X things make a post

Holy crow, it’s the end of November already. How’d that happen?

Work on Lovecraft Country continues apace. I’ve passed the halfway mark, and more importantly, the remaining gaps in the story arc have been filling themselves in neatly. I’m not yet at that magic point where I’ve got the complete novel in my head, but I can see it off in the distance now and know that I’ll get there.

In other news:

* Wednesday’s New York Times had a story from the granddaughter of a Bronx landlord who claimed 13-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald liked to shoot at the neighbors with his BB gun. Reading this, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen a film about the JFK assassination that unambiguously portrayed Oswald as acting alone. But once you admit the possibility, he seems like exactly the sort of character who’d decide, on his own, to try to murder a public figure.

* Laurie Anderson wrote an incredible piece for Rolling Stone about her life with Lou Reed, and their last moments together.

* A Buzzfeed staffer ranked all 144 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is great if you’re in the mood to waste huge amounts of time debating the opinions of a stranger. But what else is the Internet for, amirite?

* Now that the Seattle weather’s turned cold, I put out the hummingbird feeder, and almost immediately got a customer. This led to a breakfast-table conversation with Lisa about whether this was the same hummingbird who visited us last winter. Then, while I was checking hummingbird lifespans on Wikipedia (3-5 years on average, so yeah, it could be the same guy) I noticed that our Anna’s hummingbirds are described as “medium-sized,” which begged the question, “If that’s medium, what does a small one look like?”

Like this:

This is a bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world. Wish we could lure some to Seattle, but seeing as they are native to Cuba I doubt they’d like the climate much.