Linked Stories by Gina Isabel R.
Find me also at @RiffleComics, @RiffleHistory, and @RiffleWorldLit and their respective Tumblr blogs.
In America, homeless drunks are routinely ignored, or despised, or given one-way bus tickets out of town. In kind-hearted Canada, homeless drunks become local celebrities. Chris Purdy of the Canadian Press wire service has a great story today about a homeless alcoholic named Alvin Cote who died last month at the age of 59. Cote befriended most of the cops on the Saskatoon police force, largely because he interacted with them so often. “It’s believed Cote had been arrested more times for public drunkenness than anyone else in the city’s history,” writes Purdy. In February, Saskatoon’s Star Phoenix reported that Cote had racked up 843 public drunkenness arrests.
Nobody asked me to prom, so I took my calculator.
Pics or it didn’t happen
His name is T.I.
He brought me flowers.
Obligatory outdoor photos.
Here I am, introducing him…
Hero.
This is all part of the larger paradox of fiction, where the characters must be specific enough to be anyone. In the end, the packaging may simply serve as an introduction. The true meeting takes place when the book opens, and a stranger reads about — and comprehends — a stranger.
Because you can see the veins
It referred to the fair skin of the upper classes, “pure” in the sense of not being allied to any darker-skinned races, especially the Moors. It also suggests a complete lack of tan, the sign of a leisure class who doesn’t have to work in the sun.
The deoxygenated blood in your veins is somewhat darker and bluer than oxygenated blood, though it’s still quite red. But when you see the veins with light filtered through the skin, the veins show up as rather blue. Your lips do the same thing when you don’t get enough oxygen; the red blood in capillaries under the skin usually turns our lips red, but when you’re oxygen-deprived or cold the deoxygenated blood appears blue through the skin of the lips.
The veins themselves are white, with a tinge of blue, enhancing the effect.
In scores of science fiction stories, hapless adventurers find themselves unwittingly introduced to the vacuum of space without proper protection. There is often an alarming cacophony of screams and gasps as the increasingly bloated humans writhe and spasm. Their exposed veins and eyeballs soon bulge in what is clearly a disagreeable manner. The ill-fated adventurers rapidly swell like over-inflated balloons, ultimately bursting in a gruesome spray of blood.
As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.
Condorito es del Eterno Campeón y no se hable más
