37078

This (ed. removed link which as of 2023Sep22 is flagged as malicious.) really did not go where I was expecting.  As a recovering racist, I found it amusing but the more sensitive SJWs among us may find it horrifying.

Really enjoying New Tricks and Call the Midwife.

Not much else to report.

36818

Migraine yesterday, with brilliant, beautiful scotoma, looking like rainbow Enochian symbols rendered by Marcel Duchamp.  Apart from tiredness and feeling like I’d been socked in the gut and waking up at one am like I’d been shot from a cannon (I got back to sleep) no other symptoms.  Hey, the neurologist said I had atypical migraines. Other people on my fl on facebook had migraine poopiness as well.

As you can see no writing.  Making sure that all the people in this scene speak like themselves and not like me is proving more difficult than I had originally planned.

36818

Brendan and Varisha are negotiating a deal for her to study Theo, currently living on her balcony.  Michel has just hauled Slider up a 14 story building at 30 kph.  Hydra is annoying everybody.  Hermes just quit his job as global telecommunicator; every Sixer either has a phone already or doesn’t care.

The Oldest is about ten thousand feet in the air, stuck in the middle of morphing into a space ship, and George is trying to tease the USAF into blowing him up although they’d much rather capture him for study.

The Eighteen (less Hydra) are trying to figure out how Sixer civil society will work going forward, which efforts are boring the living shit out of the old school Sixers, who would rather do something practical or entertaining.  After their first round of talks  they are going to scatter across BC to learn the indigenous languages.

Various religious and political dignitaries were invited to part of the talks, which took place on tribal territory; the hosts provided a little food but the Catholics, Mennonites and Sikhs all brought tons and everybody else either forgot or thought somebody else was taking care of it.  So it was a feast in spite of itself.

36410

It’s VERY ANNOYING.  I am going backwards.  I ripped out 400 words yesterday and wrote almost enough to end up where I started, but the scene – which is pivotal to understanding the depths of the friendship Michel feels to the two humans he is closest to – now rollicks instead of bollocks, so yay me.

Happy valentines day.  I sent out Galentines yesterday and I have one to distribute today.

36469

Sue very kindly forwarded a most interesting job posting, which I have this morning applied for.

Working on edits today; I’ll write when the muse comes back and do something else useful in the meantime.

Lovely time watching the Attenborough documentary about the Great Barrier Reef with Keith yesterday; he spent the whole time muttering the names of the tropical fish under his breath. As much as he likes the aquarium shop he’s wanting to get back into the optical trade. I am OBVS in support of this.

HIGHLY recommend Heavy Water War.  Really great historical drama about trying to shut down the German capacity to build an a-bomb.

 

36318

One of my favourite filkers played a drinking game with himself while watching the Democratic debate last night, and then live blogged it. He was pretty smashed by the time he stopped, and his wife was carefully hydrating him at last report. It was pretty funny.

Still no plan or commitment to end police violence.  Bernie is using all the right words, but they don’t add up to “We will take the following steps to end deaths during custody and confinement”. This is the standard that the black activists I follow on twitter are politely asking for, and it is not adding up to a plan.

When they point it out to white people (or wypipo, as it sometimes appears on twitter much to my amusement) the mostly male Berniestans LOSE THEIR CHEESE.  The stuff they say to people like Imani Gandy @AngryBlackLady (lawyer, feminist and CHRIST can she throw shade) and Elon James White (who is straight up one of the funniest, kindest, nerdiest and clearest thinking humans I’ve ever run across, while still being uncompromisingly stern with racist assholes) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (‘ta na hezzy) who is an awesome prose stylist and an atheist, and you try being an atheist in black culture, Abiyomi Kofi, the Gullah-Indigenous intersectionalist, and I dare you to say that when you’ve been drinking, and Wagatwe Wanjuki, activist against gendered violence — is absolutely disgusting.  All these people get shit from white people on the internet, in an ever flowing stream of bile, bad spelling, shitty science, gendered slurs, racial slurs, and yet they rise every day and try to hack through the thickets of law, media and custom to get to a place where anything but equality is unthinkable.

The Zika virus is unlikely to be causing the microcephaly cluster.  It is much more likely to be a previously unknown teratogenic effect of a Monsanto larvicide which started being added to the water in large swathes of the affected areas in 2014.

So I am looking at this horror show and thinking, wow.  Monsanto sells MORE LARVICIDE to get rid of the mosquitoes. The various government health bodies pay out money for larvicide and reap the hellish bounty twice: Once when the larvicides quit working and forever when microcephalic children are born.

The governments involved may say it’s a fair price to pay to keep the working population healthy enough to you know, work.  Screw the kids, they’re all poor anyway.

As for Zika virus being found in sufferers, it’s present in 75% of the population in that state anyway.  Not a clear signpost.

I DIDN’T LIKE MONSANTO BEFORE THIS.

This ol’ world sucks a mop.  But it’s the only one we got, and I need to help make it better.

 

Dawww Buster

Sweet little nose kiss for Margot when he came home this morning, it was adorable.  Margot is acting off colour, but she just misses Jeff’s keyboard as a perch I think, and she did eat this morning so she can’t be that bad.

Played with Buster downstairs for a while.

No writing progress, but I finished the bridge for Blues for an Orange Sky.

 

36294

Laughed SO HARD.

Buster likes to hide behind the shower curtain and attack my backscratcher through it. This morning Miss Margot joined the partay, and Buster’s response was to jump up and shove Miss Margot off the edge of the bath. She slid to the floor, looking hard done by, and then he leaped over her head and fled the bathroom in as hilarious a display of athletics as I’ve ever seen.

Then Margot followed him and slapped the end of Buster’s tail for spite, (the only part of him still visible from inside the bathroom and a completely pointless effort, since she’s about as effective in that regard as a plushtoy) which made him run down the stairs at about 30 k. Margot is sitting at the top of the stairs quacking to herself in a very self-satisfied sort of way.

 

It was lovely to see Alex, he was in great shape. Katie is well but always clinging to the underside of exhaustion. Her SO is working and I am sure he’s happy to be working, I know I would be.

Blues for an orange sky

I don’t want to die here
not if I have a choice
took almost three months for NASA to know
I still had a voice
First day was bad, got inside
half urine and half blood
Then I set myself on fire
to make a little mud

I got blues for an orange sky x2

You think you know alone?
I’ll give you alone
standing at sunset under two moons
upon this barren stone
Captain o my captain come back and make it right
get a steely eyed missile man to calculate your flight

I got blues for an orange sky x2

36284

Biscotti will be distributed in Victoria to the Richly Deserving, and my mOm has already made a good start on it. pOp too I do suspect.

Hey that was HUMOUR YESTERDAY.  More than two gerunds in a sentence is a clue. Of course I’m angry about drivers in Vancouver, it’s impossible to live here in any capacity and not be.  But not head for the gunracks mad, that’s too difficult.

Katie and Alex are due here later this morning.  I’ll try to get her to send some pics while she’s here.

 

 

35891 – Vancouver driving rant

Vancouver drivers are really random. Something like forty thousand people turn up here every year and they’ve never driven in these conditions, you know, the special hell that is Vancouver conditions, which can change, with Vancouver bicyclists, who are all masochists, and Vancouver pedestrians, who are all on their cell phones and wearing clothing that indicates the citizenry is participating in some particularly aggressive act of mass mourning, or possibly a wish to be killed by a car and thus miss the rest of the Vancouver winter, or perhaps these newcomers to Vancouver don’t drive at all, or have never driven in any country where human life has more meaning than the ten bucks they need to give you a decent funeral including a reading from a dude in a dress. So in addition to the fucking assholes who know what they are doing and are only too happy to demonstrate it in their noisy, whining chariots of penis worship, we have a broad assortment of clueless wimps with baloney skins for tires.

Vancouver drivers are the kind of people who will weld their brakes stopping for a squirrel and then clip a granny at a crosswalk at seventy k without blinking.

Vancouver drivers have such pretty cars! Such expensive cars! none of which seem to have functioning turn signals.

Vancouver drivers treat the distracted driving laws passed in 2010 as “goidloins”. Everybody knows you should not text and drive, and virtually everybody I know with the exception of my son, my brother, my ex and me does it (we had a family member killed by distracted driving so we’re REAL crabby on the subject.)

I’ve asked cabbies to pull over to finish their conversation and had them argue with me! I’ve had cabbies try to find out where they are going on a cell phone GPS while driving dangerously and arguing with me about whether they should pull over or not.  The guy was so fierce he threw me out of the cab, and the licensing commission never returned my call, so they go on the list of Vancouver drivers I fucking hate. I didn’t have to pay for the ride though, so I guess I won that round. And I’ve lost track of how many cabbies drive away before my belt is on and ignore me when I tell them to pull over when I’m done.  Is it misogyny or stupidity? Why not both?

I hate people who don’t know what fucking lane they are supposed to be in. ON A BRIDGE.  How can you not know what fucking lane you’re supposed to be in when you’re crossing one of the lower mainland’s fine death traps, like the Patullo Bridge, which has such narrow lanes that I’m constantly getting other people’s side mirrors stuck in my teeth, and where some fucker in a truck from Alberta did actually try to kill me last year. Jeff toooo.

I hate the fucking fuckers who fucking completely fucked the fucking intersection at Willingdon and Deer Lake Parkway. Those ratfondlers should be dipped in boiling recycled cooking oil and have their interfered-with corpses left for the crows.

I hate with the force of a gamma ray burst all those festering hemorrhoidal pustules on Satan’s ass who designed the signage for the roads coming back from the Tsawwassen Ferry.

Sessile B de Me

Day 491 of being a grandparent.  It certainly makes more kinds of fun possible.

Not really feeling much like moving. There are leftovers to be et.  I made a regular size batch of biscotti and am hoping I will be able to forward a few to Victoria.  I need to send at least six to Juliana and her krewe and Editrix should get at least two although I suspect she’ll want at least four for comparison and so she and her esposo can reasonably discuss them.

They did not rise properly but they are still quite airy and crunchy.  It’s always something…