Author: foxtongue
James!
happy KLAATU birthday BERADA sunday NIKTO tea
March 21st
560 Mclean
noon – 11:30
Sunday Tea is a roving Vancouver tradition, an open-invite social event held weekly at different venues, generally from 11am-ish to 2pm-ish, depending on the hosts. Basically, if you’re reading this, you’re invited and so are all your cupcakes, cookies, and most fun friends. This tea is in honour of Ray and Tony’s birthdays, (March 16th and 19th, respectively), and goes from noon until it blends into our Sci-Fi Double Feature, (Eden’s Log & Pandorum), which starts at seven. (They knows nothing about either film, by the way, make sure not to give anything away!) There will be tea and cake! BYO-anything else. Pyjamas welcome, nudity discouraged. We urge people to bring not only the usual trappings of Sunday Tea, which are tasty snacks and good people, but also party hats, just for fun.
General rules for Tea are: New people are excellent, children are welcome, tasty things and interesting kinds of tea are encouraged, but no TimBits are allowed.
Allergy note: our household contains two cats and some nuts.
going on the wall above my bed
Tony and I scored some awfully sweet treats at the Emerald City ComicCon on Sunday, (especially at the TopatoCo booth, where Tony picked up both Wondermark books, a Futurism poster, “Building a fake future in the hopes that the real future will show up to mate with it”, the Dresdon Kodak Biscuit Science shirt, Questionable Content’s glow-in-the-dark cat-with-a-rocket-pack Science is a Verb Now shirt, and Kate Beaton’s new book, Never Learn Anything From History), but one of my absolute favourites has to be a print of Powder, by Ben Walker:
Ben insists they are locked in mortal combat, (“Look at the blood and claws! You don’t know who will win.”), but we prefer our interpretation, that the moose and mighty jackalope are merely rough-housing, thundering together in epic no-holds-barred two ton tickle-fight. See that open mouth? The jackalope is laughing, its chittering squeals of merriment and mirth loud enough to shatter glass.
spring ahead, fall back
Just a reminder: today is Daylight Savings. Remember to change your clocks!
just one of those things
His body shifts and I wonder if it’s automatic, my mind almost on other things. Abruptly, however, a flash, headlong, hurried, intense as something, suddenly, is very, very right. It is like a switch has flipped. I am concentrated. My body becomes fierce and my words slip away, pushed away by this unforeseen, lovely surprise.
(It doesn’t last, of course. There’s never enough time to get it where it needs to go, but that’s another story.)
I read about sex in novels, in science studies, in stumbled little webzines and in You and Your Body books pressed into my hands by worried boyfriends, (hoping, I suppose, that I shall discover how to fix how I am apparently broken), and never do they describe the immediacy I experience, the severity, how fast it happens, how disengaged I can be before. Always they write about sweet climbing momentum, gentle swells, an upward glide into pleasure leading like foothills to some final poignant apex no one seems to have words for, as if sex were oceanic and mysterious instead of a cliff. Or they write about fucking, fast powerful sex that racks the body with rushing orgasms, rapid spasms of keen, overpowering whatever it is. “Waves of exquisite pleasure overwhelmed her body” it says on page 45, but nowhere in my history can I find a similar sugar crumb trail of slow sticky nights or sensuous afternoons. Instead, if I am very lucky, there is an absolute point of sudden, violent desire. A severe, immediate, precipitous change when things get interesting. It is swift and always unexpected, a quickening that hits quickly, and without it, sex is only exciting for other people, something to smile with, about, yet through.
I check the name of the author. Female, same as the last few times. I wonder again, as always, how it is that I have been doing it wrong.
exciting news!
365:2010/01/22 – good morning!
Never having done this in any serious way before, I’m not exactly sure which pictures I should be offering, so I turn to you and ask, “what are some of your favourites?”.
help some artists get to norwescon!
Regarding my recent post about Norwescon, I have to admit the primary reason I’m planning to attend this year is because my friend Myke Amend and his incredible partner Bethalynne Bajema will be in attendance. (Check out their super website, the Miskatonic Archive.) Both of them are absolutely lovely people, treasures in the world, and though I’ve known Myke for many, many years, we’ve never yet had a chance to meet!
For me, attending is simple. Seattle is three hours away by bus, the con will be full of friends, and it’s all very familiar territory. For them, not so much. Late-payment by a publisher has made the point of payment pretty much pointless, as their plane ticket prices have jumped $500 in the time it has taken (so far) for them to make good. To help, I’m asking my readers to take a look at their art and purchase something or pass it on to someone else who might.
What do these two do? Style, panache, airships, steampunk, tentacles, elegance, and dark, deadly wit. If you’re at all interested in ‘teh spooky’, these two are where it’s at. (To give you some references, Myke just recently did a book cover for another friend, Cherie Priest, author of Boneshaker, which has just been nominated for the Locus Awards, {vote for her at the link}, and had a painting commissioned by Robert of Abney Park to hang in his study.)
They have Airship Pirate T-shirts and Babydoll tees, prints from Myke Amend’s Airships and Tentacles series, pretty box purses, and Bethalynne’s striking neo-victorian art for sale at Etta Diem. Prices range from $10 for a print to $375 for an original painting, with a lot offered in between. For a more visual view of what they have on offer, they also have an Etsy shop.
I dream of being at a dinner like that (everything until the plug gets pulled)
A lovely stop-motion short, Out Of A Forest, filmes in the forest of Viborg, Denmark, from Tobias Gundorff Boesen. Music: “Slow Show” by The National.
so fascinating I’m forgetting to sleep
I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? […]
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.
An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.
Also: Vitamin D crucial to activating immune defenses. Copenhagen scientists have proven that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells – will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.