Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 30

Null States, an appreciation

Null States is the second book in Malka Older’s Centenal cycle, following on Infomocracy and preceding State Tectonics.

( Big fat long entry about this big fat book I loved )

Muse upon it, friends!

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Samba da Utopia, by Jonathan Silva and Ceumar

I found this song, Samba da Utopia, while wandering through YouTube. The composer's video is here , but there are many, many other videos by cover singers--like this one , which I almost like better. The words and tune are simple and the message is a good one (aside from the minor detail that I don't believe in utopias)--I really like it!




PS, I don't actually know what makes a samba a samba--I should find out.

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frogs in ice melt

Wakanomori and I went walking with a friend at the Quabbin Reservoir, and we came to a little pool that was alive with frogs, swimming around in the melting water above the ice still covering the pool. Amazing! Aren't they cold blooded? But they didn't seem to mind the icewater--they swam powerful breaststrokes this way and that in the three inches of water above the ice.

Wakanomori took this video. You have to turn the sound up very high in order to hear them, probably. Unfortunately, no closeu...

question, and what I'm up to

The ninja girl has a question about Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest series. I read some books in the series and enjoyed them, but I have a notoriously bad memory, and I didn't read all of them, so I'm putting the question to you.

The magician character [quick Google search... ], Mendanbar: the ninja girl remembers an occasion where he (or possibly someone else??) creates a duplicate person/doppelgänger of someone, using magic. Does anyone remember such a thing? And if so, can you situate that p...

the proper use of a knife

On Thursday I sat in on a workshop critiquing some recent papers relating to Timorese culture. (It's one true blessing to come out of this pandemic: people from all over the world can meet and talk with ease via Zoom: participants were in Japan, India, Brazil, Timor-Leste, Canada, and the United States, and I, a non-academic, was allowed to audit.) All of the papers sounded fascinating (the one that critiqued NGO activity as, in some regards, a continuation of colonialism had me nodding like a b...

postcard for a pine tree

I delivered** minoanmiss 's postcard to the pine tree whom I had to deprive of mail some weeks ago (described in this entry ).

It was close to sunset and the light was very long and golden.



( I took a video (it's 55 seconds) )

And here's a still photo



**I say "delivered" but I didn't actually leave it there; I just shared it with the pine tree the way you do with mail that's addressed to both of you. "We got a postcard from Minoan Miss! Let me show it to you and read it to you."

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tattoos for your teeth

At the dentist having my teeth scraped clean this morning, I was thinking about how staining material (like tea, which I drink a lot of) tends to linger in grooves, and I was wondering if the scraping doesn't just create such grooves... and then I got to thinking about making grooves deliberately. About etching designs. You could brush ink over them, and then wipe the ink away, like scrimshaw. I wondered if that's ever been done anywhere. A lazy-quick internet search didn't turn anything up.

And ...

the tigers in the road; drawers

This picture was lying in the road amid sharp fragments of glass.



It's just a print--here is one of its jagged edges, as if it were cut with scissors.



But you can see its appeal



I took it home. It's the year of the tiger, after all.

Here's something else from the day: labeled drawers:



You'll have to click through and then click magnify to see, but the drawers say "Stamps, Supplies, Janelle, Pending, Envelopes, *Italian flag w/soccer balls*, Deposit/WDL/Loan Slips, Lollipops."

You can tag yourself! ...

mossy mouth

I thought you all might enjoy this mossy mouth--it reminds me of ellenmillion 's tiny worlds



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more from Laloran Justisa

Laloran Justisa is up front about being didactic/educational: it covers issues like domestic abuse, alcoholism, presumption of innocence, nepotism, and so on. The most recent episode dealt in part with an upright young police officer with a secret in his past: his brothers were part of pro-Indonesia militias that formed after Timor-Leste declared in a 1999 referendum that it wanted to be independent of Indonesia.

( quickie historical review )

In an earlier episode, Vitór and the idealistic lawyer...