Yet another quick drive-by post

I’m tired, so just a quick drive-by post:

Today, I was visiting my aunt at the care home where she is staying following a back operation and got mistaken for a doctor. When I left, one of the old ladies sitting in the common area stopped me. “Are you a doctor, miss?” I had my laptop with me, because my uncle wanted some photos burned on CD, and I suspect she mistook my laptop case for a doctor’s bag. I have one of those fancy Swiss laptop cases and the Swiss cross logo does look like a colour-reversed red cross.

And now for some links:

Awesome: Hal Duncan’s contribution to the “It gets better” project intended to show gay kids (and other outsiders) that suicide is not the answer and that life is worth living. It’s a great project in general, but this clip is just bloody awesome. Just don’t watch it at work or when sensitive people are in the room, because Mr Duncan is very liberal in his use of the f-word.

Carrie Vaughn has a great post on how parents can support kids who are budding artists, writers, actors, etc… She also has two previous posts on the same topic.

Nathan Bransford on the nine circles of writing hell. Found via Charles Tan.

Now that was fast: The police have arrested a suspect in the double murder of two teenagers in Bodenfelde. I know Bodenfelde a bit, because I have relatives two villages over. It’s a very nice small town and it’s hard to imagine something so horrible happening there. I hope they caught the guy.

Why do journalists, first in Germany and now in Britain, insist on giving this guy publicity? If no one reviewed or wrote about this racist pile of crap, no one would read it. Though to be fair, most employees of chain bookstores seem to hate this book almost as much as I do. They have to carry and display the book due to order from corporate HQ, but it regularly shows up in strange sections of the bookstore (one does not look for political non-fiction between science books and foreign language literature) or is placed on a table with plenty of books refuting his thesis, either directly or indirectly. One bookstore had a pile of this book (I’m deliberately not naming author or title, because I want to deny the guy the attention and google juice) on a table with several memoirs by muslim immigrant women.