murakozi | Reading

The bill passed the Commons 314-291 and now goes to the Lords, and I don't have a clue what happens there.

The bill is fairly simple in operation. If you have a terminal condition and six months to live, you have the right to end your life. Two doctors go before a three-person panel who must approve your application, and that seems to about it. The original legislation had the two doctors going before a judge, fears of further clogging up the judiciary had them change it to the panel. No information on how the panel is constituted.

Canada, Spain, New Zealand, most of Australia, and clinics in Switzerland support assisted dying, along with the USA states Oregon, Washington, and California.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/20/uk/uk-assisted-dying-commons-vote-gbr-intl

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/20/1354239/lawmakers-in-britain-narrowly-approve-bill-to-legalize-assisted-dying

disneydream06

austin_dern

Nigloland was closed.

Not just for the night. They would not open Monday, the day we had planned to visit. Nor Tuesday, the day we were leaving town. They would not be open again until next weekend, a time when we were scheduled to be out of the country of France altogether.

This threw our night for a loop.

So here are the mistakes we made. The first was forgetting just how late the European amusement park season starts. Even when we were in the Netherlands for our honeymoon, in early July, parks were still closing at 6 pm. This early in the year they haven't even gone to full-week operation. The first week of June they weren't even open outside weekends and holidays.

Holidays. This was the mistake we made. We knew they were open the following Monday, the day after Pentecost, because that's when every park in France was expecting to be slammed with people. This is why we changed our trip plans, moving a park from the Monday after the academic conference to the Monday before. We failed to think to check whether the parks would be open.

We had come close to this mistake before; our big Pennsylvania Parks Tour in 2013 originally saw us going to Waldemeer on a Monday when they were not open, but bunnyhugger caught her error the night or two before we set out and rescheduled the entire trip to avoid this. This time ... well, we didn't imagine anything was up until the night before our visit, and there was no rescheduling things to match. To do anything at all we'd have to rebook our plane flight from the following Monday morning and get a hotel room that we now realized would be much more expensive than we had gotten here.

My joke about the Walley World photo stopped being funny and we won't be doing that again.

It wasn't an easy night of sleep, as nice as the hotel bedroom was. But what was there to do?

Besides breakfast, I mean. We got down, late but not before the end of service and could have a petit dejeuner to ourselves. This would include the softest, runniest brie we've ever seen; it was more of a puddle than a cheese and I would not be disappointed if I ate that nonstop. Also crepes and what sure looked like locally-made jams, and an all-kinds-of-fruit juice (mostly grapefruit) which revealed to me that I really like grapefruit juices. So many pastries. More cheeses, too. Even champagne, though I didn't partake, for not much good reason. We ate a good-sized breakfast like we would every day of a trip that saw us both somehow losing weight.

After that, and with le Wi-Fi Password in hand, we went back to the room and I confirmed the sad news about Nigloland, just in case we had somehow fallen prey to an astounding hoax. I did a little Internet stuff on the balcony a bit, enjoying the air and the sunlight and tranquility and a couple people wandering into the Parc du Chateau garden around the hotel, and bunnyhugger searched to see what could possibly be done locally without a car. We couldn't even put together a picnic and go off to the river or something; there's no grocery stores in town, and only one bus that runs once a day to a town that has anything. Nor would we be able to eat dinner unless it were at that hotel, a place we had feared was too formal for the likes of us.

After an hour or so of that, though, I was hit by sleepiness, and decided to lie down for a nap. This turned into a two-hour nap and then I got up and went back to bed for another hour. And then got up and went to bed for another three hours while thinking, oh, I would have been an absolute zombie if I were walking around Nigloland all day. ... Well, maybe not; being out in the sun and doing things instead of sitting would keep me going, and coming home to fall asleep would be normal enough. But my did that show how we maybe should have planned on some recovery time after all our transit.

bunnyhugger slept too, not as much as me, unusually. It felt good to have done and I guess it left us well-prepared for the rest of our week six hours ahead of our home time.

With the Jackson County Fair sinking slowly into the past what could possibly come up next but ... oh, the Calhoun County Fair which, as you'll see, was quite different:

We got there late in the day so here's the Nuf Edils already in evening glow. Also the slide was in a different spot this year!

Advantage of getting there later is everything already had lights going, and visibly so.

The Nuf Edils makes a natural angle over the Haus.

Getting here a slightly better look at the fun haus because the art is ... not exactly folk, really, but it's got a fun vibe.

Center of the funhouse that's going pretty hard for the Fun Bavarian German vibe. Note the 'Outhaus' sign reading 'Ocupado'.

And finally, off to the left, the Biergarten hause with a bunch of fun-looking animals all over the place.

Trivia: In the early 18th century, shortly after the invention of champagne, the craze for it was such that a bottle might sell for up to 8 livres. At the time, all the wine drunk in a day by a great lord's household --- including 35 to 40 servants, some of whom had allowances of up to three bottles per day --- might cost only 6 livres. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

disneydream06

Why is this man not in jail???

Politics 1.37

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/the-big-idea-jane-mondrup/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56149

Sometimes when you look in the mirror, it can feel like you don’t even recognize yourself. This might be doubly true if you’re looking at a perfect copy of yourself that thinks you’re the copy, not them. Author Jane Mondrup brings us such a conundrum in her new novel, Zoi. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how evolution is just the beginning.

JANE MONDRUP:

An endosymbiosis involving humans and set in space—that is, in very few words, the big idea of my science fiction novel Zoi.

Symbiosis is a close relationship between two life forms, often (though not necessarily) to the degree of mutual dependency. Endosymbiosis is when one of those life forms gets integrated into the other, living inside it.

One very important endosymbiosis, which happened around two billion years ago, provided the conditions for the evolutionary jump from the simple life forms—the procaryotes (bacteria and archaea)—to the much more complex eucaryotic cell, of which we and our multi-cellular relatives are made. This is a whole little world in itself, full of internal structures and mobile elements, all with specific functions.

To furnish its lavish lifestyle, the eucaryotic cell needs energy—lots of energy—and that energy is provided by an organelle called the mitochondrion. And the really interesting thing is that this extremely important element didn’t develop inside the cell but was originally an independent organism; a small procaryote that somehow ended up inside a larger procaryote, managing to survive in there and become an integrated part of its host and all its descendants. These proto-mitochondrial lodgers were the kind who not only pay the rent and keep their room in order but start refurbishing the whole place, in this case developing a small hut into a veritable castle.

Not being a biologist, I heard about the origin of the mitochondrion on a podcast, the 2016 episode of Radiolab titled Cellmates, and found it endlessly fascinating. My subconscious started working on it, until it surfaced again in the shape of a dream vision of two identical women drifting apart. I knew it was a cell division, happening in space. Like proto-mitochondria, the women (originally one person) had become part of a larger organism and was now included in its procreation.

There was a story here, but what story exactly? And how could I tell it?

That’s often how a story begins for me, with a situation I either have to work from or get to. Making up what feels like a plausible background for this (usually quite strange) situation will send me in all kinds of interesting directions. In this case, I had to invent a creature fitting the picture, a cell-like, space-dwelling species that I decided to call zoi, based on the Greek word zoion (living being).

The zois, I figured, had not developed an immune defense, but the opposite. In space, life would be very rare. You wouldn’t have to defend yourself against parasitic intruders, and the chance encounters with other organisms would represent an evolutionary opportunity.

Whenever the zois came across another life form, they would invite it in, immediately discern its basic needs and start to accommodate them. Some needs would either be impossible or very costly to meet, and it would be more rational to solve the problem the other way around, helping the life forms it had engulfed with adapting to their new environment. Changing them.

This was the unsettling situation the woman (I named her Amira) was in—residing inside a living creature, experiencing changes to her body, and then starting to grow a double. It seemed very scary indeed, and my story could easily be a classic SF horror, ending in some terrible conclusion. But that wasn’t what interested me.

The horror elements were there, and I absolutely planned to harness them for emotional impact, but the horror ending didn’t fit my dream vision. The women in it had looked desperately sad. They obviously had a very close relationship which was now broken up. There was regret too, a hint of unsettled conflicts. But no enmity.

When a cell divides, the two resulting cells aren’t parent and offspring, but equally newborn. I saw the two Amiras in the same way, not as a human being with an inhuman clone, but a set of identical twins—one person becoming two. While the double grew, there was only one consciousness. Then, the two woke up with identical memories, both convinced of being the original. That would be a difficult situation, and very interesting to explore.

Amira would be part of a small crew of astronauts, the first to leave the solar system inside a zoi. They would know some but not all of the consequences, and they would react to them in different ways. The impact of these differences on their relationships to each other would be another backbone of the story.

Even before the cloning began, the astronauts were undergoing physical changes, starting with adaptation to the lack of gravity. In zero g, humans quickly start to lose bone and muscle mass, which is why astronauts on space stations have to do a lot of exercise. The zoi would recognize the deterioration as something that needed correction. This would be the first of many adjustments helping the mutual adaptation along.

Just like the bodily transitions and upheavals of a normal human life, such changes would have consequences for mood and physical well-being. This parallel allowed me to draw on concrete experiences with puberty, pregnancy, illness, menopause, and aging. These are all processes involving bodily reactions outside our control, influencing or even determining our thoughts and actions.

I have a lot of themes in Zoi, but they are all related to the big idea: becoming part of another life form, and what that would entail. My aim has been to write something both visionary and tangible, based in science but easily understandable, equally comprising ideas and emotions. If you find this essay concepts interesting, there’s a good probability that you will like the story. I hope you will read it.

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook|Bluesky

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/the-big-idea-jane-mondrup/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56149

disneydream06

Gay Trivia.....

Which country was the first to elect an
openly Lesbian Prime Minister?

A: Canada
B: United Kingdom
C: Iceland
D: Australia

( The Answer... )

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/were-seeing-art/

And it’s giving us a lot to think about.

Venice continues to be lovely and also at this moment rather warm and sweaty. After a morning of seeing art we’ve retreated back to the air conditioning of our hotel room. We’ll go back out again when we’re not so darn sticky.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/were-seeing-art/

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/when-life-looks-like-a-movie-set/

The little island town of Burano, which for all the world looks just like someone set designed the place. Cute tiny colorful homes set next to a canal? Check! You half expect Popeye to show up, singing a sea shanty. But it is, indeed, real. And apparently it’s against the law to change the house colors without permission. The things you learn.

We’re still on vacation. It’s still lovely.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/when-life-looks-like-a-movie-set/

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/the-big-idea-auston-habershaw/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56136

There’s magic to be found everywhere you look, even in a mall! At least, such is the case in author Auston Habershaw’s newest novel, If Wishes Were Retail. Come along in his Big Idea to see how this idea initially set up shop in his brain.

AUSTON HABERSHAW:

When I graduated from college, I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a novelist. I’d already written a novel during college (I will never inflict it upon anyone, I promise) and I figured, if I worked hard and focused on my goals, I’d be a professional author making a comfortable salary by the time I was 25.

I’ll pause here for your peals of laughter.

…

Done yet? No?

…(checks watch)…

Okay, okay—the point here is that I needed to get a job in order to pursue my dreams. For that period of time (my early-mid twenties), the idea was to get a job that wouldn’t occupy much of my attention so that I could focus the balance of my efforts towards writing. That’s how I wound up doing a lot of odd jobs and minimum wage gigs. I was a coffee barista, a restaurant server, a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a theme park performer (I dressed as a pirate), an SAT tutor, a hotel bellhop, and so on and so forth. I spent most of my time broke and barely able to pay rent and in the evenings I bashed my head against a keyboard until words came out and I published exactly nothing. I was exhausted, usually hungry, but still chasing that dream.

And that, right there, is where If Wishes Were Retail comes from. Everybody’s got a dream, right? And the world just gets in the way, you know? Money, opportunity, luck, health, family—the list of obstacles to “making it” are endless, or so it seems. Enter the genie.

I mean, everybody’s thought about it, right? If you could get 3 wishes, what would they be? We ask ourselves that, over and over, because just about no one is content with the state of their lives. There’s always some mountaintop we have yet to reach, and the only way we feel we’ll ever get there is, essentially, an act of God. A lottery ticket. A mysterious stranger, offering us a deal for our soul. A genie in a lamp. Rare, mythical things; unheard of strokes of fortune. We all recognize that is never going to happen to us. The world just doesn’t work that way.

But what if it did? Say we have a genie and he’s just there, you know? In public, doing his thing. Anyone can just walk up and make a wish. Now, of course, the genie has goals of his own and dreams he’d like to see realized, so he’s charging money for wishes. Cash. Walk up to him with a stack of twenties and plonk it down and BAM, you could have the life you’ve always wanted. What would you wish for? How much would you spend?

When preparing to write this book, I asked people I met those two questions. I would say “what if you could make a wish, but it cost money? What’s the wish? What would you pay?” This was a fascinating experiment. First off, a lot of people wouldn’t wish at all. They assumed the genie was malevolent and they wouldn’t get what they paid for. Second, people would make outrageously powerful wishes (World peace! A cure for all cancers! My own private moon!) and then offer some piddling sum, like ten bucks or something. “What’s it matter,” they’d say. “It doesn’t require any effort on the part of the genie! What does he care?” Everyone agreed, though, that the money—having to pay for a wish—sort of ruined the “magic” of it all. Money got in the way of their dreams.

I wanna repeat that last bit: money got in the way of their dreams. Ya THINK? Could, possibly, money and the way our economic system works interfere with people’s ability to achieve happiness and satisfaction in their lives? NO, SURELY NOT. Everyone, we live in capitalism, the fairest and most beautiful-est system ever, where the only thing that stands between you and complete material and spiritual satisfaction is hard work! Just work hard, and everything will work out! I have been informed by my lawyers that this is entirely 100% accurate with no loopholes or conditions whatsoever.

Hang on, someone is handing me a note…

…oh.

Oh no.

And, not only, does our capitalist system make it difficult to achieve our dreams, it also just so happens that we, fallible mortal creatures that we are, are incorrect about what we want! We wish for stupid, selfish things! We seek self-destructive ends! So, like, even assuming you manage to run the gauntlet of 21st century late-stage capitalism to somehow, maybe hack your way to the top of the artisanal bagel shop market only to realize you hate it and are miserable anyway. And that, friends, is a super-common problem that not even a genie can fix! How’s the genie supposed to know that you would hate being a fashion mogul? And even if he knew, would you listen to him if he told you?

I wrote this book to reflect upon the ways in which our grind-mentality, sleep-when-you’re-dead, coffee-is-for-closers culture has led us astray. Our society has created essentially infinite obstacles in an unending labyrinth that we have been told leads to happiness and fulfillment and we expend such massive amounts of energy seeking these things only to miss sight of all the things we could have that are right in front of us. It’s tragic sometimes, but it’s also funny and absurd and just, like, life you know? What are you gonna do, not be human?

Anyway, I wrote a book about this. It’s funny and it has a genie in a failing mall seen from the point of view of a teenager with big dreams, just like I was. Just like maybe you were or even are. Here’s hoping it’s exactly what you want and exactly what you’re willing to pay.

If Wishes Were Retail: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Facebook

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/the-big-idea-auston-habershaw/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56136

thewayne

Scammers have found an interesting trick via Google ads, and thus far it only seems to work with them, no other online ad company. They buy an ad, for example, for Microsoft.com, that says 'Call us toll free at 805-xxx-xxxx' and it pops up as a banner at the top of the page!

So you're browsing for whatever, and this page pops up and the URL looks completely legit, and there's a phone number just below the top of the page, do you trust it?

Well, looks like these days you shouldn't.

Might want to spread the word, and article, to your more gullible friends and older relations.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/tech-support-scammers-inject-malicious-phone-numbers-into-big-name-websites/

thewayne

The European Union, on top of France's recruiting efforts, is investing €500 million to lure displaced/disaffected American scientists to the other side of the pond. France has a head-start, having begun their program pretty much as soon as the Ketamine Kid and his goon squad started axing programs. The EU amount is about $570m USD, I'm not sure how many jobs that represents. What they need to do is relax visa restrictions to allow people to move without having direct job sponsorship: give them longer to find employment if they can't fall in directly to their recruitment program.

This paragraph makes me wonder if this program replaces the French program:
"The plan, originally proposed by the French government, also proposes creating long-term “super grants” for outstanding researchers, to provide them with financial stability; these would last for seven years. The program also plans to double the amount of financial support available this year for those who decide to move to the European Union."

I'm not really clear on the matter. But since they're not likely to be looking for telescope operators, we're not likely to fall into this program.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/europe-launches-program-to-lure-scientists-away-from-the-us/

Japan's program is throwing a cool ¥100 billion ($693 million) into the program. Meanwhile, Great Britain is throwing a whopping £50 million ($67 million) to attract top talent!

I can see Japan increasing their spend as they have a serious population problem: a shortage of young families with children. By bringing in more scientists, they may well give extra priority to those that might shore up that base, giving long-term benefit to the country.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/japan_has_a_yen_for/

austin_dern

Is it my humor blog? Is it Robert Benchley's? Here's the low-energy results so you can judge for yourself:

I didn't spend a very long time wandering around the day-after-the-fair fairgrounds, but here's what I did see while I was there.

One of the carnival rides packed up and only looking a bit like the Hall of Justice.

Couple more rides packed up and, on the left, tractors put on a trailer bed for some reason.

The Paper Eater, a caged lion here to be your trash bin.

Meanwhile, off in the distance inside the exhibition hall, people gather their exhibits. I like having the people out of focus but it really needs the frame of the building to be in focus to work well.

And here's a lion drinking fountain that's got a face full of flowers!

Of course they leave the port-a-potties up until the last minute.

ToonTown is smaller than the movie makes it look!

The ring carved out by the captive pony ride over the course of a week.

On the table there? That is the tallest broccoli I have ever seen.

Someone going in to fuss with a storefront exhibit.

That little creek within the building, turned off but not yet fully drained.

There it is. The album cover for this set of pictures, with the singer/songwriter sitting out past the spotlight. That's an Art.

Trivia: The word ``shrewd'' first appears in English in the 1300s with pejorative meanings of ``an evildoer, a villain''; by the 1500s it was softened to mean more ``mischievous'' or ``naughty'', and after the 1600s picked up positive connotations of ``cunning, crafty, astute''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.

austin_dern

After that wondrous set of carousels and fairground art and all --- including, as bunnyhugger noted, a Bayol carousel rabbit, larger than hers, which revealed that we'd been saying Bayol's name wrong or at least different from how Marianne(?) said it --- what was there to do but get back to the Gare de l'Est so we could wait for our train? Also to sit down a little after we'd been going for so very long. Also to get something to eat. There is no way to guess how much we had eaten in our journeys since the last time we had been in a bed but that's all right; this would be our last food for the day and we didn't go to bed hungry.

You know what Gare de l'Est could really use, though? Chairs. Or benches. Or a lot of seating because for all the people that were there there weren't enough places to sit. Just a bit of advice for French railway authorities there.

The train we got on was one of those high-speed things; we got to see cars on the highway hurtling backwards at highway speed, relative to us. I finally realized where on the screens they showed the speed and could see, we got up to like 150 miles per hour on the ride over, and we would again a couple other rail trips. It hardly felt that fast. We also were not positive we were sitting in the right coach because we went to the coach numbered 9 (or whatever) and while seat numbers larger than and smaller than ours were on it, our actual numbers weren't, so I kept walking in a direction until I found our numbers. We got away with it, at least.

We got off the train in the small town of Bar-sur-Aube, at something like 7 pm on a Sunday, when the place was even more quiet and asleep than you might imagine for a tiny French village late on a Sunday. Question: how to get to Dolancourt and our hotel? I had insisted, it's a train station, there will be a taxi stand. So there might be, but the station was closed up and deserted. Fortunately, they had posted signs with taxi services so I borrowed bunnyhugger's phone and after wrestling with it to allow me to make the local calls that she had got European service for, had a halting conversation with a taxi dispatcher who was running everything through Google Translate. None of this reassured bunnyhugger, but the taxi arriving in about the promised half-hour did. The driver asked if either of us wanted to ride in front and I gave the seat to bunnyhugger, giving her the chance to see the countryside --- beautiful as you'd hope --- and get the first glimpse of Nigloland park. It's got a huge drop tower, it's easy to spot.

Our hotel, the former water mill, was a lovely spot and gave us Chambre number 1, just past a small stairwell up and then another right back down. We turned down the dinner reservation offered us; between fatigue and a great number of small snacks over the day we weren't hungry. And then for all that ... well, bunnyhugger hadn't yet taken her daily half-hour walk. What better thing to do than pace out our journey tomorrow, to get to the amusement park?

We set off in the wrong direction at first, retracing the taxi's steps because we had seen a sign for Nigloland and the Hotel des Pirates from the road. Realizing we were getting only farther from the tower, I started walking along a gravel road past grapevines that possibly was private property? But finding an arrow sign pointing to Nigloland reassured us that if we were trespassing, it was a generally forgiven trespass. We stumbled our way through, trying to take whatever path led us closer to the tower, until we found a side street facing a big park sign, one of the landmarks we'd seen on google Street View. From there --- and now, suddenly, I somehow knew exactly where to get here from our hotel and how to get back efficiently --- we walked to what we took to be the gate of the park and then back to our temporary home.

Reentering I asked the desk clerk for the Wi-Fi password and he told us that was impossible. We have no idea what that meant. The next morning I would ask a different person at the desk --- I remembered enough French to say, ``je voudrais le ... [ fumbling, sheepish expression ] Wi-Fi password?'' --- and she wrote the password down for me, and did not explain that it was written on the back of our room's key card as we would have known had we ever turned that over. The first clerk doesn't seem to have taken a dislike to us or anything either; he was the host when we went to dinner the next day and was as pleasant as possible, and was the same at breakfast the day after that. Maybe I expressed myself poorly.

But for that night, we were on our own without Wi-Fi. Fortunately bunnyhugger had her cell phone and could use it to look up the most important thing: when would Nigloland be open tomorrow, so we knew just when to get up, and how long we'd have to kick around after the park closed. 1 pm to 6? Noon to 5? 11 am? 10?

The answer was nothing we had anticipated.

So with the Jackson County Fair done you know what that leaves me ... that's right: looking around the fairgrounds as they clean up, when I went down to pick up bunnyhugger's pictures! And ribbons! So here's the same spots you were just looking at but with even fewer people somehow!

Here's my car, parked where all the food vendors and picnic tables had been just like fifteen hours before.

The canopy to the right is where, I think, the magician had been set up. I don't think it was that Aaron guy bunnyhugger's been following.

Inside the exhibition hall, with the now-empty booths and false storefronts.

It wasn't just vegetables that got the card instructing people to throw them out. Baked goods got one too. In the window you can see a couple miniature sets not yet picked up.

And here's the vegetables waiting for their owners to come, take the ribbons, and throw them out.

This is not where they're to be thrown, but it is a depression that caught my eye.

Trivia: While fleeing New York, after the duel that murdered Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr stopped in Philadelphia at the home of old friend Charles Biddle. Present was also Charles's son, Nicholas Biddle, who would be the head of the Bank of the United States who warred with, and lost to, Andrew Jackson. (Nicholas was home from college and waiting to leave for Paris.) Source: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar, H W Brands.

Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/mixology-monday-at-salar/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56115

If you’ve been reading my posts for a bit, you may remember me doing a piece or two over my favorite restaurant, Salar. The posts I’ve done have been featuring their wonderful monthly wine dinners they host, but today I’m here to talk about one of their other monthly events I enjoy: Salar’s Mixology Monday!

This was the second Mixology Monday I’ve attended, the theme of this one being “Blended Beverages.” Listen, I’m a basic white girl, you already know I love a fun, blended bevvie. What I dislike, though, is the sound of a blender, especially if I’m dining at a fine establishment. It totally ruins the vibes and detracts from the classy aura of a really nice restaurant.

Fortunately, our lovely mixologist for the evening feels the exact same way, and the event was held on the secluded back patio of the restaurant so we wouldn’t disturb other guests. Salar’s back patio is my favorite patio in Dayton. It has a beautiful pergola, pretty string lights, and tons of plants that make it feel vibrant and lush.

Check out the mixologist’s setup:

A bar-station set up on one of the patio's tables. There's several different bottles of liquor, a bucket of lemons and limes, fresh herbs and sliced berries, and a thing of tajin and black volcanic salt for rimming glasses.

I thought it was odd there was a dish of poppyseeds, but upon closer inspection it was black lava salt for rimming the glass. My (silly) mistake!

Since Salar is a Peruvian restaurant, I started off with a blended Pisco Sour, which I was informed is the national drink of Peru.

My blended pisco sour, frozen and icy with four drops of bitters on top.

This was so light and refreshing, the fact it was all icy and frozen only added to that refreshing-ness. She actually let me mix this myself, which was fun.

One of my favorite things about Salar is that when you dine here, their version of “bread for the table” is housemade pita and hummus, which was served at this event, as well:

A white bowl holding some triangular pieces of pita, and there's a smaller black bowl in the middle containing the hummus, which is green in color due to the herbs they use in it. It sits atop a bed of spinach.

Their hummus is so unique, it’s super herbaceous and fresh tasting, and their pita is perfectly golden brown and crisp. I love that they start you off with something so fun compared to just regular bread and butter (not that I don’t also love good bread and butter).

Unlike their monthly wine dinners, where everyone is served their own plate per course, the Mixology Mondays have a smaller crowd (only about ten people) and are more casual in tone, so the food is served family style on larger platters that get passed around, and you just take however much you want and put it on your own plate.

Here’s some roasted veggies we were served:

A big white bowl full of roasted squash, roasted bell pepper, green beans, mushrooms, all that good stuff.

There was also a salad with grilled chicken, elote, and some kind of really yummy green dressing over top, but I failed to get a picture of that one. I do, however, have a picture of the tofu dish the kitchen made for someone with dietary restrictions, and that looked tasty:

A small grey plate with some salad, topped with two giant chunks of tofu that are dark orange in color, probably have been marinated and grilled the same way the chicken was.

Actually, I now notice that the salad the tofu is sitting on top of is definitely the same salad mix that the one with chicken had, so just imagine that salad but with chicken on top instead and that’s what I had.

Of course, gotta get our second bev going:

A super cute pineapple shaped glass filled with a reddish pink liquid. The drink is topped with a blackberry and a raspberry, plus a pineapple frond for garnish.

I absolutely love this pineapple glass it was served it, plus the pineapple toothpick and pineapple frond decoration was so cute. This drink was made with blackberries, raspberries, I honestly don’t remember what else but it was so fruity and totes delish! I felt transported to a hammock on a beach.

Even though I came alone, everyone was sat at one long table and I ended up having some great conversations with my tablemates. It was so fun chatting, sharing food, sipping our drinks, it was definitely more friendly and chill than I was expecting. Good vibes all around.

And to finish the evening, a strawberry margarita made with Mezcal, with a tajin covered lime for optimal enjoyment:

A short glass filled with pink liquid. The drink is topped with a lime wedge that is covered in tajin.

As you can probably tell, it was pretty warm out so the drinks did tend to melt kind of quickly, but they tasted just as good in liquid form as frozen form, so I can’t complain too much.

All in all, both the food and the drinks were super summery and tasty, the conversation was easy-going and fun, and it was just a pleasant way to spend a Monday evening. I look forward to the next one of these I attend.

What’s the best complimentary bread and butter you’ve had at a restaurant? Do you like pisco sours? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/mixology-monday-at-salar/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56115

disneydream06

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/the-big-idea-aimee-ogden/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56109

Coming back to ideas with fresh eyes is always a good idea. For author Aimee Ogden, it was eight years before she revisited the story that would come to be her newest novella, Starstruck. Check out her Big Idea to see how she made this story shine.

AIMEE OGDEN:
Ten years ago, I had the Big Idea that would become Starstruck: a world where each falling star held a soul that would animate whatever plant or animal it fell on. What would happen if those stars stopped falling? And what about when something got a soul that was never supposed to have one?

I wrote a book I loved about that idea—a fantasy for YA readers—and queried it with around a hundred different agents. And I got an equivalently hundred-adjacent number of rejections. C’est la vie écrivaine; I cried, presumably ate a cookie or two about it, and buried it in my trunk of failed stories, never to be seen again.

It turned out that out of sight did not mean out of mind. Starstruck haunted me (the book itself embodied, occasionally, in the person of a friend who also cared about it a lot), until two years ago, I exhumed the story’s corpse, and I was happy to find it still had good bones. They just needed to be arranged into a different order; and there was a fair bit of carrion flesh to strip away, too, to pare it down to a novella.

I still had a magical world of falling stars. I still had the same main characters: an abandoned human child, a gentle fox, her pragmatic radish wife, and a rock with delusions of destiny. Even the climactic moment stayed almost unchanged from the original version, except for the paring back of some elements that had proved extraneous to the story.

But the original version was YA, and the story had centered around the human boy. I hadn’t read widely enough yet to expand my conception of what a lead character could or should be. Coming back to it, I knew right away that I only wanted to write about a middle-aged radish. A magical middle-aged radish with a soul, and her enormous love, and her silent, squashed-aside regrets, and her utter inability to cope with a chunk of granite that told her it had a name and a birthday and a favorite color.

If I’d been paying more attention, I probably should have known where the story’s emotional heart lay the first time around—in the original version, the final scenes take place from the radish perspective. Even before I understood this was her story, I must have sensed that the needed closure could only come from her.

Or maybe I couldn’t have known yet. Eight years is a big gap to develop and change as a writer, and to accrue emotional baggage besides. Without that time, and without the double regret of failing with and then abandoning Starstruck, it couldn’t have been the same book. And as pleased as I was with it the first time around, it’s better now for its chance for maturation, and I have more room in my well-used, middle-aged heart with which to love it. Maybe you do, too. How do you feel about radishes?

Starstruck: Publisher website

Author Socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/the-big-idea-aimee-ogden/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56109

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/today-in-look-at-this-dork/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56102

Someone is a little too excited to be on the Scalzi Bridge, with the Scalzi Church in the background to the left, about to have dinner at the Ai Scalzi restaurant. It was an all Scalzi day yesterday, you see. And it was all lovely, even if the dork pictured above clearly was not at all cool about it. Shine on, silly dork!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/today-in-look-at-this-dork/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56102

austin_dern

So. Despite mild confusion about which station to transfer at, and which direction to take out of the Metro, we got to the Musée des Arts Forains just about on time for our 1 pm tour. There were maybe twenty people in the group with us, apparently about half the size of a normal tour group, which meant that some things would go quicker. The museum is at Les Pavillions de Bercy, a set of buildings that originally warehoused wine (the location was, back then, outside the limits of the City of Paris and so immune to the wine taxes) and that naturally grew open-air cafés and other little amusements. So this is why the buildings are a couple of huge, high-ceilinged spots, with plenty of space for everything inside, and separated by enough space for a modest-sized group to hang out in plenty of space.

We expected a tour something like we might get at the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, with polite docents explaining the most interesting pieces. This is not the docent we got. The one we had, a young woman with a name that was ... I don't remember anymore, something archetypically French like ``Marianne'' maybe ... a performer. I'm not sure if she said she was actually a cabaret performer but she had the energy and drive of one, talking with it seemed everyone, encouraging people to call out answers to questions both serious and silly. (The tour was mainly in French, but she broke into English for the handful of people like us who benefitted from that. Also bunnyhugger had been given a laminated booklet, most of which she photographed, explaining the exhibit in English. There were also German and other language versions available.) You might get some of the tone of the place by descriptions of some of the busts of famous figures decorating the outside of one of the buildings. They had, for example, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterand. Also Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger. Why? Well, let's move on inside, shall we?

The museum has a number of pieces of amusement and fairground art --- signs, backdrops, figures from rides, that sort of thing. A lot of things that are illuminated. Some that go back a great way, like bagatelle tables that I teased bunnyhugger with by saying at last, we had found pinball! Some go back only to ... within my lifetime, such as the horse-racing midway game they had. This was one of those roll-the-balls-to-make-the-horses-move games, and everybody got a turn, in a couple rounds of trying. The mechanism they had, in lovely shape and well-painted and with all the horses working, dates to the ancient days of the 1970s. bunnyhugger came within a whisker of winning the race, her turn.

Ah, but the real centerpiece here was not the horse-racing game, or the many figures with bootleg Mickey Mouse or Popeye or such. No, the centerpiece was carousels. Three of them, just like Cedar Point. Once was your classic sort of travelling carousel, three horses across, though with some interesting twists, like, one of the non-horse rides was a rowboat that rocks side to side. I'm sorry to say we weren't able to get a ride in that, but kids leapt into the spot and you can't fault them that.

What we expected would be the most interesting was the salon carousel. This is a near-extinct breed of carousel, with mounts resting on the platform instead of suspended by poles from the canopy, and going for ornateness in the design. This despite being a travelling ride, most of the time, itself! In the classic installation the ride would have a facade built around it to look like a salon, the sort of place where you might discuss Impressionism or the Communards or Boulanger. The platform's made to look like marble, and the seats are tastefully overdone, as opposed to the American carousel style of ``stick some more glass jewels on it''. The carousel moves slowly, even by modern standards, but it's a stately sort of slowness, the sort of thing to make you feel like your'e drowsing in luxury, an attitude supported by the music that's got some classical, lullaby feel.

The penultimate attraction and something I'm sure draws private parties all the time was a band organ, one of the huge ones that dominates a room instead of being set out by a carousel to call people to the midway. It was the sort of thing I'd seen at the Speelklok Museum in Utrecht that bunnyhugger has since been sorry she didn't get to see herself. It played a waltz, and at Marianne(?)'s encouragement many people get into the dancing. bunnyhugger asked if I knew how to waltz and I could say what I did know: you and your partner go around in a circle, which itself goes around in a bigger circle. This is true enough, although people who actually know how to waltz also know how to move as a graceful epicycle among the main circle. Well, for only really knowing the waltz from cartoons and this one podcast I didn't embarrass myself. Only bunnyhugger.

The last big exhibit and the one we did not even imagine was there was ...

So, come the late 19th century. You know what's new and stylish and exciting? Bicycles. Not like those boring old horses and donkeys that everyone rides and is bored by. So what would be a great carnival ride? Something you could really take money for? Something where you ride a bicycle. And so this is the result of that thinking: a carousel that's a ring of one- and two-seater bicycles, set in a fixed ring around the center pole. Its power source? The pedalling of the riders.

bunnyhugger had heard of these, even seen a picture of one, ages ago, in one of her books about European amusements. She did not know any still existed. Neither of us imagined we'd ever be at one, or get to ride one.

There were conditions, of course. First, these were fixed-gear single-speed 'bicycles' so if your feet slipped off the pedals you were not to try getting them back on. Just put your feet up on the frame and wait for the ride to end. Also kids, don't try pedalling. Just sit in the passenger seats behind the pedalers. Also, Marianne(?) warned, it would not be comfortable. The seats were, fin-de-siècle style, hard lumps with no give, and the pedals were shiny brass(?) rods with very little footing, closer to what you get if you take the top off a stirrup than anything you'd actually use to bicycle.

It is also loud, sounding much more like thunder when you get it going, which takes less strain than you might expect when everybody's pedalling. And it gets going really fast, even with some people losing their footing and bowing out of the pedalling; the only thing to really slow people down is their exhaustion and their fear of how fast they have got the thing moving. It felt to us like it was going as fast as the Crossroads Village or the Cedar Downs carousels, although maybe that's an illusion created by how much of a hand we have in it. You don't get many amusement park rides that are rider-powered (the museum had a couple Venetian swings, out of service, though, one of the other kinds of rides you can just go on until you or the ride operator lose patience).

I'm sorry only that we were in too small a group for there to be two cycles on the velocipede carousel; I'd have loved to get a movie of the whole process. But surely other tourists have taken videos and put them wherever you get videos online. It is something else.

After this the tour was over. I hung back to get some last pictures of the Popeye and Mickey Mouse bootleg stuff. bunnyhugger (and many of the other people) used the chance to go to the bathroom, a thing I totally missed and would slightly regret, as the Gare de l'Est had pay toilets and we had no coins and weren't going to use credit cards to pee. Sorry to end on such a mundane note but there's only so much interesting to say about thanking Marianne(?) and agreeing it was a fantastic tour.

And now at last, another end, this one of the Jackson County Fair pictures! Or is it?

I have no explanation for this elephant.

The pink elephant, that I can explain.

Green I don't remember from Dumbo.

This time I noticed there's several models of Timothy Q Mouse and they rotate around semi-freely. You can see two of them in this shot.

Elephant making sure everybody sees how Timothy hasn't got pants.

And one of the crows asking, basically, Mmmmmmmmyes?

Trivia: Coleco paid Cinematronics two million dollars for the home rights to the Dragon's Lair video game. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, Steven Johnson.

PS: Don't you want to know What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What’s this B-17 crash doing? March – June 2025 gets explained to you in fewer words than it took to read this here.

disneydream06

Anne Burrell, Food Network Star and Worst Cooks in America Host, Dies at 55

"Though she is no longer with us, her warmth, spirit, and boundless love remain eternal," Burrell's family said in a statement

By Dave Quinn and Emily Rella

https://people.com/anne-burrell-food-network-star-dies-at-55-11756639?hid=7f1109a25d2362f31854399df255b82ba78f015e&did=18183730-20250617&utm_campaign=ppl_relationship-builder&utm_source=ppl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=061725&lctg=7f1109a25d2362f31854399df255b82ba78f015e&lr_input=758ad690760192cf49795c3f52223721cac5324e3e862e41c5d4db73a4d43f32&utm_term=breaking-news

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/17/the-big-idea-john-wiswell-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56098

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Author John Wiswell tells us of a tale that usually ends in revenge and violence, but imagines a world where our hero chooses kindness instead. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Wearing The Lion, and see where empathy takes us.

JOHN WISWELL:

You deserve better than revenge.

I know, you want to catch your father’s murderer and duel them to the death, but then you’ll leave the scene feeling hollow and unfulfilled. Or worse, the pursuit will corrupt you into becoming the kind of person you hated. And there’s a great likelihood that your quickness to action will make you hurt the wrong person, and then you’re inspiring revenge in others. Think better of it now, because I will throw the book across the room if you kill the villain’s entire crew but spare the villain at the last minute because otherwise you’ll be “just like him.”

So we know there are problems with revenge. But what are the alternatives?

It’s something I’ve been exploring for my entire life. It’s tough to begin thinking about because our narratives of justice overflow with blood. We’re taught to seek culturally fetishized violence. We’re promised that reprisal will give us catharsis and justice. Mythology is rich with these narratives. Every king has made enemies who would like to get back at him. And the gods? They never drop a grudge.

Mythology is the richest place to explore this theme. Myths tell us what we think about ourselves, which is why every generation wants to remix them, ear cocked for the sound of truth. What does it do to the traditional revenge narrative if the hero refuses to hurt anyone? No cracking goons’ skulls. No blowing up a dragon’s lair. Instead, we’d follow someone who was hurt and carried that hurt in his heart, but because of that, didn’t want to see more suffering in the world. Perhaps his entire journey toward “revenge” would actually be about finding the right thing to do.

Heracles (“Hercules” to the Romans) is such an interesting character from this point of view. His was never a revenge story. The gods drove him mad and made him slay his children, and for that he set out on the twelve labors in order to gain forgiveness. All that hydra-chopping and lion-punching was about being sorry. The modern eye jumps to thinking he shouldn’t be sorry, but vengeful toward the gods.

As it is, few Heracles retellings ever reflect on him slaying his family at all. He’s too busy doing epic stuff to be bothered with mourning. It’s like if Spider-Man never thought about Uncle Ben again.

That sort of violation would change you for the rest of your life. Doing violence with your hands ever again could be nauseating. You might do literally anything to avoid hurting others, especially if your labors were carried out to get justice for your children. When the gods said to kill that invincible lion, you could technically do it. You’d have Zeus’s strength. But that same strength would give you an opportunity to find another way through the labor. And in feeling like a monster yourself, you might find yourself relating to outcast creatures. You might find kinship with the invincible lion, and the hydra, and the titans. They might know what it’s like to feel wrong.

That became the heart of Wearing the Lion, my retelling of the Heracles myth. It changes the entire nature of his great labors. If you won’t hurt anyone—and if your power can’t solve your problems—then you have to adapt.

There is a long tradition in masculinity whereby those of us who have been hurt want to hurt others. It’s a lesson we learn before we can speak, treated as immutable nature. As I grew up, these narratives went from entertaining to exhausting. It hurts to see someone use their few resources on things other than supporting survivors, on sheltering people, healing and feeding them. There’s something about losing enough in your life (and helping others through their darkest times) that reveals how paltry retribution is. Survivors deserve better.

Yep! I accidentally wrote about the crisis of masculinity. I swear it wasn’t on purpose.

But it was important to me to write about someone wrestling with these principles and looking for a better response to loss. The harm cannot be fixed. This sort of loss is not something you just “heal” from. It’s the sort of vacuum that makes revenge appealing, because in uncertainty, norms call to us. When Heracles rejects revenge and instead goes on the labors to understand what is really happening in the heavens, he starts to sound truer to me.

In his struggle, he questions if anyone can understand what he’s feeling. He thinks he doesn’t fit in with the world anymore. That he doesn’t belong around people. Who understands feeling that lost? Monsters.

Yes, his first new friends are a giant lion and extremely opinionated hydra. The creatures his labors send him towards know what it’s like to not fit in. They know what it’s like to not have answers. Grief isn’t something you can get tough enough to ignore. Heracles’s struggle with his culpability, and his quest to figure out which god is behind all of this, requires more than strength. It requires sides of the character I fell in love with while writing.

When Heracles is set against monsters while starving for peace, there’s the potential for a different kind of family. A found family of the creatures that civilization would never let near itself. Rather than skinning the Nemean Lion, Heracles winds up carrying it everywhere on its shoulders, because it demands snuggles. It’s ferocious about snuggles. Heracles bonding with these creatures, learning how to give support and feel worthy of it himself, are things I didn’t know I needed to write.

Wearing The Lion: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s Books|Oblong Books

Author Socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram|Substack

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/17/the-big-idea-john-wiswell-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56098