Under the Skin

I had some fangirling days.  They mostly died when I went to high school.  That doesn't mean that I don't still enjoy them, I just don't dedicate an expanse of time to them.  It became apparent that I had left fangirling too long ago when someone on a youtube channel I watch said the term "OTP" and I didn't know what it meant.  The term hadn't come into existence when I exited the fangirling world.  It means "One True Pairing."  The idea of shipping had come into existence then, but OTP is, apparently, the ultimate ship.  It's not just a ship that you endorse.  It is, according to you, the soulmate connections.  Some of these I do endorse.  I tend to be a canon-shipper, meaning that I ship the actual relationships of the books, but I do have exceptions.  Marius belonged with Eponine, for example.  And, even though I know they would have had marital strife, Jo and Laurie were made for each other.  Today, I bring you some cr...

The promised post is in...progress.  IP as we write on the pending logs at the end of each shift.  But I have a book review.  Or a play review. Our Town is a minimalist play by Thornton Wilder about Grover's Corners, CT, a fictional, typical American small town at the beginning of the 20th Century.  The story skips between events of the life of two people, mostly, Emily Webb and George Gibbs. The truncated, and snapshot story of their life and their town is a masterful analysis of the way that we see live as a series of events, but what really matters is what happens between the events. The story has a striking style of no linearity of time.  The narrator in the first scene introduces the newspaper boy and then proceeds to tell how he dies in WWI.  It's almost as if life is a meta-existence.  Some similarities to the shadowland theory of C.S. Lewis.  Another great play, by the way, is Shadowlands.   I had never read this play before...

I have been out of the state.  And doing all sorts of other things.  That's why you have missed me.  Also I was going to write a blog post that I've been preparing for slowly for a few weeks.  It was one of my list-posts, you see.  But it seems that the notes were lost in the chaos of the past few weeks. My living space is a mess right now.  So, I will have to write new notes. As soon as I write the new notes, the old ones should turn up anyways. So, letting you know that I am a live.  I am not dead.  That is really all.  I have a bunch of things to write, but I'm not feeling them today.  See you all at a later date.

I don't usually review non-fiction.  I like weird non-fiction, and that's fine.  But I don't think a lot of you will want to read them or really care what I thought about a book about finding the 1918 flu virus, or the ethical questions of HeLa cells, or a treatise on the history of purging in the Wild West. But this one, I have some discussions afterwards that I want to write about.  And remember, after all, it is my blog. My mother got me this book for Christmas.  I started reading it, and then it just fell by the wayside, mostly during my studying for my Medical Lab Scientist Registry exam. But now it's finished. As some of you may know, blood transfusion came into common practice in the early twentieth century on the tail of Landsteiner's discovery of blood groups.  What a lot of people don't know is that it is had been attempted far before that.  In the 1600s.  In the Scientific Revolution, many English scientists attempted transfusions, ...

We haven't had a SickFic post for awhile.  For those who do not know, SickFic is where I evaluate portrayals of chronic illness in literature.  We have an established point system, which is explained in this post .  Today's book up for review is the 39 Clues series.  It gets two evaluations, because it portrays two different diseases.  If you want just a review of these books, I reviewed the first series earlier .  Yes, first series, because they have written THREE SERIES.  Not three books.  Three series.  And I just can't stop reading them.  But now, we have to address the chronic illness aspect.  So, the first portrayal up is their portrayal of asthma. In 39 Clues, one of the two main characters, Dan Cahill, has asthma.  Seeing as asthma is too often portrayed as a character flaw, and not an actual disease, I was glad to see it taken on this way.  But how does it hold up? Accuracy : 9 For the most part, the po...