sundries

lostin_thestars, who I know through therealljidol, needs your help. She's going through an ugly divorce (I'm somewhat understating the case as I believe she wants to keep some of the details I'm aware of private) and hasn't been receiving child-support. Some of her utilities have been turned off. She needs to fix her car so she can continue to work. She's having trouble feeding herself and her child. She needs $700 to fix the immediate crisis with the car.

She runs a Mary Kay business. Now would be a good time to purchase from her if you need anything. I can personally recommend the Velocity skincare line. Although it's designed for younger women, it's the only thing I've ever used that reduces the natural redness in my face _and_ doesn't make me break out.

If you would just like to send her a donation, her paypal is tessa.rawlinson@gmail.com

A child is the sole-survivor of a Libyan jet crash.

Doubt it cast on many food allergies. While I am all for better diagnoses and celiac disease isn't an allergy, wow, this is not an article someone like me needs, because it will be used as one more excuse to disregard my really unpleasant and serious illness by lay people and medical professionals alike.

You have perhaps not been following this ridiculous thing that's going on with Newsweek. Basically, the magazine published an article by an apparently gay journalist asserting that while straight actors can play believably gay, gay actors just don't have the skill to play believably straight; somehow, he says, it just always seems wrong. The creator of Glee and other celebs have subsequently called for a Newsweek boycott. Meanwhile, I'm still like "Newsweek, what in the hell were you thinking? And how is this news? And didn't you hear? Actors? The job, is to play pretend."

Meanwhile, there's a discussion as to whether the WSJ running an old photo of Supreme Court nominee Kagan playing softball was a coded lesbian reference.

I am experiencing low-grade panic about Bristol. Amusingly, however, I may - to prove a point about Holmes apocrypha - actually be referencing Sherlock Holmes for Dummies in the paper. Mostly though, this feels like academic paper as autopsy, and that's unpleasant for me right now.

In case you were following along on Twitter, no, I did not get food poisoning from an epically expired Larabar. But I can tell you that when they ferment they taste like licorice. Bet you always wanted to know that, huh?

Finally, Buffy is back from the dead and the only person she can talk to is Spike, since, you know, he's been dead too. So far, S6 is handling this really elegantly. It makes me want to talk a lot about the whole issue of what death is in Torchwood and how "Random Shoes" makes a liar out of Jack (or at least makes the show's cosmology a lot bigger than "something moving the dark").

Also, I haven't said this enough: Sarah Michelle Gellar can really act. It's not necessarily obvious as Buffy herself doesn't really show a huge range of emotions, but when you look at having to be Buffy, and BuffyBot, and delivering some monologues that could easily fall apart in their absurdity. She makes you believe. And that's a hell of a lot.

"I" in academic and scholarly writing

This is not a search for advice. This is a point of curiosity to me, because my education was sort of extreme and obsessive on this point, and it occurs to me that perhaps other fifth-graders were not scarred for life by writing papers that said things like "this author feels that Disney World would be an idea summer vacation destination for her family."

So, inquiring minds and all that....

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