The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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"Nothing is worn under the kilt, madam... everything is in pairfect working order."

For the kids' bedtime reading, we polished off John Varley's Red Thunder and moved on to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I'd read and loved as a girl. We finished it last night. By the end, I was furtively wiping away tears. The boys, completely untouched by the drama & pathos of it all, were cracking jokes about the three witches, and laughing at the "landing in the broccoli patch" scene and the "family dog crashes through screen door" scene.

Back in the day, I had nothing to compare the book to, but there are obvious parallels to the Narnia series (religious allegory) and the Harry Potter books (triumph of love over evil).

When I told the kids that A Wrinkle in Time was followed by three other novels (actually four if you count An Acceptable Time), they groaned audibly. So I'll dust off Starship Troopers and some other early Heinlein, and see if that suits them better.

I have got to show this to my mother, whom I collected from the airport three weeks ago, and who goes back to the airport around the end of the month.

Nannarob, did any of your pupils ever think you lived at the school when you were teaching?

Edit: Seniors' Week in New South Wales is 6 – 13 April this year. I should make a T-shirt or something: "The Oldies Are Revolting!! !"

Edit again:
What postpaleo really meant by this was "Well, well! Well met!" Wasn't it, Postie?!

Tallyho, FutureCatLady! ...oops, I mean welcome to the cafe Tallyman and Future!

I am usually covered in dog hair, so a little cat hair won't be noticed, FutureCatLady.

Tallyman, I have the hunch that your humour will be appreciated here.

SleepyDragon, I loved A Wrinkle in Time too and read all her books. Every year I read "I am David" (forget author) to my older classes, and every year I choked up in the final page. It is the story of a boy who escapes a refuge camp and searches or his mother. It is set in Europe....probably written 15 or so years ago at least.

Knowing Postie, he probably meant "Well, well! FRESH meat."

Not to worry, I only like my food dead, thoroughly dead, not wounded, not sick, dead. As long as anyone twitches now and again, there will be no problems. Maybe. Yes it's true, I eat the dead and I'm not ashamed of it one little bit. Why... it was just plain gruesome having to decapitate a pudding the other day, very messy, but it was oh so good and just so worth it. I'm a natural born killer I tells ya. Did you know? No, you didn't and I'm going to tell you..I killed a rabbit* and hadn't even left the womb. They wouldn't let me eat it as I had no teeth and up to that point I was the only one that knew I was there. Now THAT is lurking, beat that. HA!! I think I started stimming about that time as well.


* It was called the Rabbit Test and don't blame me I didn't invent it and was an unwilling part of it.

I think I groaned audibly when I started back tracking to his early work. In hind sight, was it ever stated he was writing for kids? I could be more forgiving of a couple of them if they were.

Reading fans:

I think one of the benefits of reading fiction the way I did, which would be kind of helter skelter, leaving out big chunks of words, kind of fast reading forward and then back to fill in the understanding, was a way to turn off the head noise. (I wasn't allowed white noise when young and I'm not sure I even knew about it.) Which means it didn't take long before I could reread the good ones and be pleasantly surprised at what I hadn't read and interpretations. Raised hell when attempting to read more scholarly works. And that is not to say that I think some fiction is not very scholarly. Much more so then some of what is tried to be passed as educational or informative. But as I have said very early in the Cafe some of what I read to fall asleep was just pulp. I do think I was aware of my reading form, even then (what I did not know was everybody didn't read the same way) and would force myself to go slower and take as much in as I could the first time through. The Lord of the Rings was one set where I made the conscious decision to do it that way. I do miss reading from time to time and for some that don't know, I no longer read anything of much length. I'm not terribly sure why. So, I'm very happy I consumed books when younger. 3 and 4 a week weren't an uncommon number at all. Actually I was a bit dismayed when I first arrived at WP and saw what people were reading and thought, my god, I guess I didn't read any sc-fi at all. Hell I was reading the early early stuff, the classics. I don't know much about the knewer stuff anymore. But it wasn't till a pleaseant evening of conversation with lau on Skype that I knew that others here read and enjoyed what I had.

reading and lurking
Hi new People!

NASA has nothing to do with Velcro, either, Postie


The hook-loop fastener was invented in 1945 by Swiss engineer, George de Mestral. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the burrs (seeds) of burdock which kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur on their daily summer walks in the Alps. He examined their condition and saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion. He developed the hook and loop fastener and submitted his idea for patent in 1951 and the patent was granted in 1955.[3] De Mestral named his invention "Velcro" after the French words velours, meaning 'velvet', and crochet, or 'hook'. The uses and applications of the product are numerous. Today, the trademark is the subject of more than 300 trademark registrations in over 159 countries.

Merle

Well, we might be a bit disgusting at times,I'll admit but revolting?

Merle

Revolting? Oldies topic

Instead, let us re-Volt the Oldies. Give them some juice, rev them up. We are raring to go!! !

His first juvenile was Rocket Ship Galileo. He was contracted with Scribner & Sons to produce one juvenile per year for quite a long time - until they rejected an early draft of Starship Troopers, which he then took to the competition, and promptly won the 1960 Hugo for Best Novel.

More information can be found here.

Hope you're having a decent day/evening!

"Bring me a shrubbery" - only on here could you get away with that. You must be living the life of Brian. Anyway must dash - I've got a holy grail to find. I'm sure those damn French have it hidden somewhere around here but they keep farting in my general direction.

daylight come
and me want go home....

which fiend planted that in my head?????

I'm beginning to regret using that name It's toxic.

Curious day... I learned (for definite) that the college I'm working at goes on half-term holiday for the next two weeks... so I'll be a little more "present" than I have been for this fortnight.

Had an interesting day... very busy. Got to be tripped up by being on my own to handle someone having an epileptic seizure this morning. I got everything right, so no problem. The interesting bit was that later on, two other people both independently remarked: "Oh! You must have been shocked/scared/worried." I had to think a little, but I wasn't at all. I was concerned for the safety of the person, and a little careful that I didn't do anything wrong, but I was not in the slightest panicked.

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Also went to the NAS (The UK's National Autistic Society) launch of their new(-ish) "I Exist" campaign. It was supposed to be a couple of hours in the afternoon. I got completely lost, and arrived 40 minutes late. Then I had to sit through several talks, that I would have liked to listen to, but...

There was a projector that they had used for some presentation, earlier on, I gather, but it was showing the Windows screen-saver. The one that keeps displaying a box in a different position every few seconds. I sat through several talks and a lot of "question time", desperately trying to cope with not being able to look towards the front, because the screen-saver was distracting me so badly. I am still unhappy that I didn't do anything during that time - e.g. to TELL someone to unplug it. I couldn't understand how, in the room with well over 50 people, of whom some proportion were autistic, I could be the only one affected.

I sat, feeling embarrassed, as I had arrived late, and, to everyone else, I'm sure I must have looked as if I wasn't taking any notice of the speakers, as I was looking in any direction BUT toward the front - or I was closing my eyes and/or covering them.

The previous night, at our social group, I had met one of the area managers, so she bore the brunt of my "outburst", straight after the formal part was over. I think I got it across to her - how I felt I had wasted a few hours of my life, coming to an event that had chosen to merely annoy me. She introduced me to another manager, who also received an earful.

The utterly worst bit didn't sink in until a little later. One snippet of the discussion that I had managed to hear was talking about how they were trying to bring more autistics into the organisation (their council has always had autistics on it, I believe, and their board now has one (at least?)). But... on thinking about that part - I felt that they, in effect, were saying it in a way that I was only lucky to catch. "Come and join us... but we'll flash this distracting display in your face so you cannot hear us saying that."

I was unimpressed. I think I got my point across. I hope they will never commit such a gross blunder in future.

I calmed down, eventually. I had my coffee and doughnut. I left, got lost for another half-hour, and finally got home.

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Morning - drama, crisis -> calm and thoughtful.
Afternoon - comfy talk in nice hotel, trivial distraction -> panic and fury.