Are there extremely backstage machinations already grinding with regard to finding the next Pope? My vague recollection is that sort of thing is considered extremely bad form, but I find it hard to believe it isn't going on. Who will be the next Pope? How vanishingly small are the chances he will be recognizably liberal? Will he be from the Southern Hemisphere?

Enquiring atheists want to know.

You need to read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which details the process of choosing a new pope. A fine, scholarly work, if a litte dry and overly fact-filled.

[/sarcasm]

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

--J. M. Barrie, The Contemporary Review, 1891

In general, if I find a site whose interface I hate, I don't shop there. (If it's a place I really want to shop at, such as my preferred coffee supplier, Armeno, I send them comments about the annoyances of their interface.)

It's also kind of ironic that, whenever I look at that page, there's an ad in the right sidebar about shopping at Amazon. But maybe he doesn't hate them.

"First off, the machinations never completely stop. Second, the machinations have been screaming down the highway at eighty miles an hour ever since JPII developed Parkinson's Disease. At this point, what with the tracheotomy and all, you can practically see blood oozing out from under the closed doors in the Curia.

"Probably the best hope for an actually liberal Pope is one of a couple of Italians. Cardinal Martini of Milan has been being described as papabile, and as senior Vatican types go he's relatively liberal, i.e. he's not totally in the tank with the far right. There are some interestingly liberal figures in the Spanish church, but they probably have about as much chance of becoming Pope as a liberal American prelate like Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles.

"The plain fact is that JPII has reigned for so long, and done such a thoroughgoing job of stuffing the Curia and the College of Cardinals with people who could best be described as right-wing Opus Dei-type cuckoopants, that it's pretty hard to see a path from here to electing the great liberal Pope hope. Probably the best we can hope for is electing a conservative who turns out to be surprisingly broadminded.

"Almost certainly what they'll actually do, because they is almost always what they do after a really long papal reign, is elect someone who's very old and fairly conservative, so they'll have a quiet few years to sort all this out.

"That's my potted, not at all expert but I grew up around this stuff, opinion. And, I'd just like to add as a footnote, they can elect anybody. It doesn't have to be a member of the College of Cardinals. It doesn't even have to be a priest. So yes, Michael Weholt, your papacy could be nigh. Make sure you've got your platform ready."

My bet is also an old Italian cardinal. JP II's had an extremely long papacy. Didn't JP I just have a three month run as Pope?

http://www.feliekevanderleest.com/gallery_objecten/object1_uk.html

I like the tampon socks.

2) Make the official papal regalia t-shirt and jeans. Oh, and replace the hat with something better.

3) Start up a Church-sanctioned, Papally-blessed line of "Catholic Condoms! Jesus wants you to WANT your children, not just have them!"

I remember seeing an article a few years back, when the dotcom boom was still collapsing, which observed that many of the flossy retail sites had made shopping awkward and inconvenient, and made heavy demands on the user's software and bandwidth. It contrasted these startups with the commercial porn websites' use of robust, straightforward site designs that minimized unnecessary barriers between customer and merchandise, and made it relatively easy to conclude transactions.

The article suggested that this might be because the porn merchants found it difficult or impossible to attract outside financing, and so were running their operations out of their own pockets. This had a clarifying effect on their business models. The dotcoms were trying to create a retail web presence. The pornographers were just trying to sell products to customers from their websites.

I envision my papal reign being ended a few years later by an assassin from the Special Action Executive of the Bollandists.

The wave of flossiness (remember boo.com?) of the boom days was driven by the idea that customers wouldn't trust ugly sites. That idea turned out to be wrong, but good design can make a difference. I typically find stuff on Amazon, but for various reasons I buy on B&N. (Cheaper, and they give you a phone number to call if needed and actually answer it!)

Our friend Tog also assumes that an in-store experience is qualitatively better than online. I recently went into a Best Buy to look at digital cameras. The folks behind the counter barely knew which end of the camera to point at things and spent most of their time hiding from customers. Then I went into a specialty camera store where I was actively sneered at for not wanting to shoot film. Macy's recently put in scanners because their pricing is so arcane (hidden discounts, etc) that even the salespeople don't know what things cost, except that it's usually less than what's written on the tag.

Personally, I'm amazed that we manage to buy so much considering how arduous it can be to get a retailer to take your money.

Well, all I can say is that there is an 80 year old arch-conservative Roman Catholic at work who keeps telling me I would make an excellent priest. He knows I'm an atheist so I can't figure out if he's just trying to irritate me or subvert the Church. Or, since he's right -- I would make an excellent priest -- maybe he's got sources in the Vatican.

But reading around this morning, I see Tettamanzi from Genoa is a scary possibility. I guess he's a big fan of Opus Dei. Says the founder of O.D. is comparable to Sts. Benedict and Francis of Assisi. He's 70. I hope he's not the fairly old conservative of choice, though I don't imagine much would change anyway.

What I learned today: the meaning of papabile.

"That was absolutely disgraceful. You call that a sermon? I've never heard such a pile of apocryphal rubbish in my life."

Whilst there, he ended up with his name on the oldest English law still on the statute books (sort of); "Provisions made at Marlborough in the presence of our lord King Henry (...) and the Lord Ottobon, at that time legate in England"; 52 Hen. 3. But I digress.

Anyhow, he was elected pope to succeed Innocent V (who had only reigned six months) in 1276; he was elected on 11 July and died outside Rome on 18 August, still not having been ordained. (His successor lasted less than a year, too.) I think they intended to ordain him, but hadn't quite got around to it; five weeks doesn't really leave much time for that sort of thing.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's novel Magnificat plays with the College of Cardinals electing a non-Catholic. I only have it on CD-ROM, not in couch-compatible format, so I haven't gotten through more than the first few chapters.

Andy: Will "another" become 'a nother' in a few centuries?
-- well, we already have it split thus in the colloquial form "a whole nother" (which should perhaps have an apostrophe before the n, for now?)

And "don't have to be a priest" is because they can, in theory, ordain you in the morning and make you pope in the afternoon.

(I'm not qualified, under the first clause.)

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05742d.htm

Of course, things were a bit more informal back then. I don't really see that happening today. It would be interesting, though.

As for the Catholics, rumour has been for a long time that the next pope was going to be from a developing country - which unfortunately probably also means a hardline conservative.

Can someone in this whole publishing-savvy tribe tell me when, and by whom, structural decisions about books are made? How is it decided that one new hardback will be Smyth-sewn, while a nother will be perfect bound?

Is dependent on the publisher, the author, the book, or the fall of a coin? Can an author influence the choice?

--Mary Aileen

I've started a CafePress store, here, and you may find a suitable gift for a cat person.

Teresa, I like your observation about selling products vs. maintaining a retail web presence. It is perfectly possible to do on-line business with a very simple site and an e-mail box, but this point seems to be lost on most e-tailers, which I think is a shame. Myself, I would very much like to see more local shops take orders by e-mail; there is, I think, enormous untapped potential in neighborhood use of the internet.

"Papabile". What a wonderful word. Let us pray for a miracle, but prepare for the work of the devil.

I'd like to be Pope, but not enough to eat bugs first. Heck, I wouldn't eat bugs to get laid. Well, not real bugs.

At least, I don't think they were real bugs.

Of course, when John Paul I was elected, absolutely nothing in Martin's book, from using the Nervi on up, actually happened. (John Paul did show some signs of liberality, but that's another set of conspiracy theories.)

The book has a fair amount of interesting technical detail on the electoral process, but in general it's like getting a history of 20th-century biology from Trofim Lysenko.

My husband and some of our college friends got up a game of Pope-Pope-Antipope in their freshman European history course. This was a pretty decent dodge for the perennial Minnesota kid argument, "Duck-Duck-what?" (The stock answers are "Goose" and "Grey Duck." Clearly, "goose" is correct, as it is not just a big grey duck but a-whole-nother species. Some of my fellow Minnesotans are a little thick on this point.)

Which causes me to imagine a game, probably card-based, called something like Popeability. No, I'm not going to design this, though thinking about the mechanics is interesting, in a Dunniganesque sort of way. (Jim Dunnigan has designed a number of games that, while playable in themselves, were also design studies in applying boardgame methods to other sorts of conflicts. Two prime examples were "Up Against the Wall, M*F*," which was about the Berkeley riots [and was revised to cover Chicago in '68], and "Plot to Assassinate Hitler," which used a conventional wargame-style hexgrid to represent political factionalism. The latter is probably the only boardgame that ever has, or will, contain a counter representing Martin Niemoller.)

My, that got discursive fast.

The computer game Merchant Prince, which is about Italian Renaissance trading companies, has a mechanism for buying Cardinals and influencing the Papal election; having the Pope in your faction offers certain advantages, such as the ability to excommunicate cities and distract your opponents with a Crusade. Unfortunately, they tend not to last very long in office, especially since there is also a mechanism for hiring assassins.

Vicki -- I don't know if anyone has declined the papacy, but I was told that the room where the newly elected Pope is first vested is referred to as "the crying room," as it all sinks in. (Hey, there goes the rest of your life as any sort of private person.)

Oh my goodness. I must have this. Especially if there is a Dietrich Bonhoeffer piece, too.

It wasn't a popular game (that may be an understatement), not because of the subject matter but Dunnigan's handling of it. There was a hex map divided into areas that corresponded to real-world space, but were in fact how far away in terms of access and influence one was from the other characters. One could, for instance, send a counter to the Russian Front zone, which drastically diminished its influence on matters in Berlin. As the game progressed, areas would be overrun by the Allies (I believe this was semi-random), and anybody stuck there was removed from play. Counters were either individuals or influence groups, and they moved and "fought" like typical wargame units, but depending on the circumstances and the game phase (things got meaner as the war wound down) an "attack" might be an attempt to discredit someone, move him to a "distant" area, or remove him permanently (by assassination or arrest). The Fuehrer himself was not "playable;" he moved between Berlin and Berchtesgaden, but otherwise a "side" was a faction of others, and ultimately it was to everyone's advantage to kill the bas -- I mean, boss while there was still some Germany left. That is, it was advantageous to -successfully- assassinate him. An unsuccessful attempt triggered a backlash with effects that will be familiar to students of the period.

All the games I played were two-player, and I don't remember now if there was an option for muliple players (and, presumably, coalitions).

Overall I would not call it a very good game, but it was a quite interesting design study, and it's unfortunate that the system has been largely ignored. There have been a number of political/military games where a player was a faction rather than an individual (Kingmaker is probably the best example, Down With the King is another) but they don't have the idea of conceptual distance -- Kingmaker takes place on a geographic map, and DwtK has a "court" where all characters are present, and various abstract "foreign countries" that isolate faction characters at no specific distance -- being abroad is a condition, not a distance.

This has been brought to you through the courtesy of More Than Any Reasonable Person Would Ever Want to Know About the Subject, Ltd., a divsion of Pedantiquarium Associates.

"Good evening, I'm the Marx with the big cigar, and it's time to play You Bet Your Voynich. Decipher the screwy pictures and win a hundred dollars. You may say that a hundred dollars isn't much in today's money, but how many of us are?"

Though given the cult (that's not really the word I want, but it's late) status of Credo, it's probably time for another geek-friendly game of intellectual combat, and maybe if I can find three more hours in a day, I'll do one. Minicon's coming, but don't anybody hold their breath.

On another note, sorta, just received an urgent e-mail from the poor spellers at something called IPSI Transactions, who are planing [sic] twelve special journal issues, and would like me to submit a paper for consideration. A paper on what, you may well ask, knowing that I am a broadly multidisciplinary gonzo pedant? Well, it doesn't seem to matter, as long as I've got 400 Euros for a six-page paper and another hundred for each page over that. A little Googling produces endless copies of the same document on various sites (they're based in Belgrade, Europe's academic fulcrum), along with one missive from an actual academic pointing out that no journal he knows of has twelve external reviewers (and requires only six of them to respond) or publishes quite so much, er, stuff. He also calculates their estimated annual gross, gross being the operative word.

I think it is shameful that America is so far behind the Europeans in academic vanity publishing. Ladies and gentlemen, we must not have a cacoscholia gap!

<Mel Brooks> It's good ta be da Pope. </Mel Brooks>

Fun game, too, although a tad incompatible with modern systems :) It should work fine in DOSBOX, though I haven't checked it myself.

[It was remade a while later IIRC unless it itself was the remake. Check out The Underdogs if you're interested.]

The board game "Princes of the Renaissance" also has the Papacy up for bid. It's an interesting mechanic; the entire game is auction driven, so "up for bid" is the literal truth, but possession of certain key figures (e.g. Lucrezia de Borgia) makes acquiring the Papacy cheaper. It's a fun, if somewhat odd, game.

I'd settle for a transitional type who would quietly scuttle the canonization process for Pius XII and spend just a little more time reviewing the recent horror of the abuse scandcal and perhaps hanging a few red hats like Cardinal Law out to dry....

As for the church, I don't get as worked up about Papal Infallibility as Teresa does, mainly because, as it is narrowly defined, it isn't as much of an affront as it sounds (theologically). That's thanks to some of the Vatican bureaucrats who whittled back Pius IX's initial desired definition in Vatican I. But I do think on other issues, for example, birth control, the church will, er, 'evolve' the way it did, for example, about Pius IX's idiotic Syllabus of Errors. It won't publicly apologize for it or admit it was a mistake--it will just quietly mothball it over the next century and hope nobody remembers....

I can personally recommend: Give Me The Brain, Kill Doctor Lucky, Deadwood, and Devil Bunny Needs a Ham.

Thanks to those who did try the link earlier, and let me know of my mistake.

http://www.rppi.org/apr2004/hr.shtml

The header reads "Reason Public Policy Institute is a public policy think tank promoting choice, competition, and a dynamic market economy as the foundation for human dignity and progress."

This apparently is yet another faux Think Tank which has a patchy atomic thickness layer veneer of claim of being a think tank, over a level of unshakeable prejudicial Belief as obdurate as Opus Dei's, and rather more intent on spreading its worldview over all others regardless of their creeds and needs and abilities and positions in societies...

The particular article focuses on "Outsourcing Human Resources Management

In spring of 2004 the Conference Board released the first comprehensive look at outsourcing human resource activities by government agencies. HR Outsourcing in Government Organizations provides an excellent overview of the subject and is chock full of valuable information for government officials or others looking into outsourcing HR functions."

It doesn't seem to have any acknowledgement or concern that outsourcing isn't all-good and all-well-being etc., that there are issues with control, and organzations not controlling their own destiny with outsourcing, with abuses that can occur, etc. No downside to discuss or acknowledge or even create strawfigures to knock down or blow away of "this is not a problem because."

This bunch looks like some of the most bogus self-professed analysts I've ever seen an executive summary from--and that's saying something. I've seen some lousy research/reports of lousy research. This is possibly the most bigoted in assumptions, analysis, conclusions, and values, using "bigots" in the sense of extremely biased mathematically and with malice and prejudice "massaging the data" and assumptions and such to make sure that no "adverse information" or assumptions "bias" the assumptions, data, or results that would effect allowing anyone to notice that there are discreptancies--other than the whole thing being an exercise in bigotry "proving" there isn't any bias involved.

It's like a bad novel. There's a side bar that includes "Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR): Challenging the 'Girly Men' in Our Legislatures" -- note the caricatured all-evil deprecated no-redeeming social value "villains."

No, it's older than that, and I'm pretty sure it's a single author. I think I read it back in the 80s and it wasn't supernew then; I'd guess 70s-era or before. Argh, this sort of thing drives me crazy!

A member of my old college SF club recently posted a pointer to what I think was the same Libertarian screed-site. I stopped reading when I got to the description of an article about how the Greenhouse Effect was invented to scare people or some-such rot. Ugh.

A few years back, a bunch of friends got one or two selections from thier ouvre.

John M. Ford rubs salt in a long open wound:

I really loved the intricacy and innovation of some "paper" wargames. Some demonstrated a real craft in their use of charts and hex maps and tables to simulate politics and such.

That whole world has more or less evaporated. Computer games just plain whacked wargames. I dig games like Civilization and Age of Empires, but they're not the same.

An outfit called Decision Games does reprint some old SPI titles, but there's still the problem of finding someone else who plays them.

I've looked around online, and keep finding the "giant dishrag" pattern. I'd prefer not to welcome my secular godbaby into the world with a giant dishrag (baby won't know, but I will).

I was searching for technical information when this link popped up.

It's good to know that Johnny Von Neumann and Carmen Electra are 100% intellectually compatibile. They are, however, only 67% physically compatible. For greater physical compatibility, Von Neumann should look to Pope John Paul II for a 78% physical rating.

\end{open thread random comment}

What I would do, in your case, is to get yarn with an interesting texture and do a rib, but not a normal knit 2, purl 2 rib, but one that's knit 8, purl 2 on the forward side and knit 2, purl 8 on the backward side. No stitches to learn, slightly stretchy (making it useful during the swaddling phase, if the kid has colic), and the texture makes it interesting to look at.

One thing, though: if you're considering chenille yarn -- it's nasty to work with. It knots up, the fuzz comes out at rare but unpredictable intervals, and when you have to undo a row it breaks before it gives.

If others have had good experiences with chenille yarn, please explain how! Because it's yummy to look at and touch.

That said, I found a hardover of Urth of the New Sun....

The chenille also has a funny tendency to twist and require un-twisting. Gah.

Jennie - the small, hardback Vogue Knitting series has a couple of nice books of baby blanket patterns. Some are quite easy, and when you gain more confidence in your knitting you'll have some more difficult things to graduate to.

Fascinating stuff about the papal election of 1458. Here's the start:

The story so far: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, humanist and erotic poet turned apostolic secretary, is on the fast track in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, having been made bishop of Trieste in 1447, bishop of his hometown Siena in 1451, and cardinal of Santa Sabina in 1456. At this point in time, he is fifty-two years old, half-lame from gout, but intellectually still vigorous. The Pope who appointed him cardinal, Calixtus III, has allowed him to take the baths in Viterbo: [read on]

I wonder if there's an herbal equivalent of indomethacin or colchizine that will turn up somewhere down the line in the series.

Now where the heck did I put my fleam?

Stefan, in my county there are at least five game stores that provide places to play (low tables for board/paper games, high tables for miniatures). Most of them have free signups, plus a "looking for" bulletin board, but some do charge nominal fees for the tables.

Jennie, the Lion Brand site has a lot of baby knitting patterns:

http://www.lionbrand.com/content-knittingPatternIndex.html

including the classic Ripple blanket pattern.

Linkmeister, my colchicine is a little white pill, but I have Kaiser, so I'm getting whatever they could make the best deal on. Personally, I'm either walking or not. The pain is always there. (Took the dressing off my wrist yesterday, still not much pain, a 3/4" incision and three stitches.)

"'It doesn't have to be a member of the College of Cardinals. It doesn't even have to be a priest.'
Really? *boggle*"

The American equivalent is: you don't have to be a lawyer to be appointed or elected Judge. from roughly 200 to 100 year ago, small town folks would appoint or elect someone of outstanding intelligence, honesty, and common sense to be a judge. Now, unfortunately, almost all judges are ex-lawyers, and so are almost all members of Congress. White male millionaire ex-lawyers. This is one of the senses in which I believe that America is far, far, down the "wrong track."

I enjoyed the play "Hadrian VII" adapted by Peter Luke from works by Frederick Rolfe, "Baron Corvo." Chain-smoking American author's life assumes that of his subject 'Pope Hadrian the Seventh' -- a surprise non-priest Pope, in the mad imaginings of protagonist. First published 1967 in "Plays Of The Year Vol.33", Elek, London. First produced 1967, Birmingham Rep. I don't recall if I saw it on Broadway or off-Broadway, though.

Have to catch up on this and contemporaneous threads. My wife, son, and I just got home from a weekend in Las Vegas. Nice chats with Penn & Teller (who have an unannounced new show coming soon). Teller and I have a common top-10 Con ever: Artificial Life II at Santa Fe. "Why were there?" I asked, as we recalled conversing there. "I like to know what's going on in the world," he said.

Good gawk at the car at which Bonnie & Clyde were shot. 167 bulletholes, which is a prime number. Feel doubly sorry for one of their last victims, because his name was Smoot Schmid.

Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria is often considered papabile; he's fairly conservative, as far as I can tell, but I don't think he's part of Opus Dei or any of that rot. Still, I suspect it would be a big shock to a lot of white Catholics to have a black Pope.

I believe there was a Bonhoeffer piece (and in fact I may be misremembering that as Niemoller -- it's been decades since I saw a copy). I remembered that it was a Strategy & Tactics magazine game, and a little searching indicates that it was in S&T issue 59, in 1976; there would have been a boxed version as well. The way the world works, someone no doubt has one they'd be willing to part with, and The Net means that you might be able to make contact with that person.

The counter is indeed for Bonhoeffer, not Niemoller, as determined by checking here.

As Plot is one of SPI's least-sought-after games acquiring a copy should be easy and cheap. There are several copies available on eBay as I write. If anyone has conceived a sudden desire for one and doesn't want to go the eBay route, feel free to e-mail me (I don't have a copy but can probably point you at someone who does).

The board game "Princes of the Renaissance" also has the Papacy up for bid. It's an interesting mechanic; the entire game is auction driven, so "up for bid" is the literal truth, but possession of certain key figures (e.g. Lucrezia de Borgia) makes acquiring the Papacy cheaper. It's a fun, if somewhat odd, game.

I like Princes of the Renaissance but I wouldn't suggest that a non-gamer start by picking it up. It's not particularly pope-centric in any case. The only game I can think of that actually has papal elections is Richard Berg's The Prince (aka Borgia in the European editions), published by Phalanx. The object of that game is not to become Pope per se, but being Pope gets you lots of victory points and lets you mess with the other players. I thought the game was just OK, but people more into the whole papal election thing would probably enjoy it more.

Well Teresa, over the past century, the popes seem to have found their own way to back off from the exraordinary magisterium -- simply don't invoke it except in the most obscure controversies, and then only after consulting the bishops. The current occupant of the Chair of Peter has been both smart and humble enough to not invoke it at all, even when some really wanted him to. In fact, up until Papa Roncalli announced his intention to call a council (to a group of curial cardinals who recieved it in shocked silence) many assumed that no further councils would be needed -- the Curia would come up with an answer, the pope would climb into the chair and that would be that. The problem was that the popes tended not to see it that way once they were elected.

As for who can be elected, it is quite true that you don't have to be a cardinal, but it has been a long time since anyone else was chosen, and it would now also be limited to voting cardinals, that is, those still under the age of 80. Provision has been made for election of non-cardinals, and in fact nonmembers of the clergy -- Canon 332 §1. The pope is by definition Bishop of Rome, so any person elected must be eligible for immediate consecration as a bishop, which means at the minimum a single male practicing Catholic, of any rite. Single because while there are married deacons and priests, depending on whether or not you are in the Latin or an Eastern rite, no rite currently consecrates married bishops.

. . . a Hypercard stack written by sociologists (at Stanford?) and was for creating simulations of societies; the game had been made for use in class and was called "The Well Tempered Gentleman." In it you were a 17th century would-be nobleman trying to figure out who to toady to and who to sleep with to better your station.

I'll ask around. Have you tried the HyperCard List? It's now at Yahoo, but lots of folk who might know the stack hang out there.

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/HyperCard/

Now and then I think about doing a revised and expanded version of En Garde (which began as a fencing combat system and jes' growed like the Duke of Buckingham's ambitions). Time. Copious. Spare.

I suspect part of the urge to narrative is part of the function of memory. We remember what makes sense, even if we have to twist it around to make sense out of it.

(Summary includes: "Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain", so that's not at all anything like Karol Wojtyla (Jr), from Iron Curtain Poland)

Maybe that explains why I always get Shoes of the Fisherman mixed up with this other novel about a black Speaker of the House who gets to be president when Pres & VP die. My only excuse is that I think I read them in grade school as I was going through my dad's collection of RD condensed books, and they may have had the same artist doing illustrations. Some of those condensed books had really neat illustrations. The one about a charwoman who goes to Paris to buy a designer gown comes to mind.

And the book and film conclude with Kyril I liquidating the Vatican's assets to stave off massive famine in China (and possible nuclear war), so that'e a little off the reality too. This after proving that he is so infinitely humble and humane that Jesus probably has him on speed-dial.

The book is readable but very long and rather dull. The movie, despite some good cast members and opulent filming inside the Vatican, is very long and extremely dull.

I was thinking, if not the same thing, then something related.

Years ago a Discordian gave me a card that said "The bearer is a fully ordained and recognized Pope, or if female, a Mome." (I belong to a little Mome and Pope religion myself.)

Oh, I want a t-shirt that says "Teresa for Mome!" Yes, yes I do! What more momabila (best I could do without any actual Italian) woman do YOU know?

Andy, someone already pointed out that 'a whole nother' has already been heard. Did you know that 'apron' is another child of this particular type of folk etymology, albeit in reverse? English sandhi are involved here, too: the original word was 'napron' and 'a napron' got reanalyzed into 'an apron'. (I suspect 'napkin' is a diminutive, but I've been unable to verify this, or refute it to my satisfaction.)

I loved Cheapass Games' Give Me The Brain! Since playing it, I have used "My tan is stah to da flah" to mean "sorry, I just did/said something stupid/incompetent."

About the Pope: I understand Joseph Ratzinger (who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aka the Holy Office aka the Inquisition), who Catholic gays of my acquaintance call "Cardinal Rat," while not popabile himself, is a likely kingmaker (popemaker?). If this is the case, chances of a relatively liberal Pope are slim.

Unless they plan to appoint and then poison one, as many people believe was done with JPI. But that, as someone said above, is a whole nother set of conspiracy theories. I'll just go pull on mine apron now...

By Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page BW02
THE BIG PICTURE
The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
By Edward Jay Epstein. Random House. 396 pp. $25.95

"... The blockbusters do well enough in American theaters -- the first 'Harry Potter' pulled in more than $317 million -- but ticket sales are a drop in the bucket: That film's total earnings as of last year were $1,249 billion, the biggest chunk of which ($436 million) came from worldwide DVD sales. In effect, as Epstein persistently argues, theatrical release now exists not to make money but to open the way for 'intellectual property' income to be earned over the long term from other sources."

Ummmmmm, shouldn't "$1,249 billion" be "$1.249 billion?" Or is J. K. Rowling the world's first trillionaire author?

Legend has it that they sat the person down in a specially-designed chair. Somebody here will be able to refresh my memory as to what the chair was called.

All thanks to Pope Joan . . .

I'm imagining now the original B-52s lyrics ... "Lovecraft, baby, Lovecraft ... hop in my Chaugnar, it's as big as a Faugn, let's get our Necronomic-ON!"

I'm still giggling.

Sandhi are dropping out of English. There used to be sandhi-ns on the ends of 'no' and 'my', for example: hence 'none other' and 'mine enemies'. Both of these ns occurred predicatively, which has now resulted in 'none' and 'mine' becoming separate words.

A nodder* sandhi is /thiy/ vs /th(schwa)/, but that doesn't affect the spelling: 'the' is 'the' regardless of whether the next word is 'elephant' or 'pachyderm'. That one shows signs of dropping out too, which is too bad IMO.

*just kidding

JK Rowling is from Britain (Scotland, to be precise), which is profoundly uncertain whether it's really part of Europe. We use decimal points here. Decimal commas are in use on the other side of the Channel.

The British billion used to be a million million, but it has slowly become a thousand million, as in the US. I leave you to imagine the number of ambiguities that introduces. $1,249 billion in old UK speak would be $1,249 trillion.

I suspect it's a typo. Not that it leaves JK Rowling hurting for money.

Are you feeling safer yet?

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding

...

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

...

But a terroristic threat? Doesn't the word 'credible' have to be in there somewhere?

Wow. This and the State AG freewheeling after confidential medical records, and Kentucky sounds rather frightening.

I, like many introverted high school students probably wrote dozens of stories dealing with a fictional high school and mystical come-uppance. You know, those awkward tales where the insipid bully gets turned into his inner troll.

Then again, I'd already have been sent to the re-education camp for teens for wearing black (being a theatre tech) and having a military-surplus trench-coat.

I wonder if this statute only applies to students in Kentucky schools.

Imagine being a writer there, and having some fundy busybody report you to the authorities, because somewhere in your story there is a high school and elewhere in the story there is violence. Heathers is right out as well.
Heck, Jumper might be as well.

And imagine getting narced on by your grandparents. Instead of sitting down and talking with him, they report him to the authorities?!?!?

Got My 'K' states mixed up there. What I get for posting while on tech-support hold. Kansas is the one with the crazed state AG.

Meanwhile, there's always a chance that I might be the next Pope, so let's be nice.

Thanks for suggesting the Friar and the Cipher. I just ordered it from Amazon. It should help with a story I'm working on that uses the Voynich MS as a McGuffin.

Just another all-american success story.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to come over to my blog and help me deal with a sudden infestation of Amway drones, please feel free...

Legend has it that they sat the person down in a specially-designed chair. Somebody here will be able to refresh my memory as to what the chair was called.

(boggle) They have a special chair for checking to make sure if someone is biologically male?

Huck Finn, of course, left the country one step ahead of Roy Cohn ("I guess that Mister Cohn was a man who would go very far, but in what direction I could not tell you in front of folks") and was at last report somewhere on the Yangtze River, barefoot doctoring and mourning the passing of Sandra Dee and Hunter Thompson.

*Notwithstanding that the current President clearly longs to be Dink Stover when he grows up.

"(boggle) They have a special chair for checking to make sure if someone is biologically male?"

Is that the origin of the politically incorrect term "Chairman?";)

James D. Macdonald:

Grosse Pointe Blank particularly comes to mind.

We all know that High School has a dark underbelly, even if the climactic scenes are not always quasiterrorist, for instance in:

Sakura no sono; Ascension; Academy Boyz; Jing Gai'er; Unstable Minds; Twin Peaks; American Beauty; Bang, Bang, You're Dead [TV]; The Last Picture Show; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Acne; Clerks; Batoru rowaiaru; Dirty Deeds; Kenka erejii; Lone Star; Boogie Nights; Strange Fruit; Taiyo o nusunda otoko; Blackboard Jungle...

But I also specially like Mary Woronov as Miss Togar in Rock 'n' Roll High School, especially with The Ramones' soundtrack.

Kansas? I guess that if you can't safely teach Evolution, you can't have a clear concept of the boundary between civilization and chaos.

But I still don't see what that has to do with the Vatican.

I plan to look into this when I get home tonight and post what I can find.

I've been trying to get people to boycott Kentucky anyway. NOW will you?

Much as people might claim otherwise, there's no one in the world who really can't live without bourbon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51773-2005Feb24

The term "at rest" can be defined rigorously. The microwave background radiation fills the universe and defines a universal reference frame, analogous to the rubber of the balloon, with respect to which motion can be measured.

How can that be true without violating special relativity? I thought All Reference Frames Were Created Equal?

Do I correctly recall that you wrote something about relativity? (The was a relativity discussion on Electrolyte once, and I thought I remember a mention of it.)

The latter was _The Man_ by Irving Wallace (1964, movie
1972). In it the black senator became president because
he was president _pro tem_ of the Senate when the President,
VP, and Speaker got it at the same time. (The president _pro
tem_ is traditionally the senior member of the majority party,
but any senator could be elected if the body chose.)

Wallace doesn't seem to have written anything about a papal
election, but someone might have been thinking of _The Word_
which was about the discovery of a first-century manuscript
that could shake the foundations of Christianity (an idea done
later, and better, in _A Letter of Mary_ by Laurie R. King).

Someone at the top of the thread invoked Dan Brown as an
authority, which may not be wise -- he shares with me an
Amherst-trained ability to bullshit convincingly on any topic of
which the listener is ignorant. I haven't read any of his books,
but my friends who know cryptography say that his NSA book
was absolutely ridiculous...

You mean, like the statement that a 64-bit cipherkey is "64 characters long"?

You mean, like the statement that a 64-bit cipherkey is "64 characters long"?]

That kind of thing, yeah. Along the same lines, can anyone
call to mind the cryptographic howler in Robert Harris'
_Enigma_? It caused me to throw the book against the wall,
but I was gratified that in the movie Stoppard (who is a very,
very smart man) actually fixed it to be plausible.

I've been trying to get people to boycott Kentucky anyway. NOW will you?

Gods yes. There. Done.

I first got interested in "nadder" because of Caxton's Morte D'Arthur, which, of course, is really Caxton's version of Malory's Morte. Caxton first printed it in 1485. But anyway, there's this bit in Book 21, at the Battle of Camlann:

Right soon came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. And when the knight felt him stungen, he looked down and saw the adder, and then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. And when the hosts on both parties saw that sword drawn, then they blew beams, trumpets, and horns, and shouted grimly.

I suspect that Caxton's/Malory's (the same form is in the Winchester ms.) use of adder pretty much guaranteed the new form would flourish.

(By the way, your link is broken-- was it this one?)

Meanwhile, I must duck across and check on Charlie's Misconceptions. Haven't seen him for ages. Not sure if I can persuade my ex-Catholic friends to come over & enjoy the various papal discussions, sometimes the scars are still too painful.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that quite a few people seem to be making a living explicating, debunking (or both) a popular phenomenon - probably not a new idea. I'm thinking of both Brown's Da Vinci Code & Rowlings assorted Potterings, from this thread (some might say the whole non-biblical Christian literature too, like Bollandisme) but it's undoubtedly more widely applicable.
I enjoyed this part of a review:

(b) These are just two small examples, out of many the book offers, where fact (driving a sub-compact) and fiction (in a semi truck) suffer a tragic collision. However, it seems petty to nit-pick a work of fiction ... for getting facts wrong. Nit-pick away at the flat characters or the itty-bitty chapters - unraveling the "fact" can o' worms might keep you busier than you'd intended to be.

The term "at rest" can be defined rigorously. The microwave background radiation fills the universe and defines a universal reference frame, analogous to the rubber of the balloon, with respect to which motion can be measured.

How can that be true without violating special relativity? I thought All Reference Frames Were Created Equal?

I am not a cosmologist, nor do I play one on tv, but I wouldn't take this as a return to the idea of an absolute reference frame like the old "luminiferous aether."

The cosmic microwave background provides a convenient marker for an inertial reference frame, but it's a stretch to say that it's the inertial reference frame. The CMB frame is useful because you can easily determine your motion relative to it (which is a hard thing to do in intergalactic space), but it's not really privileged over other inertial frames, save by convention.

At least, that's my take on it.

Nice of you to remember. Yeah, a few years back I did a piece for Salon on anti-relativity nuts. They're a far more interesting 'breed' than anti-Darwin Bible nuts, IMHO....

*goes back to disbelieving in privileged frames, grumble grumble*

I did a piece for Salon on anti-relativity nuts
You gobble a nut and pretty soon you're on about Tachyons and Bell's theorem and gosh darn it, we broke that sound barrier, and one day we'll break that light barrier...

sheesh

Each player represents a faction (Trotskyite, Red Army, etc) and the objective is to control the general secretary at three (of ten) October parades and have him wave. All of the characters are fictional (though there is a variant that provides for Stalin as GenSec), and players exercise control by revealing influence that has been assigned in secret. The characters can be at one of three Politburo levels, or they can be at the sanatorium (voluntarily or not), or they can be in Siberia. In extremis, they can also be dead, though that is a little rarer. Cards allow you to mess around with opponents, and for random events.

Fun game, though of course more a historical interest nowadays.

I think the story I wrote in my junior year, featuring myself as a sekrit leader of some sort of mercenary outfit hired to blow up my highschool would be frowned upon in this day and age. Of course, I had all the students herded into the gym so they were safe, because I didn't care about their fate. What I was looking for was a gripping confrontation between me and a certain teacher.

why does the pope wear a yarmulke? a.k.a. a kippah, or if you must, a skullcap.

Jewish men wear them to cover their heads during prayer.. but i've never been able to find an explanation for the pope's under-miter headcovering.

The wisdom of criminalizing the possession of materials considered threatening to schools is a separate matter.

I, of course, would be somewhere else, possibly somewhere equipped with GP-standard screens.

I never managed to work "coruscating" into an essay at school.

shana: it's called a zucchetto, but I don't know why he wears it. Might be because Peter wore one (being a Jew).

http://home.epix.net/~mhryvnak/theyfightcrime.html

Yes they do. It's a Lay-Z-Boy, and if the newly elected Pope uses the footrest deployment handle and asks where the "telecomadus" is, they know for sure it's a guy.

On the other hand, we drive through KY on the way to visit my parents in SC (we're in MI), and that's QUITE A WAYS without stopping anywhere...so I'm giving something up, anyway. Twice a year. And we aren't smokers. Does tobacco come from KY? What else?

1) Yes. 2) Thoroughbred racehorses.

And don't forget the famous Kentucky Jelly.

"Greenwich Village is a state of mind. Like Hollywood. There really isn't such a place left anymore. It exists in the memories of the old ones and in the misconceptions of the new ones. It's on the map and in the vocabulary, but the thing that made Hollywood and the Village has long since gone and thousands prowl the srea where they once were, looking for tyhe reality but finding only the shadow."

"A few landmarks are still around; the streets do their jig steps and the oddball characters wrapping up their life on canvas or in unpublished manuscripts are attractions for the tourists. But the city is too big and too fast-growing to contain a sore throat and coughed-up phlegm. The world of commerce has moved in, split it with the beatniks who clutched for a final handhold, and tolerates it because New York still needs a state of mind to retain its image while the computers finally take over."

[The Body Lovers: a Mike Hammer Mystery, Mickey Spillane, New Yor: E. P. Dutton, 1967, p. 43]

Unemployed Qatari high-school jockeys, replaced by robots in camel races, plot to violently take over their High School, but are stopped from terrorism by a dying Pope in a bourbon-soaked zucchetto and a Jesuit cosmologist with a deadly pet adder. Together, they fight crime...

Seriously, I don't see how listening to Bluegrass benefits the economy of Kentucky. Bourbon does: we'd like Jim Beam to seriously suffer. Perhaps they'll choose to lobby against the anti-gay and fascist elements currently ruling that state.

And I've advocated not only boycotting the Derby, but any products advertised during it, and writing the companies to tell them why. But I'm a radical, and I was even angrier then than I am now.

Richard Curtis buys wholly into the hype, and declares that blogs are going to replace books and that authors are going to get rich off of AdSense and no one will need publishers any more:
http://www.bksp.org/RichardCurtis3.html

Shallow, Mr. Curtis. Very shallow.

Me, I've tried it. Not for very long, granted, but in terms of writing quality I think I had one of the two or three best blogfic projects running. It was fun. I didn't let it drop because it wasn't fulfilling, but because my wife's warning turned out to be correct: I don't have the time and energy to devote both to the blog and to my current novel.

The novel ought to be worth four or five figures, if it's saleable at all. The blog fiction? As of today, Google AdSense has earned me $1.01. Granted, more marketing could have improved things, but Mr. Curtis's vision of a new authors' blogtopia is backwards. If blogging helps the best writers launch careers, it's by helping them get book deals. If that changes in several years, it will have to be under a new economic model, and with an audience that does not assume that anything on the Internet will be free
by default.

Spillane's latest novel (yes, he's still going strong) involves a mysterious sea monster--or is it?

For any of you still harboring concerns about Teresa's descent into were-lorishood, if my inability to capture a non-blurry image of T is any indication, she's in no danger. Glad to know you found a way to get by, Teresa.

And, of course, it was fun meeting Steve Brust, as well...even if he did condemn me to an eternity in purgatory.

Which reminds me...

Since the search functions for The New York Times online are, to be kind about it, eccentric, does anyone have the recipie that they printed for Macaroni & Cheese served at the second Clinton Inauguration? All I remember is that the Southern Delegation of Congress was heavily involved with taste-testing, and that it was over 500 calories a serving. Which leads to a "heavily" joke I'm trying hard not to make...

And in order to demonstrate his worthiness, his testicles are felt by the junior present as testimony of his male sex. When this is found to be so, the person who feels them shouts out in a loud voice testiculos habet ("He has testicles") And all the clerics reply Deo Gratias ("Thanks be to God"). Then they proceed joyfully to the consecration of the pope-elect.

- Felix Hamerlin, De nobilitate et Rusticate Dialogus

Fascinating link!

I was delighted by the surprise reference to Piers Anthony (which could use a space after the close parenthesis).

Steve Eley:

Richard Curtis is too sly to be as dumb as that seems. What on Earth could he REALLY be thinking? I partly agree with him, but for personal reasons relating to my averaging over one edited online publication (NOT blog posting or my own site) per day, for the past 400 days or so. That is, web publication HAS displaced dead trees for some prolific authors of real short stuff. But others who qualify, i.e. Cory Doctorow (10,000+ postings on BoingBoing) still have hardcopy books -- and brilliant ones at that!

I earned $30 with my first AdSense experiment. In theory, I could make a thousand bucks to ten thou annually, since my web domain gets 15,000,000 hits per year. Too much hassle, to update by cut & paste each of about 800 web pages though. I need a full-time tenure track professorship, however, to maintain my family lifestyle, and Google can't yet beat the desired day job. But AFTER I get my next professorship, watch out, blogosphere!

So Brust is the new Pope?

However, Mammoth Cave is right out.

Ah, but Tennessee has a lot more to boycott. There's country music, and all the power generated by the TVA, and of course Rock City. I'd add Pigeon Forge and Dollywood if anyone ever actually went there.

On bourbons: the only tolerable one I've ever found is Woodford Reserve. And that's because to me it doesn't taste much like bourbon.

Well, if so, then I really want to know Mr. Brust's papal platform, aside from condemning Skwid to purgatory.

Not for long. He has half the calories of Regular Pope, but he hasn't done well in taste tests.

I believe his papal platform was published some years ago.

But oh! in Folly's mailbox
There lies the foundling Hope
'Your uncle in Australia has died
And you are Pope'

Hmmm, it turns out that I'm fairly wrong, since this is the actual poem...unless it was misquoted to me to begin-with.

Oh, and Skwid, how is an eternity in Purgatory distinguishable from Hell?, since (if I recall properly, that is better than I did that poem) the pains of Purgatory are identical to those of Hell, save that there there is the hope of release...is Brust implicitly granting you the eternal false hope of release, like the old Cordwainer Smith's "Nancy". Or does one in Purgatory enjoy the perceived Presence of God, a utility shut off infernally I've heard.

I renewed my apartment lease last fall. The initial notice stuck on my door showed I was up for a hefty rent increase, but I hadn't had an increase in a few years so I thought I'd swallow it.

It took a lot of badgering to get the management to get the paperwork to me. When I finally did, I was surprised to see no rent increase . . . plus a sort of signing bonus of $380.

What's not to like? I signed the contract and waited for the bonus to be credited to me.

Yesterday, everyone got notices on their door to the effect that the apartment complex was changing management companies. "Dang!" I thinks, "I'd better make sure I get credit for that renewal bonus."

When I dropped by yesterday afternoon, the dispirited office workers were starting to pack up. Not only had they no record of my renewal bonus . . . they had me down as having a month to month lease! They claim to never have gotten my paperwork.

Good news: I have a lease I could break any time, at a rather favorable rate.

Bad news: No bonus, and who knows what would happen if I asked for a lease.

He Is Pulling Your Leg.

Really.

Now you have me shopping for books, and my significant other will probably petition Pope Brust to have YOU condemned to, er, purgatory.

Did you keep a copy of the offered lease? If so, I don't suppose by any chance a representative of the management company signed it before they sent it to you for your signature. If so, you might be in luck, but you should check with a lawyer. If you have a copy of the offered lease but without the management company's signature, you might be out of luck, but you should check with a lawyer. If you don't have a copy of the lease, well, that's the worst luck of all.

It all depends on what the local landlord/tenant laws are, if any, and how much trouble you want to go to.

Show them the lease you were given. Tell them "The old company gave me this. I'd like you to sign it and honor it." They should understand it's in their best interest to have you committed to them.

And it's in yours, because on a month-to-month lease they're free to raise your rent at any time, as many months in a row as they please.

(And although it doesn't help you now, as a general rule it's a good idea to deliver such stuff in person and not leave until they've signed and notarized it.)

She's the patron saint of the primary progressive faction in Toronto city politics; Brad DeLong has had a number of good things to say about her on his blog. Many people have published academic work which builds on her work.

So I'm fairly sure debunked isn't the right term, even if many people haven't or won't assimilate chapter 1 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

That's it! Thanks, Glenn.

***

Macaroni and Cheese Timbales

Adapted from Design Cuisine Total time: 20 minutes, plus about 2 hours for baking

Nonstick cooking spray
1 pound elbow macaroni, cooked, drained and rinsed
1 quart heavy cream
9 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup finely minced red onion
1/2 cup finely minced green onion
4 ounces grated sharp sheep's-milk cheese (like pecorino Romano)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray the inside of a 3-quart baking dish with cooking spray. Combine all the remaining ingredients, and pour into baking dish; cover.

2. Place the baking dish in a shallow pan filled with about 1/2 inch of water, and bake in bottom third of the oven for 90 minutes. Remove cover, and continue to bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until the center is firm. To test, insert a knife in the center: it should come out clean.

Yield: 12 servings.

Note: The dish can be baked in individual timbales or molds and will take about 40 or 50 minutes.

Approximate nutritional analysis per serving: 520 calories, 40 grams fat, 280 milligrams cholesterol, 260 milligrams sodium (before salting), 15 grams protein, 32 grams carbohydrate.

***

I dunno, it doesn't sound like enough cheese to me. When I do baked mac & cheese, I use equal parts (by volume) mac and cheese.

(This is a long winded way of saying I agree with Kate.)

But oh! in Folly's mailbox
There lies the foundling Hope
'Your uncle in Australia has died
And you are Pope'

He thought he saw an argument
that proved he was the Pope.
He looked again and saw it was
a Bar of Mottled Soap.
"A fact so dread," he faintly said,
"extinguishes all hope!"

(I may have missed some extra capitalizations.)

The entire weekend was just...incredible. I can't remember the last time I had so much fun.

It was a shame you couldn't stay longer, but I hope all went well with your sister and the delivery.

But I do not think I can boycott Kentucky bourbon. Especially Maker's Mark and Woodford. If you had asked me to boycott Tennessee whiskey, I'd have no problem.

Can I ask what the beef with the Derby is? I've been a bit heads-down in my new job and only the biggest headlines manage to penetrate my awareness barrier lately.

Thanks be to Google, it's a Randall Jarrell poem:

Randall Jarrell - Hope

The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
One keeps getting the same card.
But twice a day -- except on Saturday --
The wheel stops, there is a crack in Time:
With a hiss of soles, a rattle of tin,
My own gray Daemon pauses on the stair,
My own bald Fortune lifts me by the hair.
Woe's me! woe's me! In Folly's mailbox
Still laughs the postcard, Hope:
Your uncle in Australia
Has died and you are Pope,
For many a soul has entertained
A Mailman unawares --
And as you cry, Impossible,
A step is on the stairs.
One keeps getting the same dream
Delayed, marked "Payment Due,"
The bill that one has paid
Delayed, marked "Payment Due" --
Twice a day, in rotting mailbox,
The white grubs are new:
And Faith, once more, is mine
Faithfully, but Charity
Writes hopefully about a new
Asylum -- but Hope is as good as new.
Woe's me! woe's me! In Folly's mailbox
Still laughs the postcard, Hope:
Your uncle in Australia
Has died and you are Pope,
For many a soul has entertained
A mailman unawares --
And as you cry, Impossible,
A step is on the stairs.

You can leave out the ham, and substitute canned non-fat milk for the cream, or use various mixtures, as long as the quantity is the same. Use good cheese; it makes a great deal of difference.

But not Hell, which has gone over to a biometric keyless entry system. It doesn't work any better than they ever do, but this is Hell we're talking about. The entry gate also has a chip that says, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Please take the ticket," in the voice of Paul Frees. (He's not in Hell, of course; it was a contract job.)

One small perk of being a Secret Pope is that there's a broader choice of footwear. One can select from the Clarks, Naturalizers, Blahniks, Tevas, Red Ball Keds, or Luke Martens of the Fisherperson. The Triple Crown you're stuck with, though it's commonly worn at a rakish angle.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/82400.html

15. No sickness or injury is so bad that panic can't make it a lot worse.
16. There are secret stories that only grandmothers should know.
17. It will be finished when it's finished.

Wha?

That's sort of broadly bizarre, isn't it?

And I'd say it's essential, now, for His Holiness Brust I to acquire a new leather hat with the triple crown rendered on its front...

It would have been Michael Turyn (whom I was quoting) that you misquoted it to - I've never even been to Change of Hobbit (nor Berkeley).

Anything I can do, however small, to slow or block the increasing relative economic power of Texas is a good thing.

Yep, there are plenty of fine people who are Texans, and I've enjoyed my several visits to DFW (less so for Houston). But as long as it's the fiefdom of the likes of Tom DeLay, I'll try to point my dollars elsewhere.

http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4109

While I know that all knowledge is contained in fanzines, my current collection is pretty small (out of morbid curiosity has anyone here ever seen the Man From U.N.C.L.E/L.O.T.R. crossover "The Tenth Nazgul Affair? How is it?) so since Making Light is the closest thing online I'll ask here: as the owner of a working Canon Cat that was run for about three hours total before I got it, are there any user's groups out there for them? I find it a great machine for generating lots of text on rapidly, but I'm not sure how to get the results to any of my other machines and all I find online are eulogies to Jef Raskin (who designed it), Forth programmers who want one to play with, and people setting up Mac museums that want it because of it's connection to the early Mac. Any suggestions?

So are you boycotting all seventeen states that have such amendments? I sympathize with the intent, but that's got to be nearly impossible to keep track of.

The best passage is in the middle:
We should all like to help the applicants, we should all be glad to do it, we should all like to return the sort of answer that is desired, but-- Well, there is not a thing we can do that would be a help, for not in any instance does that letter ever come from anyone who can be helped. The struggler whom you could help does his own helping; it would not occur to him to apply to you, stranger. He has talent and knows it, and he goes into his fight eagerly and with energy and determination--all alone, preferring to be alone.

There are a lot of assholes in Texas, and some of them are very rich...but you know what? Assholery of the wealthy seems to be pretty independent of geography, in my experience. A certain percentage of any sort of people, anywhere, are assholes, and the rest of us just have to be wary of them, especially the rich, powerful, and otherwise influential ones. Tom DeLay is an evil, evil con-man, but if you think every Texas-based businessperson supports him, you're completely misguided.

Really...this is extraordinarily and bizarrely vague, to me. If you have a problem with a particular company, then by all means, don't do business with them...but what state a business is based in (particularly a state as huge and diverse as Texas) should be a nearly inconcievably small factor when evaluating the worth of a company.

I always thought the Pace salsa ads denigrating New York City were harsh and insulting...but this attitude is far worse. Isn't irrational prejudice supposed to be one of the unsavory practices that motivate us to boycott against its practitioners?

And as a native New Yorker (one who lived in the five boroughs for the first 28 years of his life), I found the Pace salsa ads funny, not offensive.

I started to crack when I saw the transcript of the tape of Texas businessmen chortling with greedy glee as wildfires raced through my state -- because the deadly flames would interrupt our local power supply and increase the profits they had engineered through unfair manipulation.

I seethed when the "Texas model" of education reform was shoved down the throat of my state after it had demonstrably harmed the lives of Texan children. Not to mention Texan textbook policy, which inserts stupidities into books the students of my state have to read.

Texas politicians lose no opportunity to derogate my state: they use us as scapegoats when they are mainpulating midwesterners to act against their own interests, and draw caricatures of us whenever they want to divert attention from the real issues. They divert more and more funds from my state, while happily absorbing the wealth that we produce, allowing the producers of that wealth to suffer -- the Texas budget proposal cuts California's federal funds by 12% again this year, though our federal budget has been cut every year for a decade, and though we already don't get the money we're entitled to by law.

I get Texan mortgage scammmers trying to refinance my house so I'll have to pay them money forever and so that the already unconscionable housing costs of my (workibg-class) neighborhood will be driven higher.

The latest bit that got to me was the story of Pacific Lumber. Since being acquired by the Texas company Maxim, its logging has accelerated as much (and probably more than) it's allowed, causing irreversible damage to the watershed and the economy of Northern California, ruinging prospects for lumber work in the future -- and now Maxim says that unless they're allowed to wipe out yet more of the forest, they'll "be forced to" shut down all the mills and fire the workers.

I hear a lot of fellow Californians talk semi-seriously about seceding from the nation. I'm categorically opposed to secession, I think it always leads to disaster and Balkanized bloodiness, but, you know? If we could secede from Texas only, I might consider it.

Texas businessmen, though, are not all Enron and Halliburton. They are people like you and me, a lot of them are Democrats (Bush only carried Dallas county by a slim margin with a rally there the night prior to elections, and Kerry pretty much swept Austin off its feet), and when you malign them and their employees as a whole without individual consideration, you come off as...well, frankly, as bigots, a word I've been trying to avoid.

By all means...drive the corporate assholes into the ground. Destroy the corrupt, idealogically-bankrupt or twisted politicians by whatever means necessary...but I'm an American, and a Liberal, and so are lots of other people in this definitely purple state. Don't write us off with that carpet-bagger from Connecticut who likes to claim he's from here.

Public eavesdropping
"I'm so excited. I haven't knit yet as a man.''

Former woman overheard at Imagiknit in San Francisco by Shotsy Faust.

[the column always ends with "eavesdropping", and this remark is a fine "only(?) in San Francisco."]

A couple of games I've been having fun with lately:

http://www.mtbireland.com/dodge.html

http://www.dyson.com/game/play.asp

This rant brought to you by the syllables "frustr" and "ation."

But -- hell, I can't think of an elaboration or expansion on it. We've been seriously hurt, that's all, and the mallet is still swinging, and still held by the same hands.

And if it's nasty and wrong-headed for Texans to generally anathematize California and Californians, then it is equally nasty and wrong-headed for Californians to generally anathematize Texas and Texans, and I don't give a good goddamn which side did it first.

It's a short animated movie that I find unspeakably cool.

Hey, don't make Ivins sound like an afterthought. She is worth ten Bushes. In fact, if Bush were Ivins then he'd be able to make fun of himself and sound like he means it.

Molly Ivins isn't an afterthought. She's a national treasure.

A not so benevolent analysis of Poul Anderson's writing at Halfway down the Danube.

Worth a read. It even includes the customary "LoTR written by xxx"

Just received a message from the Beijing Greensparkling Fragrant Grass High Science Corporation, which desires that I shall join them for a conference on the Green Traffic Control System. I can buy "two seats of honored guest and some common seats," including hotel, dinner, tour of the Great Wall (doubtless critical to the workings of the Green TCS). "Not contains airplane ticket." I am exhorted to "please reply in recent days."

"Green traffic system shall give the people of your city happiness and tranquility, cast off bothersome traffic trouble. Can contain flying cars." And about time, too.

"So the investors not only have helped city people, also God rewards themselves great chances for their benevolence."

And who indeed would not shine in the morning to be the great minister of his city's traffic control? Incense rises to greet the spirit of Robert Moses, who calls in the heavens, what's my cut?

The Beijing Greensparkling Fragrant Grass High Science Corporation. There is a wonderful skiffy story in this somewhere, and if I were Paul Linebarger I would write it immediately.

The second post I linked starts:
"Who'd a thunk it. From the heart of Texas comes one of the most pro-labor and pro-civil liberties company, SBC Communications."

Given the number of infected messages I find in the Swinnex that are allegedly from regulars here, I suspect your guess is correct. (Though it would be an interesting, if not very valuable, exercise to work out the points of congruence in our Net activity.)

Looking at the letter from Larry Clopper, I can't help but notice some carefully worded sentences. And also a blatant assumption that the reader can't add up - B&N are their biggest customer with 30,000 books, and they have 11,000 authors; let's be generous, and call it 3 books an author. Wonder how that doesn't conflict with "PublishAmerica's biggest customer is not an author's family"...?

Ah. Presumably, therefore, the biggest customer is usually an author's friends. :-)

Right; back to Atlanta Nights, which I'm actually finding quite entertaining.

Their business practices also seemed to include tearing out all the extensions from apartment punch-down blocks when they start service, this way they can charge $20 per extension to put them back. My landlord was at his wits end and didn't want to let SBC onto his property unsupervised.

Perhaps their new pro-labor look is a development since I pitched them in favor of VoIP service.

I still get very aggressive marketing calls from them despite several requests that they stop. One such request resulted in verbal abuse from the customer "service" rep who interrupted my evening.

SBC - no thanks. I've got a choice and my money ain't goin' to San Antonio. I'll use Vonage and send (a smaller amount of) it to New Brunswick, NJ instead.

Kate on the Mac and Cheese, it reheats well, just use a saucepan or the oven, NOT the microwave. The thing to watch regarding the cheese separating is
that you may need to add a bit more milk, but you must stir. A fellow sufferer in my department makes a full batch (which is quite a lot) and then puts individual portions on those freezer bags that are meant to be reheated by boiling them; she says that works well.

Tom on spam, I suspect it's not direct harvesting of email addresses on Making Light, but rather, harvesting them via a local cache on an infected Windows system.

For weeks or months leading up to the writing test, perfectly sane teachers have been force-feeding students the same canned ingredients we all know will earn them a passing mark. These include the now-standard list of exactly four different ways to begin a story.

Obviously, I missed out somewhere. What four ways to begin a story would one teach fourth graders preparing for such a test?

Something along the lines of the classic "essay rules" for non-creative writing (at least in the GA and VA school systems in the 80's/early 90's).

- You must start each paragraph with a sentence that describes what you will be addressing in that paragraph.

- You must summarize what you covered in the paragraph at the end with a summary sentence.

- Your first paragrpah must be a summary of your conclusion and the fact you will provide to support that conclusion.

- Your last paragraph must be a summary of how your conclusion was supported by the facts and a re-iteration of your conclusion.

This "system" held through my senior year of high school. There were rumors that some of the Advanced Placement instructors would allow you you deviate, as long as they felt you would be improving your score in the AP test at year end.

Took me years to recover my non-fiction from the clutches of those rules.

--

So for "creative writing" perhaps:

- A beginning sentence that provides a summary of your story. "Billy had a great summer vacation"

- A cliffhanging sentence. "Mr. Grumpy was a mean old monster, but I showed him."

- Tell your reader what you're going to tell them. "I am going to tell you the tale of the little boy who found the magical mousepad"

Pixies, I can't bring myself to come up with another one. There will be teachers out ther carefully and methodically destroying the creative writing impulse in some people, because "there are RULES about these things, you see".

May we cherish the individuals who break free of that type of instruction and indoctrination.

Sorry for the mild rant, but I feel rather strongly on the subject of rote instruction, especially when one deals with creative or artisitic subjects.

On the other hand, I agree with you that similar rules shouldn't be used for creative writing. There are SOME rules, however, like "you have to grab your reader with the first sentence, because if you don't they probably won't read the second one." And restrictions like "if your hero wakes up at the end and it was all a dream, YOU FLUNK." (I once BEGAN a story with "He woke up. Thank God! It had all been a dream." But that doesn't count.)

I can't help noticing that a certain Mr Delong came up again, as well. Brad, is there anything you don't get into?

"The problem with the Ether was classical Physics not being able to explain how the Earth could revolve freely about the Sun, through a material millions of times harder than steel, based on the equivalence of speed of light with speed of sound. The solution is now obvious: the luminiferous Ether is a superfluid, able to get out of the Earth's way with zero viscosity."

One antirelativist whom I've had as a guest at my home, who has a legitimate Ph.D. and postdoc, has clarified my own thinking on, for example, the paradox that in Special Relativity, a wheel cannot rotate.

Imagine a spinning bicycle wheel. By Lorentz contraction, each little piece of the tire is shortened, so the circumference must shrink. But the spokes are moving perpendicular to that, and get thinner but not shorter. So how can a bicycle wheel have a decreasing circumference but no change in radius?

This was first published in 1906, within a year of Saint Albert revealing Special Relativity. Many solutions were suggested over the next few months. The wheel buckles. No, the spokes bend into the shape of integral signs. And so forth.

Einstein quickly agreed with the skeptic, saying that indeed, under Special Relativity, a wheel cannot rotate. But we see that wheels do rotate. That was one of the reasons that Einstein began working on General Relativity. The bicycle wheel, you see, is in accelerated motion...

I reached, in writing my article, a strange mental oasis, in which I no longer accepted Einstein as gospel (per my formal education as a Physicist). Nor did I accept the antirelativists. I was skeptical of both. This was akin to my 3rd year as a vegetarian, when I finally was no longer either attracted to, nor repelled by, the smell of cooking meat.

"Aha!" said my wife. "At last you are ready to invent the stardrive!"

I know several professional physicists, by the way, who believe that Ursula K. Le Guin's ANSIBLE is possible. But I digress...

What's Latin for this? I was thinking, what a perfect motto for you! :-)

Just teasing. But seriously, I thought relativity (can't remember which one) only applied at a significant fraction of c. Or was that what General Relativity was supposed to address? (The foreshortening of the wheel segments is just too small an effect to notice, maybe?)

Also, I've heard that Asaro's FTL drive, with its virtual anti-ship etc. cannot be ruled out by current physics. Is that so, or just a cool rumor?

There's a very good book about writing that's entirely devoted to getting rid of the bad composition habits one picks up K-12.

This one is my favorite to date:

The Starship Enterprise receives a distress call from a lost colony of Unitarian-Universalists.

Kirk: "Spock, what can you tell me about these people?"

Spock: "The library computer has little information, Captain. Logically, however, we may deduce from their name, 'Unitarian-Universalist', that since Unitarian means one, and Universalist means everything; that these people believe in one of everything."

Cribbed from a web search that led me here 'cause I can never remember how to tell a joke.

That was the point I was trying to make. Ideas about what is effective in creative-writing versus "laws". I've seen a few creative-writing classes ruined this way by instructors, even outside of K-12.

I will now submit that anything I generally try to say here, will be more perfectly stated seconds later by you or Jo Walton.

Now, back to finishing up a non-creative policy document so that I can properly relish my time at Potlatch.

There are people who would never be able to write anything -- not a love letter, not a letter to a landlord or a social security review board or a newspaper: not a history of a conflict for a legal case: not an application for a business license -- if they didn't have the process broken down into little memorizable bits. They have to have steps they can follow, stock phrases they can use.

People who don't come naturally to writing -- for whatever reason, including second language issues, including development issues, including personality -- nevertheless live in a literate world and they need and deserve to have the tools of citizenship just as the naturally articulate do. And that's why we teach that stuff. It's a necessity for democracy.

There is a problem in knowing your students, and knowing who needs a whole different kind of coaching, but that problem occurs whenever you have students in any kind of learning situation anyway.

We've got our own partner church in Transylvania, and last year their minister came to visit us. The religious persecution they're still under from their government is really alarming.

I've never once rushed home to my family and said "Wait till you hear this student's story -- it has lots of different adjectives, and it starts with a sound-making word, like Rrring! or Bang!"

Lucy:

And there are also people like me, who can be quite articulate one day and utterly frozen in panic at facing a blank page the next. The formulae get me through the bad days, too. It's why I collect them.

> I reached, in writing my article, a strange
> mental oasis, in which I no longer accepted
> Einstein as gospel (per my formal education as
> a Physicist). Nor did I accept the
> antirelativists. I was skeptical of both. This
> was akin to my 3rd year as a vegetarian, when I
> finally was no longer either attracted to, nor
> repelled by, the smell of cooking meat.
>
> "Aha!" said my wife. "At last you are ready to
> invent the stardrive!"

just to clarify, did your wife realize this because you no longer accepted Einstein as gospel or because you were neutral to the smell of bacon?

side note: i have this odd feeling that there's a zen koan in here somewhere.

This is known among the Wise as the Traffic Koan.

Depends. Was it Shakespeare or Bacon who wrote "Pygges in Space" with its imagery of Hercules' Fourth Labor: the Erymanthian Boar?

Xopher:

"'But I digress... ' What's Latin for this?" -- I think it's "Tristram Shandy."

"I thought relativity (can't remember which one) only applied at a significant fraction of c."
When velocity is close to zero, Einstein's theory gives results close to Newton's. The higher the velocity, the more Newton and Einstein disagree. At the speed of light, Newton and Einstein are fighting a duel to the death.

"Or was that what General Relativity was supposed to address?" -- no, my example failed to elucidate that Special Relativity is for motion at constant velocity (unchanging speed, unchanging direction) and General Relativity is for accelerated motion (changing speed and/or changing direction). Einstein then discovered the equivalence of inertia and gravity, and explained away the "action at a distance" that made Newton's theories suspect of occult metaphysics, replacing them with the notion that
objects are responding to the purely local distortion of space-time which is a gravitational field. That is, matter makes gravity by warping space-time, and other matter follows a trajectory in space-time caused by that warping. Matter makes space bend; that bend makes matter move. Einstein also was a father of Quantum Mechanics, but forever battled its "spooky action at a distance." But Alain Aspect's measurements of Bell's Theorem shows that Einstein was wrong. There is "spooky action at a distance." Hence teleportation is possible, and entanglement, and quantum computers (which Feynman instigated).

"The foreshortening of the wheel segments is just too small an effect to notice, maybe?" -- sorry. Any effect more than zero refuses to be swept under the rug. But yes, for the speeds you encounter in ordinary life, the effect is too small to see. There are posters available at the Caltech bookstore of Einstein grinning wildly as he rides his bicycle about the campus.

"Also, I've heard that Asaro's FTL drive, with its virtual anti-ship etc. cannot be ruled out by current physics. Is that so, or just a cool rumor?" It's always painful for me to say this, but I don't know. Would you like me to email a query to Dr. Asaro?

Teresa, Lucy, Drew:

What kind of opening is:
"'Damn!' said the archbishop" -- and that category of hooks?

And what are your favorite opening sentences in ALL of literature?

Natural selection acts on the quantum world

Objective reality may owe its existence to a 'darwinian' process that advertises certain quantum states.

Nature Article

"A team of physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world.

If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find?

Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states."

So, if you're not a member of the reality-based community, you're f***ing with the very nature of reality.

One of the few I can quote from memory is the deathless "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

Now that I think of it, just about the only other First Sentence I carry in my head is "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

(Now I suppose someone here will hybridize them.)

Oh, and "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"There was a wall."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." (No points at all for identifying that one--but since this is an open thread, I'll use it as an excuse to mention that someone has a model of hobbit (H. floresiensis) brains that suggests they were smarter than mere brain volume suggests, because the frontal lobe and temporal lobe appear to have been enlarged.)

I'd be interested in your pointers to a definite refutation of the idea that "Kirk Allen" of "The 80-Minute Hour" was definitely not Paul Linebarger.

I'm ramping up for Potlatch, now, and notice that the same issue of NYRSF with Josh Lukin's article on Philip K. Dick has Lee Weinstein's "In Search of Kirk Allen." Weinstein observes a number of parallels between situations in Cordwainer Smith stories and Allen's documented symptoms.

A year later, Alan Elms (a noted Linebarger scholar) has another NYRSF article in which he concludes:

"Though I have yet to come across solid documentary evidence, I think the circumstantial evidence (including but extending well beyond Leon Stover's recollections) is strong: Paul Line Barger was Kirk Allen, or at least a substantial component of Kirk Allen. It's still possible that Robert Lindner combined two patients who suffered from apparently similar symptoms, better to conceal the identities of both and to make his main points about therapeutic technique more strongly. That other patient may yet pop up, and I'd like to hear about him if any reader knows him (or is him)."

We had Alan Elms as one of our panelists for the 2002 Potlatch, which featured "The Instrumentality of Mankind" as its Book of Honor.

That Lindner altered his case studies to protect the patients is not in question, and there's a case that actually falsifying any detail not directly relevant to the pathology is excusable (though this leads into a hard knot about when the case study loses its validity thereby, and becomes fiction). If he combined two separate cases, I'm not sure that we can reliably infer anything about either of the sources; who then was the "traffic controller," Patient A or Patient B? It seems unlikely that there could have been two such cases. (It -is- believable that there were two patients with science-fictional fantasy lives.)

I'll gladly back off from "Kirk Allen was not P. M. A. Linebarger" to "we have only circumstantial and inferential evidence of such an identification, not proof." The only living person in SF I would think might know definitely would be Fred Pohl (though I doubt he does), and I would not expect him ever to say.

And I'd still like to write the "X-Files" episode where Mulder and Scully discover the files of their unit's OSS/CIA predecessor, and imagine themselves back in the Fifties, playing Officer Linebarger and Officer Sheldon. Maybe a sketch for Boskone someday.

Not a favorite book of mine, but definitely among the classic opening sentences.

(The perfect passive participle of "digredior" is "digressus". For some reason many English borrowings from Latin come from this participial stem rather than the main verb itself.)

This brings back nightmares of my seventh grade English teacher. The crowning achievement of the year was the production of a book report. It contained some number of paragraphs, each of which addressed a specific topic (plot, main character, conflict, etc) - the specifics and order of these was provided to us as part of the assignment. Each paragraph had to have a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding/summarizing sentence. Each paragraph was to be written on its own page AND (for this was all handwritten at the time), each sentence had to be labeled, in miniscule superscript, as to which role it played in the paragraph.

By seventh grade, I KNEW that there were better ways to write than that, and I knew that I had written a better (more interesting, more analytical) book report way back in fifth grade. It nearly drove me insane trying to meet her demands. Like Dru, it took me years to recover from that assault on my writing skills.

Never mind if the topic changed, never mind if the topic just didn't require a page worth of commentary--still, a paragraph had to be a page long.

And what are your favorite opening sentences in ALL of literature?

Questions of the form "what's your favourite X" are guaranteed to make me forget all the examples of X I could recall perfectly only seconds before. However, as you mentioned an archbishop, the opening line of Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers survived:

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

(Which is followed by the narrator congratulating himself on still being able to write an arresting opening sentence.)

Thanks.

I am a collector of abandoned shopping carts.

Xopher, re your "zen koan" on traffic, a ways above, here's something from a recent Jon Carroll column on SFGate: "I have a mantra that I say. Perhaps you would like to learn it. 'All the atoms within me were once the atoms of the sun. All the water within me was once part of the great oceans of the world. I am by the universe and of the universe, and I embrace all suffering and transgression, for I am it and it is me and holy mother of God that son of a camel's placenta just cut across four lanes to tailgate an airport shuttle that of course is going 15 miles above the speed limit and oh look here comes a Camaro it's a race pigs pigs pigs may you rot in hell, and I love every creature because I am part of every creature, amen.'"

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com

Not trying to cut the necklace of baroque pearl opening sentences, but since we've mentioned Brust and Le Guin in this and related threads recently, let me mention an interesting forthcoming event to which I've submitted my paper prosal (on relationship between the Western and SF):

15 Mar 2005 — submission deadline
23-26 Jun 2005 — event
Science Fiction Research Association

Where: Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV
When: June 23-26, 2005
Details at www.sfra.org
Papers on any SF-related topic are welcome. Papers on our guest authors - Ursula K. LeGuin, John Barnes, Kij Johnson, Steven Brust, Elizabeth Bear, and Tim Powers - are particularly encouraged, as are papers on Gaming and Gambling in SF, the American West in SF, and the relationship between the Western and SF.

Deadline for Proposal Submission: March 15, 2005
Conference Participants do not have to be members of SFRA.
Send proposals for papers and panels to:
Professor Peter Lowentrout
Department of Religious Studies
MacIntosh Humanities Building 619
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California 90840
FAX: 562-985-8999
plowentr@csulb.edu

It's funny/creepy. But the Products 2005 page has a typo:

"We are experts at customizing Precision Stike [sic] and Direct Action solutions to fit clients' needs under the cloak of Freedom, Liberty and Democracy."

Strike, Stike, Shrike, whatever...

It is definitely old-fashioned . . . probably hasn't had a major overhaul since the mid-eighties. But it was affordable and fairly comfortable.

There were plans and models on display at the time of my visit for a massive overhead addition, The Celestial Palace . . . or, if the permits couldn't be obtained, a chthonically themed addition called Underground Demon Palace.

Whether they go with IP/TCP or IP/UDP, it should be interesting.

Though not exactly a history of the Papacy (or rather, not an _authorized_ history :-), I recommend reading Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills.

I suspect that in the context you seem to be asking, however, this should probably be a secondary and illuminating reference, rather than your primary source :-D

Also, can I just say how good it is to be sufficiently out of the current American political climate that this quote:

David Brin forwarded me this link to a creepifying Neocon spoof page:

made me wonder what city NeoCon was held in (New Something, clearly), or whether it specialised in the Matrix, or was just a "new" con?

I didn't think politics until a minute or two after I clicked on the link.

But look out: if they go with UDP, there's no guarantees, and things may be out of order.

I forget who said that the first people who died fighting Hitler were other Germans, but it's a good observation. Have mercy. It's bad enough being in the same country with the Texas Republican party. Can you imagine having to be in the same state with them?

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/beaver_stump1.JPG

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/beaver_stumptree1.JPG

And isn't this cute: A little trimmed-off bit:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/beaver_stick.JPG

Not sure I get the 'paradox' here, Jonathan, since SRT deals with objects moving in straight lines and constant velocities relative to each other. This is curved motion you're describing.

But I can see how it would have inspired Einstein to start thinking about circular acceleration, etc.

Is this discussed in any of the bios? And does it persist in GRT?

Speaking of educational music, in my apartment we've really been enjoying the new They Might Be Giants kids project, "Here Come the ABCs" -- very reminiscent of both the best Schoolhouse Rock ditties as well as the Vince Guaraldi themes from the Charlie Brown animated specials.

"Natural selection acts on the quantum world."

I asked several Quantum Mechanics that I know to tell me what the actual content of this was, as I could not find any. They said that everything there was either obvious or wrong, and was provocatively titled to mislead The Press. The title grabbed me, too. I think that the jury is still out on this one, as they are on the Robert Blake case, which so interestingly combines thugs, stuntmen, chimpanzees on crack, nude photos by golddiggers, and space aliens.

Speaking of Texas, there is some interesting stuff at:

the Texas X Files.
"Visit the side bar links to read snapshot summaries of the 'X File' folders. Each section has its own separate website, discussing many interrelated issues. Most of the material here is also available in hard copy as ebooks or paperbacks. The pages run the gamut of the traditional X-files subjects: eXtreme technology, UFO's and aliens in the Bible, the supernatural, Black Projects by the U.S.military, and the government conspiracy. Everything is backed up with solid, authoritative evidence - the kind of evidence you will find no where else in the public domain."

"Thank you sincerely for visiting my website. I started working on this website in 2002, to protest being expelled from the University of Texas at Austin a semester short of a Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering (you will find all of my research here). Now the technical research has become secondary to all the other issues... Members of the media have accused me of sedition. I retort, saying I took an Oath of an Officer, at the U.S. Naval Academy (class of '78), '... to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC.'"

I remember reading once that SRT applies whenever the curvature of spacetime is flat which happens in circular central-force motion. I don't know enough about GR and differential geometry to say, though.

This was mentioned briefly last month, but I don't think anyone posted this link to a more heartfelt (and eloquent) eulogy:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/index.ssf?050228ta_talk_remnick

Miss Gould, as she was known to everyone at the magazine, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked here for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her), and she earned the affection and gratitude of generations of writers. She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity--transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.

================

Hi there, and thanks for reading.

I was wondering if I can ask you about a movie I saw as a kid in the 1970's......

I cannot remember the name of the movie and would like to see it again.

The basis of the movie was that 2 different alien races were at war with each other. There was a light race and a dark race, and I believe each wore clothing of mostly white or black. The darker race would get into people's minds on earth, and make them do things....for example...I somewhat remember the dark beings making this woman who was washing dishes in the kitchen cut herself with a knife, or something like that.

The costumes were really cheesy and as usual, there was lots of bad acting, but I do remember this movie somewhat and would like to view it again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, Brian.

I wanted to thank all of the Making Light crew for making my introduction to cons and fandom an entirely pleasant sensation. I was a pleasure to meet and put faces to names. Tim, Tom, Lucy, Madeleine, Lenny, everyone! was a joy to speak with and simply absorb from.

I now have tasty seed-morsels to scribble furtively out while the current story-work eats my hind-brain with a spoon (as Madeleine so aptly put it). Mmm, the roles and reasons for education, ubiquitous monitoring and selective enforcement, and the nature of reality, oh my! Yum.

I refuse to break my brain on any of the hybrid titles that Tim came up with at the "Do Electric Sheep Look Up" panel. Valis of the Dolls is terrifying enough.

I will now allow the accumulated con-aphids finish their job on my immune system. Thanks again for a gentle introduction!

CHip:

I may have blundered ("reification") in suggesting an *actual* bicycle wheel, but I do enjoy Poul Anderson's story about constant-diameter non-circles, which I first heard of in Scientific American. The paradox is, perhaps, better presented in terms of Perfect Circular Disks. Or, consider what happens to a very long right circular cylinder rotating about its axis. In your interesting (and I think original) suggestion, there is no reason why one point rather than another would suddenly occur to separate two linked arcs. By a symmetry argument, then, no such discontinuities develop. As I say, Einstein discarded the false solutions, and agreed that, in Special Relativity, wheels can't rotate.

Dru:

Not having been at that panel, I speculate:

Harry & Kumar & the Man in the White Castle

Ruby Martian Time-Slippers

Dr. Bloodmoneypenny

Please tell us more!

CHip: Something like this, maybe? Probably too heavy for use on bicycles, though.

I believe I have found your friend Brian's movie:

"Two different alien races are at war. Representatives of each race have landed on Earth to battle it out here, but they're being sneaky about it: They've taken human form and they can only spot other aliens through the use of special glasses."

The Love War - 1970

It was made for TV and is apparently unavailable on VHS/DVD.

Now, can anyone tell me the name of this one: Radioactive waste dumped into the ocean spawns a race of fish men who attack teens at the beach. This movie is not "Horror of Party Beach," because this movie has really cheesy gore effects, and "Horror of Party" Beach has long surfing sequences. The movie has to date from the 1970s, because I saw it on TV probably around 78 or 79, and have never found it since. I mostly remember a scene in which a sea monster is supposed to be disemboweling a young woman, but instead it looks like a guy in a rubber suit doing fingerpainting. It was the first time I ever saw a movie with more than a drop or two of stage blood, and I remember laughing uproariously at how badly it was done.

Movie. A crew is on a mission to Mars. There, some guy in a palace is somehow responsible for time. There's a giant pendulum, which at the end goes really fast and the palace blows up.

I was about to write that it was in black and white, but then I remembered that we only had a black and white TV in those days. Anyway, it was on TV in the early 70s.

There's a very good book about writing that's entirely devoted to getting rid of the bad composition habits one picks up K-12.

Title? I need this book! I've taken to writing fiction lately after years of lit essays and tech writing, and my prose is unbearably crunchy.

"Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

On a more general and completely different note: L0rd 0f teh Ringz0rz - Teh Tw0 T0werz or Tolkien translated into still another dialect.

I believe I have found your friend Brian's movie:

"Two different alien races are at war. Representatives of each race have landed on Earth to battle it out here, but they're being sneaky about it: They've taken human form and they can only spot other aliens through the use of special glasses."

The Love War - 1970

It was made for TV and is apparently unavailable on VHS/DVD.

======================
Well, thanks for responding...but I do not think you're quite right on this one..... You got the basis correct, but there were no special glasses that I recall. I saw this movie in the theater, not on tv...that part I am sure of....the movie would have been at the theaters around 1977 or so....any other suggestions?

Thanks, Brian.

=============

Now I can't find what Making Light folks said about Robert Strickland's query on 2 or 3 stories... I'm pretty sure I asked at the tail end of Open Thread 36 in Dec 2004 and was answered somewhere else...

I would recommend that anybody curious about it avoid the movie itself, and read Harlan's review in one of the Glass Teat volumes (probably the second). He didn't like it, but he analyzes it in terms of its being slushpile SF rather than simply a slushpile Movie of the Week (which not all of the MotWs were).

TLW has a simulated surprise ending, which I won't "spoil," except to note that if you watched many Movies of the Week during the waning seasons you probably already know what it is.

"When they found me I was out in the desert, burying my mother in an unmarked grave."

There was a film - not the one first described - called They Live (1988)

"John Nada discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like "Stay Asleep", "No Imagination", "Submit to Authority". Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued."

Starship Invasions came out theatrically in 1977. It's a Canadian tax-shelter movie that must have sheltered all of forty-nine cents CDN. There are two groups of aliens -- they're human-looking, though they aren't technically disguised as humans; the good ones live in a von Dummikenny pyramid on Earth and dress like Busby Berkeley's idea of Ancient Greeks, and the bad ones drive cheap plastic flying saucers and wear black spandex spaceysuities -- their leader, played with a game but hopeless solemnity by Christopher Lee, looks like a kinky Fu Manchu. Robert Vaughn's in there too, as a "UFO expert," though it might as well be a lobby cutout of him for all the emoting he does. Anyway, at the climax the Bad Aliens (who want Earth because their sun is four reels away from exploding -- presumably they're already packed, have shut off the gas, and can evacuate quick) unleash a suicide ray that causes some extras to spill much Canadian ketchup on themselves, which would cover the "woman cutting herself" scene.

It's actually better made, in a strictly technical sense, than its plot deserves, and Lee tries hard as always to give his bad guy some dignity, which is tough when you're wearing a tight rubber suit and your character's name is "Rameses." (Sadly, his first officer is not Cdr. Durex.) There's also a moment when a double line of enemy saucers is swooping in for the attack, and apparently there's a kink in the wire they're on, because as they reach a particular point in the swoop each pair does a little space-hop. Maybe it's space curvature, I dunno.

Yes, I actually saw this picture, though not theatrically. According to imdb, it was released on tape but not DVD.

This has to count as the worst piece of advertiser timing in a good while. One hopes that Nintendo's people in the UK will drop a word in the right place.

> This has to count as the worst piece of advertiser timing in a good while. One hopes that Nintendo's people in the UK will drop a word in the right place.

Why bad timing? Maybe I should look at one of those "newspaper" things I've heard about...

Or cute little fox puppies which have been bred (for 20 generations) for doglike traits.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0208_050208_foxes.html

I mean, that picture alone should make the most fanatical fox-hunter go "Awwwwww....".

More info here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0206_020206_lovedogs.html

Since there are a few jewellery fans around here; this is looking rather cyberpunk, or something - Biojewellery, from Neil Gaiman's Journal, pointed out by Sheila

For those who may be confused, this was a panel at the Potlatch just ended entitled "Do Electric Sheep Look Up?", devoted to brainstorming unwritten Philip K. Dick collaborations -- it stayed mostly on-topic, but did have a few digressions, such as the Delany / Disch collaboration Babel-334.

I got drafted as note-taker, and the notes should be going up onto the web somewhere, sometime soon.

My favorite, if I do say so myself, was my own: Dick / Carroll's VALIS in Wonderland.

(Someone else pointed out that the sequel was A Looking-Glass Darkly.)

No individual author's family has bought more than 30,000 copies. Larry's the king of Weasel Words.

They don't make movies like that anymore.

(Another movie the likes of which they don't make anymore was Without Warning, which I saw in a theatre in Norfolk, VA, many years ago.)

They don't make movies like that anymore.

Sure they do, they're called "SciFi Channel Original Movies!" They've got one in rotation now called "Mansquito" which is about a giant bug, judging from the pictures, and they've got "Alien Apocalypse" premiering in which astronauts (oo! Bruce Campbell!) return to earth to discover it's been enslaved by aliens...outstanding! I gotta Tivo that one.

"They Live" has such an iconic status in my family that "I'm all out of bubblegum!" is used as a standard warning to anyone who's being a pain in the butt.

> Fox-hunting with dogs was banned last month, with determined hunters insisting that they would ride out anyway, come hell, high water . . . or laser-armed space foxes, I guess.

How sad - the end of one of the great British traditions. I refer to the hunt saboteurs, of course.

> Regarding unusual games - has anyone played Steel & Lace? It's an FRP with rules for repartee and infatuations, in a Cavalier-period world with several nonhuman races. I bought a copy of the rules for the cool illustrations by Donna Barr.

Lace and Steel. I haven't actually played it, but I don't really play roleplaying games - I just love to read through the rulebooks and hang around with people who *do* play them. I spent several years working with the author, Paul Kidd, so I saw it being born. He was game designer at the computer game company where I was a programmer. Lace and Steel looked beautiful - and read beautifully.

I told Paul so many years ago I was going to shamelessly steal all of his Lace and Steel ideas for a computer game and he said go right ahead. And yet have I done it? Sigh...

He also did the RPG of Albedo, a pretty decent Furry SF comic. Sort of Traveller with extra shag pile.

> I've been hoping to see a copy of CREDO ever since reading about it on an SCA mailing list.

I bought CREDO for a friend once and we had one game of it. On first acquaintance the idea was more interesting than the execution, but as I say, I've only played it once - it may grow on you.

Enthusiastic YES to everyone who mentioned Merchant Prince - it's a hell of a cool game. I particularly like the way that part of the sale price of each corrupt cardinal gets kicked back to the pope, and that if you buy enough cardinals you can stack the papal elections, get yourself elected pope, and go on a mad cardinal shopping spree, partially financed by kickbacks.

The biojewellery came up in rasfc, but I don't think it's very practical. Bone is *really* porous, you'd have to keep taking the ring off.

MKK

* Someone may have information about an earlier one.
** Maybe if you sent an international SAE and asked really nicely??

Notice, no "Shire" joke. I must be tired.

Mary Dell -- the book on breaking old bad writing habits may well be Howard S. Becker's WRITING FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, a book I completely recommend, without reservation. Becker is a sociologist who writes very, very well.

I had heard that the original version (from Chaosium) had some issues, but last time the game was mentioned here I was offerred the opportunity to purchase a copy of the revised (self-published) version, so I did. It is supposed to improve the gameplay, but I can't speak to that as yet. Once I get around to cutting all the cards out, I will, but that may be a while.

I've just read P's exegesis on the papal politicking which isn't done. Have I mentioned, my dear Teresa, that your husband is undoubtedly the second most informative and entertaining husband in the world?

Janice in GA: Oh THANK YOU for that link. Although the woman is a tad obsessed with Pippi Longstocking, most of the stuff is wonderful. I really needed that today.

Michael: You would make a wonderful priest: you are intelligent and have more compassion and heart that anyone I can easily think of. Except maybe Xopher and Jeanne d'Arc (not that one -- the one who runs Body and Soul). The atheism thing is a mere detail. I suspect many wonderful priests have been atheists -- and even an occasional pope. Unfortunately you would be assassinated even faster than Pope Teresa.

Mike: Nervi is a modern architect, and therefore inherently Satanic
I'm not sure I can think of an easy way to refute that offhand...

Dave B: I know that's supposed to be a cat's eye, but, um. It could be unexpectedly popular with lesbians.

I feel a story treatment coming on. A fox and his dog.

I spent four years on a campus that has I. M. Pei buildings. They are most definitely Euclideans, all with angles and points to them.

Is Frank Geary a Riemannian?

She goes all the way back with Tor; a novel by her was the very first Tor book.

Thanks for the verification. I hope she's not in pain.

Does anyone remember the original page which the original discussion of Lentz' icons linked to? I can't seem to find it even though I've searched through the comments on two or three of Making Light's threads.

Mary Kay, I thought just that about Dave's Feline Power logos but I thought it was just me.

Cassandra, have you used the search on ML's front page, waaaaay down on the left side?

http://www.moria.co.nz/sf/starshipinvasions.htm

The first new novel with Tor is Rainbows End, a quasi-prequel to 'Fast Times at Fairmont High.' It will probably be done by April, May, or June 2005, for early 2006 publication.

The second contracted novel will be the long-awaited sequel to A Deepness in the Sky [1999].

Teresa is welcome to correct me if I got any of the details wrong here, as it has been a while since I spoke to Vernor about this.

It incorporates great soggy wads of UFO / Ancient Astronauts lore, dimly remembered from a brief pre-teen fascination with that crap.

Example: The servant robot looks like the spike-eared alien described by a couple of hicks who claimed they were abducted off of a pier.

If her wrapper was green, I'd suspect it of being James Whistler visited by the spirit of absinthe. As it is....

---L.

> They liked it better than I did, but they are somewhat subjective about certain things -- Robot Monster (the one with the diving-helmeted gorilla and the space bubble machine) gets five stars for being a perfect example of junk.

The old Valhalla cinema (arthouse/trash) used to run a regular double of the "two worst movies in the world" - Robot Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. It seemed to be a popular enough double bill that they ran it quite a few times. I'd have to say that of the two, I found Plan 9 much more fun - Robot Monster is pretty sparse.

I have no particular opinion on whether David Hockney's ideas about artists using camera obscuras for drafting are corrrect or not. The way I look at it, either they did or they didn't, and I'll get by just fine either way.

I also don't like Hockney as an artist and have no real interest in defending him against whatever people might accuse him of.

Finally, I like most of the art on the ARC website better than anything Hockney has done.

Having got the disclaimers out of the way, those people on the ARC site crowing about how the evil Hockney has been proved wrong are sick puppies. They have *way* too much emotionally invested in their opinions of what good art is. Basically they're true believers and some of what's being said over on the cult thread applies to them.

I'm tempted to send them a Jackson Pollock postcard, just to see if I can hear the screams from here.

One of the things my mother left me is a book called "Secrets of the Masters" -- whatever it sounds like, it's an artists' recipe book. The old guys did not think they were too good for chemistry and optics. We already knew, before Hockney, that occasional use of the camera obscura was made, from written records. And we knew about the grid of cords placed in front of a subject to aid in getting proportions right. So what's preposterous?

If I remember right -- I read this a while back -- Hockney was making claims for such a widespread use of the camera obscura that I probably thought he had gone overboard. But. That's all.

These ARC people seem to want to say that a good eye and a steady hand were the only tools the old guys used, and that's silly. I can't believe that smart guys like that would pass up a chance to get things more accurate more easily. They were professionals, not fetishists.

My boyfriend and I actually bought the book sometime back, which, David's theories aside, actually makes a pretty smashing art reference book. Both Lee and I are artists, and both of us work pretty hard at our art, so some of my remarks will draw from that experience. I thought DH made a good case for the probability of the idea he presented, and I don't think it is all that far-fetched to believe that they used mirrors and lenses to aid their art. Plausible, yes. (I don't think he definitively proved it to my satisfaction, but I'm not convinced that he could be utterly wrong either.) I ALSO don't think that one requires that "secret knowledge" to reach a certain level of proficiency, and I think the ARC obviously feels threatened, as many artists, having slaved away in schools, ripping through sketchbook after sketchbook, often do. The accusation of "cheating" is levelled at those claims, but it's a question of tool usage. Just because something makes one part of the overall process easier doesn't mean that craft has been eliminated from the picture, or indeed, that we aren't expanding into a new area of the craft.

Look at computers if you want to know what I mean. For the first couple years that I was online, a lot of people seemed to have the misconception that pictures painted with a computer program didn't count as real art, as if we pressed the "make art" button, and the computer squirted art onto the screen for us. Just because I can copy and paste an element of my picture over and over and over again, doesn't mean that the first creation of that element didn't require skill and knowledge. Just because I can draw perfect circles and curves using computer tools doesn't mean that I'm somehow cheating, or that I'm engaged in some soulless non-creative process. Sure, I'm not using the same tool set as the ancient masters when I eyedrop a colour instead of mixing all my pigments by hand, but I'm not without an acquired craft and honed skillset either.

The first ARC article (Ross's "rebuttal") is little more than a statement accusing Hockney of an agenda. There is a more detailed review of his book by another ARC member which I find addresses the issue more, and which more moderately calls the camera obscura a tool of the trade, albeit one they consider to be a hindrance. Where they completely lose me is completely disavowing any acceptance of Hockney's theory at all, saying that the idea is complete bunk and the opticians and lens makers had NO effect on the arts at all. And that seems to be stretching it a little.

Of course, if you make your money off of classes and courses purporting to show students the True and Traditional Way of Doing Things, you'd be a bit peeved if the camera obscura happened to make things any easier on your students. I mean, people have been learning to draw by tracing influential artwork for ages. I did it as a child (tracing the Family Circus until I could draw Billy and Dolly without that step). Alex Ross, influential comic book artist, used to use reflection and camera obscura techniques when he was younger as well, but now doesn't need them at all to create his photo-realistic watercolours. However, it's easy to fob off people with the idea that this is new. However, if it has historical significance of the sort that Hockney theorises, it lends itself to more legitimacy.

I want to write more, but I've got to run and pick up my brother.

Eric, I find Tea Tree soap/lotion very helpful for the itchies. With ezcema, dry skin and other skin conditions that may or may not be allergic, physicians with their prescriptions are about on par with what you can get you can get as a natural product in effecacy. I use tea tree oil soap when my skin is being too oily. Neem oil would likely be good too.

Steve, I remember being perfectly terrorified by a movie seen on TV where the teen-age space aliens (very human looking, not made up, just spiffy spaceship uniforms) had a ray gun that would reduce whatever alive it was fired at into a skeleton. I THINK it was Teenagers from Mars or something like that, I was about 6 when I saw it on a Saturday TV SF matinee and it scared the fark out of me for a long time. (nowadays I watch such movies when I need a cheap laugh.)

http://www.northern.org/artman/publish/Senate_Vote.shtml

cbs.com refers to someone as "flushed with their victory". The correct phrase is "flush" with victory (pride, whatever) -- isn't it?

The one that drives me the craziest is when they say "that begs the question..." and then ask a question! "Begging the question" means "assuming what you're trying to demonstrate." One of the few things, other than Dubya, that makes me shout at the radio.

bare ruined choirs

And the coast, man is it depressing out there:

somber prospect

woebegone beasties

Ah, we'll struggle through somehow.

Speaking of which, I have reconsidered part of my last post. Applications for residency in Oregon may be considered for anyone willing to
a) swear never to vote for a sales tax
and b) open a Real Bagel import business.

There wants to be a third criterion, something about supporting children while not necessarily having any of your own, but I can't get the wording right.

From a long-ago co-worker's father, who still keeps me on his CC list:

'Four novice nuns were about to take their vows. Dressed in their white gowns, they came into the chapel with the Mother Superior, and were about to undergo the ceremony to make them "Brides of Christ."

Just as the ceremony was about to begin, four Hasidic Jews with yarmulkes, shaggy sideburns and long beards came in and sat in the front row

The Mother Superior said to them: "I am honored that you would want to share this experience with us, but do you mind if I ask you why you came?"

One of the men replied, "Oh, we're from the groom's family."'

Ummm. Back in the '70s, I went to see "Star Wars" with a posse of my E.E. homies. A cheer went up when Vader ordered his Death Star minions to use the Planet Destruct-o Ray: because the "Planet Destruct-o" console was obviously nothing but a 'Grass Valley' video switcher, found in every TV control room of the day.

It would be fun, if an utter waste of time (but so much decent fun is) to do a list of Guest Appearances by bits of hardware playing other bits of hardware in movies, such as the carbon arc stunt-doubling for a reactor control rod in Gog, the numerous interplanetary spacecraft portrayed by the same captured V-2 (sometimes printed in reverse, for soft landings) and of course the outstanding star turn by the Arecibo telescope in Goldeneye. ("I am big. It's the satellite dishes that got small.")

More fun than repurposed V-2s: Spaceships that changed in flight. You'd start out with some V-2 or Saturn V stock footage, then switch to something else.

And I like the joke too! I've had the kind of day where I needed a really good tee hee... Thanks!

I'm not taking this as an omen, but I am going to go pour a shot of Bushmill's. Others might wish to do likewise.

/s/ The American guy with nine and a half fingers

Bushmill's indeed. (Or Tullamore Dew) I still remember the half-hour show that the Boston UHF channel carried for a couple of years back in the 1970s...

Oh, and for anyone else: Teenagers From Outer Space can only be an enjoyable experience in the prints that feature an astronaut and two robots in the lower left corner.

I know an E.E. that laughed during every shot of Han Solo's freeze chamber in The Empire Strikes Back because the readout was from an HP calculator. And large-format photography fans were known to comment on how Speed-Graphic had clearly had a promotional contract with Darth Vader since he used their flash rig as his lightsaber.

My favorite is still the time I saw Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D at the University of Washington, and as large anounts of fish swam past and the screen crawl went on and on about sea life in Africa a voice behind me sang out "But why are they Northen Pike?"

Marilee: In The Further Inventions of Daedalus there is a duscussion of how it would be possible to make a ball of cow's teeth, surround it with a shaped charge of plastic explosive (think of the internal structure of an atomic bomb) and produce ivory via explosion. I've wanted to try this ever since, but since Sept. 11 I think it would be hard to arrange...

Owlmirror: My favorite Miss Gould line was reported by Brendan Gill. "If you tapped this sentence on end it would never stop rocking."

And have the doglike foxes been offered for sale yet? I admit to curiosity as to how much they'll go for...

Also, at one point a shot of the recording device (an Alesis ADAT, I believe) shows that the aliens are broadcasting octaphonic sound. Very spiffy.

>It would be fun, if an utter waste of time (but so much decent fun is) to do a list of Guest Appearances by bits of hardware playing other bits of hardware in movies, such as the carbon arc stunt-doubling for a reactor control rod in Gog, the numerous interplanetary spacecraft portrayed by the same captured V-2 (sometimes printed in reverse, for soft landings) and of course the outstanding star turn by the Arecibo telescope in Goldeneye.

Dr. Who certainly went through a phase where they'd show gantry's-eye footage of a Saturn V takeoff whenenver any spacecraft of any description took off. I do hope the new series doesn't have production values.

These critters are old news to some extent. I remember reading about them ten or more years ago. Of course, in the intervening years the experiment has continued and they're even tamer and cuter now!

I've never read anything suggesting that they were or would be for sale.

I DID read an article warning that the Russian foxes would make rotten pets. They haven't lost their habit of hiding little hordes of food, meaning you'd occasionally find troves of dog food and offal around your house. And . . . foxes STINK. They have a really obnoxious musk.

I suppose it is possible that you could de-scent them. But all told, you're probably better off getting a small breed dog. There are many that are cute and spunky and atheletic, like Basenjis.

An odd and interesting page here: http://www.homestead.com/shilala/candling.html
showing how to candle eggs, with examples of what to look for.

-- Nancy Mccracken

And I thought this might provide some gristle to gnaw for the fans here: The anal-retentive apostrophe Test - "a series of questions where you will have to pick one of the answers, to reveal if you know your it's from your its and your her's from your hers."

The anal-retentive apostrophe Test - "a series of questions where you will have to pick one of the answers, to reveal if you know your it's from your its and your her's from your hers."

"her's?"

"Well done! You have 90 % apostrophy awareness!"

...well, at least I know how to spell it.

Having not read the book myself, I can't comment on whether the take-down fairly represented Hockney's claims, but it seemed pretty damning.

someone told me about an article they read about a
study that some researcher did about habits.
The study concluded that a person had to do a
particular action 30 times before it became engrained
as a "habit".

The person who told me about this study is looking for the
article to see if they have it, but they didn't have a lot
of confidence that they hadn't thrown it in the trash.

Anyway, it would be a great factoid to use in a book
I'm helping out on, but I need the facts. four-person
removed generalizations won't fly. Unfortunately,
changes to the book have to be in by March 19,
so I can't just ask around nonchalantly.

Does anyone know the specifics about this study?
Does it ring any bells for anyone?
A URL to an article? A university website?
something from the original source or something
that quotes the source and who it came from?

specifics would be greatly appreciated.

(No, JVP, we don't need a series of links to recent articles about pi. Thanks for the thought, though.)

I'll spare you the links, though I agree that this takes unusual restraint on my part. Have you still got the chance to have you one-billionth-second party? I was, so far as I know, the first person ever to host one, and others have done so since, though it's hardly a fad. How many years, months, days, hours there are in one billion seconds i leave as an exercise to the reader.

And there are LOTS of other cool algebraic and transcendental constants that have opportunities to celebrate. Google on "constants" and "Plouffe" for more.

CHip:

Thank you! I've emailed that to the questioner, along with more on the author and her Linguistics and her foundin of the Science Fiction Poetry Workshop. I admire her very much, not the least for indulging with me on a series of essays and counteressays in the newsletter of the SFWA where we violently attacked each others' theories in the greatest collegiality and decorum.

Bruce E. Durocher II and John M. Ford,

There's probably a story in these anecdotes, properly framed. If you took all the repurposed equipment and set decoration from B-movie SciFi, and hooked them together, you would have a spacewarp apparatus through which the real aleins would emerge, either good or evil, only time will tell. And what apparatus will be repurposed in the mid-21st century Massively Multiplayer Hologames? Isn't that an Ono-Sendai deck being used to program the music that hypnotizes you to follow the orders given to you by senient software on the Underweb? Isn't that an IBM Caterpiller Nanomechanical Data Storage device hooked up to that teledildonic wetware? And those Star Trek salt-shaker biomedical scanners, woot!

That's a complex joke...

See the final joke on this page, which I submitted for my son, who is the anonymous "son of mathematician" referred to:

Eric W. Weisstein, "i." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.

E.g.: Paradise Lost - (Harry Potter X The Wizard of Oz) = His Dark Materials

I guess it's a small web. How long until you all find out, due to an incident of spontaneous human combustion, that I am the long-lost daughter of the man who owned the house where Teresa's mis-prescribing pharmacist's hairdresser once lived?

And can anyone answer my publishing question waaaay up close to the top of the thread?

me too. well not a publishing question,
but a question that will help a book
about to be published.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006047.html#76923

anyone heard of some research about habits?

Complex numbers confuse me. I get π i'd thinking about them.

Clever comment, insightful analysis, great link.

Yet I find myself grading the answers as if they came from one of my student's exams, for instance:

Nabokov + Robert Elms = Martin Amis
-- the bellefox

As a huge Nabokov fan I find myself wondering if the bellefox is claiming that Robert Elms is of less than zero quality, or, if not, is she suggesting that the clever but sometimes derivative Martin Amis is worthy of a Nobel Prize?

Okay, it's rapidly approaching Pi Day party time, Pacific Standard Time:

3/14 1:59:26

I'm drinking a beer right now, and wondering if I'll get pi-eyed.

What kind of beer goes best with transcendental numbers?

Dos Equis?

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue412/letters.html

[Letter from Completely Clueless Wonder, includes:]

"What matters is that I am now a published writer and illustrator, and this boost in confidence has caused me to continue to write stories that some find interesting. Now that I am a professional writer, I'm sure that other publishers will take a second glance when I submit something to them."

"As for myself and the hundreds of other authors that deal with PA, we will continue to work with PublishAmerica, and look forward to showing you that speculative fiction is alive and well.

"Jeffrey E. McCluskey
"j-e-mccluskey(at)rogers.com"

=========

How Not to Get Published, Reason # 5378....

Someone else might get a boost in confidence from tying red ribbons to his wrists. That's okay too.

My result on the apostrophe test was 95%. It said "PERFECTION!", which seems a little odd...I noticed that it showed recent results, and nobody had higher than 95%. I wonder if that's the highest possible?

Or perhaps he should just invent the Martha Green award?

Here's the blurb:

At the end of the second millennium, the earth is at the center of a vast alliance of planets. These chronicles are based on part of the sagas of the Galactic Alliance of Planets. The year is 2999 A.D., 300 years after the Alliance was first formed. As the Alliance prepares to celebrate its 300th year of incorporation, they find that they must defend our galaxy from an attack from something they have never seen or heard of before. Join with us as the Universal Battlestar Carrier Liberty and its brave crew of Eco-Guards trek to defend our galaxy from threats seen and unseen. Interested in knowing more about Robo Trek? Please check out www.robo-trek.com or www.jemco-productions.com.

There's something vaguely familiar about this.

"crew compliment?"

I really hope Mr.McCluskey is, like, fourteen, or I might have to track him down, pull him out of his mom's basement, and teach him how to walk on dirt and not fear sunlight.

"crew compliment?"

"Captain, you have an excellent crew here! I've never seen a better group of 11,000 Eco Guards." That is a crew compliment.

Even if he IS fourteen, pulling him out of his Mom's basement might not be such a bad thing.

the blog of a thoroughly interesting Malaysian writer

I haven't seen even one of the films she's been involved in, but I'm going to look for them.

Oh, thank you for open threads.

Gee, wasn't that five or six years ago?

This is probably going to be much less fun than one might hope.

I'm trying to think of who could do justice to the investigation in a novel. Maybe Donald Westlake, though what Kyril Bonfiglioli might have done with it is interesting to contemplate. Oh, of course: Evelyn Waugh.

=================

I once read anovel but, I don't remember the author or title. I was captured by the story that didn't let on but, ended with the main caricatures being cats and dogs and one of them ended up leaving the planet. Please help! I have several friends that would also like to read the story again. Was it Robert Heinlein?

Thanks, Cliff

"Ted, co-worker of Gallant:
That freak belonged to the cult of manners. Talk about a true believer. I rode on an airplane with him once, and he wouldn't start eating his meal until everyone was served.

Sheila, Goofus's high-school classmate:
My memory of Goofus is that people saw what they wanted to. I was drawn to him because I sensed he was hurting inside. That's why he put up that wall and was "rude," but who's to say which way is right? It's just a social construct. Is there some cosmic, universal book of manners? I knew they'd find a way to make him pay, though. They always do. "

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/3/11stallard.html

Cardinal Bertone's refutation of "The Da Vinci Code" could be perfectly novelized by Umberto Eco, but those of us without access to his library would never detect his semiotic landmines until too late.

Vladimir Nabokov could have novelized this, but it would only gradually dawn on us, through an unreliable narrator in the footnotes, that he'd set it in an alternate world.

James Blish would have started on this, backgrounded it in rewrite, then sighed and pitched it as a Star Trek novel. The only copy of the manuscript would have been purloined by a disturbed Catholic "Man from Uncle" fan.

David Zindell started on it, then handed it off to Gene Wolfe. We've already read the Gene Wolfe version, but it will take us several more years, and another trilogy, to realize that he had done so.

It ends up as a direct-to-video "Bring Me the Head of Leonardo!"

NASA has some nifty shots of this phenomena as seen from orbit.

And yes, I screwed up and posted this over on Electrolite first . . .

It may not be as bad as all that, though. I worked for a bit doing HR stuff (since we had no HR department) and, like slush, many of those resumes would have been tossed without much more than a quick read-over.

Many of them probably came in without a cover letter (trashed) and several probably had extremely bad cover letters (trashed) or came to the office in some form not asked for - snail mail instead of fax, email attachment instead of plain text - (trashed) and still others would be from epople whoa re very obviously over or under qualified for the job. Easily 90% of those people were never even in the running.

They may have gotten 1100 applicants, but only interviewed a dozen people (which is still a lot of people to beat out for a job... but better!)

I know you were just typing fast, but I really like the word 'epople'. I think that's the supreme patriarch of the Miniaturized Internet Catholic Church.

Whoa Re!

Xopher, you're my hero. I'm literally still laughing.

(To completely pointless pick a nit, it sounds like an Ancient Egyptian religion to me, not Catholic.)

Whoa Re!

Yes, I remember Andre Norton's books with fondness as those were among the first I ever read. She'll be missed.

Ok, if we're gonna be picky: Vortex sheets are different from vortex streets. The pictures I posted before are of vortex streets. A vortex street is a stable pattern of staggered vortices that appears behind a bluff body in a certain range of Reynolds numbers. They remind me of footsteps.

A vortex sheet is an unstable line of vortices like (for example) the one that develops when you have two adjacent layers of fluid in which the top layer is moving at a different speed from the bottom layer. (The nifty Kelvin-Hemholtz instability here is an example of a vortex sheet.)

I love the NASA photos, and I have a big collection of them that I use for screen backgrounds.

Andre Norton (1912-2005)

According to an Inside Source, one of the more arbitrary criteria for the resume sorting: anything that was done using a pre-made template in MS Word gets circular-filed. Period.
( And since you're Not Considered an Applicant until you go in for the interview and fill out an application, this eliminates a LOT of recordkeeping. )

That strikes me as a fairly bizarre criterion to use, unless the position is for a technical writer or something along those lines. Granted that with that many resumes some arbitrariness is to be expected, that's just odd. Rejecting resumes that are badly formatted, however they were created, would be more sensible.

• Any resume printed on paper without a watermark
  (ie, they wanted to see the Pricey Stuff from local stationery supplier)
• Any resume where their contact email address is at their current employer
  (Looking for work on their current employer's time? For shame)
• Failure to neatly fold resume and cover letter in thirds within the envelope used for mailing.
  (They were looking to hire a secretary to handle corporate communications)
• Any mention of membership in a college fraternity/sorority
  (HR director's kid flunked out of college during the quarter they participated in rush.)

The Human Resources career field looks less and less attractive each day.

OK, the Reformed Egyptian Ancient Lodge/Willing Oblates of Re in the Latter Days. REAL/WORLD.

And "Whoa Re" means "I marvel at the glory of the gods in having brought this thing to be; such marvels could make the very sun (Re) stop in his tracks (whoa)."

Eventually, of course, it will simply become a greeting or validiction. "OK, I'll see you Saturday." "OK, Whoa Re." "Whoa Re."

Whoa Re.

After the aerospace bust at the end of the Cold War, I learned to write better and better resumes, and did so for more and more of my friends. Soon, not having found another $120,000 per year position in the space program, I started working for Resume Service companies directly. At one point, I was running 3 offices of "CareerPro."

Then I owned and ran Sherlock Holmes Resume Service for some years, and did resume writing, cover letter writing, interview role-playing, career counseling, and the like for 700 more clients.

I have more horror stories (and sometimes success stories) than this thread could contain. But do see these two resumes I wrote:

Curriculum Vitae of Sherlock Holmes: World's first Consulting Detective

James Bond. Objective: Private consulting in international security which will not unduly interrupt my retirement, hobbies, and family life; first class travel & accomodations.

Any resume printed on paper without a watermark
(ie, they wanted to see the Pricey Stuff from local stationery supplier)

That's another weird one. Most people couldn't use it these days since so many resumes come in via e-mail. We get most of ours not only via e-mail but from recruiters, so we couldn't use any paper/printing/formatting criteria if we wanted to - the recruiters typically reformat everything.

Any resume where their contact email address is at their current employer
(Looking for work on their current employer's time? For shame)

That actually makes some sense - even leaving ethics aside, it's usually not very bright to get e-mail at the office you wouldn't want your employer to know about.

Failure to neatly fold resume and cover letter in thirds within the envelope used for mailing.
(They were looking to hire a secretary to handle corporate communications)

That makes sense for the position.

Any mention of membership in a college fraternity/sorority
(HR director's kid flunked out of college during the quarter they participated in rush.)

That agrees with my own silly personal prejudices, but I don't use them to vet resumes. On the other hand, I don't see much reason to include this information on a resume anyway, unless one was chapter president or something.

But they lead me to another criterion I tend to use for discarding resumes -- too much personal information. In fact, pretty much any personal information. If it's illegal for me to ask about it, don't volunteer it. And if it's not relevant, don't include it. I do have a "Personal Interests" web page, but I don't include any of that in my cover letter or resume. If people interviewing me find it and think it's interesting, fine; otherwise, it's not in their way. I've had people list their height, weight, hair color, marital status, and number of children on a professional resume -- aurgh!

It's my understanding that in other countries, that sort of information is expected on a CV.

I had a conversation with Elmore Leonard about that, showing him both my James Bond and Sherlock Holmes resumes. He was an hour early to a book signing on the same block as one of the CareerPro offices I ran. He stopped just short of telling me that I was nuts, then admitted that he also felt that he had to know his characters at the time that he was starting a novel. But he didn't need to know them formally, in my way. He most of all needed to know how they talked, and how they felt. How they thought somehow interpolated from that.

Bill Blum:

One can choose to reveal personal data, although in the US it's illegal to be asked. One can do so selectively. If the job description suggests or explicitly says that one must be very disciplined, then one can say: I have an Ultraviolet Belt in zero-G Shotojan Karate. If they ask for creativity, one can say "I have had a Rhysling Award for Best Science Fiction Poem." If they say "must be able to handle multiple simultaneous tasks" then one might say: "I raised 7 daughters as a single Mom," and so forth.

For resumes of actors, it can be relevant to say: "I fence sabre, epee, and broadsword in armor; plus play baseball, basketball, soccer, and 43-man Squamish." Means they can have you do your own stunts. But Johnny Depp told me he was scared of horses, yet managed to ride credibly in Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I did several celebrity resumes, but must maintain confidentiality here.

There were judges and attorneys whose resumes I prepared -- what fun to tell a judge what he had to do! -- and they sometimes mentioned things that seemed, at first blush, to be irrelevant, until they explained how it gave them an edge over other judges/attorneys in certain aspects of the law.

Bottom line: the primary purpose of a resume is to get an interview. The primary purpose of an interview is to get an offer. The primary purpose of an offer is to pick the best one. The secondary purpose of a resume is to bias the interview in favor of certain lines of inquiry, where you can say things better not put in print. The tertiary prpose of a resume is to bias the offers towards the upper end (or beyond!) of their salary range.

Thus there is a parallel between a resume and a query letter. It is motivating, narrative, yet points towards a larger narrative.

The last I checked, it was fairly standard not to include references on the resume, and for the cover letter to say, at most, something like "I will be happy to provide references on request" rather than actually including names and contact information.

Yup. What was cool was seeing photographs from various universities of their 43-man Squamish teams.

Vicki:

Correct. Also, it is a bad idea to include salary information in a resume. Just append the line: "Salary History available on request." In an interview, NEVER give a number when asked what salary you desire. If you give one too high, they'll discard you as unrealistic. If you give one too low, they'll make a lower offer, and you've just given yourself a pay cut. Just say things like: "In my opinion, it's premature to discuss specific dollars and cents. I'm sure that if we find that my qualifications match your needs, we can negotiate a mutually satisfactory compensation package. To move in that direction, I wonder if you can tell me more about how I might assist you in increasing market penetration in the booming underwater hotel sector?"

So here's the question: if I were to apply for a job at that company, how would you recommend I answered that question? Would it still be worth deferring a specific numerical response under such conditions?

What a delightful company. It's pay systems like that that enable companies (in the UK) to pay women 15% less than men (national average). I think I'd prefer a company with a transparent, auditable and fair salary determination process.

First, the response that I indicated is recognized by sophisticated Human Resources departments as a sign of the interviewee's sophistication.

Second, in any negotiation about money, you want the other party to name a number before you respond.

Third, you can always say: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but the purpose of this interview is to determine if there is a good fit between my capabilities and your requirements. If we have reached that point, then perhaps we can take the time to schedule a follow-up interview to probe more deeply into an analysis of your growth plans, and to what extent I can provide a measurable improvement to the increased revenue expectations for the department to which I might be employed."

Fourth (USA only) the Labor Laws are such that an inquiry to one's past or current employer gives the employer limits as to what they can disclose about you. They can give your job title. They can give your dates of employment. They cannot directly give your salary, but if someone says "was it between $80,000 and $90,000" they can say "well, that's the right ballpark." There's an exception if you are a known criminal and failure to disclose that puts the potential new employer at risk of life or property, but even that is complicated.

Fifth, I'm not saying that you should withhold salary information. You should bring with you a typed page of salary history, and provide that late in the discussion. This must be prefaced by an explanation of how your current market worth is not directly tied to any specific figure in that salary history, which might have ups and down for complicated reasons. You cannot speak ill of any previous employer, but you can say that market trends in the past have imposed conditions different from reasonable extrapolations of the growth of the potential employer.

Sixth, the mantra is: "It's not what I want that is important. What matters is, what do YOU, the employer, have as a dynamic plan for creatively maintaining a sustained competitive advantage, with defensible intellectual property, and how can I best assist you in meeting those objectives? Of course, if I can materially assist you in reaching or exceeding those goals, the mechanisms exist for appropriately compensating me. So let us please return to a discussion of how you plan to capitalize on your Inner Planets dominance to penetrate the challenges of Outer Plants explansion, and, in particular, what role Triton plays as a jumping-off point for Kuiper Belt resource exploitation?"

Query by Email:

What is the movie where giant robots come from outer space and destroyed all living people in New York City using laser beams out of their eyes? They were destroyed by sound waves broadcast across the city. We think the movie was made around the 1950s.
We need the answer as soon as possible please...lives depend on it!!!

-- Helen Yantis

The nice fellow thinks that might be "The Beginning of the End" unless that's the one with the giant locusts. He says in either case it has Peter Graves in it, and googling or IMDBing that name will get the rest of the information. He also says that both the robot and the locust movies are good bad movies -- and I almost know what he means.

Hummmph. I passed on your comment, by email, to Helen Yantis, who just replied:

"Thank you for your prompt reply. We found the information about 4 o'clock this morning. The movie was Target Earth starring Richard Denning and Virginia Grey."

How sharper than a serpent's tooth is is to have a thankless email. Or damned with faint thanks. But I thank you, Lucy Kemnitzer.

The following assertions were made in a writing workshop I belong to:

- Attributed to a professional fiction editor guest-lecturing at a writing class: "He will instantly slushpile any ms with: grammar mistakes ... more than one typo.... "

- "Every piece that anyone submits should be perfectly edited prior to submission, at least grammatically and syntactically or, it will be thrown into the slush pile pronto. One typo, one subject/object mistake, transitive/intransitive mistake will axe your story immediately. That doesn't even include misplaced-placed commas or any other grammatical point. "

True? False? Teresa, can you shed any light on this? Patrick? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?

That ... well, I can't figure out what he's talking about. Assuming it was accurately reported.

What was the fellow's name? Where does he work?

This might be one of those reporterly errors, and he actually said "the trash" -- not quite synonymous, because there is that 10% -- and the reporter was just trying to be cool and getting it wrong. (I remember a news story in a local paper that covered the WorldCon, and claimed that 'fen' was the feminine singular of 'fan'.)

Jim - I was quoting two separate speakers there. One was reporting on the words of someone described as a professional editor (and I'd rather not say the name, at least not for now -- I feel I may be treading dangerously close to the edge of violating a confidence as it is). The other person was speaking from her own background as an as-yet-unpublished writer.

Her's the full text of the first quote. I truncated it because most of it wasn't relevant to the question I'm asking, but I'll include the full text now, because, well, I think it's funny:

He will instantly slushpile any ms with: grammar mistakes, the word "eldritch", elder gods (HP refs.), an old black man telling a young guy he's "special, in his head" ("Shining" ref.), new/original punctuation marks, more than one typo. The words "shambling" and "miasma" (S. King's faves) are likely to get you tossed as well. Also avoid void triple exclamation marks, abbreviations, words in all caps, archaic spellings.

As far as the demand for letter-perfection goes, well, I don't think anyone would propose that the writer not try for that, but as described, it's more than a little bit ridiculous -- you get through three hundred and fifty pages of a ms, riveted all the way, then find a misplaced comma in the last paragraph and bleepcan it? Pull the other one, it's got a green eyeshade on.

In my experience of first reading -- which is far less than that of others here, keep in mind -- one wasn't primarily looking for technical faults; one was looking for a decently constructed and told story. I certainly saw spelling and punctuation errors, but first reading isn't copyediting: it's done at a higher rate of speed (it has to be) and with an eye out for different things.

I notice that the quote begins "He will . . ." -- it isn't directly quoting the editor, it's reporting, or perhaps "reporting," what the writer heard. Or heard that someone else heard. Or something. Or other.

We now return to the adventures of Virgule Earp, Frontier Copyeditor, in tonight's episode, "Mixed Metaphor at Black Rock."

It isn't gender-related AFAICT; the major part of it, I'm told, is that so people don't know how much they're being paid relative to, say, their bosses or subordinates. Which is still deeply odd and rather wrong, but in a different way.

[Of course, maybe they are paying women less. Who knows? Doesn't seem like the kind of thing they'd be doing, though.]

I think I'd prefer a company with a transparent, auditable and fair salary determination process.

Likewise. I only know about this because half my friends in the department left to go work for these guys and I, all vapid curiosity, started asking questions.

Thanks for the advice, JvP, although I think I lack the kind of off-the-cuff BS that you spout so effortlessly. That's pretty much what I was thinking; mainly, I was just curious as to whether that was purely a result of my position of blessed ignorance or whether a professional would concur.

You're welcome. I'm tempted to print business cards that read:

JONATHAN VOS POST
off-the-cuff BS spouted effortlessly

In a sense, that's what professors and poets and fiction writers have to do all the time. The gift of gab. Kissing the Blarney Stone. If one is Jewish, does kissing the Wailing Wall do the same?

One can learn to spout the proper BS in interviews. I volunteered 6 hours per week for two years to teach professionals the methodology, at the Pasadena Job Center. We would have unemployed lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, and other white-collar folks go through some preliminary training, pass through the blue pencils of a resume-writing committee, and at last, they would be at the target-end of a table in a room with a panel of Mock Interviewers. They would answer questions and spout narratives for an hour, videotaped. We would each give them a written critique, and advise them to study the tape, the comments on the form, and do the research we suggested. Then they could have another hour of torture. I was the designated Asker of Impossible Questions, the kind with no correct answer to see how one handles oneself. Many of these folks had been stuck for months, and then, after the Mock Interviews, able to land good jobs.

I wish it were not so, but it is. Job Search is a deeply formal life-or-death game. Most people just start playing when they unexpectedly lose a job. I have helped several hundred people read the rules printed on the inside of the game's box top.

The best time to learn the rules is while you already have a job, and it looks stable. That takes the edge of panic out of the interview.

I HATED that question. I never had a good answer. But then, I learned long ago that I am not-good-at-sales in a big way.

In the mists of ancient time I worked in 40 Wall St (pre-Trump, it was owned by Imelda Marcos when my employer was based there) and we had a horrible infestation of giant field roaches. Every now and then, one would hear a rattling sound coming from the ductwork and all of a sudden Ptooey!!! and a giant (often > 1") roach would come shooting from the ceiling. Amusing when you knew what was coming, but not all that welcome during client meetings.

"Tell me about yourself?" -- that's another Trick Question. The answer can be:

"There's sufficient narrative in the resume before you, and the attached list of publications of mine on the topic central to this department's core competencies."

"So let me tell you more about what I bring to the table in each of the types of competition that is high on your priorities. I'll use, to keep this brief, John Porter's model in his Harvard Business School publications."

(1) You compete with your vendors in price negotiations for goods and services. I wrote the technical parts of the requirement specifications for 4 of your 5 largest suppliers, as shown on page 5 of the resume.

(2) You compete with your customers in product and service price. I helped to increase customer retention by 150% annually in my job six years ago, reducing churn by modern dorkware methodology, as you see on page 4 of the resume, which increased lifetime cusatomer value by roughly 200%, based on an assumption that lifetime value is ten times the first purchase.

(3) You compete with other companies in your market. I've written revenue analysis and technology analysis documents on most of the top 10 in this market. I'd say, watch out for Ono-Sendai and Yoyodyne.

(4) You compete, in a sense, with revolutionary technologies that make your whole supply chain obsolete. I can email you copies of my latest publications on Nanotechnology and Quantum Computing, with forecasts through 2020 A.D.

(5) You compete with the U.S. government, as they are a major consumer of your aerospace line, radar systems, and software. I've worked on government contracts in those areas for U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, U.S. Navy, Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, Department of Energy, and Department of What Were They Thinking?

Now, did you want me to go over aspects of my education, hobbies, family life, or is the bottom line the bottom line? The question is, how much can I help you meet your objectives.

The trick is, they don't really care about you. They want to know that you know that you care about them.

A manager I worked for once cursed me, at Boeing, for being "one of them Creative Types."

I admitted it.

"Our department had one of those once," he said. "Tech writer. Name of Pynchon, Tom Pynchon or something. We had to can his a**."

You have to get through Human Resources to get to gems like that. I wrote him in as a pig farmer turned Mars-run bureaucrat in my short story "By the Book." Last line?

"Yeah, we had to throw that idiot out the airlock... but, mind you, we did it By The Book."

*** end interview lesson ***

I have always found the response question, "Well, what specifically would you like to know?" delivered politely and cheerfully tends to re-route the interview out of the morass of generality. Yes, it is true that the interviewer's first goal is to find someone who is productive for the company, but (unless the person interviewing is not going to be working directly with you) they also want to find what people are calling a "chemistry" match - someone they don't mind working with day after day. The points you make are good ones - they should certainly be in the cover letter - but blasting someone with them right off the bat? I'm not so sure, especially as the subtext of the answer you posit can be read* as, "You nitwit. Read my resume. I shouldn't have to spell it out for you, but since I obviously do, here are my qualifications."

*YMMV

The Corps has a required reading list, which formerly included "Starship Troopers" and "Ender's Game".

The most recent version of the list strips those two titles out.

Your point is well taken. "Tell me about yourself?" can be lazy, or tricky. It's hard for the interviewee to tell. You're right, it can't hurt to ask for clarification, on any question.

One can also answer this one by saying something more personal. For instance: "The facts and chronology are in the resume and the answers I've given here this morning. If you are asking where I come from, on a personal level, I might point out that I was born in a hospital whose address was 9876 Broadway, New York, New York. Since I was literally born on Broadway, I've had a strong hankering to be in Show Business. My first wife was an actress with a recurring role in "Days of Mars and Venus." So although we've talked about your gross revenues from three-dimensionalizing old 2-D films, there's something deeper than technology and profit to me. The Roar of the Greasepaint. The Smell of the Crowd. I don't want you to think I'm some starry-eyed kid with no understanding of modern management practices, and no appreciation for the balance between craft and computation. But maybe you'll appreciate now why I will happily work the 75-hour week, even the 100-hour week once in a while, if that's what it takes to meet a deadline and enhance shareholder value."

Bruce Campbell vs The Army of Fangirls

ROTFLMAOPIMP.... i am SOOO glad I didn't spray into my new keyboard.

Yes, despite a very sorry week (Margene was hospitalized overnight for a kidney infection, I have to go back into the office 8-5 and the work computer was the only good one in the house being used by me only), it ended good. I got a G4 Cube from my family on Saturday, and a KitchenAid 5Quart stand mixer today from my mom.

The previous version of the list included a bit of fiction, including the "Red Badge of Courage" and some Stephen Ambrose, I think.