Categories
geology grad school writing

Emerging From Under My Rock

So, where have I been since Thanksgiving? The easy yet melodramatic answer is: in a black pit of horrible despair. Really, I just mean that I was working on an intensely awful end of semester group project, which I was having to spend over twenty hours a week on. With the other end of semester goings-on, it meant that I spent several weeks where I didn’t get to see my friends and barely got to see my husband while he was awake. There was other awful drama connected with it that I’d rather not go in to now; let’s just say that I’m glad I survived it without ending up in jail.

Thankfully, that’s all done with now! WOO! I survived my first semester of grad school. I have been assured by many friends that grad school is normally not quite this horrible, so I’m going to try not to worry too much about next semester.

The last thing I did in the semester was actually write a paper for sedimentary petrology. That was actually a lot of phone, particularly when compared to the soul-destroying awfulness of the group project. I enjoyed spending time with my thin sections, and it also means I’ve got a new round of photo micrographs to share! The ooid grainstone micrographs are cooler looking than the lithic arenite, though I think the diagenetic history of the lithic arenite is more interesting. But that’s because sandstones tend to be a diagenetic nightmare.
Lithic arenite photo micrographs
Ooid grainstone photo micrographs

Now that school’s done with until January, I’m hoping I can manage to get some writing done. I’ll also be in England from December 23-January 1, since Mike and I are going to see his family. There’s a lot to look forward to this vacation.

Other things:

I love my Senator. Mark Udall, I mean. Bennet, well, the best I can still say for him is that at least he isn’t Ken Buck.

Tron: Legacy was a fun movie. Don’t bother seeing it in 3D, in case you’re one of those people that actually likes the 3D thing. It’s great in 2D, and I have it on good authority that the 3D really doesn’t add anything. If you want something deep, it’s not the movie for you, but if you want lightcycles and Jeff Bridges being stoner!God, it’s a great time.

My parents gave me a Galaxy S as my early (and only) Christmas present. I am deeply in love with my amazing phone, and am greatly enjoying the fact that I no longer have the most pathetic phone out of all of my friends.

There is now a Jack’n’Grill by my house. We went there yesterday and the food is fantastic. It’s also huge. We didn’t realize until we got there that it was the home of the seven pound breakfast burrito once featured on Man vs. Food. The rest of the food is in keeping with that. You can’t get a burger that’s smaller than 10 ounces. But it’s 10 ounces of pure awesome, that’s for sure.

Yesterday Kat came up to hang out. During the afternoon we worked on some writerly stuff. The end result is that I sent out five query letters to agents. I am both excited and terrified about this. I hope the rejection callouses that I’ve built up over the last nine months with my short stories will help me in this process.

Categories
Uncategorized

My Next Bumper Sticker

Overheard at kung fu.

Shifu: “You’re assisting a face plant here. Some people plant roses. We plant faces.”

Categories
security

Senator Bennet’s Reply to My Concern About the TSA

Dear Rachael:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security procedures for airline passengers. I appreciate hearing from you.

I am committed to ensuring that TSA has the resources it needs to keep our airports secure. We face serious threats to our airport security and must ensure law enforcement has the tools it needs to do its job. With that said, we must not unnecessarily surrender our individual right to privacy.

As you may know, TSA was established under the Bush Administration as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act in 2001 as a response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. TSA is responsible for screening all passengers and all checked and carry-on baggage in all major U.S. airports in order to prevent another potential terrorist attack.

As part of TSA’s overall approach to improving the detection of explosives and non-metallic weapons at passenger screening checkpoints, it is currently exploring the use of whole-body imaging technologies for detecting concealed items carried by passengers. Whole-body imaging scanning devices offer an integrated approach to passenger screening insofar as these technologies can reveal concealed items carried on a person, including traditional metallic weapons, non-metallic weapons and explosive devices. TSA reports that all images captured by the scanners are deleted from any of its facilities or records immediately upon viewing and cannot be stored, exported, printed, or transmitted. Also, the officer assisting the passenger cannot view the image, and the officer viewing the image never sees the passenger.

In addition, TSA offers an alternative for passengers who prefer not to use the full-body scanners. The alternative procedure, a search by a TSA security officer of the same gender as the passenger, has caused public angst as some feel it is overly intrusive. According to TSA, these procedures have only been used on three percent of passengers. My office has been briefed by TSA on these procedures and we will continue to closely monitor how the agency responds to potential threats with a special eye towards the privacy rights of passengers.

It is my view that a cornerstone of training TSA officers must be comprehensive sensitivity training. Americans entrust medical professionals and law enforcement officers because they are trained professionals. We should be able to reach that same level of trust with airport security officials too.

If you would like to pass on concerns to TSA regarding your experience, you may submit written complaints at the checkpoint, which are referred to the airport’s Customer Service Manager for appropriate follow-up. You may also contact the TSA Contact Center by e-mailing TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov or calling 1-866-289-9673.

To help aid the TSA in investigating any matter, you can file a complaint and include the airport, date and time of travel, and any other pertinent information. For those with privacy concerns about whole-body imaging: please see http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/ait/privacy.shtm, or health concerns: http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/ait/safety.shtm. For general information, please visit: http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/screening_experience.shtm.

I value the input of fellow Coloradans in considering the wide variety of important issues and legislative initiatives that come before the Senate. I hope you will continue to inform me of your thoughts and concerns.

For more information about my priorities as a U.S. Senator, I invite you to visit my website at http://bennet.senate.gov/. Again, thank you for contacting me.

Sincerely,

Michael Bennet
United States Senator

So basically, I’m getting: “The naked scanners are okay because the pictures are deleted and the person who gets to look at them is in another room anyway, and those patdowns you all are whining about are only 3% of travelers anyway. So it’s no big deal. Suck it up.”

Thanks, Senator Bennet. It reminds me that voting for you was really just voting against Ken Buck for being a total misogynist nut. Glad to know that assaultive patdowns as a form of punishment for opting out of the creepy scanners are okay when it’s only a few people getting them. And that you think complete invasion and trauma can somehow be fixed by sensitivity training.

You know what? I’ll trust the TSA employees like I trust other professionals when you start training them and paying them like professionals. And you also seem to be under the mistaken impression that no medical or law enforcement professional has ever abused the public trust and it’s not something we should worry our pretty little heads about.

GRRRRR.

Categories
movie

The Expendables

Toward the end of this movie, there’s an odd scene that takes place in the passenger area of the Expendables’ ass-kicking cargo plane of doom, where the token black guy (Terry Crews) shows off his weapons to one of his fellow mercenaries. His final weapon is an extremely shiny straight razor with a handle made of transparent, neon-yellow plastic. The sight of that weapon literally made me say, “What the fuck?”

This is pretty much a metaphor for the entire movie experience.

I really wanted to like this movie. I really did. It had the hallmarks of the ridiculous but fun action flick. Kind of like The Scorpion King, a movie that I like in a sort of shame-filled way.

There was a good amount of fake, spraying blood. There was a gun that, at the beginning of the movie, literally tore someone in half and left the legs comically standing alone for a moment while the torso splattered against a wall. There were a dizzying array of knives (most of them wielded by Jason Statham’s character) which were apparently made with steel with such a strong anti-reality resonance that bone simply ceased to exist as soon as it contacted the blade.

But. But.

I don’t ask for a lot of plot out of my action movies. But I do like what little plot there is to be, I don’t know, coherent.

The Expendables feels less like a film and more like a series of loosely collected scenes that have been arranged randomly. And all of the dialog was drawn, half a line at a time, from a box. I think that some of the scenes were supposed to be character development. Instead, it normally amounted to two characters saying random things to each other for about three minutes, at which point the spraying blood and explosions would mercifully resume.

I wish I could give you a plot summary, but I really can’t. The best I can manage is that Stallone and his group are mercenaries. Except one of them burns out and goes crazy and tries to kill Stallone in the middle of the movie, after miraculously transporting himself to and from the tiny Latin American island hell hole where the Evil General lives. There is a douchey guy in a suit, who I initially guessed must be an American politician; I was close, he was an ex-FBI agent gone evil. There was the crazy general, who spent most of his time oscillating randomly between spanish and nonsensical English. He is sort of the pawn of the douchey suit guy, who wants him to grow drugs, or something, except nothing is getting done because the general’s soldiers keep kidnapping civilians and then not putting them to work in the plantations. There was the evil general’s daughter, who was Stallone’s love interest. There was Charisma Carpenter as Jason Statham’s girlfriend, causing a strange little sideplot where Mr. Statham beats the ever-loving shit out of a bunch of jerks on a basketball court.

The movie culminates in an orgy of gunfire, stabbing, and explosions, where the douchey suit guy shoots the general and then tries to kidnap his daughter for no apparent reason, despite the fact that earlier in the movie he was all for just killing her and having done with it. And I can’t even say the spraying bullets and blood were all that interesting, because on several occasions during the climactic action sequence the focus was jumping between three or four individual fight scenes with no logic or warning.

That’s also how the two major car chase scenes go as well. They actually become boring because it’s impossible to tell where the vehicles are relative to each other, and it’s really just an unnecessary pause in the bloodletting anyway.

The movie is an exercise in wasted potential. Jet Li appears in the film, but spends most of his time getting his ass handed to him by much taller white guys. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger appear in the movie for a combined total of five minutes and then, no doubt feeling the threat to their careers, never appear again. Mickey Rourke plays a tattoo artist who was presumably once a mercenary himself – he’s quite good at throwing knives – but spends most of his time trying to develop a character that is wholly uninvolved in the plot (such as it is) and has about as much depth and charm as Sarah Palin anyway.

The movie doesn’t so much end as drop in its tracks, exhausted by its own meaningless existence, with Statham making up a “poem” that had me trying to crawl between the couch cushions to escape it.

You will notice that at no point do I name any of the characters. This is because, over the course of the movie, I simply could not be bothered to learn them. The names, like the characters themselves, felt like an afterthought, a formality added to the mix to justify this as a movie rather than one hundred minutes of random people getting shot and stabbed and blown up.

Before it was over, I tried to convince myself that The Expendables was some sort of high-level satire of the action genre. What convinced me this couldn’t be possible was a scene in the middle of the movie where the general’s daughter is waterboarded by the douchey suit guy. That one scene in the midst of the ridiculous mess of a movie was disturbing and strong. And it also made me realize that, to a certain extent, the movie was meant seriously. Which somehow makes it worse.

We don’t ask much of our action movies, but this one fails on all counts. You’re better off watching nearly any other movie that any of these actors have been in. My personal recommendation would be Die Hard. Or, failing that, you’ll still get better quality story and acting from – and it pains me to say this – The Scorpion King.

Categories
security

Addendum to the TSA Post

Just a quick one, but I think this is very worth reading: TSA Enhanced Pat Downs: the Screener’s Point of View

The basic point is, some TSA employees are incredibly unhappy with this situation as well. Which I’m not surprised about; I don’t think most employees of the TSA are there because they get their jollies being jerks to travelers.

This doesn’t mean that I’m changing my opinion about the porno scanners or assaulting patdowns. If anything, I am angrier. In effect, the TSA’s rules have created a situation where both parties end up feeling violated, and have created a rapidly deteriorating atmosphere of hostility between screeners and travelers. How lovely. I’m sure that makes for some effective airport security.

And it’s great for pilots too, apparently.

So who exactly is this supposed to be helping? Other than the backscatter scanner manufacturer. Can’t forget about them.

Categories
Uncategorized

Adding Disqus

I’m not overly thrilled with how Blogger handles commenting (sadly, I think LJ does a much better job) so I’m giving Disqus a whirl. I’ve installed the widget now. So if it looks like all the comments on this blog have disappeared, it’s not that I hate you and want to censor you (please, just pick one), or that Loki took over everything this morning and decided that you are all a giant distraction that’s keeping me from paying enough attention to him. It’s that I’m still in the process of trying to import them over to Disqus. Just so you know.

Categories
security

TSA – "Total Sexual Assault"

The more I hear about the TSA porno scanners and their crotch-grabbing “enhanced pat downs,” the more nervous I am about flying out to England in December. Because you know what? I am not okay with a wage slave in a booth looking at a ghostly image of me in my altogether. I am not willing to just trust them when they say that all the images are immediately deleted. I am also not okay with a TSA agent touching my breasts or my lady bits. No one but me, my husband, or my doctor gets access to those. And for the record, I am likewise not okay with a TSA agent touching my husband’s junk. Period.

I got patted down once in Heathrow airport. It didn’t bother me. The security agent also assiduously avoided my naughty bits. And contrary to popular belief, I did not in fact blow up our flight home that year. Imagine that.

Making us take off our shoes and throw away our water bottles was already pointless security theater, trying to thwart specific attacks that had already been thwarted. This is a step beyond security theater. For most of us, this is an exceptionally creepy, upsetting invasion of privacy. For those who are survivors of sexual assault, it’s nothing short of inhumane.

I agree with Janiece. This is the point where we all tug our shirts straight and get some Captain in us. And by that, as she said, I mean Captain Picard:

We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back…Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far and no further!

I don’t know what the environment of the DIA security checkpoint is going to be like in December. I don’t know if they have the naked picture show installed there, or if they’ll be insisting on the grope fest if you look at them funny. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the giant, loud protest over this government-sanctioned assault will just get bigger and louder and it’ll all be fixed by the time I’m flying. But I’m not counting on it. I’m already planning to be at the airport several hours earlier than normal, in case I feel it necessary to make a scene. So if I’m absent for Pat’s amazing teeny sausages wrapped in bacon at Christmas this year, this little corner of the internet will know why.

I love Mike’s family, and I love our friends in Brighton, and I want to see them. But the price for that should not be letting a stranger stick their hand in my crotch.

If you need a little levity to get around all the sexual assault, here’s Next Animation’s take on the issue. I don’t recommend watching it while drinking anything.

Categories
writing

Coming Soon to an Internet Near You!

Exciting times! I’ve signed two contracts in the last week, so I’ll have two short stories in print (of the real or digital variety) soon!

Transportation has found a home with Anotherealm. I’ll know when it’ll be appearing around Christmas, when they put up their new lineup.

The Falling Star will be appearing in Aurora Wolf’s New Fairy Tales Anthology. I don’t have an exact date on that either, though the publisher wants the anthology in print before Christmas. I’ll post as soon as there’s a firm date or when the anthology is available for purchase.

The long-suffering Isaac has finished his second go-through of Throne of Nightmares so my goal is to give it one last polish and start querying agents before the new year. Wish me luck!

Categories
cats

Fuzzy Kittens Are Good (III): Go Fish Edition


Loki would like to know: Got any fours?

Categories
alternative medicine colorado pseudoscience whats the harm woo at cu

Woo at CU: The Everything Has a Price Edition

No fun name for this post, since it’s short and sweet. Stuart has the dirt over at his blog.

A friend of ours let us know that there’s an article about the magical “because ions makes it sound sciency!” wrist bands at the Sports Business Journal. Unfortunately, the article is hidden behinda paywall. But here’s the salient point, thanks to the magic of google caching:

The seven-figure deals were each negotiated through the two leading multimedia rights agencies in the college space, IMG College and Learfield Sports, which will give Power Force marketing and media rights at most of the nation’s top colleges.

Now, I’m going to guess that the seven-figure thing is probably a couple of deals to encompass all of the schools, rather than per school. But still, it’s a significant wad of cash involved, and that’s probably why we’re being told not to worry our pretty little heads about how it looks for a major research university to be promoting magical silicone bracelets that sell for something like $30. I guess infusing the material with all those “ions” is what cranks up the price.

Also?

On each of the campuses where Power Force made a deal, it will be recognized as the official supplier or preferred supplier of ion-infused products.

You know, I never realized how much it actually hurts to try to laugh and sob at the same time. Until now. Official supplier of ion-infused products indeed! What next, an official university supplier of magical fairy dust? An official university supplier of wishful thinking? Or maybe just an official supplier of unicorns that fart rainbows?

I would totally buy one of those, by the way. My car’s about to crap out, and I hear those babies get amazing fuel mileage and don’t pollute at all.