Technical Difficulties

1. There comes a point in every pro wrestling tag-team match where one of the Faces is in the ring alone with both Heels, getting the tar whaled out of him or her. That's what today is like, the Heel tag-team being Migraine and Fibro. I try not to give in to chronic pain (because once I start giving in, there's no good stopping point), but today I went back to bed.

2. Yesterday, I used 5calls.org to contact the relevant people about the Paris Climate Accord. I got voicemail at Senator Ron Johnson's office; talked to real people at Senator Tammy Baldwin and Congressman Mark Pocan's offices; and the EPA's voicemail box was full. I also used RESISTBOT to send this fax to Senator Johnson and Senator Baldwin:

Trump has already made the United States a global disgrace. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord will make us--rightly--a global pariah. Trump has already done so much damage. If impeachment is what it takes to stop him, then we have to impeach him NOW. Because he isn't waiting. Please protect your constituents, your country, and your planet. STOP TRUMP.

I know that I'm, on the one hand, preaching to the choir, and on the other hand, trying to teach a pig to sing. For Senator Baldwin, all I'm trying to do is give her data: I am one of her constituents and I am vehemently opposed to Trump. With Senator Johnson, honestly, the best I can hope for is that I annoy the pig.

3. I have NEVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE been as politically active as I am right now. I'm not actually happy about this.

4. The mayor of Austin, Texas, is made of awesome.

5. The Harriet Tubman Home is asking for donations so that they can participate in the bidding war for a newly discovered photograph of her.

1. For anyone looking for verisimilitude, below about fifteen degrees Fahrenheit is too cold to ride. (Below zero is too cold for ANYTHING.)

2. Our Formerly Feral Ninja was well taught by her Feralista Mama. On Saturday I found her with a dead mouse (!) in our bedroom (ZOMG!!!11!1!). She hadn't eaten it yet, thank goodness (because the only thing worse than a dead mouse is a dead regurgitated mouse, don't ask me how I know), but she was definitely giving me the fix my toy, biped look. I did not oblige her.

3. My dear friend and frequent enabler, heresluck, gave mirrorthaw and me Season One of Elementary this holiday season. It took us a little more than a week to watch the whole thing, plus the special features (this is why it's a good thing I don't like many TV shows, because I am the opposite of will-power). I liked it a bunch. I liked the games it was playing with the source material; I adored Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, and Aidan Quinn (and Jon Michael Hall also!, although his character is not in the slightest canonical). In some ways I liked it more than Sherlock, in some less. I may make a longer post about it at some point, but the thing I actually wanted to note here is not directly related to the show; it's something I noticed in the special features, something I knew but that it's good to be reminded of. It is very difficult to give an interesting answer to a general question. The actors and writers were getting thrown these slow underhand lobs over and over (you could tell by the answers they were giving), and it just didn't give them anything interesting to say (especially because they had to avoid spoilers). There was nothing they could hit out of the park. The set designer and the prop guy and the editor and the composer, on the other hand, who could talk about very specific details, were awesome. The composer actually demonstrated the way he puts music to a scene, which was very cool, but the best bit for me was the prop guy, who said, "Every prop has a ghost." By which he meant that, once you've established a prop, an object with which an actor interacts, it's a visual cue that tells its own part of the story without anything needing to be said. It was a tiny interview, but it was brilliant.

But nobody asked Jonny Lee Miller, in these tiny special feature interviews, specific questions about the choices he was making as an actor. Nobody asked the writers to talk specifically about how they wrote a particular episode, or how they decided what they were going to do with the bits of canon they chose to interpolate. (And there are some very interesting and specific questions that could be asked.) And so they couldn't really get beyond platitudes, like the platitudes Crash makes Nuke rehearse in Bull Durham. And it's worth remembering as a rule of thumb: to get interesting answers, you have to ask specific questions.

4. Things are better with my little Cthulhu machine. We tied the tentacles to the headboard with twine, and I can now roll over without encoiling myself. I still hate the fucker, but that's a different problem.

5. The present given me by 2013, like a cold dead squirrel on my pillow, is migraines! I now get migraines as part of my PMS package. Did you know, there is nothing cool about migraines at all? Nothing works on them except specific drugs, and those specific drugs can cause heart attacks and strokes by the inherent nature of what they are. (The first one I tried also made me so light-headed and woozy that I was no better off than I'd been with the migraine and its wicked little nail gun.) And mine last for days.

They aren't bad migraines. Even without the drugs, I'm not incapacitated. I'm not nauseated. The pain is, comparatively, not as bad as my menstrual cramps even now (and not even in the same league as the menstrual cramps I had in college, which routinely hit too serious for numbers).

But dear freaking Jesus is it annoying.