( What kind of day has it been: )

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Today's sign is orange: i or y hands circle around each other. This comes with a bonus sign: if I change the hand-shape to the I-love-you ILY shape, then it means Seanan, because I love her orangely. Yesterday's sign was FAIL, which is a K falling off a cliff basically. Hmm. More practically, I learned coffee, lactose intolerent, and POISON. There are two signs for poison in my dictionary and I love both of them. One sort of evokes the skull and crossbones and is very clear and foreboding. The second, and I like this so much, is a modified version of the sign for medication. Instead of delicately picking up medicine from your palm, you go to pick it up and the hand is stuck and wiggles a bit, maybe trying to shake its head NO. It's close to medicine, but a small difference makes it dangerous. That is pharmacy in a nutshell. One of the traditional symbols for pharmacy is a hand milking venom from a snake in to a chalice - showing that the difference between poison and medicine is the knowledge and skill of the apothecary. I am so tickled to find this expressed in the ASL signs for each.

My knee is a cranky knee. At physio on Monday and Tuesday the joint was swollen enough from working 3 days that I could straighten it less than the week before. Hmph! I took half of today off to give it a rest, but I have to work a ten tomorrow and a ten on friday. Well, in two weeks I have my ridiculous three week vacation, so that should give it a bit of a rest, depending on how hyperactive I am at Worldcon! Cedar Point! 40-fest! and Maui! Okay I'm screwed. Well, maybe I can be hyperactive sitting down. Wiggle in place. You know.

Tonight I ate a dish with cooked cauliflower and (a) it wasn't horrible, but instead (b) really tasty, and astonishingly, (c) the cauliflower was the tastiest part and I was (d) saddened when I had cherry-picked all the cauliflower bits out of it. BIZARRO-LAND! This places me in the curious position of wanting to trust advice I get from fishy (who suggested I order it,) which seems wrong somehow. He is wise and learned but utterly full of mischief and so to be treated warily. My new theory is that this was a trap designed to lull me in to a false sense of security so he can next advise me to build an igloo out of bacon lasers. Or worse, something silly.

I am slowly unpacking my room. It's SO CLOSE to the threshold beyond which it will just seem messy instead of boxed-up. My walls have squid and cockroaches and love letters on them, as walls ought to. Now I just need to mount my banjo-hooks and a person might be able to walk across the room in a straight line! Maybe. That does sound kind of boring.

So, the clarinet book of klezmer tunes completely rocks. I record the piano accompaniment and then play along. The nifty thing is that I can speed up the digital recording on my keyboard as I get better and add more embellishments.

Hee!

Yes, they brought you the lol cat wedding!

Now they bring you "Code Monkey" with accompaniment on boomwhackers.

Am in my room at the Holiday Inn By The Bay, San Diego, showered and ready to head down to collect my badge. Those who follow me on Twitter will know the basics, but I'll talk in detail about the horror story that was my trip over later (but really, knowing me, is there any other kind?).

In the meantime, this is what I had for breakfast before I left Singapore. The cool thing is that I was reading the New York Times on my iPod Touch.

Been finding it hard to get back dwon to recording - Finally today I did set something down - then midid just vanished from the new keyboard, then there was a crash - then I had a lie down. Well - I;ve cleared the decks and started. Had some fun with the Virus and got my head thinking - having some ideas. Itls like revision for exams - i know I'll enjoy it once I start but procrastination rules. I seem to be quite sleepy these days - perhaps the muggy nights aren't giving me quality sleep.

In evening did Cactus Cafe jazz gig solo - did a few songs I;ve not doen in a while - Starting Over, Dancing Shoes, Sunrise. Was mostly kin laid back bossa mood.

I ordered a batch of cheap CDs from all over the world a while ago hoping they would arrive weeks apart. Unfortunately they;'ve arrived within days. Barely had I had time to recover from the dizzy making shoegaze of Keith Canisius (who replied to my comment onmyspace - cool), then chilled to the lowfi noodling of Tape when what should arrive than the latest album from prog metal band Circus Maximus - "Isolate" - I'd enjoyed their 1st album but I've been blown away with this one. Prog Metal with a touch of AOR - harmonies and prodigious playing. prog enough to be interesting but not so wiggly as to annoy, metal enough to rock but AOR enough for the odd catchy cheesy chorus to make earworms in your head. Quite tiring (I don;t have much prog or metal) but glorious in the car. I love the production - plus now and then they play my kind of chords.
http://www.myspace.com/officialcm
http://www.circusmaximussite.com/

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/polarizing-filter-allows-astronomers-see-disks-surrounding-black-holes-16962.html

For the first time, a team of international researchers has found a way to view the accretion disks surrounding black holes and verify that their true electromagnetic spectra match what astronomers have long predicted they would be.

read more

I have just officially joined the Training & Technical Writing Team's team for the American Heart Association's Heart Walk. We are ... Team Freon ... because Chapel wanted something that sounded cool.

This post here is officially a plea for donations. Please give! Our team has a goal of something like $750. So far, we've made $25. I'd like to put a bit of a dent in our goal. Please donate! Donations can be made online at my Heartwalk home page. Money will, I assume, roll up properly to the team page.

We're also looking for a few more people to join us on our 3-mile walk. I believe that folks who don't work at AEP are also allowed to walk with us. If you're interested in joining us, tell me and I'll find out what needs to be done to get you on the team.

Thanks to any and all who participate in either capacity!

I'm working on a Mystery Host show, and if you can read this, you are invited to participate. Grand Prize is a $315 PC shopping spree - anything in the catalog :-)

( Details are behind the LJ cut )

As I head down the final stretch toward this year's Confluence, it suddenly strikes me again that Pittsburgh's sister city perennial rival Cleveland has not played host to any significant general-SF, literary-SF, or other non-gaming or non-fringe conventions of which I'm aware for something like fifteen years or more. The last EarthCon was in the late 80s or early 90s, and I don't think HexaCon was around long after that either. As a fiercely loyal Pittsburgher, I normally gloat at Cleveland's misfortune, but in this case I'm kind of sad for whatever is left of the city's fandom; Columbus has several important cons, and Cincinnati and Dayton each have one or two, but unless there's one that I'm not aware of, Cleveland's got bupkis. (I know the legendary newszine Ansible was published in Cleveland; is it still?) I'm not volunteering to start a con there, but I'd be happy to pass along my meager stash of conrunning tips to anyone who would...

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/toxic-chemicals-found-common-scented-laundry-products-air-fresheners-16960.html

A study of top-selling laundry products and air fresheners found the products emitted dozens of different chemicals. All six products tested gave off at least one chemical regulated as toxic or hazardous under federal laws, but none of those chemicals was listed on the product labels.

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http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/commercially-bred-bees-responsible-decline-bee-population-16958.html

Commercially-bred bees -- which are used to pollinate plants in greenhouses -- may be the cause of the drop in wild bee population, according to a Reuters story published today.

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I'm in the market for a simple laptop - something I can do web and flash based things on, check my email, stuff like that. So I'm searching around, and I see that Dell has a $500 notebook that's plenty powerful enough, light and etc. It also comes with Vista Home Premium, which at this point I'm not really interested in. I know I'll have to make the switch eventually, but I'm not really ready to do it now I think.

Anyway, this gets me thinking - the license for Vista alone must be half the cost of that setup - so I wondered what I could find in a simple Linux laptop...

A bit of (non exhaustive) searching later, and I was dismayed. Linux laptops for $1600? I figured I'd be better off buying thing $500 Dell and wiping the drive and installing Ubuntu myself.

IS there someplace the specializes in non-os, or Linux OS laptops geared towards end users? Or am I dreaming to think that a "free" OS is going to actually lower the cost of the computer?

( What kind of day has it been: )

Automatically stabbed through your living brain by LoudTwitter

The tone of the latest post by eoforyth, made earlier this morning with comments disabled, is very alarming. While I don't find anything else she's posted recently that indicates suicidal thoughts, and I don't discount the possibility that someone is playing a sick joke or that her journal has been hacked, I don't want to assume anything. Could someone who knows her better than I do and is able to contact her more directly do so, please, just to see what's going on (and pass on some hugs and/or encouragement to seek assistance if necessary)? I hope she's OK!

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/licking-your-wounds-scientists-isolate-compound-human-saliva-speeds-wound-healing-16956.html

A report by scientists from The Netherlands published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) identifies a compound in human saliva that greatly speeds wound healing. This research may offer hope to people suffering from chronic wounds related to diabetes and other disorders, as well as traumatic injuries and burns. In addition, because the compounds can be mass produced, they have the potential to become as common as antibiotic creams and rubbing alcohol.

read more

(This is cross-posted from The Weird Chicago Blog, where three parts of the series have already been posted).

've been doing some research on Chicago hotels and run across the DAMNEDest story - one of those "how in the hell didn't i know this whole story" sort of things.



In January, 1944, Mrs. Adele Born WIlliams, a 58 year old society "matron" walked up to her apartment at the Drake Hotel with her daughter and found the door unlocked. Inside, they found a gray-haired woman in a black fur coat. Without a word, the woman pulled from her curse an antique pistol and fired two shots at Williams' daughter. She missed, then left the bathroom and fired several shots at Mrs. Williams, eventually hitting her in the head, causing a wound that would prove fatal within hours. The fur-coated woman then walked out of the room and was seen by a couple of men before Williams' daughter cried for help. "I could have tripped her," one of them men later said, "but I'm not in the habit of tripping strange women."

And so began a case that got stranger and stranger. Among the twists in the tale:

- Police launched a massive search of the hotel and found nothing. However, four hours later, the murder weapon was found, shattered, in a stairwell, apparently having been dropped from a high floor. Police had search that place - then gun had apparently been returned to the scene of the crime!
- Similarly, a spare key to Williams' room was reported missing from the front desk at the time of the murder. Mysteriously, it appeared back on the desk at 10 o'clock that evening!
- Mrs. Williams had $100,000 in cash in a safety deposit box for reasons unclear.
- No jewelry or valuables were taken.
- Just before the murder, a phone call had been placed from Mrs. Williams' room to a fish and ale house two blocks away.
- The girl who worked the desk was a convicted hold-up girl with a bizarre past.

The mystery remains unsolved. There was never a suspect, and though various motives were suspected, none of them really held up. It was a huge story in 1944, and mentioned at least once a year on the anniversary in newspapers for at least a decade later (interestingly, as of the late 1950s, the Trib was still spelling "clue" c-l-e-w.). Today, it's been totally forgotten - until Weird Chicago came along, of course!

This case is quite a corker - this will be the first of a series on it! Consider it an addendum to The Weird Chicago Book - which, of course, is what this blog was intended to be!

For the record, I've never heard anything about the Drake being haunted other than some vague rumors. Anyone have any stories about it?

My sister arrived in town yesterday!

Today I'll be trashing the Slacker Sack - the giant foam bean bag thing that we got in place of a couch a while back. It turned out to be fairly useless, as it isn't much different from just having a mattress after a couple of weeks. Plus, it kinda smells of cat pee. An ikea loveseat is in order. Also going to mop up the floor and get it ready for married life.

Hoping the babysitter for the wedding night works out. I booked a room at a hotel for Ronni and I, but we may have to cancel it.

Hoping to make it to Batman tonight with the people with whom I snuck around watching it being filmed last summer. We saw Batman duck away from the set to send a few texts from the cell phone which, for the record, he appeared to be keeping in his utility belt.

Working up some publicity info for GHOST HUNTING FOR SKEPTICS, the nonfiction book I wrote for Llewellyn. I need to update it a bit; I brushed off the use of thermal imaging cameras in the book, but I've recently been using them a lot on a MAJOR investigation that I can't talk about just yet (loose lips, etc). I thought they were basically useless except that they looked good on TV, but now I've found that they can be pretty useful. For instance, you can use them to read inscriptions on gravestones that have worn away and are illegible to the naked eye. You can also use them to find out EXACTLY who farted, which is handy.

So here's a thing I don't get: pants and shorts for babies that don't have snaps in the crotch, but pull up 'round the waist like normal grownup pants. What, you have to undress the kid every time you need to change a diaper? Do people really do this?