I just realized I never did a books post for 2014! Ah well, better late than never.

Goodreads did this nice summary for me (click through the graphic for a full-size version which links to all the books), which shows that apparently I gave lots of books 4 stars and didn’t give any books only 1 star. I’d guess that this is probably more because I abandon what would be 1-star books pretty quickly rather than being an easy marker.

The number is approximate; I’m sure there are a few books in there marked as abandoned and on the other side a few I didn’t bother to enter. Whatever. Reading is about pleasure, not accuracy.

Of particular note this year —

Fiction

• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things. I would never have guessed that Elizabeth Gilbert had this book in her and I dearly hope she continues along this line. A really lovely book; even her science was good (I can overlook some bad science in an otherwise good book, but in this case I didn’t have to).
• Kate Atkinson, Life After Life. A nicely done conceit. Some readers feel the war parts were too long but I don’t share that criticism. Hard to put down.
• Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Starts off more or less straight but the humour and absurdity build and build. One of those ones to avoid reading on the subway if you don’t like giggling uncontrollably in public. There’s even an elephant. I give bonus points for elephants if they can be worked into the plot at all plausibly.
• Jo Baker, Longbourn. Lovely and elegant.
• Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened . Her wonky illustration style is so totally perfect.
• The whole Peter Grant / Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovich. Supernatural police-procedural mysteries with dry humour, amusing pop culture references and a clear love for London. The last one had enormous invisible carnivorous unicorns. (Apparently I give bonus points for all manner of absurd large animals.)

Non-fiction

• Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. All of Atul Gawande’s books are excellent, but this book about what does happen vs. what should happen in end-of-life situations is particularly good. Full of compassion and practicality.
• Melanie Warner, Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal. Don’t be put off by the slightly hyperbolic title. There’s lots of interesting stuff in here about exactly how food is processed, and it’s an exploration, not a rant. Really interesting. It confirmed my hunch that most breakfast cereal is pretty weird stuff.
• Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights . Just what it says on the tin. A good and very readable summary of some of the horrifying legal nonsense happening in the US and in what specific ways it’s problematic.
• David Byrne, How Music Works . Insight into music theory as well as the workings of David Byrne’s singular creative process, and a well-thought-out summary of the pros and cons of the various ways to make money from music in the 2010s.
• Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry, Last Chance to See: In the Footsteps of Douglas Adams. In 1990 Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine wrote the first Last Chance to See, which — in Douglas Adams’ inimitable style — explored various endangered species. For this follow-up book, Carwardine enlisted Stephen Fry, with predictably successful results. I’d offer some choice quotes but it would be hard to stop so I won’t start.

I’ll leave it at that. Feel free to plunder my Goodreads account for other ideas to read or avoid, depending on how your taste lines up with mine…

Because my child is rather unbelievably already in grade 8, in the past couple of months we’ve seen, I think, twelve high schools, both public and private. The tours (and the schools) have varied from appalling to excellent. During the appalling ones I spent my time thinking about what makes a tour (and a school) good.

Things that are promising

• The principal/admissions person/greeter at the door breezes past parents to greet the child first. Correct — it’s her schooling and her ultimate decision. We’re just along for the ride.
• A minimum of adults speak — they trust the kids (of all ages) and let them do their thing. Bonus points if the female student president is clearly gay, ESL, beloved by all students, and intending a career as an engineer. And is followed by a grade 9 who’s been at the school for perhaps six weeks and might say anything at all about her experience.
• Show me what you do instead of telling me.
• Talk about what you do with kids while they are there instead of telling me all the things they do after they leave you. High school is not just a waiting room for university.
• Talk about your teaching in terms of the kids’ accomplishments (“last year the kids won x robotics competition” or “we have three IB Biology classes because so many kids signed up”), not in terms of your own accomplishments and ego (“we win so many teaching awards!”).
• Sell the experience your school offers. Tell me what you’re good at and which niche you fill. Don’t spend all your time talking about how hard it is to get in. Show me the stats and move on.
• Talk about fit. Your school may be a great school for somebody else but not for my kid, and that’s fine, and we should all be clear about that and comfortable with it. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Stick to the niche you (hopefully) told me about.
• Demonstrate your culture, don’t just talk about it. If you say you’re inclusive, let me see and talk to kids of all different kinds.
• Show me that your student supports are proactive and not just reactive. Do you wait until kids are in trouble to offer help? Yeah, not good enough — why did you let them get into that state in the first place if your supports are so excellent and you know your kids so well?
• Provide a program for the tour to tell me what will happen when (and, ideally, where, and even more ideally, in advance of my arrival) and who will speak.

Things that are not promising

• You get the day wrong on your website so we miss your tour, and you do nothing but post a “sorry!” note on the door.
• You’re very expensive but only ~80% of parents think you’re providing “good or excellent” education. Yet you trumpet this rather low figure.
• Nobody is at the front door to welcome and guide visitors. If it’s a tour day, let me know I’m in the right place and at the right door by posting someone there.
• There is nobody anywhere to guide visitors. Having one person inside who points vaguely down the hallway when the room I need to find is in fact upstairs, around the corner and down another long hallway isn’t helpful.
• Your PowerPoint is a big series of “how not to use PowerPoint” examples. During one such horrorshow I leaned over to M and said “soon he’ll say ‘I know this is too small to read, but…'” and it was the very next slide.
• Nobody seems to know who should be speaking and what they should be saying. They repeat some things and leave other important things out and argue about who is going to talk next or forget people entirely. Don’t waste my time or my kid’s.
• Principal fails to introduce herself. Who is that mysterious person talking?
• No students speak OR students who speak are obviously not reading their own words. I don’t want to hear schmaltzy prepared statements, I want to hear kids talk about their real experiences.
• How do you teach programming? “Oh, we have separate groups for boys and girls”.
• All you can find to hype about your school comes down to “we have nice grounds and are really into nepotism”.
• Students all look the same (white, thin, able-bodied). I don’t care if your diversity is multi-ethnic, involving various forms of ability/disability, or more of an international-student thing, but it’s not healthy to have none at all.
• Endless talk about hard, hard work, with regular all-nighters being required (in high school?! WTF) and university-level work — but only an OSSD at the end. What’s the point of pushing kids that hard if they don’t even get any advance university credit for it? Bizarre.
• You do all kinds of advanced science — but hey, you’re balanced because you go to the opera once! Yeah, no. Those kids aren’t going to have the writing and textual interpretation skills they’ll need later. Trust me on this; I’ve TA’d for science classes.
• “This is our pool and our fitness room, but we never get to use it really”. Fancy facilities are lovely (although utterly unnecessary), but not if they’re only there for show.
• The student band is really, really bad. Sharp, flat and off time all at once. Don’t make me want to cover my ears and run away!

Fundamentally, it comes down to culture: how you treat people who take your tour tells me quite a bit about your attitude towards the kids. You’re demonstrating for me — and more importantly, for my daughter — what her next four years might be like. Don’t hedge, apologize or weasel — show us what you’ve got!

• "To ascertain the extent to which people are insensitive to patches of serious conversational…"
  “To ascertain the extent to which people are insensitive to patches of serious conversational incoherence, we generated such patches in the laboratory by repeatedly crossing two unrelated conversations. Across two studies, involving both narrowly and broadly focused conversations, between 27% and 42% of the conversants did not notice that their conversations had been crossed. The results of these studies suggest that it may indeed be unrealistic to model spontaneous conversation as faithful information transmission.”

  – PLOS ONE: Do We Notice when Communication Goes Awry? An Investigation of People’s Sensitivity to Coherence in Spontaneous Conversation

• PLOS ONE: Self-Drying: A Gecko's Innate Ability to Remove Water from Wet Toe Pads
  PLOS ONE: Self-Drying: A Gecko’s Innate Ability to Remove Water from Wet Toe Pads:

  tl;dr: they walk on dry surfaces, vs. sitting still. Okay then.

• "These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in…"
  “These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species besides humans.”

  – PLOS ONE: Jealousy in Dogs

• "Dr. MacFadyen also reminds us that ‘Smell of Books™’ is available as an aerosol E-Book enhancer – in…"
  “Dr. MacFadyen also reminds us that ‘Smell of Books™’ is available as an aerosol E-Book enhancer – in a range of flavours which include ‘New Book Smell’, and, for those who prefer the olfactory aesthesis of, say, rifling though a first edition old master ‘Classic Musty Scent’.”

  – Improbable Research » Blog Archive

• PLOS ONE: There Is No Joy like Malicious Joy: Schadenfreude in Young Children
  PLOS ONE: There Is No Joy like Malicious Joy: Schadenfreude in Young Children:

  We demonstrate that children as early as 24 months show signs of schadenfreude following the termination of an unequal situation. Although both conditions involved the same amount of gains, the children displayed greater positive expressions following the disruption of the unequal as compared to the equal condition, indicating that inequity aversion can be observed earlier than reported before. These results support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion and indicate that schadenfreude has evolved as a response to unfairness.

• "But a child in one of Peterson’s studies recalled an event from when he was just 18 months…"
  “But a child in one of Peterson’s studies recalled an event from when he was just 18 months old. It was the day his mother went to the hospital to give birth to a sibling. “He remembers crying on the floor of the kitchen, and he remembers how upset he was,” Peterson says. “And he can remember the pattern of his teardrops on the linoleum.””

  – The Forgotten Childhood: Why Early Memories Fade : Shots – Health News : NPR

• BBC News – Giant pythons have 'homing instinct'
  BBC News – Giant pythons have ‘homing instinct’:

  In case you happen to be out of homing pigeons, how ‘bout a homing python?

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…and from people with whom I converse there.

1. The arrows on the Toronto PATH signs refer to the directions: north is blue, south is red, east is yellow and west is orange. Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually told people this? My mnemonic is silly but in case it helps: blue is a cold colour so it’s north. South = red because of sunburn in southern climes. East = yellow for sunrise; west = orange for sunset.
   
2. On most newish cars there’s a cunning little arrow next to the gas thing on the dash which tells you which side the gas cap is on. In the image below, it is on the left. Of course if you have your own car you probably just know which side it’s on but we drive a wide variety of Autoshare and rental cars and this saves a lot of tedious exploration.
   
3. A housecleaner is possibly the cheapest and most effective kind of preventative marriage therapy.
4. Bandelettes.
5. Proper bra fitting. Key point: the whole adding 5″ to your underbust measurement is bunk. And you have to stoop & swoop. Then you have to throw out all your existing bras which have become suddenly hateful and go buy expensive new ones three cup sizes larger and two band sizes smaller.
6. Menstrual cups. I always particularly resented that there is GST feminine hygiene products, as they’re a basic necessity and there is no equivalent product than men (and only men) must buy. Before you say “but condoms”– no, condoms are not equivalent; both men and women buy them and they’re also fundamentally optional in a way that feminine hygiene products simply are not. A DivaCup (stupid name, but never mind) can be bought once and used more or less forever — the recommendation to replace it annually is just plain silly. They used to recommend replacing it every ten years but I suppose they weren’t making enough money that way. Mine is twelve years old now and shows no signs of wear whatsoever. Also, they must have let their lawyers near the tips section: actually it’s perfectly fine in the dishwasher (wash it thoroughly first of course!) if it needs an extra-thorough cleaning, and medical-grade silicone is not going to be affected by a bit of vinegar or bleach either. Oh: cut the silly prong off the bottom; it serves no purpose except to irritate one’s labia.
7. You can do calculations, unit conversions and a lot more right from the Google search bar.
8. Do Not Feed the Energy Creature. Applies offline too, of course.
9. If you adopt cats from a reputable rescue organization, someone else has already done the hard work of vetting their personality (and probably getting them spayed/neutered).
10. Yes, this pastry recipe really is foolproof.

Books! According to Goodreads, on which I track the majority of what I read, I read 114 books (give or take) in 2013. This year I diverted more time into reading magazines, since the TPL started carrying e-versions of such, and I also spent a chunk of time doing time-consuming things with my hands such as making quilts for various babies and re-learning to program and make things blink and flash and so on, which cut into my reading time. Such is life.

This year I also decided to do some reading in French since it would be Good For Me. My office is bilingual, so I hear a lot of French day to day and I work with French texts, but don’t spend a lot of time reading. I read roughly eight times faster in English, by my rough calculation, because I don’t have to spend so much time internalizing the tenses and sentence structures.

I thought the Harry Potter books in translation would be good since they’re not particularly babyish in vocabulary and I’m familiar enough with them in English that it might help me follow the plot adequately. I made it through the first three, which pleases me although it’s less than I’d hoped to read — but on the other hand I haven’t read a whole French novel since Les Liaisons Dangereuses about twenty years ago. My pace puts me in mind of the two-headed monster on Sesame Street, sounding out words:

Okay, well, not quite that bad, but I do look up two or three words per screen which does slow me down even beyond the slowness of reading in French to begin with. I assume I’ll get faster over time, just as I’ve gotten faster at doing our French newsletter at work. I used to have to put on French music while working on it; now I’m fine with whatever the iPod throws at me and I’m still much faster than I was before. (Yay for progress, I guess.) Bonus: excellent translations, such as Choixpeau for the Sorting Hat! And a magic wand is a baguette magique which gives me amusing if incorrect mental images of people wielding long sticks of bread. The TPL has the French ebooks should you want them and they’re usually not in great demand so you won’t have to wait long on hold (if at all).

Beyond that, my top recommendations from stuff I read this year:

Fiction

• Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang. Some minor flaws in character and pacing, I thought, but overall I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It walked the fine line between pleasant absurdity and fardo with delicacy, and some of the art pieces were howlingly funny. Here’s a quote, which truly isn’t a spoiler for anything:
  

  The Fangs found Buster hiding under the van, conspicuously sparkling as he shifted his weight upon the uncomfortable asphalt. Mr. Fang knelt down and helped his son inch out into the open air. “What happened to the line from Milton?” Mrs. Fang asked. Buster flinched at his mother’s voice. “You were supposed to throw the crown away.”

  Buster looked up at his mother. “It’s my crown,” he said.

  “But you don’t want it,” Mrs. Fang said, exasperated.

  “Yes I do,” he replied. “I won it. I’m Little Miss Crimson Clover and this is my crown.”

  “Oh, Buster,” she said, pointing at the crown atop his head, “this is what we rebel against, this idea of worth based on nothing more than appearance. This is the superficial kind of symbol that we actively work against.”

  “It. Is. My. Crown,” Buster replied, almost vibrating with righteous anger, and Mrs. Fang allowed a slow smile to cross her face and unclenched her jaw. She gave in, nodded three times, and hopped into the van. “Okay,” she said, “you can redefine the crown if you want to.”

  It’s just not possible to read that on the subway and not giggle; it just isn’t.

• Lois McMaster Bujold, the Vorkosigan Saga. I read the first eight books but stopped there only to enjoy still having more of them to read. I’ll be sad once I’ve run out.
• Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men and its sequels (the Tiffany Aching series, embedded in the Discworld series). Really fun YA stuff with some pleasantly serious embedded themes. The audiobooks are excellent.
• For fluff of a purer nature and a steampunkish bent, Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books. I see numbers 2 (Changeless) and up on my list for 2013 — I must’ve read #1 in 2012. Very silly. Lots of supernatural beings and James-Bondish devices.
• On a less fluffy note, Drew Hayden Taylor, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass. Sweet and very Anishnawbe. Don’t piss off the raccoons, yo.
• G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen. Not a perfect book by any means but well worth the time.
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. The creepiness ebbs and flows (or more accurately, flows and then ebbs) with extreme precision.

Nonfiction

• Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Very good advice, very low bullshit. I rarely disagree with Howard and this continues that trend.
• Jessice Hiemstra, How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss. Very good collection of stories from when things went south. I’ve had five miscarriages myself (very early ones, thank goodness) so I’m in the intended audience here, but even if you’re not it’s worth a read.
• Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. Another hard read, and long, but thoughtful and covers territory I haven’t previously seen covered well for many of the exceptionalities he covers.
• David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service, following recent US veterans through a variety of postwar re-integration experiences while fighting PTSD and other injuries. Just brutal, but well done.
• Frank T. Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery. Who can resist a gory brain surgery memoir?
• David Stuckler, The Body Economic: Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death. Details the disastrous health (and economic) effects of cuts in social spending by governments. So often books of this type — books which have one major point to make — fall into the trap of making it too many times, using too many similar examples and losing readers’ interest. The Body Economic avoids this trap perfectly, giving enough diverse and well-supported examples to support its main thesis but ending before going overboard.

So that was 2013. Feel free to chuck me recommendations for 2014 here, on Goodreads or on FB.

Every year about this time we make a metric buttload of tomato sauce. Well, not quite tomato — mine has onions, garlic, peppers and stuff in it too. From a canning perspective this has been a problem because tomatoes alone are only borderline acidic enough to be canned without using a pressure canner and once you add even lower-acid veggies nobody will make themselves liable for your death by botulism by giving any kind of canning time or direction even for pressure canning.

We like the flavour of our sauce when it’s been frozen but of course fitting the amount of sauce produced by 75lbs of tomatoes in our World’s Smallest Chest Freezer is a challenge.

Last year I pressure-canned it following the time and pressure directions as if it was meat sauce. Massive overkill, but again, nobody is willing to give directions for random veggie mixes. It worked reasonably well and we loved having it on the shelf and not in the freezer but we found the flavour much less fresh. It had a bit of a stewed taste to it. And the pressure canning took forever. I’d much rather water-bath can it so the flavour stayed fresher.

To avoid botulism I’d have to do at least one of two things:

1. Make the sauce acidic enough (below pH 4.6) that botulism spores won’t thrive.
2. Make the sauce hot enough to kill botulism spores (240F for a good while)

Then it dawned on me: really, the problem is that I don’t know the pH of the thing being canned. Secondarily, if it’s natively over pH 4.6 I need to know what it takes — what it absolutely, reliably, definitely takes — to give it a pH under 4.6, because I am not in the business of giving myself and my family members botulism.

So: science!

How much, I wondered, do decent pH monitors cost? (I don’t think the cheap little test strips are sensitive enough for this application.) The answer was only ~$20 after tax and shipping, so I ordered one.

Then I did a bit more research online and found this paper, which found that 1/4 cup of lemon juice very reliably acidified a pint of either single or mixed low-acid veggies and tomatoes while still not tasting terrible. Useful information, but 1/4c of lemon juice (4 tablespoons) is kind of a lot — it’s 4x what you’d use for plain tomato canning, and I thought it might make the sauce runny. We like our sauce pretty thick.

Many tomato canning sources recommend 1 tablespoon of lemon juice OR 1/4 teaspoon citric acid to acidify plain tomatoes. I decided to go with citric acid for this experiment since it’s powdered thus not runny. The paper above found that 4T of lemon juice per pint jar produced a pH well below 4 so if 1T lemon juice = 1/4t citric acid, then 4 x 1/4t = 1 teaspoon of citric acid might be hypothesized to do the same.

Also, I had citric acid around because I use it to clean the dishwasher and I didn’t have bottled lemon juice. Science! Perhaps I should submit that to Overly Honest Methods. You can buy citric acid at bulk food stores, usually near the spices.

But what’s the dose-response ratio to citric acid, since pH is a logarithmic scale? And does the sauce taste okay? Will it need sugar to counteract the extra sourness from the citric acid (I hate sweet tomato sauce)?

There were about ten cups of sauce left after the freezer was full. So I water-bath processed five clearly-labelled pints of sauce (40 minutes processing time, probably 5 minutes more than necessary at this altitude) with these additions:

• 1 pint with 1/2 tsp citric acid
• 2 pints with 3/4 tsp citric acid
• 2 pints with 1 tsp citric acid

As soon as they were reasonably cool I put them in the coldest corner of the fridge instead of on a shelf, because again, not in the business of botulism.

Now we had to wait for the pH meter to arrive. Why do things not arrive immediately? Tappy foot tappy foot.

We had an extra frisson of excitement when our main fridge/freezer died and the jars of sauce spent 36 hours at room temperature. Since they’re properly sealed and processed they’re sterile, but were they acidic enough to be safe from botulism? Would we have to boil them for yonks just to be sure? *Where* was that pH meter?

Eventually the pH meter arrived and I calibrated it using the buffer solutions provided.

And so we had pasta for dinner. We had a jar of frozen, unadulterated sauce open so that was first — pH of 4.6 so yes, without some sort of intervention it was out of the comfort zone for water-bath canning for sure. My family wouldn’t eat pasta for a week straight though so it took a while to work through the jars with citric acid. To make a long story short:

• Plain sauce from the freezer: pH 4.6
• Pint of sauce with 1/2 tsp citric acid: pH 4.4. Taste was normal.
• Pints of sauce with 3/4 tsp citric acid: pH 4.3, 4.2 (for the two jars). Taste was a bit sour.
• Pints of sauce with 1 tsp citric acid: pH 4.1, 4.1 (for the two jars). Taste was distinctly sour; remedied with 1/2 tbsp sugar.

None of them were likely dangerous to us during the interval when the fridge was dead. But for long term non-fridge storage I’m not comfortable with a pH of 4.4 so half a teaspoon of citric acid really isn’t enough. Given the limitations of the pH meter, which is accurate to +/- 0.1, and possible variation across a huge pot of sauce, I’m going with the highest dose — 1 tsp of citric acid per pint, equivalent to 4 tbsp of lemon juice — as the safest, most reliable intervention for water-bath canning my own particular sauce. This agrees with the dose suggested in the paper I linked above so while it sounds high it’s not particularly surprising.

I’m going to thaw, re-boil and water-bath can a number of jars of sauce with 1 tsp citric acid and will continue to pH test them (recalibrating the meter regularly with buffer solution) to check the effects of longer-term storage and also to check repeatability.

Your sauce may — probably does — vary. Please don’t take my word as recommendation but as a place to start your own testing, because botulism, while rare, is deeply unfun and pH meters are both cheap AND fun.

Bonus cat picture, because it’s the Internet:

Yesterday evening our fine cat Jake let us know his time was up and after lots of snuggles he made his last trip to the vet.

It wasn’t unexpected. In January the vet discovered a large, fast-growing tumour in his abdomen. As an FIV+ cat he was not a candidate for either surgery or chemo so we took him home to spoil him in his last weeks — and oh yes, he was spoiled, spoiled with chopped chicken and tuna and even milk, and endless cans of $3-a-can special prescription yummy food, and was allowed to sleep on my head and had fresh water run for him every five minutes and all kinds of other spoiledness.

He came to us in 2007 with his pal Elwood, sick enough that his FIV+ status was quickly discovered. His original name was Ricky Bobby but we thought that was too goofy even for him so he quickly became the other Blues Brother.

After his initial illness, despite his lack of an immune system his health was pretty good except for his teeth. Over two separate surgeries several years apart he had them all removed and was a much happier guy afterwards. (Cats don’t actually use their teeth for chewing, so it didn’t stop him eating pretty much whatever he liked. It meant he could stick his tongue WAY up his face though.) After his first surgery he got a hilarious special gold-star certificate (which I should have kept) from the vet for excellent behaviour.

Here’s the first picture we took of him when we got him — lying on the stairs, demonstrating his habit of being totally immovable and also his other habit of lying down in inconvenient spots where he blended in well and could be easily stepped on.

Of course, laundry was a different matter. He always had to sit on contrasting laundry for maximum shedding effectiveness.

He liked laundry a lot. Particularly dirty laundry — underpants or other unmentionables — the kind an enterprising cat could dig out of the hamper, drag down the stairs with much triumphant yowling and then hump to death in the middle of a dinner party to great effect. Jake killed all of our socks repeatedly and sometimes even larger items, whole pairs of pants or dressing gowns, fell to his mighty hunting skills.

In a more practical vein, he was an excellent hunter of millipedes. It used to be Elwood who found them and played with them a bit before turning them over to Jake to kill and eat, so for four happy years I didn’t have to deal with a single millipede myself*. After Elwood died I had to take over the finding (ick) but could still sic Jake on them for killing and disposal.

After his teeth were out his tongue often stuck out when he was sleeping since there was nothing to keep it in:

Not that we got to see it much since he often slept with a paw shielding his face:

He was particularly fond of sitting on my head if I was lying down with a migraine. You wouldn’t think a purring cat on your head would be at all good for migraines, but somehow it did help. Perhaps he learned it from Elwood.

He was a huge burrower. When I washed the duvet cover I’d try to pile the duvet in an entertainingly burrowish way for him.

In his last weeks he wasn’t much good at grooming himself so he’d park himself in front of Carson and let Carson groom him, at least his front half.

They were good pals, although not above taking a random swat at each other just for fun when passing each other in the hall.

He affected a dignified obliviousness to being dressed in cunning outfits.

He was never full of mischief — he wasn’t a climber (although he did like M’s loft bed), nor did he push small objects off shelves. He limited himself to scratching the furniture, jumping on the kitchen counter, and doing absolutely anything in pursuit of fresh water.

Bye, dude. You were a good pal.

—
* Bugs are a Pink Job in our house

Soup! A foundation of winter food in our house for sure.

I’m a huge proponent of making one’s own soup stock. It costs pretty much nothing and if you start with your own yummy stock it’s very hard to make a soup that’s not also yummy (as well as being free of excess salt and preservatives and who knows what else). It’s also really easy, since it’s more a general technique than a recipe and it doesn’t need any special equipment. It does take a number of hours but the active time is very minimal.

First, save up some chicken (…duck, turkey) bones. Chuck them in a ziploc and toss them in the freezer. A friend once added the brilliant notion of also tossing parmesan rinds in there — definitely do that if you have any.

Once you have some bones and a longish afternoon, it’s time to make stock.

Put all the bones in a big pot and cover them with water.

While the pot comes to a boil, poke through your veggie bin and pull out any or all of these according to your taste and whatever’s in the bin: carrots, celery, celeriac, onions, shallots, garlic, mushrooms. How much? Not a lot. Some. Doesn’t matter much. A carrot or two, an onion or two, a few cloves of garlic. Whatever strikes your fancy. They don’t have to be lively fresh veggies — elderly limp-ish ones will do.

Wash them, cut them up roughly (no need to peel) and toss them in the pot too.

Add some seasonings. I usually put maybe a dozen peppercorns, some savory (a teaspoonish pinch in my very large pot), some thyme (another teaspoonish pinch) and a small pinch of rosemary. Sage is nice too. But again, whatever strikes your fancy and/or whatever’s handy in the cupboard.

Once the pot boils, put the lid on and turn it waaaaay down. You want to keep it boiling gently but not at the point where it might boil over or otherwise cause you to pay attention to it. You want a nice quiet simmer so you can stir it once an hour or so and go about your business the rest of the time.

So yeah, stir it once an hour or so. At this point your house will smell strongly of yum and your stomach will rumble so make a sandwich or something.

At some point you have to declare it done. In our house this happens in one of two ways: either I notice the chicken vertebrae have totally disarticulated and I’m sure no further goodness will boil out of the bones, or I get really bored and declare it done just because.

Now comes the only boring part: getting all the icky bones and drowned veggies out of the actual soup. I usually get a strainer and a second large pot and pour or ladle the soup and bones through the strainer and into the second pot.

When the strainer fills up, dump it in the green bin & repeat. Take the garbage out right away because it’ll stink really quickly, but make sure it’s safe from raccoons because they LOVE this stuff. Don’t even think about eating the veggies; they’ve given their all at this point.

Now you’ve got a pot full of soup stock, hurray! Except it’ll have a layer of fat on top.

You can either cool it off a bit put it away right away, in which case the fat will rise to the top in whatever containers you’re using, or you can leave it overnight in the fridge and skim the fat off before putting it into containers.

Either way it’ll keep for a short while in the fridge and approximately forever in the freezer.

Then whenever you get sick all you need to do is pull out a container of stock, some salt (I never salt my stock so whatever soup I’m making will need salt) and some noodles and there you are, chicken noodle soup. Or for a quick dinner: container of stock, finely chopped random fridge vegetables and/or meat, bit of cream, cook it, done.

Oh! I should mention that homemade stock will gel when cooled. It may also still have a little fat in it or seasonings that settle to the bottom. This grosses some people out (my husband for one) but it’s totally normal. Actually the gelling is very convenient because nice thick soup is less likely to leak out of its container if you take some to work to heat up for lunch.

Related post: Jam, an encouragement

Around April last year I thought it might be interesting to join one of the more interest-based forums out there since it’s a mode that’s really taking off. The cooking ones are scary and the craft ones are even more scary-intimidating so I picked Goodreads. Books, I can do.

If you’d asked me how many books I thought I read in a year I would’ve said I dunno, maybe thirty or forty. No. From late April through December 2012 alone I apparently read 104 books, and I know there are a few I didn’t enter for off-the-charts fluffiness or whatever other reason*. The number is neither here nor there but it’s interesting that my self-perception was so flawed. It’s inflated, I suppose, by the kids books and fluffy novels which take 2 hours max to read.

You can see from the list it’s a mix of kids/YA (so I can talk to my kid), fluffy fiction, non-fluffy fiction and nonfiction. More nonfiction than I would’ve guessed too, but then I had a lot of vacation in the summer in which to kick back and use brainpower for reading instead of actual functioning. Busy/stressful correlates directly with fluffiness of reading, IME.

I joined Goodreads because I was at a bit of a loss picking out new books and I thought Goodreads’ recommendation feature would help. Well, not so much. Even now that I’ve entered a few hundred books I find its recommendations banal at best even for the kids’ and YA books I read in hope of passing them on to the miss. Oh well.

On the other hand, the social aspect really is useful. Not so much being able to read strangers’ reviews, although that’s fun, but seeing friends’ list additions, ratings and reviews and being able to add mentioned books to one’s own to-read list with one click. That’s been very handy. I quickly got a sense of whose tastes approximated mine and whose differed wildly. Both are useful — the first to find things I’m nearly guaranteed to enjoy and the second for variety.

Looking at my ratings, the books I read in 2012 that I’d most recommend were:

• The whole Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I’ve read them before and have them all in paper but the audiobooks read by Simon Vance are wonderful. You just think you’re not interested in early-19th-century sea intrigues. Trust me, you are in fact interested.
• In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs. Short and perfect.
• The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin. An excellent takedown of the whole absurd autism/vaccine hoax.
• For those of us who harbour a hostile and/or xenophobic tendency, Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books. Great, hostile, violent, gory fun.
• Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto. I was less a fan of her more recent book State of Wonder but Bel Canto was lovely.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. People who seemed to take this as a serious tale gave it bad reviews but it’s very, very funny.
• Doppler by Erlend Loe. Another one for the xenophobes out there, and again very very funny. As in don’t read it on the subway unless you don’t mind giggling helplessly in public kind of funny.
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe. A good summary of the issues and entertainingly written.
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. All extroverts must read this book immediately. Introverts are welcome to read it at their leisure.
• Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis. Really well done and thorough descriptions of what various drugs feel like, and excellent science too to back it up.
• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. Yet more evidence that going walkabout can be surprisingly curative. Anyone who’s ever spent any significant time in the woods, who’s physically run away from a dead relationship or who has properly hated a pair of hiking boots will recognize something in this. It would be good to read alongside Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, I think.
• And finally, Les Misérables. Victor Hugo, of course. Even in translation the language was so lovely it really made me wish my French was up to reading the original.

And now on to 2013! If you’re on Goodreads feel free to friend me; the more the merrier.

—
* No, I did not read that 50 Shades of Grey book. It sounded ghastly.

• The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression – Brian Gabriel – The Atlantic
  The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression – Brian Gabriel – The Atlantic:

  It turns out that depression may not be a mere trade-off for a vigorous immune response. Dr. Miller suggests that depressive symptoms like social withdrawal, lack of energy, and a loss of interest in once enjoyable activities were actually advantageous to our ancestors. For example, a loss of energy might ensure that the body can leverage all of its energy to fight an infection. Also, social withdrawal minimizes the likelihood of being exposed to additional infectious agents.

  Interesting, if not entirely convincing. More evidence needed, etc.

• The fiscal cliff: Are cliffs very dangerous? – Slate Magazine
  The fiscal cliff: Are cliffs very dangerous? – Slate Magazine:

  About 76 per year. Between 1999 and 2009, 761 Americans died falling from cliffs, according to the CDC’s magnificently detailed data. That’s a relatively small number. If commentators wanted to scare the public, they might have called the looming economic crisis, the “fiscal anvil,” because falling objects killed nearly 10 times as many people as cliffs between 1999 and 2009. Or they might have gone with the “fiscal cobra,” as venomous plants and animals killed 856 people in the same 10-year period. Another option would be the “fiscal hansom cab,” since 1,201 Americans perished while riding on an animal or in an animal-drawn vehicle.

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• Weapons made from shark teeth are completely badass, and hint at lost shark diversity | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
  Weapons made from shark teeth are completely badass, and hint at lost shark diversity | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine:

  For those of you who are wondering how you weaponise shark teeth, which are already regenerating, serrated meat knives at the business end of a streamlined, electric-sensing torpedo, here’s how. You drill a tiny hole in them, and then bind them in long rows to a piece of wood to make a sword. Or a trident. Or a four-metre-long lance. And then, presumably, you hit people really hard with them.

• Why Is The World’s Largest Foundation Buying Fake Poop? : Shots – Health Blog : NPR
  Why Is The World’s Largest Foundation Buying Fake Poop? : Shots – Health Blog : NPR:

  The scientists need a standardized material for testing their toilets, and that’s where the fake poop comes in. Soybean paste is extruded into 350 gram segments for testing in toilets. They can’t use the real stuff because it’s a hazardous material, and of course, it’s noxious. So the foundation turned to the experts of fake feces — Maximum Performance, which distributes synthetic poop to nearly all toilet manufacturers around the world for testing purposes.

  I am glad there’s someone out there who is worrying about creating standardized fake poop for testing toilets. I’m VERY glad it is not me.

• Good news: Migraines hurt your head but not your brain
  Good news: Migraines hurt your head but not your brain:

  Previous studies have linked this disorder to an increased risk of stroke and structural brain lesions, but it has remained unclear whether migraines had other negative consequences such as dementia or cognitive decline. According to new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), migraines are not associated with cognitive decline.

  Well, yay. I guess.

• Lying less linked to better health
  Lying less linked to better health:

  Over the course of 10 weeks, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. For example, when participants in the no-lie group told three fewer white lies than they did in other weeks, they experienced on average about four fewer mental-health complaints, such as feeling tense or melancholy, and about three fewer physical complaints, such as sore throats and headaches, the study found. In contrast, when control group members told three fewer white lies, they experienced two fewer mental-health complaints and about one less physical complaint. The pattern was similar for major lies, Kelly said.

• What Are You Really Saying? Associations between Shyness and Verbal Irony Comprehension – Mewhort-Buist – 2012 – Infant and Child Development – Wiley Online Library
  What Are You Really Saying? Associations between Shyness and Verbal Irony Comprehension – Mewhort-Buist – 2012 – Infant and Child Development – Wiley Online Library:

  Ninety-nine children (8–12 year olds) listened to stories wherein one character made either a literal or ironic criticism or a literal or ironic compliment. Children appraised the speaker’s belief and communicative intention. Shyness was assessed using self-report measures of social anxiety symptoms and shy negative affect. Shyness was not related to children’s comprehension of the counterfactual nature of ironic statements. However, shyness was related to children’s ratings of speaker meanness for ironic statements.

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• PLoS ONE: Extending Body Space in Immersive Virtual Reality: A Very Long Arm Illusion
  PLoS ONE: Extending Body Space in Immersive Virtual Reality: A Very Long Arm Illusion:

  …participants experienced ownership over the virtual arm up to three times the length of the real one, and less strongly at four times the length. The illusion did decline, however, with the length of the virtual arm.

• Caught in the act: Bats use the sound of copulating flies as a cue for foraging
  Caught in the act: Bats use the sound of copulating flies as a cue for foraging:

  The researchers found that the flies rarely fly at night and mostly sit or run on the ceiling. Finding the flies by echolocation is nearly impossible for the bats as the faint insect echo is completely masked by the strong background echo which makes them virtually “invisible.” This scenario completely changes when the male flies find a suitable mating partner. The subsequent copulation is a noisy event because males then produce broadband buzzing sounds that can be heard by the bats. Around five per cent of the fly pairs that engage in copulation were attacked and mostly eaten by the bats…

  Bit like teenagers in horror movies, really.

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• PLoS ONE: Public Street Lights Increase House Infestation by the Chagas Disease Vector Triatoma dimidiata
  PLoS ONE: Public Street Lights Increase House Infestation by the Chagas Disease Vector Triatoma dimidiata:

  Artificial light has been known for a long time to attract many insect species, and therefore may contribute to the spread of different vector-borne diseases. Also, based on the collection of different species of triatomines with light traps, several authors have suggested that light might attract triatomines to houses, but the role of artificial light in house infestation has never been clearly demonstrated and quantified. Here we performed a spatial analysis of house infestation pattern by T. dimidiata in relation to the distribution of artificial light sources in three different villages from the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico. In all three villages, infested houses were significantly closer to public street light sources than non-infested houses (18.0±0.6 vs 22.6±0.4 m), and street lights rather than domestic lights were associated with house infestation.

  From the “unintended consequences” department…

• Ideas Illustrated » Blog Archive » Visualizing English Word Origins
  Ideas Illustrated » Blog Archive » Visualizing English Word Origins:

  Some examples of English texts with each word or part-word coloured based on its language of origin. Interesting stuff!

• Rats have best bite of rodent world
  Rats have best bite of rodent world:

  Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that mice and rats have evolved to gnaw with their front teeth and chew with their back teeth more successfully than rodents that ‘specialise’ in one or other of these biting mechanisms.

  Well, that clears that up then.

• A "Fast" Solution to Jet Lag – Patrick J. Skerrett – Health and Well-Being – Harvard Business Review
  A “Fast” Solution to Jet Lag – Patrick J. Skerrett – Health and Well-Being – Harvard Business Review:

  New research points to another, possibly more effective, weapon in the fight against jet lag: fasting before and during a trip.

  Oh good. A way to make long-distance travel even MORE unpleasant!

• PLoS ONE: Airflow Dynamics of Coughing in Healthy Human Volunteers by Shadowgraph Imaging: An Aid to Aerosol Infection Control
  PLoS ONE: Airflow Dynamics of Coughing in Healthy Human Volunteers by Shadowgraph Imaging: An Aid to Aerosol Infection Control:

  The qualitative high-speed video footage of these volunteers coughing into their sleeves demonstrates that although this method rarely completely blocks the cough airflow, it decelerates, splits and redirects the airflow, eventually reducing its propagation. The effectiveness of this intervention depends on optimum positioning of the arm over the nose and mouth during coughing, though unsightly stains on sleeves may make it unacceptable to some.

  Glad I wasn’t in on that study. All that coughing!

• PLoS ONE: The Risks We Dread: A Social Circle Account
  PLoS ONE: The Risks We Dread: A Social Circle Account:

  Fear of risks killing 100 people was higher than fear of risks killing 10 people, but there was no difference in fear of risks killing 100 or 1000 people (Experiments 1–4, 7–9). Also in support of the hypothesis, the median number of deaths that would cause maximum level of fear was 100 (Experiments 5 and 6).

• Do I look bigger with my finger on a trigger? Yes, says study
  Do I look bigger with my finger on a trigger? Yes, says study:

  UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns.

  The research, which publishes April 11 in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise

• Big Box Stores Linked To the Presence of Hate Groups – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities
  Big Box Stores Linked To the Presence of Hate Groups – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities:

  Big box stores contribute to a kind of anonymous social experience. And in these anonymous settings, the strong social bonds that could inoculate a community against hate groups may disappear.

• BBC News – US man survives shooting four-inch nail into his heart
  BBC News – US man survives shooting four-inch nail into his heart:

  Dennis Hennis, a 52-year-old self-employed builder, was working on his neighbour’s roof when his nail gun jammed and he tried to clear it. The nail pierced the right side of his heart and he went into cardiac arrest. His surgeon credited Mr Hennis’ recovery to prompt medical attention and knowing that he should not remove the nail himself.

• Study of the Day: Ambition May Bring Success, but Not Happiness – Hans Villarica – Health – The Atlantic
  Study of the Day: Ambition May Bring Success, but Not Happiness – Hans Villarica – Health – The Atlantic:

  Despite their many accomplishments in school and at work, go-getters tend to live somewhat shorter lives and are only slightly happier than their less-motivated peers.

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Me, upon entering the kitchen and finding the child on the floor at my husband’s feet, clearly in the middle of a ticklefest: Are you torturing our child?

Him: Not in any way that’ll leave a mark.

Child: It’ll leave a mark on my SOUL!

Me, 10am: I didn’t sleep well and I still have the headache I had last night and my nose is stuffy and I have cramps and a backache and I have skinless patches of psoriasis in spots where it’s very awkward not to have any skin and there’s a big pile of laundry and waaaaah, it’s too early to start drinking isn’t it?

Him: Yes.

[pause]

Him: But it’s not too early for drugs.

Here we have an article exploring pedestrian-vehicle crashes “in which the pedestrian was using headphones“.

Results There were 116 reports of death or injury of pedestrians wearing headphones. The majority of victims were male (68%) and under the age of 30 (67%). The majority of vehicles involved in the crashes were trains (55%), and 89% of cases occurred in urban counties. 74% of case reports stated that the victim was wearing headphones at the time of the crash. Many cases (29%) mentioned that a warning was sounded before the crash.

This sounds a bit confused — were there 116 incidents, or 74% of 116? One wonders. Either way, 116 over seven years (16.6 fatalities a year) doesn’t seem like a lot to get excited about, given that the USA has over 30,000 fatalities annually from car crashes (did they have their car stereos on? Perhaps it’s the music that’s at fault).

One also wonders, if I count as “one”, why the headphones are being blamed here. Being a pedestrian is not in itself inherently dangerous. It’s hard to kill yourself just walking around; it’s the large vehicles with which one may suddenly come into contact that are the danger here. As a pedestrian walking around at 6km/h, I am not dangerous. A motor vehicle comprising a bunch of metal traveling at 50km/h or more is dangerous.

A train is also dangerous. If 55% of these crashes involved trains, mostly in urban areas, why is the focus not on decreasing pedestrian access to train tracks? And since when is 29% — where “a warning was sounded” — “many”?

This sort of blame-the-victim writing really ticks me off.

While I love them, physical books have a few practical issues for me at the moment.

One, it’s trivially out of my way to pick them up at the library. It’s only a few blocks but it has to be either on my way to work (unlikely, since the library doesn’t open until 9, and I leave to take M to school rather before then) or on my way home (which means I can’t use a transfer and take the bus, or which means I add 2km to my bike commute) – both awkward.

Two, I have to physically carry them around. My purse is big but once it’s full of Purse Stuff, lunch, coffee thermos, keys, iPod, etc. there’s not a lot of room for a book. Plus if the subway is crammed — and it always seems to be crammed these days — there’s not a lot of room to wave around a large book.

Three, if I buy them, they don’t go away when they’re finished. I rarely re-read books so more and more I enjoy reading something and then giving it back to the library so it takes up their shelf space, not mine. I know it’s there if I ever need it so the whole library concept seems pretty ideal really.

Four, aside from subway time, I mostly have time to read late in the evening after the dinner/child-putting-to-bed fuss is over, which means I’m tired and have trouble keeping my eyes open.

I haven’t yet committed to an ebook reader / iPhone type of object, so unless I read on my computer (and I sometimes do) my commuting/bedtime salvation is found in audiobooks.

Hurray, audiobooks! An especial hurray for unabridged (abridged books are an abomination) audiobooks read by authors or readers who are good at reading. A huge, monster-size hurray for ones I can borrow from the library. (Granted, borrowing most audiobooks from the library usually means I have to have a Windows computer “read” them to my Mac in real time and re-record them before I can actually listen to them, but whatever.)

So lately, my audiobooks:

Katie MacAlister – lots of fluffy but entertaining quasi-romances about dragons and whatnot. In the first couple months of this year I was working insane hours and wanted pure fluff to distract me as I fell into bed, and this fit that niche to a T.

Neil Gaiman – I had some short stories on my iPod as well as Coraline (kids book) and The Graveyard Book (YA-ish). He reads his own books, and well. They’re very good. I’ve read all his other stuff on paper, as it came out.

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Patrick O’Brian – a wonderful, wonderful friend loaned me the entire 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series in paper when I was pregnant with M and hopelessly sick and bed-bound. They’re fabulous books. “But I don’t care about 18th-century naval battles and spycraft,” you say. Yes you do. Trust me. Read them. Or get the audiobooks — the first one is read badly, much too slowly and ponderously and with no sense of fun, but the rest are excellent.

As actual physical books:

Ian (M.) Banks – I have a couple of these on my nighttable, waiting to be read. He never disappoints. But they are heavy, and I am tired, and once I read them they’ll be read and I won’t be able to look forward to them anymore. So they’ve sat for a while.

Jasper Fforde – recently I finished pretty much all of his oeuvre by finishing off the last two Thursday Next books (not quite as clever as the first couple in the series), the Nursery Crime books (fun but more ponderous, somehow) as well as Shades of Grey. They’re all well worth a read. I somehow came across Shades of Grey as an audiobook after I’d read it in paper, and I liked it rather more as an audiobook. Not sure why. It was very well read, anyway.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I wasn’t crazy about this one; I think his reach exceeded his grasp somewhat. Great universe, great concepts, but the plot and characters didn’t do much for me. The supposed cleverness overreached the actual content, IMO.

Anyway, there’s a brief overview of my recent fictional explorations.

A to-do list I found on M’s floor today.

I detect a nascent world domination plan here, which I suppose was inevitable given her genetic material.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the “fake lightening machien” and the “bat machien” and I wonder what the stuffed horse robots are going to do with their remote-controlled car, but I particularly like the note at the top: “*clean desk before attempting any of this”.

Having pretty much exhausted biological subjects (roadkill, organs, diseases), makers of fine plush lovies have moved into statistical distributions. You can buy a full set of ten, or individual distributions if you’re particularly fond of one.

I note they also sell “statosaur” burp cloths featuring embroidery which combines dinosaurs and statistical distributions. Excellent!

I finally got my Bixi key last Wednesday, hurray! But I had to wait with tappy-footed impatience to try it out since I wasn’t downtown until today. I’ve been looking forward to its launch, as my own bike has been languishing due to the need to take the subway to get M to school and home again (there’s really no kid-safe bike route between our house and her school, and anyway 6km each direction is probably a bit far for a kid’s commute). It’s almost another 3km to my office. I often walk at least one direction, but being able to bike is a nice (and faster) option.

For the uninitiated, Bixi is a bike-sharing service. You pick up a bike at whatever station you like and return it to whatever station you like (the same station or a totally different one). You can pay by the day ($5), 72 hours ($12), month ($40), or year ($95). Trips of less than half an hour are included in those prices; trips longer than that cost extra. Since at the moment it’s a downtown-only service, however, it’s mighty hard to exceed thirty minutes unless, I don’t know, you ride around in circles for a while or something.

There’s a Bixi station just by M’s school, with ten or so bikes. So I stuck my key in the lock to get the station to release a bike, adjusted the seat height (they have convenient numbered markings), clamped my purse in the front basket, put on my helmet and off I wobbled. I got the feel of the bike within a few blocks and stopped wobbling — they’re just very different from my own bike!

Heavy but stable – these things feel solid. Tanklike, almost. No light breeze will push you off-course on one of these things. It takes some effort to drive them. I wouldn’t want to, say, put it on my back to go up the Casa Loma stairs or anything. On the other hand, they’re very stable, not twitchy or fussy or unpredictable at all. Solid. Once they get going they have some decent momentum. I hope they’ll be easy to maintain.

Very upright – they’re cruisers, definitely. I found myself sailing along in an almost perfect standing position, like Mary Poppins on her carousel horse. This is so entertaining I don’t think you could help but be in a good mood while riding one. Also, it gives you excellent visibility.

3 speeds, none particularly fast – if you’re used to zooming along at near-traffic speed, well, forget it. These are not fast bikes; sit back (stand back? One barely sits) and enjoy the ride. They have three speeds controlled by gripshifters — the lowest will probably get you up most big hills, the middle will get you started at stoplights, and the highest will carry you along at a reasonable but by no means speedy clip. I found myself wishing for a fourth gear. Because of the weight of the bike, though, I found I did work up a bit of a sweat as I sailed along. These bikes are not going to win anyone any races, although a race of Bixi bikes would be very entertaining to watch. A bunch of sweaty upright folks working to exceed 20km/h…

Soft brakes – you can’t stop in a hurry. It takes a bit of time. Not that you’re going very fast. There’s no possible way to flip yourself over the handlebars by braking too hard (my specialty!) on one of these puppies. Still, I pity the pedestrian who steps off the curb without looking and gets nailed… the weight of the bike combined with the inability to stop on a dime is going to hurt.

Step through frame and chain guard – clearly these are bikes made for riding in whatever clothes you happen to be wearing. Smart. It’s nice not to have to carry a pants clip.

No clips on the pedals – this was the biggest adjustment for me. I am, apparently, very used to my clips. I had a couple of false starts where my attempt to raise the pedal by lifting my foot left me looking pretty goofy. I’d kind of forgotten about having to push off the ground to start! By my second trip I’d more-or-less got the hang of it, but my first few stoplights were probably pretty funny for onlookers.

Overall: I was thoroughly amused, got to where I was going in less time than it would’ve taken to take the subway, and can recommend it fully. Let’s hope they’re successful enough to expand the service area!