Pegging away

According to the trusty desk calendar, today’s bit of Forgotten English is “peg away,” meaning “to continue determinedly on one’s course.” That seems like an apt enough metaphor for today, which was mostly just your typical Mondayish Monday.

I didn’t sleep so well last night, so I got a later train this morning. And then I spent most of the day working on a counseling book I really need to get into production by the end of the month. Which, now that I look again at the calendar and exactly how much is left of said month, I don’t think I’m actually going to manage. The author still owes me a good five or six revised chapters, and I still have to read through them and make sure there’s no problem with the changes. It’s nothing I can force, and the author’s been really good about getting the work done, but it’s at times like this that I wish there were a few more weeks left in February.

I spent my lunch hour listening to this week’s Radiolab podcast — which I actually heard as the second half of this week’s This American Life — and I have to say, it left me a little shaken up. The whole TAL episode was great stuff, but Lucy’s story was particularly powerful and sad. It’s worth a listen, but don’t expect light and frothy fun.

In other news, my father had a procedure to hopefully fix the blurred vision he’s been having lately. I’d actually managed to forget that today was the day, so it was a little disconcerting to come home this evening and find him lying on the couch, in the dark, with a patch over one eye. He seems okay, though I don’t think the procedure was much fun, and there’s still the worry that it won’t have the desired effect. I’m not sure if he’s planning on going to work tomorrow, but at least the eye patch only has to stay on for a day.

And now, I think, it’s time for bed.

Monday various

  • Play any website as music using CodeOrgan. For what it’s worth, here’s what this site supposedly sounds like. [via]
  • “Sealed with a righteous kiss and something something death.” Very funny subtitles from Cambodian Twilight and Avatar DVDs. [via]
  • Meanwhile, here’s a neat infographic outlining just what you get as a DVD pirate versus as a paying customer. Of course, it seems to be missing one of those full-length anti-piracy ads — also often unskippable — that play at the start of many DVDs.
  • Here’s a horrific and “little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”

    Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. [via]

  • And finally, on a slightly happier note: the headline reads: Rapper says politician used Vulcan grip on him in airplane fight.