Mind Strong! Body Weak!

Man, I don't know what's wrong with me this week. I've been good to myself, and eating well, and all that stuff, and yet today my body goes into revolt. My eyes itch; every muscle in my back is killing me, ( Medical TMI: oversharing! )

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And you know what's worse? I had my annual physical on Monday: I'm as healthy as a dragon. Heart rate normal, cholesterol low, blood pressure low, skin and muscle tone excellent, diet excellent, exercise routine fair. After listening to my first-world-only complaints, she gave me only two prescriptions: shorts through the summer, and a daylight therapy light with dawn simulation once dawn comes after my usual waking time.

When we talked about diet, I mentioned the JAMA article about how no study had been made linking dietary cholestorol and serum cholestorol. "Yeah," she said. "It's not that. It's genes. Genes, simple starches and sugar." She also recommended vitamin D3, but when I pointed out that doses of 4,000 IU and up were associated with bone brittleness, she said, "I take 1000. Which is in that 'We don't know if it does any good or not, but it doesn't hurt' range."

I like my doc. I just wish we all knew more.

A Closed Loop Story Title Idea

Last night, I was looking through story ideas, trying to find something I'd want to write fiction about. I found an old note about "The Rejected," robots who had been rejected by their beloved human. One option for such robots is to join The Conspiracy Theory, an STL starship manned and crewed only by robots like them, robots in deep existential crisis about their own worthiness (see The Forever Promise for details).

The Rejected had even left that, and landed on a world far, far away from organics, where robots could live out their existence while denying their attraction to human beings. Yeah, it was supposed to be an "ex-gay" allegory.

As I faded off to sleep, my brain was thinking about an appropriate title. I kept thinking, "Well, they're made to be servants, but they're trying to be post-servitude. So instead of being Robinson Carusoe's Friday, they'd be Saturday. Saturn's Day. Hey, Saturn's Children would be a good title."

I had to inform my brain that Saturn's Children as the title for a robots-without-humans story had already been done.

Oddly, I dimly recall that Stross arrived at that title from a completely different path.

Red Robin decides cute isn't relevant

Red Robin has these little folded boxes of advertising at every table. About the size of a coffee cup, these little cubes display nationwide specials and menu experiments. The treat of these things is that, on the bottom where all the tabs are put together by bored restaurant staff every quarter, there used to be a cute comment by the designer. "Stove tops have all the fun. Stove bottoms? Not so much." or "This is for everyone who didn't get a pony as a child: It's okay. Ponies are really hard to take care of, and they don't appreciate it as much as you'd think."

They've apparently decided to forgo the whole cleverness, and just put a "Friend us on Facebook! Follow us on Twitter! Visit our QR Code!" blurb on the box, making them as pedestrian and boring as every other restaurant out there.

Hey, they like the same music I like

The other day, we took Stormy out to dinner for her 14th birthday. I am so not ready for her to be 14. We went to her favorite restaurant, a Japanese hibachi steakhouse she loves, where we feasted and gave her gifts and had a good time.

As I was sitting there, I listened to the (sadly, too loud) radio playing overhead. Like most restaurants, I assumed they were commercial subscribers to XM or some other network that provides music for businesses. But the mix was bizarre: Lady Gaga, Bonnie Pink, Mariah Carey, and Ayumi Hamasaki, all in a row. It sounded a lot like the pop/jpop playlist on my iPod.

"The music, what channel is this?" I asked the waitress.

"It's one of the waitress's ipods," she told me.

Witty Dialog

"Laws of Courage."

"What?" Omaha said.

"Laws of Courage," I said. I pointed to the book in the new age section of the store. It was on sale. It looked like a mash-up between Gretchen Rubin (for whom I have enormous respect) and Deepak Chopra (for whom I have none).

"I thought you said 'Claws of Courage.'"

"That sounds like a sci-fi novel."

"Sci fi?" she said.

"You're right. Fantasy. Although it could work as Transformers Beast-Wars Fanfic with lots of 'shipping."