I'll be at FOGcon this weekend. This is a small, regional convention, with interesting panels and interesting people. It's one of my favorite cons, and takes place in March in a very barcon-friendly hotel.

My panels are:

Saturday, 4:30 - 5:45 pm
Pitches, Presentations and Proposals: making your point without resorting to kidnapping your boss
I'm moderating, with panelists Marie Metivier-DeMasters, Alfred Nash, Loren Rhoads

Having to get a complicated point across in a brief "elevator pitch" -- or even in an actual presentation -- can be very intimidating, whether you have five minutes or fifty. The legal system and basic moral sense mean you can't really kidnap your audience for appropriate brainwashing: let's talk about tips for pitches, presentations and proposals that won't end in your humiliating arrest -- and that might get other people excited about your idea. Whether for work or passion, being effective often depends on communicating your idea compellingly. Learn the common -- and a few uncommon! -- mistakes, and how to avoid them.

Saturday, 3:00 - 4:15 pm
Reading by Chaz Brenchley, Ellen Klages, Ellen Kushner, and Karen Brenchley

Or as I call it, the Brenchley-Ellen-Ellen-Brenchley show, in which I will be very outclassed. But I'll read the beginning of my Friar Tuck story.

If you're there, look for me in the downstairs lounge area in front of the bar.

As it turns out, those mass sexual assaults in Germany didn't happen. Trust snopes to ferret out the truth: http://www.snopes.com/2017/02/15/german-mass-assault-without-foundation/.

ETA: [Removed, because it was incorrect. Orwellian editing at work?]

ETA2: The first sentence of the article says, "German media reports of mass sexual assaults that reportedly took place on 31 December 2016 and 1 January 2017 have been withdrawn after local police discovered that the rumors were completely baseless."

The final sentences say, "The debunked German “sex mob” claim was one of many popular yet unreliable claims about refugees and crime sprees to spread throughout Europe before then appearing in American media.

In 2016, large numbers of robberies and sexual assaults were reported during New Year’s festivities throughout Germany, particularly in Cologne. Germany’s federal police found that at least 1,200 women were assaulted across the country, igniting a debate about immigration after many of the suspects were reported to be of North African origin."

This reads to me not as a negation of the first paragraph but as supporting information for what was debunked.

ETA3: A link from the BBC about 8 Iraqi men being convicted of gang rape that happened in Vienna on January 1, 2016: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39142620.

I've finally figured out that Dymphna is an Eastern box turtle. Yes, I'm slow.

So I've been trying to understand why the Trump supporters are, well, Trump supporters. My uncle Joe lives in Louisiana. He's a Vietnam vet who believes firmly in the ideals of the '40s and '50s. What I gather from that is that he believes in serving his country and protecting women and children, among other things. He's basically a nice guy, reasonably intelligent, and not a Fascist by any stretch.

I asked him to be specific about why he doesn't want Muslims in the US, and he said it's because of stories like these that he claims aren't being reported in the mainstream press. I googled on "germany islamic men rape women" and found many articles about what the wikipedia article talks about, including this from The Washington Post. Go ahead and take a look. I'll wait.

I read the San Jose Mercury News every day, cover to cover, because it's not nearly as thick as it used to be. Still, it has a decent national and international section, though the international news seems to be mostly about ISIS and the countries where they have footholds. I hadn't read anything about the rapes in Germany and Sweden. However, looking at the sites that are reporting on these rapes, I see some are from fake news sites, like this one.

So, is this really happening? It's certainly one of the fears from the grand old days of the '40s and '50s, that black men might rape white women. It might be happening. When I was in high school I was raped by an Iranian college student, who said the same kind of things to me as are reported in these internet stories, so yes, this happens. But, I don't see this happening, certainly not on this scale, in the United States. We do a much better job of vetting our refugees, and while we probably get a terrorist or two, I don't think we're importing enough for this kind of thing to happen. However, my uncle is concerned enough about this happening that he doesn't want any Muslims to enter the country at all. It's an interesting problem.

I've been amazed at this year's flu season. I, who hardly ever get sick, and very very rarely sick for more than a day, had the sinus/cough flu for over two weeks in October. Many friends have had it at various strengths, and this month my jurors are getting hit pretty hard. Everyone get your flu shots, get lots of sleep, and so on. You all know the drill.

Chaz has not (so far) had this bug, at least not at a really strong level. He's had coughs, and the last week or so has had an intermittent fever. I've shamelessly taken advantage of this, I'm afraid. I ride my bike once a day. We've had a strong storm system the last week or so, and even when I ride between rainstorms my fingers still get very cold. (The weather is in the low fifties, plus whatever wind chill my trike delivers.) When I get back from my ride, I can check my husband's temperature my putting my fingers against his forehead. Ah, so warm. Usually he claims that my fingers feel nicely cool against his brow, but today he's a lot better. Oops.

I downloaded this journal, which gives cvs files will all the journal entries for a single month. Downloaded them by hand is really fast, but then I started peaking at the largest file per year. Which led me to the month maestrateresa died, which lead me into three years where my life changed dramatically, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Interesting reading, for me, at least.

One thing I'd like to do with my csv files it to try to do some NLP* processing on it, to see if I can figure out things like how positive/negative the entries were, and what topics I wrote about the most (probably not Chaz. no, really.), that kind of thing. If I come up with anything interesting I'll post it somewhere so other people can run it on their own journals.

I've also trimmed my journal somewhat. The people I removed were people who hadn't posted for years. If I took you off my list and you're still reading here, I'll add you back. About half of my list are still people who post regularly, most of them writers, so that's OK. I don't know how many are on dw.


*Natural Language Processing

I wandered over to dreamwidth, where I have an account, and started adding in people that have said they are leaving. I looked at my list of accounts I follow here, and so many of them haven't had new postings in years.

I noticed something else. Some of them, like maestrateresa and jaylake and likesargent and kathlaw, will never have new postings. I don't want to leave LJ, because it will feel like finally leaving them, too.

Life goes on?

I've asked my neurologist what he would need to know in order to prescribe the chemo treatment for me here, rather than waiting for the Sheffield Teaching Hospital to get back to me. He'll probably say that he won't/can't do it, for FDA reasons.

When I first met Mac and Barry, they greeted Chaz and me at his front door, their little noses sniffing at the outdoors. When they moved here with Chaz, we had discussed letting them be outdoor cats, and quickly decided against it. Mac disagreed with this choice. He would try to get outside, and on occasion succeeded, but he usually ran for the closest clump of grass and starting eating. I got him a harness, and about once a week I take him outside for a few minutes and let him explore the back yard. He seemed to enjoy this.

I went to visit my mother at the beginning of October, and when I came back home Mac had managed to lose his collar. It was no big deal, since he's an indoor cat. We finally found where it had ended up (on the floor in Chaz's study, mixed in with some other stuff), and its safety feature had worked but it was no unusable. Oh, well, we though, he's an indoor cat.

A week ago on Thursday, when we had our regular group of friends over for dinner, I didn't see Mac inside right after the gang had moved over to the clubhouse. No problem, I thought. He'd been by himself in the bedroom, so he was probably just in one of his nooks. Nope. When I went back to the house to feed the boys, there was only Barry. I called in the house, but no Mac. Chaz went out the front door and called, but I went out the back door and called. A little gray furry shape raced out of the darkness to me, and I picked him up and brought him inside. Crisis averted, I thought.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and again no Mac once everyone (only about six of us) had gone over to the clubhouse. No one saw him go out, just like last week. Still, it was soon obvious he had gone out, and he wasn't in the back yard (or at least he wasn't coming when called). We had dinner (which was astounding delicious. Chaz really has figured out American Thanksgiving dinner.), and I worried, since we were eating at 6:00 and the boys' dinnertime is 8:50. At about 7:00, though, I went outside to check, and mentioned loudly that it was treat time (Mac's cue that it's time for our outdoor time to end), and once again a gray furry shape raced out of the darkness. I picked him up, and he leaped out of my arms to get inside and have his treat.

I'm pleased that he's coming back, and that he seems to be having fun, but I really don't want him to go outside on his own. He's a smart cat, and still very agile, but he's also ten years old. We'll have a new collar soon, so his tags will jingle, and dinner guests need to wait until I've put Mac in our bedroom before they head across to the clubhouse. I want Mac to enjoy his life, but I really don't want him outside. He's been less purry to me today, and is sleeping very deeply, so I think he had an exciting time yesterday. I hope he treasures the memories, because I really don't want him to do it again. (Mac disagrees.)

To add injury to insult (at least for Dymphna), I kicked my turtle last night. Four times.

I might have been depressed at bedtime last night. My bedside light was on, but I stayed up killing demons on WoW for a while. I think that may have tricked Dymphna into thinking morning had come (or something. Her head is the size of a walnut. Her brain is smaller.), because when I got up to use the bathroom a couple of hours later, I kicked her side as I walked past the end of the bed in the dark. Coming back, trying to be careful, I kicked her again. This happened twice more in the night, until finally I got up again, found her by touch, and slid her *under* the bed.

Today Dymphna is walking around slowly and cautiously, as if something large may appear out of nowhere to kick her. Which is kind of how I feel today, too.