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Monday, October 19th, 2009
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12:38 pm
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| Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
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2:29 am - Bekka's Housekeeping Techniques - Do not try this at home
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So the other night, I cleaned the kitchen floor with coffee and broken glass. This is not the most efficient way to do it, but it was highly effective in making me do a thorough job.
Then Tom MacGyvered a coffee pot for me at 2:00 in the morning. This is why he is my hero!
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| Thursday, July 30th, 2009
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6:07 pm - Reading meme ganked from crowyhead
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BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here[citation needed ;)]. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions:
Copy this. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible - x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
Total: 10
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 6
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
Total: 8
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma -Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
Total: 6
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving x
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total: 5
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Total: 4
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
Total: 7
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Total: 6
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Total: 5
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute x
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 7
Grand Total: 64
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| Monday, June 22nd, 2009
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7:30 pm - Rare update
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I will never learn to properly communicate.
So, update: Helping a friend move next weekend.
Going to Ohio for 4th of July weekend to help my sister pack for their move. They finally bought a house! I'm so proud.
Garden is doing really well. My new rose is putting out its first blooms (slightly damaged from the torrential downpour, but still beautiful). My old rose is doing well at the in-laws, and the seedling that came off my new rose has also made an appearance. I just bought ladybugs from GardensAlive, and we'll see how they do against the aphids that attack the rose and the hoyas. The aloes are protesting the rain.
Currently reading Loren Estleman. It's a good thing he's a prodigious author, because I LOVE his writing. When Mom said she's even reading his Westerns, I knew he was a force to be reckoned with. I took a break from the Estlemans to read the new Anita Blake, and a fairly new author named Craig Clevenger. The Anita Blake actually pleasantly surprised me (for what it is). There was somewhat of a return to her first books.
Craig Clevenger: I picked up The Contortionists' Handbook (his first novel) on a whim, and absolutely loved it. Highly original and intelligent, riveting story and great voice. Then I tried his second novel, Dermaphoria. Frankly, very disappointing. Felt derivative and stale. On the other hand, it is the type of story I absolutely hate, so someone who enjoyed Memento, David Lynch etc. might really love it. And I still look forward to giving his next work a shot, because The Contortionist's Handbook was truly brilliant.
Excited that both Fringe and Dollhouse made it through for a second season, and may be able to catch The Mentalist and Castle in the upcoming season.
Tom is currently playing in four bands: Mondays Blues Review, Two Cakes in the Rain, Van Allen Belts, and Ceann. The Ceann shows are going to be keeping him pretty busy this summer, as he's traveling to join them for a lot of shows.
I love lots of things about my job, but am highly frustrated about some key aspects. At least my boss is frustrated by the same aspects.
That's me, how's you?
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, March 16th, 2009
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10:33 am - Hmmm
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Do I want the Republican Party to continue to cry Socialism and drive their party further into shame and irrelevance? Or do I recognize the need for at least a two party system which maintains checks and balances in our democracy?
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/murrowmccarthy.html
Come on people.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
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12:23 am
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Two Cakes in the Rain (Tom and Tamar) are playing at Rock'n Bowl at Arsenal Lanes, Wednesday, March 11th, 10-midnight.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
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11:43 am
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GOP Chairman Michael Steele says the problem with Obama's stimulus package is that road projects have an endpoint. Clearly, he's never been to Pittsburgh.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
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3:17 pm - Tetris as a treatment for PTSD - Bekka's soapbox
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So, a recent study suggests that playing Tetris, or other visuospatial computer games, may help reduce flashbacks for individuals suffering from Post Traumatic Stress disorder.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/07/tetris-trauma-cure
I call bad science on this one, and do so from the perspective of having used Tetris in a similar manner. This study wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't foresee it resulting in a winnowing of the military's too-small mental health budget, replacing therapists with dummy terminals.
So, here's the thing. They tested the subjects by having them view "a 12-min film of traumatic scenes of injury and death." The test subjects who followed this by playing Tetris had fewer flashbacks to the violent images than those who just sat quietly.
Now, I have long used stimulating distraction as a response to distress. When I was a kid, reading a book could calm me down and distract me. Tetris was one of the first computer games I played, and I would use it deliberately, in the same way, if I was upset and getting into an obsessive loop about it. It DOES work - to an extent. If you can concentrate on getting into it, your mind clears and all that's left is Tetris. Afterward, I could get to sleep...albeit with tiny little shapes endlessly falling in a pattern all night long.
However, and this is a big however, it didn't clear the event from my mind, or lessen the upset when it was recalled. In the event of a trigger, the pain and anger were just as fresh. And keep in mind that this is upset over a fight with a friend or boyfriend, or an injustice, not actual Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'll grant you I was an overemotionally young adult, but I would still never presume to compare my trauma to that of people who've experienced real and devastating trauma.
Next think about the fact that viewing video of "traumatic scenes of injury and death" is nothing like being involved in or personally affected by "traumatic scenes of injury and death" or even by a fight with a friend. I can thoroughly enjoy a violent movie like "Shoot 'Em Up," or I can be saddened at video of real life devastation. Watching a comrade, or even enemy, having their head actually blown off is entirely different.
Then, of course, there's the concept of triggers. You don't actually experience a film in the same way you do an event in real life. If, after a "Tetris session," anything reminded me of the recent distress, it all came back again. But I was never triggered to recall a particularly bad game of Tetris. PTSD triggers are similar, on a larger scale.
In conclusion, I posit that it's true that Tetris is, somewhat literally, mind-numbing. But I think this experiment and its conclusion dangerously oversimplify.
End rant
current mood:  bitchy
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
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2:52 pm - 1978 Staw Wars Holiday Special
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12:55 pm - Stream of consciousness
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Once a month, that's my new plan. Surely I can update this thing once a month. So, work is going really well, we just had a board retreat and the board is getting re-energized so very good. Mom and dad gave me the ultimate library geek present, a lifetime membership to Librarything and the ISBN reader, but now I have to actually start using it. Also, one of these days I will get the brain jack, so the myriad posts I make to LJ in my head actually make it onto the page.
Holidays are here too fast, and I'd better start mailing if I want presents to make it to the South in time.
I've been a little unmotivated reading wise since Thanksgiving, though I'm really enjoying Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates. Like David Sedaris, I can hear her reading it to me as I go along, which is kind of fun.
My current obsession is gay soap opera story lines, which was getting tedious until I landed on Queer as Folk. Since it was Showtime, I never got to watch it, but now I own Season One. For all those media companies worried about copyright infringement, they should know that Youtube has inspired me to purchase all the Seasons of three shows thus far. The sexual frustration of ATWT's Luke & Noah storyline has given me new appreciation for fanfiction, but now I know I'll never be satisfied with what the show comes up with.
I tried to explain my new appreciation of Paris Hilton, but I'm still at a loss. You'll be glad to know that her new BFF is the one who looks like a Shi-Tzu. But seriously, her second album should be the best thing since Aqua.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
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9:40 am - Happy Birthday to Me!
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| Friday, October 31st, 2008
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2:08 pm - Sarah Palin Songs
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11:34 am - Don't forget to Vote - November 2nd
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| Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
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4:21 pm - 24 Hour reading marathon at Jo-Beth’s on Friday
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Hi! I'm hoping people would like to sponsor me in a 24-hour reading marathon at Jo-Beth's on this Friday/Saturday. They provide the comfy chair, I provide the books. All proceeds from my reading will go to Beginning with Books. I'm doing it because: I like the charity, I love the idea, it's a brand new idea and they need support for it, and I love the Jo-Beth model of charity. Let me know if you'd be willing to sponsor me at all. Thanks!
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, October 3rd, 2008
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10:42 am
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| Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
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9:33 am - Van Allen Belt Opening for Stereolab - Philadelphia, New York
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I'm proud to announce that the Van Allen Belt are opening for Stereolab at the Trocadero in Philly tomorrow, and at the Fillmore in NYC on Thursday. Looks like both shows are sold out.
http://www.myspace.com/thevabelt
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
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11:37 pm - Game Night - Saturday, August 9
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Hi, all!
Late notice, but I'm going to have game night at my house Saturday. I'm currently thinking taco salad, but may grill out since it'll be gorgeous. Tom's watching his brother get doctorated in Florida, so just me and the silly kitties.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, July 10th, 2008
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6:16 pm - Things I did on my week off
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Day 1: Vegged out, watched all of Dexter Season 1, which I really, really enjoyed. Season 2 comes out on DVD in August, yay!
Day 2: Put clothes away, did groceries, worked on editing my index.
Day 3: Got upgraded cable, vegged, worked on index.
Day 4: Rubbed armpits vigorously all over the cat.
So, at about midnight last night, the Woogie and the Best Girl were out in the yard and something seriously freaked them out. Naturally, in response, they turned on each other.
Beehivers, remember when Paco and Popeye were fighting with imaginary people, looked up and saw each other, and Paco layed Popeye out cold with a chair? Sort of like that. Only with lots more yowling and growling and hissing and puffing.
As near as I can tell, a neighborhood cat freaked them out, they beat each other up, and then freaked each other out when both tried to get back through the door at the same time. Eighteen hours later, she's hiding in the closet in her room, and we have the door closed, since anytime the Woogie comes near her, the whole process starts all over again. So I'm doing all the things recommended for reintroducing your cats, as well as improvising some of my own, which is where bathing the Woogie and then rubbing my head and armpits all over him comes in. It did elicit progress, she only started growling when she could actually see him.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, May 26th, 2008
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7:59 pm - Rest in Peace, Utah Phillips
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"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
http://www.utahphillips.org/
U. Utah Phillips: anarchist, wobbly, hobo, railroader, folksinger, activist, great iconoclast, husband, father and and all around amazing human being.
Thank you Utah. For sharing stories and songs, fighting the good fight, and introducing me, through your stories, to Ammon Hennacy.
In memory, I wanted to share you quoting Ammon Hennacy. This story helped me shape my character, and bolsters me when times are tough.
"Ammon Hennacy? One of Dorothy Day's people, the Catholic workers, during the Thirties they started houses of hospitality all over the country; there're about eighty of 'em now.
Ammon Hennacy was one of those; he'd come west to start this house I'd found called The Joe Hill House of Hospitality. Ammon Hennacy was a Catholic anarchist, pacifist, draft-dodger of two World Wars, tax refuser, vegetarian, one-man revolution in America - I think that about covers it.
First thing he said, after he got to know me, he said: "You know you love the country. You love it. You come in and out of town on those trains singin' songs about different places and beautiful people. You know you love the country; you just can't stand the government. Get it straight." He quoted Mark Twain to me: "Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to the government when it deserves it." It was an essential distinction I had been neglecting.
And then he had to reach out and grapple with the violence, but he did that with all the people around him. These second World War vets, you know, on medical disabilities and all drunked up; the house was filled with violence, which Ammon, as a pacifist, dealt with - every moment, every day of his life. He said, "You got to be a pacifist." I said, "Why?" He said, "It'll save your life." And my behavior was very violent then.
I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Well I can't give you a book by Gandhi - you wouldn't understand it. I can't give you a list of rules that if you sign it you're a pacifist." He said, "You look at it like booze. You know, alcoholism will kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' And then you can begin to deal with the behavior, you see, and have the people define it for you whose lives you've destroyed."
He said, "It's the same with violence. You know, an alcoholic, they can be dry for twenty years; they're never gonna sit in that circle and put their hand up and say, 'Well, I'm not alcoholic anymore' - no, they're still gonna put their hand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' It's the same with violence. You gotta be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your capacity for violence, and then deal with the behavior, and have the people whose lives you messed with define that behavior for you, you see. And it's not gonna go away - you're gonna be dealing with it every moment in every situation for the rest of your life."
I said, "Okay, I'll try that," and Ammon said "It's not enough!"
I said: "Oh."
He said, "You were born a white man in mid-twentieth century industrial America. You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons. The weapons of privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege, economic privilege. You wanna be a pacifist, it's not just giving up guns and knives and clubs and fists and angry words, but giving up the weapons of privilege, and going into the world completely disarmed. Try that."
That old man has been gone now twenty years, and I'm still at it. But I figure if there's a worthwhile struggle in my own life, that, that's probably the one. Think about it."
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| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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2:30 pm - The Van Allen Belt - March 14th
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pghbekka's journal
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