Thursday afternoon things

* I have hit a wall with this heat. I went out over my lunch break to water my hanging baskets and refill the bird bath (the robins, in particular, seem to use it a lot this summer) and I felt like I needed to lie down even though I'd not been outside that long or done anything very strenuous.

* I am also in START ALL THE THINGS mode. (this often happens this time of year). I dug out the duck-egg colored Nashua I want to use for Flax, but I also found the yarn I bought ages ago for the Heliopath vest (though now I'm wondering, as it's a "hairier" yarn (Lustro), if I will come to grief with the dropped stitches and if maybe I'm not better off finding something else....I think it takes a worsted for the vest and I very much want yellow as the color for it, so....it would mind buying new yarn as I don't have any larger amounts of a yellowish yarn. I don't know. Maybe I could swatch and try dropping stitches in the swatch to see how it works).

And I also want to make Ginny's Cardigan (from the same Harry Potter Knits, which I guess has been re-branded Wizard Knits to avoid copyright complications). In fact, I have some tweedy dk on order for it in a medium brown (the color I most commonly wear of the neutrals).

A lot of times Start All the Things mode also carries with it a strong desire for "fantasy" projects, like the Harry Potter knits. I wonder if it's a bit of a desire for an escape....I was searching on "hobbit" and "Narnia" the other day for patterns on Ravelry. (And I found a couple of nice fingerless mitt patterns.)

* I read a few more chapters in the biostats book this morning but I find my brain fatigues fast with that sort of thing, so I switched to the "history of the environmental movement" book for the afternoon. And a couple of striking things:

- In the late 60s, there was a move to dam a couple side canyons of the Grand Canyon, which would have flooded them and probably altered things in the main canyon. Lots of people were aghast at that idea (Barry Goldwater, for one) but LBJ was in favor of it. But a huge PR push by environmental groups (plus anger from some in the Northwest because apparently some dams on the Columbia were bundled in with the plan) stopped it.

- It seems there was less of a hardness-of-positions in the past: there were a number of people (Goldwater being a well known one) on the R side of the aisle who were concerned with conservation and with NOT destroying (at least) the big, recognizable areas. (Goldwater apparently said his greatest regret was voting in favor of the Glen Canyon dam, after he realized what was destroyed).

I really do think in recent years divides have got sharper, people are less likely (less willing?) to work together or to see the other guy's side, and I think that hurts us as a nation.

- Also, once again, women's contributions: one of the EARLY (like, WWII era) proponents of solar energy was the physicist Maria Telkes. (And I wonder - how different would the nation be if that path had been pursued heavily that far back? Would we have more efficient solar power than we do now? I mean, there have been a lot of improvements in the past 15 years, but imagine, if industry/government had backed it back starting in the 40s....)

* Much discussion on Twitter of a mysterious black granite sarcophagus that had been found in Egypt. The "serious" speculation was hope it was the tomb of Alexander the Great; the best "silly" speculation I saw was that they'd discover David Bowie, alive and well, and with secret knowledge that he'd use to heal this timeline. The most "downer" on was "it's full of plague scarabs, and we probably deserve that."

Well, it was opened.

The skeletal remains of three people (they have been dubbed "warriors" on the basis of one having what looked like arrow damage to the skull) and a heck of a lot of thousands-of-years-old "sewage" (or perhaps, and I hate to acquaint you with this term if you don't know it, "body liquor"*)

(*there is a long and bad old story about how I even know that term. Suffice to say it involves one of my grad school colleagues who worked for the gross anatomist, a deep-freeze full of rat carcasses, and a careless janitor over Christmas break)

I kind of expected - on the basis that what looked to me (from the photo I saw) like a vandalized head of an alabaster statue - that it was going to be some old leader, maybe even someone written out of most histories, who had gone so bad his people offed him, buried him, and busted up one of his statues and left the head there as a warning to others/insult to the one they killed. But it seems to have been even less romantic than that...

* But still, News of the Weird in my world:

- a woman was arrested in Ada for attempted arson. She was spotted rifling through a deep-freeze (I suspect this was one of those situations where the homeowners had it in a garage, and the door was left open). When the cops came (apparently the homeowner called them), the woman tried to set the deep freeze on fire.

- Another woman was arrested and fought cops for *an hour* after a traffic stop. They are claiming she was under the influence of "bath salts" (a synthetic drug that I guess is like khat? But it sounds like her reaction was more like that of someone on PCP. At any rate - yipes).

I think the heat brings out worse behavior than you normally see. Irritable people get more irritable; people prone to behave in illogical ways get more illogical.. When drugs or alcohol "are involved" (as the common news-speak is), they seem to be involved to a much stronger effect....

And that kind of thing is also why I'm less inclined to go out in the heat. I COULD stand to pick up a few things at the natural-foods store, but, meh - I remember a couple summers ago when some parts of 75 buckled in less-extreme heat than we're having now, and I have no desire to experience the damage my car could take as a result of that, so I guess I'll rely on local stores for a little while longer.

I'll be glad when the heat breaks. It's like the whole world has a fever.