Cat

Going to the local bookstore to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday.

I made a sweater!

I’m teaching myself how to knit.

1. They’re ugly as sin.
2. They’re scary as shit when you happen across one in the dark and it hisses at you with its pointy teeth and glowing eyes.
3. I left my car parked in a lot at work overnight, and in the morning it wouldn’t start. A possum had climbed up under the hood and chewed clean through a bundle of wires that apparently was most of the electrical system. It was so stupid that it wouldn’t leave even when I poked it with a stick. That car never ran again.

My sister had a long-haired tortie named Artemis! She was a little freak. Hope your Artemis is a little saner!

Maybe people would be more willing to fund science research if all experimental results were reported like this!

I hope Ned feels better soon!

I’m usually reading at least 3 books at any given time, so when I’ve finished one or two, I still have time to pick up the next one.

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. Not a collection, but an easy-to-read overview.

Cat

I didn’t loathe it, but I didn’t much care for it. It’s basically a polemic about the history and effects (racism, poverty, income inequity, classism) of colonialism and capitalism. Not that that would make a bad novel per se, but I was expecting something more fantastical. The promise of linguistic magic was a big draw for me, but I felt this book could have been written, and maybe should have been written, as straight-up historical fiction, instead of promising fantasy that it pretty much failed to deliver.

Third one from the end looks a little stretched.

The cats or the boxes?

To Kill a Mockingbird, of course.

Here’s a very technical paper that studied nose vs mouth vs combined nose-and-mouth breathing:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7455204/

I confess it was over my head and I just skimmed it. But the conclusion says, “The high filtration efficiency of the nasal cavity together with its efficient clearance mechanisms lead to the recommendation to prefer the nose breathing over combined or mouth breathing.”

The conclusion also says, “There is general scientific agreement that lower airways are more vulnerable to severe infections” and “From this point of view, the nasal inhalation is preferential because it significantly reduces the number of particles penetrating to lower airways.” I’d guess that means that shallow breaths are probably preferable, but you’d need to read the article to confirm that.

Heterosexual men want to look at boobs. If she thinks this is “weird,” I feel she needs something explained to her.

I’m reading The Garden of Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu. It’s a collection of very strange and seemingly unrelated short stories, interspersed with chapters about a traveler in a Mediterranean city who ends up taking part in a human chess game. The publisher’s description says, “With many strata to mine, The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness, the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.” If you like Kafka, or Italo Calvino, this might be up your alley. Me, I’m not too sure yet.

I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. It’s told from the point of view of Tookie, an ex con who works at a bookstore in Minnesota owned by an author named Louise. Tookie is now married to the tribal cop who arrested her, she has a fraught relationship with her step daughter and with the ghost of a former bookstore customer who died while reading a book that is now in Tookie’s possession that she thinks may be cursed. It takes place in 2020, and COVID-19 has just struck. I love Louise Erdrich, and this is much more engaging than the Karasu.

One of my many favorites is The Cave by José Saramago. It’s an indictment of capitalism, bureaucracy, and commercial development couched as a sort of realist fable. Saramago is compassionate and tender toward his protagonists and wryly sardonic in his social criticism.

For SF, I recommend anything by Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first of her Wayfarers series.