sundries

If you're not on my Twitter, I need to inform you that last night I saw a woman in Duane Reade doing an elaborate interpretive dance imitation of her cat cleaning itself. She was twisting her neck around and kicking her legs back and sticking out her tongue and all. While in a skirt and high heels. Her boyfriend clearly wanted to die.

Today, the building shut off the water (while I was in need of it) to replace a toilet downstairs, all without telling me. It's fine now.

My academic programming for DragonCon has been submitted. Between that and Writercon stuff (still have to pull the vending thing together) and the recent Modern Library contract and some other submissions I've sent out, I feel really good and together and solid. Yeah, still need to write the Madonna thing.

Am I wearing a cute shirt? Is it in the orange or red spectrum? That means it's laundry time and I'm wearing Patty's clothes.

Every time I think I'm ready to get my plane tickets to WriterCon, I look more closely at the options and frown. AirTran is awful right? What the fuck is SunCoast airlines? Does Delta really offer the only non-stop and is it really $340? Sigh. I can take a flight with a stopover, but it's incredibly bad for me, and I'd really, really prefer not to.

It's super warm out, so I didn't wear a coat or jacket. Now I am freezing in my office.

Thanks to my most recent photo posting, sethg_prime has given me a frightening idea for a Torchwood AU fic: Torchwood as hedge fund. I've already sort of got it figured out too, in terms of Ianto pulling some Kerviel-like stunt instead of the RobotGirl in the basement thing.

The gluten-free chocolate caramel biscuits are back in stock at Whole Foods, after I whined and whined. So I bought four boxes, in preparation for future shortages again.

Various Bachchan's after voting in India's general election; via sannate. Probably less amusing if you don't actually know who they are.

My outrage fatigue of the Bush years has given away to a frustrated incredulity. I feel as if I can no longer say anything rational about politics, because nothing that is happening in politics is rational enough to even address: Obama lying about actively working with the Pentagon on Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Dick Cheney's notion that he's somehow running for president; this cracked out belief that our maximum security prisons are incapable of holding terrorism suspects; deliberate lies from politicians about what habeas corpus actually is (and a citizenry that apparently no longer learns this in third grade -- DO YOU KNOW WHAT HABEAS CORPUS IS?); the ongoing torture/Gitmo clusterfuck or lies, forgiveness, moving forward and selective demonization. I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT. What can we do? I don't even know what we can do.

Lambda Legal says California Supreme Court will announce Prop 8 decision on Tuesday, May 26.

found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baill and cast out as rubbish

via coyotegoth

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/exclusive-the-unseen-photographs-that-throw-new-light-on-the-first-world-war-1688443.html

The place, according to a jokingly chalked board, is "somewhere in France". The time is the winter of 1915 and the spring and summer of 1916. Hundreds of thousands of British and Empire soldiers, are preparing for The Big Push, the biggest British offensive of the 1914-18 war to date.

A local French photographer, almost certainly an amateur, possibly a farmer, has offered to take pictures for a few francs. Soldiers have queued to have a photograph taken to send back to their anxious but proud families in Britain or Australia or New Zealand.

Sometimes, the Tommies are snapped individually in front of the same battered door or in a pear and apple orchard. Sometimes they are photographed on horseback or in groups of comrades. A pretty six-year-old girl – the photographer's daughter? – occasionally stands with the soldiers or sits on their knees: a reminder of their families, of human tenderness and of a time when there was no war.

Many of the British soldiers are wearing rough sheepskins over their battle-dress: a tell-tale sign of the great overcoat shortage of the winter of 1915. The sheepskin-clad "Tommies" look, bizarrely, like ancient warriors or Greek or Yugoslav partisans.

Within a few months – or days, most probably – many of the soldiers were dead. The "somewhere in France" where these pictures were taken was a village called Warloy-Baillon in the département of the Somme. Ten miles to the east was the front line from which the British Army launched the most murderous battle of that, or any, war, which lasted from 1 July to late November 1916 and killed an estimated 1,000,000 British empire, French and German soldiers.

More than 90 years later, at least 400 glass photographic plates preserving the images were found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baillon and cast out as rubbish. In recent months, the plates, some in perfect condition, some badly damaged, have been lovingly assembled and their images printed, scanned and digitally restored by two Frenchmen.

I'm going through the photos now and finding them nearly impossible to look at, they're so wrenching. What's really interesting about them is that, as informal photos, it allows their subjects to look remarkably modern. I think it's generally very hard to look at photos from this era and earlier and realize these people were just like us. Not so with these. There are also many, many faces here that I'm not even convinced were so much as sixteen.