Coincidentally, I also am a big collector of do-it-yourself books, especially the ones with lots of pictures. I’m a visual type. Although I am very comfortable writing and reading text, a demonstration of some sort, whether live or photographs and diagrams in a book, almost always is necessary. Maybe I am too comfortable with text. When I encounter written instructions only, the copy editor inside me often kicks in, and ambiguities and omissions begin to crop up everywhere. Questions arise faster than they can be answered. Illustrations almost always help. Come to think of it, maybe this isn’t strange at all. I do make my living putting together words and pictures.
84 responses to “Shelf Awareness”
Ghost: Yes she is and I have gone from being a wannabe lab rat to a surgical assistant and general helper. Whatever she need done that she ddoe’t have time for or doesn’t want to do, I do for her.
Anon, the most frequent question I get asked (after “Is it going to hurt?”) Is “What do they do with the blood after they do the test?” Real answer: freeze it and store it for six months. (Some) Answers I give: “Fertilize the Rose Garden” and “Feed it to the vampires.”
Lily, one of my friends was formally a clinic nurse who assisted her doc in surgery. She enjoyed working in both places, but she obviously preferred surgery.
She also used to say that she had held more ******* than any *****. I’m sure you can figure that out if I tell you she assisted on urology cases.
Good morning, Lilyblack et al. This is NK in AZ, in case I come out anon again as I did with my blood test vampire comment yesterday. iPad not laptop maybe? It looks okay just now, but we’ll see. On the SoCal freeway back to Tucson from seeing our son in Long Beach for a few days. Good time!
Here’s a suggestion for a title for the next book: The Arlo and Janis Family Album. Then JJ can group the strips by subject: seasons, activities, family members, etc.
Ghost, my boss says you can always tell a urologist because they wear yellow sneakers with rusty eyelets. I think that is a very old gibe, as nobody uses metal eyelets in sneaks. I would update it to “yellow shoelaces and soggy socks”. 😀
Lily, an anesthesiologist once told me, “Anesthesiologists sit on their butts and work. Radiologists sit on their butts.”
Ghost, my favorite mad anesthesiologist says “anesthesiology is hours of boredom punctuated with moments of stark terror.”
Lilyblack: Or DEAD silence!
No, there is very little silence in that event 😀
The same applies to piloting airplanes as committing anesthesiology.
Never mind piloting, I am terrified from the moment I step into an airplane till the moment the wheels hit the runway. And for a while afterward
‘I believe Arlo would like and enjoy knowing most of us as much as we like and enjoy knowing him.’ and similar statements by others:
Elohim [the first but more recent name for G–d in Genesis] is said to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and other ‘omnis’. It follows that ‘he’ is familiar with all our legends, stories, and fictional characters. Maybe he considers some more interesting than others, and is disappointed with a story’s ending. If he is all-powerful, he must be able to make the character and his or her world real to see what happens next.
Do Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum have a successful marriage, or does it end in divorce? Ursula LeGuins’s ‘The Dispossessed’ ends with the physicist Shevek on a Hainish spaceship, returning to his home world to an uncertain fate. All an omnipotent deity has to do is make Shevek and his setting real and see what happens.
You might argue that Elohim is omniscient, and therefore knows would happen. Ah, but omniscience and omnipotence are contradictory. God must be able to choose not to be omniscient. If ‘he’ does not have the power to make that choice, he is not omnipotent. I choose to believe that Elohim has chosen not to know how everything will turn out, because, if he does know, the universe, however marvelous and intricate, is ultimately dull, a still-life rather than an unfolding drama. If there is a hereafter, we may not only meet our loved ones but also Poirot, Nanki-Poo, and Shevek. Peace, emb
My favorite LeGuin story is “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I consider it a perfect example of her Dunsany influence, directly for “”Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean” from A Dreamer’s Tales.
Trapper Jean – Thank you for the birthday wishes.
Debbe – Gotta love “Oh s#%*!, company’s coming”‘mode. Don’t work too hard. Make sure those high schoolers are pulling their share of the road. Your stories take me back to growing up in the land of a million sheep and six million chickens. 🙂
As for staying on topic, our fearless leader is also quite prone to posting remarks unrelated to the latest retro strip. When in Rome…
What topic? I’ve spent the last couple nights catching up on “Cosmos.” Had I been mentally wired for advanced mathematics, I would be thousands of dollars in debt with some sort of advanced astronomical degree. Life has yet to present the coinciding of an observatory event and a day off the next day. I dream of seeing as far into space as possible with my own eyes to the telescope. I would love to watch the whole series in a high-def theater, but I’m not sure my heart could take the overwhelming joy – I’ve found tears on my cheeks just watching at home. My body survives by day, but my heart lives at night.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
~ William Blake
Very poetic, Indy Mindy. Personally the stars seem awful cold and far away, and my math goes no farther than “120 kcal per mile run and 3600 kcal per pound of fat.” But, hey, different strokes, right?
Mindy from Indy, staying on topic? If it isn’t required, whatever for? Half the fun of the internet is going to look up something, and then just following the trail as your interest directs. Although I have found myself far afield from where I started sometimes and with a missing half-hour, I haven’t been bored. Can’t say that about TV!
Here is some interesting reading by Robert A. Heinlein. I can’t say I agree with everything he says here, but it is thought-provoking. The book the excerpts are from is about the world’s oldest living man and these are supposed to be random thoughts he is writing down for his descendants.
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html
Lily, I’m sorry that flying always terrifies you. Perhaps that’s because you never flew with me. 🙂 I can honestly say I never carried a passenger who exhibited more than a little mild discomfort about flying with me.
The one exception was when I wasn’t the pilot but a passenger myself on a commercial flight while I was in the AF. Back in the day, when flying on smaller airliners, I liked to sit in the rearmost aisle seat on the port side…not because it was safer in the event of a crash but because the seat across the aisle was where the (then always female) flight attendant sat, with her gear parked in the window seat, and they were always fun to visit with on a quiet flight.
Once though, that seat wasn’t available so I took an aisle seat further forward next to, as luck would have it, a tall and attractive young blonde. We struck up a conversation prior to takeoff, and she seemed perfectly at ease…until the takeoff roll began. At that point, she suddenly leaned over and wrapped both her arms around my left arm; held on to it tightly; and confessed that she was terrified of flying. She never let of my arm for the entire flight, which of course I didn’t mind, since, as I noted, she was kind of a dish, and she smelled nice to boot. The funny thing was that she also told me she was a member of her college skydiving club and had made 10 jumps. Go figure.
Mark, the Lazarus Long advice that has best served me over the years goes something like “If you have an argument with a woman and it turns out you are right…apologize immediately!”
Debbe 😉 I always thought the wind was crying “Debbe”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpkDdLZGg30
Oops, wrong link. Well, they’re both classic Hendrix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piSGhB4j5EE
The idea that God’s omniscience and omnipotence are inconsistent with each other is merely another version of the old question “Can God make a rock so huge that even He cannot lift it?”. In Mark 3:25 (I think) we read that a house divided cannot stand. In other words, it is pointless to ask if anything or anyone can beat/defeat itself. After all, can anyone beat him/herself at, say, checkers? Of course not! If one were to lose in that hypothetical game, one would also have won that same game since the same player played both sides.
The Almighty is surely omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He has chosen to give us the freedom to choose His way or the wrong way, and He does know which way each of us will select. Does He want us to choose the correct way? Yes. So why doesn’t His desire come true if he is omnipotent? God, as far as He has let us know, has two kinds of desires: the one, we would call a “command”, and that kind will be borne out no matter what. The other is what He desires, but which He has decided not to make a command, rather leaving it to our free wills. He apparently does not want us to be merely robots.
Aside from all that, I am terrified of flying and have not done so since 1967. I have seen a lot during my few trips, from (yes, attractive female) attendants changing skirts in the aisle (!) to fleets of ambulances waiting to see if we could actually land in KC early one stormy morning (we couldn’t). Even slid off a runway landing at Pittsburgh once….
Can’t decide whether to admit I developed a fear of flying after learning to fly from several of my flight instructor friends and wanting to get a commercial pilots license, only to learn the military program was restricted to males- boo again! Got hired to fly with Delta as a stewardess and didn’t show up for the training- boo to me, I guess!
Had flown thousands of miles, make that probably hundreds of thousands by the time I developed that fear, since began flying back and forth from South America to USA at age six on old, old DC-6 and prop planes. So why would I suddenly become afraid of flying? I once slept through a landing in Pittsburg and the landing gear had stuck, my seat mate woke me up to say we were changing planes, I asked why? He said, oh plane problem.
Walked down the ladder to find they’d lined up the emergency equipment and prepared for a crash landing!
Now I never want to fly. By the way, Ex-Professor, was your sliding off the runway in Pittsburg in the 1950’s and was there a cute blonde sitting/sleeping next to you?
Love, Jackie Monies
I love flying, but I’m unlikely to do it again. Because of my implanted defibrillator, I would have to either be scanned by one of the x-ray devices or go through a pat down. And if I ended up with the pat down by a male TSA agent, chances are I’d end up in jail for decking him if he touched me inappropriately. So, since I prefer driving myself to jail time, I won’t fly again until or unless they can guarantee no pat down.
Besides everything else, being frisked by anyone but an officer who has legally justified reasons to suspect I have committed or am about to commit a crime is a violation of the plain language of the 4th Amendment. It is not a price I’m willing to pay for the privilege of flying.
Ghost, I have to ask since I assume you were a commercial pilot, who’d you fly for? Do you still fly? Idol curiosity.
Love, Jackie Monies