Bits & bobs

Today I ploughed through a month's worth of backed-up e-mailed tables of contents. I'm not sure it was the most productive use of my time ever, but it feels good to have them out of the way.

Things I came across along the way (I think most of these are full-text links, but if not and you want to read, let me know):

Free-Market Ideology and Environmental Degradation: The Case of Belief in Global Climate Change, from Environment and Behavior. Study conducted by researchers at UVic.

The effects of support for free-market ideology and environmental apathy were investigated to identify some bases for not believing in global climate change. A survey of community residents' (N= 185) beliefs about global climate change also assessed ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, perceived knowledge about climate change, and self-efficacy. The beliefs that global climate change is not occurring, is mainly not human caused, will also have positive consequences and that weaker intentions to undertake ameliorative actions were significantly associated with greater support for free-market ideology, greater environmental apathy, less ecocentrism, and less self-efficacy. About 40% of the variance in each belief and 56% of the variance in the behavioral intention was explained by these factors. The results suggest that the relation between support for free-market ideology and the beliefs about global climate change is mediated by environmental apathy.

One Bright Idea at a Time, from CMAJ. References a New Statesman article from October, which sadly isn't available full-text, thus:

And so the New Statesman's round-up of "10 people who will change the world" in their October 17 issue includes only one politician (Barack Obama, "potential saviour of the US Democrats") and one head of state (the modernizing Emir of Qatar). The others are folk we've never or only recently heard of: Anton Zeilinger, inventor of "quantum teleportation" and the Dalai Lama's tutor in quantum physics; Aubrey Meyer, an ex-musician who has devised an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol; Sania Mirza, India's first Muslim woman tennis star; Victoria Hale, whose non-profit pharmaceutical company is ready to put a treatment for visceral leishmaniasis into clinical trial; Mo Ibrahim, who is revolutionizing communications in Africa with mobile phones; 20-year-old social campaigner Kierra Box; Brewster Kahle, who is trying to build a digital repository of all human knowledge; Samira Makhmalbaf, a 25-year-old feminist Iranian filmmaker. What qualifies a person for admission to this top-10 list? In varying degrees: thinking out of the box, courage, recognizing an opportunity, a knack for persuasion. It isn't always "thinking big" that does it, but bringing a good little idea to a larger scale.

And finally JAMA, which has a very restrictive access policy so I couldn't read the whole thing, offered a review of A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain, which judging by its table of contents sounds like a riotous read:

Introduction: the willful organ meets fantasy surgery
The best of your property : what a boy once knew about sex
Pathologizing male sexuality : the masturbation phobia and the invention of spermatorrhea
The shadow of Parson Malthus : sexual morals from the Georgians to the Edwardians
The priests of the body : doctors and disease in an antisensual age
A source of serious mischief : William Acton and the case against the foreskin
A compromising and unpublishable mutilation : clitoridectomy and circumcision in the 1860s
One of the most grievous diseases of humanity : spermatorrhea in British medical practice
The besetting trial of our boys : finding a cure for masturbation
This unyielding tube of flesh : the rise and fall of congenital phimosis
Prevention is better than cure : sanitizing the modern body
The purity movement and the social evil : circumcision as a preventive of syphilis
The stigmata of a gentleman : circumcision and British society
Conclusion: the end of the culture of abstinence

and in other news: my weekend

So, Friday was my choir concert. More exactly, it was the end-of-term recital for the music school of which my choir is a part. This meant that we were the only adults performing; the other performers were an array of (mostly Asian) small children who were all OMGSOCUTE. Some of them could barely reach the piano keyboard, but they all did their thing -- not that I know much about it, but I thought their pieces were pretty well matched to age and ability, so you'd get one kid doing something very simple with only a couple of hesitations while the next whipped off a little flawless Bach. Which I guess is the point. (They were mostly piano students; we also had one violinist, one vocalist, and the children's choir.) Fun to watch; some were very happy to get up there and bow and do the stage-presence thing, and others sort of dashed back to the audience as soon as they reasonably could.

It was all pretty informal -- before it started our choir spent some time figuring out how to line up to get on and off stage in the right order, and there was a call for audience help moving the piano, and none of us was entirely certain where to sit. We were at St. George the Martyr Anglican Church, which is lovely and a wonderful place to sing. My parents and Jen came and enjoyed themselves very much (at least, they said they did). I think we did well; I spend so much time frantically trying to remember stuff like "OK, breathe like this, aim your voice here, shape the note like this" that it's always hard for me to notice how we're doing while actually in the midst, and it's over terribly fast. But it was fun, as it always is, and it was nice that it was SO relaxed and informal. (Especially compared to Wednesday night, when I did front-of-house for my mother's choir and about 700 people came and the choir alone has to be 200.)

Our program:
Aralo - trad. Georgian
Nana - trad. Georgian
Yedid Nefesh - trad. Jewish
Thula Kizio - trad. Zulu
When the Stars Fall - Stephen Hatfield (with a soloist who hadn't rehearsed with us, but who was incredible)
Shouting, Whispering Sea - Mark Patterson (I think)
Come, Let Us Sing - not sure who the composer is, but it's a fun song which we do with the children's choir (did I mention OMGSOCUTE?)

The rest of the weekend:
Friday night: dinner with parents (Peruvian restaurant); The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with crankygrrl, which made us both very happy (disclaimer: although I read and enjoyed the books as a child, they weren't and aren't favourites in the same way as, for example, the Swallows and Amazons books -- as a result I don't think I bring as many expectations to the movie as I might otherwise. I enjoyed it very much.)
Saturday: took the dog for a walk; started rereading Pride and Prejudice (necessary to reassure myself that it was still there); went over to the house and swept the floors and watched my new window being installed; got parents to drive me out to the wilds of Scarborough to pick up a package which, it turns out, Canada Post didn't leave at that postal outlet at all; dinner with parents (Swiss Chalet); home; bed.
Sunday: socialized a bit with hosts who have returned from frozen North; more Pride and Prejudice; house, vapour barrier (Jen scraped paint off our heat registers); walked over to aunt & uncle's house, meeting real estate agent along the way (he seems slightly horrified that we aren't living in the house yet); admired newly tidy basement and burgeoning Christmas decorations; copied down selections from posted Christmas wish lists; back home for dinner with Italian family who have been in Canada for 6 weeks and were very sweet but had varying amounts of English. Generally more than my Italian, though. My brain kept trying to default to French and then hauling out Spanish words. It's not like I speak Spanish. However, goodwill got us all through.

Christmas cards written: 1 (today at lunch). I had nearly given myself permission to slack off this year and everything.
Number of people for whom I have finished Christmas shopping: 2. I think. Sorta. It would be more, but I'm waiting for some deliveries.
Number of people for whom I am moderately stumped for a present: 2. Hey, that's not so bad.

I am leaving the office

...see me leaving? Good. But before I leave, one thought:

I love Jennifer Crusie's books. Love them. Now I love her blog as well. One recent post sums up her writing process so beautifully (go read it -- there's an illustration, and there's no point me excerpting just part of it), and it made me smile. When I was in high school, and wrote for fun, that was kind of what I did. I lived with these characters in my head, and I would write down scenes that struck me on loose-leaf pages (often during class) and put them in a binder where they seemed to fit, and eventually I wound up with a story. (It was an Anne McCaffrey pastiche, I realized much too late, but never mind.) I put together family trees and maps and all kinds of supporting material as well. I don't think I ever got as far as a second draft, which is kind of a shame (if only because it prevents me carrying this thought all the way to its conclusion). But the scenes I wrote were good -- at least, I thought so, because I knew these people and I could see and hear what was going on so clearly in my head that I hardly ever had to search for a word. I just knew. I miss that. I miss trusting that I knew where I was going, and just writing. I started to second-guess myself for a variety of reasons, and then I got short on time, and it was No Good.

(The collaboration thing is kind of funny too. Back in university I was writing a tacky romance novel -- I should dig it out and see if it still strikes me as any good -- and crankygrrl asked if she could come in on it and I said sure, and our writing styles COULD NOT be more different. She likes to write a scene. The first scene. Then she rewrites it. And rewrites it. And rewrites it. And I'm saying Good God, woman, it's DONE already, can we PLEASE move on? As a collaboration, it was kind of a disaster. Although we did have a lot of fun at one point with file cards and outlining the structure of the thing.)

This year I want to get back to writing for fun. I say that a lot, but this time I want to do it. Perhaps it needs to involve some loose-leaf paper and a binder.