Fiction and Fantasy: Not the same

I was looking for an entertaining read when I checked Turncoat by Jim Butcher out of the library and I got that much. I read it all the way through. It only felt tedious a few times but something was missing and I think I know what it was.

Turncoat is a work of fantasy. It takes place in a world like our own real world but the main character is a magic user and he operates among magic users and there are vampires and fairies and even a skin walker in his world. Butcher juggles all this very well but I think the fantasy ingredients get in the way of the characters. By necessity, the workings of magic and exotic creatures occupies the part of the book which a non-fantasy fiction writer could devote to building his characters. The outcome of this is characters which are not as three dimensional as I might wish.

This used to be fine by me. I inhaled science fiction and fantasy as a young person but at my age it no longer satisfies. There is an element of non-fiction in a book in which the events are fictional and that element is the behavior of the characters. A good fiction writer brings his cast to life in a way that is believable and even educational and often surprising. The twists and turns of the plot are great especially if the characters are interesting too.

I will continue to read fantasy and science fiction but I will be checking out the straight fiction writers as well.

Saturday 5/11/2013

 

Today I worked on a new garden pond. I didn’t write fish pond because plants and the water are more important than the fish.

I bought a 125 gal pond (holds 1000 pounds of water) and dug a hole to fit it. I was worried that at 70 years I couldn’t do the digging but I took rests and got it done though. I’m a bit sore in the shoulders. But my back held up and I have the energy left at 10:00 PM  to write this. I started yesterday and got the hole dug today and filled it with water.

I noticed a corner of the semi-rigid pond liner was lower than all the rest after I filled it with water. I will seek a solution and adjust the liner tomorrow’… or possibly never.

I will need gold fish to control the mosquito larva and make the pond more interesting. Also (I will need) lily pads and emergent water plants to finish the sense of a pond in my yard.

After it is done I will have my fourth backyard pond (you can do a lot in 70 years if you aren’t a vegetable).

A Heads Up from the Purple Mushrooms

 

Until a few days ago I had never collected or eaten a blewit (Clitocybe nuda) but I collected a few recently and brought them home to be eaten. I looked them up in the David Arora book and they matched the description he gives for blewits as well as the photographs.

Entire mushroom bluish purple

Cap bald, not sticky or slimy

Gills close together and attached to stalk

Stalk solid

Veil, ring, and volva absent

I put a piece of a cap on a white paper towel under a cover to check the spore print and proceeded to chop them up and dry sautéed them. I stored them in the refrigerator overnight and took them out the next morning and ate them on a bagel with goat cheese. They were pretty tasty.

After breakfast I remembered I hadn’t checked the spore print, expecting pale pinkish or cream spores, I found that the spores from my mushrooms were dark reddish brown even though the gills were pale lilac colored. They were not Blewits!

Realizing I had eaten an unknown species of mushroom I returned to Arora to find out if I had poisoned myself. There are several genera that contain violet species. The poisonous one is Inocybe lilacina which contains muscarine, Others include Cortinarius, Psilocybe and several more. Fortunately the Inocybe does not fit the description and sickness occurs within a few hours. I have no more specimens to identify with a key so I’m not sure what I ate.

I will be more careful in the future.

The CPR Way of Dying

 

An article in the Eugene Register Guard, August 31, 2012, headlined “Hopes are high for new cardiac resuscitation process” unwittingly provides insight into CPR and its successor, compression only CPR, that makes carrying a Do Not Resuscitate card an attractive option.

In the article a Eugene firefighter-medic, Josh Moore, tells us that “We’re used to seeing only 10 percent of our patients survive.” In an earlier part of the article he says that only 31% of the survivors escape brain damage after traditional CPR. He hopes the new CPR will raise this to 50%. In other words out of 100 people who experience cardiac arrest only 3 to 5 will survive without brain damage. Between 5 and 7 will live out their lives with some degree of impairment, possibly severe. Ninety will die. The odds are only 3 to 5 out of 100 that you will emerge intact from an attempt to save your life using CPR or its new improved replacement

The new process is horrendous. The “pit crew approach” described by Moore requires a team of 8 people. Four of the responders will take turns compressing “hard and fast” on the patient’s chest. Broken ribs are not uncommon although the article doesn’t mention this. Two more will push an airway tube down victim’s throat to assist breathing. Two others will administer drugs or fluids through an IV into the patient’s “humerus elbow or tibia shin bone.” You had better hope to be thoroughly unconscious when you undergo this procedure.

I have in my wallet a nifty little red card titled Physician’s Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) and that card says DO NOT RESUSCITATE and I sincerely hope that the rescuers look in my wallet before they try to “save” me.

Three Teachings of Lao Tzu in the Tao Tse Ching

Simplicity

Patience

Compassion

Prostate Screening Rip-off

The data is in and the scam is on. Prostate screening does more harm than good and the urologists are peddling the big lie. In all the media the “institutes of Urology” are sending the message that “prostate screening saves lives” but it just aint exactly so. Prostate screening ruins lives by causing men who would live normal life spans without medical intervention to become impotent and incontinent.They can’t get erections anymore and  they wet their pants for the rest of their lives. In addition they risk internal damage caused by radiation treatments and infection by antibiotic resistant bacteria during surgery.

The urologists pay for screening in part through donations from companies that benefit from the removal or radiation of prostate glands and the subsequent incontinence of the patient/victim. The maker of Depends adult diapers is one such contributor.

Various studies of the outcomes of prostate surgery indicate that between 18 and 49 men are made impotent and incontinent for every man whose life is saved by prostate surgery. Are you really willing to risk lifelong incontinence or impotence on a 1 to 50 chance of having a dangerous form of prostate cancer?

Patients who have undergone prostate surgery or radiation treatment are told by their doctors that their lives have been saved by the urologists’ intervention and they believe it. They are not told that the doctors themselves don’t know who has been saved from death due to prostate cancer. These pathetic men are used by the prostate profiteers to proselytize other men to undergo screening.

Cancer cells are present in the prostates of many men who live to old age. I had an uncle who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his sixties and died at the age of 94.

Otis W. Brawley is an American physician who is currently the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of the American Cancer Society. He has written a book, How We Do Harm, that documents the abuses of patients, health care providers, and the Medicare system perpetrated by money-crazed urologists. Any man who values his quality of life should read this book before getting another screening for prostate cancer.

There is a first rate article in The New York Times Magazine on this subject at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/magazine/can-cancer-ever-be-ignored.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine

An Eclipse of the Sun

Yesterday (20 May, 2012 about 1800 hrs.) there occurred a full annular eclipse of the sun.  In Florence there was a screen of high thin clouds that allowed viewing without a solar filter. I had my camera ready to photograph the full eclipse but just before it happened the clouds thickened and the chance was gone.

I downloaded a picture from Huffington Post that was similar to mine, the main difference being that the bright part of my view was at the top.