Zeborah

In which she fixes that for you

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:29:26 GMT

(Trigger warning for societal fubar-ness culminating in murder of a trans woman)

Slain woman had been arrested for being a woman, records show

Cemia Acoff was stabbed repeatedly and dumped into a pond with her lithe body tethered to a block of concrete, a brutal ending to her long fight for acceptance, police say.

Township Police Chief John Minek told reporters that authorities identified the body Monday. Acoff, 20, of Cleveland, had been reported missing March 27. Her body was found April 17 clad in a red Betty Boop tank top, three black bras and a light black hooded jacket. She was naked from the waist down, police said at the time.

The slaying ends Acoff's attempts to be accepted as a woman, according to court records obtained by The Plain Dealer. In November 2010, RTA police said they were checking bus riders for proof of purchase when "we came across a female later identified as Carl Acoff.... Acoff gave us verbal information stating that [s]he was a female." She later admitted legal documents listed her as male.

Six months later, RTA police again stopped Acoff. They found her carrying hormones used to treat low estrogen in women, according to a police report.

Her body was found at 3:30 p.m. April 17 by a renter living in a two-unit apartment next to a retention pond on MacKenzie Road, north of Cook Road, in the township.

[Not being concerned about column inches on my blog, I elide some paragraphs about the area and the neighbours busy fertilising their gardens.]

Records indicate she faced several charges in Cleveland Municipal Court, with many linked to being a woman.

In December 2011, she was sentenced to six months in the county jail after she pleaded guilty to inducing panic and assault for squirting Mace in a man's face while on a bus.

The passengers had to evacuate the bus. Cuyahogo County Common Pleas Judge Stuart Friedman also ordered her to not to ride RTA buses after that.

A month later, in January 2012, she pleaded no contest, and a judge found her guilty of possession of dangerous drugs involving the hormones. She was fined $1,000 and sentenced to 100 days in jail.

In January 2011, she was fined $100 after pleading no contest and being found guilty in Municipal Court to misconduct involving public transportation. The charge involved her failing to pay a fare and telling officers that she was a woman.

(This post has been lightly copy-edited from the original news article. The online version has been edited multiple times in an attempt to conform to AP style without ever having to use the s-word ("she"). Comments are mixed, but pretty well moderated and there are some good ones. Many point out that if she hadn't been transgendered and black the article wouldn't have focused on her criminal record; however I don't actually agree with these commenters that this content is irrelevant to a report about her murder. On the contrary, I think it's quite likely she was murdered for exactly the same reason she was arrested and convicted so many times.)

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In which roadcones = progress

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:50:24 GMT

Once upon a time there was a bus-stop four minutes' walk from my house.

Then there was an earthquake and there were no buses at all. Then they started running for part of the route but the nearest stop was ten minutes away (and my erstwhile 30-minute commute became a 2-hour commute due to omg the traffic, but that's another story). Then some many months later after various permutations of the route My bus-stop started being used again and I might have cried a little.

Then roadworks came to the street. Even before the recent "[image of a roadcone] = progress" propaganda posters went up I've always believed in the sentiment, and the challenge of trying to find a new route across the road every time I want to visit the supermarket is all part of the fun of living in a post-apocalyptic society. (Another is jumping over the semi-filled-in ditches they dig across the footpath away from every house when they're fixing the sewers. It's like playing Super Mario in a virtual reality system.) But it did put My bus-stop out of use again — at least the one I go to on the way to work; the one I get off at on the way home was unaffected.

But tonight! I was on my bus on the way home, and I pressed the buzzer and started collecting my bags. And the bus started slowing down at the lights. And I'm all, "Wtf, driver, don't you know those are flashing orange lights because of the roadworks, you don't need to stop at them!" And then the lights — wait for it — the traffic lights turned red.

So I'm all, "Zeborah, play it cool, this is just a thing traffic lights do." But, I mean, they turned red, so when we reached my bus-stop I said to the driver, "Did those traffic lights just start working today?!"

And he said, "Yeah! And I was like, where are all the roadcones?!"

Which passed me right by like it was just a figure of speech, because pff, you can't have roadworks without roadcones! That's just logic! So we said goodnight in good spirits and I hopped off the bus (carefully so as not to sprain an ankle on a pot-hole). Then, just as I was about to turn into my own street, I chanced to look back the way we'd come and I saw that the roadcones were gone.

(Okay, there are still several scattered at various spots, but it's less in the way of someone having set up roadcones to delimit roadworks, and more in the way of someone having missed picking them up. It'd be pretty easy to overlook a few bright orange cones with reflective stripes, because that sort of thing just blends into the post-apocalyptic landscape along with the "Safety is no accident" hi-vis vests: you only notice them if you're really looking for them.)

I... I think the roadworks are finished?

At least on that side of the road.

And I think that means I'm going to get My bus-stop back.

And you know what that means?

View Poll: It means I have 5-6 extra minutes every morning!

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In which she links to that speech she mentioned, and others by people who aren't straight white guys

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:19:17 GMT

One of our straight white male MPs is going to go on the talkshow Ellen. He did give a great speech, but, um, what about the LGBT MPs and ex-MPs who also gave great speeches? And who did most of the work on the bill? Like, say, the Māori lesbian MP who submitted the bill in the first place?

So here are some speeches from the night by MPs who aren't straight white guys.

Firstly, the kōrero in which Te Ururoa Flavell (straight Māori guy) talks about about Tutanekei's hoa takatāpui Tiki, and gives more context to the history of Pākehā redefining marriage to exclude Māori customary marriage.

(Procedural notes: a lot of MPs on the evening chose to share their speaking time with someone else, and Te Ururoa was the recipient of one such five minute slot from John Banks which is why he's acknowledging "Hone Banks". He gets cut short at the end for going over his time limit which is a tremendous shame given how informative his kōrero was, but the rule seemed fairly equally enforced against Pākehā MPs doing the same. And applause is normally I gather not allowed but that rule went out the window completely for the whole evening.)

More awesome kōrero on the evening included:

Louisa Wall (Māori lesbian; submitted the bill; first name pronounced lou-issa)

Kevin Hague (gay white guy)

Tau Henare (straight Māori guy; responding to straight Māori guy Winston Peters' vile speech which I won't link to because Winston is *that* MP, you know the one, who just always.)

Mojo Mathers ((Deaf) straight white woman; bringing tears to my eyes every time I watch it)

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In which she translates for the rest of the world

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:38:16 GMT

New Zealand just passed the third and final reading of our marriage equality bill 77-44.

(I was listening by radio after, having failing to get reception for Parliament TV and failing to get sufficient bandwidth for the internet livestream, I put out a plaintive tweet asking about livestreaming audio and someone pointed me to 882AM. Oh yeah, that dusty old machine.)

After the Speaker's announcement of the result and before the tumultuous applause, a waiata was sung and harmonised upon.

This is itself probably needs explaining. Waiata are traditionally sung (among other occasions) in support of a speech. As a non-Māori New Zealander I've most often witnessed/participated when this has happened during a traditional welcoming ceremony or opening ceremony; but also after some keynotes at New Zealand library conferences; or in support of family/friends at graduation. So for this to happen was very appropriate.

But the particular waiata chosen is what really needs translation. It was Pokarekare Ana which is a song extremely widely known in New Zealand, you may well even have heard it overseas, so it might just seem a bit twee if you don't know anything about it. And it's about a famous heterosexual love story, so if you know a little bit about it you might think that in this context, um, what?

But the reason this song was perfect for the occasion was because earlier in the evening, speaking in support of the bill, Te Ururoa Flavell referred to another part of this story of Hinemoa and Tutanekai - to the part where after Tutanekai married Hinemoa, his hoa takatāpui Tiki grieved for losing him. Te Ururoa pointed out that people complaining about this bill seeking to "redefine marriage" need to be aware that, in New Zealand, marriage was redefined way back in the 19th century by colonialism.

A lot of people, throughout the evening, pointed out that there's still a lot of work to do for justice and equality. But this was a great step, in so many ways.

[For reference, words I had to redact from this post given I'm attempting to translate here: Pākehā; kōrero; pōwhiri; marae; tautoko; Aotearoa; ahakoa he iti he pounamu.]

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In which she shreds the latest Doctor Who episode (Bells of St John)

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 11:06:04 GMT

Obvious spoilers are obvious

Melodramatic opening is melodramatic, derivative of a bunch of Moffat's previous stories (most obviously "Don't blink" and "Who turned out the lights?") and not at all creepy.

Opening credits are... new, again? Maybe not, I never bothered rewatching the last episode.

At this point I was already so bored I turned to Twitter.

In the next scene we're apparently meant to be surprised that a mysterious hermit 'monk' (like the last half-dozen mysterious strangers in town) turns out to be the Doctor. Apparently he's decided that the best way to track down Clara Oswald is — rather than looking her up in a gigantic database somewhere, or even travelling around at random hoping to stumble across her — to sit in a hole in the thirteenth century staring at a portrait of her he painted.

I nearly go back to Twitter but now we get a scene with Clara herself. She's now a nanny in modern-day times (one of her charges is reading a book by Amelia Williams. It takes me half a minute to realise it's a reference to Amy Pond because the writers decided, after seasons pointing out that Rory would totally take her name, that actually no, now she's going to take his) and she's trying to get someone on the phone...

...Which turns out to be the TARDIS phone (whose door of course mentions St John Ambulance). This is a mildly clever explanation for the episode's title except it's never touched on again so I'm not sure what the point is. The Doctor acts like no-one's ever called him on this phone before. Turns out Clara wants tech support to get onto the internet; a "woman in the shop" gave her this number saying it was a helpline. (I like to think it was Sally Sparrow.) The Doctor does the obvious techline troubleshooting because she knows nothing about computers.

(There's a high-larious interlude of the monks asking "Is it evil spirits?" and then crossing themselves when the Doctor says it's a woman. Because women are just like evil spirits, hahahaha oh misogyny you're not even original.)

The Doctor realises who he's talking to when she murmurs the thing she tells him whenever she dies as a mnemonic for the wifi password the family she's working for set up. So... even her catchphrase isn't really hers?

She accidentally attracts the attention of the horror of the week.

The Doctor turns up on her doorstep. Instead of explaining, he keeps banging on the door (which she has sensibly shut in his face) telling her he needs to explain. Seriously, Doctor, explain first; ask to come inside second. If you're less shouty and shovey, women will probably be less instantaneously scared of you.

The Doctor belatedly changes out of his monk's costume into a new suit, complete with bow tie. Now, I've always been in the "Bow ties are cool" camp, but there comes a time when every woman's loyalties reach breaking point, and that time for me is when I discover that the Doctor has made a little shrine of a box for his bow tie. Bow ties are now officially no longer cool.

(I think around here I returned to Twitter for another pick-me-up.)

Clara gets uploaded by the horror of the week. The Doctor bursts in, downloads her again, and carries her up to her bed to recuperate. While she's sleeping it off he puts water, flowers and jammy dodgers next to her bed, which is nice. Then he snoops around her bedroom, opens her journal, and licks a maple leaf from it, which promptly displaces Nicholas Cage perving on the showering woman in City of Angels for Most Unintentionally Creepy Moment In the History of Video Entertainment.

(Later I had an argument on Twitter about this with someone who thinks this behaviour is okay because a) the Doctor's obsessed with her, b) he's a Time Lord/alien, and c) it's only scifi. I used a word that I mostly otherwise reserve for 7.0 magnitude earthquakes, and then I blocked him. If anyone wants to continue the argument, I've got my Baninator right here.)

The Doctor then sets up camp outside her house to guard her, which I guess provides him a remnant of redemption? (The being outside part, I mean.) Then because Stephen Moffat is writing the episode, she spunkily insists on coming out to pseudo-flirt with him and he is awkward about her pseudo-advances. He deduces that while uploaded she learned a bunch about computers because before she couldn't operate one and now she's parroting the same kind of joke about Twitter made by technophobes the world over.

(Incidentally, in this version of herself she looks a lot like an older version of the girl who was stored in the Library. This ups my mental tally of Moffat's creepiness quotient to unprecedented levels.)

The horror of the week chooses this moment to attack. The Doctor yanks Clara into the TARDIS (it's bigger on the inside, yadda yadda), saves the day, jumps to breakfast-time in an unprecedent feat of temporal accuracy, and after an interlude involving a fez and a motorcycle, sets up at a cafe and attempts to track down the horror of the week. Clara tells him to hand her the laptop and get some coffee, she can do it. The Doctor's forgotten that she just learned a bunch about computers while uploaded and mansplains that no, she can't.

Eventually she prevails. While he's getting coffee and stealing food with impunity, the horror of the week (having used the ubiquity of wifi-connected cameras to track him down) controls the people around to gloat at him.

In a really clever bit of social hacking, Clara has tracked down the physical location of the horror of the week by a) getting its employees' photos from their webcams; b) doing facial recognition searches to find their social network accounts; and c) reading their profiles/status updates for their work address.

(Of course there's no conceivable way the plot could have worked if this had been her own talent rather than a skill accidentally technomagically gifted to her by the horror of the week because women don't have talents of their own, especially not involving technology, sheesh, don't be silly!)

She tells the Doctor that she knows the location, except it's actually a robot thing which uploads her. Her face remains when the real Doctor returns to tell him "I don't know where I am" even though three seconds ago she knew exactly what the location was.

Jump cut to the Doctor knowing exactly what the location is even though three minutes ago he didn't have a clue. (I like to think he read it off the screen of her open laptop, but the show doesn't take even a second to admit that he didn't work it out for himself.) He confronts the puppet queen of the horror of the week and when she doesn't back down he reveals that he's actually still at the cafe and she's talking to the robot thing, which uploads her.

Her only way to escape is to order her employees to download everyone, including Clara. While UNIT storms the offices, the puppet queen reports her failure to the season's Big Bad the "Great Intelligence" and on his instructions does a "factory reset" of all the employees, including herself. Thus (as all powerful women must) she gets her comeuppance by being found huddled on the floor asking in a silly little girl voice and even clunkier dialogue where her mummy and daddy are. (The male employees only lose a few mental years and are merely bewildered, which apologists will say is because she was under the GI's influence for longer, but this isn't an excuse. Children can have dignity too, and for her to end as she did is either a) lazy writing or b) misogyny or my personal favourite c) both.)

Meanwhile the Doctor tries to convince Clara to go with him on the grounds that he can return her with precision to this exact time to pick up her responsibilities. Maybe River fixed some TARDIS circuits so that nowadays he can pick a time and place and actually end up there? Clara plays hard to get with an "Ask me tomorrow" and the Doctor is all happily intrigued.

Summary:

The Doctor, having steadily got creepier and creepier over the last year and a half in particular, is now actually creepier than the horror of the week.

Clara Oswald is steadily getting less and less interesting. When we first saw her she was a technowhizz. The next time she was maintaining jobs both as barmaid and as governess. Now she accidentally became a nanny to repay a favour, can't even log onto a wifi network without assistance, and her flirtiness and wanderlust are exactly the same flirtiness and wanderlust as all Moffatt's other female characters. She doesn't even seem to bake souffles anymore.

The horror of the week and large chunks of the plot (not to mention the extra-plot trimmings like the monk gambit and the wardrobe fishing) could have been generated by Mad Libs. It was all so utterly predictable that I stopped watching several times to chat on Twitter and once to watch the last third of an Attenborough documentary about baboons. Baboons are fascinating, but even so when a documentary about baboons is more compelling than a brand new Doctor Who episode, something somewhere has gone terribly terribly wrong.

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In which she is possibly recovering a bit

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:58:17 GMT

Apologies in advance for another boring post. The short version is: eating food is good for you.

I did get over the worst of the laryngitis thing a good while back; was only off work a few days. (Things that ended up really helping the cough: the experimentally-proven warm moist air; keeping hydrated; cough suppressant; and salbutamol. I keep forgetting that when it comes to anything to do with my lungs, salbutamol is almost always going to immediately improve the situation.)

However it has been lingering on, unhelped by a Bonus!Rhinovirus of about ten days ago. So have got a tad tired, and the housework's suffered accordingly, and similarly grocery shopping and the will to cook, and thus haven't been eating properly, and thus have been lacking energy, and so on and so forth.

Until Sunday I piked out of my ordinary commitments--

(Meaning: I missed the bus to church, attempted to walk instead, realised my blood sugar was way low so stopped at a grocery to buy breakfast, wasn't able to eat it all, made it to my parents' house and sat on the couch for several hours; then phoned friends to cancel my normal Sunday evening visit, and went home to sleep for several more hours. After which--)

--made myself buy groceries and cooked with them. I also cooked and ate food on Monday and today, and also along the way got some more extra sleep; and then today, by complete random happenstance, minor items of housework have started achieving themselves.

(Possibly it helped that if I didn't do the laundry soon I was going to have to raid my go-bag for clean underwear.)

So I think I might possibly be getting functionally better, albeit with the occasional coughing fit (eg tilting my head back to drink the last drops is contraindicated because it stretches the throat and coughing) and singing two or three tones lower than normal. Planning to book annual leave for this Friday just to solidify this whole healthiness thing.

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In which she spends the night conducting medical engineering experiments

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:18:24 GMT

So a week or so ago I caught this bug off my mother. (My mother, who's had it for three weeks or so, in turn blames the dust from roadworks repairing sewerage pipes.) For the first week it was rather genteel, involving only a persistent productive cough and no other symptoms. At all. It was actually quite weird, but nice, because I didn't *feel* sick.

On Friday the coughs got too much for me to stay at work; and yesterday I went to the doctor who diagnosed laryngitis by a) the time-honoured method of translating symptoms into Greek and calling it a diagnosis, combined with b) what everyone else has. She wrote me a prescription for antibiotics-if-I-get-desperate, on the grounds that although it's probably not a bacteria I seem like a sensible white middle-class person who didn't walk in demanding antibiotics so can be trusted not to abuse the privilege. Also while it's airborne, as public health menaces go that ship's already sailed so I can go to work as long as I feel well enough and work doesn't mind.

This sounded good to me because while my work sensibly provides infinite sick leave and I'm a fan of sitting on my couch with my cat, there's a meeting I *really really* want to go to this morning.

So of course I spent large proportions of last night:
a) attempting in vain to suppress a persistent, nonproductive, side-splitting, lung-hacking cough;
b) attempting to figure out how to stop this cough in order to sleep and/or survive the night;
c) attempting to find a practical implementation of my solution;

and a regretfully small proportion of the night:
d) sleeping.

Also I eventually woke up this morning with the more classic symptom of laryngitis, to wit, not exactly being able to talk, per se.

Anyway, here are the results of my medical engineering experiments, because while my research was not strictly publicly funded, I'm a firm believer in open access.

Hypothesis A: The cough is induced by irritation in the bronchi, and if I can soothe the irritation with ice water then the cough will be suppressed and I can go to sleep.

Methodology: Subject sucked on and occasionally chewed ice cubes.

Results: Even more coughing, omg, seriously, if you have strong religious beliefs about how the proper place of lungs and stomach contents is inside the body then don't do this. I did actually manage to keep everything in its proper place but it was a near call and I painfully strained a rib muscle of some sort before I managed to stumble hacking out of bed and to the location of my second experiment.

Hypothesis B: Cold bad ergo warmth good.

Methodology: Subject took a hot shower with the fan turned off so that the bathroom steamed up.

Results: Inhaling steam good. The cough mostly went away. The hot water also felt nice on my strained rib muscle. Unfortunately once I came out of the bathroom again the cough resumed.

Hypothesis C: Lungs are clearly super-sensitive so need a constant stream of warm, moist air.

Methodology: Having discarded, for practical reasons, the idea of trying to sleep in the shower, bath, or a hypothetical Linwood all-night sauna, subject boiled the jug and nuked a wheatpack for her ribs. Subject then spent the next six hours working out the best way to sleep safely with a bowl of boiling water in one's bed and periodically waking up (the water having cooled enough to retrigger the hacking cough) and going back to the kitchen to reboil the jug.

Results: I think I got almost four hours of sleep in three batches? Not bad, all considered. Anyway my eventual method was to lie on my side on pillows, with next to the pillows a large plastic bowl containing a smaller metal bowl of boiling water, and my head and the bowl covered with my polar fleece poncho, aka 'blankie'.

At one point I added some eucalyptus oil; I don't think this either helped or hurted.

A damp towel nuked for a minute provided near-instant relief while waiting for water to boil. But it cooled quicker than a bowl of water so wasn't by itself a good solution.

Conclusion: If you see or hear someone coughing, run as fast as you can in the other direction. Apparently this thing is going around.

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In which two years make a tradition

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:51:14 GMT

I passed through town late this morning and saw families going in for the memorial service, and hugs between friends, and old rubble and brand new buildings, and everywhere flowers in roadcones.

When I cut some lilies from my garden to take to the roadworks at the end of my street, their stems wept.

"Road cones on Cashel Street" by Christchurch City Libraries, on Flickr; licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

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In which a bunch of things make a post

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:14:43 GMT

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries today has ALL THE FEELS, omg. I'm going to have to mop my face before I head off to work.
Criminal Minds and White Collar are very much going downhill; Elementary isn't bad; Once Upon a Time is currently the best thing on. Around town there are billboards dubbing it "Damsels in Charge" which is exactly what I love about it, and portraying Emma in leather armour that actually covers her entire torso even if it does leave her upper arms worryingly bare.
The neighbour has finally ~~scythed~~ mowed their lawn jungle. Hopefully this will reduce the number of biddybids I have to pick out of Boots' fur with sneak attacks.
Being an adult means when you run out of milk you can melt some icecream onto your cereal for breakfast instead.
Freezing cheese totally (and totally predictably) borks its structural integrity.
My plums are almost finished; grapes and peaches seem to be coming along nicely.
I've been making lots of curtains and doing lots of baking while watching lots of West Wing. I think it's a phase? Also doing bits of coding and fanfic and other writing and adding to my "Awesome projects it'd be fun to do if I had infinite time and parallel selves" list.

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Maakah daughter of the king of Geshur

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:47:10 GMT

Maakah (2 Samuel 3:3 and identically 1 Chronicles 3:2) is the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur. "Geshur and Maakah" are a people subdued by but not driven out by Israel back in the day, so they continue to live in the country and apparently keep on having a king; 'Maakah' appears to be a not uncommon personal name.

When this Maakah marries David, then, it's probably (like I suspect Ahinoam of Jezreel) for political reasons; probably shortly after he returns from exile to be crowned king of Judah. She gives birth to his third son Absolom, and to an ill-fated daughter Tamar, about whom more another week.

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The witch of Endor

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:02:57 GMT

One of various interludes among the various wives of David.

A woman in Endor is known as a medium (1 Samuel 28:7-25). This isn't a terribly safe trade since King Saul has driven all its practitioners out of the land and she now risks death, so when a man turns up one night asking for her to summon a spirit she demurs. Not for too long, though.

Her client wants to talk to the late prophet Samuel (son of Hannah). She brings up his spirit and then realises: her client is King Saul himself. This makes her Somewhat Nervous, but Saul's too desperate to talk to Samuel to worry about how this is all against a law he created himself. He demands to know what she sees (spirits coming out of the earth) and what he's wearing (an old man wearing a robe).

"That's him!" Saul says at once, convinced by even less evidence than most clients of mediums need.

He asks spirit-Samuel what to do now that the Philistines are fighting against him and God isn't talking to him anymore. Spirit-Samuel says, "Too late, bub: tomorrow the Philistines are going defeat your army and you and your sons will die." At which Saul collapses in fear and exhaustion, having eaten nothing all day.

The medium asks him to let her feed him so he'll have strength to go on his way. (Whatever's to befall him tomorrow, one can see how it'd be inconvenient to her life and liberty to have a monarch fall sick in her house after she's committed a crime for him.) He's not hungry, but she and his advisors prevail on him. She immediately butchers a fattened calf and bakes unleavened bread; he eats; and the men all leave.

(The Philistines defeat Saul's army, kill three of his sons, and badly wound him; he falls on his sword so he won't be killed by uncircumcised men.)

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Abigail

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:52:02 GMT

Abigail (1 Samuel 25:3-42) has brains and beauty; unfortunately she's married to a stingy fool.

The country's in the midst of civil war and the leader of one party, David, sends to Abigail's husband for food for his army. Her husband refuses outright. Luckily for him one of his servants runs to Abigail to see if she can fix things, because a) David's been really polite, not taking anything without asking and making sure his soldiers don't loot the place, and b) this doesn't mean he'll carry on being so polite.

Abigail (as the servant expected) knows what to do. She ignores her husband's orders and goes to meet David with five of her handmaidens and donkeys laden with food. She makes a long speech:

"Pardon your servant, my lord, and let me speak to you; hear what your servant has to say. Please pay no attention, my lord, to that wicked man Nabal. He is just like his name—his name means Fool, and folly goes with him. And as for me, your servant, I did not see the men my lord sent. And now, my lord, as surely as the Lord your God lives and as you live, since the Lord has kept you from bloodshed and from avenging yourself with your own hands, may your enemies and all who are intent on harming my lord be like Nabal. And let this gift, which your servant has brought to my lord, be given to the men who follow you.

Please forgive your servant’s presumption. The Lord your God will certainly make a lasting dynasty for my lord, because you fight the Lord’s battles, and no wrongdoing will be found in you as long as you live. Even though someone is pursuing you to take your life, the life of my lord will be bound securely in the bundle of the living by the Lord your God, but the lives of your enemies he will hurl away as from the pocket of a sling. When the Lord has fulfilled for my lord every good thing he promised concerning him and has appointed him ruler over Israel, my lord will not have on his conscience the staggering burden of needless bloodshed or of having avenged himself. And when the Lord your God has brought my lord success, remember your servant."

And David blesses her good judgement, accepts the gift and decides not to murder all the men of the household after all.

When Abigail goes home Nabal's drunk, so she waits until morning to tell him. At which point "his heart failed him and he became like a stone" and ten days later he dies. When David hears of this, he sends to ask her to become his wife (I'm guessing partly considering himself responsible in a 'he totally deserved it' way for Nabal's death, and partly super impressed by Abigail). She accepts and goes to him with her five female servants, thus becoming his third wife though at this point Michal is off with her other husband.

Later events in Abigail's life:

She travels with David and his first-apart-from-Michal wife Ahinoam into exile to avoid Saul. (1 Samuel 27:3) While there she's captured by the Amalekites; (1 Samuel 30:5) and carried away with them until David kills them and rescues her and Ahinoam. She returns with him when he's anointed king of Judah. (2 Samuel 2:2) There she gives birth to his second son (named either Kileab (1 Samuel 3:3) or Daniel (1 Chron 3:1), oh biblical inerrancy!)

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Ahinoam of Jezreel

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:46:59 GMT

(I swear one day I'll get my calendar alert to actually alert me, and post these on Sunday as planned.)

Ahinoam (1 Samuel 25:43 - 2 Samuel 3:2) is David's first wife apart from the absent Michal. Being married to someone on the run from the current king means a lot of travelling and danger: she and his second wife go with him into exile to Philistine territory where David fights local battles for a local king.

When he goes to join the Philistines in battle against Israel - in fact against her hometown - Ahinoam and the other wives and children left behind by David's troops are captured by a local raiding party. Luckily the Philistines don't trust David that much and they send him back. When he finds Ahinoam et al missing he catches up with them, kills their abductors, and liberates the women and children and a lot of loot (which he deploys politically to his allies back home).

Eventually the exile is over: Ahinoam can return with David to Hebron in Judah when he's to be annointed king. And there she gives birth to his first son Amnon.

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Michal

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:18:16 GMT

Michal (1 Samuel 14:49 - 2 Samuel 6:23) is King Saul's younger daughter. She's fallen in love with the rising star David, her father has his own machiavellian reasons to approve the match, and after letting her older sister Merab get away, this time David lets himself be convinced.

But her father's not completely balanced. After their marriage, he sends men to kill her new husband. Michal finds out about this and warns her husband to run for it. She lets him out a window and makes a decoy out of an idol and some goats' hair. When the soldiers arrive, she tells them that he's ill; and when her father sends them a second time, they discover the decoy. Her father's pretty mad at her letting his enemy escape. She implies that she only let David go after he threatened her life, but this does her little good: at some point while David's on the run, her father marries her off to someone else entirely.

David, despite accumulating a good number of other wives in the meantime, doesn't forget about her. When her father's dead and her brother Ish-Bosheth inherits the war against David, David demands her back. (He refers to her as "betrothed" to him, so they probably hadn't had time to consummate the marriage.) Her second husband is pretty cut up about losing his wife in this way: he goes with her, weeping, until he's forced to go back home.

And, though Michal was head over heels for David in her youth, he's not nearly so perfect in her eyes now. I suspect it's something to do with how he's been at war with, and responsible for the deaths of, her father and a couple of her brothers. Becuase when Ish-Bosheth is murdered, making David king over all of Israel, Michal watches his triumphal procession from a window. She sees him "leaping and dancing" and "she despised him in her heart". (This line is so important the Bible mentions it twice.) When he gets home she scolds him for disrobing in front of slave girls like a vulgar commoner. He retorts that he was celebrating before the Lord, and will be as undignified in that cause as he likes.

And then they never have sex again; or at least I'm guessing that's why she never has any children. It may well not have been her decision (David isn't fond of other men stealing his wimminz) but I can't imagine her being terribly cut up about it.

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Merab

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:02:43 GMT

Merab (1 Samuel 14:49 - 18:19) is the older daughter of Saul, first king of Israel. Saul promises his daughter in marriage to the man who can defeat Goliath. For some reason he doesn't actually keep that promise at once, but later he does offer David Merab. David the ex-shepherd is too humble to accept, however, and she marries someone else instead.

In due course she has five sons, but when famine strikes (2 Sam 21:8), King David kills all five to appease a tribe who her father attempted to wipe out.

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Ahinoam daughter of Ahimaaz

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 07:17:05 GMT

[It's been ages since I've done a Women in the Bible post, even though I've got a bunch ready to go. Today The Most Interesting Chapter in the Bible and Three poems from the book of Judges inspired me to tidy up a few more and get started posting again.

[The first one is super short, so go and read those two links up there; and I'll try to post one each Sunday morning for at least the next couple of months.]

Ahinoam (1 Samuel 14:50 - 20:30) is the wife of Saul, first king of Israel; they have three sons and two daughters. When Saul is mad at his eldest son, he calls him "You son of a perverse and rebellious woman" but of course we never hear enough about Ahinoam to even guess if there's any literal truth to this epithet.

[See, told you it was short.]

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In which she doesn't write any of the posts she planned to write

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:07:56 GMT

I planned to write something about all the awesome cool things popping up in town around the rubble.

Or about how absolutely awesome my new job is.

Or some other things maybe apart from who am I kidding, I was never going to get around to those.

Instead I'm going to revert to one I didn't have the heart to write two weeks ago or three months ago.

You see, back in the mists of time, I can't even remember why, a chunk of the corner of one of my front teeth had to be filled with composite. Three months ago, this filling came out while I was chewing on a (cold therefore a bit toffee-like) Shrewsbury biscuit. The dentist duly replaced it for me.

But then, two weeks ago, right at the start of a long weekend, the replacement came out in (of all things) a bread roll. And then when the dentist was back in her office there were still no appointments available for eight days. Luckily after a while I worked out what and how I could continue to eat without ouchies, otherwise I'd have got very hungry. Anyway and so the dentist duly replaced it for me this Wednesday afternoon free of charge (or as I'm calling it, 'under warranty'), and carefully made it shorter than last time so there'd be less pressure on it.

So, everyone, guess what happened this evening barely two days later? That's right. And guess what was I eating? Nothing, that's what. I was just absentmindedly scraping my teeth across my lip as I always do when it gets dry, and I guess the torque got it where (one presumes) just biting something wouldn't; or I don't know. Whatever, this is official "You have seriously got to be kidding me" territory, and I guess means that if the dentist even wants to have anything to do with me again I'm going to have to go full on and get a crown instead.

Also my php include refuses to work when I use an absolute instead of a relative path and I don't understand why. I need to use an absolute path because this itself is an include and might appear in files in multiple different directories so the relative path breaks for obvious reasons. --Oh, never mind, I worked it out and fixed it. Now I can go to bed and dream of disintegrating teeth in peace.

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In which she bounces

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 07:38:54 GMT

So I've been waiting to say something until it's all signed and official because that's how I roll, but it's now all signed and official so here goes: I can haz new job. :-D

This is at the place I interviewed at around the start of the year and kind of fell in love with, and then a month or so ago this other position came up. The work's a more techy side of librarianship than I've done before so it'll be a bit of a learning curve but also really fun because I've been increasingly interested in that kind of thing. And now instead of me constantly bugging Library IT about things I get to be the one being bugged. :-D

So, paperwork having been done, I've got three weeks to tie up loose ends (and do a bunch of work that's just descended upon us with a short timeframe) and farewell people :-( and then I have two weeks leave :-) and then I start my new job. :-D <bounce>

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In which she watches the Pirates of Penzance

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 01:46:18 GMT

Being home sick with a cold seemed a good opportunity to watch the Pirates of Penzance like I've always been meaning to, and so I did. I only fell asleep three times which seemed pretty good going.

It was less of a comedy than I'd been led to believe. With every moment of potential happiness overshadowed by the ruthless Ruth's determination to manipulate her five-year-old charge into marrying her, it struck me as a commentary ahead of its time on female-on-male pedophilia. (It was interesting to note in contrast the conspicuous background detail of the harem the major-general must have kept to produce so many daughters of like age.) By the end, of course, everyone is entangled in the resulting climactic battle. Since the next thing I was aware of was waking up to the title-screen's hauntingly cynical repetition of the leitmotif "I am the very model of a modern major-general", I can only presume that everyone died, including said major-general, leaving his daughters -- ironically -- orphans in truth.

In other news, it's amazing how refreshed one feels on waking up from a good nap, and how little time this lasts upon standing up to pour oneself a fresh drink.

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In which she has a panic dream. Or not...

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:33:55 GMT

So I was sleeping badly anyway due to my nose having a tendency to block. (Winter, new gas fire drying it up, something like that.)

Then I dreamed I was back in Korea taking a taxi to our apartment, and accidentally got it to drop us off in the wrong apartment block. So we were walking through to get to our own, and came around a corner to where just a few fragments of brick walls remained - fragments of murals painted on what had been the inside - and I realised it was the church I'd last visited there before the quakes, and even though I'd only been there the once it hit me really hard. I had my hand over my nose and mouth just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing...

...and woke up sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, and got the waterworks going too, and then suddenly I thought: Wait, am I actually emotionally affected here or was this just a breathing problem? And I took one deep breath to stop the sobbing and then I was absolutely fine.

So that was anticlimactic; and then my alarm went off before I could get back to sleep. Le sigh. OTOH I've just had too full snowdays off work so I suppose I can't complain too much about going in to work for today.

Oh look! I made you a bonus haiku thing:

I thought, "Wait for spring
to see the cherry blossom," but
here are snow and dawn.

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In which she makes an icon

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:54:11 GMT

I forgot to mention:

This is from Criminal Minds season 6, episode 14. (Possibly it's only funny in Prentiss's voice.) I was watching it for research for my fanfic: I wanted to know if Prentiss and [White Collar] Caffrey's paths could ever have crossed while he was swanning around Europe. I concluded it's possible that she got pointed out to him at some point as someone scary to stay the hell away from.

I don't know if I'll ever use either this conclusion or this icon, but both amuse me too much not to share.

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In which she's been swallowed by a fanfic

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:30:57 GMT

I may be some time.

I would like to briefly affirm, for personal future reference, that the best way ever to get myself to eat is to so arrange things that I come home to the delicious smell of pumpkin ready to be mashed and have some coconut cream stirred in. Once it's heated again (in the slow cooker, I'm in no rush) I can eat with bread.

Also, in case anyone's curious, when one has some coconut cream left over, this does make a different but extremely serviceable substitute for milk in hot chocolate.

Oh and I may as well do another earthquake update.

The latest big one we had, I dutifully shifted out from among the bookshelves I was weeding but I only figured it for a 3.9; turns out it was a 5.2. I'm at the ehh, whatever stage.
I have my gasfire finally reinstalled, five months after they took the old one out to rebuild the (previously brick) fireplace and discovered it wasn't up to standard to put back in. So now I have heat again which is nice.
The Cathedral is to come down, which is sad and gives the city a bit of a dilemma about all its logos, but I do think that, in the absence of money from nowhere, it's the right decision. What I'm a little more distressed about, because my bus goes past it each day and it's the building where I had my first job ever, is the demolition of the old railway building. Again I'm sure it's the right decision and all. But I just have this conviction that this building is the only thing that separates the CBD from the southern suburbs and hills, and once it's demolished there'll be nothing to prevent the two realities from bleeding into each other in some vast Escherian nightmare of epic distortions. We have to do something! The very fabric of space-time is at stake!

Although actually, as the bulldozers hack away at it from the west, it's revealing the old Magnum Mac in its row of buildings on the other side of the railway tracks; while not so imposing as the old clock tower, it isa solid unbroken line, so perhaps all is not lost.

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In which she re-evaluates a literary reference

Fri, 04 May 2012 11:32:17 GMT

For the one or two people on my flist who watch Criminal Minds and therefore don't actually need the spoiler cut:

(Spoilers for Criminal Minds "Slave of Duty" - S5 ep10 or 11)

Near the end of season 1 of Criminal Minds we learn that Hotch and Haley met due to a school production of Pirates of Penzance. So it's appropriate for him to quote from it at her funeral in season 5.

OTOH I've always thought that what he quoted was an (admittedly not entirely uncharacteristic example) of Hotch supremely missing the point. Granted, quoting from a comic opera at a funeral does limit your choices. But. As she's about to be killed, she makes Hotch promise to tell their son about how they met, how he used to make her laugh. Basically, stop walling up all his emotions as he's done increasingly over the last five years.

And so at her funeral he says he considers

Oh, dry the glistening tear
That dews that martial cheek;
Thy loving children hear [here?]
In them thy comfort seek.
With sympathetic care
Their arms around thee creep,
For oh, they cannot bear
To see their father weep!

to be an appropriate sentiment? Oh Hotch, we love you, but you really suck at this feelings thing.

Anyway, today for reasons which I already forget I happened to be looking up the context of the song. (Really someday I ought to watch the DVD I have.) And discovered it's not so much a "Dear Dad, please stop grieving", it's a "Dear Dad, please stop feeling guilty (about lying)".

Which... if Hotch is (at least subconsciously) feeling guilty about that thing where he beat Haley's murderer to death with his bare hands... would explain why the quote resonated so strongly for him. I still wouldn't call it appropriate for a funeral where you should be thinking about your wife rather than your manpain, but. At least it explains it.

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In which she dreams that she's one of Janeway and Garak's 14 lovechildren

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:11:49 GMT

We were all the same age, 11 boys and 3 girls. At a certain point, about seven of us went to live with Garak on Cardassia. One by one he killed us off, but he liked me, believing I took after him. Unfortunately he then learned (by means of a device on my finger(*) that put me into a virtual reality he could control) that my admirable duplicity was in aid of the less pleasing goal of reforming (my pov) / corrupting (his pov) Cardassia. This discovery was a great disappointment to us both, but we handled things in a civilised manner: we sat down to read a book together so that he could reach behind me and stab me in the back. I was a little concerned whether he was sufficiently advised of human anatomy to make it relatively painless, but please note this was not an anxiety dream of any kind: it was a touching father-son moment.

I did wake with a sensation of a tinge in my back, though.

(*) Boots has got rather more matted fur than I thought, so yesterday I started attempting to comb a bit of it out. I got sufficient fur to make a mouse, and a gouge in my finger pad, so I was wearing a bandaid overnight.

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In which she seeks a movie review site

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:43:13 GMT

Every now and then I have the urge to write up a short review of a movie the same way I write up short reviews of books on Goodreads. Problem is, I've never been able to find a satisfactory Goodreads-for-movies. Last time I searched, I ended up starting research on how I'd go about building my own.

(The answer is, with great difficulty. I don't have the knowledge or the skills and I particularly don't have the willpower necessary to put in the time to gain the knowledge and the skills.)

I did another hunt today and ended up creating accounts to further investigate:

DVDCrate - makes a bad first impression with a random error prominently displayed on the main page; I suspect something wrong with a database query. Still, I'm easy, so looked further, but when I create reviews there's no page which lists my reviews. This is kind of a basic feature.
DVD Aficionado - pretty but clunky. DVDs can only be in one collection at a time (eg it can be 'owned' or 'watched', but not both!). Again you can review items but there's no apparent listing of one's reviews.
FilmCrave - looked decent considering the advertising and let me have my preferred password with non 0-9a-zA-Z characters. Allowed multiple custom lists to be created and lists all my reviews in one place; on the downside, I couldn't find an RSS feed for that list, the user interface is... frankly bizarre, I was automatically friended by the founder, which fine, but this made his face appear on the friends area of my profile without recourse; plus did I mention the advertising.
Criticker - lets you create 'private lists' which can be used as tags, lists all reviews in one place and has an rss feed for them (though the item titles are ugly as heck). Downsides: terrible ads and reviews can only be up to 500 characters long.
Oh, and iheartmovies.com which looks like it'd be exactly what I want if the website was actually up and running.

In the end I went with Criticker. But that 500-character limit is really going to bug me. It's almost tempting to just create a Dreamwidth account just for movie reviews. It's almost tempting to go back to researching how to build my own Goodreads-for-movies.

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills. Most importantly of all, I do not have the data.

--Oh dear. I just googled "open movie data" and discovered TMDb, "a free and open movie database" with an open API. (None of the services currently using it do what I want.)

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills....

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