Pressed the search button on my phone and then pressed "c". Autocomplete offered up "can you roast potatoes and swe", which my brain helpfully autocompleted as "can you roast potatoes and swear like a sailor? If so, you're the girl for me! Please reply to enclosed address." But then I actually followed the link and remembered that I had googled "can you roast potatoes and sweet potatoes in the same pan" a few weeks ago. Oh, well. The answer to both questions is yes.
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11:16:41 AM,Friday 31 May 2013
My recorder teacher's teacher, playing Telemann.
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08:44:54 PM,Tuesday 28 May 2013
Okay, so Julius Caesar summons an army of undead British Colonial soldiers to storm Ptolemy's palace, Ptolemy gets killed by Pompey's son, whose mother fingerpaints on his face with Ptolemy's blood, and Cleopatra does the Charleston in jodhpurs and gumboots.
I can dig it.
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11:52:57 PM,Friday 10 May 2013
I cannot handle anti-vaxxers. I cannot handle them. They are more often ignorant than selfish, but their ignorance *is* selfish. They willfully misunderstand how disease and vaccination and herd immunity work, and not only do they put their own children at risk, but they put all children at risk, because of some vague hand-wavy idea that "children have too many vaccinations these days" and "well, who knows what all those chemicals are doing to our kids' development" and "nobody gets measles nowadays, and even if they did, it's probably safer to build immunity the natural way". AGHHHHH. It's becoming part of the liberal parents' party platform: Breastfeeding, anti-circumcision, anti-vaccination. I'm all for breastfeeding, I wouldn't circumcise my son if I had one but I don't think it's my place to dictate terms to cultures that would, but holy hell, anti-vaccination?! It isn't even about autism anymore for these people, as spurious and horrendous as that whole debacle was. They don't say why vaccinations are bad. They don't say what horrible things will happen if they vaccinate. They just think it's counter to the natural, non-interventionist lifestyle that they want to cultivate, and because they don't want to make their kid cry by poking them with a needle. Meanwhile, babies (too young to be vaccinated) are dying of pertussis because the number of unvaccinated toddlers has broken the threshold of herd immunity and provided a reservoir of fatal disease. And what about when these kids grow up, if they do grow up? Because you didn't vaccinate them for chicken pox, you want your kid to get shingles when they're 60? A disease that can cause pain so intractable it can lead to suicide? Do you want your grandchild to be born deaf, blind, and intellectually disabled because you never vaccinated your own child for rubella? The misinformation is staggering. I've seen charts claiming that the startling decrease of childhood mortality and morbidity in the early 20th century wasn't caused by vaccination, but by public hygiene. Public hygiene undoubtedly played a part in it, but the streets were just as clean before the Salk vaccine in the '50s as they were after. The only difference is that children weren't dying or being paralyzed due to polio. The charts also claim that vaccines wear off after a while, so herd immunity is a fictional construct. Yes, some vaccines do wear off. That's why we get tetanus boosters. Even if you only have universal vaccination in children (barring immunocompromised children, who rely on herd immunity to keep them safe) and not all adults retain 100% immunity, you drastically reduce the potential reservoir of infection, because children are more susceptible both to spreading and to contracting (and to dying of) these diseases. Yes, some vaccines carry risks. We stopped vaccinating people against smallpox when the risk of sequelae from the vaccinations exceeded the risk of dying from smallpox. You know when that happened? When smallpox was eradicated. You know why that happened? VACCINATION. You're not willing to assume an infinitesimal chance that your child could have a bad reaction to a vaccine, when by not vaccinating, you're putting both your child and thousands of other children at risk of deadly and catastrophic diseases. All because it makes you seem like a natural-living, trend-bucking, anti-establishment parent. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!!
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02:42:38 PM,Tuesday 16 April 2013
Welcome to Last Night's Hypnagogic Hallucination Theater:
Perky Receptionist: Hello! Workaday Frosting!
Staticky Male Radio Voice: A Train Tennis Bawwwwlllllzzzzzz... *fizz* *crackle* *hiss*
Repeat x200 until loss of consciousness.
And... Scene.
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(1)
07:59:42 AM,Thursday 28 March 2013
I should go to the gym more often.
I should start studying ASL again.
I should get a Python tutor.
I should save more money.
In other news, I think I might start taking recorder lessons.
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(3)
11:22:37 AM,Thursday 14 March 2013
I just took the bus (actually two buses) through the snow from 175th Street to South Ferry. It took almost exactly three hours. It was beautiful.
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09:58:16 AM,Friday 8 March 2013
Gerald M. Elwood, hamster phlebotomist.
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(1)
11:46:11 AM,Sunday 3 March 2013
Step 1: Google your new primary care provider (with whom you have just made an appointment to meet for the first time for a routine physical).
Step 2: On the fourth page of hits, discover that she plays Magic: The Gathering.
Step 3: Do a happy little dance.
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(1)
02:30:48 PM,Friday 1 March 2013
7-11 employees in New York tend to be friendlier and look less stressed out than 7-11 employees I've met in other states. I just realized why. They're not in the middle of nowhere and constantly braced against the possibility of being robbed at any moment.
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09:45:52 AM,Friday 1 March 2013
I suck at Python, part a million. How long have I been at this, on and off? Since around 2006, I think. Maybe even 2005. How many Python books have I started and then given up on? At least half a dozen. How many tutors have I hired and then let go? Three. How many online courses have I tried? Two. One I passed the first part but dropped out of the second part. The other is Codecademy, which I've been plodding through at a rate of five exercises every week or so. My brain just doesn't take to this stuff, even the simplest, most elementary, most babystepping, handholding elements of it. I've had to look up how to call a key in a dictionary three times in the past two weeks. In the lesson I'm doing right now, I was just asked to find an average of numbers in a list. My solution?
def average(x):
count = 0
total = 0
for i in x:
total += i
count += 1
mean = total / count
return mean
Then I consulted the hint and saw that I just could have used sum() on the numbers and divided by the len() of the list. WHY. IS. THIS. SO. HARD?!
I really miss getting new music from the blogmass. Can we do a group Turntable session sometime soon and all play songs for each other for an hour or two? You don't have to have a Facebook login anymore.
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(6)
09:07:41 AM,Tuesday 26 February 2013
I got nine hours of sleep last night. I feel like I'm swimming through a warm haze of non-exhaustion, so different from the ragged eyeballs and whistling brain that usually accompany me through my morning's work.
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(1)
10:55:47 AM,Wednesday 13 February 2013
I kind of love the repair shop I'm at right now to fix the cracked screen on my phone. They have:
* A giant piece of floor-to-ceiling wall art made out of alternately black-painted and chrome-polished hard drives.
* A four-inch-tall leather armchair.
* A beautiful old antique typewriter.
* A poster in a gold-painted wooden frame that reads "Think Before Throw It! Bring It To Us!"
* A flatscreen TV playing extremely strange music videos with the sound off. (When I got here, it was showing this. Warning: Freaky depictions of Dead-Eyed Swedish Dance Fever.)
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(2)
02:05:43 PM,Friday 1 February 2013
So as some of you know, I'm currently captioning at a dental school. Last night I dreamed that I'd decided to take the dental board exams just for the hell of it, to see how much I'd picked up along the way. They were being given at an abandoned strip mall in Missoula. When I walked in, I immediately had to sign an affidavit stating that I had not secreted an orangutan in my clothing to covertly perform the drilling part of the exam in my place. I assured them that I had not, and set to work on the written portion of the test. It was in the form of a glossy fashion magazine, with about four pages of clothing ads per one page of dental exam questions. One of the questions was about the role of stenography in film adaptations of Peter Pan, and I remember scribbling a enormous thick blue ballpoint circle around that question, pleased that the importance of my profession had been acknowledged by the dental licensing board. Then I looked up and noticed my high school band director staring at me suspiciously. He'd noticed that I was an impostor. I tried looking for a back door to make my escape, but then my alarm went off and I woke up.
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(3)
07:58:51 AM,Thursday 31 January 2013
St. Germain cocktails and Super Mario Galaxy. That's how we roll on a Friday night round these parts.
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10:35:14 PM,Friday 11 January 2013
