Teresa Robeson's Blog, page 19

See oh, too?

In case you’ve missed the news reports, and it seems like a lot of people actually have missed the memo, gas stoves are bad for you and the environment. But being married to a climatologist means I get to hear about these things and I’ve mentioned to some friends that the Spousal Unit is monitoring the carbon levels in the house.

If you’re thinking, oh, I’ve already got a carbon monitor in the house, you might be thinking of this:

This nifty device is a carbon monoxide detector and is a must-have in any house because CO is dangerous in even tiny amounts. According to the Iowa State University site, “High concentrations of carbon monoxide kill in less than five minutes. At low concentrations it will require a longer period of time to affect the body. Exceeding the EPA concentration of 9 ppm for more than 8 hours is suspected to produce adverse health affects in persons at risk.”

But it was my bad. When I was talking to those friends, I should have been more specific and said carbon dioxide monitoring because CO2 is a much different beast than CO. CO2 isn’t nearly as deadly in the short term and it takes a huge amount for you to notice it. After exposure to levels above 5,000 ppm for many hours, you might experience headache, dizziness, and nausea. CO2 can cause asphyxiation as it replaces oxygen in the blood-exposure to concentrations around 40,000 ppm and, at that point, is dangerous to life and health.

Buuuuut, CO2 levels serves as an indicator of the other things that comes off of a gas stove…the other things being carcinogenic or lung irritants. So the Spousal Unit monitors it in our house.

Plus, CO2 is a major greenhouse gas and cooking with gas contributes to the amount that’s already trapped in the atmosphere. So, now that we know, we’ll be shopping for an induction or electric range in the next couple of months. For the sake of your own health, especially if you have someone who’s prone to asthma, you might want to do likewise.

The good things in life

There’s so much in life that stresses me out (for an example, I’ve included a snippet from a recent newsletter from The Guardian at the very bottom if you can stomach it). So, I try to focus on much of the good or I’d be paralyzed by the sense of doom and despair.

Want to see some of the good things in my life? How about golden marmalade that I made last weekend?

And what goes well with it? Homemade artisan sourdough bread, of course.

Speaking of sourdough, I love the stuff, but it demands to be fed regularly, and I hate to throw out the discard. Luckily, King Arthur Flour has recipes for using up discards, and one of our favorites is dinner rolls (scroll across to see the photos).

If food is not a good thing, then I don’t know what is.

If you’re wanting to read about something scary instead, scroll down a bit to read below. The rest of you can go have a nice weekend!

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Over the course of a number of months, an Israeli man calling himself Jorge boasted in a series of meetings of having meddled in dozens of elections around the world – elections he claimed he was able to sway through sabotage, hacking and disinformation.

“What Jorge and his team did not know,” the Guardian reported in a bombshell investigation published this week, “was that his demonstration was being secretly filmed by undercover reporters.”

The eight-month investigation into “Team Jorge” is part of a project called Disinfo black ops, which was reported by a consortium of journalists from 30 outlets including the Guardian, Le Monde and Haaretz. It is part of a wider investigation into the burgeoning disinformation industry, which has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French non-profit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters. And it is inspired by the murder of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead in Bangalore in 2017, as she was finishing an article exploring the actors spreading disinformation in India.

Months of digging revealed that Jorge was actually Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old Israeli who has been secretly working around the world for over two decades on behalf of political and corporate clients. He and his team claim they can gather intelligence on rivals and spread disinformation “at scale and at speed” through a sophisticated software called Aims. The software controls tens of thousands of bots with synchronized online accounts that look and act like real humans, and, Hanan claims, uses artificial intelligence to create their posts.

The investigation has found that Team Jorge hacked Telegram and Gmail accounts belonging to associates of a Kenyan presidential candidate. The operatives worked alongside Cambridge Analytica in an attempt to swing a Nigerian presidential election. And they’ll work offline, too – the team even claimed they sent a sex toy to a politician in order to make his wife believe he was having an affair.

Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment but told the Guardian: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”

It’s an investigation that puts faces and names to a shadowy topic – the disinformation industry – that’s typically incredibly challenging to report on. It was fueled by the evidence gathered by three Israel-based reporters who posed as consultants seeking Hanan’s services and brought what they found to the consortium. That includes video from meetings with Hanan, some of which you can view here. (The Guardian was not involved in the filming but we are publishing the material given the public interest in the findings.)

Team Jorge didn’t manage to get their guys elected in Kenya or Nigeria, but the impact of these kinds of campaigns can be even more fundamental, and harder to detect. And it has big implications for democracy.

“There is still a cloud of doubt over the current president,” Stephanie Kirchgaessner, one of the Guardian’s lead reporters on the project, said regarding the Kenya campaign. “It’s not only about winning the election – just creating that doubt is also sort of a win. And we see echoes of that here in the US.”

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WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SUCH JERKS AND DON’T WANT US TO HAVE GOOD THINGS LIKE DEMOCRACY???

Do the Ss in “USPS” stand for “SUCKS”?

Last week was a lighthearted, nostalgic look at some of the more fun things about the postal system. This week, I’m going to talk about the the annoying, and possibly criminal, acts of the postal system, specifically the United States Postal System.

In the past year, 90% of the emails that are addressed to my younger son, who still lives at home, has gone missing.

How do I know? The USPS has this service called Informed Delivery that you can sign up for. Every day that there is mail delivery, they send you an email with the scanned pieces of mail that you should expect that day, everything from important stuff to junk mail. From these emails, I know what should be arriving any particular day. And I give them some grace. If a piece arrives a few days later, I’m okay with that because the mail is scanned in a different city than mine and it’s never a direct route from A to B.

My younger son doesn’t get a lot of mail, but one of our favorite aunts always sends our kids a birthday card. She sent him one in November which never arrived.

I let her know that it’s lost and she insisted on sending a second. THAT one also went missing. Someone is bilking a septuagenerian.

My kid also had doctors’ bills go missing last summer. Luckily, we knew that they were lost because of Informed Delivery and called the doctors’ offices to let them know so we wouldn’t get overdue fines.

Even his junk mail goes missing. What in the actual F??

This month, our oldest child’s birthday card from the same wonderful aunt also went missing. This is a screen capture from the USPS.com site where you can log in to see your Informed Delivery if you want to (the other screenshots are from the emails they sent me).

And my husband and I have had important mail go missing, too.

But you know what doesn’t go missing? Mangled pieces of junk mail. This image looks like the mail will be shredded or fall through the cracks, but it arrived just fine (I couldn’t resist a snarky comment at the bottom):

I have reported the missing mail through the Informed Delivery system as well as filed a report for stolen mail on the USPS site and NOTHING was ever done about it. I know it’s not my mail delivery person (or at least I’m 99.9% sure it’s not him). I always develop relationships with our mail carriers, asking about their families and giving them gifts for the holidays. I suspect it’s someone at the facility where the mail is scanned.

I’m at a loss as to what recourse I have next? Do I go to the police? The FBI? The USPS obviously doesn’t care, but I feel like there needs to be a criminal investigation. Anyone out there have a solution for us?

Beth Anderson Shares Writing Wisdom with Digging Deep to Uncover Deborah Sampson–Plus a Giveaway!

I am such a fan of Beth Anderson’s books! If you write nonfiction, whether it’s for kids or not, you’ll learn a lot from Beth’s posts. Check this one out…and there’s a giveaway!

Alayne Kay Christian

Before I introduce today’s guest blogger, I want to apologize for my delay in choosing the winner of free access to all my webinars. I had to take some time off after the sudden death of my youngest brother. Because of the delay, I’ve decided to offer the giveaway prize to two faithful blog followers. Char Dixon and Tara Cerven. Congratulations and thank you for taking time to comment on my post. I’ll be in touch.

Today, Beth Anderson shares her kid-lit writing wisdom gained from life and nonfiction writing experiences along with writing her latest picture book CLOAKED IN COURAGE: UNCOVERING DEBORAH SAMPSON, PATRIOT SOLDIER. Beth is also giving away a copy of CLOAKED IN COURAGE. To enter the drawing comment on this post, please state that you would like to be entered in the drawing, and please help Beth out by sharing the post link…

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Philatelist no more

I used to collect stamps as a kid, not because I wanted to but because my Uncle Francis wanted someone to foist his collection onto. I don’t know if his wife forced him to declutter or what, but I found myself the unwitting owner of a bunch of stamps from all over the world.

It’s not that I minded that much as a kid. I was rather fascinated by the beautiful art on some of the stamps and the idea that they are from places I’d never heard of and might never go to. Ahem, New Hebrides, I’m looking at you.

Weirdly enough, despite my lack of passion about stamp collecting, those albums moved with me from Hong Kong to Vancouver to Delaware to Indiana. And the collection used to be actively growing when I was young because people (that would be mostly my mom and relatives) assumed I wanted to collect more since I already had them. It’s like with my friend who was given a cow ornament one year as a joke, and then suddenly everyone gave her cow knick-knacks because they assumed she liked and collected them.

Still, this collection occasionally gives me moments of delight. For example, when Zolima Magazine posted on Facebook:

I was excited because I immediately knew I have the same stamp! And here it is, in one of the albums:

Not only that, but because philatelists are wacky ardent collectors, postal services have these special commemorative envelopes made for them, too. Here’s my (or really, my uncle’s…I’m just his surrogate) collection of the Lunar New Year celebratory stamp stuff:

Some of you might notice that I’m missing 3 envelopes: the Year of the Rabbit, the Year of the Snake, and the Year of the Goat/Sheep. I do have both the Rabbit stamps and one of the Snake stamps, but nada for the Goat/Sheep and I have no idea why. Now it’s going to bug me for a while; I’ll have to search the entire collection thoroughly to see if it’s misplaced somewhere.

What about you? Do you collect or have you ever collected stamps? And if you do/did, WHY??? LOL! Let me know if you want to inherit my collection.

The brain is a random info eating monster

While people are more comfortable with that which is familiar, the opposite is also, counterintuitively, true: our brains crave novelty. As noted in the articled linked, “all of us have felt the pleasure of acquiring information.” I think this is why shows like Jeopardy! are enjoyable and also why people love memes from IFLScience.

the Alex Trebek

While Jeopardy! is loads of fun for showing off the (mostly useless) knowledge we’ve amassed, most people who are all, “I f*cking love science,” are really more into amassing tidbits of info. They’re not actually into science. Science isn’t about just a collection of cool factoids; it’s a way of thinking about and approaching the mysteries in the world and universe around us.

Science isn’t immutable facts set in stone that you go around impressing your friends and competitors with. In fact (hah), science isn’t about “facts” at all. Science is about discovery and experimentation and changing one’s mind about the how things work when provided with new evidence that may be contrary to what was previously acknowledged to be the best working theory. So don’t say you love science if you’re not prepared to change your outlook on something when the experts say that new research show that a certain pet view is, at best, half-baked and, at worst, totally wrong.

(And don’t get me started about the general populace confusing the scientific use of the word theory with the layperson’s use of it.)

So, it’s great to want to accumulate random bits of knowledge and make your stimulus-hungry brain happy–I love to do it, too–but “IFL science” should really be changed to “IFL trivia.”

Hey! Did you know that some bats have poop that sparkles because they eat insects whose exoskeletons are made of a shiny substance called chitin? IFLTrivia!

Luck!

As the Lunar New Year approaches, East Asians’ thoughts swirl around “luck.” The Chinese are all about luck. Ever notice how many Chinese restaurants have the word “luck” or “lucky” in their names?

lucky red (and gold) envelopes for New Year Money gifts

Coincidentally*, this email newsletter I get from Referio also talked about luck on Monday. Ryan Kay wrote:
“It’s been said that the people who succeed in life are the ones who make the most of their time. They don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. They take control of their lives and make things happen.

As Seneca once said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” 

In other words, success is often a matter of being in the right place at the right time. But it’s also about being prepared when that opportunity comes knocking.

So if you’re looking to get ahead in life, don’t wait for things to happen. Make them happen. Get up and seize the day. It could be the start of something great.“

I loved this sage bit of advice. It also reminded me of something my team in the Indiana chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrator noticed: there are members who read all the newsletters and emails our chapter sends out. We don’t send out very many, usually just once a month. But when we do, it’s because we have terrific opportunities to announce. The members who keep on top of them are able to partake of those opportunities, some of which have limited spots or time frames. It dawned on me and my team that those members are ones who have made things happen in their careers and have books published.

It’s not a coincidence. Luck really favors the prepared!

Are you ready for luck to land in your lap? Then actively position yourself to catch it.

Happy Lunar New Year!

The unexpected

I’ve been spoiled by watching The Umbrella Academy (and, to a lesser extent, Knives Out: Glass Onion). I now crave the unexpected…and not just a plot twist, but a highly quirky, somewhat off-kilter, but still in-line-with-the-story-and-characters plot twist. Nearly all other films/series fall short of this new expectation.

“Whuuuuu??“

Case in point: Netflix kept pushing the movie The Pale Blue Eye on us and a friend gushed about how good it was, so I decided to watch it with the fam. I came out of it fairly disappointed. It was through no fault of the acting (I’m a fan of Gilliam Anderson, Toby Jones, and Christian Bale) or the generally solid storyline. But there was nothing unexpected. I could predict what was going to happen and why, so I was a bit bored. (SPOILER ALERT: I also don’t care for sexual violence as a plot device)

Considering that Agatha Christie wrote a pretty surprising plot twist with And Then There Were None in 1939, I kind of expect more from mystery stories 80 years later.

What about you? Watched anything lately that knocked your socks off? Anything you care to recommend?

Well, hey there, 2023!

The holidays flew by, didn’t they? I hope you had a restful or productive time, whatever you set out to have.

I promise myself to adopt a good attitude this year (channeling this delightful Johnny Nash song that’s one of my favs) in addition to making some other changes.

What changes? Well, I’ll be sending out my newsletters once a month instead of quarterly…I’m making them shorter but more frequent. Check out the first issue of 2023 and hit the big SUBSCRIBE button at the top left of that page if you like what you see. And don’t forget to enter the giveaway!

Speaking of giveaways, there will be a giveaway of large bundles of kid’s books at the Multicultural Children’s Book Day‘s Read Your World Party on January 26th. It’s free to participate, so please join us! I’m an author sponsor.

What changes are you making this year?

These are a few of my favorite things

Some of my fragmented, yet very strong, memories from my youth involve cute stickers. This is why I watched this video from JetPens unblinkingly, like a cat staring at a goldfish in a bowl. My taste in stickers have matured a little but I still love them.

You know what else I love? Sleep.

Like this bear, I’d like to nap until Spring. I won’t, but I’ll let this blog take a little hibernation until the new year. In the interim, I’ll consider what Janna Morishima advised me in that consultation I mentioned previously and think about how to combine my blog with my newsletter content into a cohesive package that works for me and serve my readers.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season!