Food
Sep. 29th, 2025 15:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Scientists discovered that high-fat junk food disrupts memory circuits in the brain almost immediately. Within just four days, neurons in the hippocampus became overactive, impairing memory. Restoring glucose calmed the neurons, showing that interventions like fasting or dietary shifts can restore brain health. This could help prevent obesity-related dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Of more immediate application: if you need to study for anything, don't eat junk food while doing so. Eat brain food.
Birdfeeding
Sep. 29th, 2025 15:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 9/29/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and some savanna seedlings.
I saw a huge corn devil in the field across from us that was harvested recently. This wasn't the usual 10-15 foot tall kind. This was a wide, strong spiral of air that threw corn leaves hundreds of feet into the sky. Impressive.
.
(no subject)
Sep. 29th, 2025 15:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Clarke Award Finalists 2016
Sep. 29th, 2025 12:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"
Which of these look interesting?
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
18 (51.4%)
Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (5.7%)
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
5 (14.3%)
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
9 (25.7%)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
29 (82.9%)
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
(no subject)
Sep. 29th, 2025 11:32![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Oopsie observed
Sep. 29th, 2025 10:32![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Weekly (ish) check in
Sep. 29th, 2025 21:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
It's a long weekend where I am, so Monday is the new Sunday. Which brings me to the topic of the post!
How goes the decluttering? Have you shifted anything out of the house? Found something to sort through? Had thoughts on things you can let go of?
Comments open to locals, lurkers, drive by sticky beaks, and anyone I've forgotten to mention.
(no subject)
Sep. 29th, 2025 07:50![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.
Götterdämmerung
Sep. 29th, 2025 07:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Monday Update 9-29-25
Sep. 29th, 2025 03:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Today's Cooking
Philosophical Questions: Peace
Poem
Sustainability
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Sustainability
Birdfeeding
Philosophical Questions: Effects
Today's Adventures
Pigeon Pea Recipes
Follow Friday 9-26-25: Jane Austen
Holiday Activities
Birdfeeding
Hobbies: Crochet
Artificial Intelligence
Birdfeeding
Hard Things
Let's Boycott Mississippi has 60 comments. Affordable Housing has 50 comments. Robotics has 72 comments.
"An Inkling of Things to Come" belongs to Polychrome: Shiv and needs $200 to be complete. Shiv attends the first session of his Worldbuilding class.
The weather is sweltering again. >_< Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches and a fox squirrel. I heard a blue jay screaming but didn't see it. Currently blooming: dandelions, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, moss rose, firecracker plant, tomatoes, tomatillos, yellow squash, zucchini, morning glory, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, sunflowers, cup plant, firewheel, cypress vine, sunchokes, sedum. Tomatoes, ball carrots, cucumbers, and groundcherries are ripe. Fields are about half harvested.
Menz B Weeerd
Sep. 29th, 2025 09:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.
My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:
He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?
I suppose there isn't actually some scoreboard somewhere out there Rate My Manly Performance but I wouldn't entirely rule that out, alas.
Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:
Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.
Apparently, 'Zhu insists he has a deeper, more profitable mission: to gamify health and build an empire around male fertility'.
Yeah, well, I'm over here going
a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?
b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)
c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.
D.O.P.-T.
Sep. 28th, 2025 23:04![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Cat food got devoured in quantity. I wonder whether Mama Violet got shut in somewhere and busted out this morning.
Today's Cooking
Sep. 28th, 2025 23:51![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
My partner Doug riffed on a recipe using the sourdough bread we had that wasn't optimum for grilled cheese sandwiches. So he blended up eggs, cheese, and stuff to pour over slices of bread and broil. It was amazingly good. :D
I cobbled up a fruit crisp in muffin tins because I had a cooking apple, some leftover strawberries, and for the crumble topping I added a broken-up gingersnap to the usual ingredients. It turned out quite tasty. \o/
I like that we know enough about cooking to throw together something from what we have available, and it works.
Philosophical Questions: Peace
Sep. 28th, 2025 23:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
What is your contribution to peace?

( Read more... )
Poem
Sep. 28th, 2025 20:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
"New and Innovative Approaches"
Story Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Summary: Frank the Crank attends a council meeting about earthquake recovery.
411 lines, Buy It Now = $206
I don't know what to make of this
Sep. 28th, 2025 20:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:
Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?
Sustainability
Sep. 28th, 2025 14:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Amazon: It’s Jeff Bezos’s 2-day shipping giant that seems almost impossible to avoid.
But the company’s impact on both the environment and the lives of its workers has catalyzed conscious consumers to switch to alternative companies that are more ethical, environmentally friendly, and aligned with their personal values.
The good news? There are plenty of options online to meet a variety of needs. (Not to mention all of the in-person, small business, and secondhand shopping you can do, too!)
Birdfeeding
Sep. 28th, 2025 14:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
As it is suppertime, I am done for the night.
Culinary
Sep. 28th, 2025 19:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Last week's bread did some spectacular mould action, bah, so I made the light rye loaf from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, discovering as I weighed out the ingredients that I had rather less strong white flour than I thought and had to make up the requisite proportion with white spelt. Turned out v nice, though.
No Saturday breakfast rolls because of rushing off to conference.
Today's lunch: pork spare ribs, which I rubbed with a mix of maple sugar, hot and sweet smoked paprikas, black pepper, garlic salt, and salt, and left overnight, then wrapped in foil and cooked for 3 hours in a very low oven, then basted with what was more of a barbecue sauce than a glaze of a small tin of chopped tomatoes + apple vinegar + dashes of tabasco and worcester sauce, simmered together, and cooked at a slightly higher temperature for 45 or so minutes - v tasty if a little dry - possibly did not need quite so long at that final stage; served with tenderstem broccoli and okra simmered for 45+ minutes in coconut milk with ginger paste and fresh coriander (possibly a little overdone?); baked San Marzano tomatoes; and cornbread (plain white flour + baking powder, half and half with mixture of fine/coarse cornmeal).
Sunday floral/avian report
Sep. 28th, 2025 11:50![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Flock of about 10 turkeys by the roadside, about 4 miles into my route. No threat postures, at least one tom. Airport metal birds limited to a couple of commercial takeoffs and the Army whirlybirds. No roadkill beyond a couple of small patches of flattened brown feathers.
Got out on the bike, temperature about 62 F when I headed out and 75 F now, wind gusting over 15 mph but at my back on the way home. Did not die.
15.69 miles, 1:30:04