M. Caspian's Blog, page 14

Moana (again)

When I was in grade school – not that long ago – we were taught a story that hadn’t changed since the 19th century: that the Maori arrived in New Zealand by accident, starving and desperate to bump into land after going adrift far to the north.

[image error]A New Zealand art treasure: The Arrival of Maoris in New Zealand, 1898, Louis John Steele & Charles F Goldie, oil on canvas. Currently held in the Auckland Art Gallery.

This was complete bullshit.

And now I’m completely addicted to this song from Moana.

For all the film’s problematic aspects, can I at least count it as a success that Disney viewers now know that Pacific Islanders were – are – the greatest navigators the world has ever known?

It makes my skin tingle.

2017 Reading Challenge

My 2016 Pop Sugar Challenge died mid-year, for reasons. I’m still annoyed at myself for not completing it, but as one of my intentions this year is to be kinder to myself, I’m working at forgiveness. But this year I will do it! My challenge page is on Goodreads here.

For practical reason I am imposing  limit on myself. Instead of Buy No Books June, I’m doing Buy No Books 2017.

a) I want to save money because I have an exciting but expensive plan for October, and

b) I own an embarrassment of unfulfilled books. I have books I bought in 2004 and have yet to read. I have entire bookshelves I haven’t read.

[image error]These are not my unread books. Mine are more numerous. Photo by Pascal Maramis on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence

So I’m basically going to complete the 2017 challenge using library books (thanks to the awesome Auckland public library system), Kindle loans, and what I already own.

Now, I’m not being a complete minimalist. I will buy a few books this year. For Christmas a dear and kind friend gave me an incredibly generous USD$50 Amazon gift card. This is my BUT I HAVE TO HAVE THAT BOOK OR I’LL DIE, GAAAAAAAH! fund.

The full 2017 Pop Sugar reading challenge is

1. A book recommended by a librarian

2. A book that’s been on your TBR list for way too long

3. A book of letters

4. An audiobook

5. A book by a person of color

6. A book with one of the four seasons in the title

7. A book that is a story within a story

8. A book with multiple authors

9. An espionage thriller

10. A book with a cat on the cover

11. A book by an author who uses a pseudonym

12. A bestseller from a genre you don’t normally read

13. A book by or about a person who has a disability

14. A book involving travel

15. A book with a subtitle

16. A book that’s published in 2017

17. A book involving a mythical creature

18. A book you’ve read before that never fails to make you smile

19. A book about food

20. A book with career advice

21. A book from a nonhuman perspective

22. A steampunk novel

23. A book with a red spine

24. A book seet in the wilderness

25. A book you loved as a child

26. A book by an author from a country you’ve never visited

27. A book with a title that’s a character’s name

28. A novel set during wartime

29. A book with an unreliable narrator

30. A book with pictures

31. A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you

32. A book about an interesting woman

33. A book set in two different time periods

34. A book with a month or day of the week in the title

35. A book set in a hotel

36. A book written by someone you admire

37. A book that’s becoming a movie in 2017

38. A book set around a holiday other than Christmas

39. The first book in a series you haven’t read before

40. A book you bought on a trip

41. A book recommended by an author you love

42. A bestseller from 2016

43. A book with a family member term in the title

44. A book that takes place over a character’s life span

45. A book about an immigrant or refugee

46. A book from a genre/subgenre you’ve never heard of

47. A book with an eccentric character

48. A book that’s more than 800 pages

49. A book you got from a used book sale

50. A book that’s been mentioned in another book

51. A book about a difficult topic

52. A book based on mythology

If you decide to do it too link me to your challenge page in the comments so I can follow your progress. And if you have any recommendations for books to match any of these categories, shout out.

Music Monday: Mike Snow, The Rabbit

2016 was a fucker for losing music greats. In 2017 on Mondays I’m going to be sharing some of my favorite music – sometimes from the more obscure side of the tracks i.e. prepare to meet some Kiwi music sensations! Not today, though. Today it’s the vaguely NSFW The Rabbit by Mike Snow.

Thank you

Welp, that was a hell of a year, wasn’t it?

Thank you for reading my blog.

I made 109 blog posts and broke 5,000 blog views. In global media terms that’s not even small potatoes, it’s a single microscopic rhizomic nodule, but – not gonna lie – it means a hell of a lot to me.

Thank you to everyone who bought one of my books.

I banked USD$953.62 this year from book sales across Amazon and Smashwords. That’s nearly NZD$1400. To me, that’s huge. (And Germany is so fucking close to paying out. Come on, Germans, if I write some more, please will you buy just a couple more books?).

With the income I paid a power bill, donated some to Rainbow Youth, made a mortgage payment, and bought a piece of luggage. According to Stephen King’s rule, I’m a real writer.

I released five and a half books (a half because I pulled one, rewrote the end, and just re-released it as a 2nd edition). I didn’t release any M. Caspian books, but I have several first drafts completed and resting, and I will have at least a couple out in 2017, plus that book of three short stories, just as as soon as I get a cover. And that second book with Lisa Henry, I pinky promise.

Kraken is still my best-selling book, which is amazing considering it’s three years old, and it’s about violent non-con squid/man sex.

It’s the early evening of the 31st in Auckland right now. I’m going to put some more time in on my yearly review and 2017 planning, then head out for a walk along the beach. I suspect I will be asleep before midnight.

Not everyone’s 2017 will be peaceful, safe, or filled with well-being and joy. Let us find the strength to support one another through the next year, and continue to stand up for what we know is right. We will not allow fascism and hate to win.

Much love to you all.

[image error]Auckland from Mt Eden. Photo by Harrison & Peppery on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence

 

“Sir” is a problem.

There’s a few words missing from our language.

In New Zealand, if you’re a waiter or a bartender at a middle-class establishment, ‘Sir’ is the only term you’ve got available to use to get the attention of the XY-chromosome-carrying member of the dining/drinking party so you can take their order when they’re busy talking i.e. “And what can I get for you, Sir?”

And then 85% of the time you get the smartass baby boomer who says, “No need to ‘Sir’ me, darling, I haven’t been knighted yet.” (These are the same men who say “I’ll have a wee dram” and mean they’d like a Drambuie, but if you ask for clarification, they’ll tell you you have to figure it out. Guys, you’re jerks. Cut it out).

[image error]Seriously, don’t make me guess. ‘The Bar’ by David J on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence

‘Sir’ also works for everyday interactions, like “Excuse me, Sir, is this your wallet on the ground,” or “Sorry Sir, your mobility scooter is parked on my foot.”

“Ma’am” isn’t any better, unless you’re addressing royalty, in which case, booyah. (Entirely uninteresting fact: I once scrubbed down a BBQ grill so the Duke of Edinborough could cook on it during the 1990 royal tour of New Zealand.) Who the hell wants to be called Ma’am, but what’s the alternative?

We need a non-gender-specific term to mean Fellow Human Whom I Am Addressing. For years I’ve wanted to bring in ‘Comrade,’ but that went down worse than ‘Fetch.’

The other word that doesn’t work is ‘boyfriend.’ At least, it’s totally fine and dandy for sixteen-year-olds. And twenty-six-year-olds. Or maybe thirty-six-year-olds. But yesterday I met a woman who is 72 (she told me repeatedly she was 72) and who went to her “boyfriend’s” family for Christmas dinner, and cognitive dissonance set in. I’m not sure where the appropriateness cut off is for ‘boyfriend,’ but I feel it’s under 72 for heterosexual women. Curiously, I can see ‘boyfriend’ working if you’re a 72 year old guy. But I can’t think of anything better.

A quick poll at the dinner table suggests baby boomers dislike the term “partner.” A few said it suggested a power imbalance, or was impersonal. I found partner the most useful when LGBTQ humans couldn’t marry. It seemed elitist to use the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ when that was denied to a big chunk of the population. But now, I guess – in many countries, but not all, sadly – the need has gone.

Does partner work for a short-term or new relationship, though? It suggests something fairly solid and lasting, involving wills, although not necessarily joint mortgages. A partner is the person who takes you to chemo. A boyfriend is the guy you hooked up with last month and have been sexting with ever since, and more power to my new 72 year old friend if that’s the case.

‘Man friend’ doesn’t work for me. It makes my teeth clench. Perhaps it’s because it has an air of cruise ship dance host about it. ‘Girlfriend’ is confusing, when a woman can go out to the movies with ‘girlfriends’ and doesn’t mean she’s in a polyamorous lesbian relationship. ‘Woman friend’ is only marginally better than ‘lady friend,’ which makes me nauseated.

Most of all I really, really want something gender neutral, that means “Another human with whom I have formed a relationship involving emotional closeness.”

These are all keystone terms for any culture. We need better words. I’m open to suggestions.

Pineapple revelations and bioterrorism

My whole life I’ve wondered why the hell anyone eats pineapple. While the flavor is nice, it’s woody and fibrous and nearly impossible to chew through.

[image error]Pineapple: evil fruit of evilness. Photo by David Hilowitz on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence

Until I ate pineapple this Christmas. At first I only snagged a slice to be polite, but when I took a bite it was sweet and succulent and melted in my mouth. I thought I’d reached Nirvana. I would have eaten the whole fruit if I could have pushed everyone else out of the way.

Apparently my whole life I’ve been eating unripe pineapple. 99% of New Zealand pineapples come from the Philippines, from Mindanao Island. It takes weeks to get them to my supermarket. They’re picked unripe, because it prevents the risk of including over-ripe, rotting fruit in the shipment. The kicker is pineapple won’t ripen by itself once it’s picked. It will get softer – eventually – and change color, but it won’t get any sweeter. That gross chewy, woody texture? Unripe pineapple has chitinase inside it. Chitinase, aka the stuff that makes exoskeletons.

[image error]Delicious pineapple-y goodness, aka Chrysolina americana. Photo by Sonja Schulz on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence

Side note:  pineapple eats you back. The flesh contains the enzyme Bromelain. Bromelain digest proteins. When your tongue and cheeks feel weird after eating pineapple, that’s because the Bromelain has started to dissolve the surface layers of your mouth tissue. That’s also why you can’t put fresh pineapple in jello. The enzymes dissolve the gelatin proteins- from all that finger-licking skin, horn, cartilage, and bone donated by our animals friends – and it won’t set.

Okay, but back to the chitinase. Chitinase has anti-fungal properties. Humans are now cloning chitinase from pineapples using e-coli bacteria, and using it to control Rhizoctonia solani, which kills cotton seedlings.

[image error]Cotton seedlings with Rhizoctonia solani. It mushes the root systems and stops the seedlings getting nutrients. The cotton plants starves to death.

The reason it’s important to develop new, effective anti-bacterials and anti-fungals is because bioterrorism is the next up and coming thing. Who needs a jihadist with a Boeing when a few harmless-looking hikers can infect crops with something like an adapted strain of Pythium ultimum and wipe out an entire year’s harvest of wheat, potatoes, corn, and soybean in one fell swoop, state wide. Nation wide. Hell, given enough people, world wide.

[image error]Pythium ultimum damage in a potato, aka watery wound rot.

The University of South Florida Center for Biological Defence is working on developing ways of inoculating plants, in preparation for just such bioterrorism attacks. You don’t need an army any more, to create a famine of Leningrad.

Pineapple is helping.

These are things I did not know yesterday.

I fucking love living in the 21st century.

 

Happy 4 days after Solstice, everyone

I don’t have the balls to eat this salad

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Lucky I only went in for tea.

Is this the worst thing about living in New Zealand? (Updated!)

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I know it will get here before Xmas. I trust you, Amazon.

Update 12 hours later:

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Fuck!

It’s not undeliverable!!! I’m right here! I get stuff all the time! I have many, many things from you, Amazon!

*sigh*

 

 

 

Is this the worst thing about living in New Zealand?

I know it will get here before Xmas. I trust you, Amazon.