DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR

Nothing like a wicked allergy to a mulberry tree with one growing right outside my bedroom

Remember that tomorrow is Cyrillic alphabet day!! NEVER FORGET

BOOK REVIEW TIME!

In the Company of Cats: or On Nature's Natural Birth Control

Ok this book is actually kind of cute, even though Robin didn't like it enough to keep her present from Jim and Beth for Christmas in 1992. One quote I like in particular is something that's quite relevant to a recent visitor to this city:

"Whenever he was out of luck and a little downhearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own."

And I want to be like this cat: "... grace and elegance... independence and arrogance, and the way they lie and look at you, summing you up, surely to your detriment, with that unnerving, unwinking, appraising stare."

That's that. Book wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be.

Time for lunch! But before that, look at some pictures of William Kunstler!

Next book review: MANHATTAN GMAT - the new standard. FRACTIONS, DECIMALS & PERCENTS, GMAT STRATEGY GUIDE. or not?

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE

It turns out that the tales of Bob Tomarchin and Moko are GREAT stories to tell to everyone who I can corner to listen. Great for me, probably not so much for everyone else subjected to the tales of Henderson island and Pitcairn history, but whatever.  He made Life Magazine! And was insane! And grabbed the chimp and went on a circuitous route to Mexico - FREEEEEEEEEEEDOM.

The soul-sucking, soul-crushing, horrible hideous thing that is what I spend much of my day doing is even worse than it normally is.  Every single day all I do is waste my time doing stuff that I should never have to do.  I am a completely wasted resource at a firm that underpays its employees while emotionally abusing them.  I learn nothing anymore; I do nothing. My coworkers have complained that they sometimes get bored, just staring at their computer screens. My computer is jacked so I can't even print the emails that I'm supposed to print, and the new intern came in already to complain about how slow her computer is going, as if she thinks she has a unique problem.  I am contemplating breaking the copy machine more than it is so it finally gets fixed, seeing as right now it can only print one page before it gets jammed. [ED NOTE: this has downgraded to not even printing a page before it decides it's jammed.]  I just want to quit so I can move onto something else, but my boss hates attorneys who leave so much that she has pretended that one of my former coworkers, who is now heading a team at another firm, is dead, and we're no longer allowed to speak her name.  I'll look back at the 11 hours a day I've spent here over the past year with an enormous, enormous amount of regret, and this completely pointless waste of time blog is the only (incredibly crap) thing I've gotten out of it, other than a hatred of the legal profession and an extremely strong desire to never have to work in a law firm again.

In protest of that, I'm going to blog for a little bit, and I may work out for a little bit during lunch.  That or play sims on the ipad. The only things I've used the iPad for so far are taking pictures and playing games. And reading Vanity Fair. I really want to read Sons and Lovers but OH I JUST FOUND IT FOR SOME REASON OUT OF ORDER ON MY IPAD WOOOOOOOO. Sons and Lovers here I come!

I found out one thing my life is missing other than purpose is Gizlibahce on Saturday nights. Best music I've heard in a long time and I danced like I haven't in a while.  

NEWS ROUNDUP

People come out against putting that one kid away who videotaped his gay roommate and told people to watch it online and then that kid committed suicide and it was all big in the news, and I think he had also posted something to it gets better (note: not the law school version, just about it getting worse).

This article is interesting but I wish it went into a little more detail about the glass escalator.  Like in nursing, at least from what I remember my mom telling me, although nursing is primarily female dominated, when men enter, they tend to flock to the most highly regarded areas, like nurse anesthethists, which - although it's certainly good to remove gender barriers for professions - kind of keeps them enforced (male nurses earn the most, female remain the underpaid masses). From the article:

Men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs. And white men in particular who enter those fields easily move up to supervisory positions, a phenomenon known as the glass escalator — as opposed to the glass ceiling that women encounter in male-dominated professions, said Adia Harvey Wingfield, a sociologist at Georgia State University. 

I had some more articles but, of course, my work computer is too messed up to be able to handle both printing and blogging at the same time. So with that, my dear readers, I tell you to please do as I say, but not as I do, and never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever work in this office.
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Update! Well, that was an exciting day!  Officemate assigned the intern some of the more boring work from the job, certain individuals in the office indicated they have little grasp on the assignments they deal, and my blackberry caught on fire! full of smoking melted plastic. HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TWO

Looking up tropical islands a bit more - specifically, coral atolls - I found this gem about Henderson Island:

In 1957 a twenty seven year old American, Robert Tomarchin, lived the life of a castaway on the island for approximately two months, accompanied by a pet chimpanzee, apparently as a publicity stunt, until he was rescued by people from Pitcairn in two longboats.

Of course, I needed to know more.  First, of course(!), it coincided with the International Geophyiscal Year (IGY), a year of many discoveries and scientific feats, including the launch of Sputnik and discoveries related to solar flares and a lot of other things. Not sure why, but IGY was something I looked up yesterday. Probably has something to do with the islands, atolls and research stations.  Read that article, if only to appreciate the Russians who've edited the section on the Space Race and why the USSR really won... Or at least I think that's what the incoherent English is trying to say.

Anywho, I stumbled across this article, which lays out the history of the guy.

They're not really sure why he was on the island, but it may have been because he jumped ship from a yacht that was sailing near by.  After a bit of discussion, the nearby islanders of Pitcairn went on a rescue mission the Henderson, which has little potable water. Upon discovering him on the beach:

The islanders knew something was up, though, since he had an extremely well-supplied tent that looked like he wanted to camp out on a desert island for a while. The yacht he had been 'cast away' from later radioed Pitcairn to tell them Tomarchin had paid them to put him on the island, where he was incapable of cutting his way to fresh water.  As the Americans refused to bring him back with the chimp, the islanders took pity on him and brought him back to Pitcairn, where

Rob was a stranger, a very muscular and personable young man of 27 who had come dramatically onto the island. No wonder the girls who had only seen their relatives all their lives should be attracted to Bob, even though he didn't do a tap of work all the time he resided on the island.

He apparently liked his time on the island enough (or was insane enough) that he attempted to return after a directive from Fiji announced he had to leave.  However, sneaking in as a stowaway and being caught only resulted in a further directive prohibiting him from interacting with the islanders upon his eventual arrival.

The Pitcairners interest in seeing Bob again was intense, but Bob was locked away in the spare hospital room with a guard on watch and no one was allowed to see him or send a message. Charles Christian managed to get fruit to him. As they left the ship Clarence Young yelled out,Goodbye, Bob! And Bob stuck a hand out of the window and waved pathetically. 

The story just gets better and better, with Tomarchin eventually selling the chimp to a zoo, after which he thought the chimp was heartbroken and wanted to be reunited with him.  After the zoo refused to return it, he snuck into the zoo and left a check and an IOU, absconding with the chimp in a desperate attempt to get south of the border.  When he was eventually caught, instead of arguing insanity as I probably would have done - something is seriously not right with this guy - his attorney argued that his relationship with the chimp was akin to father and child.  The lawyer also compared this case involving a chimp to a case where a Jewish couple adopted a Catholic kid, because clearly the two are very similar. Of course.

If you want to read more, check out the links here and here and this picture here.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE POST TWO

Aw! This is kinda cute, about the language spoken on Kiribati:

The Kiribati language is written in the Latin Script and has been since the 1840s, when Hiram Bingham Jr, a missionary, first translated the bible into Kiribati. Previously, the language was unwritten. The letter 's' does not appear in the Kiribati alphabet, instead the combination "ti" is used for that sound.

One difficulty in translating the Bible was references to words such as "mountain", a geographical phenomenon unknown to the people of the islands of Kiribati at the time (heard only in the myths from Samoa). Bingham decided to use "hilly", which would be more easily understood. Such adjustments are common to all languages as "modern" things require the creation of new words. For example, the Gilbertese word for airplane is te wanikiba, "the canoe that flies".

And then another article about the Dothraki language, which was farmed out to be created based off the novels to someone from the Language Creation Society.  The article's not very interesting, to be honest, but perhaps in the future there'll be more to add there.  On the positive side, the Language Creation Society's webpage has a lot of cool stuff, including a calendar with awesome holidays such as Cyrillic alphabet day and the feast day of the inventors of Cyrillic. And when the 5th Element came out.

I'd like to give a big thank you to the person who gave me the illness that I can feel I'm currently battling off.  Your efforts weren't for naught; my immune system was feeling a bit bored with its easy life.  As an added bonus, my allergies have been acting up like crazy and I've even gotten some hives!

And finally YOU MUST WATCH THIS! IT IS SO ADORABLE AND IS SOON TO BE MY FAVORITE DOCUMENTARY EVER! Based on this website.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE

Every day Hatice comes, a little part of my insides die.  Also, her presence in my house means that I can't make the cold soups that I have so carefully researched: today was to be cucumber avocado, after yesterday's yogurt cucumber success.

A rather poorly written article about nuns in the Western frontier.

There's just something about the tiny Pacific islands that gets me. Here's one that used to be called DANGER REEF. Unpopulated and almost always completely submerged, it was quite dangerous for ships.

I JUST LEARNED SOMETHING REALLY FUNNY ABOUT OFFICEMATE. So funny that she has clearly not been telling me knowing I would laugh and laugh and laugh. !!!!!!! AND LAUGH AND HOW.

I'm a sucker for men in uniforms, but have to say, not sure these ones are so hot. Also, the tales of the dude wearing a cartoon shirt outside the children's police station also did not sound so cool.  

Back to reefs and stuff: here's a phantom reef. Many of these islands are completely abandoned and probably uninteresting to my loyal readers, so I won't tell you about Starbucks island (or the variety of other islands with such pleasant name as "starve island" or "barren island"). 

And then after reading about different types of rats ("rat island"), I want to get a mouse-like hamster.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POST TWO

Just saw I missed this - a court case involving the Turkish Coalition of America, Inc. v. Bruininks, a college.  Guess if it's about the Armenian genocide or not! Guess! Go on!

And another Turkey piece that was published recently about Natashas, a term for sex worker. Most of my loyal readers will, of course, know that, and if you don't, fun fact! And not so fun stuff in the article:

Furthermore, over 40 percent of women have experienced physical and sexual violence, meaning a woman is significantly more likely to have survived abuse than be gainfully employed.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY

I remember reading this article about the world's largest family with early onset Alzheimer's, and it looks like there's another one in the NY Times.

"Sea level does not rise uniformly around the world, and so far, Dr. Fletcher and other geologists said in interviews, Hawaii has escaped some of the rise that has occurred elsewhere as earth’s climate warms." 

Do you know where the longest serving head of state in the Americas is?  St. Kitts and Nevis, which is also called St. Christopher and Nevis. His name's Denzil Douglas!  If you google St. Kitts and Nevis because you've taken it into your head that the idea of moving to a tropical wonderland may not be so bad after all, you'll find that the first result is for wiki, second for their tourism website, and only the third is for the government. With an extra governmental .net website thrown in for good measure. St. Kitt's and Nevis, if you want a more effective social media analyser, I can be your girl!

And now, with the anger and frustration of dealing with an incomprehensibly idiotic Nelnet behind me, I sign off for the day.  Officemate has been called away yet again on urgent tutoring duty. Fourth grade spelling tests can be hard and important -- hard enough, and important enough to keep a kid home from school for a week! Apparently.