Coleman Ridge

Exercise bands are very smuggleable. If all else fails you can hold one between two hands and open your arms to the side like a Victorian gentleman using a chest expander. It's not as good as rowing, but it will keep the back muscles activated.

Warning: When I did this, my manager counseled me about my drug habit. Evidently I would emerge from my office damp, flushed, breathing heavily, and slightly wild-eyed.

If you just do pushups, you are setting yourself up for muscle imbalance and eventual shoulder injury. It would be better to get some of those TRX straps and do suspended rowing with them, pushups, air squats, and 1-legged deadlift. Still better if you can get some exercise bands or dumbbells.

If you think of the U.S. as a large country become demented, the situation looks bad. If you think of it as a land empire falling apart - well, OK, it still looks bad, but in more interesting ways.

Done against a background of rebuilding, with the rebuilding made as interesting as possible to the average audience member. It could be done. You would have to know something about how things actually get rebuilt.

You could do it like they do the 5-year period after the Blip in Avengers Endgame: it is mostly offstage, it is spent putting things back together, and everyone who goes through it is badly damaged.

I am fond of Li Tieguai, who was his own shije. His soul was off visiting heaven so long that his servant cremated him, thinking him dead. When he came back, no body was available but that of a recently dead, ugly, lame beggar. He took the body cheerfully, and became immortal in that form.

As creatures of the imagination, aliens, mutants, and robots took up residence in my mind, continuing to argue their cases long after safely subordinated in the story.

Science fiction was a great big deal to me as a kid. It was the aliens, mutants, and robots. They offered whole other ways of being. The horde of chain-smoking, drunkard, socially disabled hacks pumping them out could not be kept wholly under control, because they couldn't wholly control themselves.

Biology being what it is, the book doubles as body horror, though horror preferable to going along with the program. Mostly preferable. Probably. One can hope.

It is also old-fashioned sf in that it is an idea-driven adventure story. Tchaikovsky has no problem at all maintaining narrative tension.

Both are back from when sf was just about the only writing describing any alternative to the school, work, army, job, death conveyer belt. Tchaikovsky too presents an alternative way of looking at the world, and uses much more science, in this case biology.

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is such an old-fashioned sf novel that most people won't realize it's old-fashioned. It is strongly reminiscent of Robert F. Young's 1959 "To Fell a Tree" and Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 "To Marry Medusa."

What is often intended is "don't hate yourself," but either is making too much of yourself.

Jesus, the traditional meditations start out by cultivating loving kindness toward oneself. Just what I need! More manure for the selfishness patch!

Feh. I will try imagining my family and friends existing independently of my desires, as they actually are, and happy just like that. Might work.

No, I don't want to be kinder or more loving in general. This is NYC. They would pick my bones. There are maybe two dozen people I would like to treat better, though.

Looking for research on loving-kindness meditation, I find that all the research is on whether it makes you happier or healthier rather than on whether it makes you loving and kind. What is *wrong* with people?

Around here, the dog who bit can be judged a dangerous dog, and the owner required to keep it always confined or leashed.

Report the bite to the police now. State laws vary, but sometimes there is a deadline. Again, laws vary, but sometimes the owner isn't liable for the first bite, having had no way to know the dog was vicious.If so, you are helping the next person by reporting.

The angels in Purgatory take each soul and tune, turn, situate, and light it so that it can be as happy as possible while remaining the person it has become.

Martial arts is a way out of a particular set of bad character states. It will help only some people and will get them only partway to goodness. Or discipline, or badassery, come to that.

If that last one isn't obvious, think about the old epics about unmanageable badasses. Achilles is a vicious child. Odysseus lies like breathing. Roland will not call for backup. Lancelot waxes wode. Great fighters, abominable soldiers.

The problem with martial arts for character building is that what makes you a good person, what makes you a good soldier, and what makes you a good fighter only partly overlap.

While it is true that more living people means more total happiness, so do more living deer, squirrels, pigeons, wolves, dolphins, rats, bison, and so on. If you want to maximize quantity, rabbits are probably the way to go. If variety, maybe rain forests.

Were evolution animate and aware, it would regard cries that we must breed lest the species become extinct as librarians regard cries that they mustn't throw books out: we have far more copies of those DNA sequences in far more bindings and formats than necessary.

Caveat: This quote is part of an extended general discussion of how to divide things into kinds that I can understand only so long as I seize my hair with one hand, hold my head slant, open one eye very wide and squint the other, grimace, and outline.

The immaterial part is the form. With Aristotle, you won't go too far wrong by taking that to be the shape.

"A species is constituted by the combination differentia and matter. For no part of an animal is purely material or purely immaterial; nor can a body, independently of its condition, constitute an animal or any of its parts, as has repeatedly been observed."

Partibus Animalium, Book I
Ogle tr.

No rings were forged for Hobbits, because no one gave them a thought. I wonder what magic rings forged to corrupt Hobbits would do.

Giving the One Ring to little guys so good at staying off radar that no one even knew about them is a great idea right up to the point they disappear off your radar too.

Walking with my eyes shut so as not to get distracted.