When that happens, you have to make yourself some apricot jam, or maybe some fruit leather, or maybe chicken stew with apricots in it.

Sometimes you don't have any apricots at all.

When that happens, you better write something about apricots, and also plant a tree.

So the last couple of days everything I eat has a bitter aftertaste.  It's a bit subtle so it's taken me those couple of days to be sure that I am really tasting this all the time.

Apparently, sometimes Asian pine nuts can give this effect, and nobody knows why yet, though there are theories, and yes, I ate a handful of pine nuts I had been saving in the freezer, and now I think I must throw them away.  They weren't as expensive as Italian or North American pine nuts (which you can't find anyway), but I guess pine nuts are just going to be out of my reach if eating the affordable ones might randomly give me a pervasive bitter taste. The articles I read said it goes away in a few days to about a month.  Meanwhile, as I become more aware of it, it's becoming more annoying (at first I thought maybe the particular food I was eating was too old to eat, though it looked, smelled, and tasted fine and I knew it was okay).  Things taste fine when I first put them in my mouth, but after a couple of bites it starts, and after I eat it gets worse and worse for a while.

And then there's the phenomenon, the inverse of the placebo effect, that once you know something's happening it gets more and more noticeable after that.

Oh well.  I suppose, given my extra storage, I actually could give uop eating, relatively, for a while.  But I don't want to.  and given my personality and the fact that food tastes fine for the first bite or two, it will be difficult not to unconsciously stuff my face trying to chase the bitter away.  Must not be unconscious around food, I guess.

So there's this cute little tumbler called "Problems with Webcomics."  It presents the results of a painstaking study of webcomics and how they present "nonheteronormative sexuality" (is that the ugliest way to say that which isn't meant to be derogatory I have ever seen? I am not sure) and race.

The conclusion: There are no transgender or queer characters in webcomics. That's right, none.

This was a shocking discovery to me, as I only follow fifteen webcomics, and every single one of them features main or major characters who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender:  Three of my fifteen have main or major characters who are transgender.  20% is not zero.  Of course "webcomics that Lucy follows" is not a valid sample. (one nice side effect of bumping into this is that I've gone and tracked down some other comics that I had lost track of over the years, so that now I think I am following eighteen or nineteen comics).

The other conclusion is confusingly stated: 18% of webcomics have only one character of color. Does this mean that the other 82% have several each? Surely not, if over four hundred of the over six hundred characters they counted were white.

How did the people who did the study arrive at these conclusions?

They gathered up 500 webcomics from one webcomic server's list and personal recommendations of their friends and chose a random one hundred to study.  Then they counted things and presented them as percentages of each other. This shows a pretty shallow understanding of what statistics is for, if you ask me (and of course nobody did). 

There's nothing very comprehensive about the initial group.  And it's a small enough group that there's no reason to choose a smaller group within it.  Sampling is what we do when a population is very large and unwieldy and we want to make it maageable.  Randomization is only one of the tools used to ensure that samples are representative.  If you take a random sample of the entries in the San Jose telephone book to represent the households of the Pacific Coast States, it really doesn't matter how meticulous your randomization method is, the sample will not be an accurate representation of the population you say you are studying.

This seems to be what happened here. 

There are other problems with "Problems with Webcomics."   I need to qualify all this by saying that it's kind of difficult to say what's a criticism and what's not, or even, in some cases, what's from the authors themselves and what's a comment or a response to a comment. Tumblr is a lousy format: sorry, all you enthusiasts out there, but it is.  Furthermore, the report is presented as speech balloons spread over a number of unidentfied characters, scattered over the panel so that the relationship of one statement to the next is obscured.  It's hard to say which points are just raw data, which are being presented as actual problems with webcomics, which are exceptions or mitigations, or what.

Once they get beyond mere numbers, it's just plain confusing.  It is sort of the nature of the problem, to a degree.  Is it more of a problem when characters are presented with some simple indication of diversity of skin color, hair texture, etc., without cultural details beyond geekhood, or is it more of a problem when characters are presented with the same seven or eight ethnic markers ?  Is it wrong to slap a bindi on a character's head and then have them never show any evidence of being Hindu? (and if a character is wearing a bindi and has no other ethnic marker, how are you sure they're not a Mexican schoolgirl from Watsonville, California, about fifteen years ago? It was all the rage at Lakeview School back then).  But there's no discussion of this, though it is a problem webcomics, like all media, should confront early and often and with different conclusions all the time.  It's just brought up as a complaint that there are "ambiguous"-raced characters and characters who are drawn with one or more "racial" markers who are lacking in any other racial or ethnic markers.

The only discussion of genre appears to come out of the finding that there are three romance-oriented comics that feature gay male characters, and the comics that feature lesbian characters are not romances.  Though the statement is broader than that: there are no romances feature main or major lesbian characters.

Of the hundred comics they studied, four were ones I have read (I follow one of them).  Of them, one,"Girls with Slingshots," must be mischaracterized -- or some of the zeroes in the findings would not be zeroes. I suppose they dismissed the two lesbian romances in the comic because one of them has one of those black characters that don't exist in webcomics and the other one features a couple where one of the women is bisexual (another thing that doesn't exist in webcomics) and the other is asexual.  Which of course means that the romance is not lesbian and is not a romance?  Another comic on their list , "Scandinavia and the World," (which is one I have read but do not follow.  I understand that it is an attempt to de-nature stereotypes and to reduce everybody to the same level of mockery, but it often just doesn't work for me and seems like it's the same old racism after all, in spite of what I do believe is a sincere author.  Sometimes sincerity isn't enough) has to be mischaracterized also,  if the claim that "there is no alternative sexuality represented in webcomics" is to be supported. (those are their words, not mine)  Here I think the fluidity of the characters' sexuality disqualifies them in the eyes of the "Problems" authors.  I think.

Oh, and it's apparently offensive that there are 35 non-human characters among the six hundred and somewhat.  No, I got that wrong.  What's offensive is that there are more non-human characters than there are any other category that is not "white." What I think is offensive is counting non-human as a non-white category, which they totally did there, in a chart and everything: leaving us with "white, human" vs. "non-white and non-human."  What the hell, children?

I wish that they had sampled their comics in a more comprehensive way, and that they had paid some attention to genre: as it is, the only mention of genre is the complaint that only gay men get romance comics. Further, I wish for a couple of different studies.  I wish that someone would interview webcomic artists about their intentions as to the ethnicity and sexuality of their characters, and then have readers complete surveys about the ethnicity and sexuality of the characters in the webcomics, and then analyze the two together.  Don't you think that would tell us something about what's actually happening in webcomics?  Another cool thing to do would have been to try to look at what happens to webcomics about people of color.  Do they get lost?  Do they get featured in the same way comparable webcomics about white characters do? 

Really, if they want to talk about what isn't there, I just wish they had spent the extra effort, and recruited more kiddies to work on it, and counted a lot more than a measly hundred webcomics from a dubious sampling method. 

It's not that I don't agree that there's a big deficit all across the board here.  But I think that when you look at webcomics and deny the existence of comics about characters of diverse sexualities and colors and castes, and you erase what's actually out there, you're not, even if you intend to be, creating a call to action.  You're impeding action.  You're sending your readers back to square zero, when they have a right to be in square one or possibly even three or more, when they have a right to build on the work that's already being done.

I really should, at this point, offer up a page of links to the comics I read and have read, but it's one-thirty in the morning and I need to write an obituary tomorrow.

My stepmother (Moher Downing)  died at 2:30 this morning after a long and valiant struggle against breast cancer.  She lived a lot of life in a life that was not that long.

More at another time.

Pyrophone -- an instrument in which flames cause vibrations in glass tubes.

Symphonia-- ah, who knows?

Glassichord -- different from the glass harmonica in that it is played like a spinet and little hammers hit glass rods.

Marimbaphone -- which could be used with a bow.

Lithophone -- yes, a xylophone made of rocks.

Crotales -- little bowed cymbals.

nail violin

Daxophone

friction harp

Ball point pens  now, go surfn the pen tapping

Fortunately, my super-competent genius roommate Zack figured out a way to see the eclipse, and we're in and out with a camera obscura he made from a box, looking at the progress of the moon's shadow across the sun's image (I'm sure I have said that wrong).  Right now it is 6:10pm (18:10) PST and we're seeing a bite out of a cookie.  Zack has sharper eyes than me and he thinks he sees a little corona.

Dancing not at folk dance class but at the end-of-the-year celebration for a series of classes for preschool teachers, and I could really really do it.  It was nice.

Also, I have the opening to the sequel to the Drummer Boy, and many of the things that are in the story, but not the plottyplotplot.  Of course, it is Ludmilla's story, and it might be more interesting than Yanek's if it only had a plot.  Ludmilla's a more attractive person than Yanek.  She's one, a mystic, except that two, she's not because she's a materialist, and three, she's practically a Lorax, only instead of being a ball of fuzz who makes panicked prophecies, she's a calm scientist who knows things beyond what she knows.  When she knows stuff about situations that she doesn't have the supporting information for, she considers it to be a hypothesis, not a vision, and while she's not afraid of dropping bombs into conversations with matter-of-fact confidence, she won't commit to them as facts until she's gotten the data.

So I know some other things about her character, and her appearance (she's not as little as Yanek).  I also know that she gets her parents to agree to send her to University on the grounds that Yanek will be there to be a chaperone (sexist times, yes).  And I know that when Yanek disappears she comes up with another plan.  I know that despite her determination to put off marriage as long as possible -- forever if possible -- she ends up marrying, and I know why, and I know how that happens, and I know that she has at least one child,  And I know that she does something magnificent and steampunky to do with her botanical mojo, but I don't know what.

But I wrote the opening paragraphs anyway, because I didn't want to lose them while I finish this interminable novel here in front of me.

The words I wrote this morning are probably compost.  And so is the long journal post about it that I just deleted.

whenever I visit romance sites I bump into the non-question: "Is there anything sexier than a former Marine with a gorgeous body?" (Really. every time)

Yes, yes, there is.  A former marine isn't sexy to me at all.  Show me a real man -- a railroad engineer, a nurse, a chef, an archaeologist, a mechanic, a hairdresser, a guitar repairperson, a tailor, a phlebotomist, a glassblower, an irrigator, a dentist, a gandy dancer, a crab fisherman -- not a marine.

And those bodies that can only be achieved by carefully symmetric, exactly counted, perfectly time repetitions of precise movements and measured weights, and evenly tanned all over to some peculiar ideal?  They're boring and unattractive.  I want the ones that develop from real-life activities and experiences, a sinew there, a muscle there, a lump of fat there, a tan line, a freckle, a mole, a scar, something real and imbued with story.  I don't care what a man can bench-press.  I want to read his story.

I knew an ex-marine that I liked very much.  He joined to defend democracy.  When I knew him: he was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

If you hang up after two rings and don't leave a message you will never, ever, ever have a chance to talk to me because I can't get to my phone before two rings and I can't call you back if you don't leave a message.

I'm looking at you, almost everybody who calls my number.

My latest favorite musicians are these fantastic singers from Russia.  They are this year's Russian Eurovision entry.

Everything they do is magnificent, although I am less anamored of the covers of "Hotel California" and "Let it Be," even though the latter has some cute grandsons playing along.

On another front: Bosnia and Herzegovina abolished serfdom in 1918, and they weren't even the last ones -- that honor goes to Bhutan and Tibet -- 1959.

Also, there's this Ukrainian dance (also Romanian and a few other ethnicities), called "Arkan."  My brother used to dance it as a young man.  It's kind of the archetypical macho Eastern European dance, with stomping and high kicks and showing off and arms around the shoulders.  Tonight I discovered that at least in some places there was this tradition where the men would kidnap boys and bring them to a bonfire where they would be made to dance this dance with the men and thus be initiated as an adult who could marry and tend sheep.  I am not making this up.  I couldn't make this up. 

I also am now thoroughly confused about just who was expelling whom from which villages throughout the 20th century.  There was a lot of it going on.  The end result, at least in this one area I spent a lot of today reading about, appears to be vast tracts of utterly empty land with houses gone to ruin and the families scattered all over the globe.  I already knew that there was a large area where several of the dialects could be and are equally justifiably assigned to Polish, Czech, Slovak, or Ukrainian, depending on the language ideology of the observer. 

I also am more confused than ever about what it means to own villages in that region.  I had this picture in my mind of a long-established nobility in at least part of the landscape, with landed folks claiming ancestry going back hundreds of years, but looking at these villages and the estates that claim them, with records going back to the 1500s, it looks like the ruling class had a complete turnover every two or three generations, with partial turnovers between.