language

Weapon-salve Wednesday

The Forgotten English on my desk calendar for today is “weaponsalve,” meaning “a salve which was supposed to cure the wound, being applied to the weapon that made it.”

So I just need to find the boxes of books I carried two years ago in New Orleans, which I think was the injury that hurt my spine, and apply a healing salve.

I was actually fine for most of the day, staying a good quarter or half step away from the pain a lot of the time, but the discomfort really kicked up in earnest this evening. I fear I’m fit for little else but watching an episode of House and going to bed.

I’m not in real pain, and I actually had a pretty decent day, trying to track down reviewers for projects and digging through stock photo websites. Nothing exciting…and sure, this morning the train was ridiculously crowded, so much so that I couldn’t even put down my bag, much less find a seat, for most of the trip. I didn’t even have enough room to read my book — Ubik; and let me tell you, sometimes it’s all too easy to believe Philip K. Dick was a self-medicating schizophrenic. Still, the train tonight was much less crowded. And at lunch this afternoon, as I walked around midtown, I actually saw someone with spray-on hair in the wild. I never knew such things actually existed! This gentleman really wasn’t fooling anybody.

So that’s it. Turning in early to rest the back, hopefully relieve some of the pressure. I fear it’s going to be a whole lot more of the same between now and next Friday — assuming it doesn’t get worse — and it may not get better without some serious treatment options. It seems like every time I get used to living with this thing, working around the pain, the pain changes, and the coping methods I’ve been using don’t work as well anymore.

Oh well, I’m sure House will make it all better. That, or distract me by being really bad. I’ve really been on the edge of love-hate with this show since the end of last season. I watched the season premiere last night and didn’t hate it, actually found some things that really worked about it, but I don’t know. These are probably thoughts for another time.

Zouching towards Bethlehem

So I went to the doctor today, and I guess the good news is, it seems like the back is the most likely culprit for the renewed and varied discomforts I’ve felt this week. Because of the placement of the disc, and the surrounding nerves that can be pinched by the bulge, there’s all sorts of radiating pain and mixed signals. I’m not particularly enjoying this, and I think I even preferred when it was just sciatic pain or feet that fell totally asleep, but it’s easy to mistake this for something other than a problem with the spine, even when there’s some accompanying discomfort in the lower back.

I want to reiterate that this could be much, much worse, and I’m not strictly speaking in pain. I’m not bedridden or incontinent or paralyzed, and I’m not even all that terribly inconvenienced by this. I’ve just had more (and different) discomfort since about Tuesday.

So today I called my doctor and scheduled an appointment. Of course, it meant that I had to leave work early, since they wanted to fit me in today, which was a little awkward, since I’d already planned on taking Monday off. (It’s a three-day weekend, just to use up some remaining vacation days.) And despite being a rainy day when lots of people were out of the office, I’d probably could have found plenty of work to do.

Then again, yesterday’s Forgotten English desk calendar page was “zouch,” meaning “an ungenteel man; a bookseller.” And lord knows, I don’t want people thinking my momma raised no zouch.

But still, it’s good to know that I don’t appear to have a bladder infection. Don’t worry, this post won’t get more graphic than that, beyond acknowledging the existence of my bladder, and that it was one of the things we tested for today. Too much information? Well, let’s pretend like this paragraph never happened, then, okay?

Anyway, after that, I scheduled an appointment with my spine doctor…which, unfortunately, isn’t for another two weeks. My main concern, beyond what I do between now and then, is that he’ll just want me to have another MRI before we discuss anything, which means it could be the end of this month or even next before we get down to actual treatment. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m concerned that there won’t be much, if any, treatment to discuss beyond referring me to a surgeon.

On a happier note, though, I’m preparing the latest issue of Kaleidotrope for mailing to contributors and subscribers over the weekend. And SFRevu had a lot of nice words to say about the issue already. And you still have an hour — provided you read this before midnight EST on October 1 — to use the promo code “KAL102010” to get a free e-book copy of the issue at the Kaleidotrope website. Just scroll down to the bottom of the front page, add the e-book option to your cart, and then enter the code when checking out via PayPal. One-day offer only!

Wednesday various

  • James Cameron doesn’t like Piranha 3-D:

    I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip..

    Something tells me he’s going to hate Jackass 3-D.

    Frankly, though, it’s films like that — cheap horror movies with visceral, jump-out-at-you scares — to which I think 3-D is actually most ideally suited. Cameron may be throwing his full weight behind it as a tool on the artistic palette, but even in Avatar I thought the 3-D was a lot less impressive than advertised. It has its uses, but even at its best, I don’t think it rises above a gimmick. (For which you trade a not-insignificant amount of brightness and comfort.) So a film like Piranha, which embraces it fully as gimmick, may actually be exactly what the technology is meant to do.

  • Eye chart for geeks.
  • And interesting look at Yiddish in America:

    The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)

    On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end. [via]

  • Have you been reading Kaleidotrope contributor Jason Heller’s weekly Frequency Rotation posts at Tor.com? You really should be.
  • And finally, based on this clip, I would totally buy Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rap album. [via]

Gardyloo!

The word for today on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “gardyloo,” which apparently was “a common cry in former days of the dwellers in the high flats of Edinburgh, who were in the habit of throwing urine, slops, &c. out of the window; from the French gare l’eau, beware of the water.”

So I guess, if nothing else, we should be thankful we don’t live in the former days of Edinburgh.

I spent today mostly working on the Sunday crossword (which I haven’t completed) and watching a few episodes of Eureka and Breaking Bad. I also joined my writing group for our regular Sunday free-writing exercise in Huntington. The group is usually more of an idea factory for me than anything, but this week I managed to pull together something approaching a narrative. We had multiple prompts to get us started, but it mostly came down to a shared sentence, the first one in the paragraphs below:

When the clown lost his head, Sandra knew that the party was over. The piñata lay smashed against the ground, foil-wrapped candies spilling everywhere, to be trampled underfoot, the afternoon’s lunch of spaghetti and marinara still caked to the wall opposite, in a pattern all too reminiscent of the guts and brains that had so thoroughly failed to explode out from the faulty robot’s bursting head. Sandra wasn’t even sure where all of the children had run off to, although she was sure it was just to one of the other playrooms, to create additional destruction, to revisit one of the other full-service party droids that had somehow managed to escape their original warpath.

The party was an unmitigated disaster. She’d be lucky if MechaPlay, Incorporated, didn’t sue for damages; she could absolutely kiss her initial deposit goodbye. She only hoped her son had enjoyed himself. Kyle’s tenth birthday had probably just cost them his entire college fund.

She stared down at what was left of the clown, marveled again at the detailed realism of its features. If she didn’t know better, if she couldn’t now see the mess of wires erupting from its neck, she’d have sworn that it was an actual zombie. Certainly, when it had shambled into the room, with its blood-spattered pasty white skin and angry grunts, Sandra had been taken aback, suffered a moment of genuine fear. She knew that it was based on one of the video games Kyle and his friends liked to play — Bozo Ghoul or Deadly Chuckles or something like that — but it was still quite a shock to see it in the flesh, so to speak. She’d rehearsed the line that would cause the droid’s head to explode, had been assured by helpful techs that it would seem real, if perfectly harmless.

But, like so much else that afternoon, it had not gone according to plan.

It’s a goofy idea, and I don’t know if it’s a story that has any legs to it, but I had fun writing it. And it was sort of nice to have something to read, however, short, at the end of our forty minutes than just an overview of the story idea I’d come up with.

You just can’t go wrong with malfunctioning zombie robot clowns.

Thursday various

  • Scholars beware!

    Experts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high–or at least a little wacky–by sniffing old books. Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores. [via]

  • I have to admit, I didn’t immediately understand this video (a collaboration with NPR’s Radiolab), but I liked it enough to re-watch from the beginning once my brain kicked in. [via]
  • I have no idea if the new Scott Pilgrim movie will be any good or not. Some say awesome, some not so much. I know this will lose me some indie geek cred, but I’ve been stuck halfway through the first volume for several months, not particularly loving it. That said, I can totally get behind this:

    There’s no reason to be angry at the people you imagine a movie will make happy just because you didn’t like the movie. [via]

  • Oh come on, it’s an honest mistake. [via]
  • And finally, I need to start riding the subways more often!