Suggestion Saturday: September 21, 2013

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Child Exchange. A series of 5 articles about the practice of “re-homing” adopted children in the United States. This is a long read, but despite the sensationalistic titles of certain entries I think it did a fairly good job explaining the kinds of issues that can lead to adoptions being disrupted. There aren’t a lot of good options for people who adopt a child only to later realize that he or she needs more help than their new family can provide.

A Love So True via StoryRoute. I dare you to watch the video embedded in this post without crying. Cathryn’s blog is always excellent, but this particular story is going to stick with me for a very long time.

Putting Time in Perspective. As a species we aren’t very good at measuring large amounts of time. These graphs make this topic a little easier to digest.

Cassandra’s Legacy. At this point you’re probably wondering why I’ve included two links with such similar themes in the Suggestion Saturday roundup. “Putting Time in Perspective” provides a birds-eye, purely scientific understanding of time and the probable fate of all life on earth. This link eventually splits off into two different paths, both of which are creative guesses about what might happen to earth based on whether or not humans are able to slow down their consumption of natural resources and temper the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

A Ghost of My Own via JohnJGeddes. This short story reminds me of my favourite “Start Trek: The Next Generation” episode of all time. If you don’t want 20 year old Sci-Fi spoilers, skip the next sentence. 😉 In the episode Beverly, the ship’s doctor, travels home to attend her grandmother’s funeral and meets a mysterious entity living in a candle who just wants to love her. I don’t know if John’s story was influenced by this episode, but I strongly prefer his take on this type of storyline.

“I Put Algernon’s Body in a Cheese Box and Buried Him in the Backyard. I Cried.” The title of this post comes from the novel Flowers for Algernon. I don’t have any personal experience with Lyme Disease, but the author’s description of how it’s affecting him cognitively is chilling.

From Spent via jdubqca:

You’ve spent a lifetime,
trapped by the four walls
of a bedroom world.


What if mythical creatures like satyrs and mermaids once really existed? Dr. Spencer Black, The Resurrectionist,  is convinced that they are very old versions of what the first humans looked like, and in the mid-1800s he scours circuses, hospitals, and graveyards for proof of his convictions.

Medicine in the 1800s had just begun to make major progress in diagnosing diseases and figuring out what might have caused them. Some of the theories that were formulated during that time ended up being true while others have since been discredited. What I loved about this book is how realistic it felt. Dr. Spencer Black’s deep-seated prejudices, hunches, unshakable belief in science, and determination to discover the truth rang true for everything I know about medical advancements in that century.

What makes it even better, though, are the anatomical diagrams and brief descriptions of mythological creatures in the second half of it. I loved seeing the physiology of the mermaids in particular.

What have you been reading?

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