Shadow Shot Sunday at the Festival

These shots come from the Polish Festival...

BBC Book List Meme

BBC Book List Meme

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How many have you read?

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2. Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3. Italicize those you plan on reading

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (many times. A star for "Fellowship of the Ring," only.)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (many times)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams * (I've read all five books in this trilogy that were authored by DNA, many times)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole *
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My score: 22/100

Most of the ones I've read had been required reading for school.

Wednesday Weigh-In 20100908

I'm back to drinking coffee to stay alert. I guess I'm eating more for the same reason.

Waist = 37.75"
Height = 5' 9"

References:

1. Wikipedia BMI page
2. Tanita Scale with Body Fat monitor
3. Javascript must be enabled to view the data.

Notes on the Pain Chronicles

These are my personal notes from The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering, by Melanie Thernstrom....

"There are interesting differences in male and female opioid receptors. (The differences are also present in male and female rats.) There are three types of opioid receptors, most notably mu and kappa; most opioid drugs such as morphine target mu receptors. Few drugs that target kappa receptors have been developed, because early trials found them ineffective. The research, however, was conducted largely on men, and it turns out that women are more responsive to kappa-receptor drugs. One study of a rarely prescribed kappa-receptor analgesic (Nalbuphine) on postoperative pain in men and women ... found that the drug had the opposite effects on the two sexes, ameliorating female pain and exacerbating male pain." - page 175

Writing about a patient named George who scoffed at the idea of taking the anti-depressant Cymbalta, the author describes how he changed his mind when she told him that "antidepressants mitigate pain in rats as well as humans." She writes, "It had not been enough for him to be told that antidepressants effectively mitigate pain in humans, because he believed they worked in the wrong way. But to work for a rat -- that was really working." - page 223

"I used heat therapy with an ingenious product called ThermaCare [by Proctor and Gamble] -- pads that adhere to your neck or back that interact with the air in some way that makes them stay hot for hours." - page 253

Botox is used to paralyze neck muscles in order to relieve spasms that contribute to migraines. - page 256

Omneuron develops real-time functional neuroimaging. One application with fMRI is to help patients learn to lower activity in their rACC, "the part of the limbic system that gives pain its emotional valence. The pain of pain, as it were, is the way it's suffused with particular unpleasantness -- the sadness, anxiety, distress, and dislike that researchers refer to as dysphoria -- a reaction so fierce that you are instantly compelled to try to make the stimulus cease, not in five minutes, not in five seconds, now." - page 313, 316.


Further reading:
The War on Pain, a book by Dr. Scott Fishman

It's Hard Work Behaving as a Credible Patient, paper by Dr. Anne Werner & Dr. Kirsti Malterud, details "the ways in which women with chronic pain symptoms try to discern and comply with the hidden rules of the medical encounter in order to get the help they need. The women described struggling to present their pain in a way that others will feel is "just right": to make their symptoms "socially visible, real and physical" and to achieve "a subtle balance not to appear too strong or too weak, too healthy or too sick." - page 148 - 149

Little Bird

I wished for a ladder.


I crossed the parking lot and approached the building, a Chinese restaurant. I was astounded to find one.

So while my daughter and wife browsed inside the nearby consignment shop, I acted. That was the deal I made with myself -- if there were a ladder, I'd help, because I decided that this was test. To not act was to fail -- it was inhumane. So I set the ladder in place and climbed carefully.


There was not one bird but two stuck in the runny tar, next to a large ventilation unit. But only one bird, the one that I saw flapping from afar, was still alive and struggling.

I had hoped that just its leg was caught. But I was dismayed to find that its right wing was also stuck. I pried it off carefully and climbed down the ladder. Then I tried to figure out a way to hold it without getting my hands sticky as well. But instead I dropped it, and it fell onto the soft grass rather than fly away as I hoped it would.

Now what? I decided to find a heavily shaded area to let the bird rest in. I had water with me, too. So I set the bird down in the vegetation and placed a leaf full of water in front. Perhaps it could gather its strength and survive.


Back at home, I started to have nagging questions about the affair. Was the other bird its mate? Shouldn't I have kept them together? Was there a nest that I couldn't see behind the ventilation unit? The bird I "saved" probably won't survive with its wing disabled with grease or tar -- shouldn't I have taken it to a nature center? Why was the ladder in that spot anyway -- does this happen regularly? Are birds attracted by the grease in that area -- do they often get stuck and then have to get rescued by the restaurant workers? Should I have tried to contact someone at the restaurant?

Then I prayed that the bird would not suffer.

Shadow Shot Sunday Olive Oil

I was up late last night after turning off all the lights. I carried a flashlight so that I don't step on a sleeping pet. I forgot something in the kitchen and placed the flashlight on the counter. It created this shadow of the bottle of olive oil.

Wednesday Weigh-In 20100901

School's back in session, and so we are waking up before dawn again. The call to hibernate is getting stronger, as is the call to load up on carbohydrates.

Waist = 37.5"
Height = 5' 9"

References:

1. Wikipedia BMI page
2. Tanita Scale with Body Fat monitor
3. Javascript must be enabled to view the data.