Continuing to laze through this week
So, yes, the hope last night was to either knit for the evening or else parlay my endless reading into a bit of gym time, and the fear was that I'd park somewhere with my nose in a book and do nothing else of note.
Well, at least I made a grocery run on the way home. And talked to Mom a bit before pulling out Wintersmith to finish it. And it was kind of late to be starting working on much of anything when I was done with that, and I'd just eaten dinner so I wasn't hitting the gym...
I'm two-thirds of the way through I Shall Wear Midnight, so on the plus side I'll definitely be finishing it fairly early tonight. Hopefully early enough to do some work on Mom's sock. (Really, given I got the Kindle version of this latest book (and BTW Discworld books turn out to do very well in that format -- footnotes have little hypertext links on the asterisks that let you jump to the footnote and then back to the page you were on), I could at least have been reading it on the netbook and doing some knitting on the Librarian Kneesock. Though it didn't occur to me to do so until this morning on the way to work.)
Skimming the most recent posts on the friends list, and neadods pointed out a good post: On Good Kids and Total Fucking Assholes -- "I simply can’t understand why so many adults are so eager to dismiss bullying as a childhood inevitability of no real consequence, something on a par with skinned knees, maybe a broken wrist at worst. Something that heals quickly and turns into a distant memory or even a funny story. I can only assume those people were once bullies themselves - perhaps they still are - and are thus loath to acknowledge how much serious, long-lasting damage they might have done. But frankly, I don’t really give a rat’s ass why they’re like that - I just want them to stop. And I want every adult who has ever minimized the impact of bullying, who has ever made excuses for a bully instead of standing up for a victim, who has ever described a child known to viciously torment other children as 'a good kid, really!' to know this: You are a total fucking asshole."
Another link, nabbed from a prior Kate Harding entry: What's It Like to Be a Gay Teen -- "What seems most befuddling about the suicide of Tyler Clementi, the gay teen whose roommate broadcast him having sex, is how this one incident lead to his death. It's because being a gay teen can be akin to prolonged torture. Yes, high school-and often college-sucks for everyone. That's because teens are total assholes. They're just like normal people, but amped up on a combination of hormones and self-doubt that makes them particularly awful. And mean! Teens are cruel, especially to other teens and especially to other teens who are perceived as different. Imagine your worst high school memory and multiply it by ten and that is how bad it is for many gay teenagers every day. The ones that have it the worst are those that are bullied repeatedly by their peers until they become suicidal, drop out of school, or are robbed of their education because they can't focus on learning the Pythagorean theorem or the amendments to the Constitution because they're thinking about how they're going to physically survive the day. In many cases, parents, teachers, principals and other grown-ups don't care about about the gay student's problems and condone the bullying behavior, either explicitly or with their own inaction."
Also, some more linkhopping led me to How Karen Owen and Tyler Clementi Lost Control -- "Deletion on the Internet is futile. That can be difficult as our need for privacy changes depending on what happens in our lives. danah boyd has said, 'People care about privacy in that they care about understanding a social situation and wisely determining what to share in that context and how much control they have over what they share. This is not to say that they don’t also want to be public; they do. It’s just that they also want control.'"
And that led me to The Privacy Landmine That is Duke Graduate Karen Owen’s ‘Senior Thesis’, which I hadn't actually heard of before. ("Karen Owen, a 2010 graduate, kept detailed notes on her sexual adventures with 13 members of Duke’s lacrosse, baseball and tennis teams over the last four years. She then put those notes, along with the athletes’ names and photos into a PowerPoint presentation, that concludes with a ranking of the 13 on what she calls her 'F*** list.' (Congratulations, I suppose, to this guy for topping the list.) According to Jezebel, Owen sent the 'unofficial senior thesis' titled 'An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics' to three friends and did not intend for it to go further than that. But one of those friends forwarded it on and it went viral, going out on listservs and eventually winding up on Gawker sites, Jezebel (for women) and Deadspin (for sports addicts). Interestingly, Jezebel redacted the names of all those involved and blurred out the athletes’ faces. Deadspin, on the other hand, did not.")
Back from lunch and just about at the three-quarters mark on my book. So definitely should be able to finish it tonight without taking too big a bite out of my evening.
Found on my Yahoo! page:
FBI seizes John Lennon fingerprints before auction -- "A set of John Lennon's fingerprints being auctioned for at least $100,000 was seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday 30 years after the singer's death. The 1976 signed application for Lennon's U.S. citizenship was one of the hallmarks of about 850 celebrity items in an online sale timed around Lennon's 70th birthday on Saturday. The fingerprint card was being shown to media at a midtown New York store early Wednesday in an auction preview of more than 90 Beatles items when the FBI faxed a subpoena there and took the card." And as the article went on to explain, "In a week-long discovery, Siegel said the FBI, 'with a sense of urgency,' was concerned with whether the card had been part of Lennon's file and was lost or missing. 'We're investigating how the item came to be in a private collection,' FBI spokesman James Margolin said. 'It is apparently a government document and would not normally be in the commercial stream.'"
I had a little chat with Mom last night about being smacked over the head with a costume idea but being on the fence about actually going to the trouble of assembling it. I don't have anything coming up this month I definitely could wear it to -- but then again, if nothing else there's Dragon*Con next year, and I might as well take advantage of running across the perfect dress right now that's not likely to be as readily available by next summer. I'm still debating -- but I've got a little time to ponder buying that dress. Making a hat to go with it, on the other hand, is going to take a while, and I haven't exactly been doing as much knitting as I could be lately. Might as well get started on it this weekend... (And if I do turn up a Halloween party to attend or some such, and it's not ready in time, there's still the hat that comes with the dress.)
I need some autumn icons...
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