Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things
I like to plan things out. Gather information, decide on a plan, and execute it. Buying my last 2 cars took about a month each, the tv two months. Took 3 months or so to plan summer camp.
Dentistry wasn’t much different – a month of sifting through online stuffs before settling on Doctor T. The execution, however, has been another thing entirely.
Alotta years ignoring, and incidentally (pun not intended) deadening, the pain made for a scene of devastation. In workman like fashion, Doc T has dived in done what he can for the bottom bunch. Fillings, root canals, and an extraction later, I hope he’s done with the bottom at least…
Next Monday, a mere 2 days away, he promises to begin on the uppers with a vengeance by pulling two of them. One per side. I assume that this will be to immediately scare the rest into submission. I would have thought they were already, having watched the bottom in progress, but he’s the Doctor. Read more of this post
As of this moment somewhere north of 85 Million gallons of oil has been leaked into the gulf. Depending on whose numbers you take on either spill this is from 3 to 15 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez.
Over the course of several disasters, natural and otherwise, nothing is being learned. Or rather, an amount is being learned, but that learning is not being applied. Prior deficiencies have not been rectified, prior mistakes are being repeated.
There is a certain proximity the Gulf spill has to the political arena, unfortunately, apart and aside of the business interests involved. There is also a political aspect that is fully meshed with business and finance. (and I could fill this and many more posts about it’s huge impact on disaster response over time. don’t tempt me, I might still, but it’s alotta work.) These stymie the application of common sense to current response or future preparedness. Read more of this post
The Precision of Equus - Barbara Rush
My job these days is getting new media and books into the library system and ready for circulation. Despite the repetitive aspect of physically stickering and RFIDing the individual item (A title often comes in 6 to 200 item batches) doing the final proof-read of the catalogue entry is an interestingly complex task.
Book and media cataloguing starts with the Library of Congress and follows the AACR2 rules published in 1978. This set of criteria defines the information used to catalogue an item in a standard way across all libraries. This is a wonderful thing because you can go to any library and the same book will be described in about the same manner. This is particularly important when looking for a specific edition or format of a title.
Consider Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Published in the early 14th century it consists of 3 books, really; Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Most folk are familiar only with the Inferno portion as it deals with his tour of Hades with Virgil and any exploration of hell promises all sorts of creepy settings and naked tortured souls. Standard Hollywood copy, but it stills sells. The great thing about Inferno, however, is that it’s really old and not merely written in poetic form, but it’s Italian poetry! So basically you can read a horror story and feel all literary while doing so. Unless, of course, you get a translation that ties your cerebellum in knots. (not that that’s hardly difficult to do, but I digress…) Read more of this post
The winners of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest “Where www means Wretched Writers Welcome.” Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the genius who gave us the opener “It was a dark and stormy night…”
This years winners do not disappoint.
The Winner:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
Molly Ringle
Seattle, WA
My favorite, however, is the runner-up. It looks and sounds like something I would write.
Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, “There goes the most noble among men” — in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur.
Tom Wallace
Columbia, SC
I swear I’m going to enter this contest one of these days. I can be a contendah!
So here I am, writing again – despite myself. For the size of the posts you would think I said more than I did. I don’t know if it will teach me to be a bit less wordy (I know the library’s blog would appreciate that) but I have a feeling I’ll at least figure out where to put the “Read More…” button if not write a better first paragraph. My apologies ahead of time.
And the biggest problem is ideas – not the lack of them – but keeping the writing of them on track and smaller than treatise size. A piece I began the other day on buzz words in politics has turned into pages exploring rhetorical philosophy. Read more of this post
Can’t seem to get the widget to embed properly so here’s the link to NPR’s feed that includes the widget, live cams, and various reportings. [EDIT: It appears I’d have to install WordPress on my own server as the hosted site has an aversion to embedded iframes. Simply not worth it as nobody but I reads this thing…]
For conversion purposes: A Barrel (bbl) of oil is 42 gallons, so the lowball setting on the widget of 1.47M gals/day equals about 35,000 bbl. High estimate last I heard was 60k bbl or about 2.5M gals.
One possible reason BP is lowballing estimates, and I’d bet it’s a large concern, is that civil penalties carry a price per barrel of $4300. On the low side of 35k bbl that comes to $150.5M per day.
A side note, but one I hope will get attention in the coming weeks:
Louisiana residents 45 miles off the Gulf of Mexico claim to have videotaped an oily substance raining down. Worst case scenario? It’s petroleum mixed with Corexit, the cancer-causing dispersant BP’s spraying on its oil slick. Best case scenario? Dirty roads.
About Corexit:
[Corexit] is associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems as sides effects at high doses to clean-up workers. 2-BE has also been documented to cause the breakdown of red blood cells, leading to blood in urine and feces, and can damage the kidneys, liver, spleen and bone marrow of humans – effects not included on the information sheet for workers.
We heard about workers experiencing headaches and nosebleeds almost immediately after dispersant began to be used…
The full article is here and worth a read.
A most excellent video for my first successful embed. Wore out a few tapes of this when it was new…
With no disrespect to another blogging platform (that rhymes with docks) I spent the day moving my posts from there to here. Still being somewhat a neophyte in the blogging world I was actually considering the move to a different, and somewhat less complex, blogging platform but there isn’t a way to import the vox posts there and there is here at wordpress.
So here I am, having gotten all the electrons moved and tucked snuggly in their little shells on a wordpress blog. The down side is that I didn’t get to keep my screen name in the transition. Some damn squatter got here years before me and brazenly snatched it up without a how-de-do to me at all. Fortunately I had a backup. On the up side? Nobody will notice as nobody reads it.
Click Me For a Random Post
The Ruffled Crow 