humorlessbitch is on hiatus. Due to illness and putting finishing touches on a novel. Which are nearly one and the same thing.

There’s plenty of reading within. Two years of posts. It’s amazing to read last summer’s rants on Rummy and Bush and see that they’ve only gotten worse. Let this be a lesson to us: Never marry a man or elect a president hoping things will improve.

Thank you to all who have read, commented, written—and from all parts of the world! Who knows, humorlessbitch may stir to life again. Keep the email coming, it’s way appreciated.

And take good care,
Zo

Black holes present a very interesting dilemma to physicists. On the inside is matter of some sort which must be in some configuration, but because gravity is so strong we cannot glean any information about the internal state. However, this also presents a couple of problems: If a black hole has no internal states, then dropping a box of gas into the black hole should result in a net decrease in the entropy of the universe—violating the second law of thermodynamics. If the black hole does have internal states and thus entropy, these cannot be seen from the outside since general relativity demands that the horizon be smooth. Yet we also know that black holes glow (called Hawking radiation) due to particles being produced in pairs at the event horizon. One particle with negative energy falls into the hole, the other with positive energy is radiated away from the hole. Thus the amount of matter in the hole goes down and energy is conserved. These particles are entangled (i.e., their quantum states are inextricably linked) yet as the black hole decays away to nothing the radiation is, in the end, entangled with … nothing. This, combined with the smooth event horizon is paradoxical since we know that quantum mechanics conserves information, yet here information appears to be destroyed. Whenever paradoxes arise in physics it indicates we don’t know something, and in this case that is probably quantum gravity. The reason Hawking and others have been able to predict so much about black holes is that everything happens on the event horizon, where the curvature of space is small and quantum gravity is expected to be irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’m often very deadpan, but there’s a moral statement too, and what it’s saying is that there’s a life beyond this, and these events are not the most important things. They’re not important in the long run.”

One learns today that Miss Spark has passed into that long run … Read the rest of this entry »

“Sedona is definitely becoming a place for the haves, not the have-nots”

Well for piss-christ‘ sake, name me one (scenic) place that isn’t.

Maybe in the flyover states. Bye, down there. Not compelling. We’re going to the coast, to buy up every inch of coastline, every single slice of view. To the Southwest as well; if it’s dramatic and we can build—we’re there!
Read the rest of this entry »

(Just ignore the Spanish, okay? We are not here to judge the Voice, merely to record.)

Rebecca Traister in Salon: “Psychologist Steven Hayes says the American obsession with feeling good is preventing us from living good—and that living life to the fullest means a lot of pain.”

Quite an eye-grabber. So it turns out this … this guy has published this book, and I am like, Whoa! You couldn’t have done this a teensy bit sooner? Like, I had to slog through all those years by myself?

Alright, not entirely true. But I was forced to learn—alright, dragged kicking and screaming—by that most god-awful of qualities, an unrelentingly painful (is that a word? it is now) condition. Driven to find a better inner life, only it felt whole lot more like driven crazy, so I also had to find a way to bless that.

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There is only hesitation, or trying to push oneself past hesitation. This is the mind of hope and fear, which arises because one is trying to live in some other moment, instead of in the moment that arises now. One is comparing, planning, or trying to maintain an illusion of control in the midst of a reality which is completely beyond control.

Completely? Entirely? You sure there’s not some little corner of the universe what’s rightfully mine where I am supposed to be in charge? You sure that wasn’t part of my birthright? Cause I often feel entitled. To something. I do pare away at the To What. Or to be a tad more factual, life pares away the possibilities, and I adjust. Or not.

But the Or Not was so goddamn painful, I just could not get things the way I wanted them. Things? Oh, like a kind husband, like the strength for art. Not bad wants, and not impossible, either—in another time and place.

It only required that I change the laws of physics. I don’t know why it didn’t work out.

The genuine, albeit grim, fun will be to watch the media profile Thompson in a way that proves they still don’t get it. HST once wrote, ‘No point mentioning the bats … the poor bastard will see them soon enough.’

What is my problem? Read the rest of this entry »

I can tell you what it is. Why anyone with a per capita of under a million casts their vote for Dubya.

It was there in the debates, it’s been there all along, but there are moments when the trick is particularly naked. Read the rest of this entry »