Not as bad as I'd feared. She's not in a coma or anything, but her hip is collapsed and much of her left side is destroyed.

My friend's sister is talking nursing homes. Gah!

Still, she's alive, and I'm going to be thankful for that.

That's guardedly good news. Will they be able to reconstruct the damaged parts?

My parents are crazy, but I don't think they'd forget to tell me they had surgery. Especially my mum, for whom any small trauma is expressed in movie-of-the-week terms. She much prefers to play the guilt card. "I'm not putting any pressure on you to come and see me, no no. I'll be fine here all alone"... Yeah, with your adoring committed partner and your social life that's better than mine. Heh.

It's not necessarily a shortcoming that any given SF alien species serves as a metaphor for some aspect of humanity, either. It's a reasonable approach.

Oh, sure. I love sci-fi-as-metaphor (or fantasy-as-metaphor, in the case of what we all loved about Buffy). I was just taking Shir's concern about 'other' to its hypothetical conclusion. Should there be more sci-fi that represents complete 'other'ness. From films, I was thinking about Contact and maybe Close Encounters.... I just woke up, so my brain isn't coming up with much more that represents the whole 'alien beyond our understanding' thing, but I'm sure there's more.

Hil, I hope you and yours have a good Rosh Hashanah. The Girl and I are doing a nice dinner on Friday night.

omnis, I hope your dad is recovering OK from his surgery.

Thoughts for your friend and her mom, Daisy Jane.

Barb - it CAN be easy. If somebody here *cough* would have work on that teleporter. IJS.

(please, no hairpats or anything, just venting)

How about replacing said hairpats with teh awesomemingly disturbing furniture porn?

And sweetie, I'm so sorry you had such a long, bad day. A lot of ~mas to your father, too.

Do I really want to do this?

YES. Been there, done that, still partly walking-on-clouds.

My sis will be home for Rosh Hashana. That's great. And it's starting to feel like the holidays - I don't know, it just didn't feel like it until now.

As for crazy parents stories - there's a lot of that, but I won't forget the time when one evening my sis fell hard on her tail bone, needed morphine and stayed in her bed for the following week. I only got a call in the morning, telling me they all were up all of the night and going to bed, so don't call them in the next few hours. WTF? My sister was going throught some incredible, blinded pain and I heard nothing about it in real time? Seriously? And there was the time when my mom went on surgery to get some tissue of her breast removed - it wasn't cancerous, that I know - but I was about 8 at the time, my sister's 5, so we didn't know what it really was and I guess it wouldn't have helped if we were aware. I think we were only told that so we won't jump in her lap as we used to do.

Shir - insent. Social model. Hurrah! And happy holidays.

Thank you, Seska!

Oh, and now I see I forgot to write - DJ, so much ~ma to you, your friend and her mom.

I only found out my dad was in the hospital for the last time because his friends ignored his, "Don't bother my daughters," and gave me a call. I'm sure eventually the hospital would have rung me up to ask what I wanted them to do with the body, but still, dude. He would call me up to tell me what he'd had for lunch, but didn't want to bother me with hospital admittance.

DJ, I'm glad your friend looks like she'll survive the accident. I hope her recovery goes as well as possible.

DJ, lots of thoughts for your friend's mom.

I mean, I suppose you could KIND of call that Green Lake, but it's more Greenwood/Phinney. It is south and west of Jilli by a mile or two, north and west of me by a mile or two.

Looking at it a little closer, it wouldn't work for us because there's no back yard and the sides and front don't appear as if they can be fenced. Which- a fenced back yard is sort of a requirement with the beasties. Pity, because it looked like a really pretty house.

Skilled surgery and quick recovery ~ma for your dad, omnis.

Also sending positive loving thoughts to your friend's mother, Daisy.

Vernor Vinge's aliens in A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep are good examples

I'll have to give these a try. As deep a love as I have for science fiction in movies and television, I have a hard time finding the books satisfying. At least this was the case decades ago and I have avoided them since.

Good grief - I'm pole-axed by the various parental horror stories! You guys!

wrt SF - I have to say that Orson Scott Card, despite being, from the sounds of it, a total twat, does a pretty good job of writing alien aliens, imho, with Speaker For The Dead and Xenocide. And I thought that Babylon 5 made a respectable stab at making some of their aliens really quite other (whilst most of them weren't - which is fair enough, because for the most part the point of writing aliens in SF tends to be about exploring humanity, afaic, not genuinely positing different kinds of sentience. Which is to say - I don't think it's a case of imaginative failure, neccesarily, so much as it is a case of 'alien' simply being a metaphor, and the focus actually being on how people treat people).

Sorry, that's probably redundantly obvious.

Other than Orson Scott Card, I seem to remember David Brin doing some interesting writing about different kinds of sentience, and I remember when I was a kid enjoying Piers Anthony's Viscous Circle, although I'm not sure whether it would stand up to the test of time - he's one of those writers whose stuff gradually started to hit me over the head with its squicky gender issues as I got older, and I haven't revisited it. But I remember the protagonist of Viscous Circle being pretty alien.