Daily life – Page 5 – Scripturient

Why Science Fiction Matters

In the past two years, we’ve watched all the Star Trek series (on Netflix) from start to finish, and all the ST movies (on DVD). We just started watching the Battlestar Galactica series on Blu-Ray this past week (which we had seen some years back, but with long gaps between seasons). Both of us love scifi. Although the first ST series was often more space opera than scifi (as the Star Wars series has been), it matured quickly into some complex, adult-oriented storytelling in the … click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, part 5

2020-07-30 2020-08-02 Daily life / Health & Medicine / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The resilience of the human body is truly amazing. Here I am, three weeks after major surgery, and much of my daily life is back to normal. I can drive, walk the dog, unpack the dishwasher, cook meals, pour the wine, feed the cats, walk upright… a far cry from my crabbed old-man style of a week or two ago. Not that I am fully recovered. I have several weeks or even months ahead of me for that. My incisions are still tender, in particular … click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 4

2020-07-25 2020-08-02 Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

A home is not a sterile environment. Not mine, anyway. With two cats, a dog, numerous houseplants, rooms full of books, and my sometimes lackadaisical attitude toward cleaning, our home will never be sterile. Not to mention the microbiome we all carry around with us: 100 trillion microbes live on or in each one of us: only 10% of the cells we carry around are our own. Most of these colonists are benign, but a few species are opportunistic and will invade our territories when … click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 3

2020-07-22 2020-08-02 Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The operating room was cold. Not merely cool: winter cold. In my thin hospital gown, I felt the chill and shivered a bit. The nurse told me it’s kept cold to help discourage bacteria from thriving. I wanted to ask her about this, to chat about bacteria and their lives. I’d been reading about microbiology and the microbiome a lot of late, so I’m curious. But this was not the place or time. I was helped onto the table, and a warm blanket wrapped over … click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 2

2020-07-19 2020-08-02 Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

There was an episode in the original Star Trek series called The Deadly Years in which Captain Kirk and some of his companions aged rapidly. At one point, the ship’s computer pegs Kirk’s age at between 60 and 72: he stumbles around clumsily, bent, shuffling, is forgetful, has anger issues on the edge of senility. He’s a caricature old man. Watching it recently, we laughed at the cartoonish portrayal of someone who could be a decade younger than we, yet behaved like he was much, … click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries Part 1

2020-07-12 2020-08-02 Daily life / Family history / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Stoicism & classical philosophyLeave a comment

I should have started this a while ago. Perhaps when I received the first news something as wrong. But it took a while to really sink in. And then it was upon me. Although this is personal, I wanted to share it, in the hope others might find it useful. There’s a psychological process called the Kübler-Ross model, or the Five Stages of Grief, which is often applied to cancer and other diseases, but at least for me, it didn’t work that way. Her stages … click below for more ↓

Shaving notes, again

2020-06-06 2020-06-06 Daily life / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

It’s been a while since I wrote about shaving, so I thought it was time to bring that story up to date. If you wish to read my previous posts on shaving, blades, and razors, you can do so here. Suffice to say, I gleefully returned to the art of shaving with a double-edged (DE) safety razor a couple of years back and spent some time (and money) trying different brands and styles of razor and blade. I can’t believe all those years I wasted … click below for more ↓

I’m Reading as Fast as I Can

2020-01-19 2020-01-22 Books & Reviews / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Reading & Literacy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I don’t recall just when I started putting books aside to read, or perhaps just finish, when I retired. I had this naive, romantic idea that upon retirement, at the age of 65 or thereabouts, I would be able to spend my time puttering around the house and garden, carting a bag of books from place to place, to living out my final years in the warm glow of reading and cups of tea. Books have long lives in my library. Putting one aside to … click below for more ↓

Dictionary vs Dictionary.com

2018-12-01 2018-12-01 Books & Reviews / Daily life / Internet & Social Media / Literature / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Reading & Literacy / Style & usage / TV / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymologyLeave a comment

Did you know that doxastic is a philosophical adjective relating to an individual’s beliefs? Or that doxorubicin was an antibiotic used in treating leukemia? Or that doxy is a 16th century word for mistress and prostitute? That drack is Australian slang for unattractive or dreary? Drabble means to make wet and dirty in muddy water? A downwarp is a broad depression in the earth’s surface? Drail is a weighted fish hook? Dragonnade means quartering troops on a population while dragonet is a small fish but … click below for more ↓

Imperialism and razors

2018-11-05 2018-11-05 Daily life / International politics / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

I’m looking at my recently-acquired, matte black, Weishi adjustable, TTO (Twist To Open, aka butterfly-head) razor. Quite attractive, smart even, and a solid heft in the hand. Chinese-made, Amazon-sold. I am still bemused by my ability to buy products – especially household items, things I use daily – from half a world away with a simple click. Especially when I can’t find any of those items locally (and, yes, I’ve looked…). Convenient, yes, but also a symbol of the new imperialism: the transnational corporate empires. … click below for more ↓

The sharp edge: razors and rituals

2018-10-26 2018-10-26 Daily life / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / PhilosophyLeave a comment

Since I switched to using a safety razor, as I wrote about last spring, I’ve continued to pursue my explorations into razors, blades, technologies and techniques about shaving. I’ve learned much, but still want more hands-on experience. Nothing teaches like hands-on. I followed up that post with another one on shaving, a month later, about what I’d learned since that first piece. Now, four months later, I come back to the topic with new discoveries to relate. And some new razors to describe. But let … click below for more ↓

The arts of politics and baking

2018-10-10 2018-10-10 Bread & Baking / Collingwood / Daily life / Election 2018 / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Prisig wrote about how dealing with the small things of daily life – like fixing his wayward motorcycle – could teach us about the world at large. A sort of microcosm-becomes-macrocosm perspective, with the vagarities of motorcycle repair to colour the learning. What we learn in one we can apply to the other. * Baking bread, too, offers a meta-window into other arts and crafts, in particular (for me), politics. Bakers and thinkers have oft … click below for more ↓

Abby the heartbreaker

2018-10-02 2018-10-02 Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / PetsLeave a comment

She was a small cat. At first we thought she might be not much older than six or eight months, but no, we were assured, she was fully grown. Just petite. Two kilos, maybe a hair more. Black with a little white patch on her chest. Big, expressive eyes. This was a dozen years ago, back when the humane society was in its infancy, and didn’t yet have a permanent shelter. Cats and dogs that couldn’t find homes or foster care were kenneled with willing … click below for more ↓

Shaving redux

2018-06-23 2018-06-24 Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

In mid-May, 2018, I published a post about my change in shaving technologies and techniques. I described why I thought it was a more environmentally friendly method, and somewhat of a homage to family tradition. Now I want to bring you up to date on my progress to date. Before I took the step back to the double-edged safety razors like my father used, I did (as is my wont) a lot of reading and research on websites and forums. Thankfully, there’s a lot of … click below for more ↓

The greening of shaving

2018-05-14 2018-06-24 Daily life / Environment / Family history / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & Disorder4 Comments

But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man. I recall those lines from a Beyond the Fringe sketch first released in 1964 (see below).* And so it was in my family: my brother was the hirsute Esau to my near-hairless Jacob. I didn’t need to shave until my late teens and even then it was iffy. That was in the late 1960s when sideburns and moustaches were the rage. By the time I could grow enough, everyone had gone … click below for more ↓