Gloria in excelsis deo!

Listen and sing along.

Fourth Sunday in Advent



You heavens above, rain down righteousness;
let the clouds shower it down.
Let the earth open wide,
let salvation spring up,
let righteousness grow with it;
I, the LORD, have created it.

Isaiah 45:8. Listen here.

Y'all, it is such a hardship to live here.

After a stormy Friday, temperatures are expected to plummet during the weekend.

Bay News 9 is forecasting temperatures that will reach a high in the mid- to upper 60s today. The low will drop into the lower 50s .

On Sunday, the high will only reach the upper 50s. Lows will drop to the brisk low 40s.

Monday morning will be the coldest day, with lows in the upper 30s. Highs will be in the low 60s.

A chance for patchy frost is possible. Freeze warnings could be possible for areas to the north.

Weather System to Send Shivers Into Polk

Highs will plummet into the 60s and upper 50s! Oh noes!

Pale horse, pale rider.

UNC student dies from reported H1N1 complications

Chapel Hill, N.C. — A University of North Carolina student, who friends said was battling complications from the H1N1 virus, died Wednesday evening, according to UNC Hospitals and a Facebook post made by her father.

Freshman Lillian Chason had been in critical condition at UNC Hospitals for weeks. Friends said she started feeling bad before Thanksgiving and went into the hospital on Nov. 20.

...

"I think all of us are really shocked and completely devastated. We were so full of hope the past few weeks," UNC freshman Laura Page said.

...

"I can't even comprehend it," she said. "It was so sudden and so soon, and we didn't even have a chance to say goodbye."

How inexpressibly sad.

Third Sunday in Advent



The angel Gabriel from heaven came,
With wings as drifted snow, with eyes as flame:
"All hail to thee, O lowly maiden Mary,
Most highly favored lady." Gloria!

"For know a blessed mother thou shalt be,
All generations laud and honor thee;
Thy son shall be Emmanuel, by seers foretold,
Most highly favored lady." Gloria!

Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head;
"To me be as it pleaseth God," she said.
"My soul shall laud and magnify God’s holy name."
Most highly favored lady. Gloria!

Of her, Emmanuel, the Christ, was born
In Bethlehem all on a Christmas morn,
And Christian folk through-out the world will ever say:
"Most highly favored lady." Gloria!

-Basque carol. Listen here.

Second Sunday in Advent



Christmas time's a coming
Christmas time's a coming
Christmas time's a coming
And I know I'm going home

Snowflakes a falling
My old home's a calling
Tall pines a humming
Christmas time's a coming

Holly's in the windows
Home's where the wind blows
Can't walk for running
Christmas time's a coming

Candlelight's a burning
My old heart's a yearning
Tall pines a humming
Christmas time's a coming

Can't you hear them bells ringing, bringing
Joy to all - hear them singing
When it's snowing I'll be going
Back to my country home

Bluegrass tune.

So F and the bf left about 30 minutes ago. She's to call when she gets home - it's about an hour and 15 minute drive. They are in separate vehicles. Don't care for her driving by herself at night like that but she's all grown up. Yeah.

Had a good day. The tree is decorated and looks very nice. Some of the more serious ornaments didn't get used so it's kind of a light-hearted tree this year.

We listened to some Brian Setzer Christmas music and ate beef stew. I sent some home with F also. (The beef was very tender and good; I marinated it for an hour before browning it and starting it stewing.) And F brought a card game called "Apples to Apples", which the four of us played. It was a lot of fun.

It's raining, and the temperature is finally dropping just a bit. Maybe you want sleeves when you go outside, although if you are active at all you won't want them.

Our town had its Christmas parade last night. I brought a lawn chair to work on Wednesday, and Kristina put it out on Thursday morning with her family's chairs on a sidewalk lining the parade route. This town is so backward that you can actually do that, and your chairs will be sitting there waiting for you when you leave work and go to watch the parade. Places like Memphis are way too sophisticated for that - anything that isn't nailed down disappears before you can turn around.

It was a very pleasant evening for parade-watching. Floats, marching bands, etc. Next to me sat a dad with his little girl on his lap. He'd bought her a gun that shoots bubbles (lots of vendors with shiny schlock before the parade; I had some cotton candy) and she shot bubbles at everybody who walked by. Just calmly hosed them like she was Al Capone with a machine gun. Hilarious.

Tomorrow F is supposed to come over, maybe with the bf, and decorate the tree we've had up for a week. She doesn't think she will attempt to have one at her apartment, because her young cats are still in their destructive stage. We'll have beef stew, which I'll need to start in the AM, and I'll serve it on the Christmas china that I've had since before she was born. This will be nice, b/c it's been a really stressful week at work - I asked R on Wednesday to get me some rum so I could have a rum-and-coke - I was so tense I thought I would fly into bits. I think things are going to be OK now - I think. But we'll have a nice weekend, regardless.

First Sunday in Advent



But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner's fire.

- Malachi 3:2. Listen here.

It has been an interesting weekend for the science community. Also for anyone who thought that scientists were egoless, emotionless seekers after knowledge like Mr. Spock.

For anyone who hasn't been keeping up, here is an overview of the climate change controversy, with lots of links.

Anyone who asserts something, especially something that is to be used to make major changes in the economic structures of nations worldwide, needs to be prepared to back up what he's saying. The allegations of outright data manipulation, destruction of data subject to FOI requests, incredibly sloppy documentation of methods of calculating and using data, and exclusions of contrary papers from peer-reviewed journals are disappointing to me but not surprising. The contemptuous rhetoric from climate change proponents toward skeptics ran up a big flag for me. I never mind having my data questioned, ever. Am always ready to take a second look, recalculate, rerun, let someone else have a look, whatever. Especially when my results seem to show a problem in the plant - it's a lot easier to fix an analytical error than a problem with production, even though my pride would be hurt if I found that I had screwed up.

Another red flag was the tight relationship betw. climate change scientists and politicians. I never like to see that. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is a political activist. That's fine, but when you engage that way then you give up the status of being an impartial and objective investigator. And yet he's considered to be a leading scientist on the subject of climate change.

Another flag was the unbelievable disconnect between Al Gore's crusade to fix global warming, for which he got a Nobel Prize for pete's sake, and his total lack of leadership in demonstrating responsible energy use. If he truly believed the things he's been saying, why isn't he showing us how to maintain a sustainable lifestyle? Instead of buying carbon credits through companies in which he has a financial stake, and pretending that that does anything.

Finally, another flag was the steady reporting of data problems documented on the excellent site Watts Up With That. To pick just one example - urban heat islands. Temperatures in urban areas are always higher than rural areas. And within urban areas, you can't put a temperature sensor on an asphalt roof next to an air conditioning unit, and expect to get a meaningful result. This is common sense, is it not?

So anyway, it's been fascinating to watch this unfold. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Note to Cat:

When you ask to go out the front door
and I get up and open the door
and you walk out and around to the back of the house and come in the pet door
and ask to go out the front door
and I get up and open the door
and you walk out and around to the back of the house and come in the pet door
and ask to go out the front door
and I get up and open the door
and you walk out and around to the back of the house and come in the pet door
and ask to go out the front door...

...that must be a very pleasant and fun game in catland, but for humans over the age of 4 years or so, it gets old.

Ran across this yesterday.



At first I didn't know what I thought about it. It is not the usual thing. While the arrangement is very true to Gershwin's, the singers' style is different from the operatic style one is accustomed to. Smooth and bluesy and without a lot of emotional intensity. Also some ornaments that are very nice but again, not what one is used to. Maybe it's a bit jarring to hear the black English constructions like "I is" with a very non-black accent: for instance, "I" having the diphthong that people who talk that way don't put in there. ("Ieee", not what's usually written as "Ah" although that's not exactly right.) And the over-pronounced "r" in "Porgy".

But it's growing on me, definitely.

Here's a very nice, very sweet example of the usual thing, for comparison:



I suppose that the fact that these two very different expressions of this song each work so well shows the versatility and the - structural strength? - of Gershwin's work. Not a musicologist, don't know how to express this really.

Here is a thoughtful and interesting blog post. It's about what to do when people who you think should be on your side fail you - and who hasn't had that happen, on a national-politician scale, right on down to close family members - but also there is a list of ways to act when you've hurt someone's feelings through unthinking racism, sexism, whateverism. It's actually just a list of ways to act when you're having a conversation with someone whose experiences you don't share, starting with opening your ears and closing your mouth.

Frequently I read blogs written by people with whose politics I don't agree. I run across posts that have me rolling my eyes, of course, and I run across posts that cause me to think new thoughts, which is a major reason why I read those. I also run across posts that I think make excellent points, independently of any political content.

I think that in some ways white women make a bridge for privilege/non-privilege. Perhaps especially white women who were raised in the south and expected to be ladylike and not make waves. You can achieve, but you aren't supposed to make a big show or a spectacle of yourself. But in the workplace, achieving frequently isn't enough. You have to put yourself forward, even if it feels immodest or audacious or inappropriate or uncomfortable, and it's probably hard for certain segments of the population to understand that somebody could ever feel that way, let alone anticipate it, empathize, or know what to do about it.

I remember when we terminated the coworker I've written about before. He left a spot in the chemist rank, which we wanted to fill by promoting a black female technician named Libby. I'd worked with her while we were trying to save his job, and had discovered that she had chemist potential. Like most of our techs, she had a science degree, but more than that, she was very smart and curious and cared a lot about getting the job done right. But when I told Libby that the boss and I wanted her to apply for that job, she kept saying that she didn't want to do it. She didn't think she could do it, I thought, and I knew better. I kept encouraging her to put in for it, she kept not wanting to, and I finally told her - "you're doing the work, you might as well get the pay." That made sense, she applied, and we promoted her. (She turned out to be one of the most productive chemists we ever had, besides personality-wise being a pure delight to work with.)

All of the techs shared an office, sharing desks as people came and went on their shifts, but the chemists shared separate offices, two by two. The desk left by the man we terminated was in an office that he shared with another white male chemist, Randy. I told Libby to get her stuff and move into that desk, and once again, she held back. She would just stay with the techs - she would be more comfortable.

Now let me stop here and say that in a situation like this you have to be really almost a mind-reader. You can't bully people into leaving their comfort zone so far that they are stressed out and actually fail at what you're pushing them to do. On the other hand, some people have been trained to hold themselves back and if you care about them, you have to bust them out of that. One clue that I had was that Libby had told me that her mother had said she must major in education or social work - that "they" would never let her get anywhere with a degree in biology. She was surprised when we hired Libby on as a tech, and very surprised when we promoted her. "You be nice to those white folks," she told Libby, "they've been good to you." We aren't being nice, I told her, we promoted you because we thought you could do the job.

So I told her: "You have a chemist job. You get a chemist paycheck. You go to chemist meetings. You sit at a chemist desk. Get your stuff." She still didn't want to.

"Why not, for pete's sake?"

"Because Randy won't want me in there," she finally said.

"Why don't you think Randy will want you in there?" I asked.

Silence.

"Is it because Randy's white? You're prejudiced against Randy because he's white?"

"I'm not prejudiced!" Libby protested.

"Then get your stuff!"

So Libby moved into that office, and of course she and Randy got on like a house afire. He's a very nice person, easy to get along with. I wouldn't have put her in an office where anyone would have been ugly to her.

Was I bullying her? Probably. I don't know what to do in situations like that except to think with my head, and feel with my heart, and act, and hope for the best. And, as the writer of the linked blog post says, educate myself as much as possible as to how other people's experiences affect them, not expecting other people to be like me. Ignore the buzzwords that tell me I've left my comfort zone of political thought that I agree with, and have an open mind about stuff. It's not easy but you have to do it to be a righteous person, I reckon.

So what do we think about the new breast cancer screening guidelines?

I've had a few false positives. In 2005, when we were in Memphis, I had to get a diagnostic mammogram b/c the screen appeared to show "something" in both breasts. The report from the diagnostic mammogram + ultrasound was that there were "somethings" but that they were not cancer.

(BTW, there's normally a lot of stuff in there, so they do have to be read by experienced radiologists. And the tech told me that the reason women don't get mammograms before 40 is that the tissue typically isn't fatty enough to get a good picture before then. She said that mine hadn't turned to fat yet, but give them time, ha ha.)

The next year the screen was positive again, but this time when I went for the diagnostic, the radiologist said that she didn't see the need; she saw the stuff but it hadn't changed in the years I'd been having mammograms.

After we moved to Florida I delayed getting a mammogram, which was stupid given my mom's history of breast cancer, b/c I didn't want to deal with that again. I did have a screen last month, and of course, had to follow up with more views. Got the films from Memphis to compare but had to do it anyway. Once again, a clear report.

It's a pain in the butt (well, not the butt,) to have to repeat these things, but a screen needs to err on the false-positive side if it's to do any good at all. If the concern is that women are made anxious when they have a positive screen, then that concern is easily addressed if they are told at the time of the screening mammogram that X% have to get a second look, most of these don't turn up anything, so if it happens to be you, don't freak out. If the concern is that women are being irradiated and the data show that lives aren't being saved, that's probably a valid argument. If the concern is that it would save money to not do the mammograms, that ticks me off. And no one need argue with me that delaying mammograms until age 50 is only a guideline - it's a guideline today, a mandate tomorrow.

They don't start pap smears in the UK until age 25. Here, it's 21 or at onset of sexual activity, whichever is earlier. So is it that pap smears don't save the lives of young women under 25, or is it that the NHS can't afford to spend the money? Hello, government-run healthcare.