6c. water
4 Tbsp. spread or margarine
1/4 c. milk

What on earth is 'spread' in this context? Something like the English 'dripping'?

I'm using butter just to spite them.

I've just followed the particles link to "The Way We Wish We Were" which leads to an Amazon book preview. I got distracted when I noticed that the bulk of the descender on every 'y' and to an extent on the 'g's as well has been clipped.

It would be hard to think of anything less important to say, but it's early in the life of an open thread and it's bugging me, so there you are.

On a related note, if I were following a US recipe that called for "half-and-half", what would that be a reference to?

What on earth is 'spread' in this context? Something like the English 'dripping'?

"Spread" is a product functionally similar to margarine, made as far as I know from vegetable oil, that somehow doesn't meet the technical definition of "margarine".

Butter is a fine idea, as long as you accompany it with some red wine to counteract the effects of the cholesterol. You are already showing your relative good taste by using real Kraft M&C instead of the generic equivalent.

Probably the dairy product that is half milk and half cream, used in coffee, etc., as a lower-fat alternative to cream.

And don't get me started on Vileveeta, which is now being sold for its melting qualities, which it shares with paraffin wax.

Half-and-half is the dairy product that some Americans put into their coffee. Heavier than milk, lighter than cream.

So you use half cream, half milk you'd be just right.

Although for some recipes you can get away with just milk if you don't have cream. Or use all cream if you don't feel like fussing with adding the milk. Depends upon the recipe, really, as to what you can get away with as far as substitutions.

http://www.nypress.com/18/48/news&columns/RobertClarkYoung.cfm

I'll say it again; I think most plaigiarists are habitual plagiarists; we just don't catch them the first few times.

A rough table of US butterfat content in dairy products, with some comparisons in brackets:

whole milk: 3.5% butterfat
half-and-half: 11% butterfat
light cream: 18% butterfat, though the rules say between 18 and 30%.
[single cream, UK]: 20% butterfat
light whipping cream: 30-36% butterfat.
heavy cream: 36% butterfat (or more, in theory)
[double cream, UK]: 48% butterfat. Or more.
butter (US): 80% butterfat
butter (European style): 85-90% butterfat

If anyone could tell me of a US source for double cream, I'd be deeply grateful.

I haven't been able to find a reference for this, but I have found a number of "history of margarine" sites which discuss the dairy lobby's fight against margarine and the fact that yellow margarine was illegal in many states. The manufacturers sold little bags of dye for people to knead into it, to get around the restrictions. It also led to a trade in bootleg colored margarine.

Margarine (or oleomargarine) is the food in plastic form or liquid emulsion, containing not less than 80 percent fat determined by the method prescribed in ``Official Methods of Analysis of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists,'' 13th Ed. (1980), section 16.206, ``Indirect Method,'' under the heading ``Fat (47)--Official Final Action,'' which is incorporated by reference.

Fat-free half-n-half

and

Fat-free buttermilk

Say What? I thought the whole purpose of buttermilk was to have fat in your milk. Not to mention the reason behind half-n-half is to have cream (fat) in your what-evers. *ghak*

Now they sell commercial versions. But for the authentic stuff, you have to make it yourself.

When Captain America throws his mighty shield,
All those who oppose him must yield...

Anybody remembers the rest?

But since it's so short:

When Captain America throws his mighty shield,
All those who chose oppose his shield must yield.

If he's lead to a fight and a duel is due,
Then the red and white and the blue'll come through.

When Captain America throws his mighty shield.

Axly, I think buttermilk is innately low-fat - it's what you have after you've churned the butter out of milk or cream.

I hadn't realized it's also fermented, so it's lower in sugar than regular milk.

http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/BUTTERMILK.HTM

Well, here in NYC, Dean & Deluca. Or Garden of Eden. Or the Whole Foods chain, which is also present in plenty of other US cities.

There's a reason they call us Decadent Cosmopolitans.

My sister and I have pondered this question in a slightly different form that's probably the result of too much Gilbert and Sullivan: "What's the other half?"

We're convinced it's clowns. Or unobtainium.

Jonathan Shaw: My aunt must have been telling the truth because soon after that she joined the Carmelites and hasn't been seen outside the wall since.

If you'd like specific references, here's one of the repealed Canadian statues, which includes a Misleading Advertising section. As for the States, there's a surprisingly large body of constitutional interpretation relating to dairy and pseudo-dairy products. From a case decided in 1902: "And it was further forbidden, in the marking, to use any words or combination of words indicating that the article was either butter, cream, or dairy product. This statute is compiled in Bates's Annotated Statutes of Ohio, 4200-30." (link)

I'm assuming the specific advertising limitations I'm thinking of were at a state level rather than Federal, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt their existance, especially given the exciting history of the dairy lobby's long fight against artificial butter-like substances. These are the people who managed to get states to pass laws requiring that margarine be dyed pink, after all.

Later on during our renfaire I mentioned to a friend that all our aches, pains and minor allergy ills seemed to get all better over there and she said, 'well, you were eating better whether you knew it or not, not as many additives, hormones or chemicals." I do know just about everything was tastier, and it was easier to get a 6+ lb chicken to roast (for whatever reason, here you have to pay a very sincere premium to buy a chicken bigger than 4-5 lbs. and that's not big enough to do anything other than roast or divide and fry/saute).

I'm now wondering if it's possible to substitute the Aqueous Cream I use on my psoriasis. This emollient is largely paraffin-based (Liquid paraffin and White Soft paraffin).

After all, it is a spread. I spread it on my skin.

Bonus to using Velveeta, or other Processed Cheese Food product:

Neighborhood dogs attracted by the smell will give you free tongue therapy.

* * *

Somewhere in the back of the pantry is a plastic tray and cover specifically designed to hold a loaf of Velveeta. I should probably put it on eBay as a valuable collectable.

When Cook's Illustrated did a taste test, nobody could detect ANY taste difference between the two, nor did they find that either was particularly easier to whip up. Whipping cream was somewhat more stable at room temperature, and took longer to "break" -- if you store whipped heavy cream for several days, it starts weeping, and whipped whipping cream takes longer -- but, have you EVER in your life had fresh whipped cream stay around for days?

I tend to use whipping cream more than heavy cream, mainly because that's what Costco sells in bulk, but they're mostly interchangable. I guess if you're grossed out by eating seaweed stabilizers, you might want to stick to the heavy cream, but it really doesn't matter.

As to why the cream didn't whip up -- no clue whatsoever. Someone put light cream in the carton by accident?

Paula Helm Murray: I have incredible memories of the cream I got in Raglan, at the farmers' cooperative store, with a date of manufacture the day before I bought it. It was too thick to pour, and a lovely pale yellow. And I concur absolutely with your thoughts on renting a flat even for short vacations.

G. Jules: Alas, Trader Joe's doesn't have double cream, not here at least. I'll check out the Normandy butter, though.

debcha: My last trip to the Whole Foods dairy section revealed that the whipping cream there was somewhat lower in butterfat than the heavy cream. My best guess as to the source of your problems is cream without enough butterfat. Also -- you might check whether your carton is ultra-pasteurized or just pasteurized. The "ultra" process normally denatures some stuff that stabilizes whipped cream; if their equipment overcooked it a bit, that could make the difference between whippable and not.

TexAnne: Try searching on "Phrygian cap" or "Liberty bonnet". IIRC, the originals were sewn felt.

And a knitting pattern for an American Girl doll here.

How's that?

Is this comparable to the backwards-baseball-cap of our era? When did the switcheroo take place?

Modern buttermilk is a cultured milk product and can be made at any fat level but the most common are fat-free and low-fat (1%).

Kylee - Acidulating soy milk (or spy milk if you prefer, since it can be a clandestine product) clabbers the soy milk the same way it would with regular milk. Cook's Illustrated suggests that this works better for pancakes than using buttermilk. If I were eating pancakes these days, I'd skip both and use slightly acidulated Kefir.

Interestingly, I've only just found a brand of soy milk I actually like, Organic Valley. Yum - not beaney at all.

Which inevitably reminds me of the novelty song with state names, which included gems like: "What did Delaware boys, what did Delaware?" "She wore a brand New Jersey." And "why did California you?" "She phoned to say Hawaii."

All the images I've ever seen from antiquity have it with the peak forward. Unless like the coin to commemorate the assassination of Caesar, they don't have a peak at all.

I have the Perry Como version. Some of the links are tenuous, to say the least. I guess some here might also be amused by John Linnell's State Songs. The TMBG constituency must overlap somewhere (besides in me) with the Peter Blegvad constituency.

Don't mind me, I just suddenly got excited about posting links.

Clotted cream is made, apparently, by heating very high fat content cream to about 190° F (88 C) and letting it cool slowly. It forms a rich yellow crust over a treacle-thick bottom layer. It's best eaten with jam over scones, or poured over fresh berries.

Just thought you all should know.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

However, and unfortunately, clotted cream of any respectable quality is basically unavailable in the US. They sell this stuff in jars that is disappointing in the extreme. And those of us wanting to make it at home (quite easy, actually) have to find a source of unpasteurized cream (not so easy, and in some states illegal).

Or we can settle for making it with pasteurized cream, if you can find a source of heavy or double cream without stabilizers in it; it's just not quite as nice a texture and you don't get that golden crust. In any case it makes the house smell like a dairy.

I've taken to simply importing it, wrapped with ice packs in a cooler for the flight, whenever we make a trip to the isles. Anticipation makes it taste four times as good as usual.

Film director Nina Grünfeld simply thinks the rags-to-riches story of JK Rowling is too good to be true.

Writing in a commentary in Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's cultural pages this week, she questioned whether it's really possible for Rowling to have been the sole creative force behind what's become an international book and movie empire.

(I'm sorry. Nausea has that effect on me.)

And at once I thought: "fishtins!" That was the catchword at the UK Milford conference where one of the MSS had been run off on some nasty 9-pin matrix printer, and Richard Cowper constructed a vast, spurious theory of a post-holocaust background to the story -- because although the technology was otherwise Dark Ages, some character got injured by fishtins.

(The printer didn't do descenders for letters like "g", making it fatally easy to misread "fighting". Indeed it was a sruellins strussle to read that text at all.)

Dave

And this from something that starts with a scene from Bergman's The Seventh Seal and, near the end, announces that "...Max Born, Nobel laureate in physics and one of Albert Einstein's closes friends, was the grandfather of the pop star Olivia Newton-John..."

At age 44 I have just started on my associate's degree to become a Physical Therapist Assistant. This involves taking anatomy, medical terminology, etc. etc. and has introduced me to the joys of Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, possibly the best 20 bucks I ever spent. (I should explain that I'm one of those people who knew about hypertext long before the Web--I go to look up a word in the dictionary and half an hour later I'm still chasing references around in circles, having long forgotten what I was originally looking for.)

At any rate, so far I have discovered the following delightful nuggets:

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine: an abnormally strong startle reflex, believed to be of genetic origin, and common in the French-descended population of the state of Maine. ("Mrs. Jones, we believe your husband has Jumping Frenchmen of Maine.")

Lover's fracture: fracture of the calcaneus (heel bone) such as might be caused by jumping from a balcony or second-story window.

Koro: the folk belief in some Asian cultures that one's penis can completely retract into the body, causing death. (A related belief in some parts of Africa holds that sorcerers can steal someone's penis. Pointing out that the alleged victim still has his penis does no good, as obviously the sorcerer has stuck it back on as soon as the accusation was made.)

Former Canadian defense minister wants talks on political relations with extraterrestrials, as he is afraid President Bush will start a war with them:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20051124/bs_prweb/prweb314382_1

My old machine always clips off the descenders for e-mailers at this site -- thus, the comment about the problem came from "Steve Tavlor".

As to all those kinds of cream: geez, isn't anyone else around here lactose-intolerant? Mom finally got me to try Brummel & Brown Spread, and it's much better than the thick soy-based stuff that refuses to melt, in terms of both texture and taste. I can still drink non-fat lattes and Mom loves buttermilk, so evidently it's the fat that gets us now. But I happily pig out on coffee yogurt and the occasional warmed cup of chocolate soy milk ('tis the season)!

That guy was Canada's Defense Minister, Lila? Well, you know, he might have been on to something. The StarGate is supposed to be in Colorado, but it sure looked like British Columbia to me.

Wow! I think you're only other person I've met who's milk-fat intolerant, rather than milk-sugar intolerant. It's been a constant source of curiosuty in my group of friends how it is that regular non-fat milk doesn't bother me at all, but I can't drink more than about half a cup of 2% lactaid without reacting. I wonder if there's a name for that, since "lactose-intolerant" doesn't exactly seem accurate?

I still cook with real butter though, and European butter when I can get it. Margarine, yech.

On clotted cream generally, I offer this tidbit from Alan Davidson's eminently browsable The Oxford Companion to Food:

"In Devon and Cornwall there was a traditional practice, barely surviving at the end of the 20th century, of making butter from clotted cream. The dairymaid would stir the cream with her forearm until the butter was formed."

Yum. No word, though, on how long the dairymaid was up to her elbows in cream.

Faren: Think of this as an outpouring of talk on a normally forbidden subject: butterfat. I once, preparing to make a big batch of puff pastry, went through a Whole Foods with nothing but nine pounds of butter in my basket. Parents actually blenched and pulled their children away from me, as if I might contaminate them by proximity.

I'd just like to say that people like her give stupid a bad name in so many ways.

1. The idea is, presumably, you get better writing by committee?
2. Asimov wrote 400-plus books in 60-ish years. Conspiracy! (the Potter books are, roughly, fifteen NaNoWriMos by my estimate; I'm sure a professional can give a better estimate.)
3. "I can't do this, therefore nobody can" is a thought process that should be strongly discouraged. Especially when applied to acts of intelligence.

And I must admit to being intrigued by Capgras' Syndrome - the belief that a close friend, relative or spouse has been abducted and replaced with an exact duplicate.

On a sort of related fat laden thought...I miss eating grimenes (fried chicken fat and onions). I still make my grandmother's chopped liver recipe but only on special occasions (no longer for every Shabbat) as it really is quite unhealthy.

Yes--even worse than this is Capgras' Hypochondria: the belief that you have been cured of Capgras' Syndrome, but now have a different disease with an exactly indentical set of symptoms.

Worls for Snape, I gather.

Does anyone know of a cheese that has a higher fat content than Boursin's 70%?

This is something that irks me almost as much as the metonymy of "September 11th" for the terrorist attacks on Manhattan and Washington; UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object." Technically, if you can't tell what something in the sky is, it is a UFO to you. So if you can't tell that it's an airplane, an airplane flying over your head *is* a UFO.

You know, sometimes I hear about books that contain "explicit" or "graphic" language. I get a little excited, sometimes, when I do, because I think, "Great. A writer who writes clearly, and precisely."
Alas, that is usually not what is meant. Mostly, it just means lots of "f-bombs" (does MakingLight refrain from profanity?). Which, while versatile, perhaps, is often not precise. Or explicit.

(I'm really not a pedant, I swear)

As for people who in those days managed to sneak a few ones past the censors, Billy Wilder seemed to be good at that. There was a scene in Some Like It Hot where a man trying to flirt with Jack Lemon who's in drag and playing the cello. The man asks 'her' if she prefers plucking her instrument, and Lemon responds that 'she' prefers slapping it.

Yes, and what really makes me livid is when people refer to the "metric system", when they mean the International System of Units.

I mean, every system of measurement is a metric system, right? Some metric systems employ grams, some employ ounces. A system of measurement that employs inches and feet is a metric system too!

And I'm sure I'm not a pedant either.

Link

That is all.
-r.

I've never had any trouble importing the stuff. Clotted cream is neither meat nor vegetable, which seems to be what gets them all hot and bothered in the food realm.

Then again, I've never been given the body-cavity search coming in from the UK. I do have to unwrap and explain the package before boarding the plane (the perils of an Islamic name, you know), but so far nobody on either end has had anything to say other than that they love the stuff on scones.

geez, isn't anyone else around here lactose-intolerant?

I am. But some things are worth being a bit unwell over.

BTW - I'd call fat-free, sugar-free fudge "sludge", which might offer an insight as to its origin.

When he was still working as a salesman in Wisconsin, depending on which client he was visiting, he would stop a different cheese factory. He once got a brick cheese that was so sharp, he had to stop the car and put it in the trunk because of the odor. It was yummy!

Anyways, there was one cheese factory where you could take your own jar in and get a quart of "cream" for $1. It was so thick that you could turn the jar upside down and it wouldn't come out. He would make the most amazing french silk chocolate ice-cream out of it (excuse me while I clean the saliva off of my keyboard).

Sadly, in the last two years I've come over all lactose-intolerant, so no more mega-rich dairy desserts for me. ...SOB... I keep begging for my wife to put me out of my misery, but she keeps finding things around the house that need doing...

John

It also makes a good base for "homemade" salsa, if you don't have the time and inclination to cut up a lot of fresh ingredients. I've made several batches with it, to generally as good a response as the all-fresh ingredient varieties.

Serge: you remind me that I need to buy that movie. I've never seen it, but my local drugstores often have the DVD for ten bucks. I'd be willing to wager it's money better spent than the four bucks I spend on... well. I don't remember the last movie I rented, but I'd probably enjoy "Some Like it Hot" more (although, I didn't enjoy "The Apartment" all that much. And that was Wilder, too, I believe).

Um...I hate to disagree with you, but...like me, you are a pedant. You can be a recovering pedant if you like...I'll keep you apprised (not "appraised"!) of upcoming meetings of PA.

Look, we shorten everything and use metonymy. That's the way it is. 'The attacks of September 11, 2001' is too long a phrase to say over and over. 'Nine-eleven' has become the pronunciation used by most. If you think you're irritated by that, ask someone whose birthday is on that date!

People who say "Technically,..." are almost always pedants. Yes, I know, me too! You're making the primary error that smart people make with regard to language: confusing a word's etymology with its meaning. Not the same thing at all, for most words. This is because linguistic change is going too fast for you, and you liked the way things were before they changed.

If I haven't made it clear, I share this issue.

The word UFO (now pronounced /yuwefó/; the former pronunciation /yúwfo/ appears to be obsolete) originally meant "Unidentified Flying Object." I believe the military now calls that a "Bogie" (correct me if I'm wrong, someone). And individual identification ability was never the meaning AFAIK; it meant unidentified by anyone (at least anyone in communication with the speaker). At any rate, it now means an alien spaceship. The expansion of the acronym is only of historical interest at this point.

I have a friend who likes to point out that the Beatles song "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" has explicit lyrics; the narrator indicates precisely what he means to say (and do). She, too, is a pedant, but at least in her case (and increasingly in mine and, I hope, yours) a pedant for amusement only; she doesn't insist on the literal, broader interpretation.

'Explicit' now means "explicitly sexual," if you use it without explanation or context, and for certain uses. Thus an "explicit novel" has the sexual meaning, whereas "explicit directions to the theatre" does not -- even if the play is an "explicit play"!

A couple of linguistic facts (you won't like them, but I don't like the fact that the speed of light is so damned slow either):

One, words change their meanings and forms over time. The general becomes specific, the specific becomes general, short words fill in for longer phrases. There is no fighting this, however little we (you and I and all the other persons afflicted with the heartbreak of pedantry) may like it. It's a force of nature.

Two, the dictionary definition of a word is at best the tip of a very large iceberg; its usage is generally much more complex than can be captured in such a document. The true meaning of a word is what is understood when the word is said. Just as the two southern boys I've been arguing with lately can't fly the Confederate flag without racist meaning (even though they themselves are not actually racist) you cannot cause the word 'explicit' to mean only 'clear and precise'.

No natural language has semantics that simple, and English is worse than most.

See you at the next PA meeting!

A quick google reveals this, a complete listing of all Haddock insults. I love the internet.

I went to school in Montreal, and I have a gut feel for any temperature in C between 10 and -40, but above 10 C I have to do the math. I guess it's really a matter of familiarity.

That got me wondering if this was such a hot idea. And THAT got me realizing that I don't know if all human cultures see tongue-sticking as a dismissive gesture. After all, not all human cultures think that kissing on the mouth is OK.

True, chimps do it.

Still, I wonder about the universality of tongue-sticking. And why it means what it means to primates.

"Blistering barnacles!"

Yes, ajay, I'd say the translations accurately captured Captain Haddock's favorite mode of expression.

Ayse: Thanks for the tip. Next time I'm headed to the UK, I'll bring a cooler.

Dan R.: I think Explorateur runs about 80%. Hmm...another quick check with the ever-useful Oxford Guide to Food: they say 75%. Yummy, in any case; and small enough that a small group can buy one whole and use it up before it goes bad.

Dan R. again: Fast food focuses on salt and fat because they're the cheapest means of adding or carrying flavor. Some budding epicures insist that taste has been bred or processed (or both) out of modern foodstuffs, leading to fat and salt overdoses. Those epicures are often in the awkward position of insisting that something they've never tasted is better than anything they have. I take their views with a big dose of research and, of course, a grain of salt. (That's 64.8 mg, for you SI buffs). I have a whole list of books on this kind of thing, if anybody's interested.

Dan R. yet again, re health food: One of my objections to most food movements is the idea, explicit or implicit, that if food tastes good, it must be bad for you. For instance, the Laurel's Kitchen strand of vegetarianism is pretty much explicit about bland food being the aim, for health and spiritual reasons both, of their cookbook (check the introduction for details). I keep my copy around as a cautionary tale.

John Peacock: Sounds like double cream to me. I feel for you, particularly with such a history of wonderful dairy experiences. If lactose per se is your enemy, you may have some luck with lactase tablets. Lara has had good luck with them in the past. Also, in theory, thicker the cream will have much less lactose than milk, as it's displaced by all that butterfat. (Of course, it's also richer and therefore harder to digest...)

My mother's view was that if a meal looked good and tasted good, it probably was good for you. No, we didn't do rich desserts all the time - but there usually was a dessert, even if it was just cookies. (Home-made ice cream was high on our list, but cranking the freezer was work.) Bland was not part of it, except perhaps as contrast to something with lots of flavor (rice or mashed potatoes with something spicy, frex.)

I'm all for changes in the language. It's important, and English is perhaps the most fluid of all. It creates some inherently odd exceptions ("stride" becomes "strode," so why doesn't "glide" become "glode" or "slide" become "slode"?), but, honestly, breaking exceptions like that interests me. Excites me. It's *fun* to make the language work in interesting and novel ways.

I understand how things take on different meanings (the greatest example I can think of is the swastika). Yes, of course, change happens over time.
But change does not occur by singular instance; it requires agreement, does it not? It *is* possible to quash it when necessary. And I think "September 11th" is necessary quashing. Unless we're just going to start referring to everything by dates. So FEMA dropped the ball on August 29th (er. That was when Katrina made landfall, wasn't it?), and Oswald acted alone on November 22nd.

Interested!

Titles, authors, ISBNs or Amazon links are all appropriate.

One way to use the tongue-out is with a loud, definite intake of air as a respectful greeting, impolying that you're making sure that none of your inferior-status cooties get on the person you're greeting and whose superior status you are reinforcing.

Another way is to combine it with wide rolling eyes and aggressive posture which does not dismiss the audience but does inform them that you are tough and in ceremonial mode.

Another is to be presenting the tongue for bloodletting, also cermeonial, and it implies that the person you are with is equal in stature to you and you are both rather elite to be participating in this very important world-balancing and restoring sacrifice (Central America).

Another way to use it, this in Western cultures, is with wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and spread arms and hands, and it is a gesture of surprise: if there is a very wide gaping smile, it's pleased surprise, and if the mouth is in an O it's alarmed surprise, and if the mouth is pursed up at top, it's frightened or disgusted surprise.

The tongue is a very versatile and flexible thing, in communication as well as in other functions.

(PA, Xopher?)

This is all very circular.

I actually think that the reason that so many cultures have a hands-touching greeting is because it's an obvious thing to do, being that our hands are the outermost thing that easily touches things, and are sensitive, so there's a positive message. And I think the shake is a matter of style.

But that's just what I think. I think that when it comes to a lot of behavior things, we often over-explain things. Like the people who do prettiness studies which purport to prove there's an evolutionary explanation for the researcher's favorite haircut.

My Momma told me, not to play with you,
Not because you're dirty, not because you're clean,
But because you caught the whooping cough,
From eating mar-ga-reen!

Remember, remember, the 5th of November...

Some things *do* get remembered by date, since it is just too unwieldy to talk about "the failed plot against Parliament and the King for which Guy Fawkes was arrested and hanged". The reason 9/11 became popular, I suspect, is that a bunch of simultaneous actions is pretty hard to summarise except by the date they have in common. We talk about the (previous) World Trade Center bombing, but "the 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon" is just too awkward, and to focus on the WTC misses out a big chunk of the subject. Of course, 9/11 bothers me because, being British, I have to keep reminding myself that it doesn't refer to the 9th of November.

This kind of date thing seems common in continental Europe, too. In Italy every city has streets named after dates, Via Settembre XX or the like. I can't remember exactly what they all were, or referred to. Probably dates in the struggles against fascism and capitalism, seeing as I was living in Bologna and walking along Via Stalingrado and Viale Lenin.

State songs (though nobody's interested): there was a John Linnell live show at which he played what apparently used to be the offical state song of Maryland, with the lyrics:

(to the tune of O Tannenbaum, or the Red Flag)

The tyrant's heel is on thy shore
Maryland, my Maryland.
His torch is at thy temple door
Maryland, my Maryland.
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore
And be the battle-queen of yore,
Maryland, my Maryland.

Supposedly the tyrant was Abraham Lincoln. Is this true? I suppose I should check Snopes.

Asda (the UK flavour of Wal-Mart) is ordering in "Mr and Mr" and "Mrs and Mrs" wedding cards. The Times has added a Civil Partnerships column to its Births, Deaths and Marriages section. My large corporate employer has revised all its forms to change "Married" to "Married or Civil Partner" and all related changes.

And civilisatiion has yet to fall. Fancy that.

I remember hearing both pronunciations, up until the live-action Gerry Anderson series "UFO" aired on TV. The TV show was unambiguously pronounced "You Eff Oh," and I never heard the "yoofo" pronunciation after that except from old-timers. I'm pretty confident that Gerry Anderson killed the "yoofo" pronunciation.

There are some other SF-related terms that underwent pronunciation changes between 1960 and 1970 that I've always wondered about:

1) Mechanical men were called "RObəts* fairly consistently up through the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, that pronunciation had disappeared.** Was it because of the popularity of Robbie the Robot?

2) Radiation-challenged humans used to be called "mute ants." I can attest to Peter Cushing and Vincent Price using the "mute-ant" pronunciation as late as 1969 on a BBC radio series. It was a common pronunciation on X Minus One and 2000 Plus. Any idea what triggered the transition to "MYOO-tənt"?

3) I have one old radio show where a non-pigmented person is referred to as an "al-BEE-no." I've no idea whether that was a once-common pronunciation, or a one-time gaff by a radio actor.

*Do you see a box or a schwa? It should be a schwa. I see a box here, even though I see a schwa when I use ə on other websites using Explorer.

**My favorite detail on Futurama: All the really old people (e.g., Professor Farnsworth and his contemporaries) pronounce it "RObət," as though it were an age-related pronunciation.

He's an avid "Dungeons and Dragons" player.

As strange as that sounds, hearing it didn't surprise as much as learning that Bruce Sterling was once a D&D player, and reportedly ran a awesomely good campaign. (He ditched it all when his first novel was published.)

By my recollection, the two-syllable pronunciation of the initialism "UFO" was never the standard; I vaguely recall a magazine article on True Believers that observed that they used it, and it's possible that it was created as a sign that you were a True Believer. I don't believe any of the Fifties documentaries used it. (Of course, The Typical American in the Street Because He Was Looking for Approaching Soviet Bombers was still calling them Flying Saucers.*

After all, the thing that differentiates an initialism from an acronym is that the second is readily pronounceable; people don't call the FBI "the Fubby," unless they're trying to make a joke.

*pron. "FLINEsossers."

Which in turn reminds me of a hilarious book by Afferbeck Lauder (Pseud.) called "Let Stalk Strine." It's a compilation of Aussie slang, including such gems as "Emma Chisit" and "Gloria Soame." (You gotta say 'em to get the flavor.)

There are certainly such things as food-Luddites out there, but there is also such a thing as decades of breeding plants for ease of production and shipping, size/color uniformity, disease resistance and other qualities that have nothing to do with taste or nutritional value.

I offer this experimental protocol: Procure slices of two watermelons: one Moon and Stars (preferably the pink-fleshed variety) and one Charleston Gray (pretty much the default commercial variety, and a parent of most newer varieties). Chill to 50 degrees F. Taste.

Do a similar comparison between tomatoes at 78 degrees F: one slice of Better Boy and one slice of Brandywine. You could try Better Boy vs. Purple Calabash, but you'd have to blindfold the taste tester because Purple Calabash is the color of raw beef liver.

I have grown both Moon and Stars watermelons and Purple Calabash tomatoes, and the difference between these varieties, freshly grown and picked ripe, and the stuff you get at the supermarket is like the difference between canned peaches and fresh peaches.

Well, that's the way I've always pronounced the word. And it's how the Compact OED suggests pronouncing it too, so I suspect it's standard in the UK.

And, a personal plea here, how can I get hold of this good-tasting watermelon? Can they be bought? I live in an apartment with no garden, so I can't grow them.

I really miss the Flavr Saver genetically engineered tomato, which tasted garden-ripe when bought from the supermarket. Alas.

As for peaches, your comparison could work in either direction, depending on whether the 'fresh' peaches are grocery store or tree-ripened. I'd rather eat the label on the can than those little furry boulders. But I'd walk five miles each way to get ripe peaches. If I could get ripe peaches; the growers around here won't leave them on the trees that long.

It turns out that I didn't have a list, not written anyway; and without annotation, a list would be sort of pointless. So, a few cups of tea (Ceylon, from Upton Tea) later:

Bear in mind that food writing in general, at least in the English language, seems to be pretty much exempt from fact-checking of even the most basic sort. Food history is a more scholarly pursuit, but no craft hall board of auditors keeps food writers from savaging food history. Or food historians from producing lousy, if perhaps authentic, recipes.

Scholarly material on food and food history:

The Oxford Companion to Food, by Alan Davidson. A scholar's work. You may find errors, but you'll have to work at it. If you like this, there is a related periodical,

Petits Propos Culinaires. This journal, originally founded by Alan Davidson more or less so that Richard Olney could work original recipes into a Time-Life cooking series, is your source for material such as the botanical identity of 'bird pepper'; the history of beer in Ireland; or the origin of Bakewell Tart.

Books decrying the decline of the table, American and otherwise:

1. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, by Elizabeth David. Collected essays, most previously published as short magazine pieces. If you're dipping in for vitriol, try "Big, Bad Bramleys", "Secrets", "Eating Out in Provincial France, 1965-1977", or especially "Letting Well Alone". If you'd prefer a milder flavor, "The True Emulsion", "Having Crossed The Channel", or "'I'll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon'" will give you a gentler taste. David may have pioneered the 'grumpy gourmet' style of writing.

2. Taste of America, by John and Karen Hess. John Hess spent one highly controversial year as the food editor of the New York Times. The Hess style is a sort of take-no-prisoners charge into the subject matter, but at least they do their research. They take obvious glee in savaging Craig Claiborne and James Beard, but they're careful of their ground and present their cases well. Note that even the Hesses focus on the best of the past, often contrasted with the median of the present. So you get Thomas Jefferson's garden versus supermarket lettuce. Also, this was published in the early 1970's, so you'll have to make allowances for the passing decades.

3. Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. It's been a while since I've read this one, but my recollection is that the reportage was reasonably accurate, if negative in tone. The book was certainly much better than the hype surrounding it.

4. Last Chance to Eat, by Gina Mallet. This book is tragic. It could have been a really good book at least two ways: as an examination of the quality of modern food, or as a memoir of growing up in interwar Britain in an upper-upper-middle-class family with an affinity for food. Sadly, it isn't a good book at all, though many people in food-blog-land love it. If you read this book, take notes or something so you can follow the unsupported assertions, and see how the facts the author marshals undermine her own attitudes, without affecting those attitudes in the least. Also, do some elementary fact checking. The author, for instance, claims that Cornish Yarg is a vanished cheese. I can get it 3 blocks from my apartment in Massachusetts. She also claims that it's a wonderful food. De gustibus and all that, but my cheesemonger carries it for variety rather than taste; they try to steer me onto something more pleasant every time I ask about it. I keep trying to write an essay about this one, and keep either foaming at the mouth or writing a line-by-line refutation which even I wouldn't want to read. Oh, and her chapter on GM tomatoes has no correct facts at all in it - a journalistic own goal of sorts.

A useful counteragent to all this is a work of social history, first published by the Fabian society in 1913, called Round About A Pound A Week, by Maud Pember Reeves. (Reprinted by Virago Press, ISBN:0860680665). This is a contemporary account of the lives of lower-middle-class families in the 1910-1913 time period. Wages for, say, a police constable or a skilled carpenter in London, were around a pound per week. The cost and quality of food and fuel is extensively discussed. The take-home message here is that most people ate very badly indeed back then.

For works discussing the high end of food ingredients today, I recommend obscure periodicals. Particularly The Art of Eating, published quarterly by Ed Behr. Insightful articles discussing things like beef, veal (including free-range veal), foie gras (and the associated ethical questions), aged Cheddar cheese from Vermont, Canada, or England, and so on. The current issue has an article on tropical fruit in Florida, and an extensive piece on making Comté, the French Gruyere.

There is also Behr's recently updated book, The Artful Eater. It focuses exclusively on finding high-quality ingredients, and comes with a list of sources in case you want to do blind tastings and check his findings. Or cook dinner. Or if reading all this has made you hungry.

I can also recommend the works of Jeffrey Steingarten, the food columnist for... Vogue. No kidding. Steingarten's columns almost make it worth hauling 800 pages of perfume ads home from the newsstand every month. (As an aside, it's wonderful to live in a place which has newsstands. I grew up in rural Indiana, seeing them in comic books, but never in real life.)

Since you'll probably want a higher ratio of utility-to-pulp, Steingarten's older columns have been collected in two books, The Man Who Ate Everything ,and It Must Have Been Something I Ate. These are worth their price just for, respectively, the essays "Pies from Paradise" and "High Steaks". About half of these essays are ingredients-oriented, and about half are technique-oriented. Someday I hope to have both his obsessive attention to detail and his expense account.

Feel free to make additions if I've left out your favorites.

Or the Penguin Companion, in the softbound (and still very large) form. I've found two errors: in ice-cream sundaes, Two Rivers is in Wisconsin, not Michigan; and Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday, not the last Thursday, in November. Some of the articles don't have enough information for me; there's just enough to be interesting, but not enough to explain some of the items (Egg perfumer? There's a picture, but no explanation).

And I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I don't think 'stride' became 'strode' historically. I think you're really talking about the present and past tense respectively, yes? There's a simple answer there: analogic change always flows toward the regular form. (Surface analogy to Yog's Law entirely intentional.)

That means that if there are two verbs, one strong ('stride', 'strode') and one weak like most verbs ('glide', 'glided') -- where 'weak' means that it follows the general pattern of verb tenses (that is, it's "regular"), rather than having a mind of its own -- it's possible for the strong one to become weak, but not the other way around. That means that while 'strided' may come into general use, 'glode' will not.

Every once in a while someone says or writes something that reverses this. And it's hilarious, which shows how strong the expectation of weakness in verbs is.

The thing about irregular (strong) verbs is that they're, well, irregular. Thus you get 'sing', 'sang', 'have sung' but 'cling', 'clinged', 'have clung'. (At least I've never heard anyone say 'clang' (not as a past-tense verb anyway), and would laugh if I did. "I clang to the flotsam until rescued." Nope, JPW.

There are some groups of strong verbs that follow the same pattern, but not so you can rely on it. That's why analogic change happens.

But analogic change only happens when a verb is used relatively infrequently. There has to be time for a lot of speakers to forget the strong form, shrug, and apply the weak form. The force that opposes analogic change is sound change, and ALL words in a language are subject to that, regardless of how frequently they're used. This is why the verb 'to be' is so bloody irregular in almost every language. I doubt you'd be happy if people started saying 'be', 'beed', 'have beed'.

Ick. I sure wouldn't!

And that points up one reason why analogic change only flows toward the regular pattern. If it's 'is', 'was', 'were', then it should logically be 'illustrates', 'wallustrates', 'wellustratre', right? Well, obviously not!

Lucy: Pedants Anonymous. Not Pennsylvania.

No, but I've never heard anyone say they "clinged" either. The form (just as in the past perfect) is "clung."

Well, it still makes my point though. 'Sing', 'sang', 'have sung' but 'cling', 'clung', 'have clung' is still not the same pattern.

Nevertheless, I shall dutifully pound my head with an oak dowel, as soon as I get home to where I keep my oak dowels.

I swear I didn't have this in mind when I promised to pound my head...and I really do have a couple of two-inch oak dowels at home.

Oh, and that schwa displays in Safari.

And disemdowel is a pun based on disemvowel, which procedure posts too trollish to countenance here undergo.

nd dsmdwl s pn bsd n dsmvwl, whch prcdr psts t trllsh t cntnnce hr ndrg

is how that last comment would read, disemvoweled.

There are also holidays known primarily if not only by their dates--July Fourth, Cinco de Mayo, and (on other calendars) Tisha b'Av and Ramadan.

It's a bit of a joke in my family, since my sister was born December 7, 1951, ten years to the day later. I sometimes add "Happy Pearl Harbor Day!" to her birthday cards, an oxymoron to most people. (Reminds me: I have to mail her Pearl Harbor Day card soon.) Our oldest sibling, coincidentally, was born Jan. 7, 1942, one month to the day after Pearl Harbor.

Now if you live in Delaware, it's "Delaware Day" a state holiday. On Dec. 7, 1787, Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution, which is why the state's nickname is "The First State." But I bet even people in Delaware (Delawareans?) who are old enough to remember 1941 think of it as Pearl Harbor Day.

As for your other comment, I know about disemvowelement, as it is itself a pun on disembowelement, which I've seen done to certain people on this site. The disemvowellement, I mean, not the disembowellement. When disemdowellement came up, I figured it was either a pun taken further, or a typo that reminded me of Ikea. (I have fond memories of Ikea as it was the only kind of furniture my wife and I could afford, in the early days of our matromony.)

True, although I think the difference with 9/11 (and November 5th) is that they are also used to refer to the events which the date commemorates. No-one calls the signing of the Declaration of Independence "July 4th", they say that to refer to the date on the calendar which celebrates it.

Yes, I'm a pedant too. And I have a close friend whose birthday is September 11th. At least I now never forget her birthday.

Leaving aside the possibility that it didn't actually take place on that date. That *is* what July 4th celebrates, right? I may live in Oregon but I'm still an ignorant European on such matters. I say al-BEE-no too. And maybe the old pronunciation of "robot" has to do with its origin in Czech? I'm not sure how Karel Capek intended it to be pronounced.

In that spirit, I offer Making Light: A pun taken further.

Scott Adams is now claiming the "recipe" for funny comics: Humor?? Formula. His "humor" is formulaic, indicating that he neglected one negative attribute which overrides all others: Obvious (the joke-killer).

in re Mac&Cheese: I like to add sharp and/or smoky Chedder (grated) or crumbled feta. Either gives it a nice bite missing from the original (also, I do not add milk or water -- I like mine thick!).

*Which Betty Crocker seems to have quit making in boxed form. The restaurant, and Romanoff, are long gone, and the product was done under license (Romanoff was probably phony nobility, but he was a sharp operator), and maybe the name just didn't have cachet any more. Or, more mundanely, the sales fell off for whatever reason.

I fear I shouldn't confess this, but I still can't hear the pun in the name (even though I guessed there should be one since discovering a copy of Fraffly Strine Everything in my former college's rare books room). Could someone explain it, please? And yes, I know that kills the joke.

("Fraffly" was his equivalent book on supposedly upper-class English: "Fraffly Well Spoken".)

That's good taste? I suppose if you can't find Annie's....

wrt "spread": there are a number of products in local megamarts that are a mix of oils, water, and chemicals, doing an impression of soft margarine with less than 80% fat.

wrt "double" (ultra-heavy) cream: possibly Wild Harvest would supply where Whole Foods fails? (I'm surprised that Fresh Pond Whole Foods doesn't have double cream, as they're huge and Prospect St. is tiny. Different neighborhoods, different specialties....)

Considering the quality of the early Potter books, I have no trouble believing Rowling's story -- at least if I ignore her claims about having nothing to do with fantasy.

Victor: I won't argue about who's a curmudgeon on food, as I don't buy food books. But the debasement of food in the interests of uniformity and stability is widespread; the only question is how deformed a particular product has become. My particular thing-to-fuss-about is beer: the U.S. mass product is a triumph of engineering (yeast is essentially a weed, but they've got it doing exactly the same thing every time) with horrible results -- and we know they're horrible because the change is recent and because old beers have been discovered. To my taste, what has happened to hops is even worse; they've been bred for very high overall bitterness without paying attention to the balance of different components, with the result that people are now praising(!) beer for tasting like grapefruit rind.

It has four text boxes, labeled, more or less:
All of these:
Phrase:
Any of these:
None of these:

If you discover, for instance, that

Phrase: Liberty cap

is getting you too many psilocybin mushroom hits, back up and put "mushroom" into the "None of these" box.

Me, I like to open the results into a new window (IE) or tab (Firefox), so I've got my 100-item list ready to look at easily.

The barnacles I remember Captain Haddock invoking were "Billions of blue blistering barnacles!"

I seem to remember checking against an untranslated Tintin, and finding that it was an em-filled phrase starting "Million de milliards" (which is, je pense,, billions.

I believe you're under a gross, albeit entirely understandable, misapprehension. "What apparently used to be the offical state song of Maryland" still is, as far as I know. The General Assembly keeps voting down repeal measures for the song, writ in 1861 and adopted in 1939.

The first verse, set, I have only now learned, to Lauriger Horatius, (though I have a hard time fitting the Latin I was taught to the tune I know) is

The despot's heel is on thy shore,
Maryland, my Maryland.
His foot is at thy temple door,
Maryland, my Maryland.
Avenge the patriotic gore
That floods the streets of Baltimore
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland, my Maryland.

That's the only verse I was taught in second grade, when I lived in Murlin. Reasons for such restraint become clear when one reads the screed, er, song, in its entirety.

Herewith verses VII and IX

VII
I see the blush upon thy cheek,
Maryland!
For thou wast ever bravely meek,
Maryland!
But lo! there surges forth a shriek
From hill to hill, from creek to creek -
Potomac calls to Chesapeake,
Maryland! My Maryland!

IX
I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The Old Line's bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb -
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

As Anna Russell was wont to say, "I am
not making this up!

Stately, plump Bill Patterson came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A torn red paisley dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air....

And thanks, Janet McC. I was just repeating what I was told - wishful thinking on their part, I guess. But really, how bad can a song be if it includes the line "Potomac calls to Chesapeake"? Not to mention "Huzza!" and "Northern scum".

I see what you mean about the end of verse IX, though.

Counterexample: the word "sneak" acquired "snuck" as a past tense only in the last hundred years or so. Before that, only "sneaked" was considered correct. I learned this from Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules, which examines the question of irregular verb past tenses in great detail, and which I recommend to you.

I personally especially like Rabbit 1.

From that article:

Hobbes is essentially Tigger

Apaprt from the obvious, do they really have much in common? If anything, Calvin seems like a better match for Tigger.

One reason Moon and Stars watermelon fell out of commercial production (and nearly became extinct) is that it has a very brittle rind, and therefore is difficult to ship without breaking. Your best bet is to try to find a local grower, or a restaurant affiliated with Slow Food USA (Moon and Stars has been added to their Ark of Taste: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/raft/success_stories.html#6 --you can check the "local convivia" on the main page to see if there's a group near you). I can't garden any more because I moved from a tiny house with a tiny sunny spot in the front yard to a large house surrounded by oak trees (but now I can have dogs, so it's not all bad).

Re food writing: James Lileks' "Gallery of Regrettable Food". You'd like to think he's making this stuff up, but I can testify that in at least one case (canned half-pear filled with mayo topped with shredded cheese and a maraschino cherry) he isn't.

And to cleanse the palate after that one, Raymond Sokolov's "Why We Eat What We Eat"

Well, no; in English the reason "to be" is so weird is something called "suppletion", in which different forms of a verb (or other word, but usually a verb) are not cognates. The Wikipedia article on the subject is brief, but gives a decent overview.

Is a Haydent like a Hydrant or something entirely new and unexpected?

How does that even happen? I mean, I know he's not particularly in favor, I know he's not considered to have an easily identifiable masterwork, I know he's a dead white male. But so is Thomas Carlyle (64 total pg) and at least G. K. C. didn't hurl teacups at his wife. Okay, actually, I hate that kind of anti-feminist wankery, but this honestly has me puzzled. How, in a 2543 pg. anthology, is there not room for, I don't know, "Lepanto" or "The Ethics of Elfland" or a chapter from one of the novels or something? Is it a print error?

No Saki, either, dammit. Norton Anth. vol. 2, you are dead to me!

...vol. 1 is good, though.

Off to comfort myself with the Edwardian snark of "The Stuffed Owl" and its incomparable index:

Liverpool, rapture experienced at, 196
Maiden, feathered, uncontrolled appetites of, 59

Suppose you didn't know "Ullysses", but found it in the slush pile. You read the first three sentences, or, to be fair, the first page. Would you go on reading it? Would you buy it?

"Our song before was full of gore...
We hear that Union won the war!
We're sorry if we made you mad:
It was the only song we had."

I'm sure I read it right here on Making Light. I remember reading it, falling over laughing, and singing it to the rest of the family when they came in to see what was up. I think it was last Christmas in a thread on ghastly irritating Christmas songs, when someone said "O Tannenbaum" was a great tune but the words sucked.

I'm still singing bits of "O Maryland" around the house from time to time...

"I had a dog, his name was Jack,
I threw a stick, he brought it back.
My sister had a cat I think.
My mother had a kitchen sink."

"To go" is another suppletive verb, taking its past tense "went" in Modern English from Old English wendan, which we still see in archaisms like "to wend one's weary way." More amusing still, though, is that the form wendan replaced, eodon -- which shows up in Middle English sometimes, in things like "then Lancelot yede him on his hands and knees..." -- is also a suppletive form. "To go" had already lost its original past-tense form by the time that Bishop Ulfilas grabbed the Gothic language by the throat and forced a non-runic alphabet onto it.

(Sorry. I will go off on these tangents if I'm not stopped. The kids call it "mom's parlor trick", and have been known to ask me about random etymologies for the amusement of watching me take the philological bit in my teeth and run with it.)

Why do I now have an image of Tigger and Pooh in a little wagon at the top of a hill, about to go flying every-which-way? Tigger is all excited; Pooh, a touch more grounded.

Is it true that Tigger met Pooh when the former rigged a hunney sandwich trap?

Anyway, from what I remember of the article, I got the sense that this W.J.Stuart was a real science-fiction person, but I've never heard of him/her anywhere else.

I smell a pen name.

I imagine it as more like a mordent; TNH with a slight hiccup, perhaps.

In a totally unrelated point:

Anyone in the NYC area like women? Stagefighting? Women stagefighting? We'll be going to the Sunday show.

CHip: I've always found Annie's to be more expensive and worse-tasting, but of course tastes vary. I don't deny that the food industry searches for uniformity.

As for beer, my reply is Yeah, But.

By which I mean: We are by no means at a low point for availability of good beer, nor is the good beer supply curently diminishing. Great beer is, sadly, still rare.

I had the good fortune to be in Portland, OR around about the rise of brewpubs in Oregon; at the time, the local mass-market beer was Weinhard's, a local brew with a great deal to recommend it. Yes, they made a cheap line (Blitz beer, honest) for getting loggers drunk, but even college students avoided Blitz. At that time, Portland was almost the only place you could get a good beer in the US.

Today, it's still easy to get lousy beer; but you can get (some) good beer almost everywhere. Even more to the point, sales of mass-market beer have been dropping significantly of late. Sales of small-label beer are growing. The big breweries are falling apart under their own weight.

As for hops, I agree that "bittering hops" are a travesty. However, flavoring hops are still available and used in the (micro) industry. Since my favorite style of beer could be described as something like a dry-hopped mild, I suspect we share a taste in beer.

Which beer has been 'praised' for tasting like grapefruit rind, BTW? And by whom? I'd like to avoid both source and object if I can. Also, what currently-available beers would you recommend?

Another weird one is "careered" - the verb used to describe something moving fast out of control - "the driver lost his grip on the wheel and the car careered across the road" - which I have seen in US text replaced with "careened" which normally means "to scrape the barnacles off the bottom of a ship".

And a Haydent is obviously the opposite of a Hayden. (cf did, didn't). Though I do like the idea of a fire haydent. It doesn't actually put the fire out itself, it just amends it into a more manageable and aesthetically pleasing form.

stross: (n) 1. mental condition of agitation induced by contemplation of rapid technological change. "Senior executives at IBM are suffering from unprecedented levels of stross."

macdonald: (v) p.p. of macdonnle, (v.t.): to overcome rhetorically with vast levels of often disturbing military, naval or medical knowledge. "The debate on HPV vaccination ended with the NIH representative completely macdonnling his critics".

Oh! Didn't know he'd done one.

I don't think there is a perfect, definitive adaption. They each tend to emphasize different bits of the story and character. Sometimes a generally lousy adaptation will get right a bit you don't find in others. Even the tedious musical version (Albert Finney?) had some good bits.

That said:

Best overall: The Alastair Sim as Scrooge version.

Best Scrooge: George C. Scott.

Verbs that become "irregularized" are not doing so by analogic change. They may still be formed by analogy, or influenced by other forms. For example, the back-formation of the verb 'escalate' from the noun (originally a brand name) 'escalator' (itself a portmanteau* of 'escalier' (staircase) and 'elevator') was done by analogy to 'innovate', 'innovator' and similar terms, but I wouldn't call that analogic change.

Similarly, the word 'template' was influenced by the word 'plate' into its current spelling (from older 'templet', which meant a small temple), but again that's not analogic change per se. I don't think so, anyway; my linguistics degree is 25 years old at this point, so I may have that wrong. And nobody taught me about the suppletion of 'to be', for example, so maybe I'm full of shit.

*Yes, I know that a true portmanteau is a completely separate word that stands in for two or more others, like French 'au' for 'a le'. The kind mentioned here is more common, and I think we can do Lewis Carroll at least this much honor, by using the term in the sense he used it.

As for the other versions... My problem with Scott's way of playing Scrooge is that he acted like he'd have kicked the Devil's ass if the latter had shown up. Thus, when Marley's ghost appeared, I wasn't quite convinced that this Scrooge would really have cowered in fear. Sim struck just the right note, mean, but kind of gleeful about it.

"to lie over, when sailing on the wind."

I was, it seems, wrong. Still, a careening car might well beach itself or otherwise develop a list.

No question that W.J. Stewart has been used as a pen name by more than one person with an SF and movie connection per Google (e.g. Philip J. MacDonald)

I am inclined to credit reports that: W.J. STUART is Jack (John Stuart) Williamson for purposes of Forbidden Planet. It's been suggested looking in Wonder's Child for support or contradiction.

I've seen the musical version with Albert Finney, which I thought was OK. The Reginald Owen interpretation didn't quite work form me. I missed the Patrick Stewart one. I did like the Scott version's Ghosts of Christmases Past and Present, one played by Edward Woodward (yes, the Equalizer), the other played by Susannah York.

Those who know the context in which this appears in Scrooge! can only shudder. Well, and laugh, as we did when MicroSoft, right after the "Where do you want to go today?" in that ad campaign, used a clip from Mozart's Requiem: "Confutatis maledictis," sang the chorus, and completed their answer to the question with "flammis acribus addictis."

I don't know if it's that recent a trend, but using a pop song without regard to its original meaning has been going on for some time. My favorite example is Lennon(?)'s Come Together for telecommunications. Wasn't the original about a cult leader?

Perhaps, that's not my understanding.

I'd guess just some coincidental picks - Jack Williamson anagramming his real name and some perhaps Jacobin affectation for MacDonald who had a Scots connection and so it goes. If Pohl did, it's easy to see him praising an uncredited work by Williamson

Must say I have never liked Rowan Atkinson much, though more in Blackadder than anything else. Hugh Laurie as the Prince Regent is side-splitting. And the real genius is Baldric. Every scene a masterclass in underplaying for best effect.

A few months ago, there was another car ad that played an incredibly ponderous version of "Drunken Sailor" that had me cracking up almost every time I heard it. I was in the middle of a rant about why there are no marketers with any kind of cultural education when someone informed me that the arrangement of "Drunken Sailor" was actually familiar to most people as a theme from "Wide World of Sports" or somesuch. Huh. Didn't keep me from associating the Nissan dealership with shaving his belly with a rusty razor.

As for the misuse of the requiem mass, marketers must figure that those people with a certain amount of exposure to classical music are not susceptible to 30-second commercials anyway. Doesn't explain why it showed up in X-Men 2, or Elizabeth though.

Serge:
My [least] favorite of those was John Fogerty's Fortunate Son for Union Bay (or some such) jeans. "Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Yeah, they're red, white and blue", then omitting the next two lines.

Also, having a Christian pop group (Sixpence None The Richer) signing a song possibly about heroin use (this mau just be specualation) to market Ortho-Tri-Cylen Lo birth control pills was priceless irony. "There she goes again", indeed.

Nice comment page on this subject at Songs in ads

I don't know how the dates fit filing the serial numbers off Asimov's Robbie for first publication of the Asimov story and later publication in the collection I Robot.

Forry Ackerman is rumored to have taken an interest in the story of the story if anybody here is in a position to go by and ask him.

6 c. wet from sink
4 Big Spoons spread
1/4 c. milk

(Teaspoons would be "Wee Spoons". Ounces is "lbs over ten-and-six". Pepper is "Sneeze".)

On the other hand, I remember the Golden Grain radio ads with arias: Just Look, Twenty-Nine Elephants (Triumphal March from Aida) is the first that comes to mind.

Although I do like Jo's alternate last verse, which made me spray too-hot Earl Grey up into my previously clogged, now scaleded sinuses.

Robbie Coltrane is brilliant everywhere he appears in Black Adder, not just that one Christmas Special.

And Serge, I'm afraid you're conflating multiple thread topics, now...that line is from Mozart's Requiem, not ACC.

Grease. Butterly. Just so. Be welcome; stay a while.

It wouldn't be wrong to describe Making Light's open threads as contextless -- formally speaking, they're threads not tied to a specific post -- but there's always some context kicking around underfoot. For instance, they're a place to post comments about items in the Particles and Sidelights lists, and to mention cool links seen elsewhere. They're also full of bits and pieces referencing earlier discussions. Try not to be alarmed by the automatic linkage of dinosaurs and sodomy.

The James Joyce quote is there because it's cool. There's generally a bit of something-or-other at the start of a new thread. Open thread 54 had "Potrzebie, frammistan, excelsior!" Open Thread 53 said, "As you know, Bob, fifty-three is the smallest prime which is neither the sum of nor the difference between powers of the first two prime numbers."

It helps raise our spirits.

As for the reference to the Laws of Robotics, I see that as a homage, as another sign of intelligence. Heck, getting Williamson involved was a sign of intelligence too.

"Where do you want to go today?" shows up in "Rudie Can't Fail." I never could get a good punchline for that, though.

Of course, it's jarring to hear music I grew up with and have fond feelings about in advertising, but it does get my attention, which is what advertising's supposed to do. It also tells me that I'm in the white-hot center of the demo that they're targeting. :-\

Hmmm, you mean like French? You know: je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes...

;)

Seriously, though, as I understand it, "to be" is one of the big offenders in pretty much all the Indo-European languages. The Wikipedia article also mentions "to go" in all of French, Italian and Spanish. I'm not sure about Lt. facere and its descendants, though.

However, the French preterit is directly derived from the Latin perfect, which is from a separate verb ("je fus" from "fui").

The Latin verb for "to carry" is heavily irregular along suppletion lines: "fero, ferre, tuli, latum".

'To be' is certainly messy in Latin, as is 'to go': eo, is, it. Facere is regular, but has a less generic meaning: 'to make' almost always works for a gloss.

CENTURION: What's this, then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'? 'People called Romanes they go the house'?
BRIAN: It-- it says, 'Romans, go home'.
CENTURION: No, it doesn't. What's Latin for 'Roman'? Come on!
BRIAN: Aah!
CENTURION: Come on!
BRIAN: 'R-- Romanus'?
CENTURION: Goes like...?
BRIAN: 'Annus'?
CENTURION: Vocative plural of 'annus' is...?
BRIAN: Eh. 'Anni'?
CENTURION: 'Romani'. 'Eunt'? What is 'eunt'?
BRIAN: 'Go'. Let--
CENTURION: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.
BRIAN: Uh. 'Ire'. Uh, 'eo'. 'Is'. 'It'. 'Imus'. 'Itis'. 'Eunt'.
CENTURION: So 'eunt' is...?
BRIAN: Ah, huh, third person plural, uh, present indicative. Uh, 'they go'.
CENTURION: But 'Romans, go home' is an order, so you must use the...?
BRIAN: The... imperative!
CENTURION: Which is...?
BRIAN: Umm! Oh. Oh. Um, 'i'. 'I'!
CENTURION: How many Romans?
BRIAN: Ah! 'I'-- Plural. Plural. 'Ite'. 'Ite'.
CENTURION: 'Ite'.
BRIAN: Ah. Eh.
CENTURION: 'Domus'?
BRIAN: Eh.
CENTURION: Nominative?
BRIAN: Oh.
CENTURION: 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
BRIAN: Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! Ah! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
CENTURION: Except that 'domus' takes the...?
BRIAN: The locative, sir!
CENTURION: Which is...?!
BRIAN: 'Domum'.
CENTURION: 'Domum'.
BRIAN: Aaah! Ah.
CENTURION: 'Um'. Understand?
BRIAN: Yes, sir.
CENTURION: Now, write it out a hundred times.
BRIAN: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
CENTURION: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
BRIAN: Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar and everything, sir!

Patrick, is there some way we can root this out permanently?

"I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact and was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future."

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/faintinggoats.html (video clip)
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jimknapp/goats.html
http://www.faintinggoat.com/

Awww, cuteness!

Feral Cows!!!

I find I am inappropriately delighted - although perhaps not as inappropriate as my giggling while reading about that rabid kitten in Sunday's paper.

Hey, an opportunity for pedantry in Latin. (I was too late for the me fecit discussion on Mike Ford's thread.) These are ablative absolutes, so as I understand it the conventional translation would be something like "with the wicked having been silenced / and sacrificed to the bitter flames".

As someone pointed out, fero, ferre, tuli, latum is the standard example of suppletion in Latin (it's cognate, in the present system, to the English "to bear"). In Latin eo (to go) is regular, with just a few minor sound changes (eis -> is); sum, esse, fui is both defective (no passive perfect participle - "to have been been") and formed by suppletion (sum / fui). I think that's right, anyway. I only studied Latin and not linguistics, so I may be wrong on lots of this.

Just as a footnote to the Strine discussion, and pseudonyms, isn't Cordwainer Smith's "Norstrilia" a Strine version of North Australia (or New Australia - I can't remember)?

It makes sense to me that irregularities get hammered out first in the more obscure words- if the conjugation of "Equivocate" was "I quivoke, you equivocet, he/she equivocals" it would be battered into regularity in a generation or less. It would become a pedants' darling like "trivium" or "octopodes."*

Whereas any English speaker will recognise "I am" as part of "to be", because they hear and see and use it hundreds of times a day.

*It occurs to me that many of the distinctions made in Strunk and White have been steamrollered by the evolution of the language- "will" vs. "shall", and "like" vs. "as" come to mind. Am I too eager to declare them dead?

RE: "Vox Day": Wow, how innovative and intellectually rigorous his argument is. Such a thinker, that boy.

Another quaint custom that I wish was still in use is the construction "said I" instead of "I said." Were there ever any rules for that, or was it just whatever the writer thought sounded good?

(I guess pirates still say "says I.")

If you're not using FF, I have no answer, although it might work in other browsers; who knows?

Disgusting, yes, but not immoral.

Not to say that your experience isn't also authentic; one of the problems they had was mis-handling through the distribution chain. The whole idea of that tomato was to allow it to ripen (gain sugars and flavor compounds) while remaining hard & green and packable (no breakdown of cell walls). They grew the tomatoes on the vine for something like an extra 30 days over normal supermarket tomato times, then harvested them, packed 'em off to local distributors where they got ethylene'd like any other supermarket tomato, then sent to market, turning red and soft on the way. If some store (or distributor) got them below safe tomato temperature (42F, I think), all that effort would be lost.

*I believe, for example, that it's immoral to have sex with a willing person who you're not attracted to because you want them to look favorably upon you. Or even because you like them and want to make them happy.

But, but, but... he said it was okay... And if Vox Day says it's okay, than who am I to stand in the way of his judgement? I'm merely defering to his (clearly superior) grasp of Judeo-Christian morality. I would become but a humble instrument (a tool, if you will) of God's Will, an avenging angel with a flaming dildo of Divine Justice!

Ours ranked as an all right store tomato, nothing special.

The technical term for what are commonly called in English "irregular" verbs is "strong" (as opposed to "weak" -- aka "regular") verbs. These are the verbs in the various Germanic languages that form their tenses by changing their root vowel rather than by changing the ending. They aren't actually irregular, in the sense of being unpredictable or inconsistent; there are, if I'm recalling this correctly after all the time that's elapsed since I last took notes on the Germanic strong verb system, six different classes of strong verbs, sorted out by what the root vowel of the verb is and how it changes. These do tend to be, as a general rule, the oldest verbs in the language -- most of the English strong verbs have been with the language since proto-Germanic times -- and also as a general rule, new or borrowed verbs get assigned to the weak (aka "regular") verb system. But not always.

In Russian, there is no present tense of "to be," a totally different verb gets called in when there must be one. The past goes "on byl" "ona byla" "ono bylo" "oni byli" and the future "ja budu" "ty budes'" "on bude" "my budeme" "vy budete" "oni budut". (In Cyrilllic, obviously.)

Slovak has the same past (with "o" instead of "y"), adds a present ("ja som" "ty si" "on je" "my sme" "vy ste" "oni su") and changes the future slightly ("ja budem" "oni budu").

I'm told that other Slavic languages are similar. Are these all from the same root?

I suspect they intend it to be Vanilla Ice's appropriation of the signature riff in "Ice Ice Baby," what with "ice" being slang for diamonds and all.

We do indeed live in a debased age.

WANDA: I was dealing with something delicate, Otto. He was going to tell me where the loot is and if they're going to come and arrest you. And you come loping in like Rambo without a jock strap and you dangle him out a fourth-story window. Now was that smart?
OTTO: Okay...
WANDA: Was it shrewd? Was it good tactics, or was it stupid?
OTTO: Don't call me stupid.
WANDA: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
OTTO: Apes don't read philosophy.
WANDA: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a few things. Aristotle was not Belgian. (OTTO scoffs) The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself."
OTTO: You read...!
WANDA: And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up. Now. You have just assaulted the one man who can keep you out of jail and make you rich. So what are you going to do about it, huh? What would an intellectual do? What would Plato do?
OTTO: 'pologize...
WANDA: What?
OTTO: APOLOGIZE!
WANDA: Right!
OTTO: (formally) I'm sorry.
WANDA: No. Not to me. To him. And make it good, or we're dead.

I'm also an admirerer of the Muppet Christmas Carol, though IMHO the music in all the Muppet movies took a nose dive after Jim Henson's death. Still. Muppets make everything better. Weezer videos, boring talk shows, whatever. The hideous train wreck that was the last season of Angel, redeemed for one brief shining moment by Puppet!Angel. I hear Alias is ending this season; since they have nothing left to lose, they should really have a Muppet episode. Like, Sydney gets given some kind of hallucinogen that causes her to see the members of another CIA splinter cell as Muppets. And then spends much of the briefing scene giggling helplessly, as everyone acts puzzled. Miss Piggy would be so much fun wearing all of Syd's wigs and doing karate...Marshall talking tech with Bunsen and Honeydew, or Gonzo facing down and baffling Jack and Sloane, and Kermit striking James Bond poses and occasionally flailing his arms in panic. Plus, big musical number! You can't tell me the whole cast wouldn't jump at the chance. Victor Garber used to do musicals... (/worryingly detailed fantasy) And hell, it's no less unlikely than Mind Control Orchids and the Giant Flaming Ball of Russian Zombification.

I love it too, but that's partly because I now teach Latin (and I'm increasingly convinced that the horrible Victorian schoolmaster method is the way to go). But this is partly because I like the grammar, which seems to be a minority stance among Latin teachers nowadays.

Still, you probably won't want to know that the locative case of domus is actually domi; the Latin they end up with is correct, but all that happens is that while "motion towards" always requires the accusative, place names (plus domus and rus) drop the preposition. AFAIR, the fact that these are also the words which have a locative case is not a part of the explanation. (Locative = "at [that place]".)

Life of Brian was shown without much controversy on TV in the UK. And the more I learn about Early Christianity, the more accurate it looks. They would also show The Meaning of Life on British TV, which is far more generally offensive (but possibly sufficiently ironic as to squeeze by).

"Satires which the censor understands are rightly prohibited."

Sure, candle, the movie may have been shown in the UK without a big fuss, but the UK is a den of sissy socialism. Or something. Can you imagine gutless American TV showing that movie, even with the naughty bits taken out?

I will grant you that beer in this country is no longer in the parlous state that it once was; on the other hand, it fell harder and earlier, and was bottomed out for a long time.

I can't point to names because praising citrus character in beer is something I tend to see in brewpubs -- I usually taste bottled beers rather than reading about them. But as an example of a horrible bottled type, did you taste last year's Sierra Nevada Bigfoot? It was the most dreadful malt beverage I've ever tasted, and I've been to a session on analyzing flaws in homebrew (although I admit to chickening out at one point: I didn't taste the lightstruck beer after being able to smell it from several feet away). Note also that finishing hops are not nearly universal; after a brewery tour I found out the reason I didn't like Old Dominion is that they finish with bittering hops (pellets, yet!) that just don't smell or taste good.

The thing is, I \like/ hops in reasonable proportion; my tastes run to English bitter, which is why I shirked Interaction setup last summer to get to the advance and first open sessions of GBBF. In this area I still mourn Commonwealth (Yorkshire-style brewpub), and like Gritty McDuff's Best Bitter, Tremont Ale (available as real ale in some bars), sometimes Old Thumper(?) (wild boar on the label), and after that look at what's available this week that sounds interesting. I'm not a supertaster, but I have almost sworn off west-coast beers as they all seem too citrusy for me.

Spanish manages the amusing trick of having two different irregular verbs have the same preterite (one of the past tenses). "Fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuistes, fueron" is either "I was, you were, s/he was, we were, you were, they were" or "I [etc.] went." The present tenses are, respectively, "ser" and "ir".

I'll grant, for example, sing/sang/sung as a regular pattern, but "am, are, is/was, were" as forms of "be" isn't any pattern. (At this point I will merely mention fero, Latin and Classical Greek for "carry", which attracted past and future tenses from two other verb stems in Greek (producing the principal parts "fero, oiso, einengka") and another two in Latin ("fero, feri, tuli, latum"), for a total of five distinct stems on what was presumably a single verb back in the ancestral centrum Indo-European. [Note--I do not vouch for my Latin spelling, and the Greek is fast-and-dirty transliteration.]

It's not just English that follows other languages down back alleys for their vocabulary, though English is particularly good at it.

Now, that's offensive. For it to also be achingly, killingly funny, you have to have been schooled in an English-style public school with English-style public schoolmasters. I was.

Do you think they would show Pasolini's "Gospel According to Matthew"? It's played pretty straight (no pun intended), but Pasolini would no doubt be suspect as a gay Marxist poet...

As for preterites (and aren't they vocabulary items like "did" - the thing you form the perfect tense with, as opposed to the past participle "done"), you can illustrate Vicki's Spanish example with "wrought": it serves for two different English verbs, "work" and "wreak". Not that sentences involving either in that sense are all that common now.

He wrought his magic and with it wrought havoc.

Don't mind me; I've been shopping for fences (the landscaping items, not the people of a certain profession).

Merci bien for l'explication de "milliards". What little I have had of French is some 30 years old, and more hole than rust. The bits that remain most intact are songs I learned in the after-school class Wednesdays when I was in grades 3-5. They include those jaunty bloody ditties, "Ne pleure pas, Jeannette" and "Il etait un petit navire" (though we only learned the first couple verses of the latter, and never got to the becalming, let alone the debate about whether the cabin boy should be fried, sauteed or fricasseed.)

>>Is it true that Tigger met Pooh when the former rigged a hunney sandwich trap?

If memory serves, the only honey trap in the Real, non-disnified, Pooh books is the one for heffalumps (which my own niece, in the high and far-off days, called effieshits). I *think* Tigger simply shows up in the forest, bouncing about and trying this food and that, none of which he cares for. But it's been a few years since I last read them.

The Stuffed Owl reminds me of one of my lost, lamented paperbacks - Pegasus Descending, compiled by X.J. Kennedy. It includes some items also found in The Stuffed Owl, but also much post-Victorian poetry.

I think my favorite lines may be

But lo! there surges forth a shriek
From hill to hill, from creek to creek -

I rather suspect that a surging shriek would sound something like ayyyyiiieeeeEEEE!

Pressure pressing down on me
Under pressure
That burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

seems pretty clearly about breaking up, not getting married. But later lyrics,

Why can’t we give love one more chance?
Why can’t we give love give love give love?
Give love give love give love give love give love
Cause love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care
For people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves

suggests that that the pressure of love might be enough to create change in a positive way (turning something into a life-long relationship, and even creating change in the individual), much the way (to link it to the explicit subject of the ad) that carbon is converted to diamond under pressure.

But then again, I could be reading too much into a the use of a catchy riff.

It was Calvin who caught Hobbes with a tuna fish sandwich trap.

Hmm... That, Janet, sounds like your typical French song for kids. My mother-in-law was shocked when I translated the lyrics of alouette, gentille alouette. It involves a lot of plucking of feathers from various body parts. While the bird is still alive.

Ah, yes. A grocery ad featuring "Would You Like To Have Something To Eat" by The Alfred Packer Band. Yes, it is about what you think it's about. And it's pretty hard to top when it comes to inappropriate music...

If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop

That's bad enough, but they stopped quoting just before the more appropriate chorus:

You make a grown man cry

Boy, some people really do get worked up about irregular verbs.

Remind me never to mention the pluperfect subjunctive around here...

We could be heroes
(omitted: But just for one day.)

On muppets- I think I mentioned in a different thread my purchase of "The Muppet Show: Season One" (why haven't you gotten it yet? Oh. It's going to be gifted to you. Okay). Recently, I found "Ed Sullivan presents the Muppets" (or somesuch: Amazoning "Ed sullivan" and the Muppets should get results); not a bad little collection. It's way too short (only an hour), and the best bit is a sketch with a string quartet whose fourth doesn't show. But it's great. Several of the bits were later performed on the Muppet show by the Muppets.

I watched it the other night, in fact, with my newly purchased Samischlaus Bier, which is apparently the rarest beer in the world. It's brewed only on December 6th, or something like that; I had it last year. It's great. It's *really* strong, almost a wine or malt liquor, and it's got some sweetness to it. The first taste kind of puts you off a bit (even if you've had it before but not for a long time since), but you acclimate. Or I did, anyway.

Pooh, and Calvin & Hobbes- Niall's correct on both counts. Down to the tuna fish sandwich (tigers are silly that way, sayeth Hobbes).
I followed the link to Scott Adams' essay on the "formula" for humor, and noticed that he cites C&H as the perfect strip because it very often fires on "5 of 6 elements". That he can be wrong about why it was so funny is probably partly why Dilbert has never made me laugh.
My father's newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, recently started running C&H again. Noticing it made me grin like I did the first time I read those strips. They're like the Muppets to me, in that way. Just in time for the winter and some classic snowmen strips...

Ah, the Muppets... Did they have Pigs in Space from the beginning? They make me think somebody on that show watched way too many episodes of Gerry Anderson's Fireball XL-5...

As for the eternal topic of inappropriate musical backing for commercials, my husband was properly offended by the recent use of Woodie Guthrie's "car" song, and my own child-of-the-Sixties side tends to snicker at intros (minus vocals) which rightfully belong to the Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun" and that great Who song dealing with the miseries of a "teenage wasteland".

Yes, "Pigs in Space" was on from the beginning. I think I saw two sketches in the first five episodes of the first season? Something like that. Several. I'm not familiary with "Fireball."

Completely unrelated sidenote: I set my computer to shuffle my entire collection, and the random songs it's coming up with make me smile. The Magnetic Fields (I own but haven't listened to all of "69 Love Songs"), Fatboy Slim, Soul Coughing... so many I haven't listened to in a while.

Any pointers, dangling or otherwise, would be very helpful...

And this is Fireball XL-5, one of my earliest exposures to science-fiction. I never recovered. Neither did Stephen Baxter, I think, based on one of the main characters in his book Coalescent.

Please note that the past tense of the verb 'to be' is perfectly regular for Russian, which has the strange habit of conjugating verbs by person in the present tense, and by gender in the past.

Yes, that means that Vicki and I have to say "I went to the store" differently. What I've always wondered is whether Russian drag queens use the feminine; I rather suspect that they do, and that they also speak in the past tense rather more than usual.

There are better Christmas movies, if you ask me.

You know, I was beginning to wonder if I'd just imagined that.

The one scene I can clearly recall: Ed tenderly picking up an injured muppet. Thrown from a sleigh or something.

I'd agree completely with the first, and disagree completely with the second. The second is entirely a matter of situation. Will it really make them happy for more than the time spent in sex? Or is this going to have repercussions that will make them less happy in the long run?

The answers to those questions, and others, will define the morality of that bit.

And in an ongoing sexual relationship, I don't get why it's such a terrible thing (as I've seen it mentioned over the years) when a partner occasionally has sex when they're not really in the mood and the other is -- it's like giving a person a backrun when you'd rather be reading, an act of easy kindness.

Could folks here please give me a few of the qualities, characteristics, phrases, words, that connote "rural" and "urban" for them?

Just a few.

Urban = energetic street/pedestrian life, lights, monumental structures (buildings/bridges, etc.)

Rural = domestic animals, fields, faded clapboard buildings

Is that few enough?

I can’t help but wonder if some clever person in the ad dept. thought of both Bowie/Queen and Vanilla Ice. “If we just play the first few bars of the chorus, the youngens will think of “Ice, Ice Baby” and the old farts will think of “Under Pressure. We’ll get both demographics with one song.”

------------------------------------------

Re: Pooh, Tigger, Calvin, Hobbes, Hunney and Tuna:

This threadlet started when Scott Adams equated Tigger and Hobbes. Paul Clarke pointed out, correctly, that Tigger has more of a Calvinist nature. I went on to juxtapose Pooh as Hobbes. Hence the image of Tigger and Pooh in a little wagon at the top of a hill. Further, if Tigger is Calvin and Pooh is Hobbes, then Tigger would have met Pooh by rigging a trap with a food that Pooh is silly for.

Sometimes a cigar really is a phallic symbol…

------------------------------------------

The beer I like best is likely to become more and more rare: The maker of Dixie Blackened Voodoo Lager has said that he doesn't plan to re-open his Katrina-ravaged factory. Phoo.

Watching the snow come down here, kind a cool from a 6th floor vantage-point. And since I can drive NOT on highways all the way from here to my door, I'm not too upset about it.

http://home.comcast.net/~thewoozle/photos/toyota_bait.mpeg

Urban: hustle-bustle crowds anonymous pavement fumes tall buildings hard cold smelly exciting intense

Rural: quiet growing things meadows farms (Beethoven's 6th) long winding roads cattle horses pies in the window friendly relaxed

No, the problem is the depth. I don't have any shelves 12 1/2" deep. Our collection is currently living on the bedroom dresser.

(As a bookbinder, I have to query the sense of making such a heavy landscape-format book with squares. The fore edge is already resting on the slipcase base. Fortunately, it doesn't appear to be pulling the spine more than minimally out, but I have an edition of LoTR that tore its own endpapers out from a similar structure.)

Urban = things that are not alive - pavement, buildings, etc.

(By which you can tell that I only vacation in rural locations.)

For those tempted to suffer thru the complete lyrics of Green Acres's theme song, here they are.

I always enjoyed the line about "the bluest woman I ever saw."

Look up the titles of all of the paperback collections on Amazon.

Drop by GoodWill now and then; buy the books as they appear.

Alas, you don't often see Footrot Flats books at GoodWill.

Ah, but you can find them at www. abebooks.com, my fav used book place.

Urban: where you can see Ian McKellen play Prospero.
Rural: where you can see Jerry Falwell play God.

Urban: drive-bys.
Rural: drive-ins.

Urban: pot parties (in both the celebratory and political senses).
Rural: pot stills.

Urban: the 6:00 Acela from New York to Washington.
Rural: A fifty-car grain block from North Platte to Chicago.

If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop

That's bad enough, but they stopped quoting just before the more appropriate chorus:

You make a grown man cry

---
Yes, but I hear it! And applaud the inadvertant choice!

No farmland, though--the only farmhouse in walking distance is a museum, complete with a reconstructed Hessian building on the land.

Use of the phrase walking distance is the other giveaway that I'm not actually living in a rural area.

Well, that and that some of you already know that I live in New York City. Across from a tidal estuary, with all the wildlife mentioned, and I walked past those memorial gardens on my way to the subway this morning.

Art, truth and politics
nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the Ł720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video

Wednesday December 7, 2005
In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? ...

I figure if there's anywhere I'm likely to find someone who knows this sort of thing, it's here.

I have several Footrot Flats, bought at various worldcons. I LOVE THEM. They are a guarantee when i need to be cracked up.

And I love living in urbia, even though it took me over an hour to get home tonight (usually a 30 min trip). It snowed, about 2 inches, the big job was getting NORTH of the big freeway just north of our office building, all the connecting roads were parking lots. Once I got north of the jams, it took about 40 minutes, it was just getting through...

Yup, French folk songs, or at least many that I've learned, do tend to be insouciantly sanguine.

Little skylark, pretty little skylark,
Little skylark, I will pluck you bald.

I will pluck your little head,
I will pluck your little head.
You have got
feathers yet.
Alouette, allouette. Oh, oh, oh, oh, ...

I always did wonder, though how one plucked the beak, unless one pulled it off - even more gruesome than pulling out feathers one by one.

And, of course, the song about my namesake, which with its cheery "So they hanged young Pie-er-re, / Traaa la la lalala lala lala la la la, And so they hanged young Pi-er-re / And Jeannetton as well, and Jeannetton as well."

We didn't just learn the bloody, though. Mme. Briddon also taught us "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde," with its plea that the singer be buried in a winecellar, feet against the wall, head below the spigot.

The line that follows that is "But of course he was hemmed in by the power of the senate, the Council of Ten, and his advisers." And a good part of the chapter is about the doge being by no means an absolute ruler, and how that status was maintained.

And though often misstated, the phrase is "reins" of power, exactly like directing a horse.

Good lord, you're quite right. (Except that Tyler rather liked the idea of living in the state of nature, as far as I remember...)

The first rule of Calvinball is...

...and cringe? I think the Generation Y-and-youngers will actually think of "Under Pressure" as their elders will have been inclined to turn the volume up and sing along to that one. As opposed to Vanilla Ice, which, on the rare occasions when it hits the radio, merits instant station-change.

Have been trying to come up with a good explanation for my family as to why I need the Calvin & Hobbes monolith. A little stymied, as I have every other collection, including the three treasuries, the anniversary book, and the retrospective. The LA Times has started reprinting the strip again, too, which makes me terribly happy but kind of points out the lack of innovation in the vast majority of currently-running comics. And the near-plagarism..."Zits" rips off Calvin & Hobbes jokes, expressions, and storylines with appalling frequency...the whole set up and style is basically "Calvin as a teenager." Which both draws me in...since it's not done at all badly, you know...and makes me angry.

Muppets: my favorite special was for an anniversary...25th? 30th? in the mid-80s. We had it on tape, and I must have watched the thing 286477 times growing up. It had clips from *everything*..."Mahna Mahna," the planet Koozebain, a medley of "The Lullabye of Broadway" and "Rocking Robin", Piggy with a variety of entrances ranging from Jungle Goddess Borne By Shirtless Hunks to falling down a very glamorous long flight of stairs, Kermit doing "Happy Feet," Ray Charles singing "Bein' Green," "Pure Imagination," and on and on....I would kill to have that on DVD. Just point me towards the right Disney executive....(though I will admit that the "Muppets in 3-D" attraction at Disney's California Adventure is pretty damn awesome. Partly because it makes ruthless, if coded, fun of Mickey Mouse.)

"Miss Piggy's Guide to Life," a mock self-help book, is also well worth buying if you can find it. "Never forget that only you can ever fully appreciate your own true beauty. Others may try, but they so often fall short."

I think I have to go lie down now.

Rural: center-pivot irrigation systems.

Alas, I never got good enough to experience the flip side: in an urban setting, they'll pay you a lot more for the products of aforementioned smelly clanging... And somehow I doubt my Seattle neighbors would appreciate my opening up a smithy in my (oh-so-quiet, by urban standards) residential neighborhood.

3) that person did grow up there, and didn't forget, but never had to walk 2 miles in the snow to go see the cheap matinee movies at the parish's rec center.

If I had walked two miles from my house, in any direction, I would most likely have ended up in the woods. Now that's rural.

Another good thing about growing up in the country, IMO, is that you get to grow large amounts of your own food (plant and animal.)

I'm quite happy in suburbia, thanks much. This way I have trees, quiet, and easy access to things to do. I've sampled urban living, and the concrete jungle is not for me. My wife grew up in a rural setting, and as a result neither of us have any desire to do so, especially if we ever have kids.

Well, I have a degree in library *SCIENCE* -- do you think they'd count it? (Hair's not quite back to college length, but heading that way...)

Urban vs country: Little tiny apartment dogs, and limits on how many you can have, vs packs of ill-behaved mutts who mess up the house when it snows... hmm, wait a minute, sometimes I miss that efficiency in Chicago!

Hated it.

The country is for visiting, when you need to get away from the city and slow down. City is for living in.

I know (sort of) people who never leave the city. Years ago I worked with a guy who claimed he hadn't spent a night outside MANHATTAN in twenty years. He was wacko in other ways, too.

Certainly country people come to the city for a bit of fun. Or adventure. Or just to remind themselves why they live in the country.

Or, a slightly different view:
Urban: barking dogs in fenced yards, sometimes being dumped in rural areas
Rural: barking dogs in fenced yards, sometimes running loose (and being shot by farmers when they start taking down livestock)

Would a degree in Library Science qualify you for the Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists? I have this feeling that they'd say no. I'm not sure computer science people, or just plain computer programmers like yours truly, would make it. Even if they did, my mop could not be called luxuriant by any stretch of the imagination. (It's rather jonathan-prycesque.)

They serve to a certain extent to muffle the ordinary noises of the city, but we are directly under a flight path to the old downtown airport, as well as Life-Flight to Children's Mercy Hospital and Truman Medical Center. I don't really notice it much.

Note that they had predicted it would turn into a remnant low by last weekend.

The Atlantic tropical hurricane season is officially over, which means (among other things) that they aren't issuing tropical weather outlooks, but I assume they will tell us if zeta turns up out there.

Since designing the cases, I've been thinking of adding a shelf that is like a large dictionary stand at one level, to provide a place to prop up larger books while referring to them. It would eat up shelf space, but we have 12-foot ceilings and plenty of wall space, so that's not a huge issue. The temptation would be to leave the books there permanently, though, so I'm not decided on the change.

I'm not a big fan of super-large books for things that could be smaller, but I do have to admit that for photographs, the form factor works well. For a dictionary, I'd rather have small volumes and more of them, for portability and so you can look up more than one word at a time. As it is, when I want to go on a cross-reference rampage I either need a lot of bookmarks or to use more dictionaries.

Opabinia has five eyes and a mouth tentacle. That kicks ass.

Anomalocaris, fah!

First, envy-hiss on the 12foot ceilings.

Second, why not create a pull-out standup-wth-prop? That way, you dont' use up shelfspace for something you don't use often, but have the "breadboard" effect for when you do?

Oh, you're right. Way cool!

Besides, they have a Trilobite of the Month. Now that's just cool. December features a very sexy (ymmv, of course) convex specimen from Germany. Convex!!!

I tried to find a plush trilobite a few weeks ago, but my Google-Fu is weak and puny, and I was unable to do so. One more reason to learn to sew, I guess!

Oh, don't envy too much. They were one of the few enticing things about a house entirely coated in pink paint and fake wooden paneling. If you're going to spend your last remaining energy and money on a house, it ought to have 12-ft ceilings and a decent pantry, I say.

Second, why not create a pull-out standup-with-prop? That way, you don't use up shelfspace for something you don't use often, but have the "breadboard" effect for when you do?

That's an idea, though it sounds technically challenging and possibly structurally unsound. Also, I'd like to minimise the moving parts. Maybe something that rolls out on 500lb full extension slides would work. Then I could climb on it to get to books up higher.

My other (somewhat more sensible) thought is simply to buy a couple of freestanding book stands for the room. Convenient because they can also be used to hold sheet music for musicians (2/3 of my household are musicians; you'd think the combination would work well, but what you end up with are rooms that are coated with one layer of books, then another layer of musical instruments).

Actual music stands, I find, lack the structural strength to hold much in the way of dictionaries and end up smooshed.

Come to think of it, I should really put a book stand in the kitchen, which is where I really need it 99.99% of the time.

I'm enjoying very much a series of lectures from The Teaching Company on The Story of Human Language. The professor is John McWhorter, who wrote Power of Babel. (Sherwin B. Nuland of How We Die is over in another corner with "Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography". Ooh ooh.) McWhorter's talking about how languages accrete new bits even as other parts wear away to nothingness; where grammatical bits like "the" come from; why some languages come to differentiate between Ma/mA/MA/ma etc... much more than just another round of Grimm's Law and the Great Vowel Shift.

Note: if purchasing from The Teaching Company, wait until the course you want comes around on the sale calendar. They very much want to be producing only a portion of their catalog at any one time, and price the others accordingly.

I should be lying down with my eyes shut listening to McWhorter instead of staring at computer screen... a migraine is knocking around the edges trying to get in.

Say, can anyone here address a connection between migraine and belching?

That's an idea, though it sounds technically challenging and possibly structurally unsound. Also, I'd like to minimise the moving parts.

Something like the leaf on a gateleg table? A pullout surface with a 'leg' that is flat to the bookcase front when not in use, and swings out on a hinge (or pair of hinges) to support the shelf? (The shelf itself could fit in a 'slot' in the bookcase, out of the way.)

Buttermilk Pie

6 Tb unsalted butter at room temp
1 c granulated sugar
2 eggs, separated
3 Tb all-purpose flour
1 Tb lemon juice (or more to taste)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1 c buttermilk at room temp
1 8-inch deep-dish pie crust, blind-baked until very lightly browned

Preheat oven to 350F. (In an electric mixer with a whisk attachment) Combine butter and sugar until well-blended. Add egg yolks and mix well. Add flour, lemon juice, nutmeg and salt. Add buttermilk in a thin stream until blended. Set aside.

In another bowl, whisk egg whites until they form soft peaks. Pour about 1/4 cup of the buttermilk mixture into egg whites and fold gently by hand to combine. Pour egg white mixture into remaining buttermilk mixture and fold gently until just combined -- will be somewhat lumpy.

Pour filling into baked pie shell.. Bake in middle of oven until filling is lightly browned and barely moves when pie is jiggled, 45 to 50 minutes. (Additional lemon juice will add to browning time, so bake 5-10 minutes longer if desired.) Cool on a rack and serve warm or at room temperature. Refrigerate leftovers.

Actually I have a substitute #1: do you cool the shell completely first?

Wiwaxia? Pikaia?
My favorite weirdness: Hallucigenia! (So weird, they didn't realize at first it was upside down!)

It's been a hard year for the Tropical Depression Center folks. I hope Santa [or other deliverer of gifts] brings them lots of good stuff for Christmas [or other holiday of your or their choice].

And they haven't had to retire any of the Greek letters yet!

Sadly, all of those machines are out of service. I now do my testing on spongebob, nebula, komodo, and bigbang.

3) that person did grow up there, and didn't forget, but never had to walk 2 miles in the snow to go see the cheap matinee movies at the parish's rec center.

Hah!

That's not rural. this is rural.

The nearest movie theater is a half hour by car, in Keene.

I'm just sayin'

I lived in this area for four years:

Halfway, Texas

Halfway is the white linear area in the uppper right quarter: about twenty buildings, including a farm supply, a very small card-keyed fuel station, and two Baptist churches (one Spanish-language). The buildings bottom center are a wide spot called Mayfield.

I really don't see that. Jeremy doesn't strike me as an older Calvin at all, there's no Hobbes substitute, there's nothing distinctively C&H (as opposed to kid out of touch with parents, teachers, etc.). The closest match I can think of is the bully, which is, again, not unique to C&H.

I have thought of several counter-opposites to Adams' "funnier with an animal" rule: Aqua Teen Hunger Force would not be funnier with ducks and pigs -- it would, if anything, be less funny. Conversely, Mallard Filmore should be very funny: It's got an animal, and it's usually pretty cruel. Now, if you had the backside of a horse repeating Sean Hannerity, that would be funny.

I saw some gorgeous jewelry at LosCon that incorporated trilobite fossils much like the ones I used to discover in the rockpile. Unfortunately, my budget did not allow for jewelry, but I took the business card of the lady who made them, so once the xmas bills have passed, I should be able to get a nice necklace or bracelet.

Is it weird for me to prefer jewelry made from extinct arthropods, rather than compressed carbon?

Dirt road; cows, chickens, horses.

Deer. Deer who are disgustingly clever about getting the corn.
Raccoons, bears, fishers.

Sometimes a crazy moose, usually in May, suffering from a virus and black flies.

A week or so every year, usually in March or April, where the snow is so heavy there's no electricity for days.

So quiet that you can hear the snow falling from the trees down hill, and the ice cracking in the brook when it thaws, waking you up at night--then you know it really will be spring in a couple of months.

You plan trips to town for shopping for food; movies are a really big deal, especially in winter time. Snowdays, the miracle when you wake up and you know there's no school. Sometimes two in a row, even.

Pouring hot maple syrup on still falling snow, then pulling the hardened warm slightly chewy candy up and eating it with hot coffee, fresh hot doughnuts, and sour pickles. Mulled cider later, when you've done the last of the sap.

It's good, I swear.

I like rural -- once lived on Blue Mountain a mile horizontal and 600-feet vertical from my nearest neighbor. These days, it's prudent to be less than 15 minutes from a hospital.

I've heard that the comic Frazz is the New Calvin. No Hobbes, but Frazz does seem to have some of Calvin's nuttiness.

I'm not Xopher, but it was a Sondheim reference (to "Another Hundred People", from Company). I don't know whether this means that Xopher associates Broadway musicals with urban areas or whether it was just a nice evocation of urban life (guarded parks, battered barks, answering services, friends of friends...). Anyway, none of my business really.

For me, if you're still interested, "rural" has generally meant quiet, calm, restricted and isolated; whereas "urban" has meant accessible, active, involved and interested. But then, I've lived in the country for years, without a car.

Chris W: probably you knew this already, but note that "serenissima" is a feminine adjective and it would probably be a mistake to apply it to the Doge. (I figure you were only going to give it in English anyway, but just to be sure.) My advice would be to look at either Machiavelli or Marco Polo and see what language they use in their dedications: admittedly Marco Polo was a few centuries before what you want (and dealing with the Can Grande, which may be a different matter altogether), and Machiavelli was dealing with Florentine nobility, but you would get the right kinds of adjective.

My edition of The Prince has Machiavelli repeatedly referring to Lorenzo de' Medici as "your Magnificence", and he was a duke of the same (official) rank as the Doge. It probably complicates matters that he was the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, though.

Never mind.

A humanist man of Stoke Poges,
in Venice composed apologias
for those aristocrats
who, though fond of their cats,
were accused of mistreating their Doges.

Rural: The diamond spill of the Milky Way against the truly black velvet of the night sky, beaming down overhead while the crickets and frogs sing harmony to lull you to sleep. The sharp, somehow lively, smell of fresh spread manure on white snow fields of winter.

Urban: The never-ending light and the never-ending symphony. Carlights, street lights, apartment lights, the close and comforting dome of lit clouds above. Car horn, car alarm, traffic grumble, ambulance sirens. Bus, truck, motorcycle.

I grew up rural, but (and?) love the conveniences of the city. My first extended stay in the city was my first week in college for Naval ROTC orientation. From being used to sleeping on the back lawn right next to the corn field I went to (trying to) sleep in a dorm room a block away from the city hospital.

I was writing in English, so the serenissima issue wasn't a problem. The "Dei Gratia..." formulation was actually from a letter from my author to the doge at the time, so I figured it was the best authority, though it is possible that it was slightly less formal than what would have been appended to a longer work in letter form, like I was forging. In fact, as I look back at my source, another letter addressed to the Doge uses the same greeting but inserts an "etc." which suggests a more formal letter would have had a half dozen more titles. Ah, well, that particular horse has left that particular barn, as the paper has left my hands for its day of judgement in the Ivory Tower.

(no, really, my prof's office really is in a tower, though it's more of a midwestern brownstone than ivory. It is very Gothic looking, though.)

And, in response to your limerick, I can't help but share a medieval double-dactyl I wrote while procrastinating for this class:

Waraday Snoraday
Louis the Corpulent
Battled the barons and
Normans all day

Suger then wrote ‘bout him
Enthusiastic’ly
Not even mentioning
What he did weigh

For more information on double dactyls and a few examples (including an obscene poem about Anton von Leevenhoek, father of microbiology) go here:

http://www.stinky.com/dactyl/dactyl.html

I really don't see that. Jeremy doesn't strike me as an older Calvin at all, there's no Hobbes substitute, there's nothing distinctively C&H

Well, the approach to the art, especially in the Sunday strips, is very close. Not that that's a bad thing, since Watterson was such an amazing innovator. The expressions characters wear are frequently C&H-inspired--have a look at a few grimaces, eyerolls, and sneezes, and you'll see the similarity. Still, no big deal there.

But have a look at the...let's say...mundane structure of Calvin's and Jeremy's lives:

The Dad: Middle-aged, balding w/ brown hair, glasses; mildly out of touch and ruefully cherishing outmoded ideals. Jeremy's is fat and ex-hippyish, while Calvin's is thin and a little bit Luddite.

The Mom: Tallish, sensible, smart, and harrassed. Has her hands full with taking care of home and family, esp. her only child. Has a more reliable, less startling sense of humor about life than her husband's. Jeremy's has curly black hair and wears more lipstick, Calvin's has straight brown hair and is more grimly determined.

The Girl: Smart, studious, sensitive, and a little bewildered/annoyed by protagonist's antics. Brown haired and not particularly glamorous, but uncomfortably conscious of her relative place in school's hierarchy. Can still be persuaded to unbend and have fun, on occasion.

The Best Friend: Bigger, calmer, and a little more self-aware than protagonist. Will nonetheless participate in any wild scheme protagonist suggests. Hector and Hobbes are definitely the biggest stretch...but the differences point out the ways Zits seems to have been adapted from the earlier strip. Hector is a human kid with a bit of a weight problem and a Latino background. But how often are these things relevant to the action of the strip? Does Hector ever do or say anything Hobbes wouldn't, in the same situation? He's on view much less than Hobbes, but I think that's because there's less need for him, as a character, than there was for Hobbes. (In the last couple years Jeremy has been spending a lot more time with Pierce, I think because Pierce has more energy as a character. Jeremy and Pierce tend to take turns reacting to each other's eccentricity with Hobbes-ish nonplused amusement) Partly because he lacks Hobbes's position as the central "question" of the strip--is Calvin's imagined world real or only in his mind?

Jeremy's world is drastically less imaginative and more social...as befits the difference between a 6 year old and a 16 year old. So there aren't any plots about running away to Mars or the Yukon. Cutting away the imaginary world that's 7/10ths of C&H, what we've got here are two strips about a smart but underachieving, blond messy-haired boy in sneakers living in a generalised Middle America, with a social world almost entirely composed of school and family, and occasional kindly disparagement of pop culture. You can say that the similarities between, say, the dads are just a result of them both adhering to a sort of American Dad archtype, I guess, but in C&H this worked because Calvin's Dad was only important when he interacted with Calvin. Especially in the early strips it looks to me like the Zits creators were big C&H fans who thought, "Hey! You know at the end of that time-machine storyline where Calvin says, 'let's go forward a little bit and see what I'm like as a teenager' and Hobbes says 'let's not'? What do you think they'd see?" and then structured their strip around that idea. Characters were run through a filter to make them less timeless, more specifically 90s: Calvin's red shirt gets changed to a purple flannel, Susie gets her ears pierced a couple more times, and all the unnamed kids at school start dating...and some of them are given names and one-dimensional personalities. The mundane world is more detailed, social and timely, since we spend more time there, and there's more of an emphasis on pop culture vs. (in C&H) ethical problems and broad social questions.

But the spirit of C&H was what made it so original. And that's been cut out of Zits,--along with all the dinosaurs and spaceships and the many uses of a cardboard box--by making it about stereotypical teen life instead of the constantly shifting world of childhood. Jeremy is much more literally a teenager than Calvin is a little boy, but Calvin is much more *real* as a character than Jeremy. IMHO. I wouldn't want Calvin to turn into Jeremy, because he's lost the energy and imagination that made him special. (Granted, I'd prefer it to him turning up in Fight Club...but that's a whole nother level of disturbing) So it looks to me like Zits has taken a big part of the framework of C&H and cut out most of the fantasy and individual vision. And *that's* the biggest part of why I get angry when I see jokes being directly taken from C&H and recycled with minimal rephrasing. (Which happens about once every couple months, at least, and if you go through treasury collections of both you can find them pretty easily.) In the end, I think Zits is a good but derivative strip, but Calvin & Hobbes was a genuinely great one which will continue to be important for a very long time.

[/soapbox]

It does not address the question of whether or not the crust should be cooled completely before filling, nor the effect of buttermilks with differing fat contents. Sorry! We'll all just have to experiment there, and report back.

I gotta admit, the translation of Alouette got a bit bloodier than the original, so's it'd fit the meter and have some sorta rhyme scheme.

I suppose it might go

Little skylark, pretty little skylark,
Little bird, those feathers gotta go.

I will pluck your little head,
I will pluck your little head.
Little head,
Now is red.

Ah, ah, ah, ah ...

The synopsis of the story so far: Disney wants to rewrite Christopher Robin as a 6-year-old girl, because...

"We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide," says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel.
"Christopher Robin is still out there in the woods, playing," she says.

I did prefer Calvin and Hobbes but Zits is fairly amusing.

He did not want Pooh to find him like this. It was not that Pooh would eat up all the honey and then go look for a place to throw up. The woods covered a hundred acres and that was all right, unless Roo was too close by. He did not want Pooh to appear just then because Christopher Robin's hands were covered in honey and when the bear came up for a hug it would all turn bad very fast.

And at that moment Pooh did appear. He was jaunty. He was so damned jaunty it would have made Mrs. Parker swear off the hard stuff, right after she fwowed up. Pooh was humming a song. It sounded like Bowie's "Putting Out Fire (With Gasoline)," but it was hard to tell with a hum like that. Piglet was on his shoulder, trying to manage an iPod Nano that was bigger than he was.

Suddenly Tigger sped in from somewhere in the deep green and bowled both of them over. Tigger skidded to a halt and skipped back. "That was my morning pounce," he said.

Christopher Robin used the moment to find some leaves to wipe his sticky hands. It was going to be a good day. He knew it would. He knew it even though he knew that, somewhere off in the West, where Oxonians went when their time was up, voice actresses with squeaky little-girl voices were auditioning to play him. He had always hoped that Brian Cox or Patrick Stewart would play him. Stephen Fry would have been all right too, and would have had a handle on his dreaming side. Instead he was going to sound like Puffy AmiYumi. Roo would grow up and forget who he was.

He looked at the honeypot, and thought hard about how much honey you would have to eat before you got all woozykins and never woke up. It had never worked for Pooh. He picked himself and the pot up, and went to make Pooh happy for the rest of the long, shadowy afternoon.

What horrors they visit on the grotesque puppets they now have in their power will pale in comparison to how they created them.

There's got to be a joke somewhere in there.

Perhaps I should point out that I was thinking of enthusiasm and complete lack of foresight, rather than a firm belief in predestination.

Does Hector ever do or say anything Hobbes wouldn't, in the same situation?

"Don't the other kids tease you for bringing a stuffed animal to school with you?"

"Tommy Chestnut did once, and now nobody does."

"Why?"

"Hobbes ate him."

Laura R, that's "Another quaint custom that I wish were still in use...."

Aah! The subjunctive! How could I forget?

(hangs head in shame)

Help me, Making Light readers, you're my only hope! (Maybe not, but it's an appropriate way to end a question - or set of them, rather.)

Murphy was a keen amateur historian, with a particular interest in the Battle of Clontarf (1014), and a collection of Viking axeheads, Irish cloak-pins and so forth. The prize of his collection, however, was the skull of Brian Boru, which he had bought for a considerable sum of money from O'Reilly, an antique dealer in the Liberties of Dublin. Murphy would point out to all his visitors how you could clearly see the damage done to the skull by Brodar's axe.

He was shocked, therefore, to pass Reilly's window one day and see featured therein a skull with a tag saying "Brian Boru". He stormed in and confronted Reilly. " What do you mean by this? You assured me five years ago you were selling me the authentic skull of Brian Boru. Here you are now, selling another one! and to add insult to injury, the two of them could never be confused for each other, since this one is far smaller." Says Reilly, "Ah now, don't be getting excited. Sure, this one here is the skull of Brian Boru when he was a boy."

*collects thrown vegetables to make soup*

Apparently Garrison Keillor and Jim Morrison were also born on December 8. Does that make up for the 1961 event?

On Kali: Kali Ma is one of my favorite goddesses. I'd love to hear more about her domestic aspects.

Kali is a Fierce Protector. She definitely has her sweet aspect, as anyone who has chanted Jai Ma (the one I know, which goes Jai Ma, Kali-Durge ma, Kali ma (2ce); Jai Ma Durge Ma (2ce); repeat) will tell you. But I'm not going to lecture about Kali, much as I love her, when there are actual Hindus in the room. *bows deferentially*

Hekate, though Western, is still less known in the West (probably because Eopagan religions are more familiar than Paleopagan ones). When she is depicted at all, it's in her most terrible aspects: Death-crone, Witch-queen. Yet she's known as "tender-hearted Hekate" in Homer; she was the only one who listened when Demeter was crying over her lost daughter Kore (later called Persephone). I'm fond of the belief that she actually gave Demeter the idea for her famous job action!

There are actually very few gods (or goddesses) who have ONLY terrible aspects. Not even Yahweh! (His Old Testament behavior comes pretty close, though.)

Has anybody ever seen Peter Brook's 1989(?) adaptation of the Mahabaratta? People seem to love it or hate it, but I'm one of those in the middle. My wife and I were watching the DVD again a few weeks ago and I went 'huh?' upon recognizing the name of one of the cast members. I looked thru again and that guy with the thick & black Charlie-Stross beard indeed is Kieran Hinds.

In Australia this might not be worthy of note, but in Hawaii, or indeed anywhere in the US, it's a bit unusual. I had heard of a colony of wallabies living up on the mountain ridge over Kalihi, but this is the first I've ever seen one one. Too bad it had been hit.

Rural: Hey! Wow! Five cars!

Urban: Hey! Wow! I can't see where the traffic ends!

I was writing in English, so the serenissima issue wasn't a problem.

Fair enough, and you obviously know what you are doing. I might have had access to better sources at home (where I used to share a flat with someone who wrote part of her PhD on Marco Polo), but it sounds as though you have plenty of your own. I'm as baffled by the "dux Venetiae" form as David Goldfarb, although I suppose it must mean that Venice is plural in Latin. (It doesn't seem to have been in Classical Latin, but it might have varied in the Renaissance: this is a handy resource.) Venetiis, is a dative or ablative plural in any case.

I can't help but share a medieval double-dactyl I wrote while procrastinating for this class:

Double dactyls: yes, I like them, though I can rarely make them elegant. Although I'm pleased with:

Soapery Popery
Samuel Wilberforce
thought evolution was
wide of the mark:

argued that fossils were
antediluvian
creatures prevented from
boarding the ark.

I know what you mean about writing while procrastinating. I have a tendency to write stuff like this while listening to papers at academic conferences, which last time out resulted in an entire ballade about the philosophy of Gregory Palamas.

Least appropriate form of address? "Git, little doge..."

It would be interesting, if I had the time and inclination, to track how long it takes for a scandal to filter through to the 419ers. We've heard from the friends of Saddam and his entire family, and every single human being who ever held public office in Nigeria. I'm expecting someone to start offering some of Abramoff's slush bucks within three months.

And you know, if it were really this difficult to move quantities of Schmutzgeld* across international boundaries, all sorts of illicit enterprises would have gone belly-up by now.

*It's a word now.

Plus, I just heard an story on Marketplace last night about bio-active water filtration for third-world countries where the bacterial layer on top of the sand filter was called a Schmutzdecke.

http://www.johnshirley.net/DesktopDefault.aspx

"Whew!"

I've found mongeese in my yard within the past year (Pearlridge). I've never seen that in 28 years of living here.

For those in the audience that have not held security clearances, a cover sheet is used when someone not cleared to see some materials is in your office. At one time (I believe it has changed recently) there were three sheets for the standard three levels of classification:

Yellow - Confidential
Orange - Secret
Red - Top Secret

They looked much as the spoof cover sheets do, wide borders and all, with language from the US Code concerning penalties for misuse. Sheets came in all sizes, covering everything from letter sized documents to wall charts.

There have always been spoofs. In my father's plans shop in Germany, they came up with a purple cover sheet labeled "OBSCENE" with language pulled from the laws aganst mailing obscene materials. They ususally had it over in the corner, on top of a pile of girlie mags, and would covertly watch visitors to see how long it would take them to peek under the cover.

Aack. I know, and I apologize...I'm getting over bronchitis and I'd been taking this over-the-counter cough syrup which seems to be related to P. G. Wodehouse's Buck-U-Uppo. It made me all fiesty and gregarious despite being tired and achy...except that, since this isn't the halcyon side-effect free Wodehouseverse, it also kept me from getting any sleep at all (and didn't do as much as one might hope for my cough). So when I was asked wherefore the comparison I'd made in a previous throwaway line, I launched into one of my Standard Rants. I don't actually dislike Zits: it does what it does really well, and makes much more of an attempt at using space creatively than most post-Waterson comics. C&H just happens to be one of those works of literature that I adore so much I'm ever-unreasonably-vigilant against any slight to their honor; besides, the Fight Club thing had already made my head spin a bit. It was all fairly unnecessary, and I'm sorry if I offended any one.

Paul Clarke: Hee. I'd forgotten about Tommy Chestnut. Though I didn't say Hobbes didn't do things Hector wouldn't. Obviously he does. I said Hector...oh, hell, never mind. Sorry.

In re: Calvin and Hobbes having philosopher's names: a few months back one of Television Without Pity's Pixel Challenges had the prompt, "Who else is on the Lost island?" Guess who my favorite response featured. Well, you know, there are already characters named Locke and Rousseau...

We burned material in the Navy. When I was on Kwajalein I used a Waring blendor to mulch my two classified documents per day.

Holothuroidea!
Best of echinoderms!
Five-sided symmetry,
podia buccal--

with vigorous rubbing the
mutable tissue turns
sea-starry cucumber
into brown puccal.

Now I just need a rhyme for 'barnacle'.

'Tabernacle'?

'Spectacles'?

'Ridicule'?

For the slightly longer u sound:
taffy pull
Johnny Bull
three bags full

And for the faintly shorter:
this knife's dull
Aleph-Null
carnival (in its common Englishification)

The most interesting approach to emergency document destruction I ever came across was a standard fireproof filing cabinet. Generally, these, like most fire safes, have a layer of cement under the outside shell, and a cement panel on each door, but little or no partitions between drawers. The cabinet had a thermite grenade in a box on top. If you needed to leave suddenly and did not want whatever was in the files to be read, you simply pulled the pin on the grenade, placed it quickly on top of the files in the top drawer, and close and lock all the drawers. Nor only would there be nothing readable left in the cabinet, you would have to cut it open to find out.

After it cooled down, of course. Doing this would pretty much violate any lease agreement on your office space.

Remember, few human difficulties cannot be solved by . . . uh . . . having the proper tools to hand.

Or by having the right wrong tool for the job. With a thermite grenade, there might not be much left of any of the file cabinet, concrete lining or not. That's a chemical reaction described as 'vigorous'.

There was a young man named Linnaeus:
Inspired by some mischievous deus,
He tagged all of nature
With binomenclature:
A devious way to betray us!

For example, the Danaus plexippus,
(In some books Anosia plexippus)
Is called D. menippe
In South Mississippi
And elsewhere is called D. archippus.

--Nat B. Frazer, Ph.D. (a relative of mine)

Persimmons. I was captivated by pictures of persimmons on flickr, so I decided to buy one.

I read the "how to buy" advice, carefully selected one, left it until it met most of the ripeness criteria and carved it up.

It's a miracle I still have any tooth enamel. It was perhaps the most alkaline food experience I've ever had. Yuck.

But, I've seen recipes for persimmon pound cake and the like that seem captivating.

So, did I get a bad specimen, eat it unripe or do something else wrong, or do I just plain *hate* the things, beautiful as they are?

Plus, does grating and installing in baked goods bring out their inner delicacy?

Don't have time to summarize the McGee persimmon chapter at the mo, but may try in a few hours unless someone else gets to it first.

Well, magnesium is strong and lightweight.

It's also the obvious motivation for a Fifties psychopathic killer vegetable. For the rest of the movie, he's howling (in Vegan, of course) "You squares wrecked my wheels, man!"

I just taught a short course on food and science, and I am in my office, so my copy of McGee's On Food and Cooking came readily to hand. On persimmons:

The most important persimmon species worlwide is Diospyros kaki [Japanese persimmons.]...Japanes persimmons come in two general kinds, astringent and nonastringent. Astringent varieties [tapered]...have such high levels of tannins that they're edible only when completely ripe, with translucent and almost liquid flesh. Nonastringent types [flat- bottomed]...are not tannic, and can be eaten while underripe and crisp...[omitted: technical explanation of how a centuries-old method of burial of persimmons in mud gets rid of the astringency]. Modern cooks can accomplish the same thing by wrapping persimmons snugly in a truly airtight plastic film, polyvinylidene chloride (saran).

I have very little personal experience with persimmons; here in snowy New England, the per-persimmon cost is high enough that it isn't really justified by the taste, for me (YMMV, but here is McGee's description: They have a very mild aroma reminiscent of winter squash that probably derives from the breakdown products of carotenoids.) However, I'd guess that different persimmon experiences may have resulted from the two different types.

Yup, double dactyl = higgledy piggledy. I like yours immensely.

Though I am puzzled by "puccal." Merriam-Webster.com, unsurprisingly, doesn't have it. My OED is unreadable because a hard drive forced an upgrade to Win98, and the disk unregenerately 3.1-based. I'm assuming the meaning in question has nothing to do with PUCCAL, the Public Utilities Commission of California; the Bayer code (which I know nothing about) for Puccinia allii (DE CANDOLLE) RUDOLPH, aka rust of allium, onion, leek and garlic; or the Gaelic word from which, according to "The Story of English" the name "Puck" is derived (at least according to another site I found; I haven't checked that, either).

A rhyme for barnacle? Yikes. That's a right nasty triple.

Here, it's a near nickle; thar, it's a far nickle.

I went to the concert, got squirted with blood -
a messy but typical Gwar pickle.
My date went and left me. And there I had hoped
she'd stick to me close as a barnacle.

Hmmmm.

Aack. I know, and I apologize

In that case I will leave the argument alone, but I will still recommend the instructive exercise I was going to. Find a collection of Dennis the Menace cartoons and open it to a random page. See how many tries it takes before you hit a gag that was reused nearly verbatim in Calvin & Hobbes. I did this yesterday with the first volume of the "Complete" collection (in a bookstore, I don't own the thing) and it only took me three tries.

This is not to suggest that C&H is particularly derivative of Dennis the Menace, since I don't think it is, just that certain things tend to naturally occur under similar initial conditions.

Higgledy piggledy
Ursus horribilis
Stomps through the woods on his
plantigrade feet...

but the rest of it has abandoned me. I know it was in print-published form. My Google Fu is insufficient to find it online anywhere.

And precocious small boys get into the same kinds of trouble. Any parent with sons will read DtM or C&H and say "my son did something just like that..."

Thanks for the rhymes, everyone-- I have the lower three-fifths of a limerick written, and 'barnacle' doesn't rhyme with much.

I think I'll wait for next fall, when they're plentiful and cheap and try again.

Observed in my home only, as far as I know.

A great messy affair. Many cans of condensed milk and nine bags of off-brand chocolate chips were sacrified.

I left the TV on. Out of curiosity, I put on the Jim Carrey "Grinch" movie before my hands got too grungy to handle the remote.

Cripes . . . what were they thinking? I heard it was a stinker, but sheesh!

I think there's a specialized Japanese adjective to describe the astringency of an unripe persimmon, but I can't find it right now. It's the fault of tannins, though. Something something acetaldehyde and stuff.

McGee cites several traditional Chinese and Japanese methods of ripening them, all of which enclose the fruits away from oxygen-- submerging them in water or sake, putting them in a covered jar with a burning stick of incense, encasing them in mud/clay, etc. Simply encasing them plastic bags/wrap didn't do the trick, but individually triple-Saran-wrapped fruits ripened nicely when stored inside a gas oven for a day, thanks to the baseline effects of the pilot light. You can also stuff them into the freezer, but then the tannins take at least ten days to disappear and the pulp defrosts all mooshy-like.

Playing with the pH of persimmon pulp by adding baking soda, lemon juice, or whatnot can have weird gelling effects which can also happen in the stomach, causing phytobezoars, so don't overdo the persimmon chowdown.

The Wal-Mart web site doesn't appear to list the product, and I am not burning the gas to drive into fscking Daly City to go find out what is the current price on their in-store stock.

Nevertheless, I think the corrected price comes out to around six or seven magnets per man-hour. Still quite an impressive amount of labor, and I would never have guessed it could be such a labor intensive process.

Ayse Sercan has definitely convinced me of something here...

And I think this came from "A Face in the Frost", I'm at our club's Xmas party on the hotel's internet access so I don't remember/can't look up the author:

Higgledy piggledy, St. Athanasius
Thumbing through volumes in unseemly haste
trying to find out if, hagiographically
John of Jereuselam
enjoyed almond paste.

My usual guide here is E.O. Parrott's How To Be Well-Versed in Poetry, which I hereby recommend to everyone still reading, and which also claims that the form was invented in 1951 by Anthony Hecht.

My understanding is that once you get rid of the single-word rule and the nonsense line at the start, then you are writing a McWhirtle. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

For 'barnacle' - well, 'Sparnicle', obviously. Tyrannical? Canonical? Harmonical? Cyclonical? 'Karmical' is probably not a word, but would be a half-rhyme if it were. 'Adolf von Harnack'll'? In French, one of the hills of Rome is the Janicule. And a railway up a hill is a funicule.

That will do for now.

I'm gonna be about as crass as a guy can be at a moment like this and quote one of my own characters:

If the gods are laughing at us, then by damn they aren't getting their laughs cheap.

Would it be okay to support the troops by hijacking a shipment of magnets and festooning them all over one's car? And can one festoon magnets?