http://www.angelfire.com/ab3/chrysanthemum/growingmethods/colchicine.htm

Sorry, I've been rereading Cats Are Not Peas and everything suggests genetic weirdness to me....

He loved the pursuit and the romance
But the details were more of a chore-
When the bride's veil lifted, his mind soon lifted
At least that's what happened before.

Let it blow, let it snow
Let the mercury bubble and dive
Life's little traumas and courtroom dramas
Remind me I'm glad I'm alive....

(warning: contains banana-on-kiwi sex)

From the name alone I'd imagined some clever geographic distribution of mosques aligned with the sun, or perhaps a mosque with architecture such that the sun would shine off of different domes and minarets at different times. A sort of religious flower clock. The disappointment was...well, not "crushing," but I felt a slight squeezing in my head.

Ah well. At least there was the "Paper without a city" link, and the "Hovercraft full of eels" one to try next.

Not for its own merit (the tooltip says, "Via Patrick, who got it from Sharyn November"), but because, spoken aloud, the actual text would be indistinguishable from, "Via Patrick, who 'got it' from Cher in November."

Many of you may already know this, but I can imagine few Making Light readers who wouldn't appreciate that Elements of Style is available online.

Orwell.ru? Spooky.

Why does the page refer to the senior author as "Oliver Strunk" when I have always known him as "William Strunk, Jr.?"

Let's see-- here in my office I have the 1959 hardcover edition.

Aha. The copyright page says "[Copyright symbol] The Macmillan Company 1959 [...]The Elements of Style, Revised Edition, by William Strunk, Jr. , and Edward A. Tenney, copyright 1935 by Oliver Strunk."

In the Introduction, E.B. White writes that "the little book" was privately printed with a copyright date of 1918. Apparently Oliver Strunk renewed the copyright seventeen years later, in 1935. Possibly he was Prof. W. Oliver Strunk of Princeton, author of Essays on Music in the Byzantine World, who was born the year after William Strunk, Jr. was married.

Wikipedia points me to a version of the text at Bartleby.com, which correctly attributes the little book to the elder Strunk.

I can't find a copy of it online, but there's an interesting blog post about it here.

Everybody has already answered this one, but I was under the impression that the description "wide boy" implies some physical bulk, enough to give some presence/menace. And, as has been pointed out, I think that zoot suits -- the padded shoulders, the wide lapels, the wide stripes -- also enter into it somehow, at least originally.

*The other two being,

1. Last track on Brian Vander Ark's "Resurrection" CD sounds a lot like something off of Clutching at Straws

and

2. Rearranging the living room revealed the Season's End picture disk in my record collection

...for whatever those are worth.

Come to think of it, I'm still waiting for someone to reference redheads and Vincent motorcycles over in the "Folksongs Are Your Friends" thread.

While we're on the subject, if Richard Thompson ever happens to bring his '1000 Years of Popular Music' performance to your town, don't miss it! I gather the tickets have been extortionately priced in some cities, but when he came to Honolulu last year as he does every few years, they were quite reasonable. The CD is fun, but can't capture the feel of the live performance (and it appears he always does slightly different material in each show.)

And if the term is getting into dictionaries it's likely obsolescent as slang.

Bit of a flash dresser, it seems, but possibly missing the mark a bit as far as fashion goes.

Intriguingly, the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue does give "whide" as cant for "words".

http://www.absolutelyandy.com/tvadverts/

There was a spoof of this ad for some washing machine that had people running down the street, making the shape of a giant sock and underwear and so on. While that was my favourite, alas, I can not find a link for it.

Someone did mention something about that:

Dan Layman-Kennedy ::: (view all by) ::: September 09, 2005, 08:59 AM:

Speaking of biker boyfriends: If yours has fought with the law, and he says he don't mind dyin', take it as a sign.

On the other hand, you'll get a good bike out of it, if it's any consolation.

Now that was an interesting visual...

I just dicovered Boru, an awesome Irish vodka (hey, if the French can make vodka, why not the Irish?).

Myers and club soda. About 1 part Myers to 3 parts club soda. Lots of ice. Lemon or lime optional.

And my stand-by, Old Grand-Dad.

Also -- my new (since November; ok it's not so new any more) favorite beer, is Jersey Ale from Hunterdon Brewing Co. in Philipsburg, NJ. It is great, mostly robs me of will to buy any other domestic beer. (Although Magic Hat #9 Ale will do in a pinch.) I don't know how widely HBC distributes its ale, I have only bought it in Summit, NJ. My friend who lives in Bethlehem, PA told me he had seen it there.

During the summer, Saranac Brewing (which is actually made at F.X. Matt's in Utica, NY) put out a mixed case of beers with a golden lager, raspberry wheat, hefeweizen, and a few others that slip my mind, but all were excellent. Unfortunately only a limited supply was shipped to my part of New Jersey, and I couldn't get it after July. Their Adirondack Amber is available year-round, though, and well worth drinking.

Of course it's time now to start thinking about Oktoberfest. Hacker-Pschorr made one of the best 'fest brews I've tasted about a decade ago; I think it was strong enough to be labeled as malt liquor. Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest is still available today, but seems to be watered down a bit. The best tasting domestic festbier I've found so far is Stoudt's. For beers with a little more kick, the imported doppelbocks like Schneider Aventinus or Erdinger Pikantus go down smooth and set your head sailing gently down the river. And lately I've discovered a set of Russian brews called Baltika that come in several varieties (lager, wheat ale, porter, and strong ale) -- not quite as tasty as the Germans but still satisfying.

Oh, and that reminded me that I've still got half a case of Thomas Jefferson Tavern Ale stashed away in the basement, awaiting cooler drinking weather. This is one of the most expensive domestic beers I've encountered ($48 per case in New Jersey) but I'll happily shell out for it because of the wonderful taste. Just the right blend of hops and a hint of fruit and spices. Excellent accompaniment to a chicken or pork meal on a fall evening.

Mmm... beer.

Well, thank god for that. English style and Byzantine music have poor enough reputations as it is.

(snip)

The expedition would begin, these charts show, by launching the lunar lander and Earth departure stage (essentially a giant propulsion module) on a heavy-lift launch vehicle that would be lifted into orbit by five space shuttle main engines and a pair of five-segment shuttle solid rocket boosters.

(snip)

So they're basically going to reinvent the Saturn V using a design based on, I think, an Atlas-Centaur? "Proven technology" strikes again.

Check the temperature outside and the specs on those SRB O-rings before launching, please.

I am drinking very little at the moment, due to the damn ulcer, but I have a bottle of Remy cognac and a bottle of Jamesons (Irish whiskey) in the cupboard for the occasional sip or two as a nightcap. At other times I drink mostly IPA type ales; I like the rich hops bite.

I'm pretty sure there is some brand of Poteen available in the U.S. I haven't tried it yet, because my brother in law from Drogheda says it's lethal.

Just discovered Kefir, which is sort of like a weird carbonated yogurt smoothie. I believe the genuine article is alcoholic, but the stuff in the grocery store isn't.

A combination I learned was called a "Dark and Stormy."

I just have to decide if I really *need* my books catalogued . . .

Are Mac users already aware of Delicious Library? It sounds really cool - if you have a webcam, you just hold your book/CD/DVD in front of it and it snarfs the UPC off the back and catalogs it for you, complete with cover picture. Apparently it even makes sotto voce snarky comments on certain movies/etc. But I don't have either a Mac or a webcam.

No such assumptions from this corner.

Just discovered Kefir, which is sort of like a weird carbonated yogurt smoothie. I believe the genuine article is alcoholic, but the stuff in the grocery store isn't.

Kefir is only slightly alchoholic but is fermented, and should be quite sour. Some health-food stores sell Kefir starters that will let you make your own, which will be far tastier than the stuff you get at the A & P; and you can control the acidity and degree of alchohol by not fermenting it as long. (Indeed it tastes quite good after about 24-36 hrs and has no perceptible alchoholic content, is my memory; but I have not made it in about 15 years so caveat listener.)

***

Mmmm, Beer.

Too bad I can't have any right now. I'm on a diet and exercise program (medically supervised) that claims that alcohol blocks the pathway used to metabolize fat, so it's banned. I don't know how true this is or isn't, but the program is otherwise reasonable, so I'm in it for the duration.

That said, I'd love a Schneider Hefeweitzen right about now. Or a Paulaner. Schneider is harder to find, which makes it more the prize.

Right before I started the diet, I discovered that Hale's Ales (right here in Seattle) actually makes an excellent Kölsch - first I've ever had that wasn't served in line of sight of the Cologne cathedral. The bar didn't have the little cylindrical glasses, though.

Lately, I've been making some very simple margaritas: 1 shot tequila, 1 shot tripplsec with limeaide from frozen concentrate.

Cider is always good, as well.

--Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of the Underworld

MKK

You mean as a mixer? Or shots? :0)

Cider is always good, as well.

If you get a chance try Farnum Hill cider, especially their semi-dry still cider. As rich and complex in flavor as a lambic ale. The extra-dry still cider is very good too but only about a year after you buy it. (IMHO -- their brewmaster told me everything they sell has been aged to proper maturity.)

Just checking, since the trailer for no. 4's just been released: have we all seen "Potter Puppet Pals," or have we not?

I've found imported Koelsch in New Jersey, and it was also one of the brews in the Saranac summer pack. That's the wonderful thing about the USA with regards to beer: for any recipie or tradition, there's probably a brewer in this country who does it, and is passionate enough to do it well.

Of course, there are also some lousy brewers trying to cash in on the microbrew fanciers. That's why I do a lot of taste testing.

(Hmm. Maybe I ought to get me one of these weblog things...)

Also, I mentioned this on the dying end of a previous open thread, but thought it worth repeating. Harvard is offering ENGLISH E-101 The History and Structure of the English Language as an Extension course that can be taken entirely online. A semester spent studying vowel shifts, phonology and world English. The course website is currently available for preview. If anyone else here is taking it, let's get in touch.

Hmm. I wonder if anyone around here (NYC) stocks Quebec ice cider.

---

Jimcat & John Farrell - I suspect that I could fit the occasional beer or glass of wine into my diet without detriment, but I'm disinclined to do so. This really for two reasons, first that the program has a good success rate (almost 50% retention after 1 year off program) and has a good sample size. ReallyBigCorp pays for the lion's share of the program, but I'm kicking in a substantial chunk of change as well (it's a great benefit), so I figure I should follow the program as written.

It's kind of like having a part-time job. 5 days a week in the gym (3 with trainers), meetings with dietitians, MDs, psychologists, and a group session. Since I'm making all this effort, not having a beer seems like the least bit of additional burden.

I do think that some of their scientific claims are a bit dodgy though. In addition to the ban on alcohol, they're down on artificial sweeteners and caffeine too. I wonder where the science ends and the moralism begins.

I went to visit Tor UK
But alas it's gone away
Can anyone say why this is so?
Macmillan act like they don't know

Okay, lousy poetry, but http://www.toruk.com is deader even than my poem :(.

I drink water too, not enough of it. And if someone were to offer me Cognac I wouldn't turn it down.

Drinking: the required cranberry juice and gatorade, plus skim milk and iced tea. Boring, ain't I?

I first heard Bright Lights about 5 years ago, looked it up at AMG, and was amazed at how seldom such a perfect song had been covered. At the time, I thought perhaps it was deference to the couple, but now I wonder if Thompson just won't give permission. I suppose that is his business, and I shouldn't wonder.

Another song with inadequate cover is Melanie Safka's Steppin.

I can make home-brew Cel-Ray! Muahahaha!

Well, thank god for that. English style and Byzantine music have poor enough reputations as it is.

Yes, but do they mean he was born 12 months after, or within the following year? Because the latter seems to me to give him a three in four chance of being illegitimate.

On the Moomin books, anyway: is Moominpappa at Sea the book published in the UK as The Exploits of Moominpappa? Actually, a look at Jeremy's site suggests that the corresponding book is Moominpappa's Memoirs. Whichever it is, I think it's the best book, and that Moominpappa actually emerges as the most interesting character. But that may be just because the circumstances in the book remind me of episodes in the lives of both my parents.

[People are now visualising my parents as Moomins. Result!]

(This is not cutting satire. This is satire carefully crafted from obsidian.)

[Live! on TV, the asshole from Texas whose wealthy fellow scum arranged for his installation in the Oval Orifice... ]

The words of the two footed sack of shit blowing taxpayer dollars to playing stinking lying grandstander in New Orleans -- tax dollars squandered on the sack of shit to stand in New Orleans and give a speech--wasting oil and gas to transport his entourage and probably stop dead in its tracks on-going disaster cleanup work...

Stinking piece of shit is pushing handing money over to religious organizations now. He keeps talking about faith, and pouring taxpayer dollars into what probably are going to be hole lots of sucking maws of the likes of Halliburton fatcats. And he's going to spend taxpayers dollars on expanding buildings in places that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place--shithead desn't seem to comprehend the concept that if something was been built in a floodplain and then drowned, it shouldn't be rebuilt LARGER in the floodplain.

Sack of shit of course has got neither the brains of one of those male fish which attach themselves to the giant female and devolve into a tail releasing sperm that's become a male appendages sticking out of the female's hide, nor the integrity of the Scottish Regiment's used condom.

He doubtless was using a teleprompter for the speech...

Perhaps it's time to leave Biloxi the way that the Cape Cod National Seashore is--why should ever other taxpayer in the country get charged to rebuild that place when it gets flattened again and again and again? Camille flattened in three decades ago, and it was flattened from a hurricane before that one, too. New Orleans at least isn't ON the coastline...

New Orleans wouldn't have been hit so hard if so much of the marshes in the area weren't destroyed. Stinking sack of shit seems to go out of his way to remain willfully ignorant of that. Stinking sacks of shit pronounced building LARGER than before, which to me says stinking sack of shit will destroy even more marshes, meaning that the places rebuilt will be just that much more expensive the next time they get hit by a hurricane. Stinking sack of shit doesn't believe in global warming and the increasing viciousness of hurricanes, he has faith....

And where the hell is MY job? I've been without work that provided health benefits for three and a half years now. I haven't even had substantiative contract work in two and a half years. Nobody's giving -me- a $5000 grant and making a job for me! Want tax money from me, get me a job! I apply for them and there's no responses from the vast majority of the resumes I send out. The others, most of them don't even bother after responding to the initial contact, to even send email with a rejection. Occasionally I have an interview, and never hear back. Calling up to be told you're rejected stinks, and who the hell wants to do that again and again and again after -years-?

The people from the Gulf are going to get jobs from federal programs and are getting money from the federal government. Some of them have lost all their possessions, but what about everyone ELSE who's suffered from bad weather and losses, who weren't on the Gulf Coast, whose houses and jobs are gone from floods, fires, etc.? Bush is promising money from -those- people who've lost everything, to give huge largesse to the victims of Katrina.

Meanwhile, again, nobody's hiring -me-. I hear the words of the sack of shit, saying that those victims are more important and Worthy than any other victims. They get jobs, but what about those of us who have been unemployed for years, what about those whose lives and livelihoods went away in smaller disaster, what about the people who went bankrupt in the wake of 9/11, what about the change in the federal bankruptcy law which denies people who for loss of job, or illness, disaster, etc., are stuck with bills they can't pay and aren't going to get any debtor relief come October? Bush is advocating huge spending for Katrina victims, but again, what about everyone else?

Stinking lying sack of shit...

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050829ta_talk_paumgarten

"I first heard Bright Lights about 5 years ago, looked it up at AMG, and was amazed at how seldom such a perfect song had been covered. At the time, I thought perhaps it was deference to the couple, but now I wonder if Thompson just won't give permission."

I'm frankly appalled that intelligent people have been so bamboozled by the firehoses of bullshit wielded by the copyright maximalists that you literally don't know about the venerable and extremely effective "compulsory license" model under which song-performance rights are handled, with creators quite decently compensated thank you very much.

Signed, Member, ASCAP (with the wallet card to prove it!)

Kip: Potter Puppet Pals, absolutely. (aaaaaaAAAAAA.........bother!)

A little more looking indicates that, surprise, the imdb list is incomplete and not terribly accurate, but hey, these Internets, she are the great quest adventure of the armcharious, yes?

themoomins.com lists a boxed set of a 1980s TV series (unmentioned by imdb) with English narration.

Remember, the value of a liberal education is knowing where to Look Stuff Up, which has always included not quitting easily and following somewhat erratic chains of logic.

I'm reading E. Nesbit's The Magic City to my almost-four-year-old these days. He got bored for a while and didn't want to hear more installments, but then he asked for it again just the other night. That was always one of my favorite Nesbits.

The incident with the dictionary falling into the hat is, I think, the thing that stuck with me more than anything else in the whole series.

Tonight for the first time I heard that song about the '52 Vincent and the girl with the red hair (whose name I kept hearing as "Radmullah" for the first three verses or so, wondering if the song was going to turn into some kind of political or cultural manifesto, before I realized it was "Red Molly"). I thought "Who is this guy? What kind of accent is that? Dang, that's pretty picking. Oy, it's another one of those songs. Dang, that's pretty picking. What kind of accent is that? Who is this guy?"

So I finally get home and get up to checking out the net, and here it is -- the name of the guy, and a context for the '52 Vincent song, and . . . what kind of accent is that?

I was really quite annoyed with Robert Earl Keen for "The Road Goes On Forever And The Party Never Ends,(or whatever its proper title is)" for example, but I forgave him completely once I heard "Merry Christmas from the Family" (Or whatever its proper name is).

Thompson wrote and performed the music for Werner Herzog's new film Grizzly Man, which I'd recommend to all lovers of bears and foxes.

I do have a question I've been meaning to ask here: A couple months back, I went to one of those things where published writers sit at little tables in small rooms full of unpublished writers and talk about, well, writing.

Most everything I heard there was stuff I'd already read on the web, but one writer said something that didn't sound right. He said that every publisher keeps one or two slots in their schedule open specifically for new writers. He also said that manuscripts in the slush piles weren't competing with the works of the "oft-published elite" but with the rest of the slush.

It didn't sound right to me, but I'm not in a position to know. Was he right?

Thanks.

I have a few bottles of my Jack Of The Green pale ale left, the Too Many Secrets porter is waiting for the Halloween feast, and I'm expecting the next batch of Six Dæmon spice ale to be ready for the solstice. There's still a couple bottles of Tumultuous Uproar imperial stout and exactly one bottle of Revolution! strong ale, but those will probably be gone by the end of the week.

I've been going through my enormous stack of Cropredy Festival photos, with the intent of posting a set on Flickr (don't run over there now, there's almost nothing up yet). I should probably check the shots of Thompson playing cricket, though I think they're all from a safe enough distance that nobody's really recognizable without a scorecard.

*which of course sounds like the first line of a folk song, in which Worry is only a stanza or six away from descending, followed after several more stanzas, a couple of choruses, a rickety bridge, and a catastrophic loss of string geometry by the arrival of Fell J. Death (as Jay Ward and Bill Scott would have called him) with his long black coat and his red incarnation, his Midnight Special on a .44 frame, and his invitation to come dance (nothing too Fosse, all Arlen in the night) under the pale white moon.

She likes the promise they don’t quite define
She stops the taxi at Greenwood & Vine,
Of course her Blahniks are size number 9,
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.
She’ll leave her bedroom at any old noise
Won't marry fops who are Daddy’s first choice
Walks into graveyards and raises her voice
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.
She's got a beau who’s dead, truth to tell
But his boat’s swell
What's worse? Next verse!
Short but eventful, is that life so bad?
That's why the lady's lyric's trad.

She’ll follow crooks for the whole crooked way,
Won't stay indoors for the whole month of May,
Ignores old wives' tales on her wedding day,
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.
She won’t get fooled by the High or the Low
Enchants a token and buttons her beau,
Knows seven hundred expressions for No,
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.
At some oh-dire-oh ‘ccasion of sin
She’ll get done in
Stone dead, ‘nuff said
She’ll come back Doleful and spook out the cad
That’s why the lady’s lyric’s Trad.

Can't turn away from a guy on a horse,
She falls for riddles, though rarely to force,
And he'll be gone in the morning, of course
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.
She likes the Army, their triggers are set
But then the Navy gets so friggin’ wet
There’s not a service she hasn’t served yet
That’s why the lady’s lyric’s Trad.
She's got the [Your Shade Here] sort of eyes
Sees through disguise
Nice dogs, cute frogs;
True Love will be the unlikeliest lad,
That's why the lady's lyric's Trad.

After noticing in the grocery a container of pina colada yogurt with the top all puffed up, I went and looked it up in the microbiology text. Lactobacillus come in 2 varieties, 'homofermenters' and 'heterofermenters'. The first just turn the lactose in milk into lactic acid. The second do half that, and half the other pathway, which leads to CO2 and ethanol. So that was alcoholic carbonated pina colada yogurt.

Probably those are the bugs responsible for the original kefir?

Also Arthur Daley in Minder.

Do not worry, Lucy;* your condition would at least imply that you have only just encountered Richard Thompson

Or possibly Dick Gaughan, who has covered the song. Though his pronounciation of "Red Molly" doesn't sound like "Radmullah", at least to my ear.

I wonder what superpower I'll develop.

No, that is "Finn Family Moomintroll". "Moominsummer Madness" is the one with the flood and the (mostly) abandoned theater. And Snufkin exacting revenge upon the tormentors of his youth, which is where "luminous" comes in.

Real poitín is illegal and dangerous stuff that makes you go blind or even die, and is made from god knows what by who knows who.

Meanwhile, vodka has been made in Ireland for many years. Irish Distillers, the 500 lb gorilla in spirits here have made "Huzzar" for as long as I can remember, which is a reliable second in the market behing Smirnoff. It's just alcohol in water though, without the interesting petrol flavours of, say, Stolichnaya.

I have a few bottles of Erdinger Weissbier in the fridge, along with a bottle of Jacobs Creek Sparkling Pinot Noir, which is very good indeed for the money.

And Jeremy Osner, thank you for mentioning kefir. My mother used to make that during on of her seventies DIY phases (that included spinning (both wheel and that-twirly-stick-like-thing I don't know the name of in English), dying, macrame, embroidery and lots of sewing of clothes), and my sister and I were fascinated by the process. We also drank lots of it, so I don't expect ours contained alcohol in any significant way, because otherwise my mother would certainly not have let us drink it.

Or are events like these so habitual with those who associate with Mr Ford that one hardly notices after a while?

Many small Irish farmers keep a bottle of poitín handy as animal medicine.

I have a few Czech beers in the fridge, and a couple of bottles of red wine around. I think though since it's Friday I might go and buy some Belgian beer tonight.

Meanwhile, America is slowly awaking to a new day, unfolding its newspaper, looking at the front page photo, and saying "Oh [deleted]!"

Perhaps they can be forgiven for not noticing one of the good things of life.

"That which does not kill me makes me stranger." -- Llewellyn

Like the two local farmers, who I shall call B1 and B2 since their sons know me. B1 was a butcher as well as a farmer, and, like the modern chicken nugget seller, is in not reassuring to learn what went into his sausages, stretching the meat ration beyond all carnivorous sanity.

B2 was the bigger farmer, and did a lot of darkish-grey trading in livestock. So did his son, I suspect, until the post-FMD clampdown on the sheep trade. Certainly, the apparently thriving sheep flock seemed to stop thriving.

B2 Jr. spent a lot of money on shooting, and was good enough at hitting clay pigeons to shoot competitively for his country. The last time I saw him, he was stroking his shotgun the way some men stroke their women.

I'm glad I moved to a different village.

Thank you; the song is fun!

What dont' you like about "The Road Goes On Forever and the Party Never Ends"? I found it a surprisingly affective song. Not like "'52 Vincent Black Lightning", one of the few that consistenly makes me cry any time I hear it (the "For Whom the Bell Tolls" of song), but pretty strong stuff anyway. (The Del McCoury version of "5VBL" is maybe not his best work.)

By the way, is it acronymized as '5VBL or just plain 5VBL?

Would a Series III air-portable Land Rover be sufficient, ladies? The roof doesn't leak. Much.

Mine is green, and doesn't have side windows.

:)

Back to RT though. My poor kids have grown up learning all the lyrics to most of Thompson's oevre (as well as SES and a sea chanty or two) and have suffered through my butchering them in an attempt to sing to the kiddoes. This morning I got my son out of bed by belting Hard On Me as loud as I could. He retaliated with Matty Groves...he's 7 (he'll be in therapy soon I'm sure...).

"The first rule of getting a book published is to avoid writing a book."

Added bonus: the graphic at the top is a... crescent! oh nooooo!

I actually don't like the '52 Vncent song either, except for the pretty picking.

Maybe it's because I don't glamorize dead teenage boys? I want them to live and prosper, instead? -- continuation school teaching will do that to you, I think.

(Really wishing my cover of '52 VBL this summer had been recorded; after six years, I can just about get through performing it without choking up now. Must find the chord progressions and start working on "Pavane" next.)

My new favorite beer is the Weeping Radish Black Radish, which is described on the Weeping Radish website thusly: "This dark larger in the Munich Dunkles style is brewed with a high portion of dark roasted malts for a rich, toasted flavor."

Since North Carolina recently lifted its 6% cap on alcohol content in beer, I look forward to trying many interesting imported brews and microbrews.

How come you know what "poutine" is? Are you from Quebec? Or is that staple of culinary arts known beyond my native land's borders?

The background showed Wolverine running past a sign pointing to Canada while, in the foreground, a perplexed Nightcrawler tells Cyclops that Wolverine went out to get some "...real beer..."

Also, did anyone else look at the Library Thing and think, 200 books registered free, that'd hardly make a dent in them? (Not saying the $10 for permanent membership isn't reasonable.)

This is probably correct for mass-market beer (Molson or Labatt's is far better than Bud or Coors) but I'd take issue on the microbrew front. On the small scale, the US has gotten pretty good at making excellent beer in virtually all styles. (Still haven't had a decent US-made Lambic, though.)

Even our mass-microbrews (think Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Pyramid, etc.) are world class. It's just the $6.99 for a 12-pack of cans stuff that reeks.

FWIW, even the Belgians, who are otherwise the great masters of beer-making, make Stella Artois, which IMHO tastes like fermented armpits. Unshaven armpits at that.

As I discovered 4 years ago, it is also the ideal preparation for abruptly having to homeschool a child for a year from a flat-footed standing start. Long story, with which I won't tie up bandwidth, but it ended well.

Clifton, I love Nesbit but have missed The Magic City. I'll look for it.

Marrije, the twirly stick looking thing is called a drop spindle.

Bob Oldendorf, I heartily second your rec of the bluegrass "Vincent Black Lightning". It was the first version of the song I heard and I love it dearly.

At the bar, Bacardi Silver Raz (raspberry-flavored malt beverage, not to be confused with their raspberry rum). At home, where I can mix it myself so it's appropriately weak, Diet Coke & Vanilla Absolut, or Diet Coke and Rhum Barbancourt. The grown-ups in the family* sip the Barbancourt rather than mixing it.

*that is, those who can hold their liquor

That's because nobody outside Payottenland and the Senne valley makes a decent Lambic. It's made with a wild yeast culture— a very weird one, apparently— that only lives there.

I've got a cultured sample of lambic yeast in the refrigerator, and I'm going to try my hand at brewing one next month. The fscking Belgians don't have marionberries, so they don't make a marionberry lambic ale. If I want one, I have to try to make it myself.

People I know who have tried to make homebrew lambic say it's ridiculously difficult and takes forever to get it right. Plus the lambic yeast makes a nasty smelly mess.

I really want to try a marionberry lambic ale. Most homebrewers wouldn't bother. And they're probably right not to.

Great site, what's it all about ?

Steve

Just about everything.

The Department of Justice is trolling for evidence that environmentalists held back levee repairs:

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050916/NEWS0110/509160369/1260

Sorry, what was thinking? This is not unbelievable at all. It's par for the course.

Del McCoury Band was on some PBS bluegrass special, and I heard it playing in the background, until it grabbed hold of my attention - - " I know this song. . . Hey! it's Richard F. Thompson! Played as bluegrass!!"

And in the DMcCB version, it sounded like some centuries-old folk song, and not something brand new.

Which is also a step toward an explanation of why I didn't catch Dan Layman-Kennedy's reference to it over in the "Folksongs Are Your Friends" thread. I just thought he was alluding to some general case, that there must be reams of traditional folk songs involving motorcycles and tragic deaths, and not just the specific case of RT's 52VBL...

FWIW, the only home-movie footage of my childhood that exists is a short sequence as follows:

1 - My grandfather is in our above ground swimming pool.

2 - I (at approx 3 years of age) run up to the outside pool wall and reach up towards my grandfather.

3 - He reaches down and hands me his can of Bud (old-style can with churchkey holes).

4 - I take a sip of the beer.

5 - He reaches down to reclaim the can.

6 - I run away, drinking his beer.

Of course, right now I'm drinking black coffee (at work, and should be writing a paper).

Non sequitur: According to the sample test questions for US naturalization, the correct answer to the the question, "Whose rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?" is "Everyone (citizens and non-citizens living in the US." News to me - I have a copy of the Constitution sitting on my desk and I am looking at the 14th Amendment.

He coughed up his spleen and he tossed her the horse
He said, "It has right-hand drive, of course"
He gestured theatrically and died
And she ran down the constable outside.

Something like that?

Haven't seen this much good stuff since I found the Archers parody site on bbc.co.uk

Fair enough--I've got my own grudge against the Romantics who died young through stupidity.

I thought the point of "The Road Goes On Forever and The Party Never Ends" was the the woman was a bitch, myself, and that the guy who died was an idiot.

The word is Middle English. It's been around with a generic meaning of "officer" for a long time, and has meant an underofficer to a shire-reeve (a "deputy sheriff," if you like) at least since the shire-reeve was dashing after Robin Hood. (The Constable of France -- the fellow with the stars on his armor in Henry V -- is a rather grander office, but it gives you an idea of the age of the word.)

It has generally been my way to drink mostly pale ale in the summer, darker ale and stout in the winter, for the past few years anyway. But then last Autumn I ran up against Jersey Ale and that threw me off stride -- I've been drinking practically no other beer since.

Microbrews ala Midwest, which means a steady diet of Bells Two-Hearted Ale, Schell's Oktoberfest, Capital's Fest, and whatever Summit I can get my hands on.

Richard Thompson: I Feel So Good might be one of the greatest songs of reckless intent ever written.

Pretty much. I was thinking of traditionalists sneering at the kids with their new-fangled electric starters, too.

He's also about to do a solo tour; we'll be seeing him at Town Hall in NYC on October 27. I enjoy Thompson with a full band, but I will walk over broken glass to see him solo. The effect of just him and one (1) acoustic guitar is overwhelming. You literally cannot believe a human being can get that much sound out of a single guitar.

Both have similar senses of humour which make the concerts even more enjoyable.

Steve
(Listening to a bootleg of RT in Denmark as I type)

The only downside to a RT concert is that box by the door, the one labelled GUITARISTS: LEAVE YOUR HANDS HERE.

It was hearing Thompson perform "I Feel So Good" live on "Fresh Air" that made me a fan. (Why, yes, I did have a lot of friends in the SCA who drove me crazy with their music--why do you ask?)

Here's a fun trick:

Put on Richard and Linda Thompson's Sunnydale (or is is Sunnyvale? Sigh. I'm old). Ask an appropriate mark which X album it is. Wait. Snicker.

Jones: Be careful--it's wet up front.
Relf: How come?
Jones: All the guitar players are crying.

Or words to that effect.

Well, without the use of a Lunar Module, anyway. (Not that he needs one to create that effect, either.)

Distressingly, there's a lot of turn-in-your-hands-at-the-door around. These guys are another fine example.

But I'm not actually drinking it at the moment, just the cognac.

I just listened to '52 Vincent Black Lightning' for the first time.

And wept.

Question - his bio says that he and Linda divorced in 1982. But didn't they appear on Prairie Home Companion after that date? Because I *thought* I remembered hearing them there....

Isn't there another couple with a similar name that appears there frequently? Williams, I think.

It's excellent. It's three discs with material up through, I think, the eighties. That doesn't include "52 Vincent Black Lightning," but does include a lot of other great songs, including some rarities and live performances (and most of the songs from "Shoot Out the Lights").

PNH: You literally cannot believe a human being can get that much sound out of a single guitar.

I live in Iowa City, IA, and our local arts festival somehow managed to get him for their free concert this past June. It was just him and his guitar, but he sounded like an entire band.

Yeah, well, I can't help but resent that too. The girl is always a manipulative, cold bitch, and the guy is always a doomed sociopath. I understand that without personality flaws there are no songs, but just . . . well, some of these stories are appealing to me and some are not. It doesn't help growing up with a number of boys who didn't make it, and it doesn't help that when I have work, I'm teaching girls who dress immodestly and go for rides with boys who take risks. But that's not it. What it really is, is that I don't care for that particular type of song, and there are plenty of songs of types which are quite close to them that I do like and there's no consistency there at all. No principle to defend, no asthetic to reject. I just don't like em.

While I was there, I caught all but one of Peter S. Beagle's panels, and I went to his table in the Walk of Fame. Spoke pretty extensively with Connor, his publisher. Really friendly and enthusiastic guy.

He's been trying to rustle up publicity to 1) get Beagle the royalties for the Last Unicorn DVD and 2) get back the rights to the live-action.

And "Two Hearts" is coming out soon, really! It was a very amusing story he shared, about how it wasn't supposed to be a sequel.

I'll refrain from posting the link, lest this gets too spammy. But since I initially heard about Conlan Press here, I didn't think anyone would mind.

Brain....failing....need....lambic....

The Wellington County brewery's "Iron Duke" has been described as being like liquid chocolate; I don't think that's accurate (if it had been, I should have liked it less) but it certainly had heft, as a porter ought.

These days, it's vodka lemonade and single malt, both of which my innards will still tolerate.

We just checked on the Web, and according to the store's Web site, it's actually at Ninth Avenue and 15th Street.

Again, fair enough. In fact, the stereotypes are in my head to the extent that I originally said the woman was a manipulative bitch. I took it out, because she wasn't manipulative.

Even calling her a bitch is probably unfair.

She's just the other idiot, the one who got lucky and didn't look back.

I took that song as a warning, but Lyle Lovett's You've Been So Good Up To Now is probably a better one.

You do know that "No Man is an Island" has been arranged for male choir? (George Mead) It's gorgeous. Deep bass voices on "never send to know for", oddly modulating chords in the baritone and lead tenor on "it tolls". My google-fu is weak, and I can't find it online.

As to what I'm drinking...nothing. I've been on either strong nsaids or narcotics for most of the year. (Ruptured disk and then surgery.) I had some raspberry lambic in February, and a swig of a friend's stout in July; but I've mostly been drinking ginger beer (of the non-alcoholic variety -- Stewart's is acceptable, Old Tyme is better) with a squirt of fresh lime juice.

How many folk musicians does it take to change a light bulb?

One to change the bulb, and eight to complain that it's electric.

Of course, that joke is now sufficiently part of the folk tradition to have at a minimum ska, hip-hop, and techno covers.

"Some hae drink that cannae drink
And some hae nane that want it
But we hae drink, and we can drink
Sae let the Lord be thankit."

(First exposed to that song on Sound & Spirit, and had to rewind the webcast to hear it again immediately. Wooch.)

Other folkish stuff now in heavy rotation in my Winamp: Nick Castro, especially "Guilford," which is currently vying for a nomination for Second Most Lovely Song I Know. Sadly, it's not among the downloads here, though some other excellent stuff is, including "Sun Song" from the same album. Go thou and listen.

I was thinking of the Hemingway novel--the man is such a sentimentalist!

Oddly, I've never been a John Donne fan. I recognize the greatness of his poetry, but it just don't move me the way that it should. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. (Oh, sorry--I'm getting cross-chatter, what with all my bridgework and my brand new leopard-skin tin-foil hat.)

It's always appropriate to quote Randy Newman. Always.

The local Red Cross got so many volunteers it took them a week to get them oriented. Red Cross Central shut them down for a while, saying they had all the volunteers they could handle, then started them up again.

This should probably be in the Leviticus thread, with some connection to the fact that there's localities all over the country that asked for more New Orleans refugees than they're going to get.

But this is just me personally all kind of proud and scared and crap, and you know how it is.

(Busa has been holding wine tastings every Friday afternoon/early evening, and I went there for that.)

I did once inadvertently drink a quantity of this very nice rum one Australia Day--and paid for it mightily the following day with an horrific medication-related reaction of such intensity everyone who saw me thought I must be deathly ill.

In recent years I've discovered the joys of espresso-based coffee, and then had to face the prospect of going decaf (to help the blood-pressure, but there was also the possibility that coffee had a role in the hellish, near-constant headaches I get). Since going the decaf route, I've been very pleasantly surprised that the good stuff tastes no different (though sometimes lacking that "bite" I used to really like). I personally like the long macchiato (two shots of espresso with a splash of steamed milk to "stain" the coffee), and, when celebrating, the affogato (a shot or two of espresso poured over a scoop of vanilla icecream). Both are dreamy, even without caffeine.

Adrian -- I drank a lot of espresso last month when I was in Italy and since I got back, have been drinking a lot of espresso. When my parents were in town last week, we were walking around in the (NY) city and stopped at a gelato stand, where I asked for a scoop of vanilla (well "white gelato" -- the actual flavor was crema which does not have vanilla in) and a cup of espresso, and the man at the counter asked if I would like affogato. I asked "what?" and was subsequently flabbergasted to know you could mix the two together! I am happy, happy, happy about this particular bit of information.

Listening to Mountain Stage tonight on the radio. Richard Thompson will be doing a set soon.

As I said at my place, Burke & Hare on line 1 for the Senator.

Butch Thompson's first name is indeed Richard: that confused me for years.

I'm not Debbie, obviously, but I can see how the Moomins on TV were perhaps a bit offputting. If it's the same TV series I saw, then the show is even *quieter* than the books; and I want to say 'inscrutable' here, but that may just be interference from the fact that they were animated in Japan. Finns can be pretty inscrutable too, I suspect, and there is certainly something hermetic about the Moomins which might make them a little forbidding.

Hattifatteners can be scary, too. I think I liked 'Moominpappa's Memoirs', to go back to that, in part because the whole thing seemed more precarious than the other Moomin books. Some of the comforts were there, but there wasn't the overriding domesticity of the other books (which is charming, but sometimes a little suffocating).

Again, though, this may just be me. I have friends who swear that their lives were changed as children by 'The Phantom Tollbooth', which I therefore read as an adult and found clever but hopelessly didactic.

But that's only to say I'm not reading it as a child would.

Congratulations and condolences. One of the greatest pleasures in life is seeing one's children grow and fly even beyond what one has expected of them. You've done well, and so has your son. (And alas, one of the great terrors in life is knowing one's children have moved beyond even what imagined protection one could offer them.)

Reckon it's a lot.

One to take out the old one and stomp upon it in the folk tradition of the mushkanites, doing his naughty mushkanitic dance shouting hey nanny nanny, light up my flannel fanny and waving a polka dotted hankerchief.
10 to stand in a circle and clap and stomp while he does this.
Three to play a fiddle, mandolin, and old jug while singing about capturing a faerie and placing it in a jar, bringing light for twenty nine years and no more bills, no more bills for you sweet jesus, no more bills.
18 to take part in a PBS special about how this really affected their artistic development.

Steve/Larry: something over 20 years ago, a local with Saskatchewan license plates opined that even the major Canadian companies export only the moose piss (her words) they can't sell locally. But I agree that honors are similar once out of the massiest of mass markets.

Mark D: divorce doesn't necessarily break up a professional relationship. (It might be the saving of it.) cf the Berrymans, who are performing together long after divorce.

Oh . . . sorry. That was in reaction to a post that won't be made for fifteen minutes. The clock on this computer keeps running fast.

Arrr.

In some ways nothing, since the area the spray effects immdediately is the exposed mucous membranes, but if one could close the eyes, or otherwise shield them for a moment, would it prevent them from being affected from run-off?

It's pretty commonplace to point out the disreputability of plays in the Elizabethan era by saying that if Shakespeare were alive today he wouldn't be writing poetry, he'd be working in movies and TV.

Now, it seems to me that if Shakespeare were alive today and writing movies and TV, his output might well look a lot like that of Joss Whedon. Whedon has Shakespeare's virtues: complex characters and sparkling dialogue with wordplay. And Shakespeare's faults: little talent for plot and less for thought-out worldbuilding.

Whedon I think was quoted as saying that no main character was going to be left in a state of happiness, indicating that happiness in a Whedon universe is a transient affair, and loving marriage-type partnerships are all doomed to destruction and/or death. Anya was left at the altar, Tara died, Buffy's relationships come to unpleasant terminations (and the one with Spike wasn't exactly based on mutual respect and affection and other such positive things, there were a number of very unhealthy resonances going on i there), etc. It's like soap operas, there's not such thing as a happy long-term stable relationship, and no prospects for polyamorist accommodations, either. I look at some shows and wonder, "real world there are people who are in permanent negotiated poly situation, why oh why are there -never- any such on TV shows that I've noticed?! Even Babylon 5, wherein at the state of the show Londo was a polynisti, he divested himself of two of them eventually!

It seems to me that sexual jealousy is much more a driver in film and TV, than it is in real life. I am not saying that it doesn't exist in real life, or that it can't be an extremely powerful driver, but rather, that it is not a driver for everyone and not a driver all the time. The soap opera model of the universe never has a reachout to a third party with the reaching out person saying "my partner is interested in you and here's my approval," or a couple reaching out saying, "how about coming over for a visit and the three of us can have some fun together?' sorts of things. Boggle, boggle, considering the amount of secretive guilty bedhopping and coercion and gratuitous nastiness etc. etc. etc. go on on TV commercial fiction entertainment programs.

There's nothing like the three-way marriage that occurs in Five-Twelths of Heaven, or complex marriage arrangements in various Ann Maxwell novels, or Heinlein's line marriages, or the two wives in A Specter is Haunting Texas, etc. It's all social official monogamy and sneaking around "cheating" and rapes and much other ugliness.

Shakespeare having Titania fall in love with Bottom was about as untoward as Shakespeare got that I recall in such matters. There is the issue of the cultural matrix he was in, where divorce was a rarity, but still, Henry VIII had not been a sexual exclusivist, he had had a variety of mistresses, and there were rumors that Elizabeth may even have had borne a[n out of wedlock] child.

The Authors Guild has filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit claims that Google's scanning and digitizing of library books as a part of the Google Print Project constitutes "massive copyright infringement". In addition to the lawsuit The Authors Guild has also issued a press release to explain its actions.

Hmmm.

I think I might amend that to "lack of concern for worldbuilding," or maybe "a tendency to to use worldbuilding as a blatant plot device." In either light, I'm not sure that's a fault.

(Which makes me wonder: Just how old is the idea of "thought-out" worldbuilding? It seems fairly modern - maybe a century or so. I don't really think the Alice books count, though I'm not sure I could say why.)

As far as plot goes, I'm not sure I completely agree - that is, I can see that strong plots aren't a great strength for either Will or Joss, but I'm not sure it's a weakness. I'm pretty sure it's not what I show up for in either case. To make a distinction that's been drawn here before, Shakespeare and Whedon are more interested in story than plot, and more interested in people than either. Which is probably what makes them both so fascinating, and also subject to revisitation when more carefully-plotted works are (maybe) not.

It might be an interesting excercise to see if works with enormous popular followings/rabid fandoms tend to be more plot-driven or character-driven. My suspicions lean towards the latter, but I could be wrong.

No more wild dogs. No more chickens. I miss the chickens.

After the crows moved in a few years ago we've had fewer jays -- we used to have both Stellar and scrub jays, now we seem to have only scrub jays. And after they built the housing coop and the condos in the lagoon, we have no more meadowlarks (but they're not endangered over all: I'm told they like disturbed earth at the edge of town).

Oh, yeah, I live downtown in what is sometimes called the "inner city." I do miss the chickens and the meadowlarks. And the salamanders, which might be my fault.

My reason for bringing this up here is I want a simple, memorable, clearly-true phrase for the way this administration names things the exact opposite of what they are, lying by implication about what they will do. The Healthy Forests Initiative and the Clean Air Act were two prime examples.

Bush-speak has other connotations, like incoherence. 1984-speak will be confusing to a lot of people, Stalin-speak will just make them anti, and using The Big Lie in a context where it remains to be proven that it's a lie will not work, I think.

So please help. Let's brainstorm a phrase that clearly and truthfully describes this tactic of the name that lies by implication. Because they use it so that all-too-many people will take the name at face value, and not worry about the details. And it works.

[Nine more days til the movie!!! <bounce><bounce><bounce>]

Good places to find birds, even in cities: airports (especially the overrun areas), railroads, streams, parks, golf courses. Peregrines like high-rises; you're more likely to find them downtown. (Seeing them is another matter: look for something the size of a red-tailed hawk, but with long tail and pointed wings. They soar quite well.)

A lot of cities will tolerate chickens as long as the neighbors don't complain (same goes for beehives). I didn't mind the guy across the back fence having both, but he didn't pay enough attention to his bees, and let the grass get too high around the hives (it encourages ants).

Meanwhile, there is a pre-existent term that applied perfectly to the techniques used by Gag Order Jackal Jackass George's regime, it's called "The Big Lie." The bigger the lie, the more appealing those carajous find it, and the more often then repeat is.

In a different on-line conversation this week I came with the description, placing a "wolverine in the henhouse" regarding Bolton....

I usually describe it as "Bush's Bizarro-World (policy)", as in "the Bizarro-World Clean Air Act".

One post that I was very happy to see was CHip's recommendation of "Spares" (Michael Marshall Smith). Good call - but I should have explained when I cautioned against sex&swearing. The librarian's a right dragon, and "Spares" is full of drugs, mutilation and rape of clones so although I reckon it should be in every school library I doubt she'd be persuaded. I'm going for "Only Forward" as a more acceptable way of getting them hooked.

The list is still ongoing due to funding issues and the librarian being less keen on buying in SF than is my physics teacher friend. This is frustrating. Should the librarian decide to act on her entreaties, that thread will be a great resource. Thanks again.

Several times we have talked about emergency preparedness, jump kits and the like. My question is about water. I mentioned to a friend that I was putting aside some water, and she told me that I would have to add bleach to it or it would grow nasties and get undrinkable pretty fast. Even if I did add bleach, I should replace it with fresh water fairly frequently.

After that, I noticed that water for sale at the grocery store comes in sealed containers. (Both the bottles that come in 12 packs and the gallon size containers are sealed, albeit differently.) Does this seal mean the water will keep? How often do I have to replace stockpiled water?

I have a feeling that someone here knows this.

The cheap and easy water decontamination program for third world countries is a jug, some bleach, and sunshine, though.

That being said, I'm blurry 'round the edges with movie excitement.

"A raven in a crowd is a crow. A crow all alone is a raven."

The neighborhood is more grown up with trees than it was before. What there's less of is open grassland and seasonal wetland, where the vacant lots were built.

Not ideal, but it's a good compromise and probably the best that someone as forgetful as I am can do.

As to "Threshold," I thought it was better than "Surface" (which I watched only for 20 minutes) and I suspect I'll find out tonight about "Invasion." If they're going to make lots of SF shows, you'd think one of them wouldn't be crap.

My mind flew to Joss Whedon's latest work. Have I stumbled on another layer apart from the obvious "restless US Civil War veteran going to the Western frontier" theme? Or is this one of those well-known fannish bijous?

Serene, Colorado
Serene was once a company town owned by the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company.
Serene had company housing, a post office, a tipple [*], and was the site of the Columbine Mine. [During the 1927 strike] some 500 protestors showed up at the mine on the morning of November 21.
The confrontation between strikers and the militia unit resulted in the Columbine Mine Massacre, in which six miners were killed by machine gun fire.
Serene was located ... west of Interstate 25 on Colorado Highway Seven, north of the ... Historical Marker that commemorates the Columbine Mine Massacre. The area that once was the company town of Serene is now a public landfill.

You think you'll be able to get the violence, death and madness past the librarian? If you're lucky she'll just read the first few chapters - those look mostly harmless.

Firefly:
When was it ever asserted that the whole show orbited a single star?

I've only seen the series on DVD, so I'm going on second-hand information here, but the transmitted episodes apparently had an introduction that originally said:

"After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized"

Later, this was changed to:

"Here's how it is - Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of earths"

(Quotes taken from here).

Some of Shakespeare's work were comedies, where there were happy endings, happy (or at least they were portended) marriages, happy people, whereas Whedon stories are more downbeat than Shakespearian tragedies. Yes, MacBeth dies, but someone else takes over who's not got a disintegrating marriage to psychotic wife, Julius Caesar dies but he get avenged, Ophelia goes mad and IIRC suicides (hmm, might be time for me to get some recaps on Shakespeare...) and Hamltet dies, but someone else takes over--there's continuity. They're not like the British SF disaster novels with the humanity dies off, the world ends, the universe ends (even drearier stuff than Russian Novels!): Hamlet's dead, MacBeth's dead, Othello dies, Lear's family has madness and death visit, Romeo and Juliet die, but again, there are all those survivors who survive the tragedy and go one one presumes to happied lives, sad for the loss of their departed friends/comrades/associates, but going forward with their own lives.

Exactly the opposite point was made in Gore Vidal's Kalki, a darn good book (someday, I'll read another of his--any suggestions? Or am I, as usual, at the mercy of the junk shop and the garage sale?).

SPOILER, I suppose, below

It might be a good place, while you're waiting for the spoiler, to mention that I've never watched any of Whedon's shows, that I'm aware of. I saw a couple of episodes of Buffy, and whatever the currently running series is, and I sure know a lot about it from reading what everyone else says, but while I saw the point, I missed the attraction.

Oh, yeah...there's a spoiler of sorts coming:

The lead character wonders at her emotional deadness at the loss of her husband and two children when the entire human race, except for her and four others, is wiped out. The conclusion she reaches is that the magnitude of the loss mitgated her reaction, that had (now paraphrasing from memory), say, half the human race died, the grief of the other half would be extreme, but if the whole thing is gone, well, who's left to mourn?

That was it.

One system? That's focktarded...

Thanks! That is a good idea. Right now, I'm putting the main emergency cache together in the spare closet. Then I'll put together a smaller kit for the car. If I ever get a real job with an office, I'll put together something yet smaller for that.

Even with the little I have done, I can see that portability is an issue. Best case scenario (in the midst of a worst case scenario) is that my daughter and I would be at home, or able to get there, and could load everything in the car and go. I'm trying not to obsess about how unlikely that is.

As a secondary note, it isn't always easy to find the comment by scrolling, because distinguishing the lighter blue from the darker blue is difficult unless the screen is moving slowly and the angle is just right. A different color altogether would be easier.

Silly me.

Creation is the one most like Kalki, if you like the one, you'll probably like the other.

For sf/f/alternate history fans, Messiah is his must-read. It's certainly entertaining, and gets more pertinent every day.

His history novels: Burr, Lincoln, 1876 , and several lesser works -- are extremely fun if you like that sort of thing. He has a nice angle on American history, one worth reading. (For me, the series ran out of steam after the three named.)

But Vidal's best work might be his recent essays on American politics.

**waving madly to Jennifer**

I have some extremely bad news RE a Forumite to pass on. Write when you can.

Oh, yeah...there's a spoiler of sorts coming:

The lead character wonders at her emotional deadness at the loss of her husband and two children when the entire human race, except for her and four others, is wiped out. The conclusion she reaches is that the magnitude of the loss mitgated her reaction, that had (now paraphrasing from memory), say, half the human race died, the grief of the other half would be extreme, but if the whole thing is gone, well, who's left to mourn?

That sounds like a work I am massively uninterested in reading. I burned out on Disaster Novels for the most part with the likes of Cryptozoic, The Drowning World, The Crystal World, etc. etc. etc. during the deluge of such things from British writers published in the USA by Doubleday at the end of the 1960s. I've never gone and reread any of those things since. My "adult" perspective might be different, but coming across and reading those things as a socially ostracized teenager, about people I didn't identify with (particularly not I think it was Cryptozoic) in gloom and doom and then the universe dies settings, imbued me with not wanting to read more of that sort of stuff. I had read them because that was what the local library had available(I think everyone here can comprehend "that is the SF that's available and one is a teenager so that's what one reads... these days there is a huge body of material available and rereading works that 30+ years ago didn't enthuse me, isn't an attractive concept to me.)

That book also sounds like it has a domestic home-centered female character focus, which is another extreme turnoff as regarding reading enjoyment for me. Housewives going mad etc. is a subject area I am highly averse to. The more domestic and traditional-family-centric and "homey" the setting, the more allergic I am to it as discretionary "pleasure" reading; it's not pleasurble or uplifting or interesting etc. to me generally.

That was it.

Sounds like a philosophical viewpoint along with setting and lead character that far from being attractive to me, is repellant for me. It's very anti e.g. Donne.

I bounced out of Gore Vidal books in the past
and stopped bothering to try to read them eventually.

Basically, we no longer have a bill of rights. It was good while it lasted. You can be declared an enemy combatant, and then you have no lawyer, no appeal, no nothing. The gov't doesn't have to tell anyone where you are, they can deny they have you, they can ship you off to Egypt to be tortured, they can kill you and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

This is the biggest story we have right now, in my opinion, and it's getting no attention.

Actually, the woman in question is a commercial pilot--she's ostensibly (I'll dodge another spoiler here) recruited for that reason--and the passage mentioned is the only (I think) mention of her husband, children, or home life. It's a surprisingly positive and uplifting book, as end-of-the-human-race (dodging another spoiler here) stories go.

I don't know that you'd like the book, but if you didn't, it'd be for other reasons.

(I suspect the sub-plot which comes to dominate the end of the book would tickle you. That's not a recommendation--just an observation and another spoiler dodge.)

One philosophical position of the book, I'd say, is that, in the bigger scheme of things, the human race isn't all that important, but that at scale, human suffering is terribly important.

I guess what I'm saying is that Gore Vidal wasn't really writing an end-of-the-human-race novel, but a novel mostly about other things in which the end of the human race happens.

P. S. I like Donne's thought, but I find him an annoying poet. Too compact.

Now it's old news and no one wants to cover it.

The important bit I got from the Washington Post article was "The ruling limits the president's power to detain Padilla to the duration of hostilities against al Qaeda, but the Bush administration has said that war could go on indefinitely."

The Attempted Militarization of the Jetsons.

I even remember this episode, and although I was too young to realize it, it probably shaped my views on military service in subtle ways.

Risk capital is one thing, most of it -is- risk, and investors in that market ought to understand that their investment may go totally out the door and never return a cent. But misleading investors and buyers over time, is a different issue.

Perhaps the buying companies didn't exercise "due diligence," or perhaps the information they were looking at, wasn't as accurate and impartial as it should have been....

http://www.legalcasedocs.com/120/243/500.html#item1

Finally, this quote from a guy who wrote in from Britain:

'Sucked into an interminable guerilla war in Asia, just promised to send men to the moon: is Mr Bush planning a visit to Dallas this November?'

We've been doing the "and a pony!" thing here (in my company & circle of friends) for at least 10 years now. Helps tug inflated expectations back down to earth.

Last company we started, a couple years ago, I wrote in "Pony" a little bit after "shipping" on our initial scribbled product time-line. The proper sequence, if you're wondering, is that "Pony" comes shortly after "Jacuzzi", but before "Jet-packs" and "Zamboni"! Zambonis are on the list because they are big and weird and the name sounds cool.

So bananas trump relief workers.

Mina, re. the administration's inability to keep from lying even when they name legislation: well said. I don't know a pithy way to express that, but I agree that we need one.

SciFi is advertising an about-Serenity show on Tuesday.

Verisimilitude ain't what it used to be

How the heck does Josh Marshall come to have that sort of Hollywood connection? I gotta start me a big-name blog.

That's an ... interesting ... reading of Lear. Four corpses onstage at the end and another two just off (and one of the best men left standing likely to be badly wounded, per one reading), and Albany stuck with trying to pull the mess together after his wife topped her misdeeds by killing herself? IMO, it's no wonder the stage direction at the end is for a death march. (I played Albany last year, so some of this is interpretation, but not much.)

Re raptors: I used to work at the big office building on the 128 side of Prospect Hill; I'd see a raptor rising near my window (taking advantage of thermals from the garage roof) multiple times on sunny days. And there was a red-tail, on a parking bollard near my new office, who I watched trying for a squirrel.

"Und schultert das Haupt"

it's a cheerful ending....

Lear is less downbeat that all those blasted British end of the 1960s everyone dies off/planet dies/universe dies novels!

Ah, more competence in government. Just what they really needed more of this month. (That might explain the story I heard the other day, of people sheltered in a high school after the Northridge earthquake, who were asking for something other than peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. The person telling it seemed to think they should have been grateful for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, even if that might have been all they'd had for three or four days. The thought that they might simply have wanted something different didn't get through. IMHO, probably a Republican: it's that basic meanness.)

He has a War compilation he sends to friends who contribute to The War Resisters League, too.

Let me know if you want one, and I'll put you in touch.

Here's the list:

1. Fats Domino: Walking to New Orleans
2. Champion Jack Dupree: Hometown New Orleans
3. Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, from the soundtrack of "New Orleans"(1947): Way Down Yonder in New Orleans
4.Memphis Minnie and Tennessee Slim: New Orleans Stop Time
5. Al Wynn's Gutbucket Five (1926): That Creole Band
6. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (1923): Canal Street Blues
7. Sam Morgan (1927):Bogalusa Strut
8. Louis Armstorng, Billie Holiday, from the soundtrack of "New Orleans (1947): Farewell to Storyville
9. Louis Dumaine's Jazzola Eight: Franklin Street Blues
10. Bunk Johnson (1942): New Iberia Blues (New Orleans Revival)
11. Randy Newman (1974): Louisiana 1927 (a little history)
12. Ida Cox, Lovie Austins's Blues Serenaders (1923-24): I've got the Blues for Rampart Street
13. New Orleans Wanderers (1926): Perdido Street Blues
14. Kid Thomas' Algerian Stompers (1960's): Algiers Waltz
15. Muggys Spanier's Ragtime Band (1939):Relaxin' at the Touro (local mental hospital)
16. Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers (1930): Ponchartrain Blues
17. Jelly Roll Morton (1923): New Olreans Joys
18. New Orleans Rhythm Kings (1923): Milneberg Joys
19: Piron's New Orleans Orchestra (1924): New Orleans Wiggle
20: C J Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band (1994):Jambalaya (On the Bayou).
21. Steve Riley and the Grand Mamou Playboys (1999): La Danse de Mardi Gras
22. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (2000): Li'L Liza Jane
23. The Tragically Hip (1989: they're Canadian): New Orleans is Sinking
24. Billy Holiday, from the soundtrack of "New Orleans:" Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

In yesterday's Icon supplement to the Sydney Morning Herald there's an article headed "Think Big" with a lead-in about viral marketing. According to this article the ad was initially launched as a link in an email sent to 4000 Foster's employees in July, and now "more than 2 million people around the world have used their Internet browsers and email to view [it] and pass [it] on".

'"If we come up with an engaging proposition that is creative and funny, consumers are happy to share it with their friends," [director of the ad agency] says. "It's a lot cheaper to get them to spread the message than to pay for TV ... Marketers are not in control of their brand any more, the consumer is."

Photos.

http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/112738701236470.xml?oregonian?alfssf&coll=7&thispage=2

Warning: Fonts in online version doesn't differentiate between question and answer.

There's more to Pat Tillman's death than friendly fire and shameless exploitation:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL

Noam Chomsky?!?!?!

This message is to inform you that due to recently fraud attempts that targeted our costumers, we have upgraded our internet banking system.

When you think about it, a concerted attack on cosplay could upset the global balance of payments in unforeseen ways. Imagine seeing an investor reduced to nothing but the Hello Kitty outfit s/he is wearing. A frightening thought, I know, but it gets worse if the Final Fantasy characters get involved. (The Dirty Pair, on the other hand, would probably track these people back to their secret base -- according to the non-fake URL, their secret base is in Poland -- and beat their ASCII bad.)

Recently fraud must be stopped at all costs!

What the hell kind of crack is Ann Coulter on?

I'm on the same continent.

Heck, I'm on the same planet!

Oh, you're not talking about Bush/Cheney. That's OK, then.

"The decommissioning of the arms of the IRA is now an accomplished fact," said John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who has been responsible for overseeing the decommissioning process since 1997.

Seriously, I just can't believe this one. Unless it's connected with all the news stories about the "lost dolphins." Hmmm. [scratches chin]

Plus, I've been wondering where Jonathan Vos Post is too.

This could be fun, if it weren't rather like watching any given episode of Star Trek Voyager for the 5th time...

For some of us, this is never news. It's merely a notice of change of venue.

"Doublespeak."

My reaction? Well, after being amused, I began to wonder what he had actually written, and did some digging. I had blanked on his name for a reason.

He was the perpetrator of "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". Ah, yes. The story that put me off of reading science fiction for about a decade. Right. That guy.

I'm going a bit biographical here: when I was in 9th grade, I liked sf. A lot. After running out of the ususal suspects, I stumbed upon a bunch of Hugo Award anthologies. So I proceeded to read them all, in order from oldest to newest.

Ugh. I guess I don't need to draw a picture of what happened, huh? Reading things like that as a 14 year old was...
...
I still remember which part of the route the bus was on as I read the ending.
...

Conclusion?
Well, lets just say its no accident that I like skiffy, fantasy, manga, and webcomics.
-R

According to ThinkProgress, tomorrow, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing to "discuss the role of science in environmental policy making."

Their featured witness? Michael Crichton

He has an explanation of BSE as well, so you can read that.

The things that weigh heaviest on his mind is people not getting bleach to clean the mold out of their houses, not having rooves, and the piles of food that stay in the warehouse because they can only be distributed to emergency shelters and the emergency shelter want to clear people out right away and don't want to cook. So there are all these people who are sort of back in their (roofless, moldy) homes, but without jobs, money, food, or any place to turn to. And the food just has to get moved around from one warehouse to another.

There was a question on CNN on whether America is ready for a woman president. There was a reference or two to Condi Rice's shopping right after Katrina struck (and whether or not the voting public would believe a woman as prez would be able to handle a crisis). And I realized, Rice was following the oft seen bumper sticker:

When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

In warfare, which is on the Approved Short List of Calibrations for Human Okayness, there are people who do things that are both fiercely brave and intensely thoughtful (the first without the second sometimes works and sometimes really, horribly doesn't), and there are people who lose all ability to act independently and much of the ability to act under direct command. While there are a few broad indicators of where on the scale a single individual will land, there's no infallible predictor, and every predictor based on a general classification -- race, gender, gender preference, political leanings, fondness for John Wayne movies -- has been conclusively proven worthless in practice. (Of course people still lie about all these bogus determinants. People lie about everything, especially their agendas.)

Every single human being old/competent enough to think about it wants to believe that he or she would rise to a crisis if it happened. Lots of them run through mental scenarios of what they would do if, to pick a typical example, giant Communist mud turtles crawled out of flying saucers and began eating . . . hmm, it's hard to think of a group everybody would protect, but you get the idea. Popular entertainment makes a rule of providing a character the audience can "identify with," who may be fallible and frightened but never fails in the clinch. We have all observed the recent attempts to blame absolutely anybody and anything within reach for the failure of persons who have had nothing to sell except their skill as autoharuspices, relying on their Guts O' Wisdom for infallible judgement, to do anything that did not worsen the situation.

One other point: there is a difference between failing some kind of emotional standard for a job -- falling apart under stress -- and knowing damn-all about what the job is. I think Condoleezza Rice would be a bad POTUS for the same reason I believe she is an inferior Secretary of State: she has no diplomatic background (arguably in any sense of the word), and just in case anybody forgot, the Secretary of State is the nation's highest-ranking diplomat. Her chromosome count is irrelevant. The fact that she buys shoes is irrelevant; it was the fact that she was conspicuously buying conspicuously consumptive shoes at a moment of national emergency, when anybody a sense of public presence -- Dolly the sheep, for god's sake -- would have been aware that she would be under public scrutiny, that was, to use the term, undiplomatic.

We now return you to your thread, already in progress.

Some years back - about 1990, give or take a year or so - the LA Times had a story on the giant squit of the Sea of Cortez (aka the Gulf of California). These are relatively small squid, in the 5 to 8 foot range. One of the divers was mugged by one of the squid, losing his diving watch and a neckchain to the cephalopod. (They didn't speculate on what the squid would be doing with its prizes.)

A 1946 Encyclopaedia Britannica film on how to tell if a society is tending towards despotism. Still works today.

Currently in the US it seems like all candidates have to go hunting in order to demonstrate that they love guns and would never ban them. (Such a photo-op would, of course, be a "shoot.")

Now, obviously, if a woman goes hunting it makes her "unfeminine" and unnatural, so no right-thinking person could ever vote for her. But if she doesn't go out and kill something, it proves that she has no cojones and could not possibly defend the US in these dangerous times.

Also, neither Hilary nor Condi would look good in knee-high wading boots, ammo vest and an orange hat.

(Yes, I am shouting. I cheered hearing that just announced on the TV mid-day news. DeLay has been indicted on two accounts for election law violations by a Texas grand jury.)

Oh, yes.

It looks like one count, two associates. Now the questions is, will he get off?

Fishing does seem more ladylike.

I also said "Woo-hoo!" on the DeLay thing.

Problem is, it's not altogether acceptable in most parts of the United States to fish with guns. On the other hand, where it is, it'd probably do Hillary some good. Hmm...

I'm sure it has some perfectly simurational explanation, involving defense against escaped criminals, rogue game wardens, or International Piscine Terrorists who have constructed their Secret Rebel Base* near your favorite bluegill spot. Though one also imagines an attack by a bear convinced he has eminent domain over the salmon,** or a puissant northern pike.

The principle of "with your dry flies, or on them" may also apply in certain situations. One can certainly imagine an Arthur Miller play ending with the curtain falling quickly, followed by a boom, a splash, and a Greek chorus of raucous ducks.

*This phrase loses much of its potency without Peter Cushing's rs.

**"Don' be silly, Boo-Boo! That's a Smith & Wesson, and he's, like, had his six!"

Use: Possibly putting oversized fish out of your misery? "Caution: May Not Be Effective on Giant Maneating Sharks."

I can see you might want a tackle box gun if your catfish is like the 90-pound jobs that show up occasionally in California (see Lake Irvine fishing records). The gun would probably be really useful if you hook a snapping turtle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddlefish

It does not give an idea of the length they can attain.

The American lake sturgeon has been harvested commercially, both for the fish itself and for its roe, and is supposed to be very closely comparable to the Caspian/European product, but again, that's hearsay on my part.

Eels are ugly.

Monkfish are really ugly.

And there was something really really really disgusting I saw in a fish refrigerated fresh fish section of a supermarket, on a wooden plank, called something like a black slimefish. Ick!

Are there a lot of Koreans in your area? They're big with the hagfish.

The area I live in has an increasingly large population of people from Asia, particularly India. I haven't noticed that many who are easily identifiable as Korean, though there is a Korean restaurant on Cambridge Street in Burlington (it's a couple miles north of the Readercon hotel, years ago there had been a Korean restaurant a mile from me but it closed or moved, perhaps the one in Burlington was its successor, but I've never really gone in there, something about income crashes and not eating our in restaurants except when at conventions....).

China Merchandise in Burlington carries Asian foods, including Korean, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian. There's a halal grocery store in the same strip mall, and an Indian one, and I think the Christian bookstore may still be there.

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

The slimefish I saw was in a Stop & Shop that had been in Newton on Route 9, east of route 128.

After six years together, the gay penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo have split up after a new penguin moved into the exhibit and moved in with one of the boys. [Source: New York Times]

Brokeback Penguins, anyone?

And of course, last month Nils Olav an Edinborough penguin who has been in the Norwegian military for the last thirty-some years just received his fourth promotion. He's now Colonel in Chief of the Royal Norwegian Guard and a statue has been erected in his honor. [Further links, quotes and photos @ my blog]

Meanwhile, on Serenity eve, I am finally remembering to alert y'all of the convergence of Captain Tight-Pants and the Arrogant Worms, kind of. I don't know why the Worms haven't publicized this more, but at the end of their concert DVD, their guest cameos include a lengthy spoof in which Nathan Fillion attempts to sing with them but keeps getting rebuffed by office flunkies, culminating in bluescreen karaoke.

An examination of the two swans which spend the summer at the Public Gardens in Boston, in the pond that the swan boats are on, found the reason why the eggs of "Romeo and Juliet" didn't hatch: it would be been more accurate to refer to the mated swan pair as e.g. Ramona and Juliet!

I think Mayor of Boston pointed out that Massachusetts has legal same-gender marriage, and that the swans fit in there.

Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Photos

By Greg Mitchell

Published: September 29, 2005 12:45 PM ET

NEW YORK A federal judge ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America's image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of "rape and murder" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were "blatantly sadistic."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001218842

Wow.

I've got this vision of Rove and Cheney on the White House lawn, swinging ineffectual punches and eye-jabs at each other to see who catches the Last Copter Out of Washington.

Apparently, when they chose the current pair of swans for the Boston Public Garden, somebody decided to get a pair of females because male swans were considered too aggressive for a public park. [I've dealt with a male swan up close -- they're vicious!]

Then the two set up a nest and laid eggs, and folks thought maybe they did get a breeding couple. After the eggs didn't hatch, the birds were tested and it was proven both are female.

Even more relevant than Massachusetts' recent openness to same-sex marriage, are you familiar with the term Boston marriage?

In the opera The Swan Sexer,* the eponymous Hrnstrgl** is banished from the Emperor's court for refusing to splander die Böhnen aus about the supposed mating pair in the palace's Schniegelgarten, and wanders the earth until he finds the Parliament of Curiously Designed Birds, and Lucille the Swan Babe leads all in the rousing choral "Alle Schwanen Tango tanzen, wo die heiße Sax klagt Weh" and gives him the Magic Bunny Slippers with which to return in triumph.

*"Who? What? Go away, I have a baritone pistol, and this time signature makes me unafraid to use it." -- Howard Goodall
**Popular with Vowelentferner since 1743.

When will the horrors end?

Mr. Ford, you are too funny..(but don't stop! Ever!)

What do you do for an encore? Swim home? Accompanied, no doubt, by the water moccassin, who might be, who knows, peeved and intrigued by these goings-on?

You wooden read about it, as we say in these parts.

"Moccasin."

"If you wanted Chinese food, why are we here looking for pirate treasure?"

"Stanley, we are fishing."

"Arr, fishing. I'm glad it's Talk Like an Astronaut day again."

But they do say "have fun!"

I'm a city folk who knows just enough about wilderness survival to know I don't know enough to survive long in totally wild terrain, and that's before you throw in large rocky cliffs that look like ideal territory for a puma to jump on your head. A surprising number of city folk don't even realise they don't know anything -- until someone who does know what they're doing in the wilderness emphasises it *this* clearly.

Then again, there are people for whom the words "Nobody is coming." are just the ticket. They don't want to have a park ranger, or indeed, any other human being, in shouting distance, even if it means that they're in *really* deep trouble if they break a bone. They consider that even the park owners not knowign the location of all the dangerous bits means it's wild, and that's perfect. To them, that disclaimer is sauce on the pudding.

What, and men do? Not on my planet.

The plushy microbes (see particle) have multiplied since last I saw them. Who knew syphilis was so cute?! I don't understand why HIV, hepatitis & TB are flagged as "professional", though. E. coli and salmonella are guarding their amateur status?

The chain of events you describe then occurred, substituting 4.5 metre saltwater croc for snake and observing that a .22 was just about enough to obtain his undivided attention.

http://www.kingkongmovie.com

OK. I'll be blunt: The leading man looks like a Hollywood pretty-boy wuss. He's supposed to be a hard-boiled sailor, damnit! Carl Denham isn't much better.

But . . . 1930s New York.

Oh. My. GOD.

Maybe his name is really Billy Budd?

I've found his writing an immense source of richness in my life over the years, and would like to do something to contribute. However, I'm slightly worried that this could be another scam; does anyone here have the contacts to confirm that his business manager is legitimate/aboveboard?

Near the end of The Incredibles, there are two old gents talking to each other about the ending of the big battle against the robot, saying it was "old school".

Are these guys based on particular people?

I didn't recognize them, but I can think of several possibilities, the most likely being Kirby and Lee (though Simon and Siegel would also be candidates).

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" (his master team of nine supervising animators from the "classic" era of animation), provide voices for their own caricatures near the end of the film. They also appeared in and provided the voices for the train engineers in The Iron Giant (1999) (also directed by Brad Bird. This is not the first time Pixar Animation Studios have included references to famous animators in their films (see the trivia for Monsters, Inc. (2001)).

Siegel and Shuster. Not to be confused with Simon and Schuster, the publishers, or Simony and Schuster, the religious vanity press.

Apparently it was ugly enough to put customers off coming into the shop. They were seriously thinking of moving it to the inside display counter.

I wonder about that; Canada geese are also vicious, and they infest the Boston Common. Last year I watched a tourist's little yappy dog threaten a goose with goslings nearby; we might have had yappy-dog wing-kabob if a local hadn't taken pity on the tourist and pointed out that the goose not only out-meaned but out-weighed the dog.

We were very amused to learn that Kew Gardens had imported Canada geese because they were considered ornamental. We knew geese were around long before seeing them; the dried goose poop on the walkways was a dead giveaway.

Not bad. Pretty much everything hung together. They cut out great wads of the story* without too much ill effect. This made the ending somewhat downbeat and abrupt, though.

Minor casting quibble: The guy who plays Bill Sykes was a good actor, but just not nasty enough. Sykes was a scary, scary guy. The actor was a trifle young and baby-faced. More a gangster than a sociopathic villain.

* Briefly: Everything about the hunt for Oliver' background went out the door. He was an orphan, nothing more. No further adventures of the Beadle.

I didn't go in with huge expectations. I liked the show well enough (after seeing the early episodes, broadcast late) but I'm not a fanboy.

I was _very_ pleased. They did a great job of making a stand-alone movie out of a complex TV show.

But . . . oh, man, why did the body count include familiar faces? I'm feeling bummed.

In other news, you purchase The Complete New Yorker at your peril.

And, yeah, that death was quite...unexpected. Yet another thing that separates it from the generic "action" movie.

Haven't seen Mirrormask yet. (Closest theater showing it is 50 minutes away w/o traffic.) Hopefully it will still be in theaters by the time I can get to it.

-R

I saw Mirrormask and can attest that it's well worth an hour's drive to see it in the theater. And in SF, at least, it's only playing for a week.

On the bright side, our Sean came with a widescreen TV. (houseboy, long story, if you NEED to know email me at dragonet@kc.rr.com). So when it comes out on DVD we can play it well in our living room.

A natural history of the at sign.

Reminds me of the story of the Octothorpe. (I read the origninal in Telecom Digest years ago.)

"Need to know"? One has to have a need-to-know in order to get the lowdown on the acquisition of an accessorized houseboy? Whatever is the world coming to?

Bummed didn't really begin to cover it. I actually whimpered "No!" at a couple of points during the movie.

And Mirrormask isn't even coming to my state. Hurray for DVD?

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisable, with liberty and justice for all."

The 'under God' was added during the McCarthy era. Just to show those godless communists what a righteous country we were...

BTW, the pledge as originally written was meant for any country that wanted to use it. Wish I could remember the story behind that, but it really was generic when it started!

Lori

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf

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

Because the thing is a Nasty PDF (I -hate- PDF....), I've copied and reformatted it some of it . The key paragraphs are,

"• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice."

and

" • To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement."

The former paragraph is imposing censorship by the US Government concerning what it considered to be "lawful Internet content." Who gets to decide what is and is not "lawful" there?

The latter paragraph has that undefined open-ended provision, "subject to the needs of law enforcement." Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights and freedom from searches without duly executed warrants for search and seizure?

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

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf

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

Federal Communications Commission FCC 05-151
Before the Federal Communications Commission
Washington, D.C. 20554

[snip docket numbers]

POLICY STATEMENT

Adopted: August 5, 2005 Released: September 23, 2005

By the Commission:

I. INTRODUCTION

1. The availability of the Internet has had a profound impact on American life. This network of networks has fundamentally changed the way we communicate.1 It has increased the speed of communication, the range of communicating devices and the variety of platforms over which we can send and receive information.2 As Congress has noted, “[t]he rapidly developing array of Internet . . . services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.”3 The Internet also represents “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.”4 In addition, the Internet plays an important role in the economy, as an engine for productivity growth and cost savings.5

2. In section 230(b) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (Communications Act or Act), Congress describes its national Internet policy. Specifically, Congress states that it is the policy of the United States “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet”6 and “to promote the continued development of the Internet.”7 In section 706(a) of the Act, Congress charges the Commission with “encourag[ing] the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability” – broadband – “to all Americans.”8

3. In this Policy Statement, the Commission offers guidance and insight into its approach to the Internet and broadband that is consistent with these Congressional directives.

II. DISCUSSION

4. The Communications Act charges the Commission with “regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio.”9 The Communications Act regulates telecommunications carriers, as common carriers, under Title II.10 Information service providers, “by contrast, are not subject to mandatory common-carrier regulation under Title II.”11 The Commission, however, “has jurisdiction to impose additional regulatory obligations under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction to regulate interstate and foreign communications.”12 As a result, the Commission has jurisdiction necessary to ensure that providers of telecommunications for Internet access or Internet Protocol-enabled (IP-enabled) services are operated in a neutral manner. Moreover, to ensure that broadband networks are widely deployed, open, affordable, and accessible to all consumers, the Commission adopts the following principles:

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.13

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.14

III. CONCLUSION

5. The Commission has a duty to preserve and promote the vibrant and open character of the Internet as the telecommunications marketplace enters the broadband age. To foster creation, adoption and use of Internet broadband content, applications, services and attachments, and to ensure consumers benefit from the innovation that comes from competition, the Commission will incorporate the above principles into its ongoing policymaking activities.15

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION
Marlene H. Dortch
Secretary

1 The Internet is “the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.” 47 U.S.C. § 230(f)(1). The Internet is also described as “the combination of computer facilities and electromagnetic transmission media, and related equipment and software, comprising the interconnected worldwide network of computer networks that employ the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or any successor protocol to transmit information.” 47 U.S.C. § 231(e)(3). The Supreme Court has described the Internet as a “network of interconnected computers.” National Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Services, 125 S. Ct. 2688, slip op. at 2 (2005) (NCTA v. Brand X); see also Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 849-50 (1997). No single entity controls the Internet; rather it is a “worldwide mesh or matrix of hundreds of thousands of networks, owned and operated by hundreds of thousands of people.” John S. Quarterman & Peter H. Salus, How the Internet works¸ http://www.mids.org/works.html (visited Dec. 17, 2003) (quoted at IP-Enabled Services, WC Docket No. 04-36, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, 19 FCC Rcd 4863, 4869 n.23 (2004) (IP-Enabled Services NPRM)).

[snip various Notes]

12 Id. at 3-4. We also note that the Enforcement Bureau recently entered into a consent decree to resolve an investigation with respect to the blocking of ports used for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). See Madison River LLC and Affiliated Companies, File No. EB-05-IH-0110, Order, 20 FCC Rcd 4295 (Enf. Bur. 2005).

13 See Hush-A-Phone Corp. v. United States, 238 F.2d 266, 269 (D.C. Cir. 1956); Use of the Carterfone Device in Message Toll Telephone Service, 13 FCC 2d 420 (1968).

[snip Note]

15 Accordingly, we are not adopting rules in this policy statement. The principles we adopt are subject to reasonable network management.

Also, neither Hilary nor Condi would look good in knee-high wading boots, ammo vest and an orange hat.

Kate Yule said:

What, and men do? Not on my planet.

Yes, but men are not required to look good while hunting.

CHip said:

Canada geese are also vicious

Hmm. I'm sure they can be, but I have yet to see one behaving badly, and they've infested my neighborhood too. (I still like seeing them though.)

Also, neither Hilary nor Condi would look good in knee-high wading boots, ammo vest and an orange hat.

Kate Yule said:

What, and men do? Not on my planet.

Yes, but men are not required to look good while hunting.

So why should it be required for women? [FCC-disapproved language]

CHip said:

Canada geese are also vicious

Hmm. I'm sure they can be, but I have yet to see one behaving badly, and they've infested my neighborhood too. (I still like seeing them though.)

My mother remembered being terrorized by a goose on a relative's farm decades and decades later.

Canada geese, however, was swim off when pecked at by a swan.

[Stimpy Voice]
Joy!
[/Stimpy Voice]

From:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100300190.html

"Texas Grand Jury Indicts DeLay for Money Laundering

The Associated Press
Monday, October 3, 2005; 5:59 PM

AUSTIN, Texas -- A Texas grand jury indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on a new charge of money laundering Monday, less than a week after another grand jury leveled a conspiracy charge that forced DeLay to temporarily step down as House majority leader."

(This is a NEW charge . . . in ADDITION to last week's conspiracy rap! Like I said . . . Joy!)

Our office moved, the new building is beautiful but has a goose-infested lake. Who waddle across the sidewalks to get to the grass. EEEEUUW. Yikes. We did have to have a goose massacre at our zoo a couple off years ago because they were carrying diseases to the captive fowl. And bullying the guests.

Ah, so it's the cat's doing. Got it.

I used to take walks around an abandoned salt evaporator east of Redwood City. Loads of birds in the wetlands surrounding the place. The Canadian Geese stayed away from the place, which was a relief.

I have heard of geese being kept as watch-er-critters, instead of dogs.

How come we stopped talking about Tom DeLay and started talking about livestock?

Better not answer that one either.

Mr. Holmes, they were the tentacles of a Giant Squid!! (Gasp. All faw down.)

David: I never heard of jay nomenclature being blue vs. Stellar's. We always called them all blue jays and specified "California" or "Scrub" vs. "Stellar's." But we all know how it is with names.

And I can't get anybody to agree with me that the Stellar's jays (pointy heads, for those without a program to consult) seem to come in different-colored demographics. Populations, or sexes, or something. The bird books seem to think I am hallucinating. But it does seem there are some who are nearly black, and some who are much bluer, and it also seems as if the angle of the light does not account for everything.

I know they're supposed to not live in the same spots exactly, but in Santa Cruz they seem to overlap a great deal. I mean down to the same tree, though I can't swear they're making the same use of the tree.

Hey, did I say I have seen hummingbirds harried by insects twice in the last few weeks? Once by a butterfly, and once by a yellowjacket. Just like the blackbirds harry the crows, and the kestrels harry the hawks. The butterfly was chasing the hummingbird away from a patch of . . . I think it was valerian, but I'm not sure I remember what flower it was. The yellowjacket was chasing the other hummingbird away from a hummingbird feeder (not mine, I have no need of one since I have many fuschias and salvias and the neighbor planted bottlebrush, passion flowers, princess flowers, and honeysuckle. Hummingbird paradise all year round).

Happy New Year.

Lake Merritt is rife with egrets (large and small), herons, cormorants, gulls, scaups, ducks, and pelicans - so neat to see those pterodactyl-like silhouettes circling above the lake during their hunting times.

Oh, and Canada geese. Bunches and bunches of Canada geese, many of them year-round. They don't seem terribly aggressive, though, although they do leave droppings EVERYWHERE. This spring, one of the domestic geese seemed to have adopted a small group of Canada geese. I could almost hear it saying, "Yeah, these are my country cousins, visiting from out of town. I'm looking after them to keep them out of trouble."

Memorable bird-watching moment: in Sepulveda Basin, in a eucalyptus, red-tailed hawk being harassed by a kestrel; the kestrel is flying oddly, and through binoculars, it's seen to have a hummer harassing it. The kestrel left first.

(Sepulveda Basin has a wildlife area which has a nice variety of birds due to creek, meadow, trees, and lake: the white pelicans are showing up for the winter at this time. The geese will mostly come next month.)

With petrol the way it's going, one hopes they'll be extinguished rapidly; otherwise I can imagine them mutating into a Mad Max (Road Warrior) style of vehicle, and harrassing a lot more than kestrels.