A short summary

The group hosting this week's planned event in Morelia decided to postpone the meeting until July. So hurrah, I have done all my laundry and somewhat straightened up my place and gotten my packing list in order and yet don't have to actually go through passport control or explain why my Chapstick isn't in a one-quart plastic bag.

On the other hand, aw, just a little bit. This trip sounded fun, before words like gripe porcina and cubrebocas started being bandied about. Let's airdrop in some Tamiflu and get our southern neighbors back on their feet.

Practically Twitterable

Dammit. This may put a real crimp in next week's travel agenda.

Slightly frazzled update

To the bullet-points of lazy hastiness!

• I rode Zeus last night, Lear having been sent off for vacation. Zeus is new to our class, a strange copper-colored animal who looks like a QH from the chest back and a scrawny Morgan otherwise. He's very forward-striding, which makes him good on trail (I'm told) but once at any kind of speed in the ring he does. Not. STOP. When I asked for the canter I got several laps of hand gallop; eventually I had to spiral him into a circle to get him to come back down. More to the point, oh my God he does not bend to the right. At all. EVER. It was like riding a close-paren, and after a few minutes I felt like I'd been cranking a mower from the effort it took to keep him from collapsing in half to the left. The barn assigned him to the class "because he needs dressage," the way stiff office workers need yoga, and truer words et cetera. But riding him is exhausting work, like teaching spelling to a four-year-old who's breakfasted on Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs. This pony needs less grain and a lot more work. And also not to step on my foot argh argh argh ya bastard move argh.
  
• C'est fini the mini-med course. The final presentation was on reconstructive plastic surgery after breast cancer, and the presenter was kind of an asshole. First off, he apologized for the "adult" material, which consisted of before-and-after neck-to-hip naked shots of women who got the surgeries. If you're lecturing on breast cancer, trust me, we know. Boobs. Gotcha. We've all seen 'em. Second, he implied that all surgeons should ask small-breasted women whether they've ever thought about implants, because when you're dealing with a disease that attacks a major part of your appearance, what you really want is someone implying that you weren't so hot even before the cancer diagnosis. Finally, he made some snarky remarks about feminists thinking his work isn't important. Started, comma, do not get me. True, the presentation involved some useful intels, like that you should consult a plastic surgeon before going in for general breast surgery, because that'll get you better cosmetic results, but he ruined what could've been an excellent lecture by being condescending and a little creepy.
  
• Wanda reported back on the Arizona round-up: dusty, understaffed, and fun, with an all-girl ground team to pin the calves (up to 300-pounders, aka all hands on deck cow) while Alex handled the branding. Aw. She got to ride a barrels horse who by the sound of it could've done the cattle work without a rider: "Coalie would spin on a dime and roar off after a cow that cut off where she shouldn't be, and he was completely unafraid of their horns and their bawling...all I had to do was keep him from running over Cynthia! When the calves were finally done and let go, he put his nose down to move along the little ones; it was sorta cute, no way to have a nice picture of that." Jealousy gnaweth my entrails.
  
• I'm trying to get back into C25K. Last year I'd worked up to half an hour's running at a stretch, then let it lapse entirely, so it's back to square one. I find it hard to be disciplined about running programs, but I'm trying to do this (again) because I still have dreams where I find myself running and it's easy, and I think, "Oh. How silly not to have realized," but then I wake up. So I'm trying to bridge the gap. But...
• Mexico! High altitude! Long scheduled workdays! Oh well. Rockninja and I fly out Tuesday, while those in command arrive on Wednesday. We're all a-flurry with trying to plan things, and I'm channeling my nerves into wardrobe angst and stress about my rusty Spanish. But there is balm in Gilead: One of our partners is coming up from Argentina and called with an important question: "Apart from dulce de leche and alfajores, what should I be bringing you?" Oh man. MAN. I will be worse than Zeus.
  

This again?

Gaaah, visual migraine on a Friday. Talk amongst yourselves.

(Translation: "If sour cream is always so aggressive, I won't be able to love it.")

Handling stress

I am not having my best month ever, so pardon pardon pardon if things get a little spotty around here. I am going to limit my publicized whingeing, because it is borin' and contributeth but little to the general atmosphere of teh intarwebs. So linkspam it will be for a bit, with occasional breaks for horsies and/or particularly good news.

But first, excerpts from last night, when I went to see the 3-D version of "Coraline" with an audience full of kids. At one point, a particklarly bazoombaed character appeared wearing an industrial corset, and a small voice behind me murmured, in a tone of awe, "Look at her boobs!" Later in the film, when Coraline yelled defiantly, "I'M NOT SCARED!" the same voice from the next row said firmly, "Well, I am." It added much to the gaiety of nations.

And now: Foxes on a trampoline!

All over coffee

Contrary to the tone of my last entry, I am not abnormally filled with spleen and misanthropic tendencies (though granted the personal baseline is set high). But it's been a few weeks of nearly constant people-contact, a thing that is exhausting for the average introvert, and with a few more days of it to go I find my temper growing shorter and my energy sinking lower. Also, beloved family members' birthdays and anniversaries aside, February is a total energy suck. This is why tonight IE and I resorted to our favorite bar-type joint, wherein the bartendress has the magic mixing touch with martinis and remembers what we like. What was I saying? Oh right.

So as I haze off to another round of prepping for a few days spent convincing people that perky/helpful/kind/morning person is my natural ground state ("You are to lie. You are to tell a black lie," to quote Stephen Maturin), here's a recommendation: Go check out Paul Madonna's work in "All Over Coffee." Maybe it's just because I was in San Francisco recently, but his nearly unpeopled drawings of the city, complemented by shards of story, seem to strike a perfect balance between unbearable loneliness and affectionate exasperation with the human race. "You were starting to have second thoughts about all those friends who complimented you on being self-deprecating," he writes. So you were. Martini?

And the self-regulated horse you rode in on

Back in the days before avtomobili were available, people who had to ride long distances in the States started to realize that a horse with a softer gait might not be a bad idea. Arabians are princes of the desert and they can look like the best thing on hooves, but you ride one for an hour or so and your kidneys start to bounce out your shoulders. Icelandic horses and a few others, however, have a strange middle gait (or two) that at speed looks as though the horse's feet are trying frantically to keep up with one another; it reads a bit peculiar, but it's smooth and easy to ride, almost a gliding gait. Breeders started to work on crossing horses that showed those gaits naturally, and now we've got Missouri fox-trotters, Tennessee Walking Horses, and all manner of similar creatures. I rode an Ozark Mountain Horse once, and the three hours we spent floating through the New Mexican twilight were some of my favorite saddle times ever.

Unfortunately, with any human-animal partnership, people can fuck it up in epic style. The same species that came up with the bright idea of using ginger to wake up a tired older horse turned its attention to gaited horses and invented the Big Lick. Someone not content with a horse that rides like a Caddy decided it'd be good to also have the horse show off by having it take exaggeratedly large steps, flag its tail, and fling its head to the sky. If you've ever read Black Beauty, you may remember the section where the horse laments a harness that forces him to carry his head unnaturally high; it's a similar principle. And because it's not a natural pose, the fastest way to get that big flashy stride is to ensure that the horse's feet hurt too much for it to rest on them.

Do you see where this is going? Is it making you a little sick? Soring a horse can involve acids, stacked shoes, brutal paring of the hoof, God knows what. Combine bound feet with stiletto heels that can't be removed—"and she danced to her death in red-hot shoes"—and you've got the idea.

All of this is horrific, especially given that gaited horses are bred specifically to be sweet-tempered creatures you'd want to ride all day. Flying Lily brought this up in her discussion of how she should be working with her gaited palomino (who, never fear, ain't wearin' no big pads).

The point where I wanted to hurl the computer through the nearest wall was when I found out that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) opposes outside inspection to forestall soring, to the point where he threatened to yank the USDA's funding entirely if they persisted in sending vets to do unannounced spot checks at shows. The kind of shows where 490 of 550 planned exhibitors pulled their horses from a show when they learned there were soring checks scheduled (hosted by the Kentucky Walking Horse Association, if you're keeping track of the perp list). "Let the industry regulate itself!" is the rallying cry. Because that's working really fucking well...unless you're a horse.

The physics of frigid

The 'noguration is coming up, nobody's going to be able to drive or park or walk in unsanctioned areas but downtown businesses will try find housing for staff so that they can stay open to feed and shake down the crowds, of course today Metro is demonstrating its inability to handle even seasonal temperature variations so everyone's dooooomed come Tuesday, and it's so cold outside that the wires of my earrings conducted an icy burn straight through my earlobes as I shuffled toward work this morning. If it weren't for the fact that we're going to have Obama in office come Tuesday night, I'd pack it in, curl up under the duvet, moan about how returning to Pilates is making my bits hurt, and not come out until people have stopped talking about the new Battlestar Galactica while I'm only halfway through season 3 on and don't want to know who the twelfth Cylon is.

(Whew. The cold makes my sentences run together. And I did go to Pilates, a whole hour of it, at the Big Sexy Gym. Which has a plasma TV in the women's dressing room, because you might swoon if you missed an ort of CNN while you were pulling off your layers? I don't know. I do know that it was the same when I left as it was when I got there: "Plane still in river. Cause still birds. Still no terrorists involved. Still nobody dead. STAY TUNED FOR MORE DETAILS." Thanks, I'll...be over here, gasping my way through the Hundred.)

But no, it's gonna be fun: We're going to have Renegade, Renaissance, Radiance, and Rosebud, concrete evidence that the Secret Service bad-asses have secret marshmallow fluff compartments for hearts; an epic party or seven no matter where in town you are; and mebbe a few more Hello Cupcake! Very Berry Obama treats (multi-berry cakes of surprising tastiness, topped with cream cheese icing laced with real vanilla and bedecked with stars-and-bars sugar pellets and a little American flag). Worth getting up for.

The contrast with the previous inaugurations is stark. The Bush swearings-in and -at were a pretty bitter time for most DC locals, who vote Democratic in overwhelming numbers, and it felt like the revelers were a hostile occupying force, which in retrospect makes dark sense. This time around, the locals are basically expecting a logistical meltdown that not even the cheerily efficient Obama-style organizing crews can do more than mitigate, and yet most of us who are not in Virginia are doing our grumbling without real rancor. I'll be hosting La Mère, a NoVa refugee who wants to make an effort to get downtown on Tuesday, and we hope to avoid WMATA's planned failures by taking the bus into town. We've already agreed on a strategic retreat to my office, which isn't too far from the Mall, should we start feeling the need for heat, bathrooms, and keys-only access; should the weather be too parky or the crowds too horrible, we've got the option of crashing IE's watch party.

And if it turns out that Barack is the twelfth Cylon, frak it. I for one will welcome our new mechanical overlords.

Theophany freeze

There's a Russian expression about there always being a hard freeze right around Theophany, which is when in some parts of the world Orthodox observers hack a hole in the ice of the nearest body of water and throw in a cross, inviting the dimmer-but-more-macho types to dive in to retrieve it. I'm evil enough to wonder whether this isn't a way to get rid of some of a community's more irritating youngsters, or perhaps just to get them to sharrup for a while. Anyway. It's cold now and getting chillier, though when I look at what's going on in the Midwest and how that air is heading this-a-ways to make sure Mr. President-Elect Obama feels like he never left Chicago, I get cringy.

Speaking of chill, what do you do with horses when the temps drop? Pierre of the North, the inimitable leader of the trip I did up in Canada this summer, is something of an expert on the subject, and he had a lot of interesting horsemanship tips, some verging on genius and others on the weird. He admitted that he was largely self-taught, coming to horse life in his 20s as a pickup jockey on the harness-racing circuit (I looked through his pics, and hoo boy, nobody knows the mullets I've seen), so in a way he may've become a better horseman than he would have otherwise; he had to figure out everything from first principles.

Keeping horses in an area where it snows up to the eaves of a second-story house in one go presents obvious challenges. Horses stay warm in the winter not so much by growing insulating hair (though that helps) as by digesting high-fiber hay, so it's key to make sure that they get enough to eat. If the horses are turned out in a pasture with deep snow, they don't keep all the area neatly flattened down any more than we would. Instead, they tend to make and then use paths to and from food, water, salt, and shelter; given a single site for each of those, they may let the paths get narrower and narrower, to the point where the horses can barely move as the snow deepens around them. Suboptimal. Pierre's solution is a total PITA for him, but it works for the four-feets: Every day, he takes the hay to a different site, crushing down the snow a bit and also forcing the horses to keep a variety of paths open. He rarely feeds in the barn, although as he put it in his fantastique Quebecois accent, "Sometime I know it's a bad storm coming, because the horses are all standing by the barn door with a look: 'We are not staying out there tonight, Pierre; are you nuts? It's gonna be cold!' So then I let them in. But otherwise no."

The other problem that can keep horses from getting enough to eat is herd dynamics: boss hosses can try to exclude lower-level herdmembers from the food until the higher-level horse has finished eating. Pierre's approach to that particular issue is to teach his horses that most interhorsinal debate tactics are fair game (though he does pull horses if it escalates to serious kicking), but that everyone gets to eat. It must work fairly well; we never saw his horses even flick an ear at one another, though like all herdmates they must have occasional differences of opinion.

Given that as perspective, it's wimpy of me not to ride tonight, when it'll be in the balmy 20-degree range. But I'm snorfling still (though my lymph nodes have stopped pulling their Willy Loman "attention must be paid!" routine) and would be much a-grouch, so Pat advised me to stay home and have a hot date with some tea and a blanket. At this rate the national strategic tea reserves will be exhausted within a week.

Curing the common cold

It hath been many moons since I was last the home of verminous viral wossnames of the coryzal sort, so I'm taking the opportunity to indulge in all sorts of unhealthy but comforting things. Hot toddies! Ichiban ramen with an egg beaten in! Enormous bowls of pho aslosh with sriracha! Oh I am making the most out of this cold. Pretty soon I'll install a bell that will be always on a small table beside my comfy chair, and then the fun will really begin.

For the entertainment of the fragile invalid, medical authorities recommend that reading materials of an undemanding but uplifting nature be applied. The acid in Dorothy Parker being deleterious to the soft tissues during the early stages of the patient's infection, far to be preferred is the humor of a Don Marquis, liberally applied before and after the patient ingests another snort of consolatory tipple. The poor creature is sick, after all. Now where is that blasted bell?

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall…but we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us…we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored and disorderly old age.

(In the meantime, of course, you understand you can’t have us pinched and deported for our yearnings.)

[ETA: Iiiinteresting: Eating a meal appears to stimulate the body's production of gamma interferon, which cues the immune system to attack cells that have been invaded by pathogens, such as the cold virus. Fasting, OTOH, appears to increase the body's levels of interleukin-4, which attacks extracellular pathogens, such as bacteria. "Feed a cold, starve a fever" may then be further proof that preindustrial observational medicine got it right sometimes. How perfectly fascinatin'.]

Invisibul nitting needul

I woke up at some wee hour of Wednesday morning feeling as though someone had rammed a dowel rod straight through my left ocular ridge and out the back of my head. In such moments do we learn whether we've taught ourselves to open the child-proofed analgesics bottle without even turning on the light. I knocked back some naproxen sodium and went back to sleep, hoping that the merry elves who live in the pills would do the job while I snoozed. Alas, either the little buggers were on vacation or the Campaign for Equal Heights had declared a work stoppage.

A hot shower proved useless for pain relief, and I made it through all of two hours of work before deciding that what I really needed was to spend some quality time in a dark room, whining softly from beneath a cold washcloth (or...GENIUS! one of those chilled gel eyemasks, the invention of which should have earned someone a Nobel). Five hours of quality nappage later, I felt closer to human than to hemicranial shish kabob, but it was still painful enough that I canceled on my riding class. Call me a wimp, but I want all my brainy parts working when I'm around large animals. Instead I watched the Obama infomercial, swapped reactions with IE via text, and went to bed early. Life is mo' boring when there are no horses.

Ordinarily I would've written this off as a regular migraine, but in catching up on the webs today I learn otherwise; clearly it was my body's reaction to the BBC's horrible news. Nooooo, they be stealin mah Tennant!

Hearts full of youth, hearts full of truth

I made a terrible mistake last night at the VP debate watch party: I ordered my first Negroni, figuring that I like Campari, gin is good, and how bad can sweet vermouth be? Oh merciful Lord. Apparently the drink is an aperitif, meant to stimulate the appetite. One can only assume that that's another way of saying that this decoction o' dismay will make you so desperate for anything to take the hidz medicinal taste out of your mouth that anything remotely edible is guaranteed to get a rave review. I shuddered but decided not to send it back; I'd just chalk it up to experience and move on.

G-Clef and I found a spot at the bar and busted out our Palin bingo cards, sharing an extra with a larger group (judging by the shouts later, everyone agreed that it was a pity that you could only check off "maverick" once). Our adorable bartender, between his sprints up and down the bar, peered at the cards and burst out laughing; a later arrival raised his eyebrows at us and sagely observed that this must not be a Republican stronghold. Well, no. We grow canvassers for export.

The crowd kept reasonably quiet for the debate, and the addition of the bingo cards kept people from heckling Palin quite as loudly as they might otherwise have done. G-Clef got well ahead in the early running, but for some reason Palin wouldn't say "Pakistan," despite his muttered beseeching, and I hit a streak of luck. Meanwhile, the acid in my drink was eating away at my tastebuds, reducing my ability to notice how vile it was, and I absentmindedly drank the entire thing as the show wore on. Off the bailout, through the tax breaks, into foreign policy...and then it happened. She said "National Guard."

I got bingo.

And the bartender, smiling, rewarded me with another Negroni.

Who wants to wangst forever

It cannot be that long ago that I was a melodramatic teenling, can it? I mean, the earth's crust wasn't warm, as I recall, although granted back then we had actual winters, winters like today's youth don't get, winters with snow and ice and wind, winters where we had to go to school on sleds drawn by huskies and devil take the hindmost. (As if. Fairfax County's proud heritage of flipping shit and closing at any hint of precip can be connected directly to its one attempt to take weather forecasts with a grain of salt back in 1987, and the resulting Great Veterans Day Afternoon Snowshower Farrago of Infamy is still bright in memory.)

Still and all, back in those dim days of mine and yore, I do know that the teen angst "our love can never be, phewWOE" market was served by solidly cheesy programs like "Dark Shadows" and the Linda Hamilton/Ron Perlman "Beauty and the Beast," a show that I can totally think of without getting kind of red in the face and wanting to go back in time just to smack some taste into my 12-year-old self, who had enough to deal with anyway what with a demented civics teacher, "The Day After," and stirrup pants. Oh God, down this route lies post-'80s PTSD that ends with me in the fetal position humming Martika. Let's avoid the discussion, because that is not my point here.

My point is that, by virtue of being an agéd hag, I have totally missed the post-Buffy generation's vampire smolder fodder: the Twilight series. Fortunately, others have taken the bullet and I can critique from behind a cozy protective wall of second-hand pain. It looks like the books are truly hideous tripe, possibly worse prose than that found in my now-regretted collection of early Mercedes Lackey novels. Second, the introduction of a genus of vampires unwilling to go out in the sunlight not for the traditional "I will burst into flame and do a Savini dissolve" reasons but because sunlight makes them glitter is hilariously unforgivable, even if the resulting movie (hahaha, of course there's gonna be a movie) stars the cutie who played Cedric Diggory to such tasty effect. Third, there's a weird stalker/possessive vibe between the nominal protagonist (her name is BELLA SWANN, do you begin to see the problem here?) and the aggravatingly pretty vampire/objet d'crush that is hyped up to a point that is freaky even for adolescent-bait cheese lit.

On the other hand, but, and however, there has been a commendable resurgence of Sparkle Motion references and at least one kick-ass comments thread beginning, "And they unlived in sparkly flowery goodness forever and ever, or until he said 'Fuck it' and drained her like a jug of Thunderbird." To paraphrase Spider Robinson, shared pain is halved, shared snark increased, and thus do we refute entropy.

Crippled by all this inner peace

Lack of fitness embarrassingly obvious again STOP
Yoga 2 class at new gym much harder than expected STOP
Men in class significantly more flexible than I am STOP
"Oh thank God, we're back to push-ups" not a logical thought STOP
Teacher is possible demon disguised by blond ponytail and capri pants STOP
Chances of immobility tomorrow morning v v high STOP
Too tired to type further ST

Consolatory expedients

I didn't watch the Derby, and events like Eight Belles' death make me never want to see or hear of another horse race ever again. You could argue that every horse ever put under saddle is under some sort of compulsion, that TBs are like sled dogs and have that desire to run bred into their bones, that most racers don't die on the track or suffer major long-term injury or end up sold to butchers, that racing is one of the few ways that most Americans see and support any form of horse industry. I don't care; watching races makes me slightly sick, and I've pretty much given it up. The loss of one non-betting, non-track visiting individual won't bring the industry to a screeching halt, of course, but it will make me feel like less of a voyeur.

Lest all that fumfering sound too noble, in fairness be it spoken that I had forgotten it was Derby day. I was busy making chocolate-chip banana bread of such fearsome deliciousness that it must be gotten out of my hands vitement lest it end up elsewhere on my anatomy with equal vitesse. This recipe is so easy and yet so tasty—and involves no fat beyond that of two egg yolks and the chocolate, which is so full of antioxidants that it's practically a health food, so that's all right—that you'd be tempted to let whole groves of bananas go squishy just to have an excuse to make another batch. Don't resist.

For this relief much thanks

I spent the last few days progressively getting more and more worked up over a commitment I made to join a friend at a photo shoot, so it was with glee that I read an e-mail from the photographer last night, canceling on account of rain (which has not materialized either, so yay!). Initially, goofing around all "I do want to be America's Next. Top. Model" sounded like a lot of fun, but then for some reason I started getting a little wrapped around the axle about the whole idea. Now officially off the hook (not da hook) about it, I can also luxuriate in the joy that is knowing it is not, in fact, necessary to get up before the sun on a Saturday. Sleep late and drink strong coffee and curse the acrostic! Rock.

The other glee has come from rewatching McCain get heckled at his Memphis speech earlier this week week. You could admire the man's chutzpah for showing up on the anniversary of MLK's death, given that in 1983 he voted against the institution of a federal MLK memorial day, that he backed AZ governor Mecham's 1987 decision to rescind the holiday at the state level, and that he didn't peep when Mecham defended the use of a fairly hateful word for minorities (cites, linked through a common page), but then it's probably not so much nerve as either blissful obliviousness or flat-out pandering. As such, the crowd's response is more polite than he deserves. Let's hope the people in the audience also politely vote his ass to the curb in November.

Does what it says on the tin

This morning the dermatologist swapped me a little dermis for two tiny stitches and a warning not to lift heavy objects or twist around too much for the next few days. Hoisting weighty things in a torque-wise manner is probably out, putting paid to the idea of tacking up a horse tonight or tomorrow. I could always ask someone else to do the pregame work, but then there's mounting up and the near-certainty that something would go wrong in a way that called for twisting, so after a little inner struggle I gave up and canceled my lessons for the week. I am grumpy but lack the nerve to face down the RN if I were to bust a suture by, say, wrestling with Okie's right-turn issues. So, apologies: no horse gossip this week. To make up for it, here are a few objects of coveting. Secret Santa presentations cheerfully considered.

Last night's mini-med presentation on NSAIDs was a general disappointment. The presenter was new to the program and hadn't planned the lecture very well, so we spent a lot of time flipping back and forth in the enormous packet of slides and being given tantalizing glimpses of information there wasn't time to address. Some of the presentation was borderline insulting, including the reading aloud of a printed list of NSAIDs on the market, and some was overly technical given the audience. Not quite nul points, because she included some interesting material on why the COX-2 inhibitors were put on the market (and why they're being pulled) and some fascinating data showing that the pain relief from opiate-NSAID combos is inferior to that of some prescription NSAIDs alone, but overall it was a little scattershot and not the best use of two hours. My favorite Q&A moment involved someone demanding to know why the pain-relieving effect of leech bites had not been discussed. Was it because the FDA hasn't approved them for use and the medical institution is biased against alternative therapies? The presenter just looked at her blankly for a second and said, "No, it's because they're not NSAIDs." Hee! (Pedantic NB: Leeches are, in fact, approved for use in U.S. medical facilities, although not specifically as analgesics, and were the first live-critter medical devices approved by the FDA. Maggots were the second. Disgusting medical knowledge, heyah, GETcher disgusting medical knowledge.)

Reason hangs by such a slender thread

see more crazy cat pics

I was caught mid-giggle by a spasm of twitching, because agh, THROUGH yonder window. It's through.

Meet the Press

Oh Ralph. Teach the pony another trick. "Regarding the campaign: here are your laurels. Why don't you lie down on them and take a goddamn nap for once."

H/T The Goo, over at the Expat's.

First farewell of 2008

George MacDonald Fraser, OBE, the author of the Flashman series, the pitch-perfect novel The Pyrates, and a host of other works, is dead at 82. Coincidentally, I started rereading a couple of Flashman novels over the weekend, and I finished Flashman in the Great Game this morning. I had forgotten how much fun they were. Although the Flash books, like the Bond movies, tend to follow a certain pattern—encounter with prominent British politico, meeting with a beautiful powerful and/or famous woman with whom our antihero gits it on, scene of diabolical torture, historical battle, Flashy exhibits cadfulness but triumphs (or appears to) by sneakery or luck—they're tremendously entertaining. They're educational, too, but not pedantic; like Patrick O'Brian, Fraser had a gift for bringing history to life, weaving the story through events rather than making the fictional bits a frame for a lecture on names and dates.

Ave atque vale, Mr. Fraser. Thanks for everything.

(ETA: And Neil Gaiman, writing from a month in the future,[he fix] has his own take.)