It was actually relatively dry here today, with even a little bit of sun. Which is good and bad. It’s still very much summer here, with only a few hints of fall. Right now, for instance, I still have the air conditioner on. And this evening, there were a lot of mosquitoes out and about, way too many for what’s almost October. Some folks might want to keep denying global warming and climate change, but I think the rest of us will be over here in the real world. Even if it is getting unseasonably warm here.
In other news…well, my back is pretty much the same. Maybe slightly different aches and pains, but aches and pains nevertheless. I’m trying to keep active and stretching, which seems to help, but I’m still thinking about calling my spine doctor again.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t believe chiropractics was a crock.
I did finish reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale this morning, so that’s something at least. I liked the book quite a lot. It was a little different than I expected, and I think like any novel, especially one with sfnal elements, it’s more about the time it was written than about the future. In this case, that time was the 1980s, although the book isn’t at all what I would call dated — parts of it are still frighteningly relevant, there’s little about the dystopia that feels particularly quaint, and the book is every bit as creepy at times as Heather (who sent me the book) advertised.
I’m curious now about the movie version, which seems quite difficult to procure on DVD. I’m tempted to seek it out, only I suspect, from most of the reviews and its poor box office at the time, that it’s actually dreadful. There was a lot I liked about the book, but I would never have thought to call it cinematic.
And as to the whole “is it sci-fi or not” argument that seems to dog Atwood constantly, I tend to agree with what Jeff VanderMeer says about it. I’ve only read two of Atwood’s books now, and none of her most recent books, but I could definitely see reading more.
It always worries me when I see that the curriculum at chiropractic colleges includes marketing and courses on insurance and risk management for chiropractors. I rather think it’s a crock, too. A good massage is much safer and you’re not going to run the risk of worse damage or a stroke.
Glad you’re enjoying Handmaid’s Tale. It has a lot of staying power, as a story. When she wrote it, I think she was thinking about revolutionary Iran.
That and/or the Moral Majority in the US.
And I thought Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda did a very good show on chiropractic “medicine” — which obviously angered a lot of practitioners, but which I thought was more than fair, and more than showed it to be a combination of wishful thinking, faulty science, and potenrially very dangerous practices.
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1210/segments/1210-3.htm