silveradept | Reading

haggis and her 5-year-old visited briefly this afternoon. The kid sat right down with her paper and markers to draw a picture of Gary, and write a story about Gary.

The previous time she was here, I think I wasn't around but both V and D separately told me that she'd talked to them about Gary, she recognized his photo above the couch. She said "He was in the corner [we put his little fence up when the toddler was visiting, of course] and I was very little."

She was very little! The last time she saw Gary, she'd have been 3.

I cannot tell you how heartwarming it is that, even now, such a significant fraction of her life later, apparently our place is just "Gary's house" to her.

So now, on our fridge, is her drawing of Gary: a kind of trapezoid with eyes, pointy ears, spots (I think; Gary had black spots on his back), and a smiley mouth.

(Incidentally, it's held on to our fridge with magnets including a tractor and a Minnesota one; you can tell these happen to belong to me, right? Both were gifts! The tractor was a gift from V and D, found on their travels back before we all lived in the same house.)

conuly

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.

*****************

Link

conuly

Neighbors fretted that the garden was a security issue: “I am worried about normalizing the presence of many different people in front yards during potentially all hours of the day without any kind of restrictions put on access.”

Oh, the horrors, people in front yards!

This isn't quite as absurd as the time an entire LJ comm told me that they'd be "scared" if they got a piece of mail in their mailboxes that hadn't been postmarked (I suggested hand-delivering a late-sent birthday invitation to the home rather than risking it not arriving at the house until after the party date, apparently this was very frightening), but it's more absurd than the time a whole community of people joined in to tell somebody with a stalking history that rubber duckies showing up at her daughter's college dorm were something to be alarmed over rather than reassuring her that it was probably just her friends playing a prank. (The latter was my suggestion, and I was right. I really chewed them out over that one too, pointing out that they had regular monthly freakouts over "somebody is parked in front of my house and I'm scared" or "somebody turned up my driveway and then backed out and drove off and I'm scared" and yet, nothing bad ever happened to anybody!)

This sort of nonsense is what gets people shot in America. Well, that and access to guns, but people buy guns because they are quite irrationally scared of their neighbors. Your neighbors aren't gonna kill you in your own home! If anybody kills you, it'll be a family member or maybe yourself. The worst thing that will happen if your neighbors have a vegetable garden is that they'll dump a load of zucchini on your porch. Believe me, you'd rather they give it away to people who want it!

oursin

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriages's Moulsham Strong Malted Seeded Bread Flour, turned out nicely.

Friday night supper: penne with Romano peppers chopped and sizzled in oil oil with chopped chorizo de navarra.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50:50% strong white/wholemeal spelt flour, Rayner's Barley Malt Extract, dried blueberries, turned particularly well.

Today's lunch: lemon sole fillets, which I cooked more or less thus, only with juice of half a lime which worked a lot better for making a paste; served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat (was going to do in beef dripping but it was way past its BBF), Bellaverde sweetstem broccoli garlic-roasted with chopped baby peppers (left over from last week) (other half of the lime squeezed over at the end), and spinach cooked according to Dharamjit Singh's recipe in Indian Cookery.

umadoshi

We're not observing Easter in any way, other than being grateful for the four-day weekend (today being the third day). The work crunch continues, so this reprieve is a real mercy. (Am I starting a rewrite after this post? Yes. But I did take yesterday fully off, and Friday's work consisted only of reading through this translation.)

Reading: Very, very little, although I've been picking away some more at Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.

Watching: The main thing is that, since the crunch has not kindly wrapped up, I've given up on my initial notion of holding off until it's over to start season 2 of the live-action One Piece.

scruloose and I are two episodes in. (If we'd decided to actively dedicate the weekend to it, we could've watched the whole thing before Tuesday, but have opted against that.) No Chopper yet. *vibrates*

Weathering: Yay for spring and all that, but so far it's a very Nova Scotian spring--a lot of the province had a bunch of snow and ice on Friday, with more of the same today. We're mostly getting very chilly rain here, which is bad enough.

Meat-puppetry (kinda): Within the last week or two, the length of my hair went from "this is more effort than I like to keep it off my face, but hey, having a ponytail is still novel" to "IT'S TOUCHING ME MAKE IT STOP", and thankfully Ginny was up for chopping it (mostly) all off last night when she and Kas were over. It's now back to being VERY short without the drastic step of simply buzz cutting it; there's even enough length at the front that some of it's still dyed from (I think it was?) December. Such a relief.

(Ginny cuts her own hair, Kas' hair, and my hair, and mine is veryvery different from either of theirs--dead straight and slippery and, although I didn't know this until I was at least in my thirties, very thick despite being very fine. So when she does my hair, there just keeps being more of it, even with a quarter or a third of it buzzed right down in an undercut, and it slides away from whatever she's trying to do with it. On top of that, I only actually get her to do it maybe twice a year, so she doesn't really have a chance to get used to my hair, but she gamely makes it work anyway and I appreciate it. ^_^)

Current Mood: sleepy

thewayne

Here's a bit of irony. President 45 claimed the PRA as a defense for him keeping records to himself at the end of his first term, now he's got someone in the 'Justice' Dept to say that the law is unconstitutional. Now, the beauty of this is they're not filing a lawsuit in court challenging the law to get it overturned, they're just claiming it's not valid and therefore we're not going to follow it, neener neener.

Pretty clever way of trying to dodge that particular law, scumbags that they are.

The PRA was voted into law in 1978, four years after Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate Scandal. The argument that this AAG is making is actually kind of humorous: "The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress's Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II," he found. "The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose.". Funny how the eight presidents since Nixon, including four other Republicans, didn't seem to find it too terribly burdensome.

There's a basic flaw here, in my non-legal opinion. The Constitution and Bill of Rights (which is part of the Constitution) seemingly has always been interpreted sequentially. Amendment 1 (Freedom of Speech) prevails over subsequent Amendments in most cases. Seems to me that Article I authority should prevail over Article II authority: checks and balances.

But IANAL, much less a constitutional attorney. I don't know how people would go about challenging an opinion issued out of the blue. I thought that normally opinions were issued relevant to court cases, in support of one side or the other, or to illustrate a point of law. This opinion is just thrown out there: 'Not gonna do it!' If a case is in front of the SCOTUS and the Justice Dept issues an opinion, then others, such as the ACLU or EFF, can file an amicus brief with a counter-opinion saying 'The Justice Dept's opinion is full of crap and here's the reasons why'.

But what do they do when the opinion is just floated out there without it being attached to a specific case? It's just 'HEY! This is what we now believe!'

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-presidential-records-act-unconstitutional/

james

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

brithistorian

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate and Happy Sunday to those of you who don't!

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this on here before, but not in a long time, so some of you might not have been around to see it. Since I was young (I remember being in my tweens and having this idea), I've mentally divided both Easter and Christmas into two separate holidays:

Jesus Easter vs Rabbit Easter
Jesus Christmas vs Santa Christmas

I was aware of the historical origins of both holidays, and how the non-Jesus versions grew out of the Jesus versions, but I was also aware of how some people (myself among them) celebrated the non-Jesus version almost exclusively. (I also later became aware of how some varieties of Christians celebrated the Jesus versions exclusively.)

So, anyway, if you celebrate Easter, of either variety, Happy Easter. And if not, Happy Sunday. And to everyone, enjoy the wide variety of seasonal candies in the stories (while laying a pox on the increasing efficiency of capitalism, which means that each year there is less and less of that candy available at a discount on the day after Easter).

oursin

Happy birthday,

shiv!

nanila

Death in Paradise, the newest series. I really like the new DI, Mervyn. “I'm not insensitive! Other people are just too sensitive.” Yeah, that's totally it, dude. Also, I feel you, mate. As ever, the actual murder mysteries are silly and improbable, but it doesn't matter because the scenery is beautiful and I love the characters and their relationships.

Agatha Christie's Seven Dials. Bumpy pacing and gaping plot holes aside, I enjoyed this because of Bundle's inquisitive angry little face, her coterie of hapless male admirers / accomplices, and Helena Bonham Carter's snooty lady-of-the-crumbling-manor.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Weirdly slow and ponderous, and according to the kids, quite confusing if you didn't know the back story. And yet they watched the entire film with us and thought it was good.

I was reminded of the Eddie Izzard sketch where he (at the time) talked about the differences between British and American films. How British films were all “A room with a view and a staircase and a pond”, and featured people walking into rooms and not saying things to each other. “Oh, I…” “What is it, Sebastian, I'm arranging matches.” “I'd better go.” And how you can't eat popcorn to that sort of thing. This film was like that, all long pauses and people staring moodily into the middle distance, punctuated by the occasional scene of ultraviolence and wrestling in pig muck.

The kids liked the atmosphere and the cinematography and the characters. Their one serious criticism: “That is NOT a Brummie accent.” They should know. Keiki’s still got one, and Humuhumu can code-switch effortlessly.

Oh, and we did eat popcorn during it.

Bonus pic: Ozzy the Bull with his PB flat cap on

cosmolinguist

I've found the most me thing ever: Baseball Scores, a website that procedurally generates ambient music during MLB games, based on the game situation - the score, count, runners on base, how many outs there are...

It ends up kinda musique concrète, which I also love.

Last night I was watching my Twinkies with this in one ear, and it was so fun to notice the sound change every time the game state does (and it's still fun during commercial breaks).

The creator of this said "I grew up listening to baseball on the radio, that was the first ambient music I ever heard"...and, I just, yes, I love this so much. I love baseball, I love listening to baseball, and I love ambient music; I never thought about these things as related but of course they are.

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

oursin

It's like the fact that anyone has studied it just gets erased from the record?

24 scientists contribute a preprint on Neuroanatomy of the clitoris:

The clitoris is one of the least studied organs of the human body. The detailed anatomy of the clitoris is challenging to address through a gross dissection, as most of its parts are embedded internally, surrounded by pubic bone and several pelvic organs.

Helen O'Connell and colleagues, 2005, Anatomy of the Clitoris?

O'Connell does feature in the citations, I see. Along with various other scientists who boldly went where no man....

Because one does rather want to enquire 'Least studied BY WHOM???'

Take it away, Lil Johnson:

Watch on YouTube

I feel that this is sort-of related: Founder of ‘orgasmic meditation’ company gets nine years in prison in forced labor conspiracy" - a bit more on What the Hell is Orgasmic Meditation: What to know about the controversial practice of ‘orgasmic meditation’:

“One rule of thumb when exploring sex-positive spaces might be to ask: ‘Is someone getting rich from this?’” says Dr Anouchka Grose, a writer and psychoanalyst in London. “If the answer is yes, there’s a distinct possibility that money is more important to the organizer than your wellbeing.”

Or any spaces, really.

nanila

Do you like the look of your country's currency (bills and coins)?

Yes, I do. I still don't live the plasticky feel of the new bills - they don't fold very well - but grudgingly concede that they are far more durable.
Regardless of their actual value, do you like bills or coins better?

I like the UK's coins. Especially the £2 coin, it's very pretty and has a pleasing weight in the hand. A shiny new coppery 2p piece is also quite attractive.
What is your favorite foreign currency? And why?

Euros. You can use them in so many countries. And they're also very pretty.
Do you collect coins or bills? Elaborate.

Not formally, I haven't got an organised folder or anything. But I do try to save a few coins/bills from trips to other countries as souvenirs.
Do you think human society could make do completely without money? Explain.

No. I think the sheer number of us and the vast variety of goods and services we use as individuals would make a bartering system very cumbersome. And it is still useful sometimes to conduct transactions in cash rather than card.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

conuly

I forgot to mention that Young Sherlock went to Constantinople. Naturally, I was legally mandated to recite all the words.

Watch on YouTube

So sorry, I should've posted this when we finished watching the first season.

brithistorian

I just looked up the side effects of the new antiseizure medication I'm starting. (Almost always a big mistake, but I did it anyway.) I looked at the Mayo Clinic website, so it was a reputable website.

First, the thing that made me afraid: The Mayo Clinic website, divides side effects into two groups: First those you need to contact your doctor for immediately, then those that will probably go away and you need to contact your doctor if they become problematic. Each of these two groups is subdivided into three subgroups: Common, less common, and rare. Side effects in each subgroup are listed alphabetically. Which meant that the first side effect I encountered when I looked at the list was "blindness"! WTF? (I don't know if I've ever said on here, but going blind is something I'm particularly afraid of.)

Second, the thing that made me laugh: The side effects to contact your doctor about immediately included "tiredness." The side effects to contact your doctor about only if they don't go away and become problematic include "sleepiness" and "drowsiness." I think I understand what they're trying to differentiate here, but only after sitting and thinking it over for a bit, and even so it still has an element of "WTF?" about it.

longficmod posting in

fandom5k

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I have cleared all existing nominations and reopened the tagset. You may nominate an additional 3 fandoms with 4 relationships for each fandom, but I'd ask that you please only do so for tags that you are planning to offer or request.

Please note that this year I am allowing you to repeat fandoms in multiple requests and offers, but you must still have at least 3 unique fandoms in your requests and 4 unique offers. AO3 doesn't support those exact requirements, so it's up to you to make sure you have enough unique fandoms. I'll be checking regularly and getting in touch with anyone who needs to add fandoms, but at the point that signups close, you'll have a limited time to fix the problem, so please make sure you only submit your signup once it meets the minimum!

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longficmod posting in

fandom5k

Signups are about to open! As previously announced, I'll be clearing all nominations to allow everyone to nominate an additional 3 fandoms with up to 4 relationships each.

I have saved off details of all pending nominations where I have questions below. I'll add those to the tagset myself once I've clarified with the nominator.

Please also use this post to let me know if anything in the tagset looks incorrect, especially if you see duplicates.

*******

All Media Types:

I'm generally happy to approve this type of fandom if the various adaptations or spinoffs are in continuity with one another. However, there are cases where adaptations are different enough that it could lead to disappointment if a creator familiar with one version gets matched to recipient interested the other. To the best of my knowledge, that applies to the following fandoms--if you're the nominator, please pick a version or explain why this doesn't apply:

The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Teen Titans - All Media Types
Transformers - All Media Types

16th Century CE RPF
Along with the 19th and 20th Century US Politics RPF nominations, I have decided I am not prepared to handle the implied real-life subject matter in an exchange context and will not approve this fandom. (ETA due to questions--RPF is generally fine! Historical RPF subjects I will not approve include people known primarily for committing things like war crimes, genocide, or slavery. Please feel free to ask if you're not sure.)

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
It doesn't look like these characters are part of the main ASoIaF series. Are you looking for Fire and Blood - George R. R. Martin or House of the Dragon (TV)?

Alicent Hightower/Mysaria | Lady Misery/Rhaenyra Targaryen (ASoIaF)
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Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
I've moved these tags under Crossover Fandom, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), and Torchwood. Please let me know if any look incorrect.

Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
We do have Star Trek: The Original Series (TV) already in the tagset. I don't think I've ever seen the original films nominated separately--can the nominator please comment so we can discuss what you're looking for?

kaberett

The fancy bakery had Two Cardamom Buns left when we got there, so I got one of them, and we took our Pastries down to the New River (which is still neither of those things) for the traditional springtime pursuit of Watching The Waterfowl.

Coot the first very obligingly stood up to show us their eggs after really not very much waiting at all, and they are still eggs! No gaping maws there yet. Coot the second was a total surprise to me; I think I'd not been along that particular stretch recently. This one was Not Obliging At All and indeed remained resolutely circular atop its nest, removing its head from beneath its wing only once and only briefly, but we deduce from the fact that it was atop the nest that Orbs Exist.

Pastry course then actually took place sat on a bench just down the bank from a very sleepy pile of Egyptian goslings all huddled up, until they were Alarmed by bread and then gradually heaved themselves up to investigate grass. I remain fascinated by the differences in size evident at this stage of development within the one clutch.

Also; found a bridge hidden in a hedge. Collaborated on iterating toward a solution for a problem. Picked things up and put them down again. Indulged some special interest. Good Job Team.

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Silver Adept

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Other stops along the line

Mind the Gaps, for they are often larger than they appear

Reading

Gary's house

Awaking in New York by Maya Angelou

I swear, there is something about living in suburbs that rots people's brains and risk assessment

Culinary

Weekly proof of life, Easter-in-name-only edition

Assistant Atty General issues opinion saying the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional

Ttttttttttttttireddddddddddddd

Holiday greetings!

(no subject)

Things I have watched since new year

Baseball Scores

Just one thing: 5 April 2026

Continually being rediscovered....

The Friday Five on a Saturday

Just One Thing (04 April 2026)

Oops!

The "joys" of the English language, as applied to medicine

Fandom5K Signups Open!

2026 Nominations Clarification Post 2

some good things that have happened today

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April 2026

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