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Realized today that hummingbirds love chilled nectar, plus, of course, known for a while they also love fermented nectar. Not sure about hummingbird hangovers or brain freeze. Hah!? A story title: "Hummingbird Hangover Sunday."
Homemade nectar requires refrigeration so the reserve stock stays fresh, doesn't spoil.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Firefox ended XP support lately. Chrome done with XP, also. Explorer ended support long ago. Any browsers still support XP!? The other laptop, up-to-date and state of the art, enormous RAM and bus speed, etc. Hefty software. Concerns, though, about robustness of online security apps.
Microsoft's Windows 10 browser Edge and POP email client Direct not supported by Symantec-Norton products -- incomparable Internet security. Alas, Norton, too, no longer supports XP. I need robust and trustworthy security. Too many malwares besiege my laptop castles.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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My phones and Internet failed for four days, Friday through Monday. Tuesday I got them back---by pressing the reset button on my WiFi whatsit. Didn't think of it till Monday night, but, then, I was down with a cold most of that time as well.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I run Linux Mint. Has a simple yet powerful firewall, has fewer vulnerabilities for cyber attack than Windows and is supported by major anti-virus software companies. In five years of using this software I haven't once had a cyber intrusion; and I haven't installed any anti-virus software to date.
It also helps that my drives have DOD rated encryption and are backed up daily.
For browsing the web I use Vivaldi, despite its desire to update versions every week or two. Three essential plug-ins are also installed: HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and uBlock.
Have a look, it might be worth your while.
PS. All my confidential files are password protected by 64 character passwords utilising the extended character set.
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Software for my bread-and-butter work and more than a few hobby pastimes are unsupported for Linux, only Windows and, a few steps back and to the left, Apple.
No successful intrusions here yet, either, though they do try Ilium's walls.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Haven't been here a while No real reason for most of that time.
Anyway, I saw my first Spirit store over a week ago. Maybe over two weeks. Are the early or am I just forgetting when they show up exactly?
But I realized there is something else I should have been posting. Back in the second to last week of June I had my early check up. Blood work worried the doctor because it said I was way down on red blood cells hemoglobin and one other thing I keep forgetting. I was told to get a blood transfusion. I felt fine, they kept thinking I should be tired but I wasn't. Appetite okay, no blood in my urine etc. A second blood test showed my white blood cells were all okay. I had a camera down me and up me. They showed nothing. I swallowed a video pill, carried a recorder for that for 8 hours, and that showed nothing. My wife thought I should take two iron pills since one didn't seem to be doing anything. A third blood test two weeks ago showed those three items were all up significantly. Red blood cells were within range now. One doctor thinks I may be having problems absorbing iron since two pills seem to be solving the low counts. Evidently I will have another test in a few months to see if things are still going up.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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Low mean platelet volume (MPV) is also a sign of low vitamin D, high cholesterol, and high blood calcium levels, each due to low sunlight exposure. One sure sign of the condition is hives-like skin spots, especially on the back, chest, and thighs' flesh.
I am borderline anemic, too, take iron supplements as well as B12, and others. My metabolism cycles seasonally due to low wintertime sunlight exposure. Lately, though, have realized the greater, multiple benefits of a twenty-minute one-mile walk in t-shirt and shorts: sunlight, low impact exercise, cardio stability, improved digestion, low-distraction meditation. MPV, D, cholesterol, and calcium back into healthy ranges.
Wintertime? Huh, have to show skin to the sunlight at least ten percent for twenty minutes per day every day! ---- Best wishes for safe sanctuaries to all under hurricane Florence's pall.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Sunshine: God's antiseptic; and worker of other little miracles. Vitamin D aids in the uptake of calcium, however it needs sunlight to undertake that function. Not sure why. If you're taking vitamin D tablets they are ineffective without a walk in the sun.
This places some Muslim women and others who practice full body coverage at significant risk of osteoporosis.
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Human skin exposed to healthy sunlight doses manufactures or refines a complex set of metabolic essentials, several hundreds, actually. D supplements by their selves do not provide an adequate nor complete nutritional supply.
Few other animals need sunlight as much as humans do. What? Skin like photovoltaic cells? Like plant photosynthesis? Catalytic retorts? Uniquely human epidermal synthesis -- maybe elephants, swine, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, furless marine mammals, too?
Magnesium is also essential for osteoporosis and kidney stone mitigation and for several hundred metabolic processes. Water softener treatments strip natural magnesium from water, though, and iron and calcium and other minerals. No coincidence the kidney stone belt coincides to treated ground water well regions.
Odd that Inuits' whale blubber diet provides many otherwise unavailable nutrients, maybe not. Whale flesh simulates oceanic mineral proportions, as does human blood. Use iodized sea salt for trace mineral supplements.
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Spent my life staying out of the sun as much as possible. Long-term night-shift worker. And whenever I mow my lawn, I smear my skin with the heaviest highest-SPF sun screen I can find.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Also not a sun-lover. My daughter says it's my Celtic blood.
I used to joke to people that I experience SADD (seasonal affective disorder depression) on a bright sunny day, but then I learned that it really is a thing.
I really love overcast and cloudy days are much more beautiful to me than sunny ones.
Melanoma risks versus vitamin D deficiency - which to choose? how to balance?
Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Low mean platelet volume (MPV) is also a sign of low vitamin D, high cholesterol, and high blood calcium levels, each due to low sunlight exposure. One sure sign of the condition is hives-like skin spots, especially on the back, chest, and thighs' flesh.
I am borderline anemic, too, take iron supplements as well as B12, and others. My metabolism cycles seasonally due to low wintertime sunlight exposure. Lately, though, have realized the greater, multiple benefits of a twenty-minute one-mile walk in t-shirt and shorts: sunlight, low impact exercise, cardio stability, improved digestion, low-distraction meditation. MPV, D, cholesterol, and calcium back into healthy ranges.
Wintertime? Huh, have to show skin to the sunlight at least ten percent for twenty minutes per day every day! ---- Best wishes for safe sanctuaries to all under hurricane Florence's pall.
Hmm, I have had high cholesterol but the last couple of years it has gone down. I have no idea about my Vit D levels. My blood calcium could be up, I am not sure if they checked that even though I could look. More sun. Hmm, I do excise but inside. Plenty of sunshine here the last few months-as every year at this time-and I am out in it for portions of the day. Some days more.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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Are we all willing to admit that one attraction of the writing life is that it keeps us out of direct sunlight?
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I'll admit to moderate sunlight aversion, social aversion in general, though no taste for blood and idle aristocracy's penchants for subjugation.
Might a new fantasy revenant persona compass the type?
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Sunlight aversion? Ha! Apart from an aggregate of about 12 years in offices, I've spent 48 years out in the weather: rain, hail, shine and occasionally, snow. That's what gives me a skin tone like a baby's bottom. If I was an armadillo, that is.
Social aversion? I'm a committed misanthropist. But I'm not averse to engaging in some subjugation of the masses tho.
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Just got off my sabbatical and did the exact opposite. Two months of sun, lakes, camping, hiking, climbing, horseback riding in the back woods, visiting places not many get too.
The only disappointment, coming back and reading all those stories and manuscripts I left behind with fresh eyes and saying, "uggg, what was I thinking?"
But besides that, a few times along the hikes/climbs I just had to stop, mesmerized by the amazing quiet. You never really realizes how much your brain filters ambient noise until you reach the real, "Quiet." It's deafening.
So yes, right with you GOG, balanced the scales. I'm sun-kissed, bug-bit, windblown, waterlogged, and half-starved, but it was an adventure.
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Out in the wild for two months and not a problem
Come back to the city and I catch a bad flu, break a toe, power steering fluid leak on my car, freon is out in my central air, and a swarm fly infestation.
It's a topsy-turvy world we live in my friends. The scales seem to be always balancing.
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The city is the wilderness from this perspective -- out in the wild. How missed are the hinterlands of in with Nature, especially the desert maritimes.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Stress, also, is known to induce immune deficiencies and poor physical responses to environment navigation. Basically, stress makes you clumsy and accident prone.
Survival stress is an inbuilt property of homo sapiens, social stress is another matter entirely.
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Notified .55 BTC deposited to my BitCoin wallet, which I don't have, never did, won't. Exchange rate worth $3,500. Nope, a falsehood designed to elicit an active response and create a contact for exploitation from a scam and con mill based out of Rostov, Russia.
A new variant of the Nigerian royalty inheritance confidence scam.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Scammers abound everywhere. Here in Australia they're called banks,financial institutions, financial planners, commercial superannuation (pension fund) in fact anything and everything in the financial sector. We no longer have bank robberies because all the crooks work in them now.
We do have Financial Regulators, but according to the Royal Commission now in progress, they aren't up with to snuff by a long shot. Seems the call for gaol time for these people is going to become deafening.
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I keep getting the ransomware link on certain sites. I take the browser down and that's that. Annoying but tolerable.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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If a kin group comprises a self-constituted nation, and a self of one is the kin group, a, or the, leader anyway, all the cosmos is adversary and competition and subjected to megalomaniacal masculist combativeness, exploitation, and predation.
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Just wanted to say that I am doing NaNoWriMo this year. A fantasy, that I actually wrote three fourths of five years ago. It needed a rewrite because of what I had learned since and I needed to finish it. So I am redoing it-starting from scratch.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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thank goodness thanksgiving is over I only wish Christmas and new years was over too. Holidays are to darn expensive.
Posts: 634 | Registered: Jun 2010
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Not if you don't have friends. I've assiduously avoided that entanglement for years. Fending off would be 'friendship suitors' is tedious, but worth the effort.
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My holiday and occasion gift strategy is thoughtful, situation-suited shopmade, handmade artware, otherwise, my grateful presence is present enough.
The most popular artisan-appeal ware I craft is a decorative peck-sized barrel, 5 inches diameter, seven inches height, with reversible lid, for dry storage and display. Made from construction lumber, white pine, two and a quarter barrels per two-by-four by eight feet stud, and a few hours of mesmerized joy from the crafting ritual. Even recipients', who anticipate one, faces light up from the joys of shared appreciations.
I carry little truck for the material commodification and thoughtless falsehoods of celebratory occasions.
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"Material commodification and thoughtless falsehoods of celebratory occasions." Metonymy figure: "Reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes."
And autonomasia: "Substituting a descriptive phrase for a proper name, or substituting a proper name for a quality associated with it." Substitution rather than allusive reference the distinction between metonymy and autonomasia, though both above: substitution and allusion.
And equals periphrasis: "The substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a proper name (a species of circumlocution); or, conversely, the use of a proper name as a shorthand to stand for qualities associated with it." Intended circumlocution the substantive distinction between autonomasia and periphrasis.
And euphemismus: "Substituting a more favorable for a pejorative or socially delicate term." A strategy for periphrasis' circumlocution design.
And congeries: "Piling up words of differing meaning but for a similar emotional effect." Latin term for synathroesmus: "The conglomeration of many words and expressions either with similar meaning (= synonymia) or not (= congeries)." The Latin, though, emphasizes emotional effect; the Greek figure does not.
Attribution because licensed for citation fair use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Prose poetic equipment illustration here the intent, not an assignment or instruction nor correction.
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Listen, I'm a Sagittarius, all this circumlocution stuff (outside of literature) gives me hives. Also, I was raised by a blame-fixated obsessive-compulsive, so I always like to be sure the proper entity is being yelled at, accused, whatever-the-bleep.
Point is, I love the holidays, which to me represent abstract ideas, and while their over-commercialization and whatall is irritating, it's also purely a thing of people-so just don't celebrate the holidays with people like that, and you're good.
I get what you're saying though. Dern capitalism.
Posts: 226 | Registered: Oct 2018
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Artful circumlocution, everyday speech, formal register or whatever, or prose, is also an extended ellipsis figure, not, per se, the punctuation mark thereof: "Omission of a word or short phrase easily understood in context." (Ibid.) Circumlocution-ellipsis emphasis upon extended "easily understood in context" for an extended rhetorical intent.
Thoughtless falsehoods of festive holiday origins give me fevers. Christmas' genuine origin is a bountiful social event ritual celebrated in advance of winter's deprivations, usurped by lies. Too few of the genuine occasions anymore to do much other than grateful feral grins and bears it, for me, or celebrate winter's onset alone and extend best wishes for safe and pleasant occasions to all and to all a merry winter.
My natal chart depicts Taurus-Gemini and Aquarius Sun and Moon signs, Venus-Pisces, Mars-Libra, Jupiter-Leo, and Saturn-Aires planetary signs, a double stellium, irregular six-sided star, lopsided all over the chart. Little wonder I am given a dysfunctional life-tourist life, or preferable, the heavens reflect my birth and Nature validated by a celestial portrait of a late-term, fecund birth. Never mind subsequent dysfunctional social environment and self-adjustment force influences.
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Dysfunctional? I have looked into the very fires of Hell and have not been afraid. I am doomed to complete a task set for me that I do not yet understand. I only know this: I have confronted the minions of the Lord of the Morning Light that walk among us and I have prevailed. Not won, simply survived.
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Anyway, all I want for Christmas is a job and a backrub from a certain web-slinger.
And a full set of Neon Genesis Evangelion DVDs. Actually, I'd settle for them just releasing the series on Blu Ray in the US for a decent price and buy it myself with money from the previously asked for job.
Also, for them to start calling the Infinity Gems Infinity Gems, like how they actually are.
Posts: 226 | Registered: Oct 2018
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At the least, at last, I know the task to which I am summoned, and chosen to accept, and strategies for its prosecution. Soon, maybe, the recurrent nightmares would subside.
Providence forbid! -- those night dreams are motivation and prose creation blossoms.
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Been awhile since I have been here. Got into such a habit of not coming I am finding a bit hard to break said habit.
Anyway, I have another novel that needs revising-I did Nanowrimo again this year-but this one is a redo of a fantasy I started over five years ago and never finished. Now it is finished. What I call A good old fashion classic fantasy. Now to finish a story for a certain contest deadlined this month-actually I think there are two of them.
Been writing a ton of short stories since the last time and Indie published a book and have three others ready but they need covers. Actually one is a set of five short stories. I need a pic of a Marshal's badge for that one. Old star style. Not so easy to find. That is a badge that is in good shape and doesn't have Tombstone on it. (Sigh)
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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You know who I love (apart from Tom Holland)?
Neil Gaiman. And also Ian McShane.
I'm watching the American Gods TV series. It's delightlyfully Gaimany, and Ian McShane is awesome as Mr. Wednesday.
Posts: 226 | Registered: Oct 2018
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A bicycle ride share enterprise started hereabouts called Lime. Lime green with lemon yellow trim bicycles appeared all over town, migrate by demand and destination. Three-speed, headlamp and taillight, smart phone matrix barcode scanner, GPS locator-tracker, bicycle lock, hub generator, debit card registered account pay per minute of use. Barcode scanned starts a metered run, unlocks the lock. Relocked ends a ride share episode.
The facet of the bike ride share that puts me off most is the GPS tracker, if I signed up and availed myself of the service, would track my use. Not that I'm up to any wicked designs, that the data is documented and ripe for privacy abuses. Plus, heck and libel, a cyclist's labors power the apps and such for the company. Involuntary-volitional indentured servitude at the beck and call of an exploitive business!? Bill me to work -- no way.
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Damn medication. This time around, apart from channelling Jamie Oliver, I've got the cleaning bug: I just cleaned under the fridge, for Pete's sake.
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ugg, hollywood is doing another version of little women. I swear they are stuck on repeat. Common people, give us something fresh and original! It feels like their not even trying anymore.
And get this, GRR martin finally puts out his *700* page prehistory fire and blood, all the while fans are clamoring for winds of winter, and its not a single! He just let everyone know there is a second volume to be made. Come on Martin you just wrote seven hundred pages, leave it be. He's going to be just like Rowling and screw up his own series.
Also, ever notice martin has a thing for brother-sister incest combos. Just finished nightflyers and it ends on a brother-sister hook up. Yes I know it's in our history, but it is kind of weird how he tries to put a positive spin on it.
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I think they need to make a live-action version of Titan A.E. That was such an awesome film. I would say they should just cast the voice actors for the roles (especially Matt Damon as Cale), but many of them are too old now. Who to replace Matt Damon and Drew Barrimore hmmmm....
Posts: 226 | Registered: Oct 2018
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George Railroad Martin wrote many fine things that had great influence on my own work---but I've never read "Game of Thrones" and doubt if I ever will.
If he wants to write another volume, he should write it---if he doesn't he should say so---and if he still wants to write he should write something else.
If he's blocked he should also say so.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Hollywood suffers nutritious content starvation, malnourished anyway. Due to a gorge diet and over consumption of self-comfort and self-soothe melodrama. Compared to the obesity epidemic, Hollywood only knows anymore too much melodrama easy appeal and industrial food complex advocacy for empty-nutrition fat and carbohydrate-rich foodstuffs and melodrama-rich media content self-comforts' soothes.
You are what you live, are what you eat, are what you view and hear, are what you read, are what you consume, are what you create.
Existential identity crises' slights and stings want self-comfort content soothes. Melodramatic motion pictures are that crisis alpha-world escape self-treatment, self-medication of any easy comfort and soothe means. Dysfunction.
Transcendence self-adjustments realize a self's identity and emotional security derives through a dual metastable social integration process; one, respectful, responsible, critical, conscious contribution to and participation in care given to the common good; two, likewise, respectful, etc., care given to the self, so that the self is able to give care to the common good, and inseparably every which-a-way vice versa social integration care given.
Artists are a breed apart from mainstream conformity, writer artists especially, who do our craft more or less isolated from society, responsive to social alienation's brutal exclusions. Reintegration entails meaningful, enduring creativity of a broad social appeal, which gives care to many and sundry and a self's social nourishment. Nurture and Nature, not Nature or Nurture.
Satire of the Menippean type fits the wise drama diet, targets the vices and follies of corrupt social-culture institutional forces. Pluralist Menippean satire especially, which allows life's lively vigor takes all kinds to raise a village, to hunt a mammoth, to dismantle or strengthen republican representative democracy, to shape nutritious drama. Like this post is Menippean satire.
Postmodernism, though, challenges and questions presupposed notions of moral propriety, pursues immediate, convenient, effortless self-gratification at the expense of self-discipline. This means that much of mainstream society wants to be entertained at no effort. Not enough nutritious entertainers anymore, if ever there were; certainly, too many wants to be entertained audiences' any way, every way loose, easy melodrama appeal wants.
Plus, what passes for wise entertainment nutrition anymore, for much of human time, really, is unwise, is melodrama's effortless malnutrition. Therefore, melodrama emulations are an all too common and easy, effortless gratification temptation and too little else to set nutritious appeal examples.
The Sophists of ancient Greece believed self-gratification is wise and near to the gods' graces. Cynics believed self-responsible, self-disciple, self-denial, self-deprivation, self-governance, and self-reliance for the common good are wise and nearest to the gods' graces. Stoics pushed into utter masochistic self-denial for the gods graces.
Modern-day philosophic beliefs are without such godly metaphysical guidance, per Friedrich Nietzsche's 1882 "God is dead" assertion, means the power of humankind's godly manipulations no more oppress the masses; philosophic beliefs absent altogether, except megalomaniacal self-promotion and wealth and power obtainment at all costs, any means to an end, at others' proportionate brutal losses and expenses -- zero sum scenarios.
Humanist, secular Pluralists believe non-zero sum scenarios are nearest to society's most necessary and respected social graces. Not win-win games and reward tokens and trifles, here today, already gone yesterday: meaningful and enduring social gains for all and sundry, all the while the self's responsible security gains, too. The hardest of which challenge is realization that status, power, and money are stale, lonely ashes beside the meaningful and enduring self-rewards of responsible self-discipline for the self's and the common good's graces, and responsible occasion for conscientious self-indulgence at times.
Not keep to "your" natural station and bear it a too heavy burden that wants frequent self-comfort soothes; rather, from thy present place do the genuine great social works, irrespective of how minuscule or capitalist material object, tiny step by tiny step, ad astra per aspera, to the stars by the hard way, which is the most productive way forth, for the common good's glory and the self's, and from that reap identity and emotional security rewards, no matter how humble and modest or otherwise.
A third-eye gander at G.R.R. Martin shows he is what he writes, what he lives, what he consumes: understated opulence apparel, urban camouflage from himself, heavyset from too frequent immediate, effortless self-gratification and indulgence. He is a poster icon of melodrama.
Obesity is a disease and epidemic, pandemic of insecurity and too frequent immediate, effortless self-gratification over-indulgences, and food, drug, and alcohol, wagering, combative contention, sex, etc., melodrama, toxic addictions -- signs of insecurity.
Writers are the court jester social-moral conscience of the human realm, of old and before, story spinners, bards and troubadours, and playwrights, too.
Melodrama we artists can manage through our arts' satire appeals. Bucked up and knuckled down, genuine drama satires composed. Hollywood and mainstream society are nutritious-content starved for those. All that yet another Hollywood remake of Little Women actually means -- starved. Nourish the Gorgon beast. Beware the monster's shiny eyes and many poison serpent tangles; those are lively flesh to rigid stone statue to gravel, dust, and ashes makers.
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Twas the night before Christmas and all thorough the treehouse not a creature was stirring, not even a . . .someone? Anyone? What the bleedin' heck rhymes with treehouse?
Phil.
PS. It's already the 25th here in the Land of Oz. We get in early.
Cheers and best wishes.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Sep 2012
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Leigh spouse Bee louse Ghee souse Key mouse Pea grouse Tea blouse Free douse -hard E | -ouse
A rhyme dictionary to all and to all a raucous Public Domain day. After a twenty-one-year public domain entry hiatus, January 1st, 2019, all copyrights registered for 1923 first publication and maintained lapse en masse. A next harvest reaps each successive New Year's day annually, for the duration forward: 1924's intellectual properties, 1 January 2020, etc. Another milestone expires 2073, works by creators deceased seventy years since the 2003 Copyright Act passed join the public property domain annually.
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