I was curious about the affects of height on legevity and found this.

My own theory is that very, very tall people and very, very short people, overall, have shorter lifespans because such extremes are usually due to genetic disorders or extreme deprivation. And, since population height corresponds to population conditions, taller average populations tend to live longer.

But…even though population height is an indication of population nutrition, there are some drawbacks to being taller. The distance to the ground is one–it hurts a LOT more for me to fall now than when I was 6″ shorter! And one’s weight is another. People who are taller ahnd have the same muscle/fat ratio weight more than shorter people, put more stress on muscles, joints, and feet, and overall have a strain related to just being bigger.

So I wonder if being taller, in itself, isn’t actually a BAD thing for a body, but since it’s the RESULT of a good thing (good nutrition, etc), it is increased even as lifespan is.

Just a thought from someone who’s spent way to much time bending and crouching and the like recently… *g*

Bug on the lens in a Google maps airplane photo!

I really like doing things with my hands. In fact, that’s part of the attraction to writing. You write a lot, then you print it out, and then…you have something physical that YOU MADE. Just holding a book of mine makes me happy.

I like working on the house for the same reason. I can look at a room and say, I put down that wood floor…I installed that tile…I took down that wall…I put in the cabinets. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. *g* For fear of sounding like a pop psychologist, it makes me feel empowered.

And now I’m going to try to get the thinset off my body.

Camilla, I saw the link to the ATBF that also talked about author blogs. I think I just bore the hell out of 99% of people, and then they wander off wondering why I’m so weird.

Here are two really good books I’ve read recently, though for different reasons. I haven’t read much romance lately. Since Im not a REALLY fast reader, romances are more than one-sitting reads for me, and right now, I’m mainly reading myself to sleep at night, so I need either very short or not too interesting. ST romances are too long for the first requirement, and those that are GOOD I get really caught up in and don’t want to stop, so they don’t work well at all. I’m haording some Liz Carlyles and Ann Stuarts for when I have more time. But I will let myself reread interesting books, and these are two I really like.

DEERSKIN by Robin McKinley, adult Fantasy. Robin McKinley is one of the best living writers, period. Her output is incredibly low and she scarcely ever returns to any world she’s written about, much less character, and her books often have very different feels. I never could get into THE BLUE SWORD despite several attempts, and I loathe Authurian and Robin Hood legends so much that I couldn’t ever overcome that hatred to like THE OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD more than objectively admiring its craftsmanship, but she’s still the author of a number of my absolute favorite books ever. THE HERO AND THE CROWN, DEERSKIN, and BEAUTY are absolute classics, and ROSE DAUGHTER and SPINDLE’S END are also wonderful.

DEERSKIN is the retelling of the fairytale Donkeyskin, in which a princess must flee in disguise because her widowed father takes it into his head to marry his daughter because his dying wife made him swear that he would not marry anyone who was not more beautiful than she had been. This story contains a brutal critique of the self-centeredness of the king and queen and shows Lissar growing up as a nonentity in the shadow of her brilliant parents. When the queen dies, the king goes a little bit crazy, and when his daughter comes of age, he declares that he will marry her, and the night before the wedding is supposed to take pace, he rapes her horrifically giving her a serious concussion and damaging her arm and hip, among other injuries, and almost killing her dog,t he only creature that has ever really cared for her. She flees the palace, and the remainder of the book deals with her healing and coming to terms with and confronting her past, her present, and her future. Much the second half is, BTW, a romance.

The delicate psychological insight, fabulous writing, and simply gorgeous storytelling skills come together to make this book breathtaking in its skill and brilliance. McKinley’s socially isolated heroines have always resonated with me with incredible depth, and they are brilliantly portrayed.

THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES by Willo Davis Roberts. This book was written in 1980, but I read it for the first time eleven years later. Honestly, I picked it up because of the cover. *g* I was on a paranormal kick after having read Anne McCaffery’s To Ride a Pegasus and Pegasus in Flight (both good books, but the second is great) and though it looked like typcial Apple Paperback fare, I figured it was worth giving a shot.

First, what the book isn’t. It isn’t brilliantly written. It isn’t fabulously plotted. It relies on coincidences that definitely stretch credulity. The end was contrived.

But what it is is wonderful in its own way. It’s the story of a 9-year-old girl who is diffeferent in two ways: first, she is incredibly intelligent, and second, she has silver eyes and paranormal powers. The story centers on her paranormal powers, but in many ways, it’s as much about the way her intelligence makes people see her as about anything else. By using the paranormal powers as a framework, the author can speak quite bluntly about extreme giftedness in children in a way that connects viscerally with them. This is hardly an accident, as Katie’s intelligence is mentioned in conjunction with her other “strangeness” almost every time.

The author frankly states that many people hate people who might seem “better” than them simply for existing and that they scare people. She portrays Katie’s differentness not as something that is wrong with her–however others might treat her–but as something of value. She confirms the experience of many very gifted children by creating a parallel in Katie’s life, and she also gives those children the holy grail of having others like them through Katie’s successful quest to find three others who are the same as she is–she offers up the hope of a group identity to individuals who might never have experienced any sort fo group. She also gives Katie the gift of an adult around whom she can be herself without fearing judgement, dislike, fear, or censure. And the end offers the most wonderful vision of all while still admitting the limitations of existence in such a statictically unlikely minority. The new group of children learn that there’s an entire school for kids like them, but the downside is that it’s far away and, to some extent, the people who run it share some degree of clinical interest (versus PERSONAL interest) in the children. But on the other hand, their differences are no long muttered about and whispered about by their parents–they’re openly acknowledged, and as they are acknowledged, they are ACCEPTED and no longer treated as a fault. A compromise is struck in which the children can go to school like normal and live with their parents like normal for a while and meet on Saturdays for guided advanced lessons and for practice with their paranormal powers, but there is the possibility–even likelihood–that the children will choose to go to the special school at some point in the future.

This book is a relevation and a validation for the isolated extremely gifted child, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The paranormal twist might give it a slight Indigo Child odor, but that would be invisible to a kid, and there’s plenty to redeem it, anyhow.

1) Books are best preserved when lined up as in a library. That means no horizontal stacking unless the book is so big that it can’t be supported vertically with books of similar height. It is not good for the binding. Arrange them spine out–light damages the pages.

2) Books are best preserved and most attractive when there isn’t loose space that lets them slump to the side. I recommend bookends because otherwise, you’ll have to rearrange all your shelves every time you get a book that needs to squeeze between two others!

3) Books are best preserved and most attractive when stored next to those of similar height. They are evenly supported that way and sustain less damage. I organize by genre and then by size, and I organize within a size by the author.

4) Create a wall of bookshelves using the same style of bookshelf. It creates continuity and is very attractive. If you can, it’s also attractive to keep the adjustable shelves at the same height for the entire horizontal length. That said…some of the shelves SHOULD be adjustible! The square/block-looking bookcases are impractical.

5) The heaviest books SHOULD go at the bottom, and the next heaviest on non-adjustible shelves. It’s best for your bookcases–and safest! That gives you a built-in system for organizing your books–tallest at bottom, next tallest on the fixed shelf, small ones on adjustible shleves.

6) You can make covers out of archival paper for your books if you wish. Make sure to use non-acidic archival tape and to ONLY tape the covers to themselves. Imagine how stunning a wall of white books would be, or rows in green or white or yellow, alternating. This is only a project for the ambitious/insane or for those with few books.

7) ALWAYS line your books up even to the front of the bookshelf, about 1-2″ from the edge. It doesn’t matter how deep the books actually are–keep them even so the binding isn’t damaged and so that you get an even, consistent look. For those with lots of books and little space, papberbacks can be double stacked this way, and no one can tell. It can look attractive to have theme knicknacks along the front of the shelves if done right, but they are VERY easy to knock off, so I recommend against it.

My old house was decorated in a traditional style, and so I used these:

http://www.afo.com/1795-100-Library.html?Vid=86C270998

My new one is modern, so I found a track-and-shelf system that I’m going to make myself rather than spend $100k on. *g* Instead of the shelves sitting on top of the track braces, the shelves are build in a U and the track braces are imbedded invisibly in the uprights of the U.

I like dividing the world up into categories. There are many different types of two kinds of people, and this is just one of them.

Group #1 are the Organized People. If a woman, she always knows where her keys are. Always puts her purse in the same place. If she turns on the TV with the remote, she doesn’t have to take extra care to put it back in a specific location or otherwise it will be lost. She doesn’t lose her cell phone multiple times a day. She doesn’t get out peanut butter and jelly and MANAGE TO LOSE THE JELLY behind the bread in the three seconds it takes to locate the peanut butter. She doesn’t spend half an hour a day LOOKING for things.

Group #2 are people like me. I can set something down in a Safe Place, and that’s the last I se of it for WEEKS. I have three hammers so that I can find at least one quickly–I think I’ve had all three fewer than 5 times this entire remodeling project. I can lose my glasses on an empty counter. I can lose my purse on the sofa. It’s like my brain is a sieve, and “where things are” is the liquid that always flows out.

You Organized People? I envy you. It doesn’t matter how clean the house is, or how careful I am about putting things. I have lost MOPS. For months! I swear, there’s something that you have that I’m just missing.

If only I could find it…

Some romances (like my VEIL) have really no other plot except for the romance. Most others have two plots: the romantic conflict (RC), and the other conflict (OC). The two plots intertwine and both must come to a satifactory conclusion for the end to work.

There are three ways to do this: end the OC first, end the RC first, or try to end the both simultaneously.

Most authors end the OC first and then have a chapter in which the RC is handled. Usually between the OC and the RC, there is a moment in which one character decides (usually the heroine) that the relationship simply can’t work and starts to disassociate herself and the other (usual the hero) then pursues. They meet, everything is sorted out, and then the HEA happens.

I don’t like this structure much even though I like plenty of books that have this structure. Mainly, it seems to rob the OC of meaning in terms of their relationship, and I think the OC ought to be incredibly meaningful, and its positive resolution through their efforts ought to havea POSITIVE effect on their relationship. And that doesn’t happen in the RC-then-OC pattern.

The second possibility is the one I choose most often. The characters, through struggling with the OC, come to a kind of understanding even though the OC is not yet overcome yet are still separated by an external barrier until the moment that the OC is taken away. This makes the OC mean something, and it makes it relevant, and it adds a kind of bittersweetness and poinancy because they’ve come to the point that they know they WANT each other but can’t have each other because of those circumstances.

The third possibility is almost never attempted, and I’ll tell you why: It’s really, really freaking HARD to pull off!!!! This is when the culmination of the OC triggers the RC climax at the same time, and so the two crash together. It can be fabulous when it’s done really, really well, but this is a blood-sweating scenario because it is SO hard to pull off. I tried that holy grail in MUSIC, but I’m going to leave it alone for a while while I think it through a bit better. In this model, everything works together to a single, ultimate climax, and the fallout from both is what’s so hard to juggle.

Every culture has a controlling myth…or several controlling myths. I think our age is unique only in that the two great myths are both contradictory and held by virtually everyone and invoked, arbitrarily, whenever one is needed.

The first dates somewhat from the Renaissance but actually has much older roots, stretching back to a Greece that looked continually to Homer’s age of myth. That is, simply, the myth of the Golden Age. Things were better in the past. People were nicer. Food was more honest and wholesome. People were happier. There was less crime, less child abuse, less of all the social ills that beset society today. People had a place in their society–there wasn’t all this restlessness and confusion. Everything happened in comprehensible, logical ways, and people were better, nobler, more logical. This age might be 1950. It might be 1900 or 1850 0r 1785 or 1635…or any time at all.

It doesn’t matter because this past never existed, and however it is envoked, it is usually erroneous. As one example, take violent crime. Most people would say that 1975 was safer than 2005 because 1975 has a glow of the past and people didn’t really talk about nurder and robbery and certainly not rape back then. But despite the fact that hate crimes and rape are now more likely to be reported, violent crime has, in reality, dropped by more than half, even as people are getting more paranoid about who their children talk and how far away the bus stop is and whether they have a security system and lock all the doors at night. Property crime, which has much less of a social stigma attached to certain victims and so are less likely to have been under reported in 1975, are at about a third of the level that they were. The reason is mostly the babyboom–all those little late 1940s to 1950s babies growing up in the idyllic mid-century neighborhoods were in the age rage most likely to commit crimes. (Heavy-handed, perhaps, but true: if felons were kept in prison from the time they committed their first felony until they were fifty, crime rates would drop enormously because they wouldn’t continue to commit crimes and they would essentially loose the chance to be lousy, abandoning, neglectful, and/or abusive parents who raised up the next generation of kids more likely to commit crimes. It is hard, however, to balance the *possible* tragedy of future lives destroyed against present, disproportionate measures. But once a life is destroyed, any action taken afterwards tends to reek of impotent revenge and does nothing to address the situation that bred such an abortion of what humanity should be.)

Or take school, for example. People who don’t like the educational system now are making all sorts of ridiculous claims about the education of the past. Some claim that kids were better educated 40 years ago. In the Golden Age, education WORKED. Absolutely untrue. Several times the number of kids are now going to college than went 40 years ago, and yet their average achievement is staying relatively static. Some claim that today’s educational system is ridiculous because 80 years ago, most kids didn’t start going to school until they were eight and finished by the time they were 14. In the Golden Age, a single 20-year-old girl could teach a mixed-age class a full pre-college education in just six years! And the kids spend the summers tipping outhouses and fishing in the creek, too! Again, absolutely untrue. Only a small minority of kids even attended secondary school, and even those graduates had a coursework that was similar to what sixth graders are doing now except in the most elite of schools. College ARITHMETIC was a common course for that less than 5% who attended college! And no, it doesn’t prove that in those Golden Days they learned everything a body needs to know to get on in life–they learned everything a body needs to know to be a dirt-poor farmer, looking at the skies and fearing that if it doesn’t rain this week, the crops will fail, and no one will get new clothes or shoes next year, and pray to God the money will hold out so you don’t have to go to the bank and get a loan for seed. Today, in America, people at the poverty line enjoy a level of wealth that would have been unimaginable to 40% of Americans in 1920. They generally have cars and clothes and toys and TV and cable and radios and microwaves and so much food that they are probably OVERweight. And the reason that this is true is that the average individual is now able to produce so much more than a steady hand on the plow–because education no longer stops at third or sixth grade, people are able to do so much more than they could before, and so everyone has more. This is why I don’t want to preserve low-skill occupations. I want almost all of them to be taken over by machines, freeing people from such mindlessness and enabling them to apply their time and effort to more productive endeavors. (I also believe strenously in the preservation of benefits promise and in retraining those who are made obsolete–it isn’t enough for human worth as whole to be elevated if many humans are thrown away in the process.)

In the reverse, there is also the myth of Progress, of the perfectability of man, which is really a newer myth, though stirrings began in the Humanists of the Renaissance. It really has its roots in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, when men saw what changes their minds could make in the world and in human worth, in real terms–not the soul’s worth, but the worth of the flesh-and-blood creature.

This myth says that the story of mankind has been a rise from muck. We are more knowledgable than ever. We live longer. We are happier. We are wealthier. We are healthier. From a first spontaneous stirring of life (nevermind how it happened–our minds have no end, and so we’ll figure it out eventually, and we are sure we’re right), man has grown from the Earth as an ever-progressing, ever-improving, ever-developing organism with, perhaps, a few mistakes and eddies here and there, but overall, mankind is trudging up a mountain toward a peak of nobility and perfection from which we will be indistingishable from the gods that we make in our own image.

It is no accident that the Victorian age gave birth to the theory of evolution. No other age could have done it–never was society in such a position to entertain such thoughts. There was, among the middle classes (and no other classes, after all, really MATTER, do they?) an unbounded sense of optimism at seeing their own emergence as a force from the realms of ignorance and impotence. It was a force that, through ingenuity and luck and hardwork, had carved for itself a substantial rolling plateau from the mere ledge that it had been, precariously balanced between the astronomically wealthy-by-birth and the laboring poor, only 200 years before. This class achieved material wealth that would have been inconceivable to a prince 800 years before them. And they killed God in their minds and gave the credit to themselves and made the story of humanity into an allegory of their own rise and called it evolution, using it as a convenient sop to their conscience why the poor were poor–the primative, doomed throwbacks to an ape-like ancestry–and why the superstitious, unevolved, intellectually stunted “races” with darker, ape-like skins needed their empire to tell them what to do, to guide them to a whiter, more human future. (I am not a rabid anti-imperialist, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the racist rationale that was embraced in the 19th century.)

This was the crucible the produced the perfection of the myth of Progress, with all its excitement and smugness, its bigotry and moral questioning, its self-confidence and its fears. This was also the environment in which Marxism was a coherent reaction, and it has gone and will not likely come again in this part of the world, and socialism and its abortion communism are now mere specters without teeth–the same for anarchy, its later bastard, for all that pale young misfits might try to revive it as a political force. It is easy to argue and say, “Oh, you don’t understand, evolution isn’t about the rise of the middle class! It’s a scientific theory, tried and true!” Well, actually, parts of the theory, even as it was first formulated, ARE true, which is why it was so attractive, just as parts of Marxist doctrine were/are also true. But evolutionary theory of 1860 sounds very, very different than the theory today (let us remake a god in our own image!), and Darwin’s Origin of the Species was not a brilliant product of his genius but a synthesis of current social theory and its application to a wider nature. The Victorian ideas of progress and perfectability that were the cornerstone of their evolutionary theory were NOT some massive breakthrough in science but shackled terrible, cobbling prism of prejudice to the fundamental of the idea of biological change. Those who would disagree have not read enough of the intellectual dialogue of the 19th and 20th centuries and so are blinded to where it is still continuing today.

Are we happier? The cold fact is that people who are rich are not happier than those who are poor, and those who have not suffered are rarely happier than those who have (yet are not currently suffering), unless of course you believe that those who have not do not understand the joys of those who have and so their self-reporting is erroneous as they do not comprehend what they are talking about. So we may have fewer sorrows, but that is no indication that wwe are truly happier.

People are not biologically superior to what they were a century, two centuries, twenty centuries ago, nor are their inherently better in any way. Life is more precious here than it was, and that is a good thing, but men aren’t better. They still lie and cheat, and most people would rather watch a bread-and-circus program and toe whatever party line makes them feel good than to actually have to think (thinking IS uncomfortable–it leads you in ways you don’t expect to go, and it can also easily fooll you by tricking you into thinking that because you can understand one thing, you can understand everything.) The smartest men and women are no smarter than they were, and though they may be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, they have to have the ability to climb there first–they have to comprehend what came before–to beable to see farther, and that seems very far indeed when we have just now begun to climb, but how many centuries will even our strongest climbers be able to mount ANY great peak and stand up, when there is no one alive today who even possesses the YEARS to be able to climb them all? We WILL reach the end of human intellect, and the end of what artificial intellect we can desive (or that another artificial intellect can devise), and then what? Where is man, then, when his strength has given out and there are mountains to be climbed than not one of us will have the intellect to be able to IMAGINE, much less even see? We will still be very far from perfection, and worlds from the god we want to make ourselves to be.

We were living longer…but now lifespans have fallen again, as our own decadence erodes our health. All the thousands of people who have blasted the Romans for their indulgence, and the Romans could not have conceived of what we have made ourselves into. It is NOT inevitable that things will always improve, no more than it is true that things have always improved int he past. A peasant in 800AD in England was far better off than one in 1300. A tentant farmer in 1800, if he survived enclosure, was far better off than one in 1300…but, in many way, not better than one in 800.

Take social mores, as another example. Sex. Today is supposed to be an age that accepts sexual freedom to a greater degree than any time in the past. Venice was, for centuries, a refuge for homosexuality, a place where great women had their gigolos and great men their mistresses, and the convent was a regular place of assignation. (You sent your extra daughters to the convent so that you didn’t have to split up inheritence among too many legitimate issue, but what they DID there was of little concern.) Late Georgian England–fidelity was more to be wondered at than rampant infidelity, and though it was indelicate to SPEAK about the legitimacy of certain children in a noble household, no one much cared. Or how about our dear friends the Victorians. Sure, the middle classes were sometimes prudish (mistaking etiquette for breeding), but the lowest classes–at least two fifths of the population–scarcely bothered in the city with anything but cohabitation without any resemblance of marriage either in speech or action, each individual freely leaving whenever she or (usually) he cared to. Or the Greeks, where upper class men of certain cities sometimes chose their sexual partners among men and some among women, where only the wives of other men were out of bounds. Or age is neither the most free nor the most, well, lecherous or adulterous, and the rise in divorce and the willingness to be open about women’s sexual conquests are a result of changing norms of inheritance (longer lives contributing heavily to that, as well as value being in skills and not property for most people), the financial independence of women, and the effectiveness of birth control. This is a different form only of an old cycle that will repeat, again and again, swinging from libertinage to prudery and, as often as not, providing examples of both simultaneously. The same can be said of women’s rights (the Egyptian woman had more freedom compared to men than her 1950s American counterpart, and the mediveal woman had much more independence than one of the Elightenment) and democracy and a hundred other social norms. The form is different every time, certainly. But people remain people and continue to behave, for good or ill, like people, and so we only see the results that people are capable of in a given time and place, which is rarely incredibly dissimilar to some other time or some other place.

Myths are compelling because they are safe. If the past was golden, we are not responsible for the present problems (which are the inevitable result of an inevitable decay) and must merely look to that past and copy it to regain our Eden. (The shape of that past tells us a lot more about the people looking back than it does about the supposed time in which it took place. We remake history in our own image, too, given half a chance.) If the story of man is progress, we do not need to fear for our future, as it is assured that it will be better than the past.

We truly live in a new Alexandria, a Golden Age of sorts (or at least people in the future will call it that)–flawed, of course, as the original was, with our ancient problems in new shapes. But our success was not inevitable, and our future not guaranteed. Alexandria fell, first to the incompetence and stupidity of the Romans, who killed Archimedes and had no time for the airy theories of the Ptolemaic Greeks but merely wanted to milk the Nile for its grain, and then, a more devestating and irrecoverable loss, to the Moslem Empire, who had destroyed so much before they discovered that there had been something worth preserving. We, too, can fall, and not to the Commies or the faceless terrorists but first to our own mismanagement. Everything is friable, changeable, inconstant, moving, yes, but moving neither in an inevitable decline nor in an eternal upward march. It is a dangerous ladder that we climb. It is an unexplored mountain. And myths might make us think that we know where we should be going or that we cannot fail, there are a hundred things that could trip our every staggering, self-assured step. Sometimes, it is more comforting to not look where one is stepping, to assume, to fabricate our reality from the tissue of our wishes. But if we don’t want to fall, it’s always a better idea to know where our foot is going to strike next.

The Bear has two blankets. Both are mostly white with little figures on one side, and the other side is full of color. One has a side that is solid pink, so I stared calling it “the Pink Blanky” when he was about a year old. The other is his favorite, and its mostly white side has yellow smiley faces while its mostly colored side is about 60% shades of blue and 40% green, purple, and pink. Back when I started calling the Pink Blanky Pink Blanky, the Bear began calling the other the Blue Blanky. Since Mostly Blue Blanky and More Blue Than Any Other Color Blanky were a mouthful, Blue Blanky stuck.

A couple of nights ago, the Bear was sitting in bed with a furrowed brow examining Blue Blanky. Finally, in a tone of complete mystification, he said, “Why’s it called Blue Blanky?”

I told him that he’d named it that, and he started giggling. “It isn’t very blue, is it?” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed.

BTW, his favorite color is now red because he has a soccer shirt that’s red, and he’s currently obsessed with soccer. Not that he’s ever SEEN a real soccer game, since DH and I hate watching sports, but he still thinks he loves soccer.