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Finally got a call back from the repairfolk

And they now expect the part in tomorrow, at which point we should be able to make an appointment to repair.

As I reiterated - but briefly, because the person making the call was not responsible for this situation - a delay in shipping is one thing, but lack of communication is something very different.

mesquite

mesquite (me-SKEET, MES-keet) - n., any of a dozen species (genera Neltuma and Strombocarpa, both formerly part of Prosopis) of spiny deciduous New World trees and shrubs with bipinnate leaves and beanlike pods and often forming dense thickets; the wood of these trees, charcoal made from this wood; land dominated by mesquite trees.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

The pods of most mesquites are edible once dried, and those of the velvet mesquite pictured above are still ground and baked into a staple bread by traditional Tohono O'odham on the reservation west of town. We have two intentional mesquites in our yard, and several volunteers. Most species are arid-adapted, and outside the Americas are considered a noxious invasive weed (see: volunteers easily). They are hardwoods that grow very slowly (see: arid), which makes for a dense wood that burns slow and hot that as a bonus has a nicely flavored smoke -- making it great for grilling. Mesquite honey is readily available locally, and I prefer it over any other honey source, even clover. The name dates to the 1830s, taken from Mexican Spanish mezquite, from the Nahuatl name mizquitl.

---L.

Current Mood: amused

Today in Kilts

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H.R.5106 - Restore Trust in Congress Act

H.R.5106 - Restore Trust in Congress Act is bipartisan legislation that aims to ban Members of Congress and their families from engaging in insider trading. The supervising ethics office will impose penalties and issue any additional guidance, as well as publicly disclose fines that will be set to 10% of the stock’s asset value, plus disgorged profits.

The STOCK Act of 2012 has helped expose the extent of potential conflicts of interest and provided the public with transparency into lawmakers’ financial activities, but a lack of enforcement has stopped it from achieving the goal of curbing insider trading.

(In related anti-corruption legislation: Close the Revolving Door Act of 2025, legislation that would impose a lifetime ban on former Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists.)

Contact your representative.

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman. I'm getting near the end of this and it's so good. By the way, fantasy authors, this is how you do worldbuilding. Fellman isn't concerned with why things work as they do, the details of how the post-apocalyptic New York functions or why Stephensport is stuck in time; everything is character, narrowed to the focus of Griffon and Etoine. Even Zaffre's rebel activities are in soft focus—we know there are revolutionary trans nuns (hell yeah) but Etoine is so hyperfocused on her, and what she represents, that the scale and scope of their rebellion are outside the scope of his understanding.

And it's just written so well. There's a subtle strangeness to all of the language that is just weird and offputting enough to feel like journal entries of two men across a gap of time and culture, not only from us, but from each other.

Oh Yuletide

I'm having a much harder time coming up with nominations than in past years. Part of the problem is that I've mostly been reading nonfiction, and that I catch up with shows years after they first start up. I didn't expect Phineas & Ferb to have more than 4000 stories in AO3, and the number for Elementary (tv) is almost equally high. Forget writing Strange New Worlds.

So that leaves me with one TV series with not that many stories -- Dark Winds -- and one of the old Georgette Heyer novels that I haven't written about yet.

I always try to choose things that are easily available, more or less. *stares at bookshelves that need weeding.*

And none of the nonfiction I read is likely to have enough of a fandom. Or any, actually.

At least I have a few more days to come up with something...

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and now i want to clean my computer

don't say I never gave you anything...

At this link are Charlie Warzel's Atlantic story about Epstein's birthday book, and also links to the birthday book, the non-prosecution agreement, his will, and what appears to be an address register. You can read all of it for yourself if you want. Note that the address register was scanned sideways. All the documents are PDFs.

Still no repair response

I sent them another voicemail and email saying that a delay in shipping or even ordering a part may be acceptable, understandable, or forgivable, but lack of communication is none of those things and if they don't get back to me with an ETA on this repair then they'll have to refund our deposit so we can call somebody else.

Either way, I know how I'm spending the next few hours (laundromat) and how I'm spending tomorrow morning (phone).

New Substack post

At some point within the last 400+ years your ancestors came to North America, and then (for many of you) to America. What do you know of their journey?

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GI doctor follow-up

I just had a follow-up appointment with the GI doctor, a few weeks after finishing the course of budosenide. Based on what I told her -- that I'm feeling basically better, even if my gut isn't quite back to how it felt a couple of years ago -- she said to keep doing what I have been, just add a second fiber capsule, and see her again six months. Or send a MyChart message if I need to see or talk to her before then.

ocelot

ocelot (OS-uh-lot, OH-suh-lot) - n., a medium-sized spotted wild cat (Leopardus pardalis, formerly Felis pardalis) of Central and South America with a grayish or yellow coat with stripy black spots.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Although I live at the very edge of their territory, I have only seen them in captivity and Minecraft -- which is as it should be as they are nocturnal and live in brushy woodlands, and have not adapted to human environments the way coyotes have. [Sidebar: Yes, captive ocelots do oscillate in an enclosure.] The name is from Nahuatl, but not the Nahuatl name for the ocelot -- ōcēlōtl is jaguar, while the ocelot is tlālocēlōtl, literally "field jaguar." It's not clear whether French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who introduced the name in 1765, made a mistake or deliberately shortened the long name. [Sidebar: Although ocelots can have ocellated ("eye-shaped") spots, the words are otherwise unrelated, ocellated coming from Latin. The pun may have been a reason to shorten the name, though.]

---L.

Current Mood: curious

Culinary Poll Du Jour

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books

Weekend reading pt. 2

Finished Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya, a memoir about her relationship to books and the ways this has intertwined with her lifelong mental health struggles, leading up to a nervous breakdown triggered by an inability to write her dissertation and resulting in a period where she was literally unable to read anything, which she names "bibliophobia." Each chapter structured around a different piece of writing of some personal significance: the Anne of Green Gables books, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, A.S. Byatt's Possession, Anne Carson's poem "The Glass Essay", Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Child Ballad 78 ("The Unquiet Grave"), Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. Most of Chihaya's "framework" books(/poems) were ones I haven't read (yet— I've put holds on The Bluest Eye and Possession, both of which I've long vaguely intended to get around to reading), which was an incidental aspect of this that I actually really liked— less, I don't know, distracting? than if she'd been writing about books I personally had a strong connection to...? Interesting to read a book about the things we seek from books - salvation or explanations or distraction or whatever - because the chance of a mental ouroboros (seeking xyz from a book about seeking xyz from books) is high to inevitable.

(no subject)

Is it possible for FB to choose specific accounts and slooooooooooow them down? If so, I'm a target. My FB constantly reloads, eats posts, and runs slower than when I used a 300-baud modem, back in the 90s.

sigh

... back to working on my list of nominations for Yuletide.

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An odd and pointless writing statistic

When I sat down to write last night, I noticed that the last time I had left off working on this particular story, I had ended with a character brushing her teeth and going to bed. I knew that I had mentioned characters brushing their teeth before (enough that A. had commented on it), so I got curious as to just how much my characters brush their teeth. I searched all my story files for the word "teeth," then looked through those hits to see how many of them refer to brushing their teeth, as opposed to anything else characters might do with their teeth. I found 23 occurrences of characters brushing their teeth (gritting was a distant second tooth-related activity, with eight occurrences). Dividing my lifetime fiction production by this means that my characters brush their teeth, on average, every 63,000 words. I'm pretty sure this is high, but (obviously) I've never seen this statistic from another writer. It's a meaningless statistic, but since I could calculate it, I did. And then, having done so, I decided to share it with you. Have a great day!

The Political Is Personal

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coyote

A week of miscellaneous words from Nahuatl [along with a sidebar reminder that the -tl suffix in Nahuatl sounds a lot softer than it looks, closer to -tsch than -tuhl] starting with:

coyote (kai-OH-tee, KAI-oht) - n., a wolflike carnivorous canid (Canis latrans) of North America, with buff-gray to reddish-gray fur, large erect ears, and a drooping bushy tail.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Also called prairie wolf and American jackal -- the former because it resembles a smaller, gracile wolf, the latter because it fills much the same ecological niche that jackals do in Eurasia. Coyotes have adapted very well to urban environments, to the point that their range has been expanding over the last century as humans have extended their range -- we can hear coyote choruses of yips and howls several nights a year, and meet them in alleys at dawn. [Sidebar: our cats are indoor cats yes indeedy.] Before migrants to the American Southwest came to dominate the population here, the pronunciation used to be a shibboleth: only imports called them kai-OH-tee, while locals used KAI-oht. Taken in the 1750s from Mexican Spanish (where it always has three syllables), from Nahuatl coyōtl.

---L.

I cannot even with this man

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Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: How It's Done

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help I fell in

I've been fandoms-in-law with kpop for decades, but KPop Demon Hunters pushed me over the edge into the rabbit hole. So far my kpop buds have told me about EXO, Stray Kids, Ateez, and Mamamoo. Other suggestions very welcome--Athénaïs, I'm looking at you, obviously!

My current favorite subgenre is "Youtube vocal coaches losing their everlovin minds about Ejae belting an A5 and ad-libbing a D6."

technical singing wonk alert: those are notes that opera singers hit, except for the belted A5, which is...I'm not sure even Mariah Carey ever did that. D6 is one step higher than you hear in Allegri's Miserere. tl;dr Ejae should have been a household name a long time ago and I hope she gets a recording contract if she wants one.

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arthuriana,
books

Weekend reading

I picked up an eclectic haul at a used book sale yesterday and have already finished two of them:

- I Am Morgan le Fay by Nancy Springer, which is more or less equal parts Arthurian retelling, non-Arthurian influences (Celtic mythology; Child Ballad 37/Sir Walter Scott's "Thomas the Rhymer"), and a certain type of 90s/00s(?) Amethyst-Eyed Teenage Girl Protagonist fantasy novel (affectionate) (but also, literally, Morgan has emerald-green-and-amethyst heterochromia, which is how you know she is fey/magic/special) (STILL AFFECTIONATE, I would have eaten this up with a spoon in middle school). Enjoyed this a lot! ( ... )

- The Magicians: Alice's Story, a graphic novel spin-off of the Lev Grossman trilogy by Lilah Sturges (writer) and Pius Bak (illustrator); this is a re-write of The Magicians (as in, the first book in Grossman's series— this is very much based on the book rather than the TV show, which was occasionally disorienting: why is everyone white??) from Alice's point of view, which actually resolves a lot of my issues with the novel, i.e., the insufferableness of Quentin as a main character and the fridged girlfriend-ness of Alice's storyline.

The rest of my haul was: a copy of Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster which was, per its inscription, a 1946 Christmas gift from the original owner's aunt; two Patrick O'Brian novels, including The Unknown Shore, his pre-/proto-Aubreyad ~~RPF~~ historical fiction of the Wager mutiny, having read David Grann's nonfiction account earlier this year; and a biography of Sir Bernard Spilsbury (The Father of Forensics by Colin Evans), who I mostly know about in the context of his tangential involvement in Operation Mincemeat. So stay tuned!