Surprises

1. New hair in SPT 13; SPT 12 is still in transit.

2. Short-chained swingset = lots and lots and lots of fun.

That is all; see below.

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ENID: It’s probably the slang.

Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.

I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.

In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.

That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.

"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible shroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.

As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of conquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.

"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.

I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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Brimstone

Today is the day I'm going to buy a watercolor journal for goal 67. I need to domakecreate something other than endless amounts of paperwork. I have a job because other people have jobs that they are one day going to retire from. Or die while doing. Or get fired from. And it's my job to tell them how much money they will or will not receive when one of those days comes. I mean, I guess I don't really want one of their jobs either. The only lifelong career I could really see myself being passionate about right now is at State.

Point is, I'm producing, but I don't feel productive. Commerce is awful like that. Ergo, list; ergo, crafts. Maybe I'll buy some yarn and make a new sweater or something, too. Starting on goal 40, perhaps? I reallyreally don't need any more scarves, and I probably reallyreally don't need another blanket. Things with real shapes FTW!

PS, If you're wondering why I put watercolors on the list at all, it's because of things like this.
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PROCRASTINATION

Yeah, writing up articles all the time gets really sort of dull. I'm trying not to let myself get too far behind, though. These are the highlights of my readings from the last two weeks; you'll notice that the Economist is still conspicuously absent; that's due to the fact that it's still arriving conspicuously late - UNTIL THIS SATURDAY. It was sitting on my desk Monday morning, and there's no post on Sundays, which means only one thing - it actually arrived ON TIME on Saturday. Amazing. Expect article postings to resume a more normal schedule this starting this weekend.

Oh, and on a side-note, the narrative responses for the Foreign Service are due tonight and I submitted them promptly at 1:13pm. Unless I somehow completely blow them away with my brilliance, though, I don't expect to hear from them until late January. Sigh.


"Where do ghosts come from?" Mostly your brain, but possibly also magnets.

"Captives" is an amazing and extensive look at this decade's violence in Gaza and the capture and detention of Gilad Shalit by Palestinians. Even more, though, it's about how difficult any peace deal might be, because the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are not synonymous. Separated geographically by Israel, they are also controlled by two different factions - Gaza by Hamas, the West Bank by the (relatively) more moderate successor of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority. This excerpt below sums it up well enough, but the whole article is really very good.

"Such potential solutions have been poisoned by the frustration that both Israelis and West Bankers feel toward Gaza. The political distance between the two Palestinian entities has caused many Israelis to start talking of a three-state solution, rather than two. “Hamas in Gaza is a fact of life until further notice,” Yossi Alpher, a political consultant and a former Mossad officer, observed. “All our ideas about dealing with them have failed.” Shavit and other Israeli intellectuals have proposed that the Egyptians deed a portion of the Sinai to Gaza, to make the Strip more viable—“a semi-Dubai,” as Shavit terms it. The Egyptians have expressed no interest. “Egypt’s strategy for Gaza is to make sure it’s Israel’s problem,” Alpher said."

"Clearing oasis trees felled ancient Peruvian civilisation," or, those who do not learn history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them, non-Eurocentric edition.

"Rap Sheet" examines the history of American gun ownership and the history of Americans as a murderous sort of people. Guns, it turns out, probably just enabled us to act out our more murderous impulses, rather than creating them, because - get this - we became a democracy before we were civilized. Seriously. Read, it's good for a laugh, and sort of does make you wonder why we keep creating new "frontiers" outside our homes and borders that we have to "defend" ourselves from...

"Governments should get real on drugs" is a scientific editorial by David Nutt, who was ousted this month as the chairman of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for pointing out that marijuana causes fewer health problems and deaths than either alcohol or tobacco. If this fact is news to you, or even if it isn't, you should take a look.

And finally, recovering nicely from that Sam Shepard debacle a few weeks ago, "Alone" has renewed my faith in the fiction editor's judgment. It's a sort of slow-moving story, but it isn't exactly boring... I kept at it, anyway, and I'm glad I did. No spoilers, just click it if you like short stories.
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pictures pictures pictures

It's incredibly late and I'm incredibly tired, but below the cut lie not only this week's SPT, but also photographic proof that I swung on swingsets numbers two and three today - if you recall, I have not actually posted a picture of the first swingset yet because... I fail. Whatever. Number 2 is at Wadsworth Park in Flagler Beach, and Number 3 is just up the highway at Holland Memorial Park in Palm Coast. Number 2, as you will see shortly, has an interesting architecture going for it, but has pretty short chains... still, in all, a very nice swinging experience. Meanwhile, I was far more pleased with the longer chains at Number 3, except that half of them were too long and, mysteriously, could not be rolled up. Very good afternoon, though :)

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Apocalypse Never

This weekend, after a few months of trying to get various members of my family to watch it with me, I decided to finally suck it up and get Apocalypse Now over with. It was going along swimmingly until I got about an hour and a half in, to the part where they accidentally-on-purpose kill all the Vietnamese civilians on the sampan and find out it was all because of a puppy. It was at that point I realized there was still more than an hour and a half left, and I didn't really want to see if they kill the puppy, and that really, 90 minutes is the length of a crappy movie and I was therefore allowed to feel like I'd had the complete Apocalypse Now experience. I am therefore declaring the classic movie goal, number 86, to be IN PROGRESS. Go me.
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Backlog

Everything has slowed down a lot, so I apologize for the lack of posts this week. I have two SPTs below the cut here, and an article post I've been writing queued up, and - not kidding - a two-week old draft of music-review for goal number 4. I promise, though, I have kept up with drabble-writing (nothing I'm confident is share-worthy, though) and reading and free rice and working on the responses for the Foreign Service app. I just haven't felt hugely compelled to write about it. Oh well. Picture-time!


This one was before work on Oct 28th. Some days I'm a really good morning person.

This one was last night, not on Thursday. Oh well. I'm not sure how I got it to double-expose, because it never does it when I actively try, but I like it.

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