When I was a kid I was a fussy eater. I would have been content to live on pizza and chocolate if it had been permitted, but my parents were strangely not amenable to such a limited, if delicious diet. Instead I ate most of the food put before me. But not all of it. Here’s a few items I regularly passed on:
tomatoes
onions (unless they were onion rings, because deep frying makes everything better)
broccoli
mushrooms
cauliflower
peppers
Brussel sprouts
meat loaf (I actually ate this, but grudgingly)
bread crusts (I didn’t actually dislike bread crusts but somehow my mom thought I did. I eventually told her to leave them on.)
liver
turkey necks
mincemeat tarts
anchovies
As an adult I became much more open to eating just about anything, as long as it was edible and wasn’t still moving on my plate when served. That said, there are a few things from the above list that I still won’t touch:
Brussel sprouts are horrible anti-food. You will never convince me otherwise.
I still don’t care much for meat loaf. Something about the combination of textures and flavor puts me off.
liver is yuck, like chewing on sour shoe leather
eating turkey necks is just weird
mincemeat tarts are grossbuckets; if you also happen to have butter tarts, all is forgiven
anchovies on pizza is disgusting. Why not just roll a salmon over the pizza then cover it with a box of salt? The taste experience will be largely the same.
I can’t explain why I find this so funny, but I do.
In case the link goes down in our dystopian future, it’s a page that allows you to blow a horn at Donald Trump’s head, causing his hair to fly up. It may be the best thing related to Trump we will see this year.
This most recent virus/hellcold has been especially annoying.
It first took hold a few weeks ago and I was suitably ill and knocked out of commission for a few days. Breathing became a chore rather than something that just kind of happens without a lot of thought needed. After a week or so I got better.
Then last weekend I started to feel the hellcold trying to get hold of me again. I firmly told it, “No, go and bother someone else, some jerk or something.” And it seemed to work, as the rest of the week I again returned to a state of normalcy.
Until today. It is now making attempt #3. The primary victim again is my nose, which ran like an Olympic marathoner on the commute home from work. This is not pretty when you have no tissue on your person. Tonight, anticipating another round of Nose Acts Like a Dam, I have taken a decongestant and am drinking some nice hot tea. I have approximately 50 hours of meetings tomorrow so I am hoping that my body will be generous and kick hellcold to the curb again. It has my blessing to do so for the remainder of the year, in fact.
Other than that, I was also tired and it rained. I will not be writing poetry about this day. Actually, I write terrible poetry, so it may be appropriate to do so. But I’m going to bed instead. I’ll dream of terrible poetry, where no one gets hurt by it.
We get an extra day this month, but February 29th lands on a Monday so it’s really just a bonus day of drudgery and work.
And we still don’t have practical flying cars yet. Or impractical flying cars. Do I even need to mention the lack of functional robot butlers, the promised life of leisure as machines handle all menial work, leaving us humans free to create, explore and invent ever-better chocolate chip cookie recipes? I think not.
All told, 2016 is merely okay so far. It could be worse (Yellowstone super volcano erupting without notice), but it could be better (being able to control the weather–and super volcanoes–would be handy).
Blackout uses the same broad theme as Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” replacing the titular fog with an all-encompassing darkness than envelops a small town, all the better to unleash alien horrors on its citizenry. While the story moves swiftly, it never quite clicked for me. It’s a fast and easy read but I felt indifferent to the fates of the various characters.
The writing is for the most part solid, but unremarkable. Passages like the following, where the main character state the obvious, are not uncommon:
And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen.
One of my pet peeves–characters doing dumb things to advance the plot–is also in play here, though to his credit, Curran at least has the main character own up to his behavior:
I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it. I touched the cable.
(The cables are bad, as you may have guessed.)
If you feel the need for a bleak, hopeless tale–that’s not a spoiler, as the first line of the story admits as much–you could do worse than Blackout, but I found it curiously joyless.
Let’s take a look at my progress in getting back to my running form in 2016 by checking in on what my weight was like on January 1st and how it ended up on January 31st.
January 1: 169.5 pounds
January 31: 170.1 pounds
I have gained 0.6 pounds.
On the positive side, the weight gain is fairly trivial and could easily be attributed to something like water weight, a rounding error, etc.
On the less-positive side, it’s still up instead of down. Weight loss kind of requires the numbers to get smaller, not larger.
You may remember I spent several days kvetching recently about a cold/virus that resulted in me missing a couple of days of work and spending half the weekend feeling the same level of ambition as a rock.
Yesterday that same cold/virus came back.
It seems to be doing more of a slow burn this time, so while I feel generally unwell I am still at least somewhat functional. The other good news (?) is I still have a store of medicine to dip into, as I did not exhaust the supply I had procured a few weeks back.
Still, this is annoying. January has kind of sucked. Good riddance to it, I say. Stupid month.
The symmetry of the three stars I’m giving The Three is unintentional. If Goodreads supported half stars it would be 3.5. I quite enjoyed this tale of potential apocalypse but a few issues keep me from giving it a slightly higher rating. That shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it if they find the premise interesting and enjoy the epistolary format.
The Three chronicles how three children survive three separate plane crashes, all on the same day, leading to speculation ranging from “it’s just a coincidence” to aliens to how the children are the four horsemen of the apocalypse and are ushering in the end times. It is the last theory that takes hold most firmly, particularly in the U.S. and especially among Christian evangelicals and their right wing political allies.
The book uses the epistolary format, framing it largely as an account written by an American journalist (From Crash to Conspiracy) who includes news reports, interviews, chat logs, flight recording transcripts and more to piece together the aftermath of the crashes, the fate of the child survivors and the rapidly deteriorating political landscape as people get swept up in Rapture fever.
Apart from a few lapses where author Sarah Lotz has Americans using British slang, the various reports, interviews and chats are handled quite well, with characters emerging naturally through their own words. The narrative builds slowly as each chapter adds more pieces to the puzzle, though some may be frustrated by the ambiguous ending. I discovered afterward that Lotz has a book out that is apparently the follow-up to The Three, which may partly explain why things aren’t neatly wrapped-up by the end, though to give Lotz credit, the ambiguity feels more like a deliberate stylistic choice–and one that I feel works.
Having said that, I miss the art of telling a story in a single book. Sometimes I just want a good tale, not thousands of pages of world building spread across multiple volumes. Oh well, The Three still works well as a standalone novel, letting the reader decide on their own terrible-things-will-almost certainly-be happening ending.
While I found the characterizations compelling and convincing, the rapidly-shifting geopolitical environment never struck me as particularly credible. The idea that the U.S. could so quickly change into what amounts to a fundamentalist theocracy simply because of the improbability of three plane crashes on the same day with a single child surviving each doesn’t feel plausible. Perhaps even more ludicrous is the idea that China, Japan and the Koreas would form an alliance.
These events are important to underpinning the overall story and in the end never struck me as even being that necessary.
Still, the accounts of those around the survivors are vivid, funny and often harrowing. This book may forever convince anyone feeling a little down to stay far away from spooky Japanese forests.
Recommended. Unless you’re looking for something to read while passing through an airport.
You may be asking yourself, “What happened on January 23rd that was so utterly unremarkable that it ironically merits mentioning?” More likely you are asking yourself something like, “What should I have for lunch?” or “What’s the deal with the Canadian dollar?” but I can only answer one of these questions.
On January 23rd this website had zero visits. Think about that for a moment. With over seven billion people on the planet, with over 1.5 billion people on Facebook, not a single one visited this site on January 23rd (I did, but the site analytics don’t count me. It’s kind of like using your mom as a job reference.)
I’m not really bothered by this. It’s kind of liberating in a way. I can ramble on about anything I like without the bother of attracting attention. Or maybe I’m actually shattered by the impressively obscure nature of creolened.com and despair over the pointlessness of waxing philosophical about various topics while no one listens. Well, reads.
Except the only waxing I do is of my chest.
(I don’t really wax my chest; the very thought makes my toes reflexively curl up in horror.)
As a bonus, here are the answers to the two other questions:
Have a slice of pizza. You’ve earned it.
Falling oil prices and economic uncertainty, coupled with a strengthening US dollar, are the primary reasons for the precipitous drop in the value of the Canadian currency.
Some parts of the writing process are pretty straightforward–you put down words, taking care to organize them into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters (assuming you’re working on a novel) in order to tell some kind of story. Other parts seem less sharply defined, perhaps a reflection that each writer tackles these other parts differently.
But still, I wonder, and so I ask:
How much of the first draft remains in the final version? 50%? 20%? 0.5%?
If the percentage above is low, is it because major chunks of the story get chucked/reworked or is it because sentence after sentence is meticulously altered?
How many drafts does a story usually go through?
How often does the writer know how the story will end before writing the ending?
Do most writers write the story in order or do they jump around scenes and assemble them later?
How often is stuff tossed in because it sounds neat, resulting in the writer later having to go back to make the neat stuff fit the rest of the story?
And probably a whole lot more. The big ones are the first two.
Any writers that are not spambots are welcome to chime in.
I’ve had a couple of dreams lately where I’ve been able to remember a few details, sometimes even when I’d be better off not remembering.
In one I was kayaking, something I’ve never done because water kind of terrifies me, especially the large oceany type you can drown in. In this dream I was quite comfortable with it as I and two others (I can’t recall who they were, alas) paddled along the coastline. At one point we ended up on a ferry and any dream I have that features a ferry never ends well. In this one we were planning to leave the ferry in our kayaks while the boat was still sailing. One of us then floated (ho ho) the notion that we could leave after the ship docked, so it all ended unusually well.
The other dream was one I woke up from this morning and as befits a Monday morning dream, it was quietly horrible.
In it I was back working as the operator at the concession, the kind of employment I relish the same way a mouse would anticipate an evening with a hungry cat. Various employees were doing various tasks while I took it upon myself to manage the inventory. This seemed to consist primarily of sorting and placing very tiny packets of something edible (looking back on the dream now I haven’t the faintest idea what these might have been) into very long slatted wooden shelving units. The work was fantastically tedious and involved. The whole dream had a terrible dreariness to it and I woke up feeling kind of depressed. Then it was off to actual real work, my mood ashen gray.
I’d next like to have a dream where I win the lottery or something and it’s not one of those ironically nightmarish things like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
