MY WRITING JOURNAL

Thursday, September 9

Populist Press

In his centenary year, Luis García Berlanga is receiving a renewed burst of attention at home. Why isn't he better known outside of Spain, asks Thomas Graham.

There's some debate over how it happened. It might have been after the screening of The Executioner, which satirised capital punishment in Spain, at the Venice Film Festival in September 1963 – or it might have been after Welcome, Mr Marshall! (1953) lampooned Spanish hopes for a slice of the US money destined to rebuild Europe after World War Two.

In any case, one of the ministers of Spain's then dictatorship reported the latest irritation from the director Luis García Berlanga with the words: "Of course, Berlanga is a communist." To which the dictator Francisco Franco replied, "No, he's something worse: he's a bad Spaniard."

This little anecdote delighted no one more than Berlanga himself. For the duration of the dictatorship, the director made films that were out of step with Spain's cultural mores and reverence for family, church and nation. Franco was right: Berlanga wasn't a communist.

If anything, he was an anarchist. But even that probably involved too much imposed discipline for someone who has a biography entitled, approximately: Welcome Mister Screw-Up: Chaotic Memories. READ MORE

Trust

Kenya: Ending FGM

IMAGE SOURCEGETTY IMAGES

John can barely remember a time when having sex with his wife did not end with her in tears.  It was just too painful because she had undergone female genital mutilation (FGM).  "Anytime I go to Martha, she recoils, curling like a child. She cries, begging me to leave her alone. She doesn't want to have sex any more," the 40-year-old says. John and Martha come from Kenya's Marakwet community in western Kenya.

Although FGM is illegal in Kenya, girls in their community often undergo FGM between the ages of 12 and 17, as a rite of passage in preparation for marriage.  Martha was cut when she was 15.

Sex as an endurance test
"It is painful when we have sex. I wish this practice would end," she says, adding that it had also made childbirth very difficult for her.  Recounting their first sexual experience, the couple describe it as traumatising.  Martha says she felt a lot of pain and it is not how she had imagined sex would be. She had to ask her husband to stop.

"I didn't realise a part of her [vulva] had been stitched, leaving only the urethra and a tiny vaginal opening," John tells the BBC. "I try to be very compassionate with my wife. I don't want her to feel like I don't respect her, yet we are a couple."

They lived in agony with little hope that things would ever change - not just for them, but they feared for their young daughter as well.  That was until John heard of an anti-FGM campaign meeting in his village, targeting men. READ MORE

Downside of IVIG Infusions

According to the Clieveland Clinic, prior to infusions of IVIF patients are usually pre-medicated with acetaminophen 650 to 1000 mg, diphenhydramine 50 mg. Acetaminophen is for headaches basically that this drug might cause and diphenhydramine is to prevent an allergic reaction or nausea. However, at UT Medical, I have decadron instead of diphenhydramine which is a steroid and in my body is much more powerful because every once in a while, it prevents me from falling asleep even though I take 2 benadryl at 6:00 pm.

Last night was especially important for sleep as I have back-to-back early days (awake at 5:30) since my second early wake-up call is for my monthly OPDIVO infusion.

Idiot or "no brainer me," has forgotten to swap out these two days or have IVIG on Fridays instead of Wednesdays because of the use of steroids so I will not have any problems falling asleep. Obviously, I have yet to make that swap because here it is 1:30 am and I am wide awake drinking coffee.

Once you start these monthly infusions, it is necessary for optimum affectiveness to have them every 4 weeks... and while that can be played with once or twice (in case of vacations), it is not something that the Oncologist likes to do. However, I have yet to exercise that option and once in a while my body makes me pay the price...

Water Spouts

Studied Law in Prison

In the US city of Philadelphia in 2018, one in 22 adults was on probation or parole. Among them was LaTonya Myers, who was facing almost a decade of supervision after a string of minor crimes. But a reforming district attorney, who started work the same year, has been reshaping the system - and LaTonya herself has become an activist for change.

LaTonya woke up in the night to the sound of thuds and yells. Her mother's boyfriend had been growing increasingly abusive and unstable, and now he was dragging their bed out of the apartment and into the passageway outside.

LaTonya crept out of bed and saw the boyfriend shouting and jabbing his finger at her mother's temple.

"I thought I could protect my mom," she says. She picked up an aerosol can and hit him with it. He went to a payphone and called the police.

"I thought that all I had to do was tell the truth and they would see that this man was abusing me and my mom," LaTonya says.

Instead, the police took her away in handcuffs and charged her with first-degree aggravated assault. She was 12 years old.

For three days she sat behind bars and cried the deep sobs of a child who doesn't know where her family is, or what is going to happen.

"I remember being asked for my social security number. I was 12, I didn't know my social security number!" she says.

Eventually she was taken to a juvenile court and given a choice by a lawyer: plead guilty and be released on probation, or go back to jail for another 10 days and fight the case in court.

All LaTonya wanted was to go home with her grandma, who was waiting outside. So she pleaded guilty without appreciating what becoming a convicted felon would mean.

"That experience turned my heart calloused and cold," she says. "It was a wayward life after that." READ MORE

Lips

Wednesday, September 8

Real News

Daffy Ducks

Wild Pigs and CO2

Wild Pigs Release as Much CO2 as More Than 1 Million Cars
They are like tractors plowing through fields.

Feral pigs have the same climate impact as 1.1 million cars, according to recent research.

Using modeling and mapping techniques, an international team of scientists predict that wild pigs are releasing 4.9 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year around the world when they uproot soil.1

One of the study’s authors, Christopher O'Bryan, is a postdoctoral research fellow of the University of Queensland. He tells Treehugger that feral pigs are prolific globally.

“Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are found on every continent except Antarctica but are native throughout most of Europe, Asia, and parts of northern Africa,” he says. “As such, they have been spread around the world by humans and are invasive species in Oceania, parts of Southeast Asia, parts of southern Africa, and North and South America.”

For the study, which was published in the journal Global Change Biology, researchers only looked at areas where wild pigs are invasive and not native. READ MORE

Exercising

Biscuit Taste Test

The cranberry sauce is cooked, the green bean casserole is bubbling and the roast turkey has taken center stage. Despite this Thanksgiving bounty, your plate may feel incomplete without a warm biscuit on it.

This soft, leavened quick bread is an essential in our book come the holidays, whether it’s drenched in rich gravy, stuffed with cheese or slathered in butter.

And luckily, there are a ton of canned biscuit options on the market that save you the hard work of making dough from scratch—but they aren’t created equal, so we set out to find the very best canned biscuits for every need.

To narrow down the list, we first rated the store-bought biscuits by their overall value, ingredients and ease of use.

Once we baked and tasted them, we then rated the biscuits on their texture, height, appearance (they should be light, fluffy and soft, but still toasty on the tops, because presentation is everything when you want your shortcut to stay a secret) and overall taste.

Read on for our favorite canned biscuits for every need, whether you’re a gluten-free baker or just looking for a bargain. READ MORE

Colors

Misokinesia

When somebody near you is fidgeting, it can be annoying. Distracting. Even excruciating. But why?

According to a new first-of-its-kind study, the stressful sensations triggered by seeing others fidget is an exceedingly common psychological phenomenon, affecting as many as one in three people.

Called misokinesia – meaning 'hatred of movements' – this strange phenomenon has been little studied by scientists, but has been noted in the research of a related condition, misophonia: a disorder where people become irritated upon hearing certain repetitious sounds.

Misokinesia is somewhat similar, but the triggers are generally more visual, rather than sound-related, researchers say.

"[Misokinesia] is defined as a strong negative affective or emotional response to the sight of someone else's small and repetitive movements, such as seeing someone mindlessly fidgeting with a hand or foot," a team of researchers, led by first author and psychology PhD student Sumeet Jaswal from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, explains in a new paper.

"Yet surprisingly, scientific research on the topic is lacking."

To improve our understanding, Jawal and fellow researchers conducted what they say is the "first in-depth scientific exploration" of misokinesia – and the results indicate that heightened sensitivity to fidgeting is something a large number of people have to deal with.

Across a series of experiments involving over 4,100 participants, the researchers measured the prevalence of misokinesia in a cohort of university students and people from the general population, assessing the impacts it had upon them, and exploring why the sensations might manifest. READ MORE

Ping Pong

Tuesday, September 7

Relaxing Bear

Cannibal TOADS

The cane toad (Rhinella marina) is an invasive species in Australia, where its tadpoles have become voracious cannibals. (Image credit: Jason Edwards via Getty Images)

The hatchlings of the invasive cane toad in Australia don't stand a chance against their deadliest predator: cannibal tadpoles who guzzle the hatchlings like they're at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But now, the hatchlings are fighting back.

They're developing faster, reducing the time that hungry tadpoles have to gobble them up, a new study finds.

"If cannibals are looking for you, the less time you can spend as an egg or hatchling, the better," said study lead researcher Jayna DeVore, who did the research as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and is now a biologist for the Tetiaroa Society, a nonprofit conservation organization in French Polynesia.

Developing quickly, however, has its pitfalls. Compared with typically growing hatchlings, those that grew faster fared worse when they reached the tadpole stage of life, the researchers found.

So it isn't "worth it to try to defend yourself in this way unless cannibals are definitely coming for you," DeVore told Live Science. READ MORE

Motorbikes

Star Eats Black Hole

It’s the first firm evidence of a rare cosmic phenomenon

Jets of energy explode from a star that has cannibalized its dead companion
in this artist’s illustration.

For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star.

In turn, that object gobbled the star’s core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.

The first hints of the gruesome event, described in the Sept. 3 Science, came from the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 enormous dishes in the New Mexican desert near Socorro.

During the observatory’s scans of the night sky in 2017, a burst of radio energy as bright as the brightest exploding star — or supernova — as seen from Earth appeared in a dwarf star–forming galaxy approximately 500 million light-years away.

“We thought, ‘Whoa, this is interesting,’” says Dillon Dong, an astronomer at Caltech.

He and his colleagues made follow-up observations of the galaxy using the VLA and one of the telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which sees in the same optical light as our eyes.

The Keck telescope caught a luminous outflow of material spewing in all directions at 3.2 million kilometers per hour from a central location, suggesting that an energetic explosion had occurred there in the past. READ MORE

The Model

A Solar Storm

A massive Internet outage can be caused by a massive solar storm today. The Indian scientist says global infrastructure is very vulnerable to, what she called, solar superstorms. Therefore, the world must prepare itself for a destructive solar storm that can knock out the Internet across the world.

A solar storm has a massive potential for destruction, especially when it comes to electronics and infrastructure. So, any big enough solar storm today, would have a catastrophic impact on the global infrastructure that keeps our Internet running. However, if the digital infra is destroyed, it will bring the Internet down along with it. An Internet outage in this modern era will not only cause massive money loss, it would also cost many lives.

The Internet is the backbone of everything that happens in the world today, but nothing carries a greater threat of a mass outage than solar storms. A big enough solar storm today, referred to as a 'solar superstorm', can threaten this very backbone. The world, as such, in unprepared for a solar storm-Internet linked apocalypse. This is in addition to having an impact on the electrical grids, which has already been documented in the case of past solar storms that were truly massive in nature.

Solar storm and the Internet: Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi starts her research paper with this sentence, "Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a recent black swan event.

However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure. We investigate the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe." READ MORE

Lions

Monday, September 6

Labor Day & Retired

I have been retired since 2015, so this is my SEVENTH Labor Day free from not having to work... so, Labor Day does not mean that much to me anymore, nor does having a long weekend...

Since being retired, my wife and I do not travel over holidays as there are too many crazy drivers on the road who like to drink and drive or smoke pot and drive, or sniff cocaine and drive... so, we drive when they are either back at work or in jail...

COVID slowed us down in most of our vacationing plans but after 5 years of retired life, we had pretty much reduced our need to go somewhere down to nothing, especially since we had been everywhere we really wanted to go, at least once, sometimes 3 times and had no desire at all to return.

When I was a school boy, Memorial Day Weekend opened the summer and Labor Day Weekend closed the summer but school years have changed because teachers wanted to get paid more by working more but there was no increase in knowledge acquired by our students... but, that is a problem for our politicians... I'm way beyond caring about that.

Labor Day is just another weekend for me and weekends are just like any other day of the week... as I measure the passage of time now by how many doctor visits do I have this week.

Now I know why so many people around the country are not going back to work because of increased unemployment benefits... it is nice to stay home and not have to go to work and be told what to do by some asshole.

Enjoy your day.... because when the benefits stop, you will return to work and I will continue to be retired....