The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny Crazy hectic day! In another twenty minutes, will fly out the door again for what I hope will be the day’s last event.
And so in brief I refer you to today’s rumination on the writing game.
godlmighty! i wake up on monday morning and when i go back to bed it’s friday night
Wow! I just finished studying and annotating 800 pages (yes, that’s eight hundred) of printed-out research material for the Boob Book! Wa-hooooo!
About 80 percent of it consists of abstracts or full texts of medical and genetic research studies; most of the rest is resource material published by various nonprofits. 😀 You’ll love this one:
Elmore, Joann G., Gary M. Longton, Patricia A. Carney, Berta M. Geller, Tracy Onega, Anna N. A. Tosteson, Heidi D. Nelson, Margaret S. Pepe, Kimberly H. Allison, Stuart J. Schnitt, Frances P. O’Malley, and Donald L. Weaver. “Diagnostic Concordance among Pathologists Interpreting Breast Biopsy Specimens.” Journal of the American Medical Association 313, vol. 11 (March 17, 2015): 1122-1132. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.1405. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2203798.
Hurry right out and buy it!
Now the next stage before I can begin the actual writing is to take that stack of index cards and sort them according to the topics in the book’s outline. That’ll take a few days, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
With an introduction in draft, all that’s left to do by way of building a prospectus to send to publishers and agents will be to write one solid chapter — any chapter — and one of the appendices, trick out the rough outline as a full-blown chapter outline, and distill that into the form of a proposed table of contents. And, of course, write the proposal itself, in the form of a cover letter.
In theory, I could get that done in two or three weeks…if I just didn’t have so goddamn much to have to do.
Tomorrow is gone — so is tonight, for that matter. Choir practice tonight; then out to Scottsdale at 7 a.m. tomorrow; from there grab some grocery items on the way back into town and then right back out the door to a mid-day birthday shebang kindly hosted by dear friends. That will blow the afternoon. The evening is already claimed by the Arizona Book Publishing Association, which is rising from the grave for a kind of alumni jamboree that I’ve pledged to attend.
Meanwhile, student papers are pouring in. The 235s had query letters due Monday and they have a substantial article due on Friday, and the same day the 102s will dump a mountain of 2500-word papers on us. Since those two 102 sections are full of good little doobies, several of them have already posted their papers. It would be good to start reading those, given that plowing through 100,000 words of student drivel is no small endeavor.
Honest to God. Whose idea WAS it to assign a 2500-word research paper to cohorts of students who have never written a sourced paper in their young lives?
Anyway, grades are not due until Friday morning. Most of the waking moments between 10 p.m. tomorrow and 11:30 a.m. Friday the 15th will be absorbed by reading that stuff.
And that means it’ll be 10 days before I can get back to doing my own thing. Even then, the time will not be my own: I have to build a summer course as soon as the spring sections end, and while I’m at it, I should build the fall sections, too.
So. In reality, make it three, maybe four weeks before I get any real work done on the Boob Book project.
Is there any question why I never get anything done?
🙄
OMG! Did you read this amazing, hilarious, BIZARRE story at Money Beagle? Kinda warms the cockles of your jaded little heart…
Beagle reminds us, in the preceding post, that 2015 is one-third over now and invites us to take stock. Ugh. I’m doomed. Not as doomed as I was at this time last year, when the money suck started in January and ran merrily through two quarters or more. But still. Doomed.
Retire by Forty reports, btw, that one of this year’s goals is to sock away 50 grand in tax-advantaged savings. Ah, to have a job. Ahhhhh to have a working spouse!
Oh well. Can’t complain much after reading Tara’s guest post at Len Penzo dot Com. Argha! Thirty-five grand for an accomplished, experienced young woman like her. WTF????????
Or, to put that in Old-Ladyese: what is this world coming to?
Mama Revanche holds forth on the myths of the landlord biz. It’s an interesting post with points well taken.
I love it when Financial Samurai has one of his data frenzies. He holds forth with élan in his latest post on the US middle class.
And along those lines, at My Journey to Millions, Evan asks what “average” means, anyway, when it comes to retirement savings.
LOL! Is it possible to say how much I’d love to have a $7,924 net income? Oh well. Although Planting Our Pennies broke even with dollars while I broke even with peanuts, our month-end balance is about the same. 😆
Over at I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail ruminates on what might be regarded as an “ideal” income. Readers add their opinions, some of which are very interesting, indeed.
Donna Freedman describes a financial strategy guaranteed to raise the hairs right off the head of the typical financial blogger. One size does not fit all…
And right now I need to get back to work on the Boob Book, and so…up, up and away!
Do you look like a young pup? Or is it time for a new set of make-up and some fresh dye in the coiffure?
Lo! You no longer have to gaze into the mirror and guess, or take the word of those who dare not offend. Run on over to Microsoft’s new tool and ask…
Monitor, Monitor, off the wall
Who’s the youngest of them all?
It not only will tell you how old it thinks you are, it’ll take a stab at your gender, too.
Now, to my mind it’s a brilliant invention: contemplating a face devoid of paint, the thing thinks I’m 17 years younger than I really am! That’s based on a photo snapped, on the fly, by PhotoBooth.
LOL! No wonder every medical factotum who demands that I regurgitate my birthdate (again!) coos “ohhhh, you don’t look that old!” phbhbtphbhbt!!
Fox News reporters, who apparently have little to do but manage to keep a sense of humor anyway, tested it on a bouquet of celebrities, several wax figures, and a pancake. Time, like all liberal media inclined to take itself more seriously, stodgily ran the portraits of ten presidents past it.
Result: the ages of US presidents are easier to parse than the ages of movie stars.
On the other hand…it’s a pretty sure guess that anyone residing and working in the White House is likely to age at the rate of two virtual years for every one solar year.
Try it out! You simply upload a photo to the CIA… a group of Russian hackers… the Koch brothers… Microsoft’s How-Old.net site and the program will render its opinion of your gender and your age. Over here, the techies responsible for these antics explain what they’re up to.
And at the Azure site, Microsoft techs express their awe at the number of people who have signed on to try it out, followed by a great deal of amusing user chatter.
Says one user:
Well. I’m 57. It guessed my most recent picture as 36. It also guessed the turtle tank I was standing next to as 4 and female. I’d say that’s typical for a Microsoft beta.
😆
The Susan G. Komen organization is surprisingly controversial – what’s to argue about raising consciousness of breast cancer and funding research? But interestingly, there are quite a few points of view about the group.
Some of the controversy is political. This fact came to the fore when a flap arose after Komen decided to de-fund Planned Parenthood, which was getting grants to provide breast cancer screening and consulting. In the ensuing uproar, Komen backed down.
However, questions about the group’s approach, methods, and success were on the float years before Komen’s leadership identified itself with the pro-life camp.
Probably the Komen’s most visible critics are Gayle Sulik and Barbara Ehrenreich. Sulik is a Ph.D. psychologist and sociologist, author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health, who writes regularly for Psychology Today, among others. And we all know who Barbara Ehrenreich is: Nickeled and Dimed, Bright-Sided, Fear of Falling, and many, many others.
As the controversy swirls, you hear some ridiculous things about the Komen group. For example, you’ve probably heard that less than 20% of its donated revenues go to breast cancer research – which happens, as a matter of fact, to be where funding needs to go. And who hasn’t received the chain email claiming the group’s CEO and founder, Nancy Brinker, cuts herself a check in the amount of $684,000 by way of annual salary?
These and similar claims are not altogether straightforward. For example, it may be true that in recent years breast cancer research has received only about 20% of Komen’s program expenses; however, most of its program expenses go to funding public education, providing screening and diagnostic procedures, and helping breast cancer victims to arrange treatment and home care. All of these are well within the group’s stated mission.
As for the apparently excessive salaries: in 2013, according Charity Navigator, Brinker’s salary was $560,896. The group’s president, Elizabeth Thompson, was paid $606,461 that year. While that may sound excessive to us peons, each executive’s pay amounted to 2/10 of a percent of total 2013 revenues.
However, critics do have some legitimate complaints beyond grousing about the the tyranny of false cheeriness, the pink sentimentality, and the infantalization of women. Sulik points out that Komen has become a self-perpetuating entity unto itself, highly profitable to its corporate sponsors, which benefit from soaring rates of questionably necessary testing, overtreatment, and unnecessary surgery.
Several aspects of what Sulik calls the “pink ribbon culture” get in the way of real progress:
• Scientific controversies that could sharpen medical practice and enhance research are evaded or dumbed-down for the public. This especially is true of questions about the survival benefits of mammography, the disease’s complex and diverse causes, and the fact that we have exactly zero sure ways to prevent or treat breast cancer.
• The profit motive casts a murky shadow over the group’s activities. Komen exists within a multi-BILLION dollar cancer industry that has many profit centers: pharmaceuticals, technology manufacturers, the medical industry, large breast cancer organizations, and sponsoring corporations.
• The “warrior” image and the cheery millions milling about for a cure do not reflect the reality of the breast cancer victims who don’t fit the Pink Ribbon image.
It must be said, obviously, that the group has accomplished some very positive things:
• Its vibrant publicity campaigns have raised a lot of money for research and for support of breast cancer patients.
• Millions of people worldwide have been motivated to take action.
Yet Komen is also haunted by a number of negatives:
• It marginalizes the stories of women who don’t fit the approved profile: stories that betray their tellers’ realism, cynicism, ongoing struggle, or death.
• It plays on clichés about how women should look, feel, and behave.
• It celebrates women’s breasts as the avatar of what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a sex partner.
• It engages an absurd “warrior” metaphor that has little real relevance to the cancer patient’s reality.
• It promotes cheerfulness and optimism where they do not apply.
• Its activities and partnerships redound to the profit of a wide variety of corporate interests.
• It overstates the benefits of screening. Over any ten-year period, for every 2000 women screened, ten will be subjected to unnecessary treatment and just one will have her life prolonged.
In fact, widespread screening did cause death rates to drop briefly for white women in the late 90s, but no change occurred for African American women. In the present century, there has been no change in the death rate from breast cancer, despite soaring numbers of biopsies, lumpectomies, and mastectomies. Breast cancer remains the second leading cause of death for women, after lung cancer.
What’s needed is not marches, not teddy bears, not even regular screening of every female on the planet. What’s needed is real, evidence-based research.
As we know, some of our honored elected leaders are working hard to cut back on much of that research. Congress is attempting to cut funding to the National Science Foundation, and we can see more of that kind of thing coming down the pike.
Whatever you think of Komen’s politics or of its “pink” theme, the fact remains it spends a large portion of your charitable dollar on endeavors other than research. While these services are worthy, many organizations all over the country provide the same services, and some do it better than Komen does.
So it’s worth knowing that you can donate directly to institutions that conduct basic and applied research on breast cancer. If you have X number of dollars that you’d like to direct to the cause of eradicating breast cancer, you might consider bypassing the middle-persons and sending your money straight to the researchers themselves.
Here’s a list of some of the best known cancer research institutions in the country. If you go to their websites, you can find ways to donate or to inquire about donating.
• Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
• Cancer Prevention Institute of California
• Johns Hopkins Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
• M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
• Mayo Clinic Cancer Center: Research
• National Breast Cancer Foundation
• Stanford School of Medicine Cancer Institute
• The James: Ohio State University
• University of California Los Angeles Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation
• University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center
• University of Michigan Health System Comprehensive Cancer Center
I can’t recommend what you should do, but it’s what I’m going to do.
🙂 Back on the diet means back to depriving myself of the Beloved Pasta, alas. This noon I wanted to finish off the last of the frozen scallops residing in the freezer, but because a workman was on his way I didn’t want to dirty up the kitchen or stink up the house with Eau de Fishie.
As I gazed into the depths of the freezer, it occurred to me that I could substitute spinach for the salad greens in the late, great, hopelessly dietetic Saint-Jacques à la Funny and come up with something that would at least give the illusion of more substance. Naturally, the preferred presentation would involve a mountain of spaghetti or noodles, but…well, some things are not to be.
And to keep the smell and the spattering butter out of the kitchen? Ah, there’s nothing like a propane grill.
Did you know you can cook in a pan atop a propane grill? You have to get used to the difference in heat intensity, which of course depends on the construction of your burners and their distance from the grills. But it’s a very easy conversion.
In fact, this whole meal was absurdly easy, and pretty darned good.
First: the spinach. Tear off a sheet of tinfoil and lay it flat upon the counter. Open the bag of frozen greens, if it’s not already open, and deposit as much as you please in the center of the tinfoil. Top with butter, cut into several small chunks. Sprinkle your flavoring du jour. Nutmeg is always nice on spinach. So is tarragon. Today I chose some powdered cumin.
Wrap the tinfoil tightly around the spinach, so it won’t leak.
Preheat the grill for a few minutes. Place the package of frozen spinach on the grill directly over a burner set on medium high heat.
Meanwhile, chop some garlic and a couple of tomatoes. Pour some wine. Defrost the scallops by letting them soak in some cold water. Drink some of the wine.
Go outside and flip the package of spinach over.
Come back inside. Remove the scallops from the water, spread them over a couple of paper towels, and dry well.
Place a chunk of butter in a small frying pan. Take the frying pan outdoors and place it on the grill. REMEMBER THAT YOU’LL NEED A HOT PAD TO TOUCH THE HANDLE!
Come back in. Drink some wine. Carry the chopped garlic outdoors and add it to the melting butter. Push the spinach package back off the very hottest part of the grill, so it will stay warm but not scorch while the scallops cook.
When the butter starts to bubble, add the scallops to the frying pan. Stir. Add a pinch or two or three of dried tarragon, to taste.
Allow the scallops to cook through, without overcooking (this does not take long). If desired, add a little wine to the scallops about the time they appear to be done. If not desired, drink some more wine.
Bring the chopped tomatoes out and add them to the just-about-cooked scallops. Stir briefly.
While the tomatoes cook, bring the spinach inside. Unwrap it and place it on a plate. Bring the pan inside and spread the scallops and tomatoes over the spinach. Top with some Parmesan.
Pour more wine and decamp to the table.
