If you don't know Karen, she's a friend of mine and a wonderful person who helped me a lot when I was sick, including letting me crash at her house and taking me to doctors. She's getting a treatment for MS that isn't available in the US, and so isn't covered by insurance - a situation very familiar to me. (Though in my case it was available in the US, I just couldn't get a doctor to agree to try it because they all thought my real problem was that I was a hysterical female who wasn't sick except in the sense of being sick in the head.)

Karen is holding two different types of fundraisers: one for direct donations, and one a Patreon for her equally wonderful husband, Chaz Brenchley, who also let me crash at his house and additionally cooked for me. His Patreon features girls' boarding school stories... on MARS! Details here: desperance.

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2153871.html. Comment here or there.

They are Alex Hamilton (the gray one, who talks a lot, is hyper, and gets into everything) and Erin Burr (who alternates sitting back and waiting for it with beating up Alex and stealing his food). They are two months old, tiny and adorable, small enough to be picked up in one hand and to sleep together in my lap, which they do often.

They are my former cat-sitter's neighbor's cat's kittens (neighbor pictured). [I forget if I mentioned it, but my other cats died of old age last year. No condolences necessary.] I told my cat-sitter it wasn't really a good time for me to get more pets - I'm too busy, I'm not home much, I'm trying to save money, etc. She texted me that photo with the caption, "Get two, they will keep each other company. Otherwise they go to the pound."

Erin Burr is currently living up to "feline disaster" expectations; when I took them to the vet, I was informed that the bald patch on one ear was ringworm and given a pamphlet recommending quarantining them for a month, washing hands after touching them, and scrubbing the entire house with bleach. Luckily I already had confined them to the bathroom and the hallway to make sure they'd use the litter box.

I then googled ringworm, which I should know not to do for any medical condition, and found an amazing level of hysteria, full of phrases like "treat it like ebola" and "be strong, some day this hideous nightmare will be over," and recommendations to strip naked before entering the quarantine room, put on a set of clothes and shoes that never leave it, never touching the cats without rubber gloves, boxing all my possessions for two years to make sure the spores are dead, throwing out all my furniture, and repainting the walls.

I am not leaving my new kittens alone without human touch for a month and destroying all my possessions for fear of catching... athlete's foot. I have had that sort of skin infection before. It is not a big deal. I'm treating the ringworm, keeping them where they are, washing my hands, and cleaning, but I am not acting like my new kittens are lepers. They need love and cuddles. (I tried the "shoes and outfit stays in the room," but it's really difficult as they kick the shoes around. Also there's a half-inch gap at the bottom of the doors, and they regularly shove toy mice, blankets, etc through it. DEFCON ONE precautions are not a realistic possibility.)

That being said, once Erin Burr is released from custody, I expect she will find new ways to wreak havoc. Luckily I don't have firearms.

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2153597.html. Comment here or there.

Please feel free to comment! I have not read anything by any of these writers but Johnson.



Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2153408.html. Comment here or there.

I’m afraid I did not like this at all. In fact, it was the first FMK book that I didn’t finish—I ditched it at about the halfway mark. And it’s a very short book, too: 133 pages.

Gabriel is a mason’s apprentice in medieval England. The mason is cruel, so when a troupe of traveling Mystery players comes to town, Gabriel is delighted to briefly escape his wretched life by watching the play. Then, when the mason sadistically tries to chop off his giant mop of beautiful blonde curls that Gabriel’s lost mother told him to never cut, Gabriel flees and is taken in by the players, who whisk him away and cast him as an angel.

Gabriel assumes the man playing God is wonderful and the man playing Lucifer is terrible. But no! Garvey, who plays God, uses Gabriel to create fake, exploitative “healing” miracles which he convinces Gabriel are real. Lucie (Lucifer) is unhappy about this, but that only makes Gabriel think he must be bad.

I have no idea how old Gabriel was supposed to be. At the beginning I assumed he was around twelve, but later I decided he must be closer to ten because he was so stupid and naïve. Then he got even stupider and I wondered if he could possibly be seven or eight, or if that was way too young to be an apprentice mason. Not that young children are stupid, but the less you know about the world, the more likely you are to take everything at 100% face value, as Gabriel does.

In a totally unsurprising turn of events, Gabriel is eventually shocked to learn that people are different from the roles they play. This is exactly as anvillicious as it sounds. And while I often love books in which the reader knows more than the characters, I like it when the reason is that the characters are not privy to information or context that the reader knows, not because the characters are too stupid to pick up on incredibly obvious stuff. I don’t mean to call characters with cognitive disabilities stupid, as “intellectually disabled character fails to understand what’s going on” is a well-populated subgenre. (Which I also dislike.) I’m referring to non-disabled characters who are oblivious because they just are.

It's not that I think a child has to be stupid to be tricked by adults. Even a very bright child (or adult) could be fooled into thinking they're a miracle-worker by a clever con man. It's that the way it's written, from Gabriel's POV, makes him seem like a total idiot.

However, that’s not why I gave up on the book. The reason was the incredibly unpleasant emotional atmosphere: Gabriel smugly stupid, Garvey and the mason smugly awful, Lucie and his daughter sadly suffering (with a side of smugness, because they know the real deal.) I disliked the lot of them and did not want to be around any of them. Which is too bad, because I liked the backdrop of medieval Mystery players a lot.

The prose was good, but not good enough to make me keep reading. However, it won the Whitbread award, so my opinion may be very much in the minority.

A Little Lower Than the Angels

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2153000.html. Comment here or there.

I have never read anything by any of these authors, and in most cases have only heard of them in the sense that I own one of their books. Anyone familiar with any of them?

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2152802.html. Comment here or there.

The memoir of a neurosurgeon, focusing on how dangerous it is for patients, how it's often a complete gamble whether surgery will cure them or kill them (or paralyze them, or leave them in a permanent coma, etc), and how much that gets to the author.

If a book which is largely about the doctor's feelings as opposed to those of his patients, when the catastrophe happened to them rather than to him, annoys you on principle, don't read this. Personally, I liked knowing that there is at least one more doctor in the world who cares what happens to his patients, even if the caring is composed in equal parts of compassion, professional pride, and fear of being publicly shamed.

As that suggests, it's a memoir dedicated to saying how he really feels, whether that's elevated or petty. He spends quite a bit of time on justifiable raging over his hospital's incredibly terrible computer system, which keeps locking up the password so no one can see the scans they need to operate (hilariously, at one point some equally angry person sets the password to fuckyou47 (and then no one can remember if it's 47, 46, 45...), the lack of beds that mean that patients are deprived of food and water all day pending surgery and then the surgery gets canceled, and all the other myriad ways in which health care in England now sucks. (It still sounds about a million times better than health care in America.)

He talks frankly about his mistakes as a surgeon, some of which killed people. This is really a taboo topic, and my hat is off to him for going there.

There's also a lot of fascinating anecdotes about individual patients, and some beautiful writing about surgery, the physical structure of the brain, and the constant paradox of how that one squishy organ is the source of everything that makes us human and able to do things like write books, all of which is a source of wonder to him and one which he conveys very well.

It's definitely worth reading if the subject interests you, but it doesn't quite rise to the level of medical writing that I'd recommend whether the subject interests you or not. (My nominees for the latter are Atul Gawande, Oliver Sacks, and James Herriot.)

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2152547.html. Comment here or there.

I wrote a treat story for an unusual fic and art exchange, Jukebox. The stories are based on or inspired by songs, so they're closer to original fiction than to fanfic in the usual sense.

The whole collection is worth checking out; in most cases knowledge of the songs adds to the enjoyment of the stories but you can enjoy them without it. But songs are easy to pick up. Here's a playlist. I found some great new songs on it, from hiphop (This Is The Opposite Of A Suicide Note) to French traditional songs (J'ai Vu Le Loup, Le Renard Danser.)

Some of the highlights of the collection include a Tarot card for Leonard Cohen's The Stranger Song and a beautiful moonlit scene for Loreena McKennitt's Courtyard Lullabye.. Of the stories, I especially enjoyed the post-apocalyptic fantasy Midnight, like a lost Stephen King story written between The Gunslinger and The Stand, and the excellent sf story Trajectory with cool aliens and immense sense of wonder. But there were really a lot of excellent stories in the collection. If you have time, it definitely rewards browsing. If you do, comment with your favorites!

My story, i swear by all flowers, was inspired by Simon & Garfunkel's wistful April Come She Will. Spoilery story notes below cut. ( Read more...Collapse )

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2152150.html. Comment here or there.

Last post provided some interesting, and I use that word advisedly, information in comments, which in turn provided more fodder for internet diet rabbit hole exploration. It was dark and humid down there. There was also some actually-cool info that was not about horrifying diets; I definitely recommend reading the comments if you missed them. Includes a discussion of cooking with cricket flour. I would try it. Seriously.

Here are a few highlights, by which I mean lowlights:

I was introduced to the monomeal. I propose it as the villain for the next Godzilla movie. Monomeal Stomps Tokyo!

Some diet freaks think fruit is bad. Others claim that fruit is the One True Way and each One True Fruit should not be contaminated by eating it with anything else, including other fruits.

Meet Freelee the Banana Girl, a vlogger who is scarily thin despite devouring 50 bananas every day and who once dated another vlog personality by the you-can't-make-this-shit-up name of DurianRider. You will be unsurprised to hear that she thinks chemotherapy rather than, you know, cancer kills people with cancer. And also that periods are a sign that you have toxins in your body, so if your period stops when you go on an all-banana diet, that proves that it's good for you.

My conclusion is that any time anyone says cavemen did anything and follows that with diet advice, their knowledge of cavemen consists of The Flintstones.

And also that anyone can get rich or at least Instagram-famous quick by coming up with an idiotic diet with a catchy name and a scientifically illiterate caveman justification.

I propose Monkey Meals (TM). You can eat anything you like as long as you eat five bananas first. Guaranteed weight loss! (Because bananas don't have many calories, but if you eat five of them before you eat anything else, you'll be too full and/or nauseated to eat much else. Seriously, I think this would work. For as long as you can stand it.) Like the monkeys they evolved from, cavemen ate lots of bananas. So as long as you eat enough bananas, you will be as healthy and skinny as a caveman!

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2151746.html. Comment here or there.

For reasons that really don't bear rehashing, I spent the last two years getting told to go on diets. Every kind of diet. No "nightshades." No acid. No gluten. No dairy. Low-FODMAP (bans dairy, gluten, soy, legumes, and half of all fruits and vegetables.) Low-fat. "Eat nothing but bone broth that you made yourself, and if you don't simmer it for six hours, it's no good." "Microwaving food destroys its nutrients." At one point I had successive doctors tell me to go on a low-fiber diet and a high-fiber diet.

Every single diet-pusher, whether doctor or rando, said or implied (usually explicitly said), "If you don't do this, you'll never get better. Don't you want to get better?"

This was especially infuriating given that I was so underweight that I had symptoms of malnutrition. And also that in two years of dieting, there had never once been any indication whatsoever that my illness was caused by diet or that changing my diet was helpful. I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.

Anyway, I am not dieting now. But now that I am slightly less likely to hit NEON RAGE APOCALYPSE at the word "diet," I clicked on a link and fell into an internet rabbit hole of diet advice. Like the evolved forager that I am, I bring you my findings for amusement, analysis, and mockery:

- A comparison of wild fruits and vegetables with cultivated ones, concluding that eating fruits and vegetables is unhealthy because they are unnatural and not what the cavemen ate.

By that reasoning there is literally nothing we can eat unless we get air-dropped into some untouched stretch of rainforest to forage for wild bananas.

- Eating fruit makes you fat.

- Humans did not evolve to eat fruit.

We're PRIMATES. Monkeys love bananas.

- Corn causes Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

- Corn causes ADHD.

- Corn causes autism.

- Corn causes cancer.

- Broccoli causes cancer.

- Hot water causes cancer.

The last one, from a study saying that drinking hot beverages can cause cancer, had the best response: David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said: "In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," according to the Australian Financial Review. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response."

- A Breatharian – as defined in the book A Year Without Food – is a person who chooses to live mostly, or completely, from Pranic nourishment. Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.

Umm.

- Brian J. Ford has suggested that ketosis, possibly caused by alcoholism or low-carb dieting, produces acetone, which is highly flammable and could therefore lead to apparently spontaneous combustion.

The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!

- Our ancestors NEVER ate a carb. They ate meat and fat and that was it. On that diet, they grew, improved their lot, invented the wheel, survived in caves and hinted in groups.

Bad history aside (even in the Arctic, people ate seaweed and lichen), anyone who's ever lived in a small town or attended school knows that a major human activity is indeed hinting in groups.

Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2151615.html. Comment here or there.

Explanation on FMK tag if you missed it. Please feel free to discuss your vote in comments.



Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2151221.html. Comment here or there.