Best thing about Hellboy 2

I really liked the aesthetic choices for the elven characters. All of them had yellowish white skin, like spoiled milk or dead cheese. Their lips were dark if not black, their irises glowing yellow, their hair the color of thin piss. They had no eyebrows, which made their eyes extra striking. They looked sickly, corpse-like and vampiric, appropriate for a race of characters going extinct.

Spinsters and superfluous single women

As Margaret Oliphant argues, the terms in which "superfluous" women are discussed in Victorian discourse are very telling. In her analysis, the "problem" with unmarried women was not in they themselves but in their treatment by the many who held opinions on the matter.

--Rita Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, p. 42

I need information about the cultural perspectives on and opportunities open to unmarried Victorian women, since Mary, whose diary I transcribed, remained single all her life [1864-1938]. Thus I'm reading the aforementioned title, about the massive export of single British women to British colonies, holdings and territories in the Victorian era.

While a lot of this book concentrates on how both the women and the colonies are equally portrayed as dangerous goods to be literally marginalized so that they can benefit the center [= Great Britain], some of it is relevant. I need a general discussion of the middle/late Victorian views on unmarried women; this book is not a foundational source of information, but it's a good supplement to those I have already amassed.

His rebus dictis, what is going on in that second sentence I quoted?!! "The problem...was not in THEY themselves?!" It should be "them themselves." I assume Kranidis was overcompensating for the odd-sounding semi-redundancy of "them themselves," but gah! She's a scholar! With editors! Either she or her editors should have caught this mistake.

I loathe hypercorrections such as these, cases where people mistakenly use subjects instead of objects because they think the subjects sound more formal and correct. Even Barack Obama, despite being The Shining Prince Of Hope Who Will Bring Peace, Prosperity And Hypoallergenic Shelter Puppies For All, perpetrates such language abuses. In a press conference on November 7th, he said, "Well, President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to — to meet with him and first lady Laura Bush." NOOOOO, it's supposed to be "Michelle and me!" I hate it when people can't grammatify correctly.

A Taste for Blood: Non-Human Sanguivores

Natalie Angier writes a New York Times article about non-human organisms that subsist wholly or partly on the blood of other organisms. Most illuminating for my purposes is the commentary here:

Moreover, even though we rightly cherish our own blood as the indispensable elixir of our lives, it turns out that, as a foodstuff for others, it is surprisingly thin gruel. Blood is more than 95 percent water, with the rest consisting mostly of proteins, a sprinkling of sugars, minerals and other small molecules, but almost no fat. Tiny creatures can do fine on such light fare, which is why the great majority of exclusive blood eaters are arthropods.... For larger sanguivores, though, it is as much of a challenge to survive on blood as it is to acquire it.

Small wonder that wholehearted exclusive blood feeding is rare among vertebrates, and that two of the three species of vampire bats are found in such low numbers they are at risk of extinction....

The moral of the story is that blood, while rich in symbolism, is impoverished in actual food value. Therefore I suspect that most attempts to make an exclusively sanguivorous vampire biologically convincing are pretty silly insofar as they ignore the basic fact that a human-sized biped that runs solely on blood would have to be drinking it constantly [and pissing out all the watery plasma constantly, HAH!]. Much more believable to create an opportunistic sanguivore that likes blood and drinks it whenever possible, but does not get more than, say, 25% of its diet therefrom. Maybe like the LHF vampires, who are all united by their taste for human blood, but who also eat omnivorously??

P.S. Here's Angier's general paean to human blood, a "marvelous fluid tissue...that not only feeds us and cleans us," but also tastes delicious.

Absinthe all done!

So basically she's an action figure with a resin head. The thing I like best about her headsculpt is the small serene smirk.( Picture below. )