a rare moment of synchronization with pop culture. I am also enjoying Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up (1955) even though every time one of its soldier characters swears, I keep thinking the printable profanity of the '50's can't hold a candle to Her Privates We (1929).

Current Music: Cake, "Short Skirt/Long Jacket"

oracne

After a glitch with my Apple account, their very helpful (!) customer service got me fixed up and I managed to sneak in the first episode of Murderbot before dress rehearsal, and the second one when I got home. I just finished it and am ready for more. It's a good adaptation. I never feel like adaptations replace books because there's no way to capture narrative voice in the same way in a visual medium, but there are other advantages books don't have. I love seeing actors interpret characters; it's a sort of fanfiction. The actors are all great.

Maybe I will also finally watch Ted Lasso. Severance sounds too depressing for me right now.

aurumcalendula

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson:

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Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson:

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conuly

For the job I would like the least, but any job is a job, right? So wish me luck. (Edit: No, nevermind. Dude called me before I left for the interview and kept me on the phone for an hour all to tell me he was certain the commute would not work out. This did not require an hourlong phone call, or, indeed, a phone call of any length at all.)

Also, today is A's birthday, so happy birthday! They will never see this.

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oracne

I returned to the AU soulmark series An Ever-Fixed Mark by AMarguerite for the second and third installments, which I enjoyed as much as the first.

That Looks on Tempests explores what might have happened if Colonel Fitzwilliam had survived Waterloo. A Dalliance with the Duke tries a different path, in which widowed Lizzy takes up with the Duke of Wellington instead of her cousin-by-marriage Darcy; this one gets a bit spicy!

For those who are not fanfiction readers, a "soulmark" story generally posits that people are born with, or attain at adolescence, a mark somewhere on their body, usually a name or a line of dialogue, that indicates one's soulmate/true love/most significant person. The best of these stories, I feel, interrogate the concept and its societal and personal implications, which the author does in this series.

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handful_ofdust

June 2022

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Page Summary

sovay - It's a cup trick shell game, it's a puff of smoke
conuly - The Hidden Provision in the Big Ugly Bill that Makes Trump King
aurumcalendula - Some reading related stuff
conuly - We've been trying to go back and watch the sad episode with the future drone
sovay - I was wrestling with a coat hanger, can you guess who won?
conuly - PSA, text taken from thisfinecrew
conuly - Moonpie's foot is swollen
sovay - So you surf the earth's magnetic core to keep you aligned
sovay - I can't read your mind and I can't write your name
conuly - I have a cabbage patch doll from childhood named Emma Charlotte
conuly - Ask a Manager is collectively losing their shit over how people flush toilets
conuly - Well, Sebastian has still not been seen (except by my down the block neighbor)
conuly - My neighbor around the corner has a Buddha's hand
asakiyume - two women
sovay - But the metal weighs down the bearings and the city has to cut the bolts
sovay - She's changing her name from Kitty to Karen
oracne - MURDERBOT!!!
aurumcalendula - some nonfiction
conuly - Got an interview
oracne - Wednesday Reading on Thursday

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