muranoblue

A Canadian actor by the name of Leeman Kessler has a YouTube channel called "Ask Lovecraft." In the personas of H.P. Lovecraft and his evil twin, P.H. Lovecraft, and others, he gives advice and commentary on just about anything. I can binge watch this channel for hours. He has 775 videos, so there is plenty to binge on.

To celebrate the five year anniversary of his channel, he is sponsoring a writing competition for short stories of not more than 1,000 words, that are strange or weird and focus on the number 5. The prize is having your story read by the character of your choice. It should be not too explicit for his family friendly channel. The competition closes July 12, 2017.

The announcement is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PvXrM4IIjM

Cthulhu be with you!

The kind folks at Lapidary Journal included the Tucson Show Guide with this month's issue.   Should I?  Is it a sign? I don't really need that house, do I?  Yes, I need that house to set up a permanent workshop area.  but ooh . . . shiny.

This book has come up a couple times for me recently on http://www.librarything.com and here in whatwasthatbook.  I remember this book!  It was my introduction to the whole of Norse Mythology and Wagner.  It put down deep roots. That book lead to more reading that introduced me to ideas of historical scholarship, anthropology and textual criticism. I was maybe all of twelve when I picked it up as a discard from my local library. - Raises a glass to the memory of Lester Del Ray -  The influence of people who write meaty stuff for juveniles goes on forever.

We watched the Endeavor flyover at my office this morning. We went running outside and down to the intersection. It was a stampede of about 30 folks. I got a very good look at it. It was really low. The photos don’t do justice to the amount of detail we could see, although if you compare the size of the fighter to the cargo jet and the shuttle, you get a clue about the size.

( See photo )

Hopefully that's behind an LJ cut, because the original was enormous. Photo taken by Shirley, as it went over their house. As in make your bones rattle over-your-house.

Here's another one, Juan took as we were running like insane people, down to the intersection.

( See photo )

I was surprised to find myself in tears. I remember John Glenn going into space on the first manned Mercury mission. I was little at the time, probably in first grade. I was really amazed by the concept that if you go far enough, there’s no air out there.

I also remember the Apollo missions. We didn’t have a TV, so I went to a neighbor’s house to watch the broadcasts “from the Apollo Room.” The first broadcast, maybe more, had no sound feed, so the Astronauts held up signs to the camera.

And when they finally landed on the moon, it was such a big deal. My neighbor with the TV threw a luau and roasted a pig in a pit. My classmates were tremendously excited. We probably had an advantage - our school had a substitute teacher who had just retired from Nasa, Mr. Johnson. He never bothered with the prepared lesson plans. He just brought his slides and told us stories about the people and how they did things. The stories were scaled down for our level of sophistication - very rural 7th & 8th graders. Previously the height of ambition for the boys was to get a job working cattle for one of the large ranchers - that was the cool job before Mr. Johnson. Science and math became way cool. College was suddenly “in.” For the girls, well, let’s just say this was before feminism.

Space! Astronauts! and Satellites! were a huge and new deal. It wasn’t until after I graduated from high school, which would have been five years later, that they started using satellites to send long distance calls. I was working in a hardware store and the boss had gone to Alaska. When he called back to the store, I was the one who picked up the phone. He told me they were making that call via satellite, did he sound okay? I could hear him fine. But it was amazing, it was such a new thing. Wow, a call by satellite. There was a store full of impressed people.

(Apropo of nothing: My 8th grade teacher was a retired CIA spy who had worked in post war Germany. We had very interesting critiques of the James Bond film that came out that year. And I got introduced to the notion that polyglot was a good thing.)

But I'm rambling. Today I saw the last flight of the last shuttle. The American manned space program is done. Yeah, it's okay to cry.

About a year and half ago, I made a career change. I've been working as insurance/asbestos defense paralegal for more than 12 years. I was unemployed and really tired of commuting in the SF bay area. So when a local plaintiff's firm advertised for a paralegal, I applied thinking it was a long shot. Much to my surprise, I got an interview, which went really well. And I got the job (and 4.5 mile commute, WOOOT!)

I've never done plaintiff work before. I've never worked in a politically active firm before. It's highly entertaining. They are louder and more boisterous than any place I've ever worked. And today, that-idiot-Akin caused 2 of the senior partners to stand in the hallways ranting and raving about Republican fundamentalist MORONS. It did my heart good to hear two 60+ men spend 20 minutes talking loudly, swearing and waving their arms, about how important science and women's right are.

Well, I finally saw the Avengers. I'd watched some cast interviews and read some fanfic and I decided that I wanted to see the movie on the big screen. I'm thinking I saw a totally different different movie than most folks, including the cast. Help me out here, have I been jossed?

( Cut for Spoilers )

Cross-posted to whatwasthatbook
It would be great if someone could ID this book I want to re-read that keeps niggling at me. (Don't you hate when that happens?)

There were two alien species. One was very aggressive and drafted skilled workers from a more peaceful species onto large spaceships. The ships also had a population of the second species that called themselves ship bred or ship born. The POV is mostly a ship born female. They used implants for inter-species communications. The very aggressive species set aside sections of the ship for raising their own young and were unpredictable and explosively violent near that area. The female overlord-type running one ship drafted a technician, implanted him, paired him with the POV female of his species. Then she bought a human spacer out of lot of wild humans and added him to the group and ordered the other two to see if they could come to understand him. Along the way, there was a planetary destruction, because the humans had resisted the demands of the overlord-types. And the implanted human insisted on rescuing a human child. The POV female discovered she was unable to function under an open sky. There was a rival ship, run by a male overlord-type, that picked up some humans too and wound up putting a mother and her child in the nesting area because they didn't have any of their own. The two ships came together and established some sort of alliance/relationship.

The book had a Cherryh feel in that it threw you into alien cultures without much explanation, but it isn't one of hers. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

This wall street protest reminds me of my first lesson on international finance. I was about 24 and working the night shift as a security guard. At the time the only programming on the radio in the wee hours was talk radio, which was different back then, it was mostly advice. There was a finance guy who talked about these things called CDs with an interest rate of 10%! (Don't ask for his name, it was about 25 years ago, I don't remember.)

One of the other guards had heard the same advice and we were talking it about at shift change one morning, trying to figure out where you could get these things. An older guy heard what we were talking and offered some advice of his own. (His name, I recall. Bless you Joe, where ever you may be.)

Joe said, "Oh, take half your money and put it in the bank in Portugal. They pay 24%." Then he went on to explain that they didn't do mortgages in the Azores, like they do here. It cost you just like a credit card to buy your building materials for your house if you had to borrow the money. We talked about a bit more, then my buddy asked the critical question: This sounds like a great deal, why only half your money?

Joe looked quite surprised and said, "In case the revolution comes." As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I was logged into my yahoo account tonight and discovered they’ve got a new Yahoo feature called Yahoo Pulse. It’s a Facebook wanna-be. EVERYTHING was public on my profile. They had found two prior addresses, phone numbers, all my email addresses and God knows what else. AND IT WAS ALL OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. They’re taking the Facebook approach to privacy controls too, it’s very piecemeal. I’m still not sure I’ve got everything deleted or made private.

I did not sign up for this Pulse thing. I'm not sure how they assembled it. If you’ve ever used Yahoo, go and check.

I kid you not. I was in produce section tonight and noticed some dark, round, slightly wrinkled thingys that reminded me of figs but were the wrong shape. I asked the produce guy what they were and he told they were a variety of apricots but he'd never tried one. So we split one, right there in the produce aisle. Excellent, really juicy and sweet.