new washer! new dryer!

I'm now officially a boring ol' married lady -- I've been excited about the new washer and dryer that was delivered on Monday.

I finally broke down and bought a new set last week. I was tired of babying the intermittently inoperative washer and the more recently tetchy dryer.

So I shopped around and played one vendor against another and landed an obscenely good deal. Getting quotes in writing is a great way to get a seller to lowball the price. Do that three or four times and you take a lot of the advertised price.

It will take me a while to get used to the new washer. It's a "smart" machine that does things like load adjusting, so it seems to stop and start numerous times, but that's the way it's supposed to work.

Now I'm trying to decide if I should wash all the clothes we use because, at the end, the old washer wasn't doing a very good job and getting out all the soap. Or should I just wait until we wear them again, and then give them a good clean after that.

milipede versus centipede

The dog was on the back porch yesterday trying to play with a millipede. This consisted of playful barking, leaping about, and then lying stock still to watch the millipede steadily make its way from here to there. Eventually, pooch tired of the reluctant playmate and wandered elsewhere, distracted by a scent.

That reminded me that I find millipedes cute and harmless while centipedes are disgusting and would be smushworthy if they weren't sometimes helpful.

Millipedes are slow moving like a line of marching men. They don't bite. And they don't look disgusting.

In contrast, centipedes run like hell and startle you. They have a nasty bite. And they look disgusting.

They can be good for killing pests so they shouldn't be smushed. But when I see them in the house, they are swept out the door with a broom whenever possible. They can do their good outside, thank you.

the anchoress

I happened to read something offline about anchoress, medieval women who had themselves walled into tiny rooms attached to churches where they spent the rest of their lives praying. Food was passed in through a small window from which chamber pots could be passed the other way.

It was an irreversible decision. Those who tried to escape, if captured, were often beaten then returned to their imprisonment and excommunicated to boot.

Some men did this, too, and they were referred to as anchorites.

This practice only underscores the fact that for a great deal of human history, people have done some really fucked up things in the name of religion. I have to imagine some of the anchoresses had mental health issues, and being walled up for the rest of your life would not be an effective way to addresses that.

Sometimes humans do really horrible things, and sometimes the targets of those horrible things are none other than themselves.

the queen's gizmo

I happened to see a high resolution photo of the British monarch meeting the new prime minister and so I snooped around the room visually for a minute to see if there were any traces of dust (there weren't).

And then I noticed a mysterious gizmo on the fireplace hearth (see below). What the hell is that? By cropping the photo severely as you see here, I used Google's image search function and learned it's a newfangled portable heating and cooling device.

I also learned I was far from being the only person who wondered. I have to say I was a bit disappointed because I first thought it might be some kind of cutting edge personal robot.

The Queen is known to be something of a tightwad, so I imagine it's cheaper to run her little gizmo than turning up or down the thermostat for a whole palace wing. We should all have such problems.

a woman of no importance

Last night I finished reading A Woman of No Importance, a new non-fiction book about an extraordinary disabled woman who both spied for and directed operations for the Allies from inside Occupied France for more than three years and repeatedly managed to avoid capture. I found it a fascinating, engrossing read.

The spy in question, named Virginia Hall, was originally from Maryland but lived in Europe for a number of years before World War II. More than two years before the United States became involved in the war, Hall nonetheless volunteered to help France, first as an ambulance driver and then as an undercover operative.

She initially worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain's wartime spy agency, and then later for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's wartime spy service and CIA precursor. After her cover was blown and the Nazis mounted a full scale operation to find her, she switched to the OSS from the SOE so that she could continue undercover in France. She was never caught.

I highly recommend the book for history fans with the slight caveat that I think the author diminishes her writing at times with too much reliance on hyperbole. But that's a small, easily overlooked flaw in an otherwise riveting read that's as much a page-turner as a good spy novel.

negligent parenting?

Last month, a Colorado man took his ten-year-old daughter on a five-day climbing expedition using ropes 3,000 feet straight up the cliff face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

My immediate reaction was "Bad parenting? What if she fell?" Expert climbers using ropes have plunged to their deaths before, including some at Yosemite.

But is an activity like this any more dangerous for a ten-year-old than, say, water skiing or scuba diving or gymnastics? When I was in middle school, a girl fell in phys ed class during a gymnastics exercise and broke her neck.

So at first blush, the idea of taking your fourth-grader on a 3,000 foot climb up a cliff might seem dangerously reckless. But is that just a knee-jerk over-reaction?

I do know this: if my husband said he wanted to take one of my children on such a climb, I'd want to know the likelihood of an accident compared to other, more commonplace father/child activities. I'd want to see well sourced statistics. And then I'd think about it.

the professional seductress

I am currently reading yet another book about occupied France during World War II. And in it, I found the perfect job for me had I been a single woman in wartime Britain.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret branch of the British government that recruited and trained undercover operatives it sent behind enemy lines to assist resistance groups and conduct sabotage against the enemy.

As part of future agents' training, at some point during the process, they were put in social circumstances, often at local pubs, where professional seductresses employed by the SOE tried to pick them up. The women were expected to bed their targets and then attempt to wiggle any kind of classified information out of them.

That sounds like a fun job. Seducing virile, physically fit young men all revved up about going behind enemy lines but who also had been sequestered away from any female companionship while undergoing training. And I would love the cat and mouse of trying to extract secrets from them without them realizing it.

The trainees, of course, had no idea that they would be tested in this way. They just thought they had found sex-starved locals at a neighborhood pub.

screen savory

Like many people, I use a wide variety of screensavers and desktop backgrounds on my computers. I have them set up to refresh with a new image every minute from a pool of several hundred images.

Some of them are breathtaking scenery shots I've harvested from the Internet. Some are family shots. And some are gorgeous underwater photographs my husband has taken.

Sprinkled in with these are unusual photos that I couldn't not glom onto. One of those is the shot scene below, which makes midtown Manhattan appear to be a tiny electronic model or some kind of exotic circuit board.

I found that and a few other good ones on someone's curated gallery on Imgur.

language pet peeve

Quick, what's wrong with this sentence?

The defendant was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in jail.

Ding. Times up. Did you spot the problem?

The mistake is that the writer of the sample sentence doesn't know the difference between jail and prison. Handy rule: jail is for sentences of a year or less, usually for misdemeanors, and prison is for sentences longer than a year. Jail and prison are similar but they're not the same. Jail is usually run by the city or county. Prison is usually run by the state.

I see this error all the time, in magazines and newspapers and in novels and nonfiction books, with the two words mistakenly used interchangeably. It's a mistake made by writers who should know better.

moon loons

Saturday's moonwalk anniversary brought with it articles about the most persistent conspiracy theories claiming the whole thing never really happened. Several of them linked to an article from a few years back that gathered together the "top" moon hoax "theories."

What strikes me about several of these claims is that if their authors had done a little basic research, with perhaps a trip or two to their local library, they could have seen how wrong they were.

One is reminded of the classic children's story about Henny Penny aka Chicken Little. An acorn falls on the bird's head. Rather than research what might have happened, the bird presumes, wrongly, that the sky is falling. Chaos ensues.

the king goes shopping

I've never really understood why the British monarch garners so much more media attention than the other European royals. In comparison, the king of the Netherlands with the queen visited New York recently and were able to shop anonymously.

Some of the answer may be in the fact that European royals live generally more modestly than the British monarch. Their public footprint just isn't the same as the British queen. And I think language probably plays a part, too.

Needless to say, if you have to have a monarch, I think the lower the profile and the more modest the taxpayer-funded lifestyle, the better. And the best part of this story, of course, is that the king shops at the Gap.

happy moonwalk day

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of humanity's first walk on the moon and, hopefully, the first of humankind's baby steps to the stars. I would not be surprised if a lot of people in 1969 thought by now humans would have walked on Mars, too.

By sheer coincidence, fifty years ago -- before I was born -- my family had a big blowout party for my beloved grandfather, who turned fifty on July 20, 1969. The evening was capped off by everyone staying up very late and watching the moonwalk.

I still think about my grandfather at least once or twice a day. I wish he had a chance to meet my husband, whom I'm sure he would have really liked, and I know my husband would have liked him. I sometimes see my grandfather's face in my sons and am glad that he lives on in that small way.

twitter hate

I have a Twitter account under my own name that I periodically use for sarcastic, snide, or supportive comments to various public figures.

I popped over to Twitter yesterday and, like many people, discovered they had unveiled a mandatory and unwelcome major format revision. I have unrequested change for change sake, so of course I hate this, too.

About a quarter of Twitter users exclusively access via the internet. I'm one of those. This is a great way to piss us off and drive us away.

There are allegedly Chrome apps that will pop it back into the old format. I'll give those a whirl. But if they don't work, I expect to be spending a lot less time following anything on Twitter.

androgyny blues

Quick, scroll down to the photo at the bottom of this entry and take a look -- is that a man or a woman? I'll wait here until you come back.

Okay, you're back. Remember actress and model Liz Hurley? The photo's subject is Damian Hurley, her son, now also a model and actor.

I do not understand why a man (or a woman) would want to look this androgynous. It's not a cross-dressing or trans thing. It's simply trying to be both genders -- and no gender -- at once.

And what value is there to being like that?

there's something wrong with mummy

My husband had a fright yesterday when our three-year-old son Tombo found him outside and said "There's something wrong with Mummy. Maybe she died."

James promptly found me and discovered that I was not, in fact, dead but had fallen sound asleep while sitting on the toilet. (We have typical Australian toilets in our house which are in their own separate little closet.)

I was not leaning against the wall or slumped backwards. I was just sitting there, my skirt and knickers down, motionless and sleeping.

Tombo said he had whispered my name when he discovered me but I was unresponsive. I have a feeling he whispered very quietly.

Needless to say, I am still somewhat sleep deprived because the baby is only sleeping through the night about half the time. Nevertheless, I don't know why I conked out on the toilet like that because I wasn't as tired as I have been in recent months.

1930s color mugshots

An Irish artist has been colorizing 1930s mugshots of criminals, and the results are terrific. The coloring really helps make them feel like real people who could be our contemporaries.

Some of the men, quite frankly, look like they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer. One looks very babyfaced, and if he had good conversation skills, you could imagine him pulling off various cons.

And one, I must admit, makes my motor purr. Perhaps it's because he somewhat reminds me of my husband. The criminal was named James, too, and he was an expert pickpocket.

One thing jumps out at you about all the men in the gallery -- they're quite short. The tallest is five-six. Men were shorter in earlier eras, but these men would be below average even in their day. Chalk it up to poor neo-natal health.

an enthusiastic book recommendation

I have a nonfiction book recommendation today, one made with great enthusiasm -- Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Using a single murder as the spine to his text, the author tells a compelling and haunting story of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book is addictive like the best thriller fiction except it's all real.

The author spares no sacred cows and no one escapes his criticism except for the victims. While the author clearly favors the Republic of Ireland over occupied Ireland, he is not sparing of scorn for either the IRA or Gerry Adams, particularly the latter.

If you are at all interested in modern history, I strongly recommend the book. It's beautifully written and exhaustively researched. It's non-fiction at its very best and one of the best nonfiction books I've read this decade.

porkpie hats

I saw a man the other day wearing a porkpie hat and that reminded me I always thought they were a silly affectation. While I don't frequently see them, when I do, they're always on the same type of person: a self-styled hipster cloaked with insouciance and sporting way too many tattoos and piercings.

The hat itself is pointless. The small rim doesn't shield the light. It doesn't protect the face from rain. It's wearing a hat for wearing a hat's sake. It does nothing.

I more frequently see men wearing Aussie bush hats. Those have an extra-wide brim and shield the eyes from the sun. They are a hat with a valuable purpose, a real job to perform. Hipsters seem to eschew this kind of hat.

So if I see you in a porkpie hat, I'll probably laugh at you. You have been warned.

free speech or poisonous speech?

Two years ago I wrote about Michelle Carter, an American teenager convicted of involuntary manslaughter after she sent text messages to her boyfriend urging him to commit suicide, which he did.

This week brought the news that she has appealed her conviction to the United States Supreme Court. Her pleadings assert that her right to free speech under the First Amendment shields her from criminal responsibility because her involvement was limited to words alone.

That doesn't seem to pass the logic sniff test IMHO.

You don't have the right under the First Amendment to slander someone. You don't have the right to yell "fire" when there is none in a crowded theater. You don't have the right to instruct someone to commit a crime.

It will be interesting to see how this case develops, if at all. A law professor quoted in the linked article doesn't think the Supremes will decide to consider the case.

towing icebergs

It's no secret that parts of the planet face severe water shortages, and that will only get much worse in the next few decades. Nonetheless, some officials in high places openly mock plans to tow large icebergs from Antarctica to water-parched southern locations like South Africa, Australia, and Chile.

The strategy would be expensive and perhaps it's too early for it now. But when the time comes where water shortages are a life-threatening level in parched parts of the globe, iceberg towing may offer a real solution.

I grew up in the American Midwest, where water was never short and where it's probably hard for many natives to grasp the idea that water is a precious commodity. However, after living in parched places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and now Sydney, my perspective has completely changed.

Towing icebergs may be pricey. But when it's the only option, then it's money well spent.

meanwhile, in texas

Tucked in the middle of this column is the following:

The police in Lufkin, Texas, arrested a 17-year-old girl who licked the inside of a tub of Blue Bell ice cream at a Walmart and then put it back in the freezer, and at a Walmart in Wichita Falls, Texas­—the same store from which a woman had been banned for riding in an electric shopping cart while drinking wine out of a Pringles can—a customer ate half a cake while walking around the store and then refused to pay its full price.

The burning question is why was the ice cream licker dealt with more harshly than the cake thief?

lava lake

Humankind knows a great deal about its world, but it certainly doesn't know everything and makes new discoveries ever day. That point was driven home recently by the discovery of a lava lake heretofore unknown and located on a remote island not far from Antarctica.

It's only the seventh such lava lake known to exist on our planet. While lava usually hardens once it rises to the surface, it does not on a lava lake because it's being continuously heated.

I love how there are still places on earth where humans rarely or never visit. And I love how as much as humans know, they don't know everything and continue to learn.

That makes me hopefully for our species and our planet's future.

the troubles

I'm currently reading this book about the bloody warfare in Northern Ireland in the latter twentieth century.

This period is often referred to as "The Troubles," and the author continues that use.

I've always thought that was a ridiculously euphemistic term to describe strife that killed more than 3,500 people, of which more than half were innocent civilians. "The troubles" sounds like what you'd use to describe public drainage problems.

I suspect but do not know that the Brits were the originators of this term, given their penchant for swaddling extreme violence in comfy euphemisms. the English language is full of such sugar-coated language: a spot of bother, a dust-up, a donnybrook.

What should the Northern Ireland conflict be called? How about something more honest, like the War of Brutality?

sleep, blissful sleep

Last night was the first night I truly had a good night sleep since Danny was born slightly more than three months ago. He slept for seven straight hours without needing a feed or a change.

I woke around 2:30, which is his usual middle-of-the-night feeding time expecting to hear him fussing. I heard silence and almost went back to sleep, then the idea of crib death struck me, so I went in to check on him and found him sleeping soundly.

I awoke again a few hours later and rechecked all was well. It wasn't until about 5:45 that he woke and made his usual morning noises.

I love my children but I love them more when they sleep through the night. I know that last night was probably a one-night reprieve, but hopefully he'll perfect his all-night-through pattern sooner rather than later.

I'm so excited

How can you hear this song and not want to get up and dance? Even without leaving your chair, this one starts your feet tapping on the floor and your pulse racing.

I have this on my iPod, and whenever I'm feeling sleepy and need a rush of adrenaline, I put this on. It always does the trick.

I looked through a bunch of different "I'm So Excited" videos on YouTube where the Pointer Sisters were featured and quickly realized -- they never really dance in sync. Each one is doing her own thing, pretty much oblivious of what her sisters are doing.

no more mad magazine

Mad magazine will cease publication of new material this fall after nearly seventy years in print. Thereafter, the magazine will issue only republished content and specials.

I don't believe I've ever seen a new issue of the magazine fresh from a newsstand. However, when I was a little girl, I used to read a huge back issue collection from the 1950s through the 1970s that my grandfather had stashed in his house. They had originally belonged to my uncle.

He also had a number of their books, including a number of "snappy answers to stupid questions" volumes. I think I learned how to be sarcastic by reading those.

Poor Alfred E. Newman. He'll just now disappear into limbo. He deserved a better end.

naturally gray

I saw the first picture below in the newspaper and couldn't immediately identify the silver-haired man in the middle in a prison jumpsuit. He looked familiar but then I couldn't think of who he was.

Reading the caption revealed he's the man seen in the second photo below in better days. He's Donald Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, currently serving a nearly eight year sentence in federal prison and also recently charged with state crimes in New York.

Obviously, Manafort is not able to dye his hair in prison nor does he have access to Brylcreem so he now sports an all natural look. IMHO, he looks ten times better. The kettle-black hair dye he used to use looked so fake and the Brylcreem helmet only made it worse.

There's no crime in a 70-year-old man coloring his hair, but he should at least do it so it's not so obvious. Leave the sideburns gray and maybe some of the temples, too, so it doesn't look so fake.

happy independence day!

Happy July 4 to all my fellow Americans as well as those who love liberty, justice, and the American way. If you're an expat like me, hopefully you'll find some other Americans with whom you can share the holiday.

I've been thinking that as part of my civic duty and self-education that I should read the Federalist Papers. All together, they're rather long and I don't know where I'll find a copy in Australia but I won't know until I try.

Ideally I would like to try to find an annotated copy, if such a creature exists. I've read Shakespeare that way and it definitely helps when dealing with writings from past centuries.

I don't plan to read them all at one sitting but to work my way through them, perhaps one or two a week. Then after I'm done, I imagine I'll want to read a book or two about the Federalist Papers so I make sure I don't miss any important concepts.

So Happy Independence Day, America. And be careful you don't blow any of your fingers off.

mona, whatever

A Portuguese digital artist has reimagined major art icons into modern-day settings, and you can see some of the results below with reworkings of Mona Lisa.

Other revamped artists include Frida Kahlo in a pink tanktop, Salvador Dalí as a backpacker, and Vincent Van Gogh on a skateboard. He sells the results as posters. IMHO, he'd probably get a lot of businss with some of these on T-shirts, too.

DeMilked has many more examples, if you find the sampling below intriguing.

the force

Last night, I finished reading Don Winslow's penultimate novel The Force about crime and police corruption in New York City. I found it to be a gritty, compelling, and instantly addictive read.

Although he's often on bestseller lists, Winslow doesn't seem to have as a high a profile as other similarly ranked authors. I don't know why that is because he's a very strong writer with a unique voice and a wicked sense of humor. It could be because his books are a denser, darker read than most bestseller fare.

Force is to fiction what The Wire is to television what Goodfellas is to film. All three occupy the same morally ambiguous and frenetic universe populated by emotionally complex cops and criminals in a feudal struggle for power.

My only quibble about Force was the ending, which I thought felt somewhat contrived and over the top. However, after skimming some book reviews plus reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, I didn't see that it bothered anyone else.

If you want an engaging, weighty novel to fall into head over heels, I suggest The Force or any of Winslow's novels for that matter. If you like writers such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price, you probably would really enjoy Winslow, too.

trickle trickle

I played Manhattan Transfer's anthology album Down in Birdland on my iPod and headphones while I did my vacuuming this morning and sang along and danced as I worked. It's the perfect recording for housework because I cannot help feeling vibrant and full of energy.

I imagine I looked like a perfect idiot if anyone saw me through the window, swirling around in dance moves as I hoovered back and forth. I probably don't do as good a job vacuuming to music as when I'm playing an audiobook, but tunes seem to make the work go so much faster.