However, "Paperback Writer" / "Rain" is my personal favorite.

Next: More opinions you should have! The entertainment never stops.

The written word
Should be as clean as a bone,
Clear as light,
Firm as a stone.
Two words are not As good as one.

If it is early, it can't be too early in English; note the end rhymes.

I certainly assume she did. I'm actually confused that the article caught so much flack - to me, it sounded pretty much like a comic fan bitching about their favourite gripes, rather than a clueless outsider stumbling into comics for the first time.

Now, a lot of the questions either reflect an odd disconnect from english slang of the last century ("Why are the Cats women?") or are actually questions that someone who's not a total comics geek could really ask ("Why is the Superman v. Batman question interesting?" is not a terribly stupid question if you're not conversant with Batman as he is written today). This one is just bizarrely out of touch with trends visible in bookstores and comicshops at ranges of 15 yards.

Really. Can one go into the geeky section of a B&N nowadays (or a Borders even more so -- the one near me has started carrying untranslated artbooks and tankoubon, some of stuff I've never heard of) and not notice the shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves of manga? Can one look at any artist to hit comics in the past decade and not say "Hey! I bet s/he has seen some manga."?

As far as I can tell, compared against the things around them, manga is doing BETTER than anime or J-horror. The former is mostly on late or, like the latter, mostly represented by American remakes, homages, and rip-offs ranging from the terrible (Darkness Falls, Xiaolin Showdown) to the not-at-all-bad (The Grudge, Kim Possible). Manga is edging out its US equivalent -- until the Tokyopop revolution, US comics companies were looking towards big bookstore sales of collected editions as their salvation, and things were looking up for the first time in a while. After Tokyopo hit, with an impact so hard that all the other US manga publishers changed their form factor and cover/spine designs to go on shelves with it, shelfspace for UScomics TPBs and GNs has shrunk, even in specialty stores.

Now, someone could not know this. But a person who knows even SOME of the ongoing WW film saga? Weird.

Which reminds me: Del-Rey's manga line seems to be doing OK. Any plans for Glorious Mountain Manga or what-have-you?

Now, here in Portland, I saw a spectacular double rainbow. Grabbed the camera, and if the patrons of photography smile on me, I may get one good chrome out of the shoot.

I never really got Pogo. When I was a kid, it was impenetrable. I still find that there's too much going on in a single strip, and I find myself worrying that I missed the point.

I find myself wanting to say something clever about the ancient city of Sumer, but it all seems to fall flat.

Speaking of Mal and the gang, there's a fun (cool? neat? gaah! my adjectives have gone to bed without me) book of essays about the show. Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly, edited by Glenn Yeffeth. It's got serious and silly, The Tick and goddess archetypes, "what went wrong" and "what went right" and an appendix with all the Chinese translated. ISBN 1932100431. We got in a handful of copies at the feminist bookstore I volunteer at -- also What Would Sipowicz Do? (?!)-- nobody will admit to ordering them but I'm glad the Firefly one fell in my lap.

Hey, let me know if they have music or credits at your showing, Kate! I'm interested in tracking how the prints change over time....

But Thursday, it rained. And not the weird twice a summer tropical rains we get, a regular, chilly, puddles-to-the-ankles, darken the sky and bend the trees, winter-style rain. We got .59 inch, which is pretty respectable. The rainy season is supposed to have ended a month ago.

When I was growing up unseasonable weather was called "earthquake weather," because the old folks remembered it was hot and muggy on April 18, 1906. We got four decent earthquakes in the last week, but it's really not connected except in our busy little heads.

> And for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, winter is icumen in.

Similarly, from John Clarke's _A Dag At My Table_ (also to be found in the Southern Hemisphere)

Tide is igoin oute
Lhude yelleth yikes
Water dissapeareth fast
Ebbeth before eyen
Moon it pulleth tide out
Layeth boat on keel

... snip ...

Polly putte ye kyttle on
We wylle all hau tea

...snip ...

Birds isingen, sun ishinen
Fysshe ajumpin, cotton hyghe,
Nature goeth on and on
Boreth britches off

That, and I finally finished writing the story that's been tormenting me since January, so it was a good weekend.

We're either neighbors or we're seeing a very strange adaptation in catbirds all over; the one that sings the car alarm ditty outside my window usually waits until early on Saturdays.

And Batman Begins did so very much rock. Best Batman movie, yet. Not that the competition is that stiff, but still...

There'll be more cosmos and bachelor's buttons to come. Some of the dahlias are suddenly shooting up and starting to look buddish. The gladiolus, oriental lilies, and cannas are coming along in due course, and should bloom later still.

Very happy.

Also, when I bought this rose, the bloom was yellow. I put it in the ground and watered it, and in the morning the bloom had turned a sort of peachy color, pinker toward the center. Very pretty but again, strange.

I am new to the ways of tea roses...is this normal?

Meanwhile the morning glory vines have been sprawling all over the fence; very pretty, but the blooms all face the neighbor's yard. I'm the one who waters them and loves them, but all they care about is that he's the one with the morning sun...

Was she the one that noticed it first, or you?

But don't worry, climate change is just a figment of your imagination.

Anyone who cares to join us anytime after 8, Prodea will be at the Witch's Hat Tower. We sing the Sun down at sunset on the Summer Solstice and we sing the Sun up at dawn on the Winter Solstice - about 7:45am in Minnesota.

She did--God Bless her. And she's still being insufferably smug about it today. Her mother in law (who's never set foot in the state) did not help, of course, by telling her on the phone she had just saved the entire family from certain death....

Four-year-olds. Sheesh.

.... assuming you mean your own mother-in-law...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8203492/

The reporter says that Spielberg substituted "tripods" for H.G. Wells' Martians in the upcoming movie.

*ouch*

(And I also recently bought 8 volumes of _Saiyuki_, and a few first volumes of other manga series, from a Borders graphic novel section that probably had more manga than Western comic trade paperbacks. _Saiyuki_, by the by, is complete and utter crack, in a good way.)

It's a tough call. The traditionalist in me wants the intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic to be from the dying red planet.

But we know too much about the place to take it seriously as a source of the menace. An obstacle to suspension of disbelief.

I'm more put off by the line about the movie being about relationships.

The original intent of the story was to show how people react in the face of utter helplessness and hopelessness and the smashing of preconceptions about humanity's place in the universe.

And I concur that Batman Begins rocks. That was a damn fine movie.

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

Chapter 10, In The Storm

According to the June Wired, Spielberg is looing as much to the Orson Welles and George Pal versions of the story. He is moving back to tripods from floating machines because it is now possible to do it:

Traveling between the shoot and ILM, Muren translates Spielberg's directives to the effects artists. But he's been formulating his own vision of War of the Worlds for a long time. As a grade school kid in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the '50s, he says, "I grew up with this movie." Often he'd look up effects artists in the phone book and cold-call them, but it wasn't until last year that he got the scoop on The War of the Worlds from a friend of its original production designer. "They wanted to do tripods in 1953, but they couldn't figure out how to make them walk," he reports - so they switched to hovering saucers, then built models and suspended them above the soundstage on wires so they seemed to float above the ground. "Now we have the technology to do it."

It sounds like something ate the buds. Do you have deer, or any other critters who could reach the buds?

Also, when I bought this rose, the bloom was yellow. I put it in the ground and watered it, and in the morning the bloom had turned a sort of peachy color, pinker toward the center. (snip)I am new to the ways of tea roses...is this normal?

It's not unusual. One of the roses I care for did exactly the same thing. It was solid yellow when it opened, and two days later it was blushed with peach.

(All will be forgiven if Spielberg somehow gets the Thunderchild back in... after all, the trailers have already shown the ferry scene.)

I used to have a number of roses in my little backyard, but a re-landscaping forced them out. But I had to keep space for one, so one Peace Rose stands proudly amongst colors it doesn't match. (The Peace Rose was introduced at the end of World War II.) It opens yellow, turns pink and peach, and ends up mostly white. I've been a little disappointed in this one, which has not been as pretty as the one in the old version of the yard (and which may even have gone back to the 1940s) -- but this year it has been beautiful and vibrant.

The bird feeder is a nice stoneware thingy - a vertical tube, with openings for birdies to peck at. Under the openings there are thin metal poles that run through small holes in the main tube, and are secured on each side by a small rubber ring. The doves have managed to peck away all the rubber rings, so that the poles slide out and they have nowhere to stand and eat.

They also walk away, like chickens, when I come into the garden, rather than flying away, like proper birds.

Kate - Oh, yes, please: my wife would LOVE a ticket, I'll email you. (Me, I tend to side with Chad's review: the erratic world-building keeps me from getting comfortable in the Firefly universe, nice though the characters are.) But my wife Maggie thinks it's the best TV she's ever seen.

the trailers have already shown the ferry scene.

This scene was shot in Athens, New York, last December. (I was an extra in that crowd.) It was pretty cool pulling the 'Penguin 60' of the Wells novel out of my pocket to read between takes.

Speilberg's version is a contemporary update of Wells - and while I got only a spear-carrier's view of the movie, I thought it looked pretty good. Nothing that I saw rang wrong, anyway.

(By way of comparison, I think it'll HAVE to be better than the George Pal version, which I've never been able to watch a second time.)

I attempted my first Chicago Style Pizza, which was 60% right, but the crust was just not *crusty* enough. I am now faced with the daunting task of figuring out what recipe might make the dough less, well, doughy, and more dense and crust-y.

What was it like? I've never been there, but I've heard about it.

We have mourning doves at our bird feeder. They manage to get up there like the perching birds and then look incredibly stupid, like they don't know what to do next. They can't quite peck and perch at the same time.

Why does every disk in the DVD set depict Mars?

I think they may have slipped Mars in as the planet visited in the episode "War Stories" --it will take more freeze-framing before I'm sure-- but the DVD platters are definite. There's the twisted grin of Valles Marineris leering out at you.

None of the stories take place on Mars.

Did they think we wouldn't recognize it?

My bunny lice soda devotion...

It's a good thing I'm not British, or I might have looed myself at that one.

However, it still doesn't beat the comment an exchange student made to my Mom on a college trip in the '50s; "Knock me up early, I want to have a fag before breakfast." Separated by a common language indeed...

there's an anti-anti-fanfic rant at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels which amused me greatly in itself, but when I got to the comments thread, I found a whole string of very lovely haiku praising the use of Spam(TM) as a "marital aid"...

(I don't do a convincing version of the fangirl 'squeee', but Maggie just about can....)

Some things people do on the Longest Night: Midwinter day 2004; Midwinter madness! 2003; Reflections on midwinter 2002 (From the Australian Antarctic Division)

So far, I have:

1) This sentence is in English.

2) "C'mon, Molly, grab the gat and let's beat it before the heat nabs us."

3) "`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves..."

4) Obviously, anything written in Linear A, but that's as much a tranliteration issue as a translation issues.

5) Cooking directions from a Scandanavian Grandmother. These feature such measures as "enough" and "a bit of" and "about twice what your Uncle Olaf likes."

6) Transcripts of Harry Carey calling Cubs games, esp. close games near or during the playoffs.

7) "Five-Seven-Five may
not say all that much, but that
is Haiku for you."

Somebody imaginary then broke out "This sentence no verb", and things went Hofstadterian from there. My brain is broken, but I cope with it.

Oh, and from the Make blog. Cellphone.

I really want to climb Long's Peak, leave this up there, descend a bit, wait an hour, call it, and ask if anyone's seen my sunglasses.

It doesn't look that hard to make, actually, given the cost of GSM cell modules, but I really need to finish the Nixie Clock and get the new Van de Graff generators built. (Plural, of course -- because you can charge them opposite, and get that much more voltage....)

But, man, to drop that phone on the belt on the way to the UK.

#5 is hard even if you're just trying to follow the cooking directions and speak the same language as the Grandmother in question.

The sideshow is being held/given in a fleabag of a theater right off Surf Avenue and right under the Coney Island Museum, which I suspect we'll visit on our next trip out. I remember when Dick Zigun was first starting to "revive" these bits of old Coney; he used to run a haunted house where real people would hide in odd corners and do things like grab your hair from behind as the car went by . . . it was a great shriek-and-clutch-fest.

Oh, and the local-artists-paint-the-boardwalk exhibit is going strong for the second year in a row, some nice stuff this year, too.

Anyway, the sideshow: we came in in the middle of the sword-swallower's act. She's a pretty young thing and bills herself as the youngest female sword-swallower in the history of the profession. The daytime patter is all just a tiny bit raunchy (well, there are lots of kids in the audience); the night-time show is, I expect, cruder. The sword-swallower was making jokes about "protection" and "sheathes", for instance. She also claims to have once been, before being corrupted by the big bad city, a good Mormon girl from Utah. She swallowed, separately, one thin and one thicker/wider blade, 2-3 feet long. Very nicely done, too.

She was followed by the fire-eater, another woman (all women scantily dressed to one degree or another, some in "ethnic costume") who was gorgeously tattooed including an intricate striped pattern on one side of her face. Another nice bit--fire running along her arms, putting fire out with her mouth, lighting torches by transferring flame from one ot the next with the palm of her hand, breathing fire, etc.

Short juggling act: two big knives and an apple.

Intermission: tour the museum of curiosities for an additional $1 per person (admission was $5 for adults, $3 for kids). 7 fingered hand, mermaid, "giant moth coccoon", etc. All monies from the museum go to renovating the theater, which really needs it.

Snake charmer--gorgeous woman, handsome albino python . . . a bit disappointing as the snake had apparently eaten recently and was a bit sluggish. Big snake, though.

Featured attraction: Eek the Geek. A thoroughly tattooed man who in fact made his living for a while as a real geek (claims to have learned it at a slaughterhouse he was working in). Now he does the bed of nails (he had a very overweight woman stand on the second nail platform on his abdomen, which made me cringe even though I know how the bed of nails works) and gets "electrocuted". Nice bit, that--he lights torches with his tongue and makes neon lights glow. Eek is also just plain funny and just about worth the price of admission all by himself.

Contortionist of sorts--not a great contortionist but when combined with the blades-through-the-box bit, pretty cool. This was the same woman who did the sword-swallowing and, an an extra added attraction, for an additional $1 per person, you could come up on the stage and look into the box and see her all curled up around the blades.

Human blockhead--nail in the nose, icepick in the nose, spoon in the nose, animal trap on hand, mousetrap on tongue. This is the same guy who juggles knives and acts as emcee for the whole show.

It was all tacky in just the right way, and heaps of fun. We did it at the very end of the day and it was a nice way to ramp down before taking the long train ride home. Also, there is a bathroom in the theater so we didn't have to use the paperless public restroom in the subway station--a very nice subway station, btw, now that it's all renovated.

The theater is decorated inside and out with sideshow posters and banners of the current acts.

La rivière se jette dans le fleuve.

Always been my favorite/most hated sentence to translate into english.

Also, the text of the last verse of a song I wrote a couple of years ago. The previous verse says that the narrator has never told anyone about the topic of the song, and the song includes a dream where the narrator dies. Then:

Now that you know that I'm lying still,
      My dear, my bonnie fair one,
Now that you know that I'm lying still,
     The only one I love,
Now that you know that I'm lying still,
I never loved you and I never will.
     My dear, my bonnie fair one,
     The only one I love.

Of course, being born next to fleuve Saint-Laurent helps with that translation. (Pity I've lost so much French through lack of use...)

Kate Nepveu is a wonderful human being.

(That is all. Carry on.)

Does everyone but me already know that:

a) The OED is being put into limerick form?

http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php

b) Someone has written a linked haiku/senryu about how to decrypt a DVD?

The poem:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt

The explanation of the poem's history:

http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/haiku.html

Poetry, almost by definition, is hard to translate.

Hence, the more poetic a sample of prose is, the harder to translate. The begs the question of what "poetic" means.

English has the largest vocabulary of any known language, so a majority of words are strictly untranslatable. The two writers in English who invented the most words are William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Insert obligatory joke about Shakespeare in the original Klingon. Finnegan's Wake is probably the hardest book to translate from English, not that it's entirely in English to begin with, as Joyce kept several dictionaries open before him as he wrote it.

Nice one... until you realise three pages later it cannot be the estuary (not that I'm talking out of personal experience, or anything, obviously).

"Poetry, almost by definition, is hard to translate."

Two words: Stéphane Mallarmé.

And now excuse me I'll go cry other all those nights lost in the useless attempt.

Dangit, you've piqued my interest now. So much for a restful nap at work-uh, I mean, "time away from the keyboard during coffee break," boss. Really. Honest.

(Oh, and I didn't envy the guy who had to translate Trente Arpents into Thirty Acres... an "arpant" is a *linear* measure in this context, a minimum guarantee of river frontage. Translations can be the enemies of art, indeed.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8290795/

"This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty-four letters."
[Jonathan Vos Post, Scientific American, reprinted in "Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern", by Douglas R. Hofstadter, paperback reprint March 1996, pp.26-27]

I have published transliterations of Chinese poetry, and have submitted (and had rejected) translations of Rimbaud. Of course, the fact that I neither speak Chinese nor French has something to do with it. The key is "transliteration." For famous poems, many translations already exist. One may be said to be the best literal translation; one may be the best in capturing atmosphere; one may best follow the meter. A good transliterator can interpolate a new transliteration in between the other ones. But I'm carefully avoiding the question of the topology of literature, albeit that is essential for proper formal discussion of tranlstaions as "mappings."

Talking about translating poetry, it's hard job, people make mistakes, I know, but still I hate it when some of said mistakes make you doubt the reading ability of the translator. Worst recent case I can think of is the guy who did the job for Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories. Why, why, did he decide that all the verse in Anchor Girl needed to rhyme I'll never understand.

I thought it was a metaphor for European imperialism. No reason it can't be both, of course.

I remember that one. One of my responses, very much in the metamagical realm, was:

"This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty four letters, as well as an attached clause that renders it false."

This song contains just six words...

(repeat ad infinitum)

repeat many times

--Peter Blegvad, "The Only Song"

Also, they found that missing cub scout in Utah. It's a good day.

Please send applications to:

MiniDistraction
Level 73, Desk 1,217
1 Victory Boulevard
Freedomland, Goliad 9

Or your local Fox affiliate.

* Perils related to war, environmental damage or industrial mishap not applicable.

"... what does it say about my fitness as a parent when my then-preteen daughter knows the Weird Al versions better than the 'real' ones?)"

Relax, JennR. That's true for my 16-year-old, too. If Weird Al Yankovic, rather than the director, had written the songs for the recent feature film "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" then it would have been a much funnier film.

He wrote some songs that most readers here have never heard, by the way. "Patterns" was the themesong for a Math TV show that never aired, or never lasted, or something. What was the original of "It's all about the Pentiums?"

Do we moan that nobody recalls the original poems parodied by Lewis Carroll? Thought not.

But do brace yourself for the pre-teen to teen transition. Our fun has just begun!

That'd be "It's all about the Benjamins", by Puff Daddy.

Thanks. And was it Mark Twain who sang:

Puff Daddy, puff with care. Puff in the presence of the passenjare?

for Lost fans who still remember the old role-playing games...

Probably the same thing as it says about my fitness as a daughter, JennR. My mom had heard Weird Al's Jerry Springer song but not "One Week" (and I'm a huge BNL fan, too). She was in a restaurant bathroom once and "One Week" came on. The rest of us were waiting to leave, and women kept coming out of the ladies' room with alarmed/freaked out expressions. Finally my mom emerged, wiping her eyes. She'd stayed in there until the song was over, laughing hysterically at how close she thought Weird Al had gotten it.

And she says she can't take us anywhere.

My Weird Al problem is that certain songs get tangled and don't get untangled again. I can't sing "American Pie" without some of "The Saga Begins" in it, and vice versa.

Perhaps you could render it as, "I feel like such an ass!" :-)

OH MY F#$^#%^# GAWD!

Check out this week's "THE ONION" ASAP.

Start with the Horoscopes.

http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/index.php?pre=1

People put the weirdest things on the net.

Family member bought a pair of cellphones. One would not initialize. Was broken on delivery. Went to get replacement. Clerk asked for driver's license. 3 weeks went by. Cellphone service still not functioning. Noticed driver's license missing. Searched everywhere. Assumed stolen. Feared identity theft. Many calls to banks, credit card companies, Department of Motor vehicles, many hours spent. Phone cellphone company. "Say, it just occurred to me; 3 weeks ago, did you ask for my driver's license?"

"Yes, we would have."

"Could you see if you still have it?"

[sound of drawer opening] "Yup. Here it is."

"Why didn't you call me, or mail it to me?"

"Because some people change addresses since the card was issued."

"But you HAVE my home phone number. Why didn't you phone me and say I'd left my card?"

"Oh.... Didn't think of that.... Sorry."

I suggested that family member write letter to company HQ, suggest would settle for 10,000 minutes of phonecall time.

(Camera cuts over to spokesperson)

And once again, we see the horrid consequences of Clue Deficit Disorder, and the toll it takes on the innocent victims and their relations.

CDD has plauged our young nation for nearly a century. With your help, we hope to find better treaments, and someday, a cure.

We're the Congress for Clue Distribution, a non profit organization dedicated to the fight against, and eventual victory over, CDD. With your help, we can win -- but only with your help.

Please help those who just need a hint -- all of the time.

Write:

CCD-CDD
c/o the CDC
Washington, DC.

Do it for your children. Do it for your sanity. Do it so you wont have to deal with the clueless again.

Chapter 1 - The Eve of the War
... And, before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Chapter 7 - The Man on Putney Hill
... now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place -- a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion...

Chapter 10 - The Epilogue
... this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence,...

... I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate ... Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer;...

I ordered two salwar kameez from indiashop1. Both have the traditional drawstring pants, which are fine and fit well, but you have to tie them fairly tightly if, as my mother says, you have a tum-tum-tummy. (You know who you are.)

One is made from what is listed as "chickan" and covered with embroidery. It is lovely and quite dressy. Following instructions, I had it dry cleaned the first time. Since that is costly, I hand washed it the next time. The colors are fine, but the lining is crunchy. I'm not sure if that is from getting soaked, or if I didn't get the soap fully rinsed out.

The other is made of printed crepe and is also striking. It has no embroidery, and is lighter in weight. The effect is not as dressy. Again, I had it dry cleaned the first time, then hand washed it. It is mostly bright red, and the dye is not colorfast. However, when it had dried the print was still clear and it looked nice. I was going to hand wash it again, when I noticed a label that said "Dry Clean Only," which was not what the instructions on the website said. I'm still thinking about what to do about this. (My instinct is that anything labelled "Dry Clean Only" can be hand washed, but I could be wrong.)

I bought one salwar kameez from ladiesden_india. I paid an extra $5 to have regular trousers made. These fit very well. This is made from printed georgette, and is much more casual in feel than the other two. I feel comfortable wearing it around town, in that it doesn't seem gratuitously out of place. (Although, I was once busted by my horrified family for having been wearing a coat two inches shorter than my dress for at least an entire winter season, and I was perfectly happy, so what do I know?) I hand washed it once, and then put it in the washer on cold water and gentle cycle, both times letting it hang dry. I noticed the last time I wore it that the side seam on the trousers had opened, but the lining had held so it didn't reveal anything. This is only a problem when sitting. I don't know if this was from putting it in the washer, or from the fabric being pulled tight when I sit down.

I will definitely order more, probably in the more casual printed georgette.

We now return to the more interesting comments in this thread.

The narrator, in describing the martian's silvery multi-tentacled semi-living work machine, lets on that humans later studied and reverse engineered the devices. Kind of neat.

The martian tripods communicate by SOUND. Not radio. Kind of neat in an entirely different way.

The Artilleryman. Full of big ideas and harsh logic and great ambition, but in the end a worthless windbag. I've met his type, at cons and over gaming tables. Snorting blowhards.

"Legally Stupid....That was originally Beth Meacham's idea."

Hats off to Beth, yet again!

Of course, "Legally Stupid" has little to do with IQ as such. Academe is filled with Legally Stupid professors.

I had a girlfriend in college (an anagram of her name was one of my novel characters in "The Ten Teeth of Terra": "Neon Gladring") who was smart (in IQ) but had even less Common Sense than I do (and I'm a Theoretician, where Common Sense is almost a violation of Union Regulations).

Once, in the Academic Commune's livingroom, an unopened king-sized bottle of Root Beer was accidently kicked over, hard. My girlfriend sprinted to it, and wrenched the top off, dousing us all in Root Beer.

"Why on Earth did you do that?" someone asked.

"Well, I knew that I was either supposed to definitely open it, or definitely not open it, and I forgot which."

And wow, that's a great picture. Sauron's Eye of the Southern Fish at Fomalhaut, or something.

Oregon had a anomalously wet late spring, and the rains aren't letting up. Beaverton is currently getting hit with a wicked heavy downpour. When it started, half the engineering team here at work rushed to the cafeteria windows to watch.

A cow orker noticed something neat: A whale-spout of water and vapor emerging from the parking lot.

Apparently, the sheer force of water coming down the drain pipes from the roof was too much for the storm drains, and the water shot up out of a grill in the parking lot.

I suspect we engineers talked more about that than we did about the Runaway Bride or the Lost Boy Scout. Damn uncomformists.

I've just found your Ultimate SF Site while searching for a book I read long ago. I didn't find it there, but perhaps I didn't look long or hard enough. Perhaps you can help me.

I seem to remember that the book had one of those semi-surreal covers, such as some Berkely SF books had in the 50s and 60s. The title may have been something like "20,000 A.D.," or "20,000,000 A.D." Or maybe it had the word "Armageddon" in the title.

The story concerned the findings and speculations of a survey or exploration ship of some aliens who explore the ruins of Earth many years after humanity has destroyed itself.

I hope you can help me; I've been trying to find this book for years!

Joe

"Kaposta, Joseph D"

Did you consider paying the cellphone company for providing free storage for your relative's driver's license, when it took him three weeks to notice that it was missing? Or do you routinely assume that if you make a mistake, and some random stranger doesn't fix it for you, they owe you money?

If it were for real, would cow orking be a profession, a hobby, or a fetish?

OMG! There's a lost Boy Scout?!? Maybe we'd better check in the Runaway Bride's closet! Quick, page Gerlado! Fax HANNITY & colmes! Alert Wolf "Quake-Before-My-Mighty-Facial-Hair" Blitzer! The world must know!

I've found that most things that call for dry cleaning can be hand-washed, or washed in a machine on gentle cycle with cold water. I wouldn't try it with a lined jacket or similar item, though - the lining could bunch up. Also, if there's any chance the item isn't dye-fast, it should be washed alone. I once washed a lovely pink & lavender dress with a load of other light stuff, and the blue dye in the lavender part of the dress leaked. I now have lots more blue underwear than previously!

In the Half Past Second Age, before the first film crew entered Middle Earth, the cattle of the Rohirrim were many, and their leathergoods were prized both at Fayre and belowstairs at the castle, though their cheese was runny. Runnier than that. And the horses breathed heavy sighs that there was another source of tack, and it was good.

But the orks, the numerous yet rather poorly described beings of darkness, were an affliction to them, for they would come by night, when as all Men know there is little light, and move among the animals, so that in the day they were spoilt to use, and had moreover acquired faint foreign-sounding accents. Some said the cheese was a little better, but they were not believed.

And after enough of this, the leaders of Rohan gathered, as they did in those days when things to to the point where sitting on a horse in a tin nightshirt wasn't protection enough, and in their hallowed way said, "There must be some peasants we can lay this off on, and so there came to be the cow orkers, sturdy folk of compact build and good night vision, who would be posted in the fields by night to stand among the cattle, who would themselves be standing like statues, and they'd crouch 'neath the sky with a cudgel hard by, and they'd hope to give Evil a sock in the eye . . .
Oh what a beautiful morning
Whupped me a couple of ork,
Keep to yourself what you're thinking,
They don't taste nothin' like pork.

When late-night channel surfers encounter two nude women in bed on a public-access show called "Fantasy Bedtime Hour," many things come to mind. Leprosy is probably not one of them.

But leprosy -- and monsters and mud and swords -- are what this particular fantasy is all about. The two bedded women aren't really nude, just artfully posing under the sheets; and they're not holding a titillating tete-a-tete, but a confounding discussion of a 28-year-old paperback novel called "Lord Foul's Bane." Their girl-on-girl action is limited to pondering the meaning of words like "dotard" and "inchoate," and the program's live-action sequences involve developmentally disabled horses and 7-foot monsters made out of old pantyhose.

If it were for real, would cow orking be a profession, a hobby, or a fetish?

And what if you actually work on a dairy farm?

Apparently, the sheer force of water coming down the drain pipes from the roof was too much for the storm drains, and the water shot up out of a grill in the parking lot.

It was very impressive when I saw something similar coming up through the carpet in my office next to the big computer room, and sure enough it was even more impressive when we looked under the raised floor and saw how high the fountain went without the carpeting to act as a resistor.
The building had a concave roof, and drained through big pillars. With the combination of a big drenching thumper storm and some clogged drains, we needed to push the big red button. Thankfully, the powerbusses were already raised well above the floor. The floor drains/fountain nozzles got one-way valves shortly afterwards.

It's labelled dry clean only. I normally am a big fan of handwashing, but I don't think I'll even try it with this one. The salwar is a lovely thin crepe stuff with lots of embroidery in not always dye safe colors, and it is also lined. Seems too much to risk for me. I usually dry clean anything that is lined, or is obviously not water friendly, like suit type silk.

(Yes, tickets. I find myself in Massachusetts for family matters today rather than in Albany, so my cherished ticket to _Serenity_ went to a good home instead. *sniffle* In the deeply unlikely event that anyone reading this has a single spare *Boston* ticket for, ummm, three and a half hours from now, well, kate dot nepveu at gmail dot com will reach me to my everlasting gratitude.)

On another topic, does anyone here use Serendipity as a blogging software or have a login to the s9y.org forums?

Eeeeee, _Serenity_!

MKK

Heh.

Twenty years ago, I would have put that particular capital precisely at the corner of East 81st St. and Flatlands Ave. in Canarsie, Brooklyn. It's probably moved to the vicinity of Great Neck in the intervening years. But Mattoon, Illinois?!?

I haven't been reading this thread, but I take it that Bob has picked up the _Serenity_ tickets that I left him.

Oh, yes. (I didn't email you because I knew you were out of town.) So let me thank you again semi-publicly.
At this very moment, my wife and The Youngest Member are watching the movie. And I'm sure they'll add their thanks when they get back from the showing.

P.S. It occurs to me that "The Justice Building" sounds like something out of DC Comics.

And I hope your family matters turned out ok.

They have holes in them, and they are eaten for breakfast, but other than that, they're not very bagel like.
[/lie provided for your entertainment]

Double eeeeeeee from us!

In its present form the practice only dates to the 19th century, but it is believed to derive from a game played by mediaeval bridegrooms to pass the time until their brides had finished with the droit de seigneur.

What in the world is up with yesterday's U.S. Supreme court ruling? The judges voted 5-4 that it was legal for local governments to sieze private property "in the public interest" if that public interest included a new private development that might bring in more local tax revenue.

I'm not surprised that the most conservative judges dissented. This is an issue on which I think the conservatives are right. What amazes me is that all of the "less conservative" judges were in favor. This measure pretty much says that big-money developers' wishes trump previous ownership of property! Heck, forget liberal versus conservative, that's just plain un-American! How could anyone consider this a good thing?

Anyone know of any good blogs or commentators who are discussing this in detail?

Anyone know of any good blogs or commentators who are discussing this in detail?

Someone at Daily Kos was pointing out that there are wingnuts who want to use the concept of "private property" to trump EVERYTHING else: zoning ordinances, environmental protection, etc. (Their theory being that ANY constraint on your property amounts to an illegal 'taking'.)

This decision can be seen as a defeat for them, anyway. But I admit that I'm scratching my head over this decision, too: there's a lot wrong with it, however you look at it.

Define good?

I suspect almost anybody you consider good already you will find good on this issue. The New York Times approves; the Wall Street Journal disapproves; Jerry Pournelle thinks it ought not be Federal issue; Volokh Conspiracy has a shared discussion with legal reasoning on all sides; Mrs. Kim du Toit wants to do a Rachel Corrie with the bulldozers: Daily Kos and Atrios are perhaps equally predictable.

My favorite observation is that the Supreme Court follows the New York Times editorial page.

What do you want?

For general outrage see especially Mr. and Mrs. du Toit and links but I wouldn't look for such things around here.

The Globe & Mail version

the CBC version

a visual aid

The funnest part has been reading Mr Harper's reaction to all this. He is not a man who takes being out-manoeuvred like a kid fresh from the farm with anything approaching grace.

Next on the legislative agenda: federally blessed same-sex marriage.

That said, I have never liked the way eminent domain has been applied in these cases, and I think the whole issue is one that deserves re-examination. Currently, public policy has shifted in a way that supports property owners, so that situations like that in Kelo have become rare, but there is no guarantee it will not change again.

A speculative perspective on this, citing a Famous Leftist Source™ can be found in Crooked Timber.

It occured to me that, as renter, this decision is of little personal interest to me, as I can be put out of my dwelling at the landlord's whim. Further reflection led to the following observation: this case is being spun. The spin makes Kelo out to be a representative of the average homeowner but in fact a decision in favor of Kelo would protect mainly landlords, business land-owners, and very rich homewoners, rather than the average citizen.

If there is a "natural" right of dwellers, and I think there might be, a decision in favor of Kelo would not address it. But it does address the property rights of slumlords. If we really want to protect people's rights in their homes we would need a different kind of law.

It's a weird cross between a traditional English solstice revels -- Morris dancers, an ox pulling the sun, a mock stage fight between Lord Nelson (as played by a woman) and a fearsome dragon who wants to take the sun -- and, well, something entirely different, with Chinese Lion dancing, Tibetan throat singers, African-American spirituals, and a New Orleans Jazz Band. And you get to sing "Summer is a comin' in."

Get there early; seating space goes fast.

This implies that slums are never or seldom blight as blight is covered by other statute and case law. Much of the point of Kelo was that slums were not an issue.

That is taking blight as the inferior use to be replaced by a superior use, I'd be curious what the people in New York think of the West 41st Street Realty case, a New York appellate court held that the Times Square area of downtown Manhattan was sufficiently “blighted” to justify the use of eminent domain to condemn land needed to build a new headquarters for the New York Times! .... If Times Square and downtown Las Vegas are “blighted,” it is difficult to think of any place that isn’t Somin, Ilya, "Overcoming Poletown: County of Wayne v. Hathcock, Economic Development Takings, and the Future of Public Use" . Michigan State Law Review, p. 1005, 2004 http://ssrn.com/abstract=677763

In re W. 41st St. Realty, L.L.C. v. N.Y. State Urban Dev. Corp., 744 N.Y.S.2d 121
(N.Y. App. Div. 2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1191 (2003).

There is an argument that redevelopment hurts renters, e.g.:
A 1994 summary of the evidence on redevelopment takings concludes that: In essence, the powers and internal pressures [of the blight condemnation process]create a mandate to gentrify selected areas, resulting in a de facto concentration of poverty elsewhere, preferably outside the decision makers' jurisdiction. Numerous past experiences indicate that the process has been driven by racial animosity as well as by bias against the poor. The net result is that a neighborhood of poor people is replaced by office towers, luxury hotels, or retail centers. The former low-income residents, displaced by the bulldozer or an equally effective increase in rents, must relocate into another area they can–perhaps–afford. The entire process can be viewed as a strategy of poverty concentration and geographical containment to protect the property values–and entertainment choices–of downtown elites.

Benjamin B. Quinones, Redevelopment Redefined: Revitalizing the Central City with Resident Control, 27 U. MICH. J.L. REFORM, 689, 740-41 (1994)

Looks to me as though when blight is the inferior use the results are dubious - today when any use can be declared inferior by fiat I don't look for nicer more sensitive results. City councils seem to lack the government in the sunshine of town meetings

Public good of course trumps all restraints - see the current Spectator for a nice discussion of taking children from their parents in secret courts for another kind of taking for the public good in another jurisdiction.

As to slumlords, while much of what they do violates the law, in practice the enforcement is very poor. If we are serious about thinking of a right to some sort of home for everyone, we must address it directly; a decision in favor of Kelo is not going to do the job.

I'm a Le Guin, which, other than the maternal bits, is pretty accurate.

One of the writer guests of honor, Steven Brust, was tickled when I quoted from "to Reign in Hell" in asking a political question of a panel on which he participated, along with Ursula K. Le Guin, John Barnes, Elizabeth Bear, and Tim Powers. Some time after he strongly praised, to all assembled writers, an editor named Patrick Nielsen Hayden, he wandered off to play some cards, and had the (he said) rare experience of coming up with exactly the right come-back line AT THE TIME, instead of half an hour later, as usual.

He sat down next to a rather drunk older man, drunk enough to be losing, but not so drunk at to threaten to puke on the gaming table, or fall to the floor. After a couple of hands he noticed the piratically dressed Brust, and asked "So what do you do?"

"I'm a writer."

That slowly processed through his brain. A couple of hand went by.

"Okay, whaddaya write?"

"Books."

This soaked in for a while. You could practically hear the cogs turning.

"What kind of books?"

"Science Fiction and Fantasy."

Another long pause as the wet brain cogitated.

"Do you make a lot of money?"

"Enough to live on... But not enough to date a cocktail waitress."

The dealer dropped his card and LOL.

By the way, at that same panel, one definition concocted for science fiction was that it's one of the rare genres (along with espionage and mystery) where it matters very much what a character knows.

I pointed out that this superficially makes P0rn seem to be anti-science fiction, because it never seems to matter what anyone knows, only that they have bodies. But, as has been discussed on this blog, P0rn is actually a subgenre of science fiction set in an alternate world where human nature is different in certain specific ways.

A journal editor later said, over $12 martinis at Caesar's Palace, that he'd like me to expand that into a short paper for his journal. John Barnes, when I mentioned this, cited Teresa as having written about this on this very blog. Can you help, Teresa, with, of course, full attribution?

There are many more things I could say about this small but intense con (how small? 135 people at the awards banquet), and where it will be held in 2006 (White Plains, NY: "When Genres Collide"), 2007 (not decided, Paris and Poland possible), 2008 (Dublin) and interesting things said, but I'm very sleeply right now, and should read the threads before I stumble in discourse.

Nice to be home.

Vicki:

We don't see it that way, but your view makes sense on its own terms.

I reckon either the people here know, or no-one does.

I don't know. I first became aware of the phrase at Caltech in 1968, where it was politely acronymized as "S.E.G."

But see Norman Mailer's novel ANCIENT EVENINGS (1983), set in ancient Egypt [1290-1100 BC].
In it Norman Mailer tries to deduce the nature of magic from the phrase "eat shit and die."

It was characterized by Anthony Burgess as "one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis". "Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is." [ Ancient Evenings]

He is fascinated by Science Fiction. "Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story, which he wrote at the age of nine in notebooks, called 'Invasion From Mars'."

He earned a B.S. from Harvard University, [1939-43] in Aeronautical Engineering. OF A FIRE ON THE MOON [1970] is about the space program, although not an SF novel as such.

Hello,

I came across your site while trying to find the name of a old sci-fi time travel show. Awesome work!

Perhaps you know the name. It sounds kinda like "Time Tunnel", but the actors don't look right. I was really young when I saw it....

I seem to recall a short bald guy who, as usual, due to some bizarre lab experiment gone wrong, has the ability to travel to different times (parallel universes?), but he cannot interact with these other times/places, except in the cases of extreme emergency where someone is doing something naughty that might screw up the timeline of his present world. I thought it was called something like "The Watcher". Might have been a British show. Definitely from the 50's or 60's. I might have seen it as rebroadcasts when I was a kid in the late 60's early 70's. I can't recall much more; just always remembered it, and now I
want to know the title.

BTW, your descriptions of some of the shows, e.g. "The Man From Atlantis" and "Mork and Mindy", are hilariously accurate.

MKK

I'm very happy that you particled "Life at Low Reynolds Number." I will not make any mathematicophysical comments, except to say that the author was right about almost everything; we know much more now; most Nanotechnology folks don't know this stuff; and "Surface Tension" by James Blish need not be rewritten in the light of modern knowledge.

I do wonder about 4-dimensional life at Low Reynolds Number, but that's way too esoteric for this venue. Am I partly right that this is "cool" for you in a way similar to Fibonacci numbers in flowers? That is, damn the equations, help me love Nature and understand the beauty of flora and fauna, so much more ingenious than most aliens in SF?

From the article:

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.

US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

Not on this human. Gah.

Hey c'mon, it might be fun -- you'll never know until you try it...

Thank you for the Eric Van link. The John Clute quotation proves that it is right for this blog, even for the baseball-challenged. I hereby decline to drop Bill James' name, although you know I could. The Dodgers, down 6.5 games from 1st place, show that Sabremetrics and a big budget aren't the whole story. I've tried to get MathWorld.com to run a page on "The Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball." It's not clear that Nobel Prizes often go to profound eccentrics for whom numbers have distinct personalities, yet I would love to see Eric Van's Theory of Neurobiology!

Heh. You first. *g*

But seriously, it's not the horrific-sounding process or the being dead part. It's the after waking part when you're sorting through your brain, realizing that you can't recognize faces anymore, or remember your trip to California, or find your way around your hometown, or conjugate the verbs of your second language. They can't ask dogs about these problems.

Gah, again.

Any bets on how long the meteorologist had been without, er, "companionship" when he named those formations?

Caltech to lead designer-immunity project
By Kimm Groshong , Staff Writer
Pasadena Star-News
Monday, June 27, 2005 - 9:00:19 PM PST

"... the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday that it will fund 43 research projects at a cost of $437 million to address 14 of the developing world's major scientific challenges."

"Caltech's president and Nobel laureate David Baltimore proposed and will lead one of the radical new projects an attempt to fight HIV with designer molecules, gene therapy and adult stem cells with a $14 million grant over five years."

"... 'A vaccine for HIV has been very difficult to produce and is, of course, extremely important to have,' Baltimore said. 'We got to thinking: If all of the efforts of all the scientific community for 20 years have not been able to produce a vaccine, maybe we should start thinking about this in a new way.'"

"... Baltimore said the project is "nothing short of revolutionary, in some ways,' with some likelihood of failure...."

So the plot elements include the richest man in the world, the revolutionary Nobel laureate scientist who has bested the Senate in controversial hearings, the risky new technology, the famous ultra-science yet wacky/nerdy campus, the heartbreaking scenes of agonizing death in the third world, and then the triumph, with its bizarre side effects, and a suggestion that one is immortality, setting up the sequel.

Mmm... dried C-J prions... ohohohohohohohohoh...

(If the dogs didn't start as zombies, we can give 'em a push in that direction. And the ad copy can include pictures of Lorne Greene again!)

1001 Hawaiian Nights Dedicated To The Cool And The Far Away

"Within our Galaxy, UKIDSS astronomers hope to find new neighbours for our Solar System (even closer than the nearest known star Proxima Centauri) by discovering the first example of a type of star postulated by theorists, called a 'Y dwarf'. Y dwarfs are a type of Brown Dwarf - the 'failed stars' that are too small and cool to ignite and burn their hydrogen gas. The coolest brown dwarfs known have temperatures of 600K (over 300ºC), but theorists predict that there should be a missing link between these brown dwarfs and the cooler gas giant planets like Jupiter, which has a temperature of 150K (about -120ºC). Y dwarfs are that missing link, but because they are so cool and faint, they have never been seen before...."

My photography teacher called himself an anti-abstractionist saying, "a banana is just a banana!" If any student ever hinted that a banana might have associations with anything not-banana (especially without context), my teacher would stomp around, puff on his hand-rolled cigarette, and mutter, "It's Jesus in a torilla, man. Jesus in a tortilla."

(Via)

There may be an open body of liquid on Titan after all.

Uh-oh. Someone left the lid up.

Thinking of a book I read as a kid (am now 28). Boy makes a deal/bet with the devil. Result: boy loses his smile/laugh, but can never lose a bet. Yada-yada-yada, happy ending. Have googled & ebay-ed all appropriate words/phrases with no joy. Please help. I might actually be losing sleep over this.

By the by, JVP & JMF (John M Ford) give good post always. Thanks.

They say no sign of brain damage, but I find myself with Michelle DB -- I find it hard to imagine going through that process without losing something of the essential self. In a word, squick.

Then again, I'm more spiritual than scientific. I have my as-usual-inadequately-informed opinions on faith and spirit.

Sure, in my stories, the soul and the body can be parted, and come back together without too much trauma -- but I'm writing fiction where an alert goddess can prevent the usual results of a more advanced culture meeting a less advanced (Including the germ factor), where humans are descended from selkies, who are descended from a kind of semi-aquatic bear-ape. I *know* I'm writing huge whoppers.

"Sure, in my stories, the soul and the body can be parted, and come back together without too much trauma..." is at least trying to break the shackles of:

Mind-body duality: born of Rene Descarte's agony, unmothered, unloved, beaten by teachers, staring at the tortured Christ on a cross, and inventing a cross of two numerical axes, Cartesian Geometry, the marriage of algebra and geometry, yet unloved, lonely, unable to cope with his pain, and so inventing a philosophy based on doubt rather than faith, based on separating mind (free) from body (suffering) -- and Western philosophy is only beginning to recover.

If there is no soul, nothing is divided from anything when the dog dies and is revived.

Not that I'm volunteering, you understand?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081947/

Timm Thaler, released in the UK as "The Legend of Tim Tyler" or "The Boy Who Lost His Laugh".

Based on a novel by James Krüss.

It is a vivid story, which wonderfully humanises the kabuki theatre. But its abiding glory is the outpouring of full-colour wood-block prints, commissioned and in some cases executed by their fans, which record their performances, their personalities, their world. The sheer beauty of much of this material, along with the scrapbooks and the fanzines, immortalises the fans as much as the actors, offering an illuminating model of the modern cult of celebrity, where the ostensible object of adoration or fascination is merely a pretext for the creativity and projection of the fan. At many levels, Kabuki Heroes is a sensational event.

A situation like that, where the person has nothing to lose, would I think be an appropriate test case.

Of course, Michelle, that's gotta be it.

I have to laugh at myself, because the only application I was thinking of was as a way of preserving the body during slower-than-light interstellar travel.

One of my unpublished novelettes, written roughly 20 years ago, opens with the protagonist complaining that being killed for interstellar transport is easy; it's being brought back to life that hurts. He's resurrected on a Heaven craft, by an Angel nurse. And the entire novelette is structured by each chapter expanding on a line from "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow....

What the scientists have REALLY done (if it pans out in further testing) is invented a form of suspended animation. Remove the blood, replace it with chilled saline solution, and replace the blood hours later. Dog gets up and is apparently fine.

So far, they've only done it for a few hours, so don't start packing for your stl trip to Tau Ceti just yet.

However, the treatment does have exciting implications for major surgery. Deep anesthesia is pretty risky stuff, with resultant brain damage, and if this treatment proves safer and easier, that's a win-win.

I'm reminded of a "Voyager" episode where an alien suffers a crisis of faith when he's brought back from the dead but has no memory of an afterlife. He was medically dead for several minutes, but was brought back by an experimental procedure. The entire episode suffered from massive idiot-plotting: NOBODY thought to tell this alien that he WASN'T DEAD. Death is, by definition, the place from which there is (barring the possibility of reincarnation) no return; if you come back, that means you weren't dead after all. No crisis of faith necessary.