Salman Rushdie - Haroun and the Sea of Stories
This is another book that is inspiring for writers and story tellers. I had the great pleasure of listening to Salman Rushdie's Master Class. It is worth listening to his wisdom and to hear him read some of his own writing as he massages the sounds and the shapes of his words. Many writers read their own writing at a uniform pace, but Rushdie reads the words as though his voice is an instruments and the written word is the musical score.
This is particularly true in this tale of Haroun seeking the source of the tales recounted by his storyteller father Rashid Khalifa (also known as the Shah of Blah). Rushdie plays with names like the Plentimaw fish (Plentimaw fish in the sea) and flutters in and out of reality. Haroun is guided through the story by Iff the genie and Butt the Hoopoe who explain things that perplex him - and the reader.
At one point Iff tells him to pick a bird, but Haroun can only see a wooden peacock and Iff chastises him for not being able to trust things he can't see. "How much have you seen, eh," Iff asks. "Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And submarines? Huh? Also hailstones, baseballs, pagodas? Gold mines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess."
If you ever get stuck trying to find a story to tell, you can find happy endings, beginnings, and middles between the covers of this book if you're willing to just let go and flow along with the words.
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Residential Ventilation Notes
I was thinking about bathroom fans the other day - that may be strange in normal daily life but life has been far from normal recently. I want to be sure that the air that flows through a bathroom fans comes from the outside, flows through the house, sneaks into the bathroom, and gets pushed out all the way through the ducting to the termination fitting on the outside of the house. If that path is not complete - if the air ends up in the attic or inside a wall cavity - the pollutants that air stream is carrying will end up there as well.
What pollutants are in that air stream? Well, there are the VOCs from the mellifluous odors in the bathroom caused by flatulence and other unsavory, bodily expulsions, but there can also be moisture from the shower.
When the shower is running, it produces steam or water vapor. When the bathroom fan is running, it sucks the air out of the bathroom causing it to be at a lower pressure than the bathroom surroundings. Because of the wonderful second law of thermodynamics, high pressure moves toward lower pressure, and so air is drawn back into the bathroom, replacing the air pushed out by the fan. The steam in the bathroom air causes the relative humidity (RH) to rise. As the cooler air from the rest of the house is drawn in, the RH goes down. The flow through the fan is effectively drying out the air in the bathroom.
But it has to run long enough - potentially several hours after the shower stops. All that time, water is running down the walls of the shower and the damp towels are drying. If the fan is not run long enough, moisture will condense on wall and ceiling surfaces that are below the dew point, and mold will be encouraged to grow.
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