Spontaneous Musings

I've decided to just float for a bit. My mind isn't really focusing that well anyhow.

I'm inundated with COVID stuff still from the organization where I work, and bereavement notices of folks parents dying.

Today - I went grocery shopping again - and noticed while people wore masks inside, they didn't as much outside, although many are. One guy wearing a baby breath's blue jogger suit was screaming and spitting into his cell phone outside. I gave him a wide berth.

I need to get the flu shot again - I wonder if I can get it from the pharmacy? Doctor appointment isn't until November 24, and I want the COVID booster then. Crazy Org - is giving them, but out in Mineola.

Shoulders still hurt. And fingers. I think it may be the weather?

Looked at Ancestry.com and discovered I'm now 29% Scottish, 27% Irish, 15% Welsh, 15% Scandinavian, and 3% German. Which is odd, considering my mother's father was 100% German, and I've German on my father's side. I don't know, been listening to The Cooking Gene - and that was eye-opening. 23andMe provides DNA for minorities. Ancestry tends to have mainly Western European. So...how does one know for certain?

From the Times:

* Los Angeles will require proof of Covid vaccination to enter many indoor businesses, in one of the strictest rules in the country.
( Read more... )
* There was a shooter in Arlington, Texas today - another school shooting. ( Read more... )

* I got distracted by BAD ART FRIEND about a literary writer, Sonya Larson, who co-opted another writer's personal kidney donation story (a writer she disliked and wanted to hurt) in a writer's group for a short story.( summary )

This ended up being the subject of a kerfuffle of sorts on "Literary" Twitter (which by the way makes me never want to buy another book again - I'm sticking with Amazon e-books and audio and paying next to nothing for independently published genre novels, although I was kind of already there. And I hardly need to - I've enough books that I've not read yet in my apartment and in the basement of my apartment building and on the side streets and in area libraries to last me for a very very long time). Cat Sebastain was discussing it. Along with various other writers on literary twitter:

1/ Okay, Literary Twitter, you got me. Here's one more writer's take on "Bad Art Friend" aka The Kidney Story:

One party is a needy weirdo who did, in fact, donate a kidney.

The other knowingly plagiarized the letter portion of her story and repeatedly states this in writing.

Yup.

And apparently Bad Art Friend followed a similar story in Slate: Cat Person

The other bit as brought up on Twitter - was something I've had issues with my entire life. When a group of people get together - they can often decide to go after one person they don't like very well and bully or exclude them. I told my mother why I left my college sorority in college, actually why Wales and I both left it.
( Read more... )
The Bad Art story reminds me a lot of that, and various fandom kerfuffles, where someone else was the subject of a group complain discussion or I was. I've been on both sides of that argument. Actually most of us probably have. Human beings are annoying, self-centered, and often selfish assholes. The pandemic has proven that without a shadow of a doubt.

On Twitter, the genre writers were proclaiming themselves better than the literary writers because at least they just made up stuff. LOL! (True, it's why I prefer writing genre. I'd rather make up stuff than try to write about reality. Reality is painful, and at times exploitative. Making up stuff is more fun. And I think metaphorically so I can hide it all in metaphors.)

**

Covid
Via the Times:

* The U.S. is starting to recover from a summer surge, but public health officials say the pandemic remains a potent threat.

* A new study found that “Covid toes” may be caused by an immune system overreaction.

*Sweden and Denmark paused the use of Moderna’s vaccine for younger age groups because of possible rare side effects, Reuters reported.

*U.S. hospitals in less vaccinated areas are struggling financially under a surge of patients, The Washington Post reported.

*Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set deadlines for employees of Canada’s federal government to be vaccinated. [Hmm, we're kind of ahead of Canada on this one - the US Federal Government mandated it in the Spring.]

*The choice for a Colorado patient: Get the Covid vaccine, or miss out on a kidney transplant.[ Decisions, decisions.]

***

Did UU Bible Study again tonight. We discussed Tower of Babel. ( Read more... )

At check in - I kept it simple. I didn't try to communicate much at all.
"I'm floating," I said. "God tethers me, as I float, so I don't just float away into space." This statement was aided by my background (which you can pick on Zoom) that was space. It's basically planets behind my Zoom image.

Random photo of the day...

Jordan Pound Rocks in Arcadia National Park, Maine - circa 2010.

Well, my cable is back. Apparently they suffered an outage at their hub - due to a voice/audio upgrade for digital phone. (Which personally I think is not worth the savings they brag about. I don't have it and never would.)

LJ question - describe your sense of humor in five words or less? Dry Wit.

That was easy. Speaking of humor, shapinglight's summary of the plot of the Bill Willingham Angel Comics had me in stitches. She reads it so we don't have to, not only reads it, but summarizes and with humor! I'm not reading the things, please. But...if you analyzed or watched the Angel series at all - you have to read this plot.

1. ( Want a quick laugh - read this summary of the latest Angel issue, spoilers by the way )

2. Still reading Terry Gross's interviews from the NPR series Fresh Air. Made it through the whole bit on creating hip hop, funk, DJ track skipping from experts such as George Clinton, Grandmaster Flash, and Bootzy. Now working my way through interviews with Paul Schrader and Jodie Foster on the making of Taxie Driver. Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver.

But what I want to share are two things - this bit from an interview with Nick Hornby, the writer of High Fidelty and About a Boy. I read the former - it was one of those pop culture guy books that we passed to each other back in the early 1990s as a must read, while we were drinking cosmos etc. Saw both as movies, the latter was a better movie. And...a bit from Paul Schrader regarding unreliable narrators.

Here's the first - which I found insightful and gave me one of those rare "a-hah" moments.
( Ah-hah moment )