Hey, I’m still out here. Have been scarce lately since I’ve been putting all the energy I can spare into finishing The Everything Machine, my big drumlins novel. I’m at 108,000 words and just finished the first climax. There is another climax, a little wrapup, and then it’ll be done. I’m guessing 115,000 – 120,000 words or thereabouts, which is only a little longer than Dreamhealer, and certainly shorter than The Cunning Blood. Once it’s done I’m going to take a break and catch my creative breath before embarking on anything that ambitious again.
The Sun is getting feisty, and sometime last night emitted a Class X4.4 flare. I haven’t seen one that big in quite awhile. We’re heading for a (possibly early) sunspot peak, and Bob Zimmerman of Behind the Black lays out a chart of solar activity since 2008. Predictions of solar activity are fraught, as we really don’t know what the underlying mechanisms are. What I see in the chart is that predictions for Cycle 25 aren’t panning out. It won’t be a fizzle, as many said it would. It may not be a roar (like 1957-58) but the truth is we’re just going to have to wait and find out.
I’ve been on Facebook a lot less recently, mostly because it’s a bad use of my time compared to finishing a major novel. When I logged in yesterday, I found something truly bizarre: Some(one|thing) had tagged me not once but eight times, and for what? photos of mothers breastfeeding infants. Relatively modest ones, too. (The posts point to content on YouTube. I have not and will not follow those links.) It’s not porn, though I wouldn’t go so far as to claim a breastfeeding fetish is impossible. (No fetish is impossible.) The account names are all different, but all follow a similar pattern. Here’s the latest: “Funny Art 40306 OK” The pattern is two words, a 5-digit number, and “OK.” I’m pretty sure it’s a bot, though what it’s trying to accomplish is unclear.
This summer, Illinois will be ground zero for something rare and…peculiar: Two large broods of cicadas will emerge at the same time. Cicadas don’t bite, and the racket they make–hell, I grew up under the approach to the main runway at O’Hare Field. Cicadas got nuthin’ on Boeing 707s.
While an occasional dog will develop a taste for cicadas, their primary predator is the cicada killer wasp, Sphecius speciosus. The linked item explains how the wasps kill cicadas; I won’t summarize here because I just ate. But thereby hangs a tale:
Back in the two summers we lived in a suburb of Baltimore, we would see these big honking wasps doing search patterns up and down our driveway and across the lawn. I was new in the area and concerned that Mr. Byte & Chewy could get stung. I wasn’t about to catch one and look it up on google–wait a second, this was 1985. So having been raised on sitcoms like Green Acres, I did the obvious: I called the county agent. I described the wasps to the man, who replied in a bored sort of voice: "The wasps by your driveway are cicada killers–but don’t worry, they’re harmless." Carol had been worried about the dogs too, so I called her at the therapy office where she worked. She was with a patient, so I gave the good news to the receptionist. When Carol got home, she showed me the note that the receptionist took down in longhand over the phone: "The things by your driveway are psychotic killers, but don’t worry–they’re harmless."
And you wonder why texting is so damned popular!
No fetish is impossible.
“Rule 34 of the Internet: if you can think of it, there is porn of it.”