Seven Deadly Quizzes

I took all seven of the Deadly Sins assessments over at BeliefNet. I didn't do as well as I'd hoped, considering what a heathen I am.

A couple of them I even took over because I'm really not all that virtuous. There were a couple of questions that I couldn't really answer in a meaningful way because they were about TV shows I've never seen or celebrities I've never heard of.

I suspect that the tests aren't very good instruments for measuring actual sinfulness, because even after do-overs, I still didn't do at all well on Pride, Anger, Envy, or even Gluttony. I mean, Gluttony, for crying out loud. How hard is that? But at least I had a respectable score on Lust and Sloth, and they are my favorites.

By the way, here's a little trick for remembering all seven of the deadly sins, should you need to name them: PALE GAS. Pride, Anger, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth. Of course some lists call anger "wrath" and avarice "greed" which messes it up. Too many consonants.

So here are my results. The website doesn't provide any nifty graphics or handy code to post results on your blog, and the scoring is kind of eccentric. I calculated the percentages myself, but basically, the scores were grouped in three or four categories of increasing sinfulness. The ones marked with asterisks are the ones where my score fell in the second-lowest bracket. I re-took Greed and Sloth and moved up to that category in each. All the others I was in the lowest (i.e. most virtuous) category, even though I re-did Pride and Anger and Envy. I tried, people.

• Pride: 4/24 (17%) - "You might want to work on your self-esteem"
• Anger (Wrath): 5/27 (19%) - "You're a most patient person ... or about to blow like Mt. St. Helen's"
• Lust: 15/32 (47%!)* - "Your body isn't a temple, but it isn't a fast-food joint either"
• Envy: 2/24 (8%) - "Your freedom from sin is enviable"
• Gluttony: 9/41 (22%) - "Spiritually, you might be a bit too thin"
• Avarice (Greed): 11/37 (30%)* - "Your generosity outweighs your greed"
• Sloth: 9/25 (36%)* - "Your life is a good balance between activity and relaxation, but like most of us, you could use a spiritual supplement"

Image: detail from The Seven Deadly Sins by Hieronymus Bosch. Stolen from ibiblio.org's WebMuseum.

Gone to the dogs

I'd like you to meet a couple of friends of mine. That's Hilda on the left, and Tigger on the right. Hilda lives at my new house, up in the little apartment over the garage. Carriage house, whatever you want to call it. A car won't actually fit into it, so it's not really a garage, technically. But Hilda and her human companion live there together; he leaves for work very early some mornings, and she is an enterprising dog who has figured out how to use the dog door to get into the basement and then trots right up the stairs and jiggles the door until the latch opens, whereupon she climbs into bed with me for another couple of hours of quality sleep.

Tigger is Julie's dog. More pictures of Tigger can be found here. Julie has a special section on her blog just for dog photos. Julie is at a super-secret librarian convention this week so Tigger has been hanging out with Hilda and me for a few days. He is a hoot! I have a total crush on him! And watching him and Hilda together is endlessly entertaining. The two of them wrassle and chase each other constantly, although Tigger cheerfully submits to Hilda's alphabitch vibe almost every time. It's just easier. Although she does get on his nerves from time to time, as you can see if you click here.

And they both sleep with me. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the other hand, it's only a couple more days.

As I said, Hilda is an enterprising sort, and she figured out right away that the gate between the patio and back yard was hers to open. I've been trying to photograph her just emerging from the gate, but she's very fast and there's this delay on the digital camera, and I'm kind of slow anyway. But you can see her dogged determination, I think, in the photo at left.

And you can see her delight in the activity: running back and forth from one part of the yard to the other, in this case, but she's pretty happy doing almost anything. One morning I found her trying to dig under the fence a few feet to the left of the gate, and I was afraid she'd be disappointed to have dug her way to freedom only to find that she was someplace she was already allowed to be. But she's smarter than that. She was digging to find the furry rodents that had some tunnels in the vicinity.

Tigger, on the other hand, didn't figure out the gate right away. He can open it easily enough, but he walks through it slowly, sort of like he's afraid he's breaking a rule that nobody's told him about. And when he goes the other way, he looks at me first, as if for permission.

He also followed Hilda through the dog door and up the basement steps, but he had a little trouble going back out the dog door. Part of the problem is that the door is only just barely large enough to let him through, and when you go out you are in a steep narrow stairwell. So he took an approach rather typical of your bigger, burlier types: he busted the door down. Well, OK, he broke the latch on the basement door, which (the latch, not the door) was revealed on closer inspection have consisted of a small wooden peg (on a string, even) stuck into a hole bored into a rotted piece of wood. Largely useless, in other words, and so I reinforced the door frame and installed a new latch thingy.

Then I got all butch and handy after that, and went around the house fixing little loose things and I musta removed about ooty pazillion useless nails from the walls (including 32 of them!!! in several sizes, stuck at random in the wall of my big closet where I get dressed in the morning and have been just waiting to accidentally snag a sweater or dress or something on). And I unpacked two more boxes of random stuff (do NOT let your friends pack your stuff when you move, have I mentioned that already? not if you want to find anything any time soon) and also made some of my nearly famous tater tot hotdish.

This just in from the 'WTF' department

This isn't breaking news, technically, as it's been out for a couple of days and has been commented on all over the place, but it just got my attention and I happen to have a minute to post it for your -- amusement? horror?

This post, from John over at Thoughts in a Haystack made my head spin and my stomach hurt a little bit. Partly from laughing, but partly because I wanted to throw up. The story was on TV, so you know it's true. There's this guy in Oklahoma, a Republican nominee for state superintendent of education -- yes, I said superintendent of education, people -- who proposes that students keep old textbooks stashed under their desks to defend themselves in the event of, you know, gunfire in the classroom.

Yes, if elected, candidate Bill Crozier promises put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self defense. See, he and his buddies took some textbooks out to a field and conducted experiments to see how far bullets would penetrate the books. There's a video of this procedure, which I find myself unable to watch. Two calculus textbooks failed to stop bullets from an AK-47, but the experimenters did stop bullets from a 9mm pistol with some other textbooks (the article doesn't say which subject).

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm all for emergency preparedness and self defense-type activities, and of course I think recycling is always a good idea -- but this is just plain nutty. Of course, when I was growing up, we were told to crawl under our desks in the event of nuclear attack. Remember those 'duck and cover' drills? I asked a teacher once what desks were made of that would protect us from radiation, and why didn't they just build everything out of that? I didn't get a useful response, but maybe it was old textbooks. Over at Halfway There, math teacher and blogger Zeno offers these instructions for classroom self-defense.

Much more helpful, I think, than 'duck and cover,' or the thing with the duct tape and plastic sheeting. And way better thought out than a coupla old math books under every desk.

Friday Test Results: What's in a name?

A couple of facts:

• There are 810 people in the U.S. with the last name [my last name].
• Statistically the 32512th most popular last name. (tied with 1841 other last names)
• There are 199,479 people in the U.S. with the first name Regina.
• Statistically the 313th most popular first name. (tied with 2 other first names)
• 100 percent of people with the first name Regina are female.

HowManyOfMe.com

There is: 1 person with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I actually know -- and, oddly enough, am not related to -- one other person with the same first and last name as mine. Neither of us is from the town in which we met, and we worked for a time at the same very large institution. When I left, the HR goons terminated her from the system instead of me. I kept calling to try to figure out why I wasn't getting my final paycheck, etc., and found out months later that her boss got the notification of termination while she was on vacation, panicked, called her mother to find out how to reach her. Apparently he thought she'd found a job while she was away and quit without notice. When she denied having done any such thing, he deleted the termination notification without realizing that there was another person with the same first and last names.

We had met several times and never realized that we have the same first name, as she goes by one nickname (Gina) and I go by another one (Nora) that is actually a diminutive of my middle name, (Elinore, if you wanna know). But it's an unusual enough last name (only 810 others have it, according to this website, anyway) that we were surprised to learn that I was not related to her husband's family. I had certainly never met anyone with my last name that I wasn't related to, although I've heard rumors about them for years.

A mildly interesting story about my last name: when my [great-?]great-grandfather and his brothers left Sweden in the late 1890s, they shared the last name Gustavsson, as they were all sons of Gustav. On realizing, however, that in their new country, their surname would be passed down in perpetuity, and not subject to the patronymic naming conventions of their old country, two or maybe three of the brothers decided to change their last name. They chose a Swedish word meaning, roughly, 'strife,' or 'struggle' (it is not, as my lovely ex-wife would have you believe, the Swedish word for 'stubborn.' I have no idea why she'd think that).


via Lauren at Faux Real.

Nature of wonder filmed with an original camera

It's mainly in Japanese, but it's worth a trip over to Kuribayashi Satoshi's website -- or at least it is if you like bug pictures. It says on the first page of his site that this guy "always leads the world of the small creature photograph by novel idea."

I'm not going to argue with that. Satoshi is the winner of the 2006 Lennart Nilsson Award for outstanding photography of the world of insects. His novel ideas and unique methods have to do at least in part with his ability to design and fabricate the gear he uses to capture the insects in situ, including an especially novel medical device of some sort fitted with a 3mm lens. He's published a whole bunch of books and films on the subject of insect ecology, the most recent of which is a book called "In Front of the Ant."

The Lennart Nilsson Award Foundation was formed in 1998 to recognize extraordinary image makers in science and to promote research and technical development in the visual representation of science, medicine, biology, and technology. The prize of 100,000 SEK (about $13,500 USD) is awarded each fall at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Thanks to the Neurophilosopher for the link. Head over to his place if you've never been there -- lots of cool links, great pics, and fascinating posts.

EARTHQUAKE!!!!

I can't really tell you what it sounded like or felt like, but it woke me up, right around 5 a.m. It was a kind of rattling, I guess is the best I can describe it. It woke Hilda up too; I looked at her and she looked at me and we were both kind of, well, rattled. She sort of shook her head and flapped her ears and tried to hog more of the bed. We listened some more but all we could hear was the rain. I decided it must have been thunder, even though it wasn't really that kind of rain. Hilda barked once, but it seemed sort of half-assed. Her heart wasn't in it.

But I'd been so startled that I couldn't go right back to sleep and I thought maybe A., who lives in the carriage house apartment, was just getting home and his bike knocked over that big piece of plywood out there, but then I thought no, it couldn't be A., because Hilda would have run out the dog door to greet him. And she was still in my bed and very fidgety. She kept standing up on the bed and walking in circles and then curling back up again. I was completely baffled. I knew it couldn't have been an earthquake though, on account of we don't get earthquakes here.

But apparently we do because the radio went on after a while and just before I went AAACKK!! Pledge Drive!!!! and slammed the snooze button, I heard the local news guy talking about an earthquake, for real, with an epicenter a few miles out of town! Only 2.6 on the Richter scale, but still.

I'm thinking it was maybe a buncha them wackjobs out in the county doing underground testing of something or other. You can't be too careful nowadays.

Technical difficulties

Still haven't hooked up the new house to the internets, and haven't had much time for troubleshooting. I'm over at Julie's house now using her computer while she is outside in the beautiful fall weather trimming shrubs and such. I'm still trying to figure out where all the @alphabitch.org email is being transferred to, and redirect it to the proper place.

In other bad news, I got the film back from the Asheville trip, the one where I brought the Holga. Here's some advice to Holga owners everywhere: throw away the fucking lens cap.

That is all.

Oh, and another thing I like

There are several pencil sharpeners affixed to the walls in my new house. I don't know why. I keep finding them inside of cupboards and closets. This one is at the very top of the stairwell, which you can see if you click here. The original owner of the house was very handy, and there are built-in things in all kinds of unlikely places. Also secret compartments and hidden panels that swing open if you press on the right spot. I'm going to go all Nancy Drew on youall.

Apologies

To anyone who has tried to email me here @alphabitch.org in the past couple of days: I'm so sorry. It was all being forwarded to a email account that is no longer in service.

I'm such a flake. It should be fixed soon.

For the record

I don't intend to move ever again. Let's also note, however, that I've said this before. I'm not sure I mean it this time either, but there you have it. I am all in the middle of it and it's going pretty well, no major setbacks, etc.

Despite the lack of an internet connection and hot water, I'm mostly staying at the new place on account of it's way tidier and all new & everything. Plus the bed is there, and all my clothes. Here are a few pictures of some of my favorite features of the new place.

The novelty will wear off, no doubt, but this just might be a big enough house for me to stay organized.

By "organized" I guess I mean to say that the messy parts will be upstairs in their own rooms.

But I'm getting the hang of this household chore thing. I've gone to the hardware store three times now to get light bulbs and plumbing stuff, and a closet bar and all kinds of amazing things. I love hardware stores.

I never thought that I would own such a thing as hedge clippers, but
I now have some hedge clippers. I needed them to hack the foliage out from behind the porch swing. Before I cut it back, sitting in the swing was sort of like being on the set of 'Little Shop of Horrors.' Plus all that overgrowth got in the way of the swing's trajectory. If you click on the picture of the swing, you can see all of the shrubbery that I hacked off. I did not take a 'before' picture, alas.

I'm not very fond of yard work, but I do love a nice porch swing.

And here we are in the kitchen. I kind of like this dorky little pass-through window into the dining room, although it seems kind of pointless -- I can't really reach across the stove with an actual plate of food or anything.

It does, however, seem like a good way to keep an eye on any dinner guests who might show up while I'm cooking.

Also note the wine bottle with my name on it. I'm particularly fond of it, both because it has my name on it and because it comes with a very nice, refreshing Spanish white wine in it.

The library with its wall of shelves is really the greatest thing about this house. Maybe. I already have most of my books unpacked and it looks like I have room for more!

In my last place, there was no room at all for books; they were stacked up on the floor all over the place and I used them to put my coffee cups on. Sort of like endtables, I guess. Now I'll have to get some of those. And a sofa. I need to get living room furniture.

I'm trying not to think too hard about the metaphorical import of having a house full of stuff and no living room furniture. I've been kind of a hermit these past few years. I think it's time for me to get a life, wouldn't you say?

More later, I've got to go pack up the sewing gear and the art supplies and the other stuff still at the old house.