The neighbor that I'm sort of friendly with came over this morning to relate a semi-horrifying tale. A few evenings ago, she and the Son Unit were standing outside talking when they noticed a guy a couple of houses down from her house put a cpu on the neighbor's lawn. In our neighborhood, "large trash" pickup comes on some quarterly schedule and you can put things out for pickup a week in advance. What this means in practice is that a lot of people have huge piles of crap sitting at the curb every day of the year because they can't figure out when big trash pickup is and the city only tickets you for putting stuff out early if someone complains.

Son Unit asks the guy what's wrong with the CPU, and guy says, "I don't know. It's overheating." So they yak a little and guy asks where the neighbor lady lives and how much Son Unit would charge to repair the computer. Son Unit goes home and then neighbor lady notices that guy is taking computer and random sacks of stuff back off the curb. She says she figured that they were embarrassed to be caught dropping big trash on someone else's lawn.

Turns out they were thieves. Gang-banging thieves who tagged the woman's garage. Woman supposedly lives alone and was broken into, and those guys that neighbor lady and Son Unit were chatting with were the thieves. Neighbor lady is understandably freaked out, and very glad that she didn't specify where she lived when they asked. I suspect that the gang banger thieves might actually be the robbed woman's ex (she has not always lived there alone like she claimed) or friends of an ex. Neighbor lady, who is nicer and less suspicious than I am, doesn't think that anything is going on like that. Are gang bangers really stupid enough to tag the house they broke into in a neighborhood on a block that doesn't have a lot of tagging? I suppose, but that and the fact that they left a shirt behind makes me think that the perps aren't unknown to her. Either way, they're pretty cold customers to chat up the neighbors with a smile while they commit a felony.

In the middle of that conversation, animal control came by because someone complained that my dog was out. My dog was still asleep with his boy at the time. More harassment from the neighbors. So far we've had a false police report, a report to code compliance, and an animal control call in the last few weeks. I wonder what's next? I have no idea which neighbor this is or what their problem is. Police report: Everyone in this neighborhood knows exactly where The Screamer lives and that it's not at my house. Code Compliance: Yes, I had a small amount of compost overflowing into the alley. But unlike most of the people on the block, I mow my part of the alley and keep it free of debris, and my compost was not stinking (all lawn clippings in that pile) or blocking the through way. Not that there is a through way. Other houses have grass taller than I am, junk, or have extended their fences into the alley, but code compliance won't ticket them even when they come out and see that there's a problem. They only ticket because someone called. Animal control: sometimes my dog escapes and we do our best to stop that. At least 4 other houses in my half of the block regularly let their dogs out to roam in the street every day. And this isn't even getting into the constant blocking in our driveway with cars even though there's plenty of parking.

I'm very much considering putting a For Sale sign on my lawn with one of those tubes, and in the tube putting a note: Dear neighbor who doesn't like us-- Get one of your friends or relations to buy this house for X amount of dollars and you can stop wasting all our time with your petty harassment. Otherwise, STFU. You're stuck with us.

How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylist

You show up two weeks later than you should have to the hairstylist (pretty common when you are constantly pressed for time) and instead of the usual lecture about the color of your roots, she turns you around in the chair and says:

“I look at people’s skin tones all day long and try to decide the best coloring for their hair, and I can tell you this: gray is not a normal human skin tone. Get out of here right now and go see your doctor.”

For some reason, though she is not the first person to note you don’t look your best lately, this is the one thing that manages to penetrate the fatigue-fog and you do as you are told.

Interesting story about insurance, becoming uninsurable, and the consumer costs of our current health care system.

The ritzar gave the Monty Bunny water in a ceramic bowl. This seems to please the silly critter, he drank over half the bowl last night. He's still ignoring his usual water bottle, a plastic thing with a metal tube. He also has a glass water bottle with a tube, but usually he disdains the glass one for the plastic one. The plastic one is more familiar to him, being the one that has always been in his hutch. The glass one we got for his smaller cage when he was living in it for a few weeks while we waited for the previous bunny parents to get the big hutch to us. The one vet in all of the Armpit that will treat exotics can see Monty Bun tomorrow.

This morning he had a hop around the house instead of outside, since I'm still worried about his general state of beingness. He hops outside of his wire cage, peers around the corner at the cat dozing on the front room floor. Then he hops back into his cage. Rinse lather repeat several times until finally, he decides to charge dozing cat straight on like a jousting knight at a tourney.

Bunny: Gallop-gallop-gallop-head down- CRASH!
Gizmo the cat: WTH? Meow! Jumps in laundry basket and peers out anxiously
Monty Bun: hop hop hop back to wire cage. Peers out. Hop hop hop back to front room again.
Gizmo: Hunkers down in laundry basket. Stay away from me, you weirdo!

Some time ago my former work supervisor gave the Daughter Unit a bunny named Monty. He's been living more or less happily in his hutch in the shade in the back yard, coming out for the occasional crepuscular hop about the yard and eating expensive bunny chow, banana leaves and little carrots from the garden with great verve. He was also drinking enormous amounts of water.

Now suddenly, he isn't. He is drinking some water, and peeing and making little round pellets like bunnies do, but he isn't eating/drinking in the quantities he was for the last couple of months. I thought it might be because it's been hellishly hot, so we dragged him indoors in his smaller cage. He is more active and has his ears up more in the air conditioning, keeping in mind that we keep the a/c set to 84 most of the time. But he's still not eating/drinking like his old self. He looks healthy and happy, but he's FREAKING ME OUT with this non-consuming thing.

Yesterday and this morning we rubbed his tummy. His tummy feels. . .um. Like a tummy? Pliable and not distended with no lumpy bits or anything that feels peculiar, but my tummy knowledge is really limited to humans, dogs and cats. Bunny tummies are out of my experience set.

Girl Unit will not forgive me in this lifetime if Monty up and dies. :(

Natalya Myeklin, Gold Star Hero of The Soviet Union
Soviet Era WWII Combat Pilot

Probably I should have put up Marina Raskova, the leader of the Witches, instead of Myeklin. I think that Myeklin was the youngest of the Witches, though with the exception of Raskova, they were all very young women when they joined the Soviet 588th fighter group. The Soviets had two all woman bomber squadrons and a squadron of all woman fighter pilots, as well as 2,000 women snipers in the field in World War II. In the cases of the air squadrons, every single member down to the mechanics were women.

You all impressed me a lot, a lot more of you knew about the Nachthexen than I thought you would. badger2305 knew that the Nachthexen flew Polikarpov Po-2s, wood and canvas biplanes that didn't even have guns, on their bombing raids. It's easy to jump to the conclusion that they gave the women the bad planes because they were women, but the truth of the matter is that the Soviets were desperate to put anything that could fly into the air when Stalin's non-agression pact with Hitler failed. The Witches flew over 23,000 sorties in their outmoded and fragile planes, sometimes flying 18 bombing runs in a night. Like all the Soviet military, they took terrible losses during the war.

cowboy_r knows a great deal about the Nachthexen as well, and also about the Soviet lady snipers who parachuted in behind enemy lines with their male comrades. 3/4 of the female snipers were killed in action; some were caught, tortured and killed by the enemy. Fear of capture led many of the women pilots to refuse to carry parachutes, prefering to die in a crash rather than end up in enemy hands.

I wasn't aware that gentleeleos studied Russian History in college on the way to her law degree. :) She and delsdia identified Myeklin by name. desperance, silent_ic_river, kmarkhoover and enjae knew of the NightWitches, yay!

As I said earlier, it would have probably been better to put up Marina Raskova, the organizer of the women bombing units and commander of the 588th. From what I can tell, Raskova was made of nuclear-enhanced titanium willpower. Once, when she and two of her women pilots were going for a non-stop distance record, she jettisoned herself into the wilds of Siberia when their plane's wings started icing up. She lived to tell that tale, and was KIA on a bombing run in the war.

The women fighter pilots of the 586th flew over 4,000 sorties. A great many of them were also KIA. We don't know the names of Lilya Litvyak and her sister pilots any more than we know Raskova or Myeklin, because, I think, the powers that be do not like to bring up the specter of successful women in combat.

A couple of you asked why I knew about the Russian women pilots. I'm interested in Russian History, though mostly the earlier eras. I'm interested in female pilots because my elementary school nurse was a retired WWII test pilot, a WASP. She was a quiet, kind and amazingly strong woman. And also, although I don't look like a feminist, I am a feminist. Those Commie women kicked ass and didn't bother to take names. Whatever else was wrong with the Soviet Union (lots and lots and LOTS), they did for a while get this one thing right. While the women of the RAF the USAF were consigned to positions for "freeing up men for combat", the Russian women were doing whatever they were able to do.

Why is this relevant in 2009? Because in 2009 we still have people saying that although modern military equipment has "leveled the playing field", women don't belong in the pilot's seat. Tell that to the Witches in their PPo2s, or to the Soviet women aviatrixes who flew planes initially thought to be "too hard" for a woman to fly. Because in 2009, we have revisionist Historians saying that the women of the Soviet armed services were all just a bunch of pretty faces for publicity shots, not real soldiers or pilots or cosmonauts. If I can make even the one person who was bored enough to read all the way to the end of this post aware how courageous these women were, and how many of them were KIA defending their country alongside their men, then my job here is done.

Maybe the ghosts of the Nachthexen will go haunt the skeptics. :-)

Go See Some More Soviet Flying Ladies

One question only: Who is this woman, and why was the group of women she belonged to referred to as the Nachthexen?

Answer tomorrow. Comments/Guesses screened until then. :)

I'm betting no one on my flist except for maybe justbeast will know this. There's perhaps one person on the flist of my friends who *might* know this.

2009 Lyttle Lytton Contest (not the Bulwar Lytton, that's something else again).

Featuring such gems as:

The door, which had been left open a few inches, was ajar.

I got this from jfargo who got it from this entry of popfiend's, wherein he asks us to make a joyful noise to fight off the never ending drama of life. Since I've been feeling like a giant sucking black hole of negativity recently, I figured I'd better play along.

One thing that always brings a smile to my face is goofy remakes of popular songs. Usually they're not intentionally goofy. I'm not sure about this one, whether it's intentional goofiness or just a moment of mad genius. But after the initial WTH? (to quote Son Unit) I realized that I kind of liked it.

So I present to you The Gossip featuring Beth Ditto (some Portland band I've never heard of because I live under a rock or something ) version of George Michael's Careless Whisper.



Thanks Beth Ditto and popfiend. I needed that!

TopatoCo

So does my Daughter Unit. :P

Too awesome not to share.

I saw Violette Malan's The Sleeping God recommended by somebody here on good ole lj and so I picked it up because it sounded like my kind of book.

So far I've read 16 pages and I'm thinking about giving up. It's one of those books that starts in media res, which is supposedly the hot new way to do everything, all the time. Don't bore your reader with backstory. So there's an inciting incident like on page 4. And I don't care. The motivations of the characters seem very unclear to me. I find myself comparing it unfavorably with Barbara Hambly's "Ladies of Mandrigyn", also a novel of mercenary brothers. To make sure that I wasn't being sentimental, I went back and read the first 16 pages of "Ladies of Mandrigyn". The inciting incident, which really is the incident that will launch the story, is all the way on page 12. In Sleeping God's case it's unclear if the page 4 inciting incident really is the inciting incident or whether it's minor action.

By page 16 of LoM, I felt very grounded in its world and was totally in love with Starhawk and Sunwolf. By page 16 of Sleeping God, I sort of maybe like the main characters okay, but I don't feel that I know them, nor do I understand their world well at all. It's been some years since I read LoM, so my familiarity with the characters has faded a bit. I think it's a fair test for comparison at this point. I didn't start out wondering how Sleeping God would compare to LoM. I started out excited about a new author and book that sounded like the sort of thing I very much enjoy.

Now my question is whether I keep plodding along with Sleeping God to get to the good part (the reviewer did mention that it starts slow) or give up and move on to something else.

It's really ironic that you can have what appears to be the inciting incident on page 4 and STILL have a book that is slow to start. It kind of shows the fallacy behind that whole "in media res" obsession that various people about the writing web have.

Much to think about!

June 18th ABC Article about Polyamory

I read it and thought it was only partially padded with stupid. It is at least not 100% hostile, so I guess that's progress of a sort.

But it's not clothes this time. I'm making a song list.

Caccini
Amarilli mia bella
Amor l'ali m'impenna
Alma luce beate
maybe Dolcissimo sospiro
and I have Euridice to dig through.
random trivia: the very popular "Ave Maria" often attributed to Caccini is a modern song written centuries after his death.

Biabo
Fuggi fuggi, fuggi
(looking for more Biabo)

Wow. I'm Caccini-heavy at the moment.

I should probably consider some English Ren songs as well. Like John Dowland, not like Foggy Dew. ;0

Mildly NSFW.

. . .in contrast and despite the lack of legitimate evidence, I believe you to have been involved in a fair amount of homosexual activities; activities which I and my companions look down upon.