Random Precision

Stephen Fry meditates on the subject of writing (and writes about it, of course):

I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.” It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.”

via Emerging into the Light « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry.

One of the greatest men of our time, a man who saved more lives than Hitler or even Stalin destroyed, has passed away.

Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.

via Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Fed the World – WSJ.com.

An in-depth story about the man by Penn & Teller.

Edit: Andrew Steele at the Globe And Mail contributes his thoughts on Borlaug’s passing.

Tropical Storm: Computer Model Hurricane Forecasts : Weather Underground

Worrisome: some of the computer models are now showing Gustav hooking to the south. One, the NGFDL model, shows Houston in the bull’s eye.

Even if it does, I probably have nothing to worry about, given I live almost forty miles inland. Still, it looks like I need to do some shopping on the way home tonight.

No, I didn’t suddenly become a hundred times more prolific; I just went ahead and published a couple of articles that had been sitting on the back burner for a long time. For better or worse, they’re out there, and my list of things to do is (almost imperceptibly) shorter.

Flew to Oklahoma City on the morning of the Fourth. Traveling early seems to be the way to go; I made it in time to go see the fireworks, and on the trip back (also in the morning), I had decompression time before going to work… if I had gone to work as planned (more on that below). I dislike both air travel and early rising enough that motivating myself to get out of bed to go to the airport is a bit of a challenge, but I somehow managed it.

My friends and I sat on the Robinson bridge across the Oklahoma River (still seems funny to call it that; it was the North Canadian when I grew up there) and watched fireworks. There was a professional display over the ballpark in Bricktown, but that wasn’t what we were watching; the amateur pyromaniacs were out in force, and they kept some pretty impressive fireworks going more or less constantly for over an hour. Gary remarked that there were small towns around whose professional shows couldn’t match what we were seeing from the folks by the river.

Anyway, I got to visit with my mom and with Paul a bit, got the brakes fixed on my mom’s car, and got her PC beaten back into shape (Windows updates, Firefox update, reinstall the firewall, scour off all the adware, etc.) All in all, a pleasant visit. I also got my mom to try Indian food, and she liked it. (Gopuram on NW 23rd; highly recommended.) Finished it with movie night at Leonard’s, where the theme was Dinosaurs. (There are actually a few good dinosaur movies out there. Those aren’t the ones we watched.)

Just before leaving for Gopuram, I started to feel a bit off in my stomach. (Thus, the restaurant was not to blame for what followed.) I ate too much, of course — it’s a buffet for pity’s sake, and I am but a weak-willed mortal — and left feeling stuffed. The stuffed feeling stayed with me all through Dinopalooza, and left me restless all night. And I started to feel an ache in my lower joints, which is my body’s way of telling my I have the flu.

Still, despite the restless night, I was feeling semi-human in the morning, so I packed up and took the flight home. I got home, plopped my bags in the hall, and after checking in with my mom by phone, laid down to catch up on sleep; I felt like crap, but chalked it up to lack of sleep. But waking up hours later, still feeling like a reanimated corpse, I realized that the damn virus wasn’t done with me yet.

Woke up during the night with chills. Teeth-chattering. Got it together enough to turn the airco off, add an extra layer of shirt, and get back into bed. When the chills eventually passed, and it got close to time to decide whether to call in sick or not, I took my temp: 101.6. Who knows what it had been earlier, when the virus was riding high?

Even without the fever, work would have been a dicey proposition; I was wrung out. I emailed an out-sick notice, and crawled back under the covers, and spent all morning and half the afternoon asleep.

Anyway, I’m better (even if my digestion isn’t quite right yet) (don’t ask), and I did a day at work without incident.

I suppose I should go unpack now. But Livvy-kitty has decided that my bag full of dirty clothes is her new favorite pillow, and I don’t think I’ll take it away from her just yet.