Well, not to talk trash about Shaft, but this week he’s got nothin’ on my baddest cat, Floyd. 

Sunday I had to take the Floydster to the emergency vet clinic.  He’d had an abscessed tooth removed about a month ago, but his cheek started swelling up like the abscess was back.  The vet went in and discovered that part of the tooth had been left in.  There was a lot of talk about pus.  And the color of said pus.  Ewwwwwww. 

Floyd is old. He’s somewhere between eighteen and twenty, close as we can tell.  He’s lost a lot of weight in the last year (no, not thyroid), now the vet thinks it’s kidney disease.  Despite being underweight, he managed to pull through both operations.  He’s gained almost a pound back since Sunday.  And he has this bitchin’ new piercing. 

It looks like someone jammed a piece of macaroni into his cheek.  Actually, it’s a drain.  Yeah, there’s more pus talk coming.  I was told to compress the cheek.  But no one explained I was supposed to actually squeeze the pus out through the drain.   I tenderly did the warm compress thing on his cheek.  Then I went back to the vet and saw her in action.  “I don’t think the drain is ready to come out,” she said.  “Was I supposed to do that?” I asked.  “Yep.”   Oh hell, I thought, I am The Worst Pet Mom Ever. 

Now, I have been doing the squeeze-the-ooze-out thing.  I abandoned the warm compress for gauze.  It’s easier and I can see what I’m doing.  The drain’s supposed to come out tomorrow, and since I’m getting very little action from the drain, I think we’ll be good to go. 

  Unfortunately, I can’t release him back into the rest of the prison population.  He still has to wear his Elizabethan collar, which makes him look like an Australian Frilled-Neck Lizard.  This, of course, scares the shit out of the other cats.  And he’ll have to keep wearing the collar until his stitches have healed up.  Read More »

I remember watching this one on a military base in a Saturday Matinee. I was quite young and I thought it was so cool. I suspect this is the movie that led to my later early masterpiece where the family of colonists are heading out because they’ve discovered oxygen on Jupiter.

“Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain’t much of a hand at makin’ speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin’ on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin.’ Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human bein’s if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelin’s about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin’ on you and by golly, we ain’t about to let ‘em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I’d say that you’re all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing’s over with. That goes for ever’ last one of you regardless of your race, color or your creed. Now let’s get this thing on the hump — we got some flyin’ to do.”

– B-52 pilot Major T. J. “King” Kong in Dr. Strangelove

Happy Birthday, Louis Burton Lindley, Jr.

(Another distinctive role.)

So, the cost in death just seems to float over some peoples head. How about this? As of 1:49 pm Mountain time we could’ve hired 7 million 6 hundred and 4 thousand, 8 hundred and 34 teachers for an entire year.

It’s sunny here in Manchaca this afternoon, but that wasn’t the case this morning. In fact, that hasn’t been the case for many mornings in a row. Central Texas has had the grayest, wettest spring (and now, summer) it’s had in the nineteen years I’ve lived here – and perhaps its grayest, wettest spring ever.

For all I know, this may even have been the grayest, wettest spring anywhere at any time. It wouldn’t surprise me. And I’ve spent a week in Seattle.

(Barb phoned from her office yesterday to tell me that Central Texas was big news on the CNN website because of the eighteen inches of rain that had just gully-warshed Marble Falls. “We’re always big news,” I replied. “It’s just never for anything good.”)

But despite the flooding creeks, the washed-out low-water bridges, and fresh air with the consistency of warm tapioca, we hardy Manchacans (Manchacites? Manchacoids?) are doing our best to go on about our normal daily lives as if God wasn’t punishing us for our sins.

So this morning, as usual, Barb and I walked our three dogs down Bliss Spillar Road and back. The sky was overcast and the humidity was thick, but our lucky streak of Not Being Rained On held. And then, as is my recent habit – on account of I’ve decided against being buried in a pear-shaped coffin after all – I went back out for another walk and a short run while Barb scrambled an egg and the dogs assumed their post-walkie forms as decorative throw pillows.

Then my lucky streak ended, because God had apparently decided that Not Being Rained On was a privilege reserved for the family as a group, not as individuals. Or maybe He’s still pissed at me about the whole I-Believe-in-Everything-Yes-Even-Scientology bit I wrote for April Fool’s Day last year. Or maybe He’s just a dick; I don’t know. What I do know is that He let me get a half-mile from home, then sent the rain in great soaking waves without even a thunderclap for advance warning.

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Via Scientist, Interrupted: Scientific American is offering its July, 2007 issue for free download as a PDF. The offer is only good through June 30. Click the pic!

I shop at fancy grocery stores. The kind where they have olive oil tastings, and big wine sections, and jewel-like mounds of produce, much of it organic. I made a tuna salad yesterday, but befitting the kind of place where I shop, I did not open a can of Chicken of the Sea and stir in some mayo. I do that–well, I open a pouch these days, but its the same thing. But for dinner, I’m more likely to eat a bit more self-consciously. And the grocery store is a really good place to be self conscious, for a lot of reasons.

Tuna Salad Nicoise
(serves 6) Read More »

I am typing veeerrrrrry slowly cause I’m typing one-handed (and not for any prurient reason). And guess why Hugh Laurie is my picture today–aside from the fact that I’ve had a crush on him since he was Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility. That’s right: Vicodin!

No, really. Had the hand surgery. As far as I can tell, everything went well, although I wish they’d taken a picture of the cyst in place, just so I could see it. But so far, other than having to keep my hand up in the attitude of someone taking a courtroom oath, and being a little, um, spacy, it’s all good. But understandably, my Brain is abbreviated today. I had the surgery in an ambulatory care facility staffed with half a dozen cheerful, businesslike nurses, an anesthesiologist, and my hand doctor. Two highly furnished operating suites, and recovery room, and an ante-room where they got me settled. As always happens when I have some sort of medical care issue, I chatted cheerily about all manner of stuff (mostly what sort of things I write, and why having a right hand was important to me): I think I chat entertainingly with the staff because I want them to like me and want to take good care of me. I’m sure they’d take good care of me even if I wasn’t funny, but why not give them incentive?

And now I’m going to doze off again, because you know what? Vicodin!

You can get your penis-vacuuming blog rated like a movie at Mingle.

I just did ours:

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It was such a deity-cursed surprise, I almost defecated myself.

All I got to say about this bull-feces is, “Hey, copulate it.”

:

Via BoingBoing, here’s an eye-popping* concept: space diving.

You close your eyes and leap, tumbling into the abyss. The curved horizon spins wildly. You let out a scream of terror as it rushes up toward you, and then you black out. Minutes later, a sudden jerk wakes you. This must be death, you think—your flesh meeting Earth at horrible speeds. But it’s the tug of your chute deploying at 3,000 feet. You realize you’re going to be all right. You glide in, touch down, and collapse in convulsions, traumatized. Through your tears you see your friends nearby, similarly undone but alive. You spot smoke on the horizon where, a mile away, your ship returned to the ground in an angry hail of twisted metal.

Two space industry veterans—Rick Tumlinson and Jonathan Clark—have teamed up to design a space diver suit, which will not only potentially enable astronauts to survive a space disaster, but might also attract the most extreme of extreme sport fanatics.

They have a very ambitious schedule: within a year, they want to design a suit for a dive from 120,000 feet, or nearly 23 miles up. (By comparison, most commercial jetliners cruise at about 7 miles up.) Within two years, 300,000. As the article puts it, you become a human meteorite. Pretty damn cool. With this invention, they could potentially have saved the astronauts in the two shuttle disasters. And there could even be applications for air travel that spin off from this.

But I have to admit, a fall from that height…it makes my toes hurt, just thinking about it.
_________

*Hopefully, not literally.

I’d saved this video in my ToBlog folder but remembered it when I ran across this post at Wonderoom.

Roughly twenty years ago, while shopping, I was wandering around a mall that had the sign IT’S A MALL WORLD posted all over the place. That in itself was creepy enough, but while skirting around the construction of a new store I spotted IT’S A MALL WORLD…WATCH YOUR STEP, reminding the casual shopper that the world was gradually transforming into a meaningless landscape of mindless consumerism. Watch your step indeed.

After reading the rest of it, try this video:

Chapter four from the work in progress follows after the jump.

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Chapter one.

Chapter two.

Chapter three.

Chapter five.

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:

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“Even trees like motorcycles!”

Alcoholics commonly report that, unlike non-alcoholics, they have an amazingly vivid, powerful memory of their first drinking experience. They knew as it was happening to them that they were encountering something that was forever going to alter their lives. Their surroundings still glow around them, in memory. The virgin taste is strong and sweet and pure. They are transformed.

I drink little, and I only barely remember my first beer. But I remember my first word. I was six years old, in the first grade at Escuela Anaco, a small school run for the children of the Americans who worked the oilpatch in the Venezuelan highlands. The word was ‘look’, and I was rendered instantly and permanently intoxicated by the sudden realization that the black squiggles on the page meant something.

I remember the book resting on my little desk in front of me. I remember the light coming in the windows. I remember the sounds of the other kids around me. I remember it all, like it happened this morning.

I was transformed.

–Excerpted from an essay I wrote in 1989 for the ‘Visions’ fanzine. (Yes, I’m plagiarizing my own self.)

My family moved every couple of years, and I quit trying too hard to make friends, because I’d just lose them soon. No matter where we lived, I grew up in libraries, news-stands, and bookstores. I think a lot of addictive readers suffered social isolation as children.

I would read books about everything, blitzing through uncontrolled crack-head runs with various authors and subjects. Baseball novels (don’t see those much any more), archaeology, astronomy, paleontology, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden. The Bobbsey Twins. Even the Freddie the Pig series, for Ghod’s sake.

Then the damn science fiction and fantasy books crept up on me. I read the complete L. Frank Baum Oz series, the Mushroom Planet series, the Rick Brant series, the Tom Swift, Jr. series.

I read everything I could find by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I never, never join organizations. I joined the Burroughs Bibliophiles. I still have the membership card.

I hung out at the K-G Drugstore when we lived in Houston, when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Every afternoon I came in and read all the new comic books on the rack, until they kicked me out for the day. I learned many years later that my parents had had a quiet chat with the owner. I’m not sure, but I think they bribed or begged him into letting me stay, because they quit kicking me out.

Doc Smith, Andre Norton. Asimov’s Lucky Starr series.

Then I mainlined Heinlein, and was transformed again. Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, egged on by John W. Campbell at Astounding Stories, created modern science fiction as we know it. Heinlein also created me, in many ways.

There’s no turning back after you’ve injected some pure Heinlein into your mindstream.

This research asserts that 38% of all US adults read books less than once a week, or even never. Bet they never shot up any Heinlein when they were teen-agers. Buncha prissy goody-two-shoes mundanes.

I have no idea how many books I’ve read, but it’s likely to be well over twenty thousand, because I used to burn through one almost daily, usually reading multiple books at a time.

I still go to the Bryan Library at least once a week and load up. I’m still addicted to words, and now I struggle with it. The internet has made it worse, almost unmanageable, because now I don’t have to go anywhere to encounter an endless stream of words.

I still remember the voluptuous, warm flavor of the word ‘look’.

I bet I’m not alone here.

I can’t vouch for these figures but they sound right. In any case an interesting series of extrapolations for us SF writers. From my Mom.