Just got home from archery and dinner (small party tonight--it was just netcurmudgeon and me). I have made an improvement, arching-wise; now I need to work on my consistency. But on the good shots (which are coming more frequently) I can feel how much more control I have. Some of this is better and more consistent stance and breath awareness; some of it is steadier aim as the climbing and kayaking makes me stronger.

Aim is dynamic. Like balance.

Like everything else in life.

Dinner was at Rocco's, my favorite local Italian place, and I have enough carbohydrates in my system now to run a marathon tomorrow. (Best wild mushroom ravioli evar. Testimonial!)

And now I have three and a half totally unscheduled days in front of me, and my roomie will by on a white water trip, so I can have a great big introvert fit--which is an incredible luxury. I have a lot of work to do on those days, but the mere fact of not having to wedge it in around other obligations (obligations, I hasten to add, that I mostly enjoy) makes it seem almost leisurely. I'm also going to make zucchini bread and banana bread, by god. Because I can.

And right now, I need to finish reading a book I have to write a review for.

It's a great life if you don't weaken.

On entering the bus station, built in 1988, I thought to myself that I still think of it as the "new" bus station.

I then discovered that the escalators were not working. I couldn't recall the last time they were working when I dropped by but since I always drop by at the same time, it could be I was seeing e.g. a daily maintenance shut-down, so I asked about it. The escalators are off-line indefinitely because they are so unspeakably ancient Grand River Transit is having trouble getting the right parts to fix them.

I bought my August bus pass and hobbled on home, occasionally stopping to wave my cane at passers-by.

3.7 million litres of oil are on their way down the Kalamazoo River to Lake Michigan.

On it's own this wouldn't be worrisome but Lake Michigan connects to Lake Huron, which means Canadian resources could be at risk of contamination.

Super hero comics have been nominated for the Hugo before.

I'm not saying those strips in particular should get the Hugo, just that Hark! A Vagrant is clearly something that falls within the set of things that can be nominated for the Hugo.

What it says. Go look.

Thanks to Shawn Raiford for the pointer.

Finally got my scanner hooked up, and I promised earlier that I’d put up a couple pictures of the MRI I had done. Little images are clickable and go to bigger ones. My neurologist studied every image in the whole pack (pages and pages, WAY too many to print) and concluded that I have a [...]

Roommate James William Davis charged with Steve Perry's murder.

In my last blog entry, I asked "What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?" It occurs to me that besides the obvious ramifications we've... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

Jal is off with his professor, so that the player running Jal can DM. The former DM is now playing Sonlin, a sword-mage.



Having defeated the necromancer, unified the artifact and cleared the party's names with the Breeland intelligence services, the party found itself with time to kill. They were soon contacted by House Cannith, noted industrialists, who had a job for us.

Someone with access to inside knowledge, brute strength (although within human limits) and priest magic managed to walk off with a magic anvil and hammer. Cannith would not tell the party what the anvil does, only that it is not to be used and that they'd like it back. Although they would not explain why they thought this, they were pretty sure the anvil was being taken to an abandoned Cannith facility near Woodhelm in the Dragonwood.

Despite the fact that there was lots they clearly knew that Cannith was not sharing, stuff that will no doubt turn out to be vital, need-to-know information, the party took the job.

During the negotiations Sonlin made it clear 1: that despite her claims to have been a spy, whatever she was doing in her time away was somewhat more mundane than that (although whatever it was got her to level eight so it can't have been that boring). She also "subtly" indicated to the Cannith rep that she considers Quinn nuts but useful. Oh, how she will rue that comment when the Great Old Ones return to give everyone cuddles and hot chocolate.

After negotiating a nice fee (expenses and two 10th level magic items) we set off for the facility, using the incredibly convenient rail lines Breeland is covered with [1]. A day later the party arrived at the closest spot on the rail to the facility and headed through the woods on foot. Despite Quinn's paranoia about the woods (which goes back to the days when he had nature and perception rolls of +0) nothing bad happened, at least not until the party reached town.

As the party approached the town, the party could hear the usual sounds of chaos and discord and there might have been smoke as well. The problem turned out to be a group of war-forged in the process of stealing children, which was kind of a funny coincidence because earlier the party had been discussing whether the war-forged, a despised group in Breeland, had souls to make them go and if so, if they got them by taking them from babies or from kittens [2].

Combat, as they say, soon followed, starting with a completely unprovoked attack from the war-forged that hit most of the party and left Quinn down 12 HP, -4 to hit and -2 damage (saves ended this and a minor perk Quinn has that he almost never gets to use helped a lot with this).

The other side consisted of a leader, a cleric, five brutes and two ranged-types [3], none of whom were minions. Their goal was to delay the party long enough for three war-forged to get away with the kids they were carrying, while the party wanted to stop them from getting away with the kids. Through some creative use of powers, Marcus managed to rescue two of the kids from the arms of the war-forged, kids who Quinn and Sonlin then carried off to safety. On the minus side, one war-forged did get away with a kid. Skeet managed to stay alive through the fight and spotted what direction that last kid was taken: towards the abandoned facility. On the whole, a win for the good guys although I suppose the parents of the kid who was taken won't see it that way.

Unlike the three boss fights in the last three sessions, this fight was actually not too difficult. On the minus side, Jal was the source of most of our big area-effect attacks. On the plus, damn, it's convenient having a sword-mage in the party again. Quinn did try to get two of the war-forged to surrender so we could question them but sadly they were blown to pieces by the rest of the party before their initiative came around and they could give up. I hear war-forged are all fanatical warriors who care nothing for existance due to their unnatural natures, so the party probably did them a favour by ending their hollow mockery of life.

The collateral damage was pretty low: Quinn did use up a daily that does necrotic over a fair area (and sustained it, which he rarely does) but I think otherwise the town is relatively intact. The presence of kids, almost certainly frail meat-balloons who would explode on the first touch and whose parents probably couldn't afford a raise dead, ruled out some area-effect options as well (which is why Quinn used another Daily, because it immobilizes the target, which gave Marcus time to grab one of the kids).

Brass is as cool on war-forged as he is on the undead. I'm not entirely sure devas like anything but devas and even then only some devas.

It turns out the war-forged have been stealing kids for a while and the townsfolk would appreciate it if the party put an end to this. They probably want the kids back too. I have to assume some sort of reward beyond good wishes will get mentioned at some point.

It's very convenient for the party that the kids are probably in the same place the missing anvil is.







1: Now that it's too late, I see the party should have asked if anyone carrying an anvil or heavy chest got off at the same place the party did. Oh, well.


2: It's probably not a coincidence that the anvil is used to do something the government does not want done any more and that production of the war-forged supposedly ended with the end of the war. There are rumor the war-forged have occupied the Mournlands and are busy building more, although the group the party ran into definitely was old and worn.


3: They used magic staffs of some sort. Don't think the range was more than warlock spells, so they were always within range of us when we were in range of them. This is not true for archers, who always give us a hard time, and I am surprised the party doesn't run into more of them.

 Claude Mirande is a great favorite of mine though he seems hard to find.  At one time there was a website (mirande-factory.com) where you could see many images, and I downloaded as many as I could.  I first noticed him when I was in France at a festival -- an image of his Tintin-like girl detective on a postcard for a gallery (Gallerie Collin).I can't find that he's done any books or albums of prints.  I'm pasting here the original of that image, which I found somewhere.  The few sites where work of his can be looked at seem to dwindle away.




   

The Third Bear Carnival continues, and will continue to continue over the next few weeks, I expect. The latest freakshow act contribution comes from Brian Francis Slattery, who offers some thoughts on "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town" over at The New Haven Review. Here's a taste:
One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I’d say he’s the man to beat.

Having a bit of a discussion on Facebook with my friend Bryan Schmidt. We don't agree on much politically, but we manage to get along just fine, and remain happily civil when we get into political interchanges. My response to his remarks from overnight was such that I've decided to promote it to a blog post.

Jay, I have a friend in England who hs been denied surgery by their public healthcare several times for surgery the govt claims is non-essential but his doctor says is. In fact more than one doctor because he got multiple opinions hoping to influence the govt decision.

Unlimited government healthcare can be great stuff.

As the case may be, though I'd hardly describe the UK system as "unlimited" anything. I'll point out also that no system is perfect, but the UK has the virtue of nearly universal coverage without significant compromise in social outcomes measured by infant mortality, average life expectancy, etc., where in many cases their system provides superior outcomes to the American system.

Also, though you did not raise this point as such, I'd like to highlight the fact that many Americans don't understand the difference between "single payer" and "single provider" systems. This is largely because the GOP, the AMA and the insurance industry have spent the years since WWII throwing up a deliberate cloud of confusion about "socialized medicine" in order to short-circuit any reasonable discussion of these concepts.

The UK has a single provider system. Canada has a single payer system. In the US, the VA medical system is an example of single provider. Medicare is an example of single payer. Oddly, most people in both those systems like them quite a bit, and would be appalled to discover they are victims of socialized medicine.

The issue is not privatization, it's capitalism. HMOs and drug companies and our culture of greed have created a health care environment where the rich get the best and everyone else settles.

I don't think we disagree much here. Healthcare is a market segment where the profit motive is fundamentally at odds with the nominal mission, which creates a permanent tension.

The government can't run health care any better than any other of its failed, mismanaged programs, espc. In this culture of greed.

Now you're falling into empty conservative rhetoric. Ronald Reagan's greatest, most successful lie was "Government is the problem." Government is no more automatically prone to failure than the private sector is automatically prone to success. The private sector fails all the time. Look at the statistics on the number of private sector mergers and acquisitions that meet their stated financial and business goals. It's abysmally low. Likewise, look at the statistics on how many major IT projects are cancelled or truncated. If the market were the magic conservatives like to think it is, companies would never go out of business.

Similarly, plenty of government programs work very well. Emergency services, for example. Virtually every community in the United States has a publicly-operated fire department, which generally enjoy sufficient funding and little political opposition. And fire departments tend to poll very well. How well would private sector fire departments function?

When you make a baseline assumption that everything government does will be a mismanaged failure, you'll find plenty of evidence for that due to observational bias.

For whatever it's worth, I don't presumptively assume that government healthcare is the answer. As it happens, Medicare is by far the most efficient healthcare funder in this country, measuring by overhead. That is to say, Medicare spends a larger percentage of every dollar on healthcare than any private sector insurance provider. It also polls very well in customer satisfaction. Hardly a failed, mismanaged program.

What government's proper role here is in regulation. That's how our system is established, right there in the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 — Congress is given the responsibility "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".

The conservative panacea of industry self-regulation is a laughable myth. This has been demonstrated over and over again through our history, from the Gilded Age to Enron to the Wall Street derivatives nonsense of recent years. For-profit companies are by design and law intended to maximize both revenue and profit. Our current system evaluates this on a quarterly basis, with the "long view" being a year or two. There are explicit structural incentives for private health insurance providers to limit payouts, and reduce or eliminate coverage for expensive insureds. Like, say, me.

So whether government enters the coverage business directly (say, by expanding Medicare) or simply regulates the behavior of insurance providers, it must have a role.

Also, for more on my response to Ronald Reagan's anti-government rhetoric, see this post of mine.

If we want to change health care, we need to redefine it as about "Care" and "Health," not a family's egos. When the Schiavos can waste hundreds of thousands of dollars and resources keeping alive their dead daughter, money and resources better spent on someone with the hope of a quality of life, while other people die of diseases and injuries we long ago learned how to easily treat, the system is broken not from conservatism but from its heart. It's not about what it's supposed to be about, but the soft, bleeding heart Americans can't give up, can't let people go, can't allow our loved ones to die. Fine if those poor people do, but not our families.

The Schiavo case is a very odd example to cite in making a conservative argument, given the specifics of it. Her life was prolonged (at great expense, as you point out) against the wishes of her husband through the effort of significant conservative legal and political muscle, given that her parents had rallied the Right-to-Life movement. That was pretty much the opposite of bleeding heart liberalism, forcing government intervention into a private family matter and seeking to remove the decision from the hands of her husband, where it legally and morally rested. Conservative action prolonged Terri Schiavo's life, extended the expense for years, and made a political and media circus out of the tragedy of her death.

Speaking as someone who's been at death's door more than once in the past two and a half years (I came within about two minutes of death at the time of my original ER admission that led to the primary cancer diagnosis), I'd strongly prefer my loved ones not let go and allow me to die. I don't think it's a simple as people being willing to let go, and I don't think that's a "bleeding heart" issue.

It's a sick, corrupting philosophy which government control doesn't change. I've been around the health industry all my life. My dad's a doctor, mom's a nurse, dad trained paramedics and techs, uncle developed ultrasound tech and died of cancer for his effort -- it's a bigger problem than "limited government." It's an attitude.

Again, I don't think the American dysfunction around end-of-life issues is an inherently political issue, though it is certainly subject to politicization. Palin's mendacious "death panels" meme is a very good example of conservatives explicitly undermining efforts to make end-of-life care reasonable, for example. The dysfunction is much deeper in our national psyche than that.

• I can see the line on my toenails where chemo stopped and they began growing in more healthy


• The more distance I walk in the morning, the more my feet tingle and my shins hurt


• My GI is behaving almost like a normal person's, except for frequency


• My hands keep getting colder


• Being in a heavily air conditioned building does not improve the coldness of my hands


• My sleep needs are increasingly variable depending on activity


• When I woke up this morning, the site of my lung surgery hurt, and it still does

Your Thursday moment of zen.



Automobile detail, South Dakota. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

A reader reacts to Escapement

The United Mistakes of America — On our license to err.

Ça planait pas dans sa voix — This piece about a Belgian lawsuit over the original recording of Plastic Bertrand's "Ça Plane Pour Moi" is both hilarious and bizarre. Read the comments, too.

Sunset, Shadowrise — A fascinating image from central Australia.

Get Ready for Steerable Photon Guns — "Steerable Photon Guns" would be a great name for a rock band.

New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance — From the department of learning something new every day.

Gingrich to give speech drawing on 'lessons' from anti-war secular socialists Orwell and Camus. — The synopsis of the event at the AEI website notes that Gingrich will draw "on the lessons of Camus and Orwell" to "describe the dangers of a wartime government that uses language and misleading labels to obscure reality" The man behind the GOPAC memo is going to talk about this? Irony is not only dead; it's been dismembered, burned, and its ashes scattered over the RNC offices.

Santorum’s Classless Society — More bizarre rhetoric from the Right. Besides which, isn't that a Marxist phrase?

?otD: Facial hair or clean shaven?



7/29/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1 hour, 45 minutes (revisions, WRPA)
Body movement: 50 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 8.0 (solid)
This morning's weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday's chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

I'm not posting today because we brought home a new pup to join the family, this time a little girl Sheltie:



Kat and I met her a couple of weeks ago, and while I had not intended to get another pup until next spring, from the moment we all looked at each other it was pretty much a done deal. Sometimes with dogs you just know.



If she looks a bit skinny it's because her fur was trimmed for the summer weather. She just turned three months old, and is very sweet and dainty as she tip-toes around like a furry ballerina. Cole is already in love, too:



It's my daughter's turn to pick out the name, and she's decided to call her Skye.

This time at least it required a second round of clues. But you folks continue to be scary good. Obviously you know every actor and actress in the world, and have seen every film and television show ever made, no matter how obscure.

(Either that, or you've been using this new-fangled thing called the interweb. It's made of tubes, I hear).

Anyway, yes, you got it. Dany's handmaid Irri will be played by AMRITA ACHARIA (spelled Acharya on some sites, but I have it with the "i," and she seems to be the same person).



Her initials, obviously, are AA. Twelve steps, get it?

She has been acclaimed for her performance in a play called ELEVATOR (ups and downs):
http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/185018/elevator

A photo of her is featured on a website called My Glass Eye, and she has also appeared in a film called THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE (I used devil as a clue) and another called COLLECTABLES (which I almost used as a clue).



She's young, she's lovely, she's talented, and she's Irri. It is known.

My readers in the UK have been emailing me for months, wanting to know whether GAME OF THRONES would be shown over there. The answer (I hoped) was "yes," but I could not give details, because (1) I didn't know, actually, and (2) some major negotiations were going on behind the scenes.

But now the GUARDIAN has broken the story, so all can be told:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/29/bskyb-buys-hbo-tv-catalogue

The short version: SKY has bought the UK rights to the entire HBO catalog of original shows, past and present.

So, yes, GAME OF THRONES will be seen in the UK... on SKY.

And it did not take you very damn long to figure out the second role as well.

The part of Shae, the camp follower that Bronn the sellsword finds before the battle of the Green Fork and delivers to Tyrion Lannister, will be played by the amazing SIBEL KEKILLI.



Shae needs no introduction to any Ice & Fire reader, I would imagine. If you've forgotten her, you obviously weren't paying attention, so get off the internet at once and go and reread the books. There may be a pop quiz.

Sibel Kekilli is a German actress of Turkish descent, who crashed onto the film scene in a big way in 2004 in an award-winning film called HEAD-ON, after being discovered by the casting director while shopping in a mall in Cologne. She's won both the Bambi Prize (the deer) and the Lola Award (cherry cola, L-O-L-A Lola, and if you missed that clue, you obviously haven't been listening to enough Kinks). The Lola is the "German Oscar," and Sibel has actually won it twice. She's also won the Tribeca Award and the Golden Orange Prize.



I want to say a few words about her audition, which I thought was extraordinary. A lot of beautiful young women read for Shae. The scene they were reading was the first meeting between Shae and Tyrion, in his tent on the Green Fork the night before the battle. Shae is a camp follower, a prostitute, and she is, of course, coming on to Tyrion in a big way. There is a LOT of sexual heat in the scene, as written and as played. And all of our Shaes were sexy as hell. Watching them one after another would fog up anyone's glasses.

But there's another dimension to Shae as well. She's not as practiced and hardened at this as a more seasoned pro. There's still a girl next door quality to her, a sense of vulnerability, playfulness, and, yes, innocence. And it's that quality Tyrion responds to, that quality that brings him back to Shae, and drives all that follows. He knows what she is, consciously, but down deep he wants to believe that he has found another Tysha.



All of our Shaes were hot as hell. But only a handful of them captured that other quality, maybe three out of twenty, and Sibel was the standout. It's easy to see why she has won all those awards. Watching those auditions, any red-blooded male would want to take every one of our Shae candidates to bed. But Sibel made you fall in love with her as well.

She's going to be amazing. And I can't believe you figured out who she was so fast!

So as those of you who have been around a while are aware, I have some somewhat nonstandard brain wiring and chemistry going on. *****

I'm out about it, because I'm what passes for a public figure on a really bad news day, and who the hell knows--there's so much scare out there about bipolar that maybe it will help somebody to see somebody else with a fairly fucking acute case, who is nevertheless functional, creative, realistic, moderately successful, and not yet dead.****

Normally, I don't blog about it too much, because it's boring, but what's going on right now is actually interesting.

Short form: I'm bipolar I, ultra-rapid cycling**, and I have had that diagnosis since it was manic depression and the treatment was lithium until you killed yourself. (Things are better now.) I'm one of the lucky ones that can control it fairly well through diet, exercise, and supplements, and I got a buttload of cognitive therapy and coping mechanisms from about age 6, so I'm not medicated, and I'm also not prone to hallucinations, delusions, or *paranoia.

Well, anyway, as I write this, I have not slept in forty hours.

I'm not tired. I'm extremely productive. I am mellow and cheerful as a hippie stereotype, and every synapse in my brain is being bathed in massive quantities of sweet, sweet serotonin. Life is good, everything is awesome, I'm not tired, this is fun, and wouldn't you like to go for a walk?

It's basically like E, without the pacifiers.

Since Tuesday morning, I have run four miles, practiced yoga, had a fairly stiff rock-climbing session (which I only quit because my climbing partner had had enough), read a book for review, started another one, written over 8000 words (a personal best in wordcount), completed a novel revision, brushed the dog, driven up to my mom's place to split the farm share with her, gone through a massage therapy session (these hurt, and usually leave me pretty wasted afterwards), watched three episodes of Flashpoint (it r0xx0rs, rent it), played two hours of Bookworm, talked myself out of another run because I knew I was fucking tanked to the gills on Nature's uppers--

...I wish I could maintain this for the rest of my life. I could write three novels a year and have plenty of time for everything else I love doing. I would never get tired or bored or sad. I would be one of Nancy Kress's Sleepless, and I would fucking rule.

The problem, of course, is that life is not fiction.

I haven't slept for forty hours and I have no urge at all to sleep now. And even though I feel calm and alert (and with-it enough to remember that even though I feel great, my reflexes are probably not all that, and there are fatigue poisons coursing through my body even if I'm too stoned on happy chemicals to feel them) I know intellectually that there is a price to pay for this happy, happy serotonin bath.

There's a crash, you see. Or worse, there's a manic phase (which I have been trying to head off with lots of fish and running), and my manic phases are not a happy place.

So at this juncture, I will be applying beer and benedryl until I pass the fuck out. Because I can tell already, the alternative is another post like this at 10 pm tomorrow, and the Netflix queueueueueueue doesn't need reducing that much.

Self-medicating. It's okay, as long as you are nice and know better....


*mostly. I do get the occasional fugue state of everbody hates me and I'm a terrible person and I should fall under a truck, but mostly I can correct for those. Except the one that was apparently provoked by some unregulated herbal supplement in my multivitamins, Nov 2007-Apr 2008. That? Fucking sucked.

**I don't get the good mania. I get the fits-of-destructive-rage mania. You wouldn't like me when I'm manic. Fortunately, at this age, I have interrupts installed, mostly.

***Gram Rabbit always reminds me of how much I miss Life. That was some good TV.

****I said moderately.

*****So you've noticed that these end notes are out of order, have you? They are, however, in the order in which I wrote the post--and the end notes.