I've seen a handful of things in the last week that are worth blogging about. But I'm in Hild mode, so instead of pondering these things at length, let me simply link to them.
Over at Lee Wind's blog (I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?), there's another infuriating tale of censorship, this time from Scholastic, who refused to carry a kidlit title at a book fair unless the author changed the dyke mums to a straight couple. People over on Facebook have suggested a letter-writing campaign to Scholastic and/or recruiting a PTA to weigh in. I agree.
Medical News Today has an interesting piece about back pain and vitamin D. (Also handy for the apocalypse.) "According to Stewart B. Leavitt, MA, PhD, Executive Director of Pain Treatment Topics and author of the report, "our examination of the research, which included numerous clinical studies, found that patients with chronic back pain usually had inadequate levels of vitamin D. When sufficient vitamin D supplementation was provided, their pain either vanished or was at least helped to a significant extent."
Publishers Weekly has a review of Eclipse 3 (scroll down). "...Peter S. Beagle's “Sleight of Hand” and Nicola Griffith's “It Takes Two” examine the nature and power of love from very different angles."
The Times has an article on time, procrastination, and etymology. "The longest entry in the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work that has been 44 years in the making, is for the word 'immediately'. As in - and let us pluck a thought at random here - 'We need this book finished immediately/right now/without delay.' The reason why there are 265 different ways of saying immediately? ...it is down to the human tendency to procrastinate. (Procrastinate: foreslow, adjourn, proloyne, protract, tarry, defer, delay ... ) 'A lot of the words that once meant 'immediately' came to mean 'soon', so you then needed another word that really meant 'immediately'. 'Soon', for instance - its original meaning was 'immediately'.' As in (to pick another random example), 'Yes, yes, we know you want it immediately. We're working very hard here. We'll get it done soon'."
From Sci Fi Wire: 6 secrets from the set of V. Oooh, I'm looking forward to this. I loved the cheesy 80s version. This one, though: two Firefly alums. Promising.
Enjoy.
