I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Even if you don't usually read book reviews, if you or anyone you love gardens (or eats meat), read this.

Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health: This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which you've probably heard most about in its guise of mad cow disease, is a disease that literally eats holes in the brains of its victims, killing them in a terrible fashion. We know how it spreads: it spreads through cannibalism and through eating animals that have been made into cannibals by modern food production techniques. It gets into the brain and starts converting normal proteins into agents of death, like Vonnegut's ice-9 converting regular water into an unmelting solid, through a process that may be the same as crystallization (which you might have done in high school chemistry, turning a supersaturated solution into a solid by dropping a seed crystal into the liquid). The agents that cause TSE's spread are virtually impervious to heat, radiation, formaldehyde, years of isolation, and freezing. And, even with the example of Britain, which ignored the problem for years until the infection was firmly established – and at what level, we still don't know, because infections began in the early 1980s and the incubation time can be 2-3 decades – America is taking the same ostrich-like stance, refusing to fund testing and even preventing ranchers from testing in some circumstances. Rhodes tells the medical detective story, starting with the epidemic of kuru among New Guinea cannibals in the 1950s and 1960s through modern understandings of TSEs, and along the way delivers a powerful indictment of government unwillingness to act in the face of a profitable production mechanism. I'll leave you with a bit of advice you may want to pass along, a quote from the book:

"You know the bone meal that people use on their roses?" Gajdusek asked me then. "It's made from downer cattle [cattle that sicken and die for no apparent reason, which sometimes are infected with TSE]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose."
The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully. "Do you use bone meal on your roses?"
I told him I did.
He nodded. "I wouldn't if I were you."

( other nonfiction )

So, hypothetically, if a person were to be interested in trying this vidding stuff, and she possessed the following: (1) Apple iBook running OS X.2, (2) CD-R/DVD drive, and (3) ready cash – what else would she need? Specifically, what software to get video and what to manipulate it? What lists/journals should she be on/following?

And now, some special-interest books.( Read more... )

First, the archived version of Five Things That Never Happened to Lex Luthor, now with one less spelling error. Then, a few books, three autobiographical and one definitely not.

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Greetings, sportsfans. In an attempt to distract myself from more pressing concerns, I present some books of interest. Authors covered: Sarah Andrews, Maxx Barry, Michael Bronski, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jim Butcher, Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Handler, Dan Savage, and Don Winslow.

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I’m also 60 pages in to John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy, picked because I wanted to read about a nobler endeavor, and I’m really enjoying it. Those beautiful, complex, rounded British sentences – I love them, and the subject matter is fascinating. Ooh, and for bedside reading I have a SV novel with Lex on the cover. I’m not exactly a hard sell in matters touching Lex, and it was half off at the Strand (as was the Jim Butcher novel).

In other news, I took the “which Supreme Court Justice are you?” quiz at selectsmart, and got Ginsburg & Breyer before Souter, which shows how much the quizmaker knows. The questions weren’t really designed to sort as between Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter, or between O’Connor and Kennedy, or between Scalia and Thomas. The questions were also infelicitously worded: “Do you support racial gerrymandering?” Um, yeah, I think voting districts ought to be drawn so that minorities have a good chance at proportional representation in the legislature; what about you?

More Martha soon. And then more slash.