Surgery-ma for Grace, and I hope it's just the one and not both. (eta: unless both would be better, of course.)

There's been an, uh, a spate. With no guns.

BUT STILL NICE

Popovers ARE delicious. I want some more. But what I do have: TJ's chocolate croissants that I baked this morning!

Emmett is taller than me?!?! That's so wrong. Good god, my trip to SF where Hec and I went to the gogo party was like, ten years ago. Jesus. Or, Hey Zeus Crisco.

I am not mushy. And I would not want a super public proposal of the screen-at-sporting-event type. But I could go for something arranged and mushy. My BIL proposed to my sister by sneaking a fake story into their Sunday NYTimes copy, saying "[his last name] Proposes To [her last name]" with quotes from their friends (who had helped)

Emmett is taller than me?!?! That's so wrong.

They just get enormous all of a sudden.

Good god, my trip to SF where Hec and I went to the gogo party was like, ten years ago.

You thrifted two go-go dresses before you came to SF just for that club.

So maybe instead of thinking of it as a gimmicky proposal, think of it as men who enjoy a grandiose romantic gesture and figure this is their moment.

Oh, I'm all about him having his moment. It's just that, the more complicated the proposal, the greater the peril that something will go wrong, and the greater the chance that I'll be what screws it up. I'll swallow it, or I'll drive by the billboard a hundred times and not notice. Proposal depends on me doing something, and maybe I won't want to... I think too much. Especially about things that are probably never gonna happen. Though specifically, I don't like public proposals because it feels more like he's playing to the crowd than to his girl. The moment is special; it doesn't need more cowbell.

Surgery-ma for Grace, and I hope it's just the one and not both. (eta: unless both would be better, of course.)

Yes, this.

Thanks to all who had restaurant ideas, I have passed them on.

Today is my last day at work until Jan 3rd - hurrah!

Both would actually be great. The laryngotomy would be a laser procedure to remove scar tissue in her larynx. If the bronchoscopy shows it's worthwhile, then that would mean that she has enough leakage around the trach that she is/can/does breath through her mouth. This may be the case as she does make noises.

I don't know. We'll see.

Surgery ~ma for Gracie!

Lots of ~ma for Grace.

Much health~ma for Grace.

Surgery ~ma for Grace!

ION, this is cool:

Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Harvard's Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden and colleagues have been analyzing the huge corpus of literature that Google digitized in its Book Search program, and they're uncovering absolutely fascinating information about our cultural lives, the evolution of language, the secret history of the world, censorship and even public health. It's all written up in a (regwalled) paper in Science, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books":

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: "'1951' was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years." But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of '1880' was 32 years, but that of '1973' was a mere 10 years.

The future, however, is becoming ever more easily ingrained. The team found that new technology permeates through our culture with growing speed. By scanning the corpus for 154 inventions created between 1800-1960, from microwave ovens to electroencephalographs, they found that more recent ones took far less time to become widely discussed.

eta: This io9 article has more detail: [link]