(Click to embiggen)It’s Friday! It is the first Friday in November, which means that it is National Novel Writing Month? I am spending as much of my free time as possible writing, trying to finish one of my novels.
Last weekend I posted about the mad bomber than ran off to Geek Girl Con and only learned about the mass shooting at a synagoge when I checked news later on my phone. I… I am still so angry about that. I’m not Jewish, okay, but dang it, I’m a human being and you shouldn’t have to be a member of a community to be infuriated when people murder members of that community while literally shouting things that the alleged president of the United States has said. Please scroll down and read about the eleven people who were murdered last weekend in my In Memoriam section. And please, if you can, donate to a cause that fights hatred. Even more, if you haven’t already voted, please, please, please vote. Vote for candidates who will crack down on hate crimes. Vote to take our country back from the Nazis and white supremacists who currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. This isn’t the last chance to stop the evil, this is rather the first chance to fight back at the ballot box against the evil that already controls the nation. Vote!
Welcome to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus my blog post and notable obituaries).
It’s Friday! The fourth (and final) Friday in October! Are you ready to get your spooky on? And by this time next week, will you be joining me in National Novel Writing Month?
Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of the first edition of Friday Five, which replaced my previous Friday Links. I have not, over the course of this last year, stuck strictly to my original redefinition of the post: only the five top stories of the week, plus notable obituaries, links to my own posts, and five videos. Some weeks I have two or three categories of links each of which contains five stories. But my goal of limiting how much time I was spending assembling a post which fewer people have been reading since the inauguration of that which has put many of us into compassion fatigue and so forth, has been obtained. So, since I find it impossible not to read the news and bookmark stories I find interesting, this is going to continue!
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week featuring good news, top five stories, top five stories of interest to queers and our allies, top five sci fi stories, the bottom five awful news stories, and five videos (plus my blog post and notable obituaries).
This one needs explaining: usually Shapiro is the one making deranged attacks on queer people, women, racial minorities, and the left in general. So I have to acknowledge when he says something good: Shapiro criticizes conspiracy theories about bomb threats to Dems.
Joachim Ronneberg: WWII hero who thwarted Nazi nuclear plant dies at 99. They parachuted into the mountains, skied to the base, blew it up, then eluded 3000 Nazi soldiers to escape to Sweden. In later years, Ronneberg liked to describe his team’s harrowing escape as “a good skiing weekend.”
Courthouse security footage shows Lewis County Judge R.W. Buzzard chase after two inmates who attempted to escape his courtroom in Chehalis, Wash., on Oct. 16, 2018:
(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! The third Friday in October. Halloween is coming fast, and I’m still nowhere near ready.
My immune system seems to have finally kicked the upper respiratory infection just in time that I didn’t have to skip another unrelated medical test that I have to undergo every few years. That was Thursday morning. Now that I’m on insulin, they insist that this procedure can’t be done in the afternoon (I have do it before taking any insulin that day), which meant that my husband and I were taking an Uber to the clinic at 6:00am (my husband doesn’t drive, and because general anesthesia is involved, I couldn’t drive for 12 hours after) and our friend Jeri Lynn picked us up when I was done. So Thursday started earlier and then I spent the majority of the day sleeping off the meds. Which all makes my usual work-from-home Friday quite convenient.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus my blog post).
This has not been a great week. A second, much shorter round of antibiotics does not seem to have taken care of my respiratory infection, but my next two schedule medical appointments are within the week yet have nothing to do with that, and I’m not sure I want to try to squeeze another one in there.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, top five sci fi/fantasy/science stories, and five videos (plus my blog posts).
And once again we find ourselves at a Friday. The first Friday in October. October is the tenth month of the year, though it’s name in Latin means the eighth, all because of two Caesars who wanted to immortalize themselves in the calendar.
This has not been a great week. I can’t tell if I’m having a relapse after the antibiotics were finished, or if I’ve caught another cold. Meanwhile, we have leapt into autumn. One day the overnight lay and daytime high were just slightly higher than average for this time of year. The next, both temps were 20 degrees below that, so that our averages are more like the end of October/beginning of November. If I weren’t muzzy headed from the illness, I’d find something poetic of symbolic to infer from it. But I’m just happy the work week is nearly over.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week related to queer people, top five sci fi/fantasy stories, top five science stories, the bottom five stories related to the future of the nation ,and five videos (plus notable deaths and my blog posts).
(click to embiggen)It’s the final Friday in September, the month in which superior people are born. It is also the week of my second 29th birthday—and my husband served up an awesome cake on the day.
Other parts of the week have been less fun. Especially if one has been paying attention to the news and one cares about the rights and lives of women or queer people.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week related to queer people, the bottom five stories related to the future of the nation and five videos (plus my blog post).
It’s the second Friday in September, the month in which superior people are born. I must point out that while it is only the second Friday, tomorrow is the third Saturday, so in some ways it is later than you think.
It has been a very busy and interesting week. Not just in my personal life. I had a very hard time keeping this week’s selection as short as it is.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) science fiction stories of the week, the top five science stories, five stories about horrible things, five videos, and notable obituaries (plus my blog posts—five of them this week, which is the first time in a while).
I meant to do another simple Friday Five this week, just five stories and no more. But then things happened. A lot of things, and the Constitutional crises are just piling up. There was also a lot of interesting science news and other cool stories, so there are several sets of five links below.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, the top five science stories, five stories about things falling apart, five stories about people behaving badly, five videos, and notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
I was very tempted, since this is a fifth Friday, to do five sets of five types of stories. Except that the last several weeks I’ve been doing between two and four sets of five links, which is really stretching the concept. It’s also anti-thetical to the reason I switched from calling my weekly round up “Friday Links” and starting calling it “Friday Five.” Yes, I have bookmarked a bunch of news stories this week, but making myself narrow it down to only five stories and five videos means I spend a lot less time prepping this post than I used to.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, the top five videos, notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
ETA: The original post included an image (with credit to the cartoonist), that had been shared elsewhere with credit. I didn’t research closely enough to realize that the people who have been sharing the cartoon had altered the text. So I changed the image accompanying this post.
Font Folly 