Still enjoying my vacation. Spent a few days in Baltimore/VA visiting my grandmother and other family–it’s good to see my cousin after his 2 years in the Peace Corps. Lots of pictures were taken with the new camera Michael got my for Christmas, but I haven’t installed the software and downloaded the pictures yet.

Why haven’t I?

Because I’m reading Robin Hobb’s ‘Tawny Man’ series. We’d been waiting for the third book to come out in paperback, so now we have the third book, I’m absorbed. (In fact the only reason I’m not reading right now is that I have to go to the grocery store, and knew that if I picked up my book, I’ll not make it to the store this morning.

So no serious posts (in fact I’m hardly checking my e-mail), no dwelling on the news, just enjoying my vacation. Hope that others are able to do the same.

No, I really haven’t fallen off the earth, I’m just enjoying my vacation.

We got snow flurries Christmas day, and snow fall the day after. So that’s something anyway.

When not eating, I’ve been catching up on my reading: Robert Silverberg’s “Legends II”, The newest Thieves’ World, books two and three of the Lemony Snicket series, the latest Sword and Sorceress… I love it when my toughest decisions are what to read next. Terry Pratchett or Robin Hobb?

Hope your holiday is just as wonderful!

Yup.

I love Christmas.

Just finished wrapping Michael’s gifts, and just a few things left to bake.

The only thing missing is snow, but you can’t have everything.

When Michael comes home, we’ll decorate the tree, I have egg nog, and cookies, and a Christmas tree, and friends and family I love.

So really, I do have everything important.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Thirty-five cookbooks and not a single recipe for nut rolls. Do they have some other name that I don’t know? Is there something blindingly obvious that I’m missing?

I love nut rolls, but have never made them before. I’ve got nuts in the freezer, so all I need is a recipe.

Grrr…

Okay, it’s the 22nd and I haven’t made a single Christmas baked good yet.

This means:
1) I have no time to post
2) If you’re in town, you shouldn’t stop by until tomorrow if you want any cookies. After that, however…

What am I planning on making?
Lemon bars, amaretto cake, pumpkin cookies, peanut butter blossoms, sugar cookies, m&m cookies, pumpkin roll, rugelach, and whatever else looks good.

Saturday, November 13 1:24 p.m. How rude.

Saturday, October 16 4:06 p.m. Topless frisbee players were reported at the Community Park. The field was closed, and the bare-chested disc flingers covered up their immodest wiggly bits.

6:13 p.m. But at least a few - actually, 15 - of the once-brazen topless athletes remained behind, smoking and drinking.

Year’s Best Fantasy edited by David G. Hartwell (2001)

I’m a sucker for short story collections–I love short stories, and fantasy collections are my favorite, so if I come across a collection, I usually buy it. This has, of course, led to some rather poor choices, such as “The Sorcerer’s Academy” and “Earth, Air, Fire, Water”, neither of which I’ve been able to finish. But for the most part collections tend to be good, and help to give me that reading fix, at times when I just can’t get involved in a novel.

Read More about Year’s Best Fantasy

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (1990)

Thomas the Rhymer is one of the books that managed to be precisely what I want to read. The tale is of Thomas the Rhymer, minstrel who falls for the queen of Elfland. The story is told from four different points of view: The longest narrative is from the point of view of Thomas, but the other three are those around Thomas, two of whom are an older couple who take Thomas in.

Read More about Thomas the Rhymer

So I’ve had it with FedEx.

We order a lot fo stuff through the mail (in fact most of my Christmas shopping was mail order) and so we get a lot of packages delivered to our house. Mostly it’s UPS and USPS that deliver, but sometimes it’s FedEx.

So how did FedEx incur my wrath? Well, they delivered a package the end of last month. I signed the tag (which I missed the first day, because it was a door tag, and I usually look for the UPS stickies) to have the package left. Which they did.

Unfortunately, they left the package behind the storm door, on a day when we had severe wind warnings the entire day, so they storm door was blown open and damaged. Michael immediately called FedEx, who said they would send someone out to look at the door and they’d get back to us.

No big deal.

Except that they never got back to us.

So last Monday I called, and was told they’d call me back that night.

No phone call Monday or Tuesday.

Wednesday I started to get mad. I called the national number, and got the local number to call. Where no one answered. For two days.

Friday I called the national number again and told the very nice person that I was starting to get irritated that no one was calling me back. They said someone would call me right back. Which they did. And told me that someone would be to my house to fix my door Friday or Saturday.

It’s now Tuesday morning and my door is still broken.

Now please understand me here. I’m not mad that it’s taking them so long to fix the door. I understand that it’s the holidays and people are incredibly busy. What makes me mad is telling me that something will be done at a certain time, and then NOT DOING IT.

If they’d have said, “I’m sorry, we’re really busy right now, we won’t have time to fix your door until after the holidays,” I would have been fine with that. I really would. I understand being busy. But don’t tell me that you’re going to do something and then not do it.

So if the door isn’t fixed tomorrow, I’m going to call the national people again and voice my displeasure.

And I’m not going to deal with FedEx ever again if I don’t have to.

Mere words cannot experess how much I dislike Donald Rumsfeld.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld faced renewed criticism Sunday from lawmakers, including one prominent Republican, after he said he has not personally signed letters sent to family members of troops killed in action.

Rumsfeld said armor was being produced as quickly as “humanly possible” — which turned out not to be true. Some lawmakers said they have long been telling the White House that manufacturers were not working at capacity and were offering to make more.

Yet Bush has ASKED this man to stay on the cabinet. He lets Colin Powell leave, but asked Rumsfeld to stay.

Sometimes I think there is no justice in this world.

There is an article in today’s NY Times, about Iraq, American soldiers, and battle stress. It looks at how soldiers are adjusting after returning from Iraq, adjusting to civilian life after living in a battle zone.

I’ve complained releatedly about how I think that our soldiers and returning veterans are not being treated as they should by our country. The article, although not necessarily addressing all the issues that I feel are important, does make several important points.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

…

As of Wednesday (December 15, 2004) 5,229 Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq. Through July, nearly 31,000 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom had applied for disability benefits for injuries or psychological ailments, according to the Department Veterans Affairs.

This article, although highlighting some of the problems, ignores how recent cuts in VA benefits are going to affect the issue.

We’re sending soldiers off without proper armament, and although the advances in medical technology that are saving the lives of our soldiers are amazing, I wonder whether we’re spending our money in the best way possible. I guess you have to understand that I’m coming from a public health perspective here–we’ve put the VA on the chopping block, and are closing VA hospitals. It’s wonderful that we’re saving all these lives, but I have to wonder whether we’re shorting the vast majority of soldiers to save the lives of a few.

Of course it’s not really a zero sum game here. It shouldn’t have to be either or. But I don’t see how we can do both, unless we’re willing to raise taxes to pay for these expenses.

And I don’t see the “yellow ribbon brigade” interesting in doing that, at all.

Send ‘em off and make sure to support them by blindly following the CIC and demonizing those who speak dissent, but when it comes right down to it–when it comes down to making a small financial sacrifice for those who are sacrificing far more… Well, that’s just not in their worldview.

View a list of the soldiers killed in Iraq.

Visit the Digital Memorial for those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq

Happy Birthday to my Mom!

(And coincidentally Beethoven)

Random Quizziness
(more…)

Diet and Alzheimer’s Plaques

There have been various studies that have found that reduced calorie diets can have positive effects upon human health, such as increased longevity. The latest is research that has found that in mice reduced calorie diets my slow Alzheimer’s disease.

I find it fascinating, the effect that diet has upon our health. It’s as if human physiology evolved specifically for a low calorie diet, and the modern wealth of food is having all sorts of unintended consequences.

If modern society actually progresses to the point that we rid ourselves of starvation and hunger, I wonder whether we will continue to evolve in such a way that will allow our bodies to deal better with high calorie diets with no periods of starvation?

Insulin for Alcoholism?

Drunken fruit flies have led to the discovery that insulin may determine susceptibility to alcohol. If confirmed in humans — and the two species share about two-thirds of their genes — the finding suggests a promising way to treat alcoholism using drugs that control insulin activity.

Living in the US Makes You Fat

After less than a year in the United States, the prevalence of obesity among foreign-born persons was 8 percent. In contrast, the body mass index of foreign-born respondents living in the United States for at least 15 years approached that of U.S.-born respondents, with 41 percent at normal weight, 38 percent overweight and 19 percent obese – compared with 41 percent, 35 percent and 22 percent of the U.S.-born, respectively.

I’m not really sure how this fits into science news, but what the heck:
‘Carol of the Bells’ wasn’t originally a Christmas song

So the part of the song I like best–the melody, was originally written by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovich. For someone who is not a fan of handbells, I do like to hear this song played that way.

And last but not least, Eat Your Christmas Tree, You’ll Feel Better.

Researchers have identified a group of anti-inflammatory compounds in the bark of the Scotch pine — widely used for Christmas trees — that they say could be developed into food supplements or drugs for treating arthritis and pain.

Okay, so I exaggerate a little, but it’s still interesting how we continue to discover that the plants around us contain chemicals that may serve our medical needs.

Skeletal systems of cartoon characters
(via Making Light)

I Need This On a T-Shirt:
“Impaired by Wordiness”

verbose \ver-BOHSS\ adjective
1 : containing more words than necessary : wordy; also : impaired by wordiness
2 : given to wordiness

From Merriam Webster

We finally watched Buffy Season 7 this weekend (and I do mean we watched it all between Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening–I felt slightly motion sick by the time we were done) and I have to admit that I came away feeling a little disappointed. Although I was pleased with the ending, I just didn’t feel that Season 7 was anywhere near as good as previous seasons, and I also had a problem with some of the things that happened–they just seemed inconsistent. (i.e. Buffy continually protects Spike, but has to kill Anya without giving her a chance.)

But besides that, we enjoyed it, and now we have Angel, seasons 1 through 3 to watch over Christmas break. (I’m hoping that it is, at least for most of it, episodic, so we don’t have those fits where we HAVE to watch six straight episodes to find out what happend. And it’s not just Buffy that did that: Deep Space Nine did the same thing at the start of Season 6 and the end of Season 7. Once you start watching you can’t quit until it’s resolved.

Unless of course you’re one of those freaks that likes suspense and waiting.

And I was really bothered by one thing: Why would you have to get your driver’s license renewed in California every year after losing an eye? There’s no such regulation here in West (by God) Virginia. At least for people who are blind in one eye, and I don’t see why there would be a difference between the two. Some I’m rather curious as to whether that is a real rule, or just something they made up. Because I can’t see any reason for that to be a rule. (And I do have a reason for saying this–I have a family member who is blind in one eye, so I really don’t understand why there would be such a regulation. But then I suppose California is weird like that.)

I highly recommend the Q & A with Stephen Hawking in the NY Times.

Do you feel that scientists correct themselves as often as they should?
More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.

What is your I.Q.?
I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers

I like Stephen Hawking!

Michael wants to make more bourbon balls. Apparently the fact that our kitchen cart is groaning under the weight of their alcoholic goodness isn’t enough. He needs MORE!

So I needed to pick up corn syrup. I walked up and down the baking aisle three time, and couldn’t find it. I found honey and white sugar and brown sugar and artificial sweetener, but no corn syrup. And I couldn’t come up with a plausible alternative. I don’t think honey would work very well, and I don’t feel like cooking down sugar water into a syrup, because I don’t think standing over a stove stirring sugar water sounds like a lot of fun.

So I walked back to the fruit and juice aisle. Nothing. Nor was it in the cookie and milk aisle.

So I walked back to the only aisle I hadn’t traversed, the bread and cereal aisle. There it was, next to pancake syrup, which confused me until I realized that there must be people out there who eat corn syrup on pancakes and such.

(shudder)

It was then that I realized that I’m becoming a food snob.

If I’m going to have pancakes, I’m going to make them from scratch, and if I’m going to go to all that trouble, I want maple syrup. If I’m going to bake something then I want fresh ingredients, good chocolate, and Madagascar Bourbon vanilla.

Now if only I felt the same way about making dinner…

http://ww12.e-tractions.com/snowglobe/globe.htm

I ran across two very interesting articles this morning while sitting at the Dr’s office.

‘GM cocaine grown in Colombia’
I found this fascinating since I just recently read about Round-Up resistant coca.

I can’t say I’m surprised about either story. It would seem to me that coca growers have as much money as any company doing transgenic research, so why should they be any different?

Once again, I have to wonder how different things would be if drugs were legalized, which would then legalize coca production. What might that do for countries like Columbia?

Second article I also came across in the DA, and also heard something about this last night on The World:
Troops grill Rumsfeld over Iraq
What bothered me most about the bit I heard on the world, was the statement that troops weren’t having to travel in unarmored vehicles. This is, to the best of my knowledge, completely false. A woman who works in this building was very upset last month, because he son told her that he had just travelled through Iraq in an unarmored convoy. Neither had any reason to make this up, and it squares with everything else I’ve read and heard: That are troops are just not being given the armor they need.

Mr Rumsfeld added that vehicle armour might not provide total protection from the perils faced by soldiers in Iraq - such as roadside bombs.

Of course not. Nothing can provide total protection. But an armored vehicle has to be a hell of a lot more protection than an unarmored one!

How (HOW?!) can we send out soldiers into harms way without appropriate equipment? I’ve complained about this before, and it still makes no sense to me.

It also makes me very angry at the fools who sport “yellow ribbons” to “support the troops” but could care less beyond that what happens. I don’t see them saying anything about cuts in combat pay, or cuts in veterans’ benefits.

But they’re all for tax cuts.

(Thanks Erin!)

We’ve got tickets to see Ani Defranco tonight at the CAC.

Which explains why I’m tired and just want to go home and lie on the couch reading.

I’ve actually been reading. At least after we get our daily dose of DS9. (We’re holding off on starting Season 7 of Buffy and any of the Angel, but that may start this weekend.) But I’ve read some good anthologies, which I’ve been meaning to write more about, but have not yet managed to do so. But for now, I highly recommend ‘Firebirds’ edited by Sharyn November as well as Ellen Kushner’s ‘Thomas the Rhymer’. And despite my earlier protestations, I picked up Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword And Sorceress XXI. Mostly because Diana L. Paxson has taken over as editor, although partially because I have a hard time finding anthologies that I really like, and I’ve always enjoyed the Sword And Sorceress series. The other book I’m reading is ‘Year’s Best Fantasy I’ edited by David Hartwell.

And I’m not quite sure what I’m going to read after that. I’ve got several mystery series that look good, as well as (ahem) some new fantasy series that I haven’t read before. Although the temptation is to go back and reread ‘Thieves World’… HEY! VOLUME II IS OUT! MUST BUY! (runs off)

It’s the week of pictures and paintings with very strange eyes. The 2004 WVU basketball poster I find eerie, because from far away it looks like there’s something wrong with the player’s right eye–it’s just a little too black.

And outside the Dentistry area in Health Sciences there are paintings of what I presume are former Deans and such, going back years. And for most of them they eyes aren’t quite right. It’s as if one eye was looking in one direction and one eye in another, which might be understandable in one person, but for the school of dentistry to have six or eight Deans (or whoever) all with lazy eye seems slightly improbable.

And I asked other people to look, just to make sure it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t. (Either that or everyone is afraid of me and agreeing in the hopes I’ll go away.)

So now I need to look at all the pictures and posters I go by, to see if tthis is something I’ve been missing all these years.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day.

In 1941, Japanese planes made a surprise attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 and wounding 1,178. Twenty-one ships were sunk or damaged, including the USS Arizona, which remains on the harbor floor, and the USS West Virginia, which was eventually refloated, repaired, and rejoined the fleet towards the end of the war.

The following websites may be of interest:

For information about the Pearl Harbor Attack, including ships lost and damaged and casualties, as well as other resources.
Pearl Harbor Remembered, including survivor’s remembrances.
The official US Navy Pearl Harbor website.

Information about the attack at Pearl Harbor, including images of the dispatch sent by Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC).
A site about the USS West Virginia, including pictures of the ship from the 20s through the “mothballing” of the ship in the 1950s (She was later broken up and sold for scrap).
Website for the USS Arizona, from the University of Arizona, including a brief hisotry and online exhibits.
Here you can find the text and excerpts of the audio of President Roosevelt’s speech in response to Pearl Harbor, and the other attacks that day, calling for war.

Here’s something for Morgantownies.

Go to this Health Sciences page.

Click on the link that says Photo Tour.

Scroll through the pictures and look for the picture “Medical Center 1960″

Figure out what’s wrong?

You’d think they’d have been able to find a picture from the 1960s instead of using one that is pretty obviously from the late 70s early 80s.