Wasting my day off, wine, ravioli

Slept in, decided to finally look into DSL service since my provider’s long, long descent into horribleness has led to me being having slow, vastly overcharged. This ended up taking hours, as trying to figure out which provider is least horrible is like trying to decide if you’re better off drilling a hole in your skull using a power drill and one or another sized bit, or if you want to go with a hand-cranked version. It’s all painful and horrible.

Then I went to go buy wine. Garagiste is awesome. Wine Outlet is awesome. Bringing home four cases of crazy, great, cheap wine almost redeems the day. Seattle rocks.

And now I’m going to make (not quite from scratch) ravioli and a nice tomato sauce. After which, I’ll sit down for my scheduled ~7pm appointment with the keyboard to write.

Current status

My pledge: I’m going to stop doing moon research and write the book, and not draft-1 of the book, I’m going through the last outline and writing all the chapter placeholders, all the gaps in draft-1. And I’m going to start pushing out snippets to prove it. And if not that, than the YA book, and if not that, then something. Word counts word counts word counts.

So:

“What do you think the chances are it blows out?” Megumi asked.
Shhhhh.
Megumi sighed. “I don’t know,” James said. “It’s why we’re running the test.”
Megumi made a face. “I know….” She said. “Okay. I think it’s a hundred percent.”
The two vendors looked over, and James’ eyebrows shot up.
“What?” Megumi asked. “No? You think it holds? Care to make it interesting?”

Metabolism fun

In the days after riding huge distances, my body has three reactions:
1. Holy crap I’m sore, what just happened?
2. To prevent you from doing anything that ambitious again, I’m going to go into sleep mode every couple of hours and render the brain powerless to motivate action
3. In case you figure out a way around that, I’m going to require massive calorie intake every time you wake and every few hours, so if you decide to run a marathon or something I’ll be prepped

I feel pretty good considering I biked over 200m Saturday and was criminally undertrained.

Information that would have been handy last week

Item 1: I don’t usually eat pork, or beef, but on the fourth of July, say, I’ll make an exception and have a hot dog, or a brat (in the same way I don’t go to eat at someone’s house and make a stink if there’s sausage on the pizza).

Item 2: From Science Daily:

A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

This is why I love Roger Ebert so much

I’ve always enjoyed his film criticism, and particularly his desire to find a way to use film criticism to elevate both film making and film watching. He’s a passionate advocate for the joy and awe of movies, and I’ve learned so much from him that even in disagreement I feel like I’ve learned something. I long enjoyed his occasional forays into essays on other subjects, and in recent years he’s written more and more about his life, his career in newspapers, and lately even creationism and his own Catholic upbringing. And sometimes in his essays, aided by his years of experience honing his writing, he manages these moments in his writing that make me shake my head in admiration.

And sometimes, he just totally cracks me up. Here’s him writing about Vincent, a Chicago guy who is the subject of a documentary, but in discussing it Ebert’s able to… well, here’s a long clip:

One person in the doc speculates that Vincent has spent a lot of his life being stigmatized and isolated, and the suits are a way of breaking down barriers. I confess that the first time I saw him, I saw a man with unfocused squinting eyes and a weird suit, and leaped to conclusions. But by the time I saw this documentary, things had changed in my life. Anyone seeing me walk down the street would notice an unsteady gait, a bandage around my neck, and my mouth sometimes gaping open. If they didn’t know me, they might assume I was the Village Idiot. You can easily imagine Vincent becoming an isolated agoraphobe, locked onto a computer screen. But he spends hours every day in the fresh air and sunshine, picking up that tan and getting lots of exercise.

That’s why I respond to Vincent, and applaud him. If people take one look at me and don’t approve of what they see, my position is: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. So here is a man who likes to wear pimp suits and wave them at tour boats. So why not? What are the people on the boats so busy doing that they don’t have time for that? I suspect something like 99 percent of them are more entertained by Vincent than by the information that Mies van der Rohe designed the IBM Building, which stands across the street as an affront to the tinny new Trump Tower. As least they can smile and wave and tell the folks at home about that wacky guy they saw on the bridge.

Yeah. I love Ebert.

Best comments of the day

From the crits of my short story:
“It didn’t feel like one of your stories, and not because it was good.” — Mark
“I was waiting to find out if we were at a Renaissance Faire.” — Kira
“You could lose nine pages and I wouldn’t notice.”
and
“As a reader I hate it when characters are smarter than I am.” — Caren

Of course, that’s only fragmentary and quotes are funnier when they seem inadvertently negative, so that’s not how the crits went. But it’s still funny.