MuseBlog

It’s called The Wells Bequest and will be published in June. It’s already getting good reviews on Goodreads (www .goodreads . com/book/show/16101024-the-wells-bequest).

Known MBers’ birthdays and “K Days” this month.

05-04 Cat’s Eye’s birthday (1995)
05-07 Nancy Kangas’s birthday
05-09 Axa’s birthday (1992)
05-15 Thanks For All The Fish42’s birthday (1996)
05-18 Midnight Fiddler’s birthday (1992)
05-23 Sans Orchestre’s 7K Day
05-28 Agent Lightning’s birthday (1998)
05-28 gradster’s 7K Day
05-30 SudoRandom’s 6K Day
05-31 Tesseract’s birthday (1994)

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between August 24 and September 23, 1999.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between November 27 and December 27, 1996.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between March 3 and April 2, 1994.
You turn 8,000 days old this month if you were born between June 7 and July 7, 1991.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

We don’t know that you were born on April 23, 1564, just that you were baptized a few days later. And there’s no evidence that you ever spelled your name “Shakespeare” when you signed it. But never mind. You gave us lines like these:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

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Last summer, Randomosity101, Agent Lightning, Tesseract, Kiwimuncher, Koppar, Lady Bunniful, and assorted parents Kokonvened at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Stories. We have pictures to prove it, but they’ll have to supply the stories behind them:
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If you’re new on the blog, please stop by this thread and say pie — er hi.

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Known Muser birthdays and “K Days” this month*:

04-02 THF’s birthday (1995)
04-08 Beavo’s birthday (1995)
04-09 POSOC’s birthday (1994)
04-10 Vendaval’s birthday (1992)
04-11 FantasyFan?!?!’s birthday (1993)
04-17 Grant O.’s birthday (1990)
04-17 bookgirl_me’s birthday (1995)
04-18 Maths Lover’s birthday (1996)
04-22 Piggy’s birthday (1994)
04-23 Optimatum’s birthday (1996)
04-23 Ducky’s birthday (1997)
04-24 speller73’s birthday (1995)
04-30 Oxlin’s birthday (1990)

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between July 25 and August 23, 1999.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between October 28 and November 26, 1996.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between February 1 and March 2, 1994.
You turn 8,000 days old this month if you were born between May 8 and June 6, 1991.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

Ergo, it follows that tomorrow is April 1.

If you’ve been on MuseBlog for a while, you’ll know that the First of April is a special day here on the blog. You’ll also know that there are always a few people who forget to come here that day and wind up kicking themselves for having missed it.

So unless you are into kicking yourself (and they do say it takes all kinds to make a world), you’d be well advised to show up at some point tomorrow. This is particularly true for Jadestone, POSOC, and a few other MBers, for reasons that will become apparent. (Anyone who is in touch with POSOC may want to give him a nudge.)

That’s all we’ll say for now.

bookgirl_me’s idea. Her description:

What say you to a thread about posting about certain goals/successes we set ourselves/achieve?

The catalyst for this is a bet I made with a classmate: he wagered I couldn’t pass the Cooper’s Test (a fitness test: run as far as you can in 12 minutes). I’d been thinking of getting back into shape for a while, but it never really clicked until now. It’s just so much easier to be motivated when you’re doing something with friends- sort of like NaNoWriMo, except in my case with running (I actually did “NaNoRuMo” or whatever I called it a few years back when I ran a total of 50 kilometers or so in a month but I can’t find the thread).

Anyhow, I know most MBers are pretty determined/high achievers: it doesn’t have to be about fitness, just setting yourself a not-that-easy goal and working towards it (together). Anyone with me?

Enigmatic thread title by Rebecca.

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A place to post things you’ve written and to talk about writing in general.

Continued from v. 2012.

A century later, we still have trouble wrapping our minds around the bizarre universe you unveiled. But it really does seem to be where we live.

*(That’s 3/14 in USA date format, for those who write it the other way around.)

This photo from the employee lounge on Robert’s floor at Science magazine shows why geek-rich environments are great places to work.

Where will you be at 1:59?

Those of you with online access to Science magazine should definitely check out this week’s news feature “A Sea Change for U.S. Oceanography” at www . sciencemag . org/content/339/6124/1138 .

Short version: As research budgets shrink and technology improves, oceanographers are spending less time at sea and relying more on data from remote sensing.

Polling Place threads: vital source of Muserly information, time-wasting distraction, both, other, or what? (We pick “what?!”)

Continued from v. 2011.2

KaiYves is tracking the history of high-altitude balloons through a wide variety of sources. At her request, Robert has scanned relevant panels from “The X-Men” number 18 (March 1966) and posted them here for her inspection:

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Continuing our remembrance of favorite Muse issues and articles past, the GAPAs dedicate the March random thread to “The Murder (Maybe) of Napoleon” — blurbed as “Was Napoleon Killed by His Wallpaper?” on the cover of the January 2003 issue. The nautical-themed number also included articles about shipworms and Captain Kidd, step-by-step instructions on how to plunder a galleon, and a chapter from Hornblower and the “Atropos”, the fifth book in C. S. Forester’s celebrated Horatio Hornblower saga. In a landlubberly aside, Ivars Peterson’s Math Page gave tips on winning at Monopoly. A fine issue indeed, me hearties!

Ideas for future random threads are still welcome.

Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!

If you’re new on the blog, please stop by this thread and say pie — er hi.

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Piggy asked to see the Q&A column from the September 2011 issue, which answered one of his questions but was published after his subscription to Muse had expired. As it happens, both questions in that column had MuseBlog connections. We’re a bit late in posting them, so, without further ado…

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Known Muser birthdays this month*:

03-01 Cat’s Meow’s birthday (1995)
03-03 Adeliae’s birthday (1997)
03-25 Sans Orchestre’s birthday (1993)
03-26 Shadowkat’s birthday (1991)
03-26 Clare de Lune’s birthday (1996)
03-27 ~Cskia’s birthday (1996)
03-29 Luna the Lovely’s birthday (1990)
03-30 gradster’s birthday (1993)

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between June 24 and July 24, 1999.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between September 27 and October 27, 1996.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between January 1 and January 31, 1994.
You turn 8,000 days old this month if you were born between April 7 and May 7, 1991.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

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Robert writes:

I haven’t mentioned it on the blog until now, but apparently word got out through other channels that my father died on January 26. Much to my surprise — well, no; very little that MuseBloggers do surprises me anymore. But I was touched and moved to receive by email a sympathy card that several of you jointly designed and created.

I’ll tell you more about my father soon and will try to post Time Capsules of some of his proto-proto-Muserly boyhood papers. Although Dad probably never saw MuseBlog (he developed dementia and stopped using computers about the time I started experimenting with WordPress), he contributed to it in important ways, both by helping to make me the person I am and by inventing some of the cornerstones of MB culture. For example, the useful gender-neutral pronoun “en” was his idea, and he would have been delighted to see how it has taken root and flourished on our threads.

I’ll paste in the card itself after the jump. Spoiler alert: it involves space squids. For a naval captain who loved science-fiction, I can think of no more fitting totem animal to guide him on his final voyage.

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Both were born on February 12, 1809. Both changed the world.

A place for careful, clear, respectful discussions of difficult topics. No flame wars, please. This isn’t the rest of the Internet (as you may have noticed).