health

A many-storied life

This morning, I took the train to Mineola, to pick up my parents’ car, which had been in the shop for its yearly inspection and some repair since Saturday. My father would have picked it up, but he took pretty ill with a stomach bug yesterday and is only now really recovering. Plus, I was going out after work in Manhattan this evening, and it’s always easier to get a train to Mineola in the evenings. So I paid for the repair (admittedly, with my father’s pre-signed check) and parked the car, then caught the next available train into the city.

It was a pretty normal day after that, although I still dealing with this cold, which just won’t let go, and whose accompanying cough has gotten phlegmier and worse as the day’s gone on. I feel bad that I probably gave my father this cold on top of his stomach bug, but since yesterday I’ve been worried the stomach bug was going to hit me. We really have no idea what caused it, and there’s little that he ate that we didn’t that might have caused food poisoning. So I’m still on the lookout for germs, nervous when noon rolls around and I decide, nah, I don’t really feel like eating lunch. (I think it’s the cold, screwing with my appetite, especially since I was hungry by around 2:30 and had no real problem with dinner.)

Anyway. This evening, I attended An Evening With One Story Magazine at Symphony Space. Thanks to Heather, I’m a subscriber to the magazine, and I’ve long been a fan of Selected Shorts. Tonight’s event, with four actors reading stories (and all four authors in attendance) was really great, and I definitely plan on checking out more of their work in the future.

I’m really bad about keeping up with reading One Story issues, but they do some fine work.

Oh, and then on the train home a pair of drunks sat down next to me, obviously just from a game — probably hockey at the Garden — and being really obnoxious. I got up and switched cars before it turned into anything, since I just wasn’t in the mood — when is anyone? other than when drunk themselves, that is? — but I was…I don’t think amused is the word, but it was interesting when a police officer stopped me as I left the train and asked, “Did that guy say something to you?”

“No, he’s just an annoying drunk,” I told her. Which was true. He looked like the sort of guy who would have continued saying something, maybe even done something, which was why I moved.

Right into a car with a young woman who’s cough, amazingly enough, sounded worse even than my own.

Ah, Wednesday.

It is Wednesday, right?

Wednesday various

  • How Doctors Die [via]
  • A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead
  • Every Beatles song played at once. Can you make it to the end? It isn’t easy, and I’m not sure it rewards you for your efforts — audibly, that is; some of the comments are quite funny — but it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless. [via]
  • “Won’t it make you lose your wits, / Writing groats and saying grits?” Can you pronounce all these words correctly? [via]
  • And finally, Warren Ellis on what sounds like the worst computer repair problem ever:

    One day, a few years ago, my backups all got corrupted, and my backup device died. I didn’t have online backups at the time. I’ll fix that on Sunday, I thought, as I was under deadline pressure. Saturday evening, my main machine died in flames. Sent it off for data recovery. The guy running the data recovery shop took it in and then went off to Europe for an operation. And died on the operating table. Came back to the shop to get my machine, because no-one was answering the phone, to find it boarded up, the (mostly off-the-books, apparently) employees scattered to the four winds, and the shop stripped down to the plaster. Not a computer left in there — not even mine. I lost everything, all notes and scripts for work in progress as well as the entire archive.

Wednesday various

Monday various

  • Zombie Font Generator. Presumably, when the zombie apocalypse comes, all correspondence will be written in this. It’ll be like Dawn of the Dead meets The Postman. [via]
  • Clint Eastwood’s family will star in a reality show. And, in other news: Wait, wha–?!
  • Willard Asylum Suitcases:

    In 1995, the New York State Museum staff were moving items out of The Willard Psychiatric Center. It was being closed by the State Office of Mental Health, and would eventually become a state run drug rehabilitation center. Craig Williams was made aware of an attic full of suitcases in the pathology lab building. The cases were put into storage when their owners were admitted to Willard, and since the facility was set up to help people with chronic mental illness, these folks never left.

    I’m really not sure how I feel about this. Are these photographs art? [via]

  • Dubai: come for the human rights violations and widespread corruption, stay for the sewage trucks and typhoid and hepatitis!
  • And finally, Theodora Goss on H.P. Lovecraft’s racism and the World Fantasy Award:

    Did Lovecraft intend that message? I seriously doubt it, and yet it’s there. The story is not the writer. The story is always, if it’s a living story, smarter than the writer.

Thanksgiving cornucopia

  • We live in a country where pizza is a vegetable. I’m just saying. [via]
  • Harry Potter director developing all-new Doctor Who movie. Not at all a sure thing, but still, when do we stop remaking things? Maybe when the last remake is still on-going?
  • Genevieve Valentine on Immortals, which she describes as “a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.”

    The labyrinth and Minotaur are well turned out, and their showdown takes place in a temple mausoleum, where an archway of stairs frames a goddess’s head that’s inset with candles to make it glow from within. It’s the sort of thing where you think, “Man, that’s good looking! I wish this stupid scene would stop so we could just look at it.”

  • I really don’t know what to think about actress suing IMDB for revealing her age. They both seem to have a perfectly valid point.
  • Massive plagiarism might help your book sales [via]
  • Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars this year, giving me another reason not to watch. Which is not a dig at Crystal, necessarily, who I generally like…you know, back when he made movies people watched. But it’s such a safe, boring choice. The Academy really missed a golden opportunity to let the Muppets host the Oscars
  • Tilt-shift Van Gogh
  • Polite Dissent on Forgotten Drugs of the Silver-Age:

    The more I think about it, for all intents and purposes, Jor-El was a mad scientist. He espoused scientific theories well outside the accepted norm and performed numerous unauthorized scientific experiments of questionable ethics.

  • Mysterious D.C. rampage leaves smashed cars in its wake. Seriously, it looks like the Hulk went through there. [via]
  • And finally, the Center for Fiction interviews Margaret Atwood:

    I think it’s a human need to name – to tell this from that. On the most basic level, we need to distinguish – as crows do – the dangerous creature from the harmless one, and – as all animals do – the delicious and healthful food object from the rotting, poisonous one. In literary criticism it’s very helpful to know that the Harlequin Romance you sneak into when you think no one is looking is not the same, and is not intended to be the same, as Moby Dick. But stories and fictions have always interbred and hybridized and sent tendrils out into strange spaces.