(no subject)

It's been a busy week, what can I say? My left foot has been in pain; went to doctor, got x-rays. It's not broken, it turns out. Neither are there bone spurs, nor are there the crystals that would indicate gout. So, even though it's not swollen the way one would expect with a sprain, it must be a sprain - how the hell did I sprain 2 toes without bruising them??? I can't remember doing anything. And at my age, a sprain takes even longer to heal than a broken bone, goody. So all I can do is wear protective shoes, apply ice on occasion, use painkillers to sleep, and - I'm quoting my ever-helpful medical provider here - "try not to walk into any furniture in your sleep."

I'm reviewer number 843 now on Amazon - 115 reviews, 963 helpful votes.
I need a haircut.
I am looking forward to the extra hour of sleep this weekend. Also looking forward to the Texas Book Festival - with the bike, there's a decent chance of finding a parking space within a block of the grounds.

(no subject)

thanks to stylizedboredom

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund
loins of Rum and Monkey.
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
You are Nicola Tesla, inventor of the Tesla Coil!
A minister's son from Simljan in Austria-Hungary,
you were precocious from an early age. At three you
could multiply three-digit numbers in your head and
calculate how many seconds visitors to your home had
lived. In awe of your older brother Dane, you shot a
pea-shooter at his horse, causing it to throw him and
inflict injuries from which he later died. This tragedy
haunted you ever after. You frequently suffered bouts
of illness with hallucinations throughout your life.
During one affliction of cholera, you encountered the
writing of Mark Twain, with whom you were later to
be close friends. Later, another, this time mystery,
illness inexplicably heightened your senses to a painful
extent, only relenting when you hit upon the idea of
the alternating current motor.

You developed an aversion to human contact,
particularly involving hair, and a fear of pearls; when
one would-be lover kissed you, you ran away in agony.
Later, you insisted that any repeated actions in your
day-to-day life had to be divisible by three, or, better
yet, twenty-seven. You would, for example, continue
walking until you had executed the required number
of footsteps. You refused to eat anything until you had
calculated its exact volume. Saltine crackers were a
favourite for their uniformity in this respect. In the
midst of important work, you forgot trivial details such
as eating, sleeping or, on one memorable occasion, who
you were.
Your inventions, always eccentric, began on a suitably
bizarre note. The first was a frog-catching device that
was so successful, and hence so emulated by your
fellow children, that local frogs were almost
eradicated. You also created a turbine powered by
gluing sixteen May bugs to a tiny windmill. The insects
panicked and flapped their wings furiously, powering
the contraption for hours on end. This worked
admirably until a small child came along and ate all
the creatures alive, after which you never again
touched another insect.

Prompted by dreams of attaining the then-ridiculed
goal of achieving an alternating-current motor, you
went to America in the hope of teaming up with
Thomas Edison. Edison snubbed you, but promised
fifty thousand dollars if you could improve his own
direct-current motor by 20% efficiency. You
succeeded. Edison did not pay up. It was not long until
you created an AC motor by yourself.
Now successful, you set up a small laboratory, with a
few assistants and almost no written records
whatsoever. Despite it being destroyed by fire, you
invented the Tesla Coil, impressing even the least
astute observer with man-made lightning and lights lit
seemingly by magic. Moving to Colorado Springs, you
created a machine capable of sending ten million volts
into the Earth's surface, which even while being
started up caused lightning to shoot from fire hydrants
and sparks to singe feet through shoes all over the
town. When calibrated to be in tune with the planet's
resonance, it created what is still the largest
man-made electrical surge ever, an arc over 130 feet
long. Unfortunately, it set the local power plant
aflame.

You returned to New York, incidentally toying with
the nascent idea of something eerily like today's
internet. Although the wealthiest man in America
withdrew funding for a larger, more powerful
resonator in short order, it did not stop you
announcing the ability to split the world in two. You
grew ever more diverse in your inventions:
remote-controlled boats and submarines, bladeless
turbines, and, finally, a death ray.

While whether the ray ever existed is still doubtful, it
is said that you notified the Peary polar expedition to
report anything strange in the tundra, and turned on
the ray. First, nothing happened; then it disintegrated
an owl; finally, reports reached you of the mysterious
Tunguska explosion, upon which news you dismantled
the apparatus immediately. An offer during WWII to
recreate it was, thankfully, never acted upon by
then-President Wilson. Turning to other matters, you
investigated the forerunner of radar, to widespread
derision.

Your inventions grew stranger. One oscillator caused
earthquakes in Manhattan. You adapted this for
medical purposes, claiming various health benefits for
your devices. You found they let you work for days
without sleep; Mark Twain enjoyed the experience
until the sudden onset of diarrhoea. You claimed to
receive signals in quasi-Morse Code from Mars,
explored the initial stages of quantum physics;
proposed a "wall of light", using carefully-calibrated
electromagnetic radiation, that would allegedly enable
teleportation, anti-gravity airships and time travel;
and proposed a basic design for a machine for
photographing thoughts. You died aged 87 in New
York, sharing an apartment with the flock of pigeons
who were by then your only friends.
Ridiculed throughout your life (Superman fought the
evil Dr. Tesla in 1940s comics), you were posthumously
declared the father of the fluorescent bulb, the vacuum
tube amplifier and the X-ray machine, and the
Supreme Court named you as the legal inventor of the
radio in place of Marconi. Wardenclyffe, the tower
once housing your death ray, was dynamited several
times to stop it falling into the hands of spies. It was
strangely hard to topple, and even then could not be
broken up.