vital functions

[kaberett]

Sleep cycle: slipping. [more to follow shortly...]

Reading. The Beckoning Silence, Joe Simpson: this one manages, as I think I said last week, to be a mix of memoir and polemic (most of which I am interested in, even if I don't always agree with it -- particularly the Degeneracy Of the Modern Age slant) with an unpredictable sprinkling of racism. He... recurrently has this hackneyed Thing about Japanese Tour Groups Taking Photos. Nonetheless glad, on balance, to have read.

The Appeal, Janice Hallett. Prompted by skygiants' recent post: I poked the library to see if it had a digital copy, and it did. Available to borrow immediately. So I did, and then got very cross when it came to denouement. Sources of irritation include: (1) implausibly missing data (disciplinary reports! Sam's e-mails!) and (2) a very strong sense that actually the data we were given does not allow the reader to conclusively reach the "correct" conclusion. And, as discussed in comments over at the post that pointed me its way, the wild speculation presented as logic by some of the characters. For more on its... appeal... and also frustrations, I refer you back to skygiants.

Otherlands, Thomas Halliday. Made it through the introduction. Stalled hard about three paragraphs from the end of the introduction, because:

Today, where an extinct creature is portrayed as alive, it is frequently as a monster, something villainous, with an insatiable appetite. This dates back to the early nineteenth century sensationalizers of geology. Some were so keen to promote their vision of a dramatic and vicious past that woolly mammoths and ground sloths, known even then to be herbivorous, were presented by some as voracious meat-eaters. The mammoth, for instance, was introduced to the public as a powerful predator, lurking ominously in lakes to ambush their turtle prey, while the docile herbivorous ground sloth became 'huge as the frowning precipice; cruel as thebloody panther, swift s the descending eagle, and terrible as the angle of night!' Even today, the depiction of mindless, barbaric aggression of prehistoric animals continues in countless film, books and television programmes. But the predators o the Cretaceous were filled with no more bloodlust than a lion is today. Dangerous, certainly, but animals, not monsters.¹¹

... where footnote 11 consists of references to (i) a publication from 1803, and (ii) a publication from 2013... reviewing literature of 1802-1856, which did not seem to me to be wholly relevant to the assertion of present-day portrayals. It has subsequently been explained to me that there are entire genres of fiction I basically never go anywhere near; I am now reading about ponies on the frozen tundra of northern north America around 20,000 years ago, and continue to reserve the right to bail out.

Pilates' Return to Life through Contrology, Joseph Pilates inter alia. This is a republication of his 1945 book, a "Revised Edition for the 21st Century" that has been "Edited, Reformatted and Reprinted in a New Easy-to-Read Edition", which was first released in... 1998. Bought a digital copy in a fit of pique earlier today, imposed upon A to have a Windows installation for me, and have been reading with my eyebrows crawling steadily up my face. I have made it through the first chunk of 1998 padding and am now back into Pilates' (more-or-less) Own Words and, uh, look, okay, I just... I cannot recommend this for any purpose other than completionist special interest.

Also today I bought (but have not started) Lake of Souls, the Ann Leckie short story collection; I think I've already read most of the contents but I am sure I will enjoy both rereading those and meeting the bits I haven't.

AND my brain has let me pick yánasenesse back up, for which I am Very Grateful.

Writing. ... some ... PIP review. not much. but some.

Watching. The Beckoning Silence (Channel 4), while potting up tomato seedlings. For some reason I was not expecting the documentary to include reenactment of the 1936 disaster; I think I am very glad I went into it already knowing most of the detail.

Playing. Some Fluxx? Some Fluxx. (Two games where we went nearly all the way through the deck and A won both times; finished with one game where I won twice over with my first hand...)

Cooking. Experimental butternut squash + chickpea + kale in Meera Sodha's Misc Sauce, which I was less into than I'd hoped to be in part, I think, because I overdid roasting the squash.

Growing. Tomato seedlings mostly potted up. Orange Banana came up first (as I recall) and do not appear to have survived being left in the propagator while I waited for everything else to come up, so I'm going to sow a second batch of those; Green Zebra didn't have a great germination rate, so I'm contemplating another couple of those, too; Blue Fire did remarkably well in terms of germination rate. I now have... four trays? full of various nightshade seedlings. Hopefully I will manage to get at least some of them to adulthood.

A successfully coaxed me out to the allotment once (to empty the compost bucket from the kitchen and eat pizza at my table in the sunset under the cherry blossom). I have not managed any solo trips.

Observing. BAT. A found another Bat Location halfway down the hill on the way to the supermarket, i.e. our standard Stupid Little Walk! He was not sure he had seen one, and then he could not spot it again, but I DID (and then he did). Bonus bat! Otherwise I think it's been too windy for bat activity up on top of the hill.

Local parakeet population.

And my LEEKS THAT WERE FULL OF SLUGS.

Comments

[watersword]

Have you had the dubious pleasure of encountering Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, available on Gutenberg? It is definitely racist but a ripping yarn, with every element of plausibility that implies. (This prompted by your remarks on Otherlands.)

[sporky_rat]

Pilates' (more-or-less) Own Words and, uh, look, okay, I just... I cannot recommend this for any purpose other than completionist special interest.

His words or the 1998?

[kaberett]

So far? Yes. :-p

[azurelunatic]

I return from a quiet trip through the living room and note that my quiet giggles are indirectly due to your PHD. You discussing both bullet journals and discbound things resulted in me getting a bunch of discs and a punch.

My discbound to-do lists got Belovedest intrigued.

They didn't necessarily want anything fancy. I allowed as we had various items that could be pushed into service as a temporary cover and notepaper. Such as cardboard from a box of crackers.

This is why I beheld, on my late night trip to yell at the home automation from a room that no one is sleeping in, a tidy little discbound volume with a large picture of a Cheez-It cracker on the front.

[kaberett]

<333 Thank you for letting me know!

[azurelunatic]

It has been several months and it still makes me giggle (and a better cover has not yet been requested).