Everything2 New Writeups

thoughts while cutting my daughter's hair (person)

2013-05-21T16:43:27Z

When my oldest daughter was a baby, her hair grew in mohawk fashion. Eventually I snipped the long front part, but there was nothing I could do about the stubborn part on the left side. As she grew, her hair turned curly, and it may seem like an exaggeration to say this happened overnight, but she went to bed with straight her one evening, and when she woke up the next morning, her head was full of street urchin curls. By the time she was two and a half, her hair was a gorgeous mess of tangled blonde snarls. Putting it up was frustrating, her hair is fine so hair things slid out of it, and she liked to pull out the ones that did anchor her hair well.

I was in the bathroom with her, various hair care products, a comb, and a brush when it finally got to be too much. I was sick of trying to comb out the matted knots of hair, she would cry every day when we had to fix her hair, and it was suddenly no longer worth it even though I really enjoyed seeing her with her hair done.…

Star Trek Into Darkness (review)

2013-05-21T15:57:52Z

J.J. Abrams got the chance to reboot the original Star Trek back in 2009, bringing to it a youthful cast, an action movie sensibility, and lots of lens flare. The film didn't sit well with all fans, but many people embraced Abrams' flashy vision. Nothing succeeds in Hollywood like success, and the new crew of the Starship Enterprise returned in 2013 with Star Trek Into Darkness.

I like the acting. I like the visuals. And Iâd like it if Abrams and company could come up with an original idea. Onward, then, into darkness.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), at the helm of the Enterprise, violates the prime directive in order to save Mr. Spock's (Zachary Quinto) life. Certainly, we have consistency of character here. William Shatner's Kirk violated the prime directive so many times I always assumed that reels of missing scenes existed in which he calls up and says, "execute Starfleet General Order #9838," after which someone takes the ship copy of…

thoughts while cutting my daughter's hair (personal)

2013-05-21T12:54:10Z

Back when Anna was, oh I dunno, somewhere between the age of three and five and was staying with me over a typical weekend I had one duty and one duty only. She was getting ready to go to âsomethingâ (I forget if it was a party or a school event but it really doesnât matter) and I was supposed to get her a haircut. Nothing drastic mind you, just a trim of her bangs which were getting pretty long and hanging down over her eyes.

Me, being the dutiful and ever loving father decided against taking her to a professional and would handle the job myself. After all, how hard could it be to lope off a quarter or half an inch in a straight line? Besides my feeling of accomplishment and self satisfaction at a job well done, I figured Iâd also save a few bucks in the process.

So I hunted down a pair of scissors, sat her down in a chair and then a revelation came to me. It would be much easier to cut the bangs if they were wet. Thatâs how Iâd seen it done before. So, with the…

May 21, 2013 (log)

2013-05-21T08:36:09Z

3 days before my birthday, and I got the most wonderful gift I could ever have wished for. I received the news that my book Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood has been chosen by the International Book Awards - Honouring Excellence in Independent and Mainstream Publishing. They are sponsored by US Book News. Cradle Songs won the Best Poetry Anthology Award.

The other good news is that we opened our store on May 1st. it has always been my dream to own an antique store. I was going to call it The Little Shop of Hoarders, but we decided on Hecho en Echo instead, since we are making many of the items in the store. My specialty is coiled cloth baskets made from recycled clothing and Native American inspired jewelry. Check us out on Face…

IN THE GRIM FUTURE OF HELLO KITTY, THERE IS ONLY WAR. (fiction)

2013-05-21T03:13:18Z

Premonitory Folk Songs of the Apocalypse
A little less than 38 millennia before the summer of the Badtz-Maru offensive and the Second Battle of Stalingrad, human beings had numbered in the billions. Out of these billions were a tiny handful of postmodern tribalists who mistrusted the mechanical and the chemical. This small and decentralized cohort instructed their largely indifferent peers by mournful intonations and dirges on the environment and geopolitics, the evils of vehicular transport, and the perils of modern life. Through their exhortatory effusions on the subjects of locally grown and organic produce, miraculous but profoundly ugly sandals handcrafted by peace-loving gnomes in the Black Forest, and soy products, they sought to bring their âGreenâ aesthetics to greater prominence. This was a doomed effort, which they all basically knew in their hearts. They clenched their jaws in anger and ground their teeth against the gristle of the truth.
…

May 21, 2013 (log)

2013-05-21T03:04:45Z

What do I do for geeky fun? Sometimes I make up fake memoirs.

The rule for fake biographies is that they have to a) make sense, b)use as much period detail as possible and c) be someone who, tantalizingly, might have been, but....Let me show you what I mean.

It's not often pointed out, but classic Rock & Roll was not much of an equal opportunity employer. As much as people like to point out Grace Slick, and the various J's :Janis, Joni, Judy, Carole, and Laura, the truly epic women of classic rock were not players, nor even songwriters, but wives and muses: Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono, Anita Pallenburg, Bebe Buell and Patti Boyd.

Looking over their skill sets, however, they don't look to have done very much other than being muses.

About all you can say is that Yoko Ono is a good-enough conceptual artist to make standard histories the of postwar New York Art…

L'eve future (thing)

2013-05-21T02:54:13Z

1886 novel by French decadent, opium addict, and early science fiction writer Comte Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de 'Isle-Adam, aka Villiers. Son of a failed treasure-hunter, growing up in the genteel poverty of the post-revolutionary aristocracy, besotted with Symbolism, drugs, Baudelaire, and Edgar Allen Poe - Villiers looked around at the modern world and saw a glorious dystopian future.

L'eve future is an edisonade, a popular genre in the late 19th century in which the protagonist of the story was always Thomas Alva Edison. In Villiers' novel, Edison creates a perfect electric woman - an android named Hadaly - for a friend whose fiancee's fallibility has driven him to despair. Given the almost occult significance of electricity for late 19th-c. romantics, Edison was the logical choice for the engineer-hero in this Pygmalionesque tale of perfect passion.…

You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life even if you had an electrified fooling machine! (personal)

2013-05-21T00:32:13Z

I feel bad, reading the title of this and thinking to myself, I did.

It was a lie, a big lie. No one should lie about such a thing, especially to their own mother. I was sixteen when I finally decided I could be the better person and 'fess up.

I had just come out of a one year relationship, also, my first and my mother couldn't understand why it had all come to an end and why I'd continuously asked that she did not ask.

What had happened, was that seven months earlier, I cheated, and not just once. I had confessed to my best friend and no one else. Then my girlfriend received an e-mail detailing what I had done. I wonder who... I hit that big red button in my mind that screams: DENY!

I denied it to everyone, I stood face to face with my mother and told her it was all lies, when really, I was all lies and my mother believed me and did everything to help me through this tough ordeal of people lying about me and trying to ruin my…

The Architect Erects his Time-Proof Temple from the Inside (poetry)

2013-05-21T00:04:53Z

I'll meet you again in our healthier tyme
even if it only exists in the past.
Let's be held by knowledge, hands held open
to snatch time's dice from the air as they're cast.
And I could dream myself a carpenter and an auctioneer
constructing doors and walls and windows of my time
presented as one event. Then turn and woo it away
to you who would abandon your island to fight for mine.
Lying together in constructed tangles on Sunday morning
conducting one small idea of…

Aromantic (idea)

2013-05-20T21:52:47Z

Aromantic is a term used to define one's romantic orientation (sometimes referred to as a person's affectional orientation), used for those who do not feel an urge to engage in romantic relationships. It is sometimes abbreviated aro.

Aromantic is, for the most part, a modifier used by the asexual community. Being asexual does not necessarily mean that you do not desire romance, but it does mean that terms like gay, lesbian, and especially bisexual may not quite fit. So instead you may hear the terms homoromantic asexual, heteroromantic asexual, biromantic asexual, and panromantic asexual. And, of course, you might also come across people who identify as an aromantic asexual.

The term is not always limited to the asexual community. There are also those who identify as, for example, an aromantic bisexual. And you may have noticed that there is a over-hyped stereotype in Western culture of the 'aromantic hetrosexual male' (although that term is never…

Heteroromantic (idea)

2013-05-20T21:50:25Z

Heteroromantic simply means that one feels romantically attracted to members of the opposite sex. This is not necesarily to say members of the 'opposite' gender, as many people who identify as heteroromantic do not consider themselves part of the binary gender paradigm.

Generally, this term is used specifically to refer to people who identify as asexual. (Generally, if you are not asexual, your romantic orientation will match your sexual orientation, making such distinctions redundant). Because the majority of the human race is raised to see heteroromanticism as the default setting, it is often assumed that asexuals are heteroromantic (or perhaps aromantic, to mirror their asexualiy). However, there are certainly those who identify as homoromantic, biromantic, or panromantic.

A heteroromantic asexual will, generally, desire more or less the same romantic activities as a cisgendered person, but will not desire sex.…

I remember Kristine (person)

2013-05-20T19:39:25Z

I sat behind her in Grade 9 chemistry class. She had thin brown hair that came to her shoulders, straight teeth, brown eyes and faint freckles across her face. She had a quiet demeanor but came alive with she laughed. She volunteered at the animal shelter andÂ I thought she was great. Being the shy fourteen year old girl that I was, and not knowing many other people in school, I desperately wanted the two of us to be friends. And for a while, we were.

Until she went quiet.

I don't trust people easily. I'm sure that at one point I must have, but I can't remember what that feels like. When someone invites me to a party, I wonder why. What does she want from me? What is she asking me for? Is this some sort of joke?

Many years have passed since then.Â High School is over.Â I've gone through university and entered the workforce.Â I wasn't friends with Kristine for very long. It's strange thatÂ I would think about her now.Â She swims in and out of my consciousness.Â Call me…

May 20, 2013 (log)

2013-05-20T17:32:03Z

Grief is weird. The Portland scene continues to be weird.

I don't know how much I want to go into the memorial. There were some words spoken that were fairly effective, and if you're looking for a good set of them to begin trying to understand, these seemed to suit quite well. The most effective words may not be posted, and oddly, I'm okay with that. The world needs less things capable of making me sob in semi-public.

What can I speak to? Watching people wander like ghosts with thousand yard stares, hangovers that seemed to last a week. Escaping Friday to go plant a fig tree and some basil. Weeding like a sonnuvabitch on Sunday. Cocktails at Teardrop. Going through two flasks on the porch and in the front room of Planet Motherfucker. The emptiness of the house and the slow Sunday cleaning after Jetgirl and enth had taken their trains.

The heel of a bottle of Laphroaig passed…

thoughts while cutting my daughter's hair (event)

2013-05-20T15:58:50Z

Perhaps I should have just gone to beauty school and gotten a license to cut hair. If timed right, I do a pretty decent job. And by that I mean the family members whose hair I cut are satisfied.

My daughter said, "you still could, then at least you would be getting paid to listen to strangers' lives." I asked her how short she wanted it, then made the first chop. Her auburn hair starting falling to the grass as I imagined myself to be Edward Scissorhands, only slower and not as pale.

Then we chatted about things as mothers and grown daughters do, noticing for the first time she was getting a sprinkling of white hair. We talked about my father, dead for nine years now, how he always went to the barber shop on a weekly basis. The men on his side of the family went white young, though you could barely tell with him, his hair kept under one-half inch at all times.

I remembered one of the last times I saw him before…

The Losers (review)

2013-05-20T14:42:02Z

"Ask my family and they'll tell you I was a Navajo.
Ask the Army Air Force and they'll say I was an American.
But if you ask my brothers, they'll set you straight.
John Cloud was a Loser."

Long before the Vertigo comic or the movie based on it, "The Losers" was an old-school war comic published by DC Comics.

The series was created by writer Robert Kanigher (with illustrations by a variety of DC's artists, including Sam Glanzman, Russ Heath, and John Severin, with Joe Kubert providing outstanding covers and occasional interior art) and appeared in a comic called "Our Fighting Forces" in early 1970. It starred a team of characters who had previously appeared in other DC war comics -- a pair of Marines called Gunner and Sarge, a Navajo pilot named Johnny Cloud, and Captain Storm, a PT boat commander with a wooden leg.

All of Kanigher's war comics tended toward the fatalistic, with war…

Rough Skinned Newt (thing)

2013-05-20T08:07:35Z

The Rough Skinned Newt, or in scientific parlance, Taricha Granulosa (meaning: Mummy with Bumpy Skin) is a species of salamander living in The Pacific Northwest, from the panhandle of Alaska to central California. It is a mid-sized salamander, about six inches long, with a distinctive dark upper surface and pale orange lower surface. As its name implies, it also has rough skin.

As an amphibian, the Rough Skinned Newt begins life in slow moving or still waters and then metamorphosis into an adult that lives in damp forests. The Rough Skinned Newt lives in leaf litter and lives off of a diet of small invertebrates, meaning insects and worms. It returns to water to breed once a year.

None of this is that interesting to the non-herpetologist: like most salamanders, the Rough Skinned Newt lives a slow life consuming small insects and worms, and due to the low energy needs of a cold blooded animal, it can live quietly and slowly in the leaf litter. This is true of most…

oriented 3x (idea)

2013-05-20T05:58:48Z

In medical jargon, to be "oriented 3x" (or oriented times three) simply means to know who you are, where you are, and what time it is.

Complex questions of metaphysics, existentialism, space-time mechanics, and dasein aside, being and time in this context refers to one's ability to answer the following questions:

What is the date?
Where are you?
Who are you?

Inability to answer these questions may result in findings of (or be the result of): head injury, intoxication, stroke, central nervous system infection (such as meningitis), hyperthermia, hypothermia, severe altitude illness, low blood sugar, hypoxia, dementia, poststructuralism, or a host of other interesting mental illnesses.

Following this basic assessment, the patient's level of consciousness may be graded on a scale like this:

Oriented and can do

…

Xiang mian (idea)

2013-05-20T02:21:30Z

Xiang mian (also found in Wade-Giles as hsiang mien) is the ancient Chinese art of divining an individual's character from his or her facial structure.

In xiang mian, the contours and shape of your face are read as a map of your inner landscape. Similar in theory to the popular 18th century practice of physiognomy, the face is an open book to practitioners of xiang mian, who still practice in China (primarily as medical diagnosticians). From the broad strokes of the forehead to the poetic angles of the zygotic arches - every bone and surface plane speaks.

Fundamental character typing in xiang mian is based on the relative proportions of the three main components of the face:

forehead width
cheek width
jaw width

Try this at home!

Find a picture of yourself looking straight at the camera. Lay a piece of…

Mama Sheik (person)

2013-05-20T02:16:04Z

Mama Sheik (b. 1968, d. 1993): legendary girl gangsta.

Mama Sheik grew up in the Hillside Projects in Milwaukee, became the founder and queenpin of the Sheiks, a competitive kickboxer, one-time bank robber, businesswoman, and in her final incarnation - Midwestern drug empress.

For these latter occupations, and possibly because she was a flamboyant and glamorous black lesbian woman of forbidden power whose closet could have kicked Liberace's closet's ass, she is very unlikely to be featured on A&E Biography any time soon.

At 11, she was a bright, popular 7th grader. She organized a competitive girls' neighborhood dance team (which she called the Sheiks, because she liked the power and strength connoted in the word), was active in school athletics, and was a model student.

The Sheiks were street-dancers competing on…

May 19, 2013 (log)

2013-05-19T23:28:42Z

Yesterday was cloudy with on and off showers, today more of the same. I love grey, overcast, rainy days!! Yesterday I played tennis for the first time in probably 30 years and it was fun!!! Of course, today my body is complaining, but it really felt good so I think I'll continue. Sort of fell off the exercise wagon for a few years, so I'm thinking any exercise is a good thing. Next time I will wear sneakers though, instead of work boots.

In one way, it was a first time experience, as I had never played doubles in the past. After turning 60 last month, it was encouraging to find I could somewhat hold my own, playing against my two sons, and partnering with the younger son's girlfriend. We were technically there to oversee my 2 eldest grandsons, who were at a local street fair to be picked up later, so with no grandchildren and their cadre of cousins and friends within earshot, I was able to say at one point to my sons, "You have all the balls." I know,…

eager (review)

2013-05-19T20:28:34Z

eager
by Helen Fox
Hodder Children's Books, 2003
Wendy Lamb Books, 2004

This is a science fiction book for children, intended for ages 9-14. It is a bit more thoughtful than most science fiction written for children this age, being a bit more concerned with what makes an AI conscious and a little less concerned with blood-and-thunder adventures.

The Bell family live in a middle-class English neighborhood at the end of the 21st century. Life is pretty good -- they have robots to do all of the housework, all of the comforts of modern living, and a school that makes learning fun. Their only concern, at the moment, is that their household robot, Grumps, is getting a bit old and makes unpredictable errors -- like serving dinner for breakfast.

This problem looks to be solved when they receive a gift robot, EGR3, from a scientist working with experimental IA's -- robots that learn like humans, and have…

PIMBY (idea)

2013-05-18T23:24:04Z

PIMBY is a response to NIMBY -- Not In My Backyard. While the NIMBY attitude is characterized by an unwillingness to accept any negative externalities involved in large public works or large companies (power companies, pig farms, sewage plants, etc.), PIMBY is the attitude that maybe we should replan these institutions to keep all externalities acceptable to the local community.

While this idea sounds pretty straightforward, the term is used with many shades of meaning by many different groups.

PIMBY is most often translated as either "Please In My Back Yard" or "Power In My Back Yard"; it is generally associated with personal solar power panels or wind turbines, where the homeowner produces their own power. It may also be used by those who raise their own food crops, food animals, use composting toilets, use greywater systems, passive solar heating, etc. The idea is basically that instead of relying on public utilities or corporations, the homeowner…

May 18, 2013 (personal)

2013-05-18T20:22:57Z

Sometimes, when I have writer's block, I do strange things. Strictly speaking, I don't have writer's block, but merely insufficient time to write. This story-- a novella, perhaps-- comes along swimmingly when I get the opportunity, and I almost have a complete draft, about forty typed, single-spaced pages in length. Never mind. I felt like doing something strange, and now a cat has died, blood splattered on the curb of main street. I suppose I'm only a witness, and not even that, having arrived a moment too late to report on the actual event.

My protagonist finds himself in an unfamiliar small town on a critical night of his life, and (entirely out of character) he's about to take a potentially dangerous combination of drugs. All of this makes perfect sense, in context. Trust me. Now, I could easily invent a small town and a restaurant. Lord knows, I conjured the protagonist's small town…

May 18, 2013 (log)

2013-05-18T18:07:48Z

(This was on my homenode, wrote it when Oolong resurrected it for me, but I'd rather move it to a daylog, and recommence bookmarkification and new things in that space)

I left a long time ago, and I took my action with me. That was what I needed to do, and it was my right to do it. Nobody owns my writing except for me, other than a bespoke textbook to which my university holds the copyright.Â

When people asamoth, they do it for a damn good reason, and whatever it is, they're more entitled to it than anyone else is to get pissed off that the asamoths owned their own creative labor and carted it off with them when they moved shop.Â

If you look at the writeup under asamoth, you'll see that some evidently believe that their ex should leave behind their vinyl records, furniture, art, books, and personal effects when they move out, on the grounds that all their personal belongings now somehow belong to the house. I think that attitude reflects the very soul of overbearing…

Hottentotism (thing)

2013-05-18T16:14:05Z

This is a very old and completely obsolete term.

'Hottentot' is a politically incorrect term for the nomadic peoples of South Africa. The most commonly known of these groups today are the !kung and the San. You may also have heard the term Bushmen (which is also politically incorrect). Regardless, they all speak some branch of the Khoisan language family. These languages all have a number of clicks and pops (the ! in !kung indicates one of the tongue clicks). These languages were long viewed as incomprehensible (and the fact that the natives tended to walk about mostly naked didn't help their image).

The term hottentotism was coined by John Conrad Amman, who is best known for working to teach deaf-mutes to speak in the late 1600s and early 1700s. He also worked with severe stutterers, and the most severe of these, whose stuttering was so severe as to make them unintelligible, he referred to as having hottentotism.

It is perhaps worth noting here that…