I love this: one of Fox's pretty blonde commentators finally can't take it any more and fights back. Go Kirsten!! Full disclosure: Sean Hannity is on the board (yes, really) of Rev. Peterson's BOND organization. Ladies, if ever there was a time to be a feminazi, as unappealing as that term is, that time is now:



The Rev. Peterson has more lovely goodies here. He has a nationally syndicated talk show (why? why???) and has been "cited by Republican groups as an example of a black Republican message." Fox News, fair and balanced. Uh-huh. Pull this one and it plays jingle bells...

I have another "reptilian hindbrain" surprise, but I think I'll save that in favor of one that I was reminded of last night as we were watching Supernatural (digression: Yay the Impala!) and enjoying the classic rock music.

When you're a kid, you think all grownups are old and boring. They do boring thing like go to work and pay bills, and the things they do for fun are a real snooze, like going out to dinner. Right? And then at some point something happens, and you are amazed to find that hey, they're not that different from you, and you get your first inkling that the gap between kid and grownup isn't some unbridgeable chasm, on the other side of which Grownup You will be some unrecognizably alien and different being from Kid You. Instead it's a continuum, a long and a winding road with no gaps, just slow changes, and for the first time you can (sort of) picture yourself somewhere up ahead on that road.

This happened to me when I was about thirteen. I babysat one night for a couple that I thought of as "old" because they were married and had a baby, though of course they were probably in their early 20s. As per usual, the husband had picked me up at my house around dinnertime, so then when they got home he gave me a ride back to my house. On the way home he had the radio on. We're putt-putting along, I'm kind of sleepy because it's late, and all of a sudden he says, "Oh man, I love this song, do you mind if I turn it up?" Of course I said "No," and he cranks the volume and the windows are practically vibrating to the beat of The Knack's My Sharona.

Now I loved that song as well (still do, actually -- shameful secret LOL!), and of course one must listen to at a very high volume :) So I distinctly remember the surprise I felt at this: A sedate grown-up wanting to blare loud rock music?? What is this??? Grownups don't do that!!! And for the first time I could actually imagine myself becoming a grownup, because here was something that I liked and (apparently) they liked too, at least some of them.

That husband probably didn't think of himself as very different from what he'd been as a kid; looking back, that long and winding road is easy to see. Looking forward, though, it's unimaginable: how will I change, across that gulf separating Now from Then? What will I be when I'm done? Will I even recognize myself? This was my first clue that there is no chasm, no gulf, no sudden transformation: just the drip-drip-drip of accumulated little changes, a thousand-mile journey composed of one small step after another.

It was a strange sensation, almost like a snatch of time travel, seeing through the eyes of Future Me...

There are no words for how behind I am with so many things, as anyone might guess from the fact that I've only posted three times this month. Gaaah. Editing a 300+ page scholarly monograph on Freemasonry in your spare time can do that to you.

But at last, at last, here I am with my next installment in the 100 Things Challenge. Yay!

The reptilian hindbrain, also sometimes called the "lizard brain," is pop culture slang for the most primitive part of the brain, the part just slightly more evolved than the autonomous functions like breathing. Its proper name is Rhombencephalon, and according to Wikipedia "it has been suggested that the hindbrain first evolved...between 570 and 555 million years ago."

But this surprise, which I experienced when I was about ten years old but still remember like it was yesterday, has nothing to do with where the hindbrain came from and everything to do with the fact that it's still in there, sulking at its superfluity, waiting to pounce and take over in certain circumstances.

My brother is five years younger than me, and when we were kids we had developed mad skillz at pushing each others' buttons. One evening when I was about ten, he did something -- I don't recall what -- that sent me into quite literally a blind rage. I was so furious I was incoherent; I distinctly recall that I felt like I had lost the power of speech, as well as all control over my actions. We were downstairs at the time, and I remember hurtling up the stairs, slamming into his room (a MAJOR breach of protocol: personal space was a very big priority in my family and you DID NOT enter someone else's room without permission)...I ran to his dresser, ripped the drawers open, grabbed handfuls of stuff, anything, whatever I could get my hands on, threw it left, right, up, down, hurling it about the room until it was festooned with socks and underwear. I felt like a passenger in my own head, like my rage had become a physical thing that had taken possession of me. And side by side with the red berserker frenzy was this astonishment: What the heck is going on? What is this??

I remember that my brother and my mom had followed me upstairs and stood in the doorway staring, open-mouthed in awe at my tiny whirling vortex of fury. (I was a very small ten year old.)

Later, my mom told me she was proud of me that instead of beating my brother to a pulp, I'd turned my rage on something inanimate, not to mention squashy and damage-free (socks = harmless). Looking back, yeah, as a mom I too would probably have taken that as a good sign. At the time, though, had I known who the Incredible Hulk was then, I'm sure I would have identified with him (sans the purple shorts).

That particular part of the hindbrain never showed itself to me again (though I caught a glimpse of its red-and-black hide once, years later, when my college boyfriend smugly opined that it was fine for him to have slept around in high school but that girls ought to be virgins...but that's another story, and it wasn't really a surprise LOL!). But I've never forgotten my amazement at this hitherto unsuspected capability lurking inside me, and my astonishment at the power of this most basic of hindbrain emotions.

I've just come off three very intense weeks editing a 300+ page tome for a client -- excellent content but the wording/phrasing needed considerable massaging, plus there was a good bit of fact-checking he wanted done (well there would be with 600+ footnotes, wouldn't there?). So the last three weeks have been 9-5 "real job" and then 6-midnight freelance job. I've hardly spoken to Spouse other than to mumble "Pizza or chinese? Can you go get it?", I've had zero time to read (fic or otherwise), and have subsisted mostly on coffee and take-out. Blargh.

The deadline was yesterday and I delivered, so tonight I came home and had NOTHING TO DO. Do you hear me? NOTHING AT ALL, I was free to do what I wished to do. I got to cook! I got to read!! I got to have a glass or two of wine and play with the kittehs!!! I got to read all eleventy billion prompts at sshg_exchange!!!!!! Plus, as a bonus, I got to go a bit sentimental over tonight's episode of Big Bang Theory. "Oyyyy veeeeeyyyyy!" and *gasp* Sheldon took Amy's hand :D

Indeed, I am a happy camper.

Tomorrow I get back on track with LJ and posting my 100 Surprises. Teaser: The next two, or maybe three, will involve the reptilian hindbrain. I'm sure you just can't wait...

Holy *&#$@#! There are 75+ prompts posted at sshg_exchange and more than 600 comments LOL! I haven't signed up yet but it's been great fun reading them; there are some highly original ones out there. ::goes off to ponder mine::

Heh heh heh. Get it?

Math is one of the most predictable and yet surprising things anywhere ever. Oh, some might cite the sentient mattresses of Sqornshellous Zeta, and there may yet be a very surprising fungus on Algol IX that excretes solid gold, but for my money I'll take math every time. Nothing is as entertaining and endlessly surprising as the fact that multiples of nine always add up to nine, or that given a right triangle a²+b² will always always always = c², or that the Fibonacci sequence turns up in sunflowers and pinecones. Why??? I don't know, but it still surprises me.

The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of wonderful properties that you never intentionally built into them. It is like building a toaster and then realizing that your invention also, for some unexplained reason, acts as a rocket jetpack and MP3 player. (LessWrong.com)

Did you know that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes? Really. Go try it. (Well OK, it's technically just a conjecture, but nobody has disproved it yet.)

When I took geometry in 7th grade and discovered that you could start with maybe three or four premises and make them prove all kinds of other things, I was astounded and excited and wowed and mindblown (uh-huh, I'm a Nerd Girl). I'm still gleefully surprised when I do something all mathy and complicated and it works every time. How cool is that??

Did you know that the apparently completely abstract binomial formula (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b² can be represented by an incredibly simple picture that you've probably doodled yourself at some point in your life? Go here and play with it if you don't believe me. And the even more abstract and scary-looking formula (a + b)³ = a³ + 3a²b + 3ab² + b³ is actually a really simple set of blocks that every Montessori preschooler can do?

Even what look like simple patterns turn out, if you dig down, to have patterns within patterns within patterns. Math makes some of the most beautiful patterns in the world. This page includes a bunch of interactive patterns, including Eratosthenes' sieve!

Perhaps most surprising of all, one single number can be used to predict a city's wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other characteristics. What's that number? Its population. Check out the TED talk on this topic (the TED talks alone could furnish me with at least half of my 100 surprises!).

So yay for the surprises you find when you dig into numbers!!

I don't like sticky posts -- they take up too much real estate on a small screen -- and I'm not prolific enough for the "fanfic" tag to be very visible in my tag cloud, so to make it easier for people to find my other fics I've added links (<= <= over there in the sidebar, see?) to them on AO3 and here on LJ. Hopefully that will be enough for anyone who wants to find them. (For anyone who isn't yet using AO3, I highly recommend it: well organized, aesthetically pleasing, easy to use both as reader and author. I have one invitation left to give out; if anyone wants it let me know.)

I want to do the "fic traffic meme" that's circulating, but don't have time today so perhaps tomorrow. (Perhaps I will be surprised by something and can use it as one of my "100 Surprises"!)

Now back to editing that 300+ page tome for my client from Kentucky (yup, cattle-ranchers write books too!).

So after starting out with Surprise 1, a philosophical disquisition on how much you can learn about a person from the things that surprise them, I'm going to backtrack and do a really simple old-fashioned straight-forward "Surprise!" for Surprise 2.

For a big chunk of my childhood we lived out in the country -- the real country, with the quarter-mile-long driveway and the nearest neighbor a mile away -- first in New York surrounded by woods and hills, and later in the midwest surrounded by cornfields and wheatfields. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing in the river or the barn or the abandoned chicken-house, the latter being an adventure which would probably give today's over-cautious parents a bad case of OH MY GOD NO THE DISEEEEASES, but which just gave us a high tolerance for funny smells and probably germs (I attribute my general excellent health to childhood experiences like this).

Anyway, it was big old barn, a lot of fun to play in, but for quite a few years we didn't have anything in it except mice and cats (in inverse proportions, usually) and of course ourselves. Until Christmas morning when I was eleven, and suddenly the barn had...

(That just seemed to cry out for glitter letters, don't you think?) Yep, a real live honest-to-god pony. For ME! Now, the thrill of surprise was slightly mitigated by the fact that (despite my aforementioned general good health) I had come down with a violent case of the stomach flu on Christmas Eve and every time I diverged from the horizontal, the results were rather spectacularly unpleasant. So I didn't get to actually TOUCH my pony until the 26th. But regardless, I still get to say that I got the ultimate Christmas surprise every little girl dreams of: a pony for Christmas!!

Epilogue: I had Duke for a couple of years and then traded up to Missy, a quarter horse (I was so short and she was so tall that if I got off her anywhere other than the barn I had to lead her to the nearest tree so I could climb up it and drop onto her back like some sort of "Death from Above" ambush). Sadly, we eventually moved to The Big City and there were no more ponies or horses for me. I still miss it sometimes. As Will Rogers said, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."

April is National Poetry Month, and April 26th is National Put a Poem in your Pocket Day!! Did you observe it, by carrying a poem in your pocket? I did. My three favorite poets are e e cummings, Shel Silverstein, and John Donne (because of Lord Peter Wimsey, of course), but the poem I carried today wasn't by any of them. Instead it was a a favorite from my childhood, and excellent in a sort of meta way, since it's a poem about having a poem in your pocket :)

Keep a poem in your pocket
And a picture in your head
And you’ll never feel lonely
At night when you’re in bed.

The little poem will sing to you
The little picture bring to you
A dozen dreams to dance to you
At night when you’re in bed.

So --
Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you’ll never feel lonely
At night when you’re in bed!
-- Beatrice Schenk de Regniers