Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:20 PM

Snow, sleet, freezing rain... April Fool's Day is over, why is this wintry weather still here?

A couple good April Fool's jokes this year worth sharing. I was particularly tickled by the Astronomy Picture of the Day and this one by a friend (which I may steal borrow sometime in the future). Neil Gaiman provided a link to the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time, which are also worth reading.

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately; I've always tended to clam up during tough times. Well, times are certainly tough and I don't want to recite all the petty details. And dealing with these matters of everyday life -- school, finances and jobhunting -- is taking much more of my attention, leaving me even less time and inclination to blog about it all. I'm still nursing a low-level cold (I came down with it last Saturday, and Ian's now got it too). Mostly, I've been suffering from a sore throat and stuffy head -- fortunately it hasn't gotten any worse, but it's also not getting any better. Gug.

Fortunately, we've got a lot of friends and family in the area who have been supportive. I don't know how we'd be getting through all this without y'all. It's tough. Hopefully, however, these will be the worst times Ian & I go through. And with luck, they'll break soon. [Although I'm worried about the latest unemployment figures, which are even more grim than expected.]

In the meantime, I've gotten the latest Alison Weir nonfiction from the library: Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. I've been waiting over a year for this book (since reading about it in an interview with the author). For those unfamiliar with the history, Darnley was Mary's second husband. In the middle of the night, the building Darnley was staying at exploded violently. Darnley was not killed in the explosion, but his undressed, unmarked body was found strangled in the yard. It's been a longstanding mystery of what exactly happened and who was responsible. Suspects include Mary and her third husband, but Darnley was the kind of victim whom everybody wanted dead. I've really enjoyed Alison Weir's histories and have been looking forward to her take on this historical whodunnit.

And, it definitely seems like she's having fun with this one. I keep find myself reading bits aloud to my husband, such as this description of the French royal family:

Even the royal children were tainted by the corruption of the court. Both their grandfathers had died of syphilis, and its effects were now tragically apparent in them. Of the ten children born to Henry II and Catherine de'Medici, Francis was sickly and feeble, Charles suffered from hallucinations, Henry became a homosexual cross-dresser, and Marguerite a nymphomaniac who had an incestuous affair with her brother Hercule.

Boy, family reunions must've been fun! She notes that one of the nude paintings of the teenage Mary is at the Worcester Art Museum, not too far away. ["It is not known whether Mary herself posed naked for these pictures, or whether her portrait was superimposed on the body of a nude model" however, Weir describes it in the midst of other examples of the moral laxity of the French court.] But France wasn't the only nation with crazy royals:

Don Carlos was hopelessly unstable to the point of insanity. At only sixteen, he was morally degenerate, sadistic, severely epileptic, and unprepossessing in his person. His growth was stunted, he had a speech impediment, and he dribbled. But he was set to inherit the greatest throne in Europe, and he was fabulously wealthy. Moreover, King Philip had seen to it that his son's worst defects had remained hidden from public scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the book has its flaws. There are a lot of names bandied back and forth, and the Scottish nobility have similar names and tangled bloodlines. There is a list of names in the front and a family tree in the back, but those should really have been placed adjacent to one another. I'm finding it tremendously complex trying to keep track of who's who, how they're related, and which side they're on at any particular moment. I may have to give up on this book for a while, until I can approach it with a clearer head.

This has also got me thinking a bit about alternate history. As an infant, Mary was briefly promised to Edward VI, Henry VIII's son. Then political fortunes shifted in Scotland, putting the Catholics back in charge and Mary was promised to Francis and shipped off to France to live. But what if the Protestants retained the upper hand in Scotland and Mary wound up with Edward? It's an interesting question, but unfortunately I don't come up with all that interesting of scenarios. Generally, I seem to wind up with Mary playing the role of Jane Grey, with Edward making her his heir but Mary Tudor emerging victorious overall. And I don't understand the Scottish succession well enough to determine who would rule Scotland if Mary Stewart were killed (it seems like half the nobility are decended from bastards of the previous King). It might make Elizabeth's reign more interesting without Mary as a rival (and who would Elizabeth name as heir if James were never born?) but the reality remains more dramatic than this alternate history.

Ah well, back to work...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:05 AM

Last year, I thought up some pretty amusing pranks for April Fools. Turns out, I'm not really in a mood for any of them.

I'm spinning in a pretty bad spiral at the moment. Worries about finances are distracting me from my homework. Trying to find a job is keeping me from getting the finances in order. And my job hunting is curtailed by homework. Vicious cycle, hunh?

I seem to have a mild cold which is mostly making my head feel stuffed up and brain-foggy. Speaking of bugs, we've got ants in our kitchen again and Ian's and my computers appear to have picked up some form of virus. I think (hope) it's pretty harmless, but for some reason our machines keep trying to send off packets that fortunately our firewall is blocking. And it's not either of us, because this is persisting even at times when neither of us are using our computers.

Broadcast packet dropped 192.168.168.2, 138, LAN 192.168.168.255, 138, LAN Code:17

Unfortunately, our virus checkers don't seem to be picking anything up, but so far nothing's happened but these packets, so hopefully it will maintain a stable state until we can manage to get the machines cleaned out. [If anybody wants to help us troubleshoot, I can gladly share further technical info, but for now, we're leaving things be.]

Hopefully, things will look and feel better in the morning.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:45 PM

I came down with a mild cold and have a lot of schoolwork, so not much blogging right now. For the best blog coverage of the war, abroad and at home, see Agonist, Atrios, Talking Points and Thinking it Through (Tom Spencer). You can also work your way down my Links page to see other blogs I like to read.

There's a lot of talk about how messed up our warplans are -- our troops are stopping for a couple weeks because they're understaffed and undersupplied. Isn't there something wrong with the fact that Iraqis are feeding our troops instead of the other way around? One of the Navy's trained dolphins has gone AWOL.

As I've mentioned earlier, it looks like Rumsfeld and his crew tried to minimize both the bad news and the advice of the experienced military. And now the press is filled with unrelenting criticism for this plan (anonymous senior military officials must really hate him, because they're wasting little time saying so). The knives are out and Rumsfeld may have to fall on his sword for this one. The next issue of the New Yorker is supposed to have a devastating cover story on Rumsfeld, details of which are already leaking out. [Hersh is the reporter whose recent expose of Richard Perle led Perle to (a) threaten a libel suit against Hersh in the UK, where the libel laws are easier, and (b) resign from his chairmanship position in the Defense Policy Board (though he's still a regular member)]

However, several people are asking why he was pushing so hard for such a small and fast deployment. CalPundit and Kaus both ask this question, and have some interesting theories.

At least the troops seem to be keeping their spirits up. Electrolite quotes something William Gibson heard on Sky News:

"Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton," UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons yesterday. "He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr," said one British soldier, informed of this while on patrol in Umm Qasr. Another added: "There's no beer, no prostitutes, and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth."

Finally, one story in today's Boston Globe by Joshua Glenn is worth posting verbatim.

Almost from the moment the US Department of Homeland Security launched its terrorism preparedness Web site, Ready.gov, last month, the site's ambiguous, retro-style illustrations have inspired titters and parodies. John Stewart mocked them on ''The Daily Show,'' and visitors to the political discussion site uspoliticsforum.com have suggested their own captions (see examples). Brad B. McCormick, senior producer for the New York-based public relations agency that created Ready.gov pro-bono, hinted to the New York Times on Thursday that the site's ideograms are a less-than-earnest homage to the deadpan style of Cold War duck-and-cover imagery. ''Most government sites are dull and dry, and we wanted to have as much fun as we could,'' he said.

The Globe article makes it sound like they wanted something that could be easily parodied. Maybe this should be taken as a lesson to be careful when somebody offers to help for free, as they may have alternate agendas. [You can read the referenced New York Times article here.]