Laurelyn > Recent Status Updates

...so anyway, huge huge huge girlcrush, only amplified by lines like "I grew up with a book on my bed," "My mother worried with her friends was it something she did, to get such a serious kid," "ENFP Myers-Briggs," (I have always been the I-est of I's, but otherwise, it me). And now to learn her father spent years building a kit glider in the shed? SHUT UP. My dad spent years building a biplane in the basement.

I was so excited when this popped up. My huge girlcrush on Dessa started back around 2010, I think, when I heard an NPR segment on our local station. I had never really even tried to listen to rap or hip-hop beyond the Beastie Boys, just assuming "this music is not for me" (and that was fine, not everything has to be for everybody). But Dessa's incisive intelligence, her - not literacy, literateness?- her wordplay, ❤

This was a fun read, especially once I got beyond the biological review which, for me, had little or no information that hasn't been under my belt for a few decades. Sara also manages to write about sexual assault and abuse with the right balance of righteous wrath for the perps and compassion for the targets.

Jesus God, Rosenberg. Call her "Andy-Andy" one more time, so help me...

On the mad cow disease scare: "The government ordered the 'selective cull' of 100,000 more cattle, even though it knew this was a meaningless gesture that would further alienate farmers and consumers. It was no longer even shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted; it was sacrificing a goat outside the stable."

Okay, I've gotten several smiles already, but with Moss's profile of Henry James, I am cackling. "He took a dim view, if, indeed, a view, in all consciousness, could be considered one, when the very act of its perception was, by definition, barely discernible, of biography, that addiction to 'truth-seeking' that so often cloaked, when it did not, more accurately, mask, a predilection for poking into corners"

'Genes are just chunks of software that can run on any sustem: they use the same code and do the same jobs. Even after 530 million years of separation, our computer can recognize a fly's software and vice versa.' Holy crap, we're all running Java.

Oh sweet Lord. She's an exclaimer. "It felt like my arm had been guillotined off!" #1, "as if." #2, "severed."

This went back to the library early. I took a scunner at Kahneman for nonsensically describing two modes of thought as System 1 and System 2 because it saves a few characters over using, you know, words. The "Speaking of..." summaries at the end of each chapter irritated the crap out of me as well. I may try again later.

Ah, I should have figured if we were talking short-term vs. long-term memory my old buddy H.M. would come up, and here he is. Sweet old guy.

Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus suggested the keeping of commonplace books in his 1512 De Copia.

"It was a warm summer morning in Concord, Massachusetts. The year was 1844. An aspiring novelist named Nathaniel Hawthorne was sitting in a small clearing in the woods, a particularly peaceful spot known around town as Sleepy Hollow."

"At least one major publisher, Simon & Schuster, has already begun publishing e-novels [refined, ladylike puke] that have videos embedded in their virtual pages [hearty frat-party puke]. The hybrids are known as 'vooks.'" [colossal, Nero-stopping- in-at-the-vomitorium puke] Sweet Baby Jesus, I thank you for your manifold mercies that I have never heard of that particular disgusting trend. UGH.

'Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies," as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.'

The village doctor: "The younger son of a brigadier, he had taken to medicine instead of arms and had married a lady who sometimes won point-to-points and more often fell off." I do believe I have a new binge author!