I wasn't turned radioactive after all, only fluorescent. And the news is a bit ambivalent. Not bad, but not dreamland perfect. I have to return to the hospital on Wednesday to be seen by the retina expert with the possibility of laser. Not much. There is a very small region in the right eye that seems to be sporting new blood vessels and they need to be checked. It might all end up with me being put on watch, just in case or they may deal with it that same day.

It's not actually a bad result. Small possible damage is way better (in my book) than vast definite damage. My eye has come out of this very lightly.

Right now, though, my main beef is time. I don't have much. It gets eaten by turning yellow and meeting lasers. In other words, the more science fictional my life is, the less time I have to actually write the science fiction.

When my eyes are back to normal later tonight (I look like someone from an opium den at this moment, and pages are blindingly white) I shall get some more work done. I can't do it on Wednesday, after all, since the morning is teaching and the afternoon is hospital.

On Wednesday evening I get a rare treat and am off to Geosciences Australia. Do not get between me and my treat! (that last was to my eyes and to my health in general)

Step by step I progress through this maze. It does have an exit point and that exit point is getting closer. The closer it gets, though, the more juggling I have to do. I have to get to Mawson post office, for instance, to collect the last insurance thingie this week (for they won't hold it for me beyond that) and I have to subsequently get to JB hifi and sort out camera cover and memory and stuff. It all has to be done sequentially, too - I can't reverse the order, for the insurance doesn't work that way. I wonder if I can do the camera case and etc alongside sorting my heater issues, on Friday, after the dentist? Hmm.

I'll manage it. And then I shall heave a sigh of relief when it's all managed. Until then, I rather suspect I shall whinge.

The 100 things blogging challenge.

Paging Nicola Marlow?
First woman to command Royal Navy frigate takes helm.

This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1657793.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.

My eyes are being pesky today and I'm not even at the hospital yet! Also, my fingers won't type what I've told them to.

Despite this, I only have 160 words (plus much revision) on one of the three logjam pieces. If I can send it tomorrow, that will be one burden I do not carry. I'll have run out of excuses not to do the other two logjammed bits of prose, mind you...

My BiblioBuffet column is already up: http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bookish-dreaming It's a pure nostalgia piece, about manuscripts, mostly.

It's Monday morning and already I have a scholarly quibble to make. This means I'm off to a good start this week. It's all a matter of whether the work of Pirenne counts. The author I'm reading argues that looking at the slow and long patterns is postmodern, from the Annales School (especially Fernand Braudel). But Pirenne ought to be credited for that, surely, and, even more surely, he was writing earlier? This means that any notion of flow change or a different length dynamic or even no change at all over a certain period predates the second half of the twentieth century? What this means to me is that the author with whom I quibble is creating false "There was and then there was." History in binary - with simple choices - seldom works, but this time it woks even less seldom simply because the writer in question is basing a part of his/her case on Pirenne's ideas not being around until a half century later.

Unfortunately, this is a review volume and I need to think of a polite way of explaining that it undermines the argument when one tangles the historiography. This is what I've been putting off doing. It's not a bad book, but it really does have a couple of rather big flaws.

Hello :) I'm writing an article focused on posters and advertising and I have stumbled upon a vocabulary problem.

I'd like to somehow refer to the people seeing the poster, but I can't think of a right word. I mean, if I were writing about a TV show, I'd use "viewer" for the person watching it, but I have no idea what to use for a person looking at a picture.

Thanks for any help! :)

http://intlxpatr.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/never-for-acclaim-always-for-country/

http://intlxpatr.wordpress.com/?p=13679

This weekend the CIA also honors fallen warriors, and in a new level of transparency, shares some of those names. It’s devastating to lose a loved one in the military, and I cannot imagine what it was like to lose a loved one and not to even be able to tell people your loved one was lost in service to his or her country. Heartfelt thanks to all those who have served silently and anonymously and sacrificed identity and history for our nation. You know who you are.

From ABC News:

Out of the shadows in death: The CIA honors its fallen

By Suzanne Kelly CNN – When you’re a spy, you have to accept the fact that everything you do will go unnoticed by most people during your life. Sometimes that secrecy even follows you in death, with a simple star carved into a marble wall at Langley being the only memorial to your service.

Sometimes though, in death, the names come out, along with just enough information to piece together a glimpse of what life — and death — have been like for CIA spies over the past three decades.

This past Monday, 15 names were added to what’s known by insiders as the “Book of Honor.” When a name is inscribed in the book, it allows family and friends of the fallen to publicly acknowledge in general terms, how their loved ones spent their lives, and how they died.

The names and brief stories shared with a crowd said to number in the hundreds gathered in the CIA lobby, told a story of an Agency spread far and wide; the story of an Agency not only consumed with tracking down terrorists, but sometimes becoming victims of the hunted.

Jeffrey R. Patneau, described by CIA Director David Petraeus as a “young can-do officer,” was killed in Yemen in September 2008. Yemen has become a hotbed of al Qaeda activity and is where a recent al Qaeda in the Arabian Pensinsula (AQAP) plot to bring down an airliner with a difficult-to-detect new explosive material, was recently foiled by undercover operatives.

Five of those honored this year died on April 18, 1983, when terrorists targeted the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. Phyliss Nancy Faraci had also been one of the last four Americans evacuated from the Mekong Delta when Saigon fell, according to an Agency spokesman. She died in Beirut along with Deborah M. Hixson, Frank J. Johnston, and a married couple, James F. and Monique N. Lewis. Petraeus noted the Embassy bombing as the place where the Agency “first caught sight of the adversary we face today.”

To get a sense of just how widespread the CIA presence has been over the years, Matthew K. Gannon was killed in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; Molly N. Hardy was killed in the 1998 suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi; Leslianne Shedd died when hijackers downed the plane she was on over the Indian Ocean in November 1996; Jacqueline K. Van Landingham was killed in Pakistan in March 1995; Barry S. Castiglione died during the ocean rescue of a colleague in 1992 in the waters off El Salvador; Lawrence N. Freedman was killed in Somalia in December 1992; Thomas M. Jennings, Jr. died in Bosnia in 1997; Freddie R. Woodruff was killed in Georgia in 1993; and Robert W. Woods died in a plane crash during a humanitarian mission to Ethiopia in 1989.

Petraeus told the group of gathered mourners and friends that the officers who have died for the mission “all heard the same call to duty and answered it without hesitation — never for acclaim, always for country.”

One more star has been carved into that wall so far this year, bringing the number of stars representing fallen officers to 103. We don’t know who the latest person was, or how they died, but maybe someday, we will.

Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Read more: http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/news/national/out-of-the-shadows-in-death-the-cia-honors-its-fallen#ixzz1w5kbjH5x

http://www.lizbatty.co.uk/2012/05/27/captain-america-11/

http://www.lizbatty.co.uk/?p=168

Public service post: Captain America: Winter Soldier: Ultimate Collection has one page where the speech bubbles are duplicated from a previous page. This is the correct version of that one page, in the hope that the next person to google for something like “Error in Captain America Winter Soldier corrected speech bubbles” will have an easier time of it than I did.

http://glossographia.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/chasing-voices/

http://glossographia.wordpress.com/?p=722

Check out this fascinating trailer for a forthcoming documentary: Chasing Voices: The Story of John Peabody Harrington.  Harrington was one of the most enigmatic and interesting anthropological linguists of the 20th century and a recorder of data on hundreds of California languages.   Obviously most of us don’t do work quite like this anymore, collecting and documenting virtually for its own sake, but you can’t possibly dismiss its value.   I will be interested to see how much his ex-wife, the anthropologist Carobeth Laird, whose memoir Encounter with an Angry God (1975) recounts much about their troubled marriage and Harrington’s own troubled personality, features in this new film.    I know of Harrington’s work most directly not through his work on California, but from his ethnographic comments on modern Maya numeration (Harrington 1957), published late in his life.  Martha Macri at UC Davis is the PI of an NSF-funded project on his life and work.

(H/T: Mr. Verb)

Harrington, John P. 1957. Valladolid Maya enumeration. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 164, no. 54, pp. 241-278. Washington: United States Government Printing Office.

Laird, Carobeth. 1975. Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press.

Filed under: Linguistics

The brief but glorious summer continues. I read part of a book on the not-so-busy north strand and swam when the tide was high on the crowded harbour beach. Waves too high and wild to properly swim, but the water warmer (to perception) even than yesterday, almost temperate. Some Polish lads were peeling pink, and some black lads teased me in a friendly manner about going for a dip, and dozens of skinny Irish children screamed in the shallows and jumped into breaking surf.

But soon the summer will disappear, and we will wonder, "Was it all a dream?" "Does the sun even exist?" "Perhaps it was a hallucination brought on by chemicals in the rain." But by the Peeling Tomato shade of healing sunburn, we shall know it was true, and that once, once, the sun appeared in glory.

And the memory of light will endure behind the clouds of another year. *strikes a grand and tragic pose*

Therefore let us continue on towards suppertime. And have cake and grapes, because it is summer.

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Everybody seems to be at cons, or on vacation, so I thought I'd play the Time Machine game.

Last night, went to see Avengers. Since there's no use talking about it without spoilers, here's the cut and the spoiler warning.
( Read more... )

http://londonreviewofbreakfasts.blogspot.com/2012/05/special-dispatch-breakfasts-of-paris.html

Featuring:

La Salle a Manger
136 Rue Mouffetard
75005 Paris
(+33)1 55 43 91 99

Eggs & Co
11 Rue Bernard Palissy
75006 Paris
(+33)1 45 44 02 52
www.eggsandco.fr

Breakfast in America
17 Rue des Écoles
75005 Paris
(+33)1 43 54 50 28
www.breakfast-in-america.com

by Seggolène Royal

Three-hour lunches. Romantic dinners. These are the meals for which the French are justly celebrated. Breakfast, however, is another story. The English, our kind neighbors to the north, cast aspersions on the quality of our breakfasts, simply because we don’t do a cooked breakfast. As a native New Yorker, I understand what it is to be proud of your local breakfast traditions. But breakfast in France, done right, can often prove to be the best meal of the day.

I first breakfasted in France— really breakfasted— when I was twenty years old and had been sent to Besançon, not far from the Swiss border, to observe a French family in their native habitat. I was assigned to a lovely couple, the Dorniers, whose children had grown up and moved out of the house. Their elder daughter, Aline, had left behind a roomful of white Gallimard Folio paperbacks, inspiring a collector’s fever in me that has yet to abate. I woke up that first morning to discover, laid out on the table, several baguettes, a brick of salted butter, and every jar of jam that had ever entered the house, from extra large pots of Bonne Maman to the smallest sample-sized jar, in flavors ranging from the pedestrian (strawberry) to the exotic (what is a coing?). There was also honey, which I had never before contemplated pairing with bread and butter, and Nutella, which I had. They served me coffee in a bowl and I fell in love. After that semester abroad, I moved back to France as soon as I could.

Lo these many years later, I have realized that the best breakfast in France is still to be had at the Dorniers’ house, and the second-best at my own. But for those mornings when there’s no more milk and I’m out of Nutella— here are the guidelines I use for breakfast dining in Paris.

Part One: Don’t

1. Don’t trust places that look cute: they will either disappoint or overcharge, or, more often, both. La Salle à Manger is an outwardly adorable cozy little café on the rue Mouffetard, approximately five minutes’ walk from my apartment. I pass it all the time but until recently had never gone in, not even in its previous incarnation as a Pain Quotidien, not even in the days before my gluten allergy was activated. The reason for this is: communal pots of jam. I cannot, cannot abide using a jar of jam someone else has used. Not even when that someone else is someone I live with. I am the only person I trust to be meticulous enough not to leave leftover crumbs and glops of butter inside the jar.

But that’s not my primary problem with this place: my real issue is with the service, the quality, and the quantity of the offerings. It turns out the post-corporate occupation of this space is as impersonal as those communal vats of jam. The waitress seemed annoyed to find us seated in her section and proved unwilling to address such questions as “can I get this without toast and with orange juice instead?” Menu exegesis was evidently not in her job description.

Our food arrived in fits; first the included cup of café crème, then what seemed like ages later came a soft-boiled egg, which was cold and congealed by the time the toast was provided; then a sad plastic dish of fruit salad no doubt straight from a can, involving two bits of green melon, half a strawberry, a piece of apple, and two half-shriveled grapes on their way to raisinhood. The orange juice arrived last, slightly too late for the party. There was something grey in my fromage blanc. For this I ate gluten?

This unfortunate experience is alas representative of the recent decline in quality amongst the shopkeepers of the rue Mouffetard. The influx of tourists has increased past saturation point and the original shopkeepers have been priced out of their rents, to be replaced by opportunists with no compunction about raising their prices and lowering the quality of their products. The things I could tell you about my experiences of late buying quiche, avocados, poulets fermiers, and baguettes would make a Francophile weep. Basically, it’s time to move.

2. Don’t mortgage your house for a plate of eggs. Eggs & Co (formerly known as Coco & Co), housed in a shallow duplex space in a side street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is loaded with personality: exposed beams (16th or 17th century I’d guess), with warped ancient floorboards that tilt the upstairs tables on such an incline that you’ll feel like you’ve gone down the rabbit hole and come out into some rustically lopsided Parisian garret (see rule #1). Egg-inspired posters line the walls (“Des cocottes coquettes qui caquettent” [“Cackling coquettish eggs en cocotte”] surrounded by drawings of diabolical-looking eggs). There was a line outside of people waiting for an uneven table or rickety barstool, but they didn’t hurry us out. (After all, we had a reservation.)

The cheapest brunch menu was 22 euros, which is a fair price for brunch in Paris, and even a bargain when you realize how much food is included: a hot drink, your choice of eggs (prepared four different ways: with chèvre and spinach; with mushrooms, bacon, and coriander; with bacon, parmesan, and chives, or with parma ham, gruyère and chives), one large, thick pancake, and a fruit salad. I opted for the 25 euro menu, which gave me the option of having eggs Florentine (I’m a sucker for a poached egg). Everything was delicious.

But I didn’t want “everything,” I wanted eggs Florentine, à la carte, minus all the other stuff. Alas, only brunch is served on the weekends, thus guaranteeing at least 22 euros per cover. So while this brunch might possibly be worth splashing out on, I don’t like not having the choice of whether to splash out or not. Do go here during the week, I say.

3. Don’t assume because the joint is American, or promising an American breakfast, that said breakfast will be any good. The best thing I can say about Breakfast in America is that they have bottomless cups of American coffee (popularly known as jus de chausettes, but je m’en fous). On my last visit the bacon was fatty and flaccid; the toast disappointingly small (elf-sized, really) not to mention cold and slightly overdone. I’ve never been impressed by the pancakes. The acoustics are terrible, and the nostalgia value of the diner decor isn’t strong enough to make me voluntarily spend time here, though the people who work there are very nice, and all speak English.

4. Whatever you do, don’t order a bagel anywhere in Paris.

In Part Two, we’ll look at some proper breakfasts.

Finally watching Sherlock S2 -- there was an extreme close-up where I thought "Hey, Benedict Cumberbatch has a coloboma in one eye," only I didn't think that exactly because I couldn't recall the word 'coloboma.' Someone else spotted it, but now that I look more closely, I think it's a heterochromia above the right pupil. Yeah, overthinking this.

green_trilobite spotted Alonzo Frame/George. No missing those ears.

Hey, isn't that Chipo Chung (Chantho, Fortune-teller) as a reporter? There are only a dozen actors in England, aren't there?