The media and the message

Well, another woman has murdered her child, a tragic event with a great deal of social and psychological significance that I don't particularly feel like talking about; a) it's grim, and b) I don't think I have the time or mental energy to treat it fully. What I want to mention is the media shorthand for these kinds of things.



Since it was in the Philly area—the woman was a Villanova professor—it was on the front cover of the Daily News. Specifically, a full-page color picture of a teddy bear was on the cover of the Daily News. And I bet if I watch the local news tonight, the picture in the upper right-hand corner of the screen will also be a teddy bear.



It's one of the default child-tragedy media images: teddy bear=dead child, empty swing=missing child. I'm not sure if they're just visual clichés, or if they've moved to the level of cultural signifiers.



There are probably plenty of others that I'd notice if I started paying attention to the local news: fire helmet=dead/injured firefighter, police badge=dead/injured police officer, corner picture half-full of flames=major fire, corner picture entirely filled with flames=fatal fire.



If I was still studying film and media arts, I could write a heck of a paper on it. But I'm not. So I'll just keep it in mind and maybe post about it occasionally.

Fruit

I can't be the only one who gets this: pineapple makes my mouth hurt, and kiwi doesn't hurt but just...feels funny. I mentioned this to J., who's got a degree in botany; he told me that pineapple contains bromelain, which is a protease enzyme—a digestive enzyme frequently used as a meat tenderizer. Yikes. No wonder it makes the roof of my mouth feel tender; it's trying to digest it! (Bromeline is specific to pineapples; I couldn't find the exact chemical in kiwi, but it does contain protease enzymes.)



I'm trying to find a good link, but I keep getting the Web sites of health food/natural product/beauty supply/nutrition supplement companies touting the bazillion all-natural ingredients in their latest product. I can see why protease would be useful in beauty products; it would be a heck of a facial cleanser, if you didn't leave it on too long. And I guess if you were missing some digestive enzymes taking supplements would be useful—along the lines of Lactaid for lactose intolerance.



But anyway. I think I'll be avoiding pineapple.

By the...sea?

Oddly, the air today has a seaside smell—not in a particularly good way, I guess; the way it smells when a lot of seaweed has washed up on the beach, an edge of salt with a muddy undertone of vegetable decay. Probably the extreme humidity is carrying the smell from the Delaware River, which is about half a mile away. And probably the cause of the smell isn't anything as wholesome as seaweed—there's gotta be at least some sewage out there—but I did have some pleasant beachy associations on my walk to lunch.



(When I left the office, it wasn't raining, so I didn't bring my umbrella; when I left the store, it was raining. Feh. But I didn't get too wet, just annoyingly dampened.)

Spiny mice

Well, it turns out J. and I aren't as good at sexing spiny mice as we thought. (No, that doesn't mean anything kinky; it just means determining their genders.) After the last population explosion (one male in a cage with three females, one of whom got pregnant twice), we tried to separate the males from the females; we kept the females, and the males became office mascots. (As recorded in an entry back in May.) And there didn't appear to be any frisky business going on. Until, two nights ago, I went in to feed our "females" and discovered that there were three babies. And many of the other adults were looking pretty darn pregnant. Oops...

So last night we rounded up the males, and I think we were successful this time. It looks like there's four pregnant females; it could be worse. The office mice don't have any babies, and none of them look pregnant, so hopefully we won't wind up with more than we bargained for here. Although I suppose it would make the office more interesting.

Editing: the aftermath

The publisher is very, very happy with our work. Which is good, because otherwise I'd have to hunt him down and bash his head in with the Chicago Manual of Style.

Awake now

Yawwwwnnnn...okay, just about recovered from last week. The deal was, my company and the publisher we were working for had a different definition of "light copyedit." In my irreverent summation of our copyediting levels, "light copyedit" means "You give us crap, we make sure it's spelled right." "Medium copyedit" means "You give us crap, we make it not suck." (I don't think we've actually defined "heavy copyedit," but I imagine it would be something like "You give us crap, we rewrite it and your author gets paid for it.")



Anyway, after we'd (i.e. I'd) made sure this book was spelled right, the publisher told us that they wanted the book to not suck, and unfortunately they only told us this a week before the fucking book goes to press. The 600-or-so-page book. Which has to be a) copyedited, b) approved by the authors who made it suck in the first place, c) designed, d) flowed, and e) printed. Um, yeah, sure, we can do that...



So I and our other copyeditor got three, count 'em, three days to get the fucker done. Which was difficult, since I was going at a rate of about three pages an hour, and I'd been assigned three chapters that were about sixty pages each. Bozhe moy...



Well, anyway, as I said previously, we knocked the bastard off. And although I felt bad about not getting a really good job done by 9 a.m. Friday morning, I'm glad we didn't get the weekend to work on it; then the weekend would have sucked, and I wouldn't have gotten to sleep in until 1 p.m. yesterday and 11 a.m. today, and drunk three or possibly four glasses of wine last night. (This morning I had the first hangover I've gotten in years; I didn't use my Handy-Dandy Super-Duper Surefire Hangover Preventer, which is: for every shot of liquor, glass of wine, or bottle/can of beer, drink at least one 8-oz. glass of water. It works perfectly; I haven't had a single hangover when I've used it.)



Anyway...went to Center City today, finally bought new shoes (I've been wearing the same pair of black stack-heeled loafers every day since last September, and they're much the worse for wear), got some tops at the Ann Taylor Loft in Liberty Place, and spent a long time in Border's trying to find something to read. If I ran the entire publishing industry, two of my immediate decrees would be: no more fantasies based on King Arthur, and no more mysteries with Sherlock Holmes. If you're not Arthur Conan Doyle, I don't want to hear your latest brilliant idea about how Sherlock Holmes goes to upstate New York and solves some crime involving an Erie Canal shipping magnate, or whatever the fuck these people come up with. And I think Malory, T. H. White, and Marion Zimmer Bradley have covered the Arthur waterfront just fine, thank you. So no more mist-enshrouded fantasies where all the names are spelled funny, please. (Uythyr Pendraghon and Mworgayn L'Faye and so forth...yeesh, authenticity is all very well and good, but since you aren't writing in Anglo-Saxon, could you kindly make the names comprehensible?)



Okay, I think I'll lay off the publishing industry now. For the most part I suppose it does very well. And I do someday hope to be published, so I don't want to jinx my karma. But still...if only people who couldn't write couldn't get published, the world would be a little bit of a better place...

Ugh.

Not much time on-line in the past few days. Big project. Worked like crazy. 9 a.m. to midnight Wednesday, 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. yesterday, 7 a.m. to 10:30 this morning. Project done. Sleep now. More later.



Quote of the day: Edmund Hillary on the way down Everest: "We knocked the bastard off."