Damn right!

Perle, pleasaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere,
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.

Flag of Our Fathers was a wonderfully well done and wrenching WWII story. The action alternates between the battle of Iwo Jima and the travails of three servicemen -- the survivors of the group who raised the flag on Mount Surabachi -- touting War Bonds on the home front.

This is not a gung-ho flag-waving John Wayne style WWII movie. It is a bleak and moving meditation on heroism, depicting the horrors of battle (NOT . . . FOR . . . KIDS, NO, NO, NO, DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!) and what it does to the men who do the fighting. It slows down a bit toward the end, when it switches to the present day, and the son of one of the flag-raisers starts narrating. Still, two thumbs up, plus a third for director Clint Eastwood.

Babel is the third film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Like Amores Perros and 21 Grams it presents the stories of several people from widely varying walks of life. In this case:

* A deaf-mute Tokyo teeny bopper.
* Two Moroccan farm boys.
* An American tourist couple.
* A Mexican nanny living in San Diego, trying to get to her son's wedding.

If you've see either of Iñárritu's earlier films, you know the rest of the formula: Something terrible happens, and people suffer and strive and screw up. Connection are made and the stories converge. You watch, utterly transfixed, cringing and hoping something goes right.

Not as utterly bleak and personal as 21 Grams (which was produced in English), not as cleverly constructed as Amores Perros, but a stunning piece of filmmaking. I probably owe the theater a few bucks for the rents my fingernails left in the armrests.

One of my commenters tried to find it at NetFlix and was unsuccessful, but it might be available somewhere.

He is depicted in "Flag of our Fathers", and to judge from the real-life photos of the three shown in the closing credits they didn't do a bad job of casting.

Sure enough, NASA decided to fit a new, exciting, highly experimental LITHIUM-alloy fuel tank. Surprise -- that tank caught fire during the next flight. The whole craft was destroyed. And of course, there was no budget to build another. Everything was reserved for high-budget shuttle follow-ons from the usual suspects, or Space Station Ed. Certainly not for an embarrassing not-invented-here project.

NASA is not always, or even frequently, the good guys. The evidence of that punches me in the gut every time.

I really wish I could remember the audience reaction; I saw it at a drive-in in Bagdad Az, which isn't far from a few reservations.

I'll have to look around for the film.

A number of websites I go to (less than 10%) I can't read because the left inch or so of content is off my screen. I'm sure this is a simple matter to take care of but I don't even know what to call the problem to look it up. Can someone help me out here?

Thanks.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055270/

But there's no DVD or even a current VHS! Bummer.

His last album contains a cover of "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails which gives me goosebumps.

It's done all the time by third raters and incompetents...

Serge, speaking of the Three Wise Men, I am reminded of the offspring of a friend of mine who said he thought it was the Three Wise Monkeys, wasn't it? Since then, I have contemplated acquiring a creche, just to put the Three Wise Monkeys in it.

I still haven't heard "American V" yet, but I will, on the strength of IV, which was full of sadness and beauty.

* * *

I'm about to take the dog out for a walk in a rain storm with "hurricaine strength" winds. Queah weathah we're havin', eyup.

Thereby allowing Lockheed Martin and Disney to proceed with the Mickey Mouse X-33 program....

Victor S. -- not quite right. DC-X was a project of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, SDIO. (The SDIO division that funded it was run by then-COL Pete Worden, who is now director of NASA Ames. The actual program manager was an Air Force major, Jess Sponable, and one of the "pilots" was filker Mitchell Burnside-Clapp. I was at the first public flight test, and drove back from the test range to Las Cruces with Pete Worden, pitching a new program to him. My boss was driving, and kept turning around to join the back-seat discussion -- nearly ran us off the road several times.)

DC-X was damaged by an in-flight fire on its last flight. It autolanded successfully despite having a gaping hole blown in its side, but needed substantial repairs. At that point it was under heavy budgetary and political attack -- Clinton was in office, SDIO was being cut back, and DoD was raiding anything space-related for funds to keep their main new-launch-vehicle program (NLS) alive. The net result was that NASA got named the sole national agency for reusable launch vehicle development. DC-X was transferred to NASA, rebuilt as the DC-XA, and made a few more flights, but on its last flight the ground crew forgot to reconnect a hose in the landing gear. It flew, set down, and one landing leg didn't extend, so as soon as the engines shut off it fell over, rupturing tanks and triggering an explosion that destroyed it.

So it was killed by funding problems, national politics, and plain old human error, not NASA technology choices. DoD might have done a better job of running the program, and the one that followed it(NASA did pick the high-tech/high-risk option for X-33, and it failed badly). But it's equally possible DoD would have killed the program completely after the first fire, had NASA not taken it over.

Page does not exist

You have followed a link to a page that appears, unfortunately, to have been misplaced.

In the words of John M. Ford, "We're not lost. We're locationally challenged."

"Three wise men, eh? More like Three Wise Guys."

Any chance you'll be at Boskone next February?

Here's an excerpt from today's column by Jon Carroll who was in New York City last week:

But there was something not quite right about the scene. The fire damage was just wrong somehow, and the cars were curiously intact except for their fenders. There was an official-looking person standing nearby, so I asked him the question one so often asks in Manhattan: traffic accident or art piece?

"Oh no, it's a Will Smith movie. They were shooting it all last night. Explosions and fireballs and everything. See, there's this killer virus on the loose that turns everybody into zombies, except Will Smith doesn't get it, so he has to fight the zombies all by himself. I think the movie is called 'I Am Legend.' "

I know where I'm NOT going to be when that movie opens.

(Next: Will Smith IS Hari Seldon in "FOUNDATION"! With The Rock as Salvor Hardin!)

Mary Renault.

Sounds more like a remake of The Omega Man.

I guess there was something about him that never got old. He's still a hit with the kids.

I really like the Koss "Plug" headphones. They use earplug foam to surround the speaker tube, and both fit well, block outside sound, and stay in well. I also find them very comfortable.

The Torchwood organisation must be desperate for staff.

You are right that the song is a traditional. I was wrong there. But, on the album the song is titled, "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

Great song whatever it's called.

Delta Clipper: A sad loss. That video footage of the test flight was so beautiful, and the project so promising.

*smites forehead* Of course. That makes so much sense. I do have to wonder if the rest of the world would really be in such deep and pervasive denial about what happened though.

Lieberman, who has said he will caucus with the Democratic Party despite having lost Connecticut's Democratic senatorial primary to Ned Lamont, not to mention the Democratic vote in the midterm election, wouldn't commit unequivocally to his party: "I'm not ruling it out," he said, "but I hope I don't get to that point."

What a bum he is. I think Susan needs to pay him a visit.

There's a lot of stuff uses the mailing address, and some of it might even be honest. Anyway, I doubt this outfit's use of Tesco trademarks is authorised, and I've already sent off an email to Tesco.

Maybe aggressive trademark lawyers have some uses.

Indeed, from The Discoverie of Witchcraft.

...Bush's head suffered about $25,000 in damages...

Before you rejoice, here's the rest of the sentence:

...when a Madame Tussaud's visitor attacked it the day before last week's elections...

My stepmother teaches high school art, and says that Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra are the only artists all of her students can agree on.

I can see a connection. Partly, I think it's the concept of a song's words being important; being more than just musical sounds.

Of course, that's partly the music Sinatra started out with, and he kept going with those songs. And both of them were around long enough that they weren't just a question of fashion. They became part of the landscape against which other singers were strutting their stuff.

And maybe another part of it was that they sang stuff that we could get away with singing. They could sing them right, but the songs didn't come out of our mouths sounding like a 12-bar train-wreck.

Heck, that goes wider than them. I'm trying to rememmber the last time I heard a pop record that sounded like it could be played by four ordinary guys with guitars and a drumkit.

No, music isn't easy, but so much of the modern stuff is logistically difficult.

The context was Philip of Macedon getting the prophecy "Wreathed is the bull for the altar; and the slayer, too, is ready." In Fire from Heaven he takes this as a good omen for his planned invasion of Persia, but as it happens he's assassinated that same day.

Now, maybe she used the line as you quote it in another book...if so, I'd guess it was The Mask of Apollo.

Dave #55: What does it mean to be set "after" a season of time-travel stories? I'm sure there may be key events, but...'after' must have a somewhat modified meaning, surely?

Different holidays, different decorations. Please.

Even so, the current Doctor Who hasn't been mucking with chronology for the stories happening in modern-day London and/or Cardiff. If Rose went back home to visit mom, it was always some days or months after the last time - this is even a plot point in Early Eccleston, where it turns out she's been missing for a year (Or was it half a year? Irrelevant) between visits -- and it never occurs to her or the Doctor to go "Whoops, let's just pop back in a few weeks ago, how's that?" (ARGH!)

jc: I think it would show more guts on the part of the writers and the tv series to have everyone know and accept more of what's going on, and have people on the street willing to deal with it; and I suspect more of them have an inkling than we've been shown. But... it would make for a harder job for the writers, since suddenly you're talking imaginary world backdrop, not real world. Not that this should stop them, but I feel sympathetic to their decision, as with so many other shows, to have "superpowers/magic/aliens in the modern day" be a *secret*. (Even Buffy only ahd her classmates fully "in on it" right before she graduated high school and got a new crop of strangers and distant acquaintances as backdrop.)

Annoyed, but sympathetic.

"...steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return?.."

I'd agree that the guy definitely has issues.

Probably what is happening is that your screen set to be X pixels wide, while the web designer has directed the web page to be X+Y pixels wide. If you tell us what resolution your screen is and what web pages this is happening on, we can confirm.

I believe most web browsers will show a scroll bar at the bottom of the page for you to see the rest. Opera, my browser of choice, will rearrange the contents of the page so you don't have to scroll with a click of a button or the press of Ctrl+F11.

What informed their 'puerile baggage'? Let's see... the first two were decorated WW2 vets who pushed back against McCarthyism and other anti-democratic strains in American culture. Oh, yeah - in Freeperspeak, that's anti-Americanism. Silly me.

The guys over at Sadly, No! are having a field day with him, and are keeping a pretty good list of all his various incarnations.

While there's a couple of bits of evidence in Torchwood which are obvious if explained, what is clearly said in the first episode is that it is taking place not long after the last episode of the first David Tennant season. There's a more explicit connection later. That's the local continuity, as seen by people who aren't time travellers.

As for why the Doctor and Rose couldn't have gone back a few months so that Rose wasn't missing, it isn't hard to see, from the Father's Day episode, that bad things can happen if somebody messes with their own history.

We might have the Adoration of the Dinosaurs up again this year. No sodomy will be in evidence.

"...I get the feeling here without wishing to be any more homophobic than I'm normally accused of, but in my part of [the] country, almost every lesbian you run across tends to be someone who's just been in a couple of really bad marriages and despaired of men, and I notice that in Europe, a sort of similar trend is that women who have been in a couple of bad marriages with western men basically embrace Islam as a way of, you know -- and again, whether it's your sort of boorish English soccer lout or your kind of sweet, you know, new male that, 'I'll do the ironing, darling' type, that it does seem that the women up here in the north country embrace lesbianism just as a kind of general weariness with the available range of males. So I noticed that there's something similar with the women in Islam in France and Belgium..."

"Mimic" is the story of an astronaut who returns from a deep-space mission after five years. His sister begins to suspect something is wrong, and it's revealed that her brother has been assimilated by a shape-shifting alien, and the alien is still hungry. Pretty standard, but plenty entertaining. Anyway, John W. Campbell as host interrupts the story from time with some inane, rambling analogy about "what would happen if you let a pair of tigers loose on an island full of sheep," and concludes, "the tigers would eat all the sheep, until there was nothing left to eat but tigers, and therefore, the monster in tonight's story is impossible, and these events are inconceivable in the real world." (Paraphrase.)

I thought, "Waitaminute -- did he just dismiss the very story he's presenting? What's that about?" Then later it occurred to me that "Mimic" uses the same plot device as Campbell's "Who Goes There?"!

Could some of you who know more about Campbell than me (I'm guessing that's approximately all of you) speculate as to what was going on in Campbell's brain?

IIRC, one of the many tricks that the Great Sage Equal to Heaven learned was the art of turning his hairs into copies of himself (who would, I think, merge back with him after doing whatever needed to be done).

I can see him doing it just so as to mess with people.

A three Monkey-Kings sculpture would no doubt have the "See-No-Evil" one peeking, the "Hear-No-Evil" cupping one ear so as to hear *better*, and the "Speak-No-Evil" one would be sticking out his tongue through his fingers.

Sebastian Faulks said that he thought it was the best Bond film so far. Praise was heaped on the new actor chap, the script, the music, the character development, the plot -- basically everything.

In fact, the BBC website now has a review of the new Bond film, and it is indeed quite positive. Another article quotes positive reviews from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times.

MADRID, Spain - A shipwrecked first-century vessel carrying delicacies to the richest palates of the Roman Empire has proved a dazzling find, with nearly 2,000-year-old fish bones still nestling inside clay jars, archaeolgists said Monday. [snip]

1500 amphoras, formerly holding fish sauce (read garum), but now containing only fish bones, because the seals weren't hermetic. It's a 100-foot-long ship, in 80 feet of water. The archeologists are very happy.

Or to find the exact opposite of your favorite book, go here:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

For example, the exact opposite of "Atlas Shrugged" is Flann O'Brien's "The Poor Mouth".

But the exact opposite of "The Poor Mouth" is something by Terry Pratchett; Pratchett is the opposite of almost everything, because apparently his fans read no other books. Flann O'Brien is only #2, because his books are less popular than Pratchett's.

Thus though I show up on a number of web pages, Googlism only sees a few references to me, mostly due to activity on tech mailing lists, where somebody said "Clifton Royston is such-and-such..."

(Even so, it does seem oddly limited in what it finds. Searching for the phrase "Clifton Royston is" manually on Google turns up a number more references.)

Error 500
-------------
Checked other blogspot bookmarks, all same. Hope they're back soon, Ms. Snark is a high point in my day and I got whacked today with work. Insanity, thy name is gift marts....

It's also possible that he'd had some time to think about the idea behind "Who Goes There?", which would hardly be the first highly-rated SF story to be massively implausible if you try to trace it back.

Philosophical quibble: I don't think it's possible to be OT in an Open Thread.

Automated sorting quibble: Pratchett (likewise JK Rowling, likewise the Beatles when it comes to music) really messes up every "people who like this also like that" algorithm I've ever seen. Surely there is a computational way to correct for: this item is so vastly popular that everyone likes it, and therefore you can't use it to predict what other things someone might like?

It's curious how effortlessly and casually the cops bring surveillance photos into the equation. They do that on Law & Order now and then, but here the Eye seems quite pervasive.

Ever since the Christmas episode of MISTER BEAN, I've felt that no Nativity is complete without a T. Rex and helicopters.

(I don't have any depressing modernist books about programming knitting patterns, but it's only a matter of time.)

ahahahaha. i wonder who will write the great american depressing modernist novel about programming knitting patterns.

individeweal,

Pratchett (likewise JK Rowling, likewise the Beatles when it comes to music) really messes up every "people who like this also like that" algorithm I've ever seen.

i would think everyone who likes terry pratchett likes douglas adams. i could be wrong, of course. people are funny.

I ran into the Unsuggester when I was looking at my LibraryThing earlier today but hadn't checked it out. If you tell it "The Tao of Pooh" you get a zillion books about Christianity.

The most useful thing about it to my mind is the ability (if you've got a cellphone with 'Net capability) to check your library while in a bookstore; it prevents you from buying duplicates.

O Melchior, you brought me gifts of gold
To make a crown that you refuse to see:
You hide your eyes lest kingship make me bold,
Seduce me on the heights, corrupting me.
And Balthasar, who gave me frankincense,
Is deaf to my pronouncements. Are your fears
That I'd usurp my Father so intense
That cowering, you cover up your ears?
My Caspar, bringing myrrh, forshadows loss
And closes fast his mouth, unreconciled
To thoughts of death, the shadow of the cross:
A monstrous gift to bring a newborn child.
My kings, this all was planned, and you might trust
I'll do not what I choose, but what I must.

Whether we humans are right or the dumb machine are right depends on your perspective. There are just so many people who have read at least one Pratchett novel and liked it, that asking "what sort of things does this group of people also like?" ends up being equivalent to asking "what sort of things are popular with the whole population being measured?"

You know, I just tried it with Foucault's Pendulum and got pretty much the same thing, including the same books by "John Piper" (although a vampire romance novel and something called Daughters of the Moon: Goddess of the Night showed up in the middle of this, looking a bit out of place).

Re: earbuds. I'm using a slightly upscale pair of Sonys that cost about 39.99. Their selling points are that they have a sort of floppy collar that softly hugs the inside of your ears, shutting out a lot of outside sound. They are the poor man's noise cancellers. They last a long time. I wouldn't have had to buy a second pair, but I somehow slammed the wire of the first pair in the peppermint tin I was keeping it in. I'm more careful now.

THE PLAIN AND THE CROSS
by
Lucia D. Lammermoor

Bob Gunderson, minister of a small knitting village in Minnesota in the 1950s, finds himself facing two challenges: his parishioners are being driven into penury by competition from the new Hollerith Automated Knitting Machines, and he himself is suffering a crisis of faith. As winter comes, with the town's young men fighting in Korea, Gunderson faces a long, dark night...

"A powerful, disturbing work of knit-punk from the author of 'Purl Harbor'" - San Francisco Examiner

I need to work out how to download it into my Palm, that I may go into BookBuyers and know whether that desirable out-of-print classic is something I already own. That's where it could be really useful.

But the reason I started it was because it was a very easy way to catalogue my books, which I wanted to do for insurance purposes. As I've found out, shipping companies are more inclined to cough up without arguing for damaged/destroyed books if you have a detailed list of what the books were and what their value was... That it is an off-site catalogue is even better.

Anybody else going?

I came across this article on cnn.com today and I thought of you:

Soldiers' widows sue for pagan symbols on headstones

The Star of David is OK, as are more than a dozen variations of the Christian cross. Even the atomic whirl used by atheists gets the thumbs-up from the federal government.

But a Wiccan symbol representing earth, air, fire, water and spirit isn't recognized by the federal government for veterans' grave markers.

The article goes on to say that there are "approximately 1,800 active-duty service members identify themselves as Wiccans, according to 2005 Defense Department statistics." It's more than reasonable that they deserve to have recognition of their beliefs on their headstones, but try explaining that to the christian right folks who equate anything pagan with evil.

I'm sure there's much more to this issue than I can understand, and I know that there are a few people around here of pagan faiths that might be able to comment on this. So, I thought I would post it here.

(I apologize Xopher if I have wrongly identified you as a Wiccan if you are not.)

Stop now.

It's all attributable to a glass of POJ every morning and a large collection of black footwear. Also, wearing funny things on my head.

[returning to her sulky my-state-is-full-of-idjits hole]

Like Princess Aura's tiara?

I entered Pride and Prejudice -- one of my favorites -- and was told, basically, that I ought not program computers. I found this amusing, because my job last year (which I quite liked) consisted entirely of coding. In FORTRAN 77, no less.

I've been meaning to use Library Thing to catalogue my son's book collection (in what spare time?) - he was recently gifted his second Each, Peach, Pear, Plum and his third Goodnight, Moon.

I've been using it on my on collection as well, since I have a terrible memory for the names of authors I hated. I've wound up being seduced by the slick packaging and buying second helpings of crap more than once. I intend to be soley responsible for an upswing in the use of the "craptastic" tag.

Plus, as someone else said, shiny! As someone with fairly impressive aphasia that comes with tiredness, I really just love the name.

Incidentally, I suppose neither of those titles actually have the punctuation I've given them. But, dammit, I believe in the serial comma and the post-vocative comma. Please don't be too harsh.

Lots of factors.

Whether the only idiots here were Dems is open to question.

I was wondering whether old-style embalming might affect the classic Brit murder-mystery exhumation scene. It now occurs to me to wonder about current-day practices. Dibsies on doing a murder mystery where this matters, or, better yet, kills off all the exhumers.

Susan #126: I'm now thinking about which of the silly-things-to-wear-on-one's-head I should bring to Philcon to photograph you in.

Caroline #129: If you enjoyed a job programming in Fortran 77, perhaps you shouldn't program computers...for the same reason an alcoholic shouldn't drink!

Gotta be Richard Powers. (_Galatea 2.0_, _The Gold Bug Variations_)

I keep buying duplicates of scholarly things. My husband keeps buying me duplicates of just ... things. Having the list available via Pocket PC or his computer could save a lot of embarrassment and expense. (Soon, soon ... I already keep lists of series author mysteries on my pocket computer, in my purse.)

More LT widgets here.

We have a bunch of books carefully stored in the garage; we took pictures of various piles before we packed them, so we'd know what we had, and they live on both computers. Unfortunately, after a couple of years of raiding the storage and moving things about, the picture numbers on the boxes in no way match the actual contents.

Then my head exploded.

Maybe I've been misled on this, but the explanation seems very plausible to me.

This isn't a huge issue. While we far outnumber Quakers these days, our numbers aren't large, and most Wiccans prefer cremation. I suppose you could be cremated and yet have a marker; I myself hope to be scattered (given the unliklihood of my real preferences being honored).

If I were not so tired I might have written the whole thing.

What it represents depends on whom you ask. . . five-limbed humans being another popular story.

As far as "Head Wiccan"... *sneezes and laughs at same time*

...where was I? Ah yes, the Society of Friends must give them fits as well.

I used to tell first aid students "everything your mother told you about catching bad things if you don't wash your hands is absolutely true!"

Serge - on the bright side, the Dem challenger locked in the tight recount here in CT is maintaining his lead and will probably be declared the winner tomorrow. It isn't quite as much of a squeaker as the infamous Eddie Munster race was and hopefully won't drag out as long.

And Wiccans are much more likely to serve in the military than Friends! Though it's far from unheard of for people to join the Society of Friends after military service, so there might be some issues there.

TexAnne: "Save the subjunctive, would that we could."

Meanwhile, we also have a tight race here in Albuquerque. They're still counting the votes and it looks like Heather Wilson is very slightly ahead of Patricia Madrid. I hope Madrid catches up, but, if I find myself with 6 more years of Heather, I can always remind myself that she's been de-fanged by the House's majority now being Democratic. Woohoo!!!

It has just occurred to me that the Google wifi service is now up and running, which means that if I take my laptop with me to BookBuyers... But this doesn't really work for dropping in while I happen to be passing.

Is there a symbol for this?

signed
wiccan virgin

WOW!

I mean really

WOW!

Ah, will check out "pentacle" from the wikipedia library tonight. thanks.

Henry Troup at 147, thanks a lot. Now I'll be watching myself for signs of exotic lung disease, out here in the library annex with nothing but ancient dissertations and journals to keep me company. But I'm not surprised -- I never had asthma attacks until the massive mold outbreak at the last place I worked.

I, too, am a proud believer in the serial comma. Long may it prevent confusion! Anathema to editors who remove it from my writing! And I promise to helpfully add it to all items that cross my desk for editing!

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

My great-uncle Chad, the conscientious objector, drove an ambulance in WWI.

So it's possible in theory.

Despite being [I hope] the stupidest thing I've said today...

Just wait until the Veterans Administration has to deal with a grave marker for a deceased soldier whose religious preference was Asatru...

Just quickly, I'd like to try an experiment: can people list some books that feature time travel. Just as many as you can off the top of your head.

Thanks.

Asimov had at least one sideline Foundation/Empire novel written in the Fifties(?) about a man from today who gets zapped into that future.

*facepalm*

Time travel:

"All You Zombies" [Heinlein, short story]
"Time after Time" [author? possibly mainstream/breakthrough]
There was a series (three or so?) by John Barnes.

I'm drawing a weird blank on specifics- I know I've read a couple dozen, but can't remember any specifically. It's a really really easy type of story to screw up, and I think it specifically attracts stupid people. It's almost impossible to write one that doesn't have a sloppy, cheap, obvious ending.

Of course now I start remembering time travel stuff by really good authors.

There was a Tim Powers one.

And Fritz Leiber wrote one or more.

Connie Willis, "To Say Nothing of the Dog."

I'm going to stop before I embarass myself any more.

The Time Patrol (et sequelae), Poul Anderson
Up the Line, Robert Silverberg
The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold
The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov
The Time Ships, Steven Baxter
Timeline, Michael Critchton
Lest Darkness Fall, L. Sprague deCamp
The Big Time, Fritz Leiber
The Great Work of Time, John Crowley (novella)
The "Company" stories, Kage Baker
Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick

Tons more where those came from (the cobwebbed depths of my never garbage-collected memory, that is).

The first three or four times I typed that it came out "Time Powers one."

I find it surprising that I haven't seen any mention of the fact that Jack Williamson has passed away. He was published in nine decades (in the twenties and forth), and was a giant in the field. May he rest in peace.

Marilee mentioned it over in Open Thread 73, and Patrick posted Particle. But gee whiz, I expected more chatter as well.

Will anyone ever have a career that long again? First sale 1928, last manuscript still, no doubt, in the pipeline 78 years later.

Obituaries have appeared in the L.A. Times and the New York Times.

The latter says:

In 1976, Mr. Williamson was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, only the second author, after Robert A. Heinlein, to be so honored.

Which is a little misleading; lots of other writers have since been named Grand Masters. But it is fitting that Jack Williamson was one of the first two. After all, he had been publishing well-regarded stories for 48 years at that point, and showed no signs of slowing down even though, at 68, he was one of the oldest of all SF authors...

Little did they imagine that two Hugos and a Nebula were in his future. Or maybe SFWA's members did imagine it-- after all, they are professional visionaries.

He coined "terraforming." He coined "genetic engineering." He went to war, and came back. He went to school and got a PhD. and wrote a critical study of H.G. Wells. He taught for many years at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. All along, he kept writing SF novels.

I didn't know Jack Williamson at all well, and only met him a few times. Among his many distinctions, he was the first to incorporate the shiny new idea of antimatter or "contraterrene matter" into science fiction, in the stories incorporated into Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock.

I once got to show him the antiproton factory here at Fermilab. I am very pleased about that.

He was a giant in science fiction. I'm glad I got to shake his hand.

The Time Machine (Wells)
The Proteus Operation (Hogan)
Doomsday Book (Willis)
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Willis)
(blanking on the name) Diane Duane's second cat-wizard novel
"A Gun for Dinosaur" (lead short story in eponymous anthology) (de Camp)
Knight in Shining Armor (Deveraux)

That last one is a bit embarassing.

I have had To Say Nothing of the Dog sitting around for the last two weeks, after buying it on the multiple recommendations of friends. I've read the first few chapters but I am bouncing right off it - I keep putting it down and picking up something else instead. I loved Doomsday Book and people keep telling me that I should thus love TSNotD; does it pick up dramatically in the middle or something?

So quick, with the titles.

How about Night Watch by Terry Pratchett?

Hehe! I really want to share that quote with someone here at the office, but I'm afraid the set-up would be too laborious. I'll just giggle on my own, then.

Were I not already claimed for a G-d, I'd start the First Church of Copyediting. Would we have to excommunicate ourselves every time we slipped up, though? How would the expiation process work?

I think that might have been Jack Finney. He did more than one story with “nostalgic imagination” as the engine for time travel.

Jasper FForde, The Eyre Affair (rather peripherally, though)
S.M. Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time

And if overlapping is OK, then I guess additional ones that came quickly to mind would be:
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Tim Powers[*], Anubis Gates
Michael Swanwick, Bones of the Earth
Poul Anderson, Time Patrol books
John Crowley, Great Work of Time

[*] typed "Time Powers" the first time, too...

Time And Again is indeed Jack Finney, and is kind of a mainstreamy romance SF novel, if that isn't too much a contradiction. (I think there is also a sequel called Time After Time)

Skipping those I noticed posted upstream *
Thrice Upon A Time, Hogan
The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold
The Door into Summer, Heinlein
Eon and its sequel Eternity by Greg Bear is a somewhat different spin on time travel
The End of Eternity, Asimov
Kaleidoscope Century, John Barnes (a book which made me want to go wash my mind out - very disturbing.)

Andre Norton's Time Traders novels - 5 or 6 of them, I think, starting with The Time Traders and including Galactic Derelict which fully won my heart to SF when I was 13 or so.
Greg Wolfe's New Sun series is time-travel SF, though I'm sure some readers don't quite get that part.

Do cross-time/parallel-time novels count? There's a whole long list or sub-sub-genre of those, including Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and the Crosstime series, and a couple more Heinlein stories.

(BTW, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything isn't exactly a time-travel story, it's a time manipulation story - the ability to pause time but not to reverse it.)

* The Time Machine, 'All You Zombies', Bones of the Earth, etc. but I just skimmed so I'm probably duplicating some

Lots of things by A.E.van Vogt.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross (perhaps time travel attempted is more accurate)
Millennium by John Varley

Someone called Mike Shupp wrote a series of novels for Del Rey that really gave me a headache. And I didn't care for his referring to Jimmy Carter as a penaut farmer.

Moorcock's adventures of the Lord of the Air, which went cross-wise in time and forward, to realities where zeppelins are the modern form of transportation.

Madeleine L'Engle's 'Tesseract' novels.

... and @ #186: The Niven time-travel/fantasy stories were collected as The Flight of the Unicorn

That reminds me, there's also a good Niven time-travel short story called "One-way Street". (The more the subject tries to go the wrong way in time, the more accidents he causes...)

The Paradox Men, by the great Charles Harness

Fragano @ 194: I never can manage to grow the roasted kind which I like. (OK, it's an old chestnut.)

Sturgeon's Venus Plus X has some (putative) time travel. Or maybe not.

There're also a slew of books with relativistic time travel themes - The Forever War, for instance.

I'm noticing these things everywhere now and I'm starting to cringe reflexively. I 'm afraid that next I'll be seeing runned and seeked.

Is this some sort of editorial trend? Or editorial idiocy?

Oh, and there was a 16th Century playwright who used it, too:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

"weaved" -- how was it used? My American Heritage Dictionary actually likes "weaved" as the past tense for certain senses (e.g., "make a path by moving from side to side").

(And, sure enough, if you google for "Shakespeare" + "weaved", you get a couple of hits...)

(suppresses obvious Indiana Jones reference)
(suppresses obvious Umberto Eco reference)

OK, I'm done here.

I may be reading too much into it. Only about 1/7 of books are given tags, and many of those are simply tagged science fiction or fiction. And looking now, I see Diana Galbadon's books are tagged time travel three times as often as Wells' The Time Machine is, for a comparable number of copies. I have no idea what that means.

Children's/ young adult
The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit - great book!
Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling - maybe more visionary than literal time travel.
The Old Powder Line by Richard Parker - has a time-travelling train and a lot of paradox and strangeness.
A Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price - time travel story w/ C16th Border Reivers, strictly it's an alternate universe rather than time travel, but does a very good job of portraying a modern person trying to adapt to a historical culture.

Adult:
A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright (historian of science in London at the millennium discovers H. G. Wells' time machine, which takes him to an abandoned future England: well-written, sad).
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger- has anyone mentioned this yet? I did not like this book, but it does what it says on the tin.
The Fetch by Robert Holdstock - read this a long time ago and forget the details, but it had a haunted child able to travel to the past and bring back artifacts.

I have to say time travel stories often freak me out excessively, even when the story probably isn't intended by the author to be frightening; especially stories where people travel within their own lifetimes. I'm not quite sure why. It's partly the thought of encountering your own extinction - either death or the non-existence before birth - but also a queasiness at the thought that there might be something uncanny about reality, that you might get to the wrong place, horribly unmoored. Is there a name for this sort of vertigo concerning time?

Speaking of librarians, I see that the TV Guide is giving us advance warning about The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mine, to be aired Dec 3. Considering that the original Noah Wiley movie did for Shangri La, I should probably run for the hills. On the other hand, this new movie still has Bob Newhart as the Head Librarian and martial-arts expert.

nonnewtonian fluid particle sidelight:
WOW!
I mean really
WOW!

All together now:
"There's Oobleck in the bath tub: the con's not over yet! It's pleasantly disgusting, and it's thick, and white, and wet...."

A pool of Oobleck is definitely cooler than the bathtub was.

Another LeGuin story whose name I can't recall, and also "Semley's Necklace" if you count forward time travel.

The problem is that the neopagan community is saying, "OK, then, how about we start with a pentagram", and the authority in charge of approving symbols is dragging its heels.

Part of the problem (from the gummint PoV) is that there is no Wiccan central authority to tell them "this is the Wiccan symbol."

Yes, precisely; they are not willing to accept the opinion of 85% of neopagans* that a pentagram would be acceptable because there's no "central church".

What it really, really looks like is the government having decided they don't want there to be a pagan symbol, and using the excuse that there's no neopagan pope to avoid allowing it.

The list of currently permitted symbols is somewhat enlightening, really.

They do not want to have the obligation of putting absolutely anything the customer wants on the gravestone.

I'll bet you could cover all but the occasional schmuck by allowing a pentacle, a Thor's Hammer or similar, and a Triple Moon. And hey, if the Izumo Taishakyo Mission Of Hawaii can have a symbol...

Also, this being the gummint, it would take a while, as much bureaucratic mulch would need to be mulched to create the artwork, approve it, have the Head Wiccan approve it, add it to the list, etc.

There is no Head Wiccan. That's the excuse they're using to not allow it at all. Because the response of most every pagan who's queried being an immediate "Yes" is apparently not sufficient.

*Wouldn't work for, say, Asatru, but a large majority of neonpagans would be contented if not prefectly satisfied.

I worked for an IT contractor on the 3rd runway project at Lambert-St. Louis Int'l Airport; part of the runway construction involved relocating 2 large cemeteries and one small one. One of the land acquisition contractors we worked with had moved part of a cemetery during a previous expansion of the airport, and some of the guys who worked that job had some amazing stories: the 8-year-old boy who was perfectly preserved except for a thin greenish pallor, buried some 75 years prior; the way that by the end of the project they could tell if someone had died from tuberculosis (or other infectious agents) because of the differences in the smell and color of the earth filling the grave...

"The Shadow Out of Time", Lovecraft
_Time For the Stars_, Heinlein (are we counting relativity?)
_The Night Lands_, William Hope Hodgson (old, largely forgotten, and @$^!ing great)
_Books of Magic_, Neil Gaiman

Paging PZ Myers.

i was gonna say the one harry potter book (the third?), because even though it was a plot point & not the theme, it got on my nerves.

cause like, the time machine is given to hermione so she can take more classes. it seems a pretty lame reason to mess with the fabric of reality, which it does seem to be able to do when it comes into the plot (they can change the course of events, & there's no evident controls or exceptions to that). & again, like so many rowling devices, there is loud humming at why this device can't be put to even more useful aims, like stopping good guys dying.

but i am afraid to get into that stuff, cause there are real harry potter scholars out there, & i'm not one. i'm not a fan, i'm just a person who reads each book in one sitting as soon as it comes out, & then feels angry about it.....

If time travel forward is allowed, Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters.

12 monkeys
world without end
the original Planet of the Apes series
the time tunnel ("In color!")

That was my point. I guess I should have put scare quotes around it.

Paging PZ Myers.

He was running a search and poll to come up with a good atheist symbol just a week or so ago. I personally liked the one that looked like DNA. The atom one was on the list, too.

Jenny - The Time Traveller's wife has been tagged with time travel more than any other book.

Gee, took how many books for a building full of hundreds of magical experts-in-training to get wise to ONE of the plot devices?

163? by Flint et.al.
Replay, Ken Grimwood
Lest Darkness Fall, de Camp
The Timeline Wars(?) by Charles Ingrid? -- All I remember is the first novel starts with someone at college having a spherical volume which included his dorm room transported several thousand years into the future.

And as I recall, there was a very odd look at time-travel and timeline-based wars in a book I read in the past 5 years. But for the life of me I can't remember the title. Something about a war spanning the timeline, which winds up breaking time, but(!) the story keeps going from there.

I may be reading too much into it. Only about 1/7 of books are given tags, and many of those are simply tagged science fiction or fiction. And looking now, I see Diana Galbadon's books are tagged time travel three times as often as Wells' The Time Machine is, for a comparable number of copies. I have no idea what that means.

I'm not sure either, but there's probably a doctoral dissertation in there somewhere.

Now if you're quibbling with a death at the end of one of the earlier books, I have no answer for that one.

I was really disappointed in Andre Norton's The Time Traders the last time I read it: The plot is about developing time travel to find something in the past. The Russians finish their time machine first, oh no -- we Americans must hurry! Because if we finish our machine a week after them, we'll get to the past a week after them and they'll have had a week to find the alien device or whatever. Not good time travel theory.

And now, I need to go re-read some Shakespeare.

In the vein of time travel and open threads (and delurking), I have a can't-think-of-the-title query -- does anyone remember a Golden Age-era post-apocalyptic short story about a man who had invented a time machine before the Nuclear Holocaust (TM) and who then found ants with lungs in his backyard, and, in his grief and despair, took them waaay back in time in order to let them found a new society? And it all ended very badly?

"Let the Ants Try," by Frederik Pohl?

As for time travel books that have not yet been mentioned, time paradox of a sort plays a pretty big role in the Dark Tower series, specifically Drawing of the Three.

Also, Time Pressure & Lifehouse, by Spider Robinson, as well as his Callahan series.

Otherwise we'd have A Clean Well-Lit Place."

One Phlp Shrpshr, for whom disemvoweling was invented way back in 2002 on this very site, has surfaced today on Steve Gilliard's blog.

He hasn't learned anything in the interval.

It is demonstrably true that science can be advanced both by atheists and by people with firm religious convictions; in fact, it is a neutral ground where scientists of all faiths, or no faith, can collaborate.

So using a symbol most people would associate first with "science" is not a good way to say "I have no religion."

Of course, I am a scientist, and may be too sensitive about this. I can imagine a Roman executioner irritated at Christians who appropriate the symbol of his profession...

Not that I have a better suggestion for the American Atheists. But "atheism" doesn't come across when I see a picture of an atom. Or a DNA helix. Or laboratory glassware. That's my retort.

Lest the pun thread be petri-ng out?

Vibe does in fact have a cult following: The Absorbascon blog, by Scipio, the funniest gay classicist comics blogger on the web.

Generally speaking he hasn't gotten much airplay on country stations in YEARS.

His recording of Hurt has arguably become the canonical version.

Compared to Cash, Trent Reznor just sounds like a whiny little emo twat when he sings "I hurt my self today".

I've got my organ donor card, and don't much care what happens to my body after the usable parts have been recycled. (If I had a house and a garden, I'd borrow Lee Hays's idea of being cremated and having the ashes scattered on his compost pile; that isn't practical in a sixth-floor Manhattan apartment.) I suspect that the main thing my survivors will want on any grave/niche marker will be my name, and maybe some quote they consider suitable. But, well, if they decide they'd like Jewish or atheist or other symbols, that's fine too: I'm not the one the marker will be for.

'...Bush's Agriculture Department has struck the word "hungry" from its annual report on what it's now calling "food security." (...) The report measures the number of Americans who can't afford to put food on their table during at least some period of the year. The Agriculture Department's Mark Nord says "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured" in the report. Thus, people formerly described as suffering "food insecurity without hunger" -- meaning that they'll probably get something to eat, somehow -- and "food insecurity with hunger" -- meaning that they'll go without food for stretches of time -- shall henceforth be known as sufferers of "low food security" and "very low food security."...'

I label myself a devout technologist. The atom symbol fits, for me, although maybe a resistor symbol would be a trifle less intimidating.

Isn't Pohl one of Silverberg's pseudonyms? Or vice versa?

Actually, I remembered the title but my googlefu danced out of the room and I read the editor (as Dave Goldfarb suggested) rather than the author.

Stories about other species taking over after homo sap. screwed up would be an interesting topic. "City," by Simak would be a start, with dogs. "Hothouse" by Aldiss had ants. "Midsummer Century" by Blish had birds. Lots of Varley has cetaceans. And of course there is "Planet of the Apes." There must be others.

What editor let that one get by? My red pencil is twitching. Surely "If I Had Done It, Here Is How It Would Have Happened, Had I Any Grammatical Skills Whatsoever." O temopra, o mores.

Leaving the subject matter aside entirely.

They had their eyebrow mites...

How about a capacitor. It fits for atheism, because there's a central void which not only doesn't prevent it from working, but is required...

2 for time travel done right -

White has one (Tomorrow is Too Far IIRC) where the time traveller moves in time but is not locked in place on a rotating sphere in orbit around the sun which is moving toward...... and so time travel is really space travel.

There's a puzzle short someplace in which the humans think the aliens have FTL but it's only a little convenience - human stowaway discovers it's STL to the right spot then time travel back to when the destination is there

Robert Forward threw in a little time travel in the first, may have been the second Starquake, of his duology of life on a neutron star - as I recall not so much for the plot but so he could show humungous rotating columns and throw in more good science to the limit.

I don't think that Animal Planet's TV network is going to have a show titled "the eyebrow mite whisperer" any time soon, Jon.

The protagonist is given a time-travel belt by a mysterious stranger and proceeds to:

win the bets on horse races by reading tomorrow's paper

have past and future versions of himself as sex partners

be both of his parents because there is an alternate timeline in which he is female

when older, be unable to have a relationship with the female version of himself because the younger version of himself got there first

and finally give up in disgust, get rid of the time belt by being the mysterious stranger who gives it to his younger self.

I think that's how it went, anyway.
After reading that, I figured "this says everything that needs to be said about time travel" and didn't read any more time travel stories.

All these years I thought the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons were set in the American Southwest...

You could also make a case for travelling-forward-only in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime (which is, so far, my favorite of all Vinge's books).

Yikes. How could I forget that? It creeped me out when I first read "City."

Adding to the list, in Poul Anderson's "Brain Wave," the prediction at the end is that the super-intelligent humans will leave the Earth to the now intelligent animals, IIRC.

And getting back to time travel, there's Harry Turtledove's "Guns of the South," though it's really mostly alternate history IMHO.

Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" was a classic short deconstructing the whole idea of changing history.

Due to recent events, I've been writing sonnets. Not all of them are for ML, of course - the one on my company's new risk recording system, for instance, won't turn up here.

In light of this, I was explaining the classic sonnet structure to a friend. I was talking about the Italian pattern, with an octave and a sestet, and about how the pair of 4-line units in the octave was useful for setting up two similar alternatives which the sestet then twists to an unexpected resolution.

And I stopped, thinking about SF slang.

Sonnets are a Motie form of poetry. The octave is the "one hand/other hand" pair, and the sestet is the gripping hand.

The only TTM I can think of that I actually liked the plot of?

Huh.

(there was no sequel of any sort. )

<plaintive> It won't? </plaintive>

signed, Lexica (who works in risk management)

I've always felt that [UNICODE 2204] should be appropriated for use as an identifier for atheism. Nobody ever listens to me, of course.

Speaking as the guy who objected to the atom, I think that is an excellent suggestion: from mathematics, the symbol for "There does not exist:" ∄.

Appropriate for atheism in general, particularly appropriate for an atheist's tombstone.

For extra points, figure out how to make a clever chrome There Does Not Exist Fish for your bumper.

(By the way, I note that in that long list of approved graveyard symbols, none are exclusively Catholic. A simple cross will do, I guess.)

OK, but it's more about the mandatory fields in our new application (PlanView) than anything else. It's the introduction that never got included in the one-page quick reference.

Recording risks is done in PlanView now.
The forms have changed from what we used in PRIME.
This briefing tells you what to say and how,
The basics, anyway, for when you're short of time.
Use wording as sugested by this sheet
And in your action plan record details
Of what you'll do, and when, and whom you'll meet,
With fallbacks if your first intention fails.
Remember as you write that those who read
Your text may not be technical or see
Details of your project. They will need
Plain terms, not TLAs. Be jargon-free.
In time these practices will be the norm.
Till then, this sheet will help you with the form.

I was partway through an octave on probability and impact for a more abstract treatment of risk, but I couldn't find the turn for the sestet. If I do, I'll be sure to let you know.

I suspect that the main thing my survivors will want on any grave/niche marker will be my name, and maybe some quote they consider suitable. But, well, if they decide they'd like Jewish or atheist or other symbols, that's fine too: I'm not the one the marker will be for.

Since I know you in various fannish contexts, I'm imagining a silhouette of a propeller beanie.

And I always thought I had such a *clean* mind.

--Mary Aileen

A brief preview:

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
[...]

I get this, too! I am often boggled to see a cat inside a house, making demands just like any other member of the house. But it's not human. It's not even bipedal! It's got a strange little triangular head! It's a whole other lifeform, and it's living among us. Weird. Neat, though.

I get this, too! I am often boggled to see a cat inside a house, making demands just like any other member of the house.

Actually, we felt this way about our first child when he started to move about. We were so used to being just the two of us...

"What! Dem's fighting words!"

I got to have my great-nephew run in circles around me this past weekend, as well as seeing his year-old sister flirt with her uncle, her father, and her grandfather.

I hope yours are doing well, and making good progress.

BTW, you're giving me senator envy--if Lamar didn't have a gummint job he'd have to write another book, and Mr. Corker will be there to look after his money.

I'm just glad to finally have a picture that doesn't look like something out of a horror film - the first set were mere moments post-C-section and featured purplish tadpoles dripping blood all over the doctor's latex glove like something out of "Alien" - ewww!

(Why no, I don't have any maternal instinct, why do you ask?)

The two babies together in this picture do not yet make it to five pounds total between them, but they're doing pretty well and gaining weight. And now they're starting to look cute and baby-like. And apparently preemies don't cry, so they're very calm babies - they eat, they sleep, they get their diaper changed, repeat ad infinitum.

"...Imagine a world without novels. That was most of recorded history -- Alexander the Great did not have a juicy thriller by his bedside to read before drifting off; Eleanor of Aquitaine was imprisoned without the solace of a hefty midlist book about a sprawling Armenian family in turn-of-the-century Greece. (Turn of the 12th century, that would be.) People found other ways to amuse themselves, like farming, pillaging and contracting tuberculosis..."

No diminuitives. There are limits to family feeling. Just Aunt Susan.

Yes, he's running for Prez. This should be fun.

"Yes, gentlemen, curiosity killed those cats."

I miss Larson. Gary Larson, that is. Glen Larson, not so much.

Maybe organ donors should have that mentioned, proudly, on their markers.

Kage Baker's Company novels and stories. Most of the protagonists aren't Travellers, just folks recruited substantial distances in the past and made immortal. They are, due to a glitch in the processing, susceptible to Theobrome, their drug of choice, and resort to it in time of stress. One scene has an upset operative munching on the brown discs (think Ibarra) as if they were rice crackers.

I just don't see why someone who thinks he's the reincarnation of Legolas's cousin thinks he's got moral superiority over someone who thinks he's the reincarnation of Revolutionary Girl Utena's cousin, you know?

Couldn't it be argued that this would simply lead to creditors being pickier about which tyrants to finance, and being willing to take actions to protect their investment (the regime)? What am I missing?

Oh wow. They look like real babies, only smaller!

I am expecting a nephew next year. He doesn't look nearly so cute or baby-like, though he may already be about the size of one of your sister's kids. My sister-in-law sent pictures already, expecting us to coo over him. I think that's just because she's so attached to the child.

Don't they know that dragons are endangered? What will the Otherkin think?

(link courtesy BoingBoing, natch.)

Which is a worry.

This is why we store uncooked meats on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.

Oh yikes! I've camped in the campsite that's still there in slide 6. I only live in Portland and I hadn't heard of any of this (that'll teach me to depend on the Guardian online for my news). Thanks for the news!

"I don't think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages. We use the word because the dragon is synonymous with Wales."

I'm taking this to mean that his sausages also don't contain whale. Personally, I'm glad we've got trading standards officers to make sure our Soylent Green really is people!

somebody wordy at 320: More on those Otakin here, as featured on Fandom_Wank a while back.

* * *

Hmmm. Maybe it's time for Lore Sjoberg to write up an Otherkin Hierarchy.

Seems pure ham leaves the question open?

If you're in New England, eastern NY or eastern Canada, you might get an especially fine show for a brief while centered around the peak time, where you might see very long and bright Earth-grazers. If they happen, they'd be bright enough to see even if you're in deepest, brightest urbia.

There's just something fun and back-of-the-brain addictive to watching a dark sky for the random bright slices of meteors. And there's always the faintest hope that the smart people have it wrong and there'll be a meteor storm instead of just a gentle shower. (Unfortunately, we're just not hitting the comet dust trails like we used to, so overall the Leonids may have peaked compared to 2001 or earlier.)

Dress warm, be able to lean back or lie back to get as much sky-view as possible, and if you have binoculars use them to check out the trails of the brightest meteors. The darker the sky the better, but even an urban or suburban sky can show some meteors if you can be where there's no direct light to ruin your eyes' adaptation.

-Kathryn from Sunnyvale, which will not have spun far enough east to make the shower visible.

I think so, Brain, but where are we going to find a rubber chicken, six cases of masking tape, a sodomized dinosaur, and a jar of true kosher pickles at this hour?

I laughed, they cried.

The second is from Pickles: 1. Grandson says to Grandma "Gramma, do you think Muffin knows she's a cat?" 2. Grandma replies "No, I'm pretty sure she thinks she's just a person like us." 3. Grandma says to Muffin "Isn't that right, Muffy? You think you're a furry little human, don't you?" 4. Muffin thinks "Not true. I think all of you are large homely cats."

(Wikipedia, referring to Hogfather movie)
"In March 2006, the production company, impressed by Discworld costumes seen at fan events, announced that fans with appropriate costumes would be offered the opportunity to appear in background scenes. This was announced by a fan on the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett, and caused a flurry of negative posts, with some criticising the company for using fans as unpaid extras, and others questioning how much quality control would go into the costumes used. In the wake of this unexpected criticism, the opportunity was withdrawn."

...hey! Where did my weekend go?!

It's for the Vegans.

Man, the shipping must be a killer.

Yes, Marilee, that IS probably what cats think about their pet humans. When they think.

So many right-wing Christians, so few lions

Frankly I wouldn't have minded tossing to the lions any Southwest official who'd have dared show up. What irritated me the most is that they didn't bother telling us all what was going on. Maybe it was simply that a conveyor belt was busted. Or maybe they had found some shampoo bottle in someone's suitcase that struck such terror in their quivering hearts that they had to call Homeland Security.

The photos also make him look somewhat Borat-esque.

Exporting as tab-delimited text is also an option, of course.

(In case you're interested, I saw the strip's characters available as figurines in a comic-book store.)

I think there's a line in one of the Miles Vorkosigan books about a "young officer who realised his pet cat did nothing but eat, drink, sleep, groom itself, play games and fornicate, and so named it 'Imperial Cavalry'".

Meanwhile, here's what Jon Carroll had to say about his cat Archie...

...I know that cats have brains the size of walnuts and that a lot of the crafty behavior we ascribe to them is simply hard-wired predator behavior, but I thought at least the animal whom I have fed and petted and cared for for nearly a decade would be able to pick me out of a lineup. Now I'm not so sure...

Apparently, if Jon Carroll comes thru the front-door, Archie is all lovy-dovy. If he comes thru the backdoor, Archie then acts as if he was intent upon the extermination of all things feline.

(*) yes, I am a computer programmer. How did you guess?

My cats react completely differently to me depending on what room of the house I am in. Petting is only acceptable in certain locations; in other locations, it is perceived as an attack. Most of the cats' adjustment to civilization has come in the form of being more relaxed in the few Chosen Locations and not even slightly less nervous anywhere else.

I never recall the first Yule he spent with us without a chuckle. Magick must have been somewhere napping when we got the tree into its' stand. When he came into the living room and saw the tree for the first time, he ran to it, reared up on his hind legs, threw his front paws out to the side as far as they would go, then wrapped them around the nearest branch, which he then rubbed his face into, all the while making odd little chirping noises.

Jan and I stared at him, then each other, and I said, "We should have called him 'Dances-with-Trees...'"

I don't think any of ours has a single name.

My first Siamese was Pyewacket, aka Pye-wicked, Wack-kat, Wicked-wacket...

Of the current batch there's: DC, sometimes called Deese, or Dee-cee deucey; Kitsumi, who also answers to Kitsi or Miss Kitz; D'Artagnan or Dart; Alibi also called Bi-cat or Silver'sinnian; and Marcus, aka Marky.

Most of the crew are Siamese/Balinese, the odd man out is Alibi, who is a Siamese/Abyssinian cross.

Same here. I have two cats, officially named Ada and June. Ada gets a lot of suffixes -- Ada-cat, Ada-love, Ada-sweet, Ada-my-heart, Ada-ling -- but June has a lot of names. June, Junalie (often embroidered to Junalia or Junaliacat), Juniper, Junebug, Juney-cat, and Little White Cat (descriptively).

Both of them got called Dammit You Little Bastards yesterday, when I came into the guest room to find that they had utterly destroyed my flannel sheets. Huge, gaping holes from little cat teeth biting and shaking, as if breaking a rodent neck or tearing off a piece of meat from a large kill.

It's a good thing they're so cute.

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) -- Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel -- a key member of the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament -- has been shot dead in Beirut.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/11/21/lebanon.shooting/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

That's a Bathtub Offense in my opinion. Too late now, of course, unless you wrap them in the ruined sheets and tumble them around before dropping them in the icy water.

Isn't odious debt an inevitable result of extremist starve-the-beast political tactics?

I was going to link to the wikipedia page about the tactic, but I don't know how links work here.

Nor can any draft that does not include women.

Universal military service is a better bet; I don't like it for other reasons, but justice isn't a factor. Even someone who can't serve in a combat capacity (or who can bribe a doctor to SAY s/he can't) can be sent to a combat zone. UMS would also force reconsideration of the status of gays in the military; if they have no choice about being there, everything changes. Or maybe it would just lead to a lot of gay boys being locked up...see why I don't like it?

Monster was known as Moo or (when we were being cute) MooMooMooMooMoo; same root as Chache.

Further Cat Entries may adversely effect the fabric of time and space.

Proceed with caution.

Audrey and Phoebe as in As You Like It.

But, Stefan, how do we know if this is a cat entry unless we measure it by observation? No, I don't have a cat called Schroedinger.

Oops. Reality just collapsed.

Oops. Reality just collapsed.

No, the Open Thread just bifurcated into two separate universes. (One of which now has too many cat entries.)

Everything's fine as long as none of the posts start destructively interfering with each other.

Does that count as a cat post? (No, I won't make lame puns about scratch posts.)

The rest is silencecnelis si tesr ehT

I once had to pry her jaws from around a cat. Blood everywhere. Kira's, not the cat's; she got bit on the tongue sometime during the melee.

So do the spammers; Beria would do nicely.

I have no idea what it would do to site performance...

My Tommy is also known as Tomboy, Tomasne-Chaton-Chaton, Tompuss, Tompuss Est Iocundum, & Tombolo. His one sister is variously Sara, Sara-chan, Saracat, & Sarapie, and his other sister is Mookitty, Mookie, Moo, Miss Moo...

I'm staying in one universe only.

Yeah, folks have been on it; it's been hard to keep up with...

It would be obvious from the above that I know nothing about the matter whatsoever, mind you.

The no kneading not only means no kneading, it means no needing to clear much counterspace- this is helpful. Easy on the hands, easy on the mind.

Took me all of 8-10 minutes (plus the 16+2 hours rising), which includes the searching about trying to find my cast-iron pot. (I used a glass casserole instead- has to be lidded and thick for heat transfer.) I didn't even use instant yeast, just ordinary rapid-rise. I've read that some stores sold out of instant yeast, possibly because of this recipe.

Start one now for the experiment, and then start two batches Wed. afternoon to have ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Mmmmmm, fresh bread.

That's better than most people do... You're probably fine. You'll be even better if you've got a couple of anti-spyware apps in that mix, too (I say a couple only because they don't all quite find the same malware).

About my surprise and delight over the fact that a movie about singing and dancing pengins could be both visually beautiful and kind of deep?

People with bread expertise have noted that the printed recipe differs from the online video instructions: the video has 1 1/2 cups water (354 grams water) for 3 cups flour (468 grams). The printed recipe has 1 and 5/8 cups water, which- as you say- is too much.

ohhh. fourhundredth post.

I'm not quite sure if that's possible, but in the last few days I've seen more froth on my screen that was produced by the combination of hot cappucino, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and St. Trinians.

At least the wingnuts don't get their froth onto my keyboard.

I'd toss something out about "not meddling in the affairs of spammers" but I'd want to end it with "for they are crunchy and good with ketchup" which just destroys the quote. Uh. Insofar as that nugget of fandom can be destroyed further.

As for what triggered it? Who knows - this crap comes and goes in waves; I help run a geeky little group blog, and the stuff that our spamtrap catches really ebbs and flows. Some days we get tons of the same stuff, over and over; other days, we might get one or two attempts.

We're using WordPress - my own site uses a combination of BadBehavior and Askimet; BadBehavior blocks most of them, and Askiment traps the remainder. The group blog runs Askimet only, and while it traps everything, it does mean I need to review a queue of attempts every so often (if I want to - the list gets purged automagically every 15 days).

What, man!? Do not dinosaurs and sodomy already qualify!? What such a universe would hold, I shudder to think.

Damn. Beat me to it.

It's a great Fleming take-off, with a very different James Bond. It does a particularly brilliant and twisted job of making all the Bondian elements (sinister supervillain and all) fit rationally into the Lovecraftian universe of the "Laundry" agency. (I don't think it's necessary to know the backstory from The Atrocity Archives, though it doesn't hurt.)

I had some rather creepy dreams after reading the first quarter of the book, too.

We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.

Are their stairs in your house?

(1) the first man killed by James Bond in the films;
(2) a character in the last canonical Bond novel.

The Chinese have managed to substantially increase the panda conception rate in captivity by showing the males panda porn.

I rather suspect that there was a bar in Londinium where a Jewish wide-boy was telling jokes about the Romans.

Though I'm thinking more Max Miller: "So Julius Caesar, sleeping all alone in his bed—now there's a funny thing—[...]"

More seriously, Tim Harper is generally (a) pro-spaceflight and (b) reasonably militaristic. He WOULDN'T have had a favorable impression of JImmy Carter.

If it makes you happier, I'll go so far as to say I personally give Carter credit for good intentions, if not always for performance. But it was Tim Harper's story I was telling, not mine.

Massive paper slice on hand, now swelling up and oozing unpleasantly.

Face hot, bright red, and tingling due to careless application of what seems to be a new allergen in the form of a face cream. Should know better. Arrgh.

Dead and pre-dead people everywhere.

Cynical Company on CD. Don't get up.

No time, no time, no time, too much to do, arrggh.

Weekend will be better. NYC, friends, History Boys, DeLovely, black faille, happydanceteach. If I can just get there.

Ouch.

Take care, Susan.

Actually, the damnit-this-is-NOT-hives thing with the allergenic cream is even more annoying. I am about to go lie down with an icepack on my face and really, really, really hope that I don't have to trot around NYC tomorrow looking like I should've been in the Macy's parade or (better yet) manage to get my eyes swelled shut and be unable to go properly laugh at History Boys (un soldat blesse'! snicker)

It's doubly annoying that this is due to my own stupidity in using an unfamiliar product. At least the paper cut is routine bit of damage with a predictable course.

I refuse to have hives. Refuse, refuse, refuse.

Susan: My sympathies! I had terrible hives (though not oozing ones) all summer and into a long hot autumn, but now colder weather is helping a lot -- a few days ago we hit a new low for the year: 8 degrees F! As for the cream, what a drag, and how typical of manufacturers. My latest sensitivities also extended to anything with mint in it, and what do all ChapSticks include? (Even the "Vanilla".) I finally found a lip balm that didn't make lips tingle or swell up, but it took a lot of searching.

Feh.