Ree

It's dark now. It's the shortest day/longest night.

Tomorrow, the year's reborn.

I had a rotten afternoon - unpleasantly intense conversation with my mother, my work laptop went blue screen of death - and then I rang Ajay and she said she'd do anything to cheer me up and instead of taking advantage of this, we settled to meet up outside the Odeon on Lothian Road, get tickets to Avatar, then have dinner. We ate in a lovely Chinese restaurant called the Rainbow - I practically inhaled the ginger/pineapple/nut stirfry, except not really, because that would be gross and lethal - and I had steamed dumplings and Ajay had steamed Malaysian-style sponge pudding, I don't know what made it "Malaysian style" but it was nice. And Avatar was really terribly silly with plotholes you could drive a tank through great fun: though the Odeon bar has boring boring white wine, the homemade ginger chocolates Ajay brought were fantastic. And it snowed. We left the restaurant and walked to the cinema through a flurry of beautiful, perfect, enormous snowflakes.

...it had stopped snowing by the time the film was over, but Edinburgh was still pretty in the snow.

( cut for decency )

We're about to have a party. I mean really, we're due to start having it in about five minutes - most guests due to arrive in about half an hour.

I don't feel partyish, though I did just have a lovely conversation with OffTopic, the OT environmental assessor, who asked me what support my parents need and listened seriously when I said "a declutterer!" and explained that their children had been advising them this for years but they won't listen.



It's cold.

It started to hail as I walked to work: I stopped off at the library to return a book, and it was hailing even harder as I came out. This was sort of interesting: hail is so visibly frozen rain as it falls! - but then it started to snow, icy-wet and miserable. I passed by a bistro with wifi and seriously thought about going in and ordering a cup of coffee and unpacking my laptop and checking my work e-mail and such: but then I thought, how bad can it get? I'm only fifteen minutes walk from work.

It was the worst fifteen minutes of my life. Well, not actually. I've had worse. But as I walked down the unsheltered street on the shore of the Water of Leith, facing the oncoming wind, my head was so cold it hurt, and the snow that was still nearly hail was stinging as it hit my face, and the fallen snow that was forming puddles of ice was freezing my feet through running shoes and not-thick-enough socks. And my jeans were wet down my calves with snow hitting them and melting. The only thing that made other worst-fifteen-minutes-of-my-life worse was major emotional trauma, and fortunately there wasn't a lot of that. Snow doesn't care about inflicting emotional trauma. Think how awful for us if it did this because it hated us rather than with the awful imperturbability of weather death.

( speaking of emotional trauma, my mum )

I need to be in the holiday mood, already. There's a Christmas party tomorrow night. :-(

There's my yuletide story, though my deadline for that is 4 days late.

Give me a word. Let's do the insta-flashfic thing. Give me a word, optionally a theme, and I will write flashfic.

(Alternatively, ask me a question and I will lie to you.)

I don't just need to get stuff done before Christmas, I need to figure out what stuff I can get done before Christmas and what I need to surrender with a sad sigh into 2010. (Which is a silly year, isn't it?)

One Christmas flashfic left...

I don't actually want it to be Christmas next week. I bought a present for one nephew and I can't think what to get the other one. I could get him a bottle of Brew Dog Tokyo. He's old enough to drink if someone else buys it for him. He will never drink a more delicious beer, though. Ought I to spoil all the other beers of his life by buying him one so good so young?

I probably need to check with his mum if he drinks beer, at all. Or drinks, at all.

My current favourite set of C. J. Cherryh novels is the Foreigner series, in which a human colony on a new world end up losing the war to the atevi: advanced technology does not help when you are outnumbered a million to one. I was re-reading Heorot, one of Niven's nicer novels, in which a human colony on a new world win a kind of war against the grendels, who are intelligent but solitary: a million to one lose when each one of that million is potentially at war against each other one.

But what struck me for the first time reading it is that the colony of 150 people (plus 600 potentials, frozen in embryo) doesn't really have government. There's a headman, Zack, who runs the tribe pretty much on consensus (to quote one of my favourite lines from a long-ago movie about a South American tribe, "If I tell them to do what they do not want to do, I am no longer chief") but there's no elections, no civil service, not much sense of private property, no buying and selling, no taxes: people work for themselves or for the colony, which is small enough that it works well like that. But within 25 years, this small group of 150 people could be over a thousand, a tribe become a town: and you can't run a town of a thousand people without government. Yet Niven outlines not even a plan for government - not even any sense that the colonists have thought about it. (Granted they're pretty busy fighting grendels through a lot of the novel, but they have time to think about plenty of other future possibilities: all we ever see of discussions on "government" is Zack and Carlos concluding that it's just as well their Beowulf isn't interested in being king himself.)

But then I have to admit to having got fascinated more than once about how many people you would have to have in a start-up colony, assuming you could have all necessary skills and assuming terraforming wasn't required, to be able to continue for multiple generations without outside input. Niven's bright idea of bringing along embryos for implantation gives a certain number of extra genesets, though each implantation still requires a woman's nine month's labour and parents several years more. Which is partly what my dragons'n'eggs game has turned into: how many times can I breed my dragons together, how many generations can I get, without crossing ancestors?

First generation:
Second generation:
Third generation:

Read their latest newsletter:

Our purpose is to work as a team to help women help others and themselves to create a better world. Currently, we are mainly focused on women in northern India. But, everyone is welcome to join and help.

We are new at websites, so please be patient with us. Also, for most, English is not the primary language. We would greatly appreciate any help you can offer. At the moment, we do not have internet access so it is difficult to update this website. But we will find a way!

Be the change you wish to see in the world. - Gandhi

I am only one, but still I am one; I can not do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do! - Helen Keller

Please reach out and lend a hand :-) We would appreciate your help.

I remember whatho discussing this when they had a major shortfall in income and it turned out to be horribly very difficult to raise money properly for a charity without any real links to the UK. :-( Suggestions at whatho's journal maybe?

I guess so.

I moved here in February 2004. In doing so I moved more than a mile away from Tattie Shaw's, easily the best greengrocers in Edinburgh, and shortly afterwards my place of work moved addresses too, so that I wasn't conveniently handy to Tattie Shaw's either living or working, for the first time since Tattie Shaw's opened in the 1980s. (It was founded by a couple who used to work in the financial sector in London, and who were prudent enough to sell their house in London at the top of the boom and move to Edinburgh, where the property boom had not yet really begun. Obviously when I lived in Reading and in Basingstoke I didn't shop in Tattie Shaw's, but aside from those times...)

[In May 2004] Sometime in 2004 - if you asked me when I could not tell you, but I'm fairly sure it was before I did the stint in Cambridge, too - a fruit'n'veg cooperative opened in the local primary school's community hall. The prices were not much different from Tattie Shaw's, but much cheaper than supermarket fruit and veg, and I thought it was ideally positioned to take advantage of the housing estate over the road from the primary school. The coop provided work experience for several people with a learning disability, and got a certain amount of basic income from the Scottish Government's subsidy of five-a-day fruit packs for primary school children.

The man who ran it - who left for another job a couple of years ago - used to run events like baking competitions (I won a prize for my scones once!) and have special offers.

The housing estate over the road is gradually being closed down - as tenants move out, they're not being replaced - and this must have cut down on customers: and the Scottish Government decided they were not going to subsidise fresh fruit for schoolchildren past primary 2 (and Edinburgh City Council declined to do so either). The supplier changed its "sale or return" policy - which had enabled the coop to lay out a massive array of fresh fruit and vegetables and look as welcoming to customers at 9am or at 11am. And Asda opened up a 24-hour superstore fifteen minutes walk away.

Today was the last day of the coop. I told them I was sorry to see it go, and so I am: but they've been providing a less and less suitable service for some time now - buying only what they know they can sell, and so if you come in late there's likely to be not much left. I've been buying some fruit from Tattie Shaws on Saturdays anyway. I shall just have to figure on buying my whole week's supply. Or getting a fruit bag when I get my organic vegetable box.

Also, my period started.



PS: Two Christmas flashfics left...

angiepen, two months ago: Is YOUR Senator Pro-Gang-Rape?

Yeah, that's pretty inflamatory. I'm feeling pretty damn inflamed right now, so I think that's appropriate.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR -- at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they're hiring -- was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she'd be fired. (more...)

The co-workers who drugged her, gang-raped her, mutilated her, and imprisoned her, could not be brought to trial, because Jones' employment contract with KBR required victims of sexual assault to surrender the right to have a rapist prosecuted: her co-workers could only be dealt with before a private arbitrator, without any transcript of the proceedings, and no public record, and no prison time.

In October 2009, Senator Al Franken brought an amendment before the Senate to change the law so that companies with this kind of damaging requirement in their employment contract could not get a government contract: Franken wanted to ensure that if someone is raped, she hasn't been made to sign a contract that says her rapists can't be prosecuted.

Thirty Republican Senators voted against this law: they wanted companies that employ rapists and protect them against prosecution to continue to receive lavish government contracts to pay their rapist employees and their pro-rapist arbitration schemes: they wanted rapists to be protected from prosecution. Those Senators were Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; John Barrasso of Wyoming; Kit Bond of Missouri; Sam Brownback of Kansas; Jim Bunning of Kentucky; Richard Burr of North Carolina; Saxby Chambliss of Georgia; Tom Coburn of Oklahoma; Thad Cochran of Mississippi; Bob Corker of Tennessee; John Cornyn of Texas; Mike Crapo of Idaho; Jim DeMint of South Carolina; John Ensign of Nevada; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; Judd Gregg of New Hampshire; James Inhofe of Oklahoma; Johnny Isakson of Georgia; Mike Johanns of Nebraska; Jon Kyl of Arizona; John McCain of Arizona; Mitch McConnell of Kentucky; Jim Risch of Idaho; Pat Roberts of Kansas; Jeff Sessions of Alabama; Richard Shelby of Alabama; John Thune of South Dakota; David Vitter of Louisiana; and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

Now they are complaining that this vote of theirs is being held against them - that some people in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming would actually rather their Senator had not voted to protect rapists at government-funded companies. They think that just because they voted against a law which would do something to ensure the employees of government contractors can't be raped by their co-workers, it's unfair to describe them as pro-rape: "Senate Republicans are outraged at Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) due to their votes against an amendment he introduced, to crack down on the rape of employees of military contractors, now being used against them."

Dear YouTube peoples:

All I really want to see is pretty pictures of a nifty phenomenon that happened over Norway a few days ago. Because of the pretty. Because of the amazingly beautiful, in fact. I mean, that was totally awesome and I wish I'd been there to see it firsthand.

I really don't need your tinhat explanations of what it means. Please to be not showing me crop circles and telling me that stargates are real.

Whyyyyyyy can't you all just enjoy the pretty? And let me see it without having to swallow your global thermonuclear martian theories along with?

:P

Yesterday was the first time I'd been there in daylight when visiting my dad.

( Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh )

Bibliotherapy:

One of House's therapists at Mayfield challenges him to express himself through poetry. YAY!SYMBOLISM!
See if you can tell what each poem is about. Some are obvious and some are not. Some have multiple meanings.
Bear in mind that House would have written these under the impression that no one would ever see them.

JuliaBohemian is easily my favourite House MD writer. She has written 98 stories (some of which are multi-chapter novels) but this one is just a set of 19 sort of poems: ( the review )

1. I'm celebrating my birthday by getting my hair cut. I'm tired of having long hair. It's been interesting for 3 years but that's it.

2. My dad's doing well! I got there at 2pm and stayed till nearly four and we were both talking a lot and it was great. The staff nurse robot I spoke to last night said robotically that she could not possibly give me even a ballpark estimate of when he would be discharged to the Astley Ainslie, because harrumph, what did I expect, they had no idea when a bed would become available there, but it does sound like that's all they're waiting on. Also, he reports, he's got his appetite back (and apparently hospital food has improved a lot, also you get a card the day before to choose your meals from).

3. And this is an example of why I plan to never visit the US* again. Peter Watts:

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.
In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.
But that is not this universe.

*Now that would be an interesting googlebomb tactic, wouldn't it?

4. I found out about what happened to Peter Watts via Avedon at Sideshow, who found out via BoingBoing; I found out about what happened to Shah Rukh Khan via every news source in India and quite a few others round the world on Google News and Bollywood fan sites; I found out about what happened to Emily Feder via Sideshow, and she's the nearest I can think of to an ordinary person who nonetheless managed to bring her experience about being harassed by the authorities at border-crossing to widespread public attention. Most of the people who are harassed in this way by the US Department of Homeland Security do not have the same kind of resources as Peter Watts or even Emily Feder to make their story widely known - and certainly not the kind of governmental protection that Shahrukh Khan has, as Khan himself has pointed out. (Example from my own online acquaintance.)

5. The ACLU has a $20M shortfall in its funding - it lost a major donor thanks to the financial crisis. Glenn Greenwald has a well-documented post about the importance of the ACLU: while I would not normally urge non-Americans to donate to any US charity, the ACLU has defended the rights of the many non-US citizens who have been kidnapped by the US, held for years, and tortured: indeed, is still doing so under the new Obama regime as it did under the old Bush regime. You can donate to the ACLU here.

6. This list of ten things has got a lot more complicated and less lighthearted than I'd originally planned. So, er: ( illegal immigation kitteh style! )

7. There are still 3 Christmas flashfiction offers open!

8. Royal Infirmary photographs: need to get flickr-pro, soon, I guess.

9. First, second, and third generation eggs:

10. Two more first-generation eggs:

According to a long-standing tradition from 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008:

I'll write flash fiction on any fandom I know enough about to write in for the first ten people to comment here. Name your fandom*, give me a word to include, and (optionally) state a theme.

Stories will be posted on my journal on 25th December.

*If you name a fandom about which I know nothing, you can still get your flash fiction - you'll just have to switch fandoms.

I had lunch with threeoranges today, and you didn't. I win. And she gave me a copy of Affinity, so I win a bit more, too.

Also, it is Friday, and I get to leave the office now, and this week is almost justabout nearly over.

( lj cut for silly surrealist lyrics meme )

First generation egg:
Second generation egg:
Third generation egg:

moar funny pictures

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of sisterhood."

When you see this in your friendslist, quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Sexual Minorities Uganda asked for people all over the world to make today an international day of protest against the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill: You Cannot Tell Me You Will Kill Me Because I’m Gay. Today at noon in London activists will gather in front of the Ugandan High Commission in Trafalgar Square.

The original text says "in a spirit of brotherhood", and to note again how often human rights for women are regarded as optional.

British schoolchildren doodle for Google...

(And consider, if you will, how very few of them have any idea there are women in British history. ...bah.)

Managed to miss two work-related events that I'd wanted to go to, but in compensation, I met threeoranges, who is lovely. (Both in personality, which I knew about, and gorgeous, which I didn't.)

I bought her a coffee. She bought me a beer.

Just for a change, I caught the 24 all the way to the Infirmary. (It's 35 minutes, give or take, from Lothian Road: quite quick, compared to the 21.)

My dad was doing well (though his cheerfulness may have been because they forgot about his evening torture session physiotherapy) and I had found him a couple of Stephen King books to read. Which is slightly unique, really, my dad is so not the horror novel type.

I have run myself a hot bath. That's nice, too.