It’s the Long and Short Review’s Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge. The prompt is what entertainment (Books, movies, TV ) wouldn’t you return to. This one is easy for me. I do enjoy both the deep and shallow ends of the entertainment pool. So I’m not embarassed to say back in the day, I quite enjoyed flicks like Independence Day and True Lies. Indeed, I remember the last summer of my PhD (I had an August dissertation defense date), the university movie theater had a late night showing of Independence Day on July 4th. I worked all day in the library with that as the carrot at the end of the day. I went to the show and realized I might’ve been the only woman in the audience. That was a weird moment. But I enjoyed it. However, Since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, I haven’t been able to rewatch such movies. The blowing up of monuments and skyscrapers no longer has an entertainment value for me. Too much watching of the actual thing on CNN in the aftermath.
Time once again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday Weekly Blog hop. Given the prompt of songs that confused me when I was a kid, I immediately thought of Prince’s “I would die 4 U.”
I suffered from a bit of mondegreen – you know, when you mishear something as different words (from Sylvia Wright, who misheard “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”). My brain sort of mixed it up with Fred Flinstone’s trademark interjection:
Othertimes, I thought he was singing, “Apple Dapple Do.” I once mentioned the song to a friend, using what I thought was the right lyrics, and she looked at me like I was crazy. She explained the actual lyrics and laughed heartily at the thought that Prince would be quoting Fred Flinstone or saying Apple Dapple Do. She asked if either made sense to me, but I didn’t really think lyrics had to make sense.
Time once again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday Weekly Blog hop, this time asking ourselves to answer whether we are an introvert or extrovert.
My brother years ago, self-identifying as an introvert and identifying me as an extrovert, explained the difference as being that he recharged by being alone and I recharged by being around others. I’ve always liked that definition. And his identifications weren’t without merit.
But I think we are all more complex than that.
Through much of grade/high school I was probably introverted in the sense of being shy and withdrawn socially. I only found my voice at the end of high school and in college when my family moved to Mississippi and confronted with overt racism, I found that silence = complicity, so I couldn’t stay silent. I would say I’ve acted extroverted since then, but friends/colleagues have noted they can see the introvert within me when we’ve discussed this past.
And since the pandemic, I do find myself happily a homebody a lot of time. Big, crowded events don’t appeal. Indeed, I’ve never liked huge crowds period. And, in the words of my brother, sometimes I just need to be alone to recharge. But it’s also true that being around others can really life my spirits.
So to answer the question are you an introvert or an extrovert, I say yes.
It’s once again time for Long and Short Review’s Wednesday Weekly Challenge. I’m always a little late responding to folks’ postings for this because our firewall at school keeps me from reaching Long and Short Review’s site. (There are a lot of weird little sites that I can’t reach at school, such as the Wirecutter reviews on NYTimes). But I look forward to yours after I get home.
This one is easy. All week long I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the 2017 total solar eclipse I saw in Oregon and wishing I could’ve seen the totality this year. As I noted on Monday, this episode of The Pulse really took me back there as one of the interviewees described the total eclipse experience. And here again is one of my photos from that 2017 experience
You can see photos of Monday’s partial (where I was) eclipse on this post from Monday.
Oh goodness, my to be read list is very long. E-book readers have helped me keep my bedside table from getting so piled up that it’s in danger of tipping. (especially with cats, who like to jump up there). But what’s been on there longest? Fortunately, readers can also help with this question. Looking at my content from oldest to newest, I spot Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Greg Keyes’s The Briar King , Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (yep, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve not read it, though. I started it; I think I stopped when Victor Frankenstein was reassuring himself the trial of the maid unfairly accused of a murder committed by his monster was all going turn out fine and she’d be acquitted and I felt sure that she wouldn’t), and Stieg Larsson‘s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I remember starting, but I don’t remember why I never finished). These take back a good 14 to 15 years. 😳 Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future takes pride of place in the discussion of apocalyptic systems thrillers in the NYTimes (which I discussed yesterday). I’m adding it to my list and hopefully it won’t sit there as long as Red Mars.
Oops – just looked at my digital collection and I have already purchased The Ministry for the Future last September. 😳
I Look forward to reading what is on other peoples TBR lists in this Long and Short Reviews Wednesday weekly challenge.
When I was in middle school (or junior high, as we called it back then), we had a rescued dog named Gerry. She was mostly black lab. My mother’s boss had gotten her a couple of years earlier, already an adult dog, thinking that she would be a good hunting dog. He’d kept her penned up in pretty bad circumstances (and never took her hunting as far as I know). One day, he mentioned that he was going to have her put down because, I think, he didn’t want to deal with her more. My mother phoned my stepfather to see if we could adopt her (always good to get one’s partner’s consent before making major life changes to the family). He always had a soft spot for animals and immediately agreed.
So we adopted the unnamed dog and my brother named her Gerry because he’d always wanted a dog named Jerry (I’m pretty sure we spelled with a G as a nod to her gender, short for Geraldine). Her first stop was the vet, who uttered the famous last words: “She’s fixed, I’m sure.” Needless to say, she wasn’t.
When she went into heat, we tried to keep her away from other dogs, but one day, she escaped out the back door and met a very nice Great Dane before we found her again.
A couple of months or so later, all three of us (my high school sister, my grade school brother, and I) happened to be home sick (who knows what was going around), when the very pregnant Gerry was scratching at the front door wanting out. And we spotted a little tiny tail sticking out beneath her tail. We called Mom in breathless excitement! By the end of the night, she had 13 puppies (plus two still born pups). We named them all for sports stars, except for the last born, Lucky.
We created a puppy corral out of refrigerator boxes. We put carpet at one end and the rest was newspaper (we went through a ton of newspaper!). The pups were paper trained before they could fully walk. They’d shimmy themselves off the carpet to do their business. We kept the cats locked out of where the corral was lest Gerry get protective as a new mother. They snuck in one day and we found them standing up with their front paws on top of the cardboard fence, looking at the puppies. When we walked in, they turned and looked at us with “What have you done?!?” expressions on their faces.
Gerry was pretty soon over nursing 13 puppies so we had a whole feeding system pretty early. We kids found it exciting. We have photos of my brother nearly buried in puppies, wagging their tails and licking him (he says now that it was terrifying and his laughter at the time had actually been hysteria). They could also fetch before they could walk (hard-wiring is amazing!). You could roll a ball and a pup would crawl after it and push it back to you with its nose.
As they got bigger, we got a deep snow (Iowa) and I recall the little puppies bounding across snow twice as high as they were tall.
Initially we found homes for all but two of them: Yogi (Berra) who was all black and Bart (Starr) who has black with a white star on the back of his neck and white tipped tail and feet. (Some of the others had been brindled). But keeping two huge dogs + their mother proved too much in town. Yogi was adopted by a farm. We went to visit (they held a Christmas shop each year on the farm) and Yogi at the time had been adopted by some of the farm kittens as a mother-figure. You must picture a big black dog standing taller than waist-high followed by three little black kitties.
Bart was one of the sweetest dogs – and so beautiful when he ran! He would get the wander lust can could clear a 6 foot fence. We used to borrow the little girl from next-door. He loved her. We’d take her out and she’d call to him. It could be terrifying (if you didn’t know) as this dog bigger than the girl would come barreling up and, at the last minute, flop down and present his belly for her to rub. Then we’d take him home. Despite his lab-heritage, he was terrified of water. On one of his escapes, he fell into a neighbor’s pool and my brother had to rescue him.
Bart must have been 5-7 years old when, sadly, he got cancer. We treated him as long as his quality of life was good. My cat, Athena, who was always empathetic, would curl up with him (which she had never done before he got sick). At last, we had to say goodbye to him.
So that’s my story. We had many other pets along the way, but I’ll never forget the winter of 13 puppies (+ their mother + two cats).
Time for Long and Short Review‘s Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. Ooh, this one seems even harder. Some tropes just don’t (and seem likely to never) happen in real life at all (superpowers, for example). But this challenge seems ask for one that does happen or potentially is looming in the future, but I wish it wouldn’t.
Well, living in the era of generative AI, I guess a good one to go with would be I hope that the Singularity doesn’t happen and an AI/robots don’t destroy human civilization and/or all of humanity (not that we aren’t doing a good job of that ourselves, with pollution, climate change, war, human-instigated famine – yep, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, at least according to the Good Omens version, in which pestilence has retired in favor of pollution). Of course, the Robot/AI apocalypse would just be another form of human self-destruction. Here’s hoping we do a better job of avoiding that one.🤞
Of course, then, I immediately started wondering when this AI takeover trope first started and turned to Wikipedia. It suggested Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 19th century, but that seems more than a little questionable as an example of the trope per se (even if it directly inspired at least one story in this trope, which in turn inspired the World Wide Web). A better contender seems to be Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon (which I had never heard of, but Alan Turing even cites as a warning of Ai takeover). The Wikipedia article also notes the 1920 Czech play R.U.R., which gives us our word robot, has robots revolt and kill most of humanity. So this trope is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but it does seem increasingly possible.
Among this trope, some of my favorites are Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Linda Hamilton is one tough mother – Yes, the series of movies, like the terminator itself, keeps coming, but I stop with T2); TheMatrix (again, I’d stop there in the series); Battlestar Galactica (not the 1980’s series, but the post-9/11 series; I was sorry the spin off Caprica didn’t make it); and on the lighter side, I loved The Mitchells vs. the Machines. On a smaller scale, who could forget:
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
There are probably others but these are the ones that first jump to mind when I think of the trope. Yep, all movies or t.v. series. I’m sure I’ve read books with these tropes (esp. since the prompt is about book tropes), but the ones that first come to mind are all video.
It’s time once again for Long and Short Reviews Wednesday challenge. This is a good one. I had to really think about it. But I think I would go with enemies to allies/enemies to friends/enemies to lovers or any such variation. It seems these days that it is hard for people who have different ideas to cross those divides. Ideas that might contain possibilities for mediation are turned into absolutes, leaving no room for understanding and compromise. Those who support ideas different from one’s own are demonized, that they are operating from a place of good will is rejected. So the tropes where one sees in an enemy or opponent humanity, goodness, and/or a potentially useful working relationship seems like something that would make our society more functional if it happened more often.
A groundbreaking resource for fiction writers, teachers, and students, this manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.
While the book looks to diversifying voices by challenging the writing workshop model, another way to describe it is that Salesses highlights the “givens” of writing craft and calls upon writers to think about them as conscious craft choices. I’d highly recommend it to anyone. I have also used some of the writing exercises in a class I was teaching and the students really liked them.
Other than that, I’ve been reading fiction, books for my the classes I teach, or just doing my own writing.
I wish I had a brilliant answer to this, but mostly I just scroll on my smart phone. I think at times, however, how the phone has gobbled up those quiet moments of just being with one’s self. Standing in line in various places. Sitting in a waiting room. One week, on NPR’s Wait…Wait… Don’t Tell Me, they discussed a video of a woman just sitting on a plane doing nothing – it went viral because people (including the woman’s daughter who filmed it) thought it was so weird for someone to just sit quietly. I teach at a Quaker school, so once a week I do have the chance to sit quietly with myself (and several hundred other students, faculty, and staff) during Meeting For Worship. And sometimes I just sit quietly in a waiting room. But there’s a certain beckon of my phone and all the things I can read on it. (EDIT: Oops, forgot to link to Long and Short Reviews, the hub of the challenge)
Ramblings 