Food
A tempting recipe is in the comment
section: vegan, gluten-free, and tweakable to fit other special
dietary needs.
Every year or so I feel a need to
publish some version of the comment I made at Natalief's Live
Journal. Is making it on her LJ (and Tweeting it, too) hijacking her
site for my purposes? I don't think so. I think (1) anyone interested
in “face blindness” will want to follow the link she provided;
and (2) anyone who has an opinion about whether autism and
introversion are part of a “spectrum,” or are two unrelated
things that may sometimes look similar, will be interested in
comparing Natalief's blog with mine; and (3) anyone interested in
knitting will want to follow Natalief's blog. Maybe if I'd thought
about it longer I would have posted my comment here...or maybe not.
Phenology, or Stupidity, or Stealth
Nag
Like,
whatever...it's
too hot to go out and look for flowers and butterflies. I don't
really need to read the Blaze article about the idjit who left a
child in a minivan outside a store. People do things like that. Most
of the victims survive. Surely, nobody who reads this web site needs
to be told...it's high
summer
out there. Some places are setting new
heat records.
Do not leave any
living creature inside
a parked car. Not a child, not a dog, not a potted plant. Everybody
always worries about children and dogs during the summer heat wave.
Reports of actual heat-related deaths that I've seen make me a little
more worried about adults who may or may not have already had a
stroke or heart attack, who say “I don't want to go into that store
with you. I'll just wait in the car.” Probably most of these people
do know how to open the car door before the heat gets to them.
Sometimes people who are in fact tired, sleepy, sluggish, or
rheumatic and slow-moving don't react to the heat in time. My mother
lost a yardman that way in 2003 (he thought thirty was “young
enough” to do yard work in ninety-degree weather); the crowd
celebrating Duffield Daze last year almost lost a vendor that way. So
I'll say to the intelligent adults out there: Don't leave yourself
inside
a parked car. Go into the blasted store already. Demand a seat near
the door where you can wait for the person who wanted to shop there.
(Once,
when we were very young and ignorant, a friend and I took four cats
in for rabies shots in this kind of weather...without a carrier box
in the car. The cats were nice, quiet pets until the car got out into
the blazing sun, when they started crawling up on us, shoving their
heads right in our faces, saying “meow” in a way that clearly
meant “Get us out of this deathtrap now.”
They were due for rabies shots; rabies had been reported in the
vicinity that year. We stopped at a fast food place and bought about
a two-liter-size paper cup of ice. My friend drove, and I massaged
him and the cats and myself, in turn, with ice cubes. We all
survived. We all know better now. If you must take an animal anywhere
in a car in this kind of weather, put it in a carrier box, put some
ice cubes in the box, and put more ice in a plastic bag on top of the
box.)
Vaccines
Frankly,
NaturalNews.com kind of annoys me with the way they handle this
tidbit: “Centers for Disease Control held meeting with scientists
to destroy evidence linking vaccines to autism.”
Well, duh. It's not
“vaccines to autism.”
What are youall...some kind of panic-mongers or something? It's
fevers (which may or
may not be caused by vaccines) to brain damage (which
may or may not be or resemble autism).
Maybe
if I make my argument personal, some people will understand it. My
natural sister wasn't vaccinated; she had scarlet fever, she lost the
ability to hear most of the notes women usually sing, she developed a
peculiar way of walking, she talks with a “deaf accent,” and,
possibly because she had had a real talent for music before this
time, she's been peevish and depressive ever since. Heather
Whitestone wasn't vaccinated; she had scarlet fever about the same
time my sister did, she lost the ability to hear anything at all, she
still became a beauty queen and a poster girl for A.D.A., she's still
completely deaf. The Nephews were vaccinated; one of them had a
reaction that included a high fever, had significant hearing loss,
started wearing thick glasses in primary school, learned to greet
people in a friendly way but still can't participate in a
conversation, and, during the painfully shy stage of adolescence, was
misdiagnosed as autistic. None of these people is in fact autistic.
And although the difference between my relatives and Heather
Whitestone, the first deaf “Miss America,” was probably an
individual reaction, the fact is that Ms. Whitestone suffered more
severe hearing loss from being unvaccinated than my relatives did
from being either vaccinated or unvaccinated. Do these people begin
to see the point now?
It's
not “vaccines cause autism.” It's “vaccines may cause
fevers, which may cause
brain damage that is
more likely to resemble autism than actually be autism, but may also
aggravate autism if a patient has that type of brain damage.” Since
either having a vaccine or not having the vaccine may cause a fever,
how do parents make the decision for young children? Remember Ben
Carson's Take the Risk?
Do the “Best/Worst Analysis” relative to the actual risk that a
child will be exposed to a disease.
Words
I've
seen and heard the word “spoons” floating around in contexts that
showed that it's a new slang word. Many slang words enter our
language without having a clear point of origin. Thanks to Natalief
for steering me to the original explanation of phrases like “they
didn't have the spoons to...”
+Sandy
KS continues the ABC Emotions writing “challenge” for bloggers:
At
journal.neilgaiman.com, Neil Gaiman offers an “animation” of a
conversation he claims to have had while he was asleep. I know the
Sickly Snail won't
play an “animation.” Your computer might play it. I'm sure Neil
Gaiman has said and written things that weren't entertaining; I doubt
that he's ever published those things.
Jerry B. Jenkins
discusses how to edit our writing:
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