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via my cousin:

Hamster added to British consumer price index

Hee.

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Hmmmph.

I think my desk has a parasite that eats pads of little Post-It notes. I had at LEAST two pads of them and I can't find them.

Yes, I know, minor in the scheme of things, but aggravating.

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Maybe it's time I posted something with, oh, actual content.

Book club last night: much fun. I was late (my own fault, staying at the office to try and actually get something done) but not too much so. crankygrrl, rebelling cheerfully against the whole "potluck" notion, went it alone and made chili (which was really delicious) and salad and pie (!). J brought guacamole. I made Joy of Cooking cornbread on the spot, and it turned out quite well (once I got past the forgetting-to-write-the-oven-temperature-when-copying-out-the-recipe part). Also, it was easy. Must bake more; I always forget that I enjoy it.

The book was Friday Night Lights, and I think most people enjoyed it. It did spark lots of discussion, which is always more fun than everyone showing up to say "Yeah... it was fine, I guess" (see: Girl with a Pearl Earring). Unfortunately, the woman who really hated it wasn't there.

Anyway, got home around 10:30 and finished Dogland, which has made for a really interesting counterpoint to FNL and given me a delightfully accidental, possibly somewhat subjective little course on desegregation in the South, 1959-1988. Read them both.

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Wow. Don't you just love it when you're proofreading a site against the allegedly final copy and there's four paragraphs that, apparently, just appeared out of nowhere?

waaah.

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for raithen and any others interested:

( Ethics of prolonging life differ depending on religious beliefs )

(Posted in response to a comment on fairoriana's journal. Seems it requires registration. I can't remember what I'm registered with any more...)

Also, who listened to The Current yesterday? They had an interesting bit with a Catholic theologian on the ethics of life support.

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As seen on both bookslut and bitch_phd:

There are still publishers with integrity and courage, but they are under massive pressure. You may not feel immediate sympathy for them, but if you care about short stories, or poems, or novels outwith the mass-produced mainstream that don't rely on lists of trivia or dissecting spelling mistakes, then you do need publishers to be there and free to do their job - which is to provide you with books you didn't know you wanted, books which are not clones of those you read last year, books which may be risky, or offensive, or unsuccessful, or shocking, or delightful, or the one thing that kept you going during the worst month of your life.

Which brings me to the heart of what I find so offensive about the Women's Writing juggernaut - it's about telling people what to think. Possibly you approve of that, but I have to say it gives me a fucking pain.

- A.L. Kennedy, whose work I now must read, explains why sweeping generalizations about Women's Writing are a crock

(Also, a far more eloquent way of saying what I was trying to say last week.)