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Inhalation, virtual shoulders, and book space
A student at the Institvte died as a consequence of nitrous oxide inhalation yesterday.
I personally feel you have to be pretty stupid to manage that - it's not a very dangerous chemical, all told. The only way to die from it is if you don't let your body get enough oxygen while you're doing it - which, when you think about it, would kill you dead even without the nitrous oxide. Duh.
The Globe printed a very fair piece today - fair, meaning they did not immediately set out to lambaste the Institvte, as if it is somehow responsible for this act of autodarwination. But you can bet others will.
Nonelvis doesn't think this will result in the sort of Draconian policy changes which followed a student's death from alcohol poisoning two years ago. I hope not. If we find a way to ban stupidity, great; but banning the instruments people use in their stupidity is not a good answer.
(At this point Ysabel will write and ask me, teasingly, to please reconcile that with my position on gun control, or pilot's licenses, and so forth. I plead Emerson.)
I never did note what people said about my Lands' End experiments.
Well, Beth agreed that we Boys With Odd Fashion Ideas should wear sleeves (not just to hide our shoulders but also to hide our male-looking armpits, or so a cross-dressing friend once informed her). She says, however, that she also has broad shoulders and that sleeveless is marginally better than short-sleeved, which makes her "look like a linebacker."
She also said her Virtual Model made her look like a German pole vaulter. Apparently that's a bad thing; I don't know - I've never seen a German pole vaulter.
One correspondent said not to worry, Lands' End's clothing for women looks horrid on everyone except maybe "those over 40 with the seemingly ubiquitous middle-aged spread, I suppose." On the other hand, another correspondent didn't mind not being able to get into the site because "they probably have nothing for old fat ladies." I haven't decided if these two thoughts contradict each other or not yet.
I do note that, while the model didn't expect you to be ultra-skinny, there was nothing there for the ultra-tall. Not that I'm surprised. Let's face it - I need to be a runway model and have all my clothes made by Big-Name Designers. They love working with tall people. Problem is, I can't do the runway walk.
(Although, oddly enough, I walk more gracefully in heels than without - because I walk more slowly.)
I finished reading Me by Katherine Hepburn tonight ... many months after I bought it, barely started it, and left off. It didn't take long at all to read once I got going. Now I can cross another book off my list.
See, here's the problem. We buy books, and we tend to stack them in the living room. Every so often Rose and Eric come over - they're virtually the only people who do - and to prepare for their visit, we take whatever books have accumulated in the living room since their last visit (just about), and move them all into the room with the bookshelves.
Corollary: If Eric and Rose never came over, we'd never get our living room cleaned.
Since we're usually in a hurry, we often just pile the books up any old way in the book room. Last week, for once, I actually tried to put some of them on the bookshelves - a difficult task since the bookcases are mostly already full - and in the course of my labor, I realized three Important Things.
1. We've got to stop buying books. (But it's so hard! Even as we speak, The Sub is sitting in a bookstore somewhere, taunting me.)
2. When we built some of these bookshelves, we deliberately built two units with shelves close together. This meant we could fit more books, but also that we could only store standard-sized paperbacks there. Since we have as many paperbacks as all our other books combined, this was not a real problem.
However, I am increasingly needing to sort books by theme - topic - and the fact that all the paperbacks are segregated is one of the biggest factors standing in the way. I need all my folklore books in one place now, for example, and all the history books, and so forth. All the sex/gender books are already together, because mouth organ demanded that long ago, but they're running out of space!
Ideally we'd have a real library and we could just start using the Dewey Decimal system. Hah.
(Yes, I know it's outdated, but confound it, I can still do Dewey from memory and I never did get the hang of Library of Congress numbers, even working in a library that used them for many years. I simply learned where each topic was by location and didn't bother with the numbers.)
3. One reason it's hard to put books away is that I don't like to shelve them until I've read them. I worry that if I put them on the shelves, I'll never read them. Well, as I was sorting books, I made a list - on paper - of books Yet To Be Read. It was far from comprehensive, and yet it has thirty books on it, some needing to be finished, some not yet begun. I'm in deep trouble.
Maybe if I tell myself I can't have The Sub until I read all the books on this list.
By then, it'll be out in paperback.
© Columbine
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- Emerson, more or less
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