Fighting Foo?

If she feels a need to briefly escape the Web 2.0 vortex of coolness, we'd be happy to swing by and and pick her up--just let me know.

{{jealous}}

That is all.

Sabastapol is also the setting of "Peanuts."

I remember some comedy routine from the 90s on the subject of Dude, the Universal Word, and how it could encompass every situation. One of the latter situations offered was, "Are you hiding in the closet with a knife?" = <small>"Dude?"</small>

Or, ignore the thread entirely (see alternative usage as verb).

Guild of Radical Militant Librarians T-shirt.

My partner prints these. It's our newest design, debuting this weekend at ApolloCon.

Since then I've only been able to go to bar camps. I know O'Reilly is big on the fresh blood thing, but there's always that ache of "could I have been more interesting? Why am I at the beta-geek basement party instead of the alpha-geek prom? ::Want to be inside::"**

-----
* I'd just gone through a stressful event before camp, so I was distracted.

** because we are social primates, and thus have millions-year-old deep structure devoted to groking our place in any local hierarchy. Even if we hate hierarchies.

If there's going to be several Fluorospherians, then we should have a party!** Or afternoon tea! Although I'm going to be attending lots of afternoon panels.

On an entirely diffident note, I'm still all-ears about my request for tips on moderating panels. Thanks, Bill H., for the Minicon guide.

----------
* Next weekend, June 30-July 3. San Mateo Marriott [halfway between San Fran and San Jose]. Looks like it'll have a nice ratio of writers and guests- all the better for conversations.

** I'm tempted to throw another bid party (after Worldcon, anything else seems easy, no?), but haven't completely decided. If not, I might try sub-co-hosting at another party.

(There's actually an earlyish strip where Lucy displays her first fussbudgeting trophy...and it's labelled "Hennepin County".)

I recently discovered that Teresa spans the multiverse*. Yes, she's in a Sebastopol that gets snow every year. She can choose to watch the giant ground sloths wander along the eastern moat (it helps keep out the dire wolves, which'd otherwise be a nuisance for the outside foocampers). She's also in Sevastopol, where Fort Rossiya was never sold.

-------
* she'd complemented my comments in a thread where I hadn't yet posted what I'd written (I wasn't going to post those until I'd finished a project). Obviously at least one me did finish.

I'm sure other regions-people around the world will claim something along the same lines.

I'm a novice knitter who, through a stroke of better luck than I deserve, has come into a small stash of homespun alpaca yarn. I adore it. It is wonderful enough that I am driven to overcome my terror of sweaters and knit one, but I have no idea how to translate a pattern for worsted wool to something that can be used with chunky yarn. To screw up with this yarn would be tragic. I therefore throw myself on the mercy of the fine folk here and beg for advice based on experience (even--especially--if that advice is, "Um...better hold that yarn for something else").

Thanks in advance.

Is that terror related to night sweats? Or would that be knit sweats?

Actually uttered by an Edinburgh landlord: 'Fuck me you fucking fuckers! You've fucking fucked the fucking place!'
It had been a good party...

I'm not sure what else to suggest without seeing the yarn, though. The obvious answer would be a hat-and-scarf set, but I know that's not the sort of thing I look for when I've got fabulous yarn. Maybe some sort of open, lacy wrap or shawl? That might let you show off the yarn while still keeping the finished product cool enough to wear inside. Maybe something along the lines of Cozy -- a bulky shawl/wrap for practical wear.

That's the Cotswold Dialect version. Somewhere I have a demonstration record showing how to hold a conversation with just the one word. Like 'How to speak hip' only for Cold Aston, rather than San Francisco.

I was at the Milwaukee Zoo a couple of weeks ago, and one of the volunteers gave me a big handful of Bactrian camel hair from where they were grooming off one's winter coat. (It came off in big sheets, and the camel looked blissful, closing its eyes like a cat so that you could see the long long lashes!) It's wonderfully soft and, of course, camel colored naturally. I'm thinking that I'll have to think up some sort of felting project to use it up....

Anyone remember the Doonesbury strip in which re-activated Viet-nam era reservists are on a bus heading for Iraq (1)? One guy complains that he doesn't even know how to use the "f-word" anymore; his buddy counsels that it works just like a comma.

You could always double-strand your lightweight yarn to get something easier to work with. (You figure out the estimated weight of that yarn created by doubling the lightweight stuff by multiplying your original stitches per inch by two, and then dividing by three. So if you were getting 8 sts/inch with the yarn single stranded, you'll get about 5 1/3 per inch with it double stranded...which with a little fiddling will get you to a nice worsted weight yarn.) Or use larger needles than are called for by the lace pattern, which will force you to knit more loosely.

Aconite--

I'd also lean towards lace with the chunky alpaca you've got. It's a slow friday in the office. Give me a yardage estimate on what you've got on hand and I'll try to dig up some patterns for you....

And do NOT fear lace knitting. It looks hard, but knits easy.

Consider:

"Is this enough money to purchase this item?"
"Yes, thank you very much. Sold!"

could be rendered as:

"Dude?"
"Aye!"

or

"Please pardon my clumsiness. I hope I didn't get anything on your shoes."
"No harm done. Think nothing of it."

as

"Dude..."
"Aye."

And so on. What elegant conciseness!

"Oy" says the first one.

"Oooyy" says the second.

"oy, oy, ooyy" says the first one.

"Wait a minute," says the second, "I thought we agreed not to discuss our grandchildren!"

Once I get that straightened out, then I'll worry about what to make with it.

And why am I not one of you?

Teresa, your hamster says to tell you, "Dude. Liek woah." I think he's referring to today's landscaping effort.

(But then, I once encountered a linguistic theory that held that adjectives are in fact a species of verb, since they involve states of being.)

I got a big stash of it on sale at one of the local shops--gorgeous, pinky-brown variegated stuff. And maybe someday the pattern I bought to use it for will actually show up. Dude! It's been since April!

As this is an open thread, I invite you to contemplate two URLS to forms of transport that were most interestingly augmented by the addition of turbojets in strange places:

The M-497 jet-propelled commuter train

Jet-propelled Sinclair C5 conversion

On a related note, one of my Texas cousins (the lawyer) assures me you can get through any conversation in a bar with the use of the phrases "Fuckin' A" and "No shit."

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

Regarding wool: I an a perpetually new knitter, having only accomplished scarves and hats. I am in love with knitted wool diaper covers though, and when I was still cloth diapering my daughter invested in a few gorgeous examples of those. One from here, as you can see here.

Would using alpaca for a diaper cover cause the knitting population here to cringe in horror?

I've just started reading A Canticle for Leibowitz and am wishing I'd studied Latin in high school. I can say "Et cum spiritu tuo" and "Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes, venite, venite in Bethlehem" and "Ave verum corpus natum de Maria virgine" (etc., but I have to sing it) and that is pretty much it.

So hamsters talk like surfers, do they? My cats talk like lolcats and always have, even before lolcats were a thing. "OMG WTF!!!!" -- tail poofs out and cat takes off running like all the devils of hell are after her, for no apparent reason. Cat noses her way into the bathroom while you are taking care of business, saying "Y HELLO THAR."

Serge @26 wrote:
Hamsters of Dude

It's a good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read that!

I once had a hamster who liked to hang upside down from the top of his cage. "Duuuuude!" I would say, "Lookit my hamster!" But that was to my roommate. I was in college at the time.

(The 1993 Voyager started to need its driver's side door duct taped shut after 276,000+ miles and three transmissions. Himself broke down and admitted that he had, indeed, driven it into the ground. I need now to put my emergency garment into the 2004 Camry).

One of my cats just talks like Garfield. Not the unfunny one in the newspapers, but the one you get if you remove all Garfield's thought-bubbles. He's particularly good at the slow, disapproving stare.

The other one mainly runs around saying "What?" which is short for, "Why are you picking on me what did I ever do to you?" He says that, and also "Hey! Hey! Hey." He wants something, we know that much. We're not sure what, though. He probably doesn't know either.

#68: I wouldn't cringe in horror at the idea of an alpaca diaper cover, but I'm also not sure how well it would work. Alpaca is a different fiber from wool; it tends to have less spring, and it doesn't shed/absorb water in the same way.

#73: I figured I wasn't the only one who did that. :-)

I'm going to have to go search hyenacart to see if anyone uses alpaca now.

I have been reduced to helpless giggling by Senex MacDonald.

Am I crazy to think of following it up?

Googling, the company doesn't seem to have a website, and appears to have just moved its base into Scunthorpe proper.

I never did finish The Exploding Shampoo Plot

86 = 1 + 2^2 + (3^2)^2

(Eighty-six is one plus two-squared plus three-squared-squared).

Maybe other math-geek Lucifices can do better.

eh

--
(*) "complete" in the logical sense of expressing all possible meanings, that is.

Nothing more need be said.

Not.

Then I see a "include airports within 50 miles" checkbox. I select it and start another search.

Suddenly, I'm presented with flights beginning at $218, round-trip.

To Philadelphia, via Newark Airport, with the last leg by train.

So, if I fly to Newark, and get on a train to Philly, I pay less than just getting off at Newark.

I wonder how much trouble I'd be in if I missed the connection.

Don't try this with checked bags. You'll probably never see them again.

I was noodling around my favourite flight finder site* at flights from Portland, OR, and note entirely in passing that JetBlue flies direct from there to Portland, MN.

I don't know why this amuses me, but it really does.

-----
* My husband works there. I'm biased.

That, as they say, is serious money -- not quite enough to cover the charter hire of the Gulfstream, but getting into the same order of magnitude!

Alex Cohen (#87): Dude.

Stefan Jones (#90): The real worry is the return trip; they might not let you board the return unless you took the Philly legs. Probably less likely with a train connection than with the old trick of not boarding your flight out of the hub you were actually trying to get to.

----

* I went in 2003. And you?
** Or more precisely, I'm going to my first in 2 weeks.
*** That ache is particularly frustrating to me given that I'm only about ten miles due north of the campus. I know there's cool people coming to my neck of the woods and they're just over there...

Of course, if a friendship can survive a course of Diplomacy games, it's a true friendship.

I think you mean Portland, ME (dunno if there's a Portland in Minnesota, but JetBlue doesn't fly anywhere in the state).

I never get the M-states right.

Be careful. I don't know if you need to check into the train like you do for a flight (as opposed to handing the conductor a ticket & having it punched) -
but airlines have been known to cancel the return ticket if the connection wasn't taken - precisely because of people taking that kind of advantage of their silly pricing.

If its merely someone punching the train ticket - well, then, they'd hardly know that you skipped it, would they.

[From Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, by Barbara Tuchman]

You know about 21st Century Diplomacy? It adds an extra player to the original game, the USA.

No territory, no playing pieces, just a can of gasoline and a box of matches.

All on travel:
I've found the single best place to ask any or all questions related to flying is the forum section at flyertalk. For a questions like Stefans either the airline-specific forum or TravelBuzz could work (don't worry too much about which: they'll move your question to the best forum if needed).

Reading flyertalk will help get you up to speed on finding good (or at least the best possible) prices. The people there are travel-geeks = they're big on sharing ideas and helping out.

If you're into travel-geekery, I'm also a big fan of Bidding for Travel, a site that helps you hack the best possible deals out of Priceline or Expedia. It's excellent for hotel rooms: I don't know about flights. As I recently blogged, the combination of people sharing their numbers* plus you knowing how bidding works** makes for better prices than I've seen anywhere else.

i.e. downtown Toronto for $25/night, or (current on bft) a London Hilton for $85***. A price like that made for much more shopping at Bakka.

-------
* the exact details of their bid- where they started, what they got.

** It isn't as complicated as it might seem once you've done it, and (depending on the city) you can know which hotels- or exact hotel- you'll get. See a short example in the blog.

*** about £13, given what the exchange rate feels like.

This is because they want to be able to charge you that extra for getting off at Newark, and because they charge steep change fees.

The airlines have more scruples than Dick Cheney, but it's a near thing.

Dude!

(Xopher see bandwagon, jump on)

Dude!

(Xopher see bandwagon, jump on)

But now I'm wondering what other weird transit combos might turn up.

Fly to Las Vegas: $350

Fly to Las Vegas, connect with camel ride to Laughlin, NV: $187.50

Dan @55 and elise @60: I think by "phoneme" you mean "morpheme" or perhaps "lexeme". /du:d/ has three phonemes, /njVp/ has four, even /aI/ has two.

No territory, no playing pieces, just a can of gasoline and a box of matches.

Give that to every player and call the game MAD.

"Dude" is as useless in written communication as it is useful in spoken conversation though. Even if you resort to painful attempts like "duuuude", you still have no idea what was really being said.

Aye?!

It starts off with a more-or-less standard Risk board and topology - minus a randomly chosen radioactive territory - but as the game progresses special commander pieces open up undersea colonies, which totally change the topology around. Suddenly Australia and South America no longer look so safe... Other pieces allow you to use "nuclear" cards, open up Moon territories which can be reached from any country containing a launch facility, and so on. The new card types do weird things too - there are space warfare cards, nuclear cards, etc. Of course, you still have all the frantic politicking, alliances, and bland-faced treacherous back-stabbing of classic Risk. It's a ton of fun.

Do Pagans say "Drude"?

If you're not in the tech world, here's an analogy of ::want to be inside:: from my life in fandom.

During my first WorldCon my partner was a SFWA member: his badge had the swfa tag, mine a sfwa guest tag. That tag had awesome powers, because SFWA sponsored a members only room filled with snacks and drinks and comfy chairs.

That room had the greatest concentration of writers I'd ever seen, and I could just walk in, and sit down, and join a conversation. With writers!

Imagine being able to do that, if you never had before. Be like finding yourself the only audience member at a panel filled with your favorite writers. Except you're on the panel too: there is no audience. Just writers.

But, like Lyra with her alethiometer, that tag's power wasn't mine.

In part because we'd stopped going to Worldcons... BurningMan*... my guy let his SWFA membership lapse. We still went to local/regional cons- cons with the usual numbers of writers- and life was good.

And then ConJose came to town- run by people we know, 6 hours away from Burningman. We knew we had to do both. We did.

SFWA still had a guest room, and it was still filled with pure writerly goodness, and I sure wanted to go in, but I couldn't. To meet the writers diffused around the con I had to run early to the coffeeklatch sign-up sheets and hang out after panels and all the usual way-of-the-fan. But I remembered that room.

Imagine the ::want to be inside:: if you'd once been in the middle of a concentration of writers like that. Even if was just good luck and none of your work, even if you know your wanting is unreasonable**, the room is there, filled with people who aren't where you are. You'd like to revisit.

And that's not unlike how not being at Foo camp is like, once you've been. And Teresa is there too?. Dude, too frackin' much.

:grabs knife:
:goes to mashup 30 lbs of plums waiting in the icebox:
:Tired of plums for breakfast, this week. Still, saving them from the compost heap, me:
:Yay, me, not in Sebastapol:

-------------
* (as always) if you love SF, consider Burning Man. In 2008 they're on different weeks.

** Of course I knew that the way in is hard work and the zillion rejection slips before those first professional sales, sales yet unsold.

You know about 21st Century Diplomacy? It adds an extra player to the original game, the USA.

No territory, no playing pieces, just a can of gasoline and a box of matches.

SPI had a rule like that in their old NATO game: "To simulate the use of strategic nuclear weapons simply soak the map with lighter fluid and apply a flame."

There are of course more actual Diplomacy variants than one can shake a very large stick at. (Or is the speed of the shaking that determines the number of things one can shake at? Someone should look into that.) Diplomacy in ancient Ireland, over the entire Earth, in Middle Earth (done at least a dozen times, once even as a boxed game), in space, etc.

Long ago there were the Druids
Running naked through the wuids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
And they're good enough for me!

Um, no, but only because assasinations are so icky.

Looks like a good series, though.

So, I checked out his blog.

I was going to post a sample of this rant about SF/F writing, but it's really mean, so I'll just link to the thing for those who feel like being insulted.

Anyway, Patrick's right that I was jumping to conclusions, which I shouldn't, but I've done my research now and I stand by my initial knee-jerk reaction!

Let us pray with Zarathustra
We'll pray just like we used to
I'm a Zarathustra booster
And it's good enough for me!

My dad says he also learned the song as a kid, but it had different words than our version ;)

In the Church of Aphrodite
She's a mighty righteous sightie,
And her priestess wears no nightie,
And that's good enough for me!

Mary Dell #128--I first heard the "Zarathustra" song you allude to in an interview with the great Joseph Campbell. He provided several more verses that were equally droll.

But on to the subject at hand. I thank you, some of you, for having a glance at my posting re: "Good Science = Bad Fiction". I can understand that it would raise some hackles within this community.

But my mini-essay has something to say about quality writing, lasting writing, writing that imparts a sense of wonder. You can dwell on the negative aspects or see the posting as a manifesto of sorts in praise of timeless prose. I do think there're some kudos in the piece along with the brickbats. Perhaps (and I know I'm risking that "blog pimpage" thing again) you should read more of my work and determine if I have any credibility whatsoever. I've been a professional author for over twenty years and much of what I say on my site is derived from hard-won experience and close observation. I'm not just some airhead fan-boy with shelves full of STAR WARS novelizations. I hope you'll give me (and my work) more credit than that. If you disagree with my contentions, you're welcome to rebut them and I'd be happy to engage you. But I'd like to think that at all times the discourse be civil and reasoned...or perhaps your etiquette only goes one way...

The trouble with joining self-styled elitists in pissing all over something is the near-certainty that sooner or later they're going to turn around and get some on you too.

I don't think implying that everyone else here has been or will be rude to you is going to help create a civil and reasoned discourse. I don't know if you're deliberately trying to provoke hostile reactions, but it certainly reads as if you are.

My first instinct is to want to make excuses for this kind of adolescent muscle-flexing that many young fans go through. They (we) sometimes grow out of it. But then he says he's been a professional author for twenty years -- and he's still apparently so lightly-read that he shouldn't go near a keyboard to attempt literary criticism. (It's also a bit incongruous to see Michael Swanwick described as a "hard science guy" with a clunky writing style. At the least, Cliff Burns should probably have seen the many excellent "A to Z" bestiaries that Michael has written for NYRSF, even if he's clueless about other stuff. )

Having read that post, I was wanting to beat you about the head with some of the hard (and other) sf that I prefer. YMMV, so don't expect universal agreement.

(BTW, I've been reading the stuff since the 'golden age', which is far enough back that I read Dune as two serials. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who did that. Think about the quantity (and the quality) that can be read in that amount of time.)

Having read that post, I was wanting to beat you about the head with some of the hard (and other) sf that I prefer. YMMV, so don't expect universal agreement.

(BTW, I've been reading the stuff since the 'golden age', which is far enough back that I read Dune as two serials. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who did that. Think about the quantity (and the quality) that can be read in that amount of time.)

*which may have been sufficient, but not everyone is a hamster.

(Oh we worship Aphrodite,
she may seem kinda flighty
but she's pretty in her nightie
and that's good enough for me!)

Ah. I do see. Excuse my while I apologize to the people to whom I (very mildly) defended you.

"I'm not a 'bullying jackass,' I'm a credible individual"

Funny, I was just explaining to my credit card company that "I'm not a 'hopeless deadbeat,' I'm a 'secret billionaire.'" They didn't believe me. I wonder why?

"Seems I've stepped on some toes here and that was not my intention."

Oh, bullshit.

I don't care what you think of SF writers, or fantasy writers, or modern genre fiction, or the publishing industry, or anything else.

What I care about is that your posts are an anthology of sophomoric attempts at self-praise and self-justification that wouldn't work on a nine-year-old. As such, you're a waste of my time and of the time and energy of people who could be having much more interesting conversations if you weren't taking up oxygen in the room. Go practice your nonsense on someone not bright enough to notice what a fake you are.

*grin*

...Dude...

It's your site, you determine the quality of dialogue and who you want dropping by. I can respect that. I've left muddy footprints on your living room carpet. My apologies. We'll leave it there.

Best wishes to you--

You are not credible. Claiming that you're credible is like claiming you make convincing arguments; if people are not convinced by your arguments, your arguments are not convincing. If people do not believe you, you are not credible.

I don't believe you. You are not credible. There are many adjectives you might apply to yourself that I couldn't prove or disprove from these few statements you've made here, but that one? I am not convinced. I do not believe. You are not convincing. You are not believable.

What CnAyjuns say is *A*, ay?

The number of syllables varies contextually, situationally, individually, regionally, alarmingly, and often. Dealer's choice.

Charlie at #115 knows.

But thank you for mentioning it. I hates it. Flense it everywhere and forever, the fell and fellacious "eh". Peh.

If you can ask science fiction writers to put extra time and effort into adding more beauty to their words, then we can ask you to put extra time and effort into adding more graciousness to your words.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it. It's not that you don't have a point. Why don't more SF writers have the lyricism of various non-SF writers?* That's a good question, but it was hidden under some non-lyrical anger.

i.e. your prickly defensiveness is as much of a conversation-killer to folks here as a badly phrased technobabble data-dump is to you.

---------
* other than that some of those writers only publish every few years, or that those writers have much more time if they don't have to understand why science works, or etc. But then why don't more non-SF writers have sensawunda and the numinous in their stories?

At dooméd Troy no one was mean-a
Than the Great Goddess Athena
Mopped them up with Ajax clean-a
And that's good enough for me!

"One token to rule them all" but if you drop it, everybody is suddenly very quiet.

By Crom we're always swearing
as the swords our flesh is tearing.
He expects us to be daring.
And that's good enough for me!

Knee jerk, but there you go. I've read his prose, which is tightly written, but the content is drivel.

Because the explications are useful (even important) just as the various descriptions in war writing of the mechnics of combat (such as Caputo's Rumors of War or Cragg's The Soldier's Prize or such things as Webb's exposition of how plebes are treated in A Sense of Honor (which is probably more useful in evaluating him as a political animal than, Fields of Fire, but I digress) are important to setting mood, and establishing verismilitude.

What I find bothersome (even objectionable (in that piece) isn't that you discount a genre I like, but that you do it for such facile reasons (and with a blanket condemnation of an author, as opposed to his specific works. Jordan's D&D novels are tripe, but his skills are more than that, as Emil and the Dutchman makes clear, and Ties of Blood and Silver puts well outside the realms of debate. That he is making money because there is an audience for shallow writing isn't his fault, but rather speaks to who is buying what. If it sells, who is he to spend more time and effort writing things of greater merit; in lieu of that which pays?).

Any genre (even that of "literature) has a lot of dreck (as Ted Sturgeon said, "90 percent of everything is crap). To abuse the entirety because of that dreck is shallow and pathetic.

Also, I'm on the 'more alpaca fleece than I can possibly use' side of things right now. So if anyone in the vicinity of Portland, OR is looking, I'd be happy to share.

Hanuman's a monkey,
which makes him kind of funky.
But some think he's quite hunky.
And that's good enough for me!

S'funny, but I'm having a bit of deja vu. Didn't we just deal with a crew of "But it's so UNCIVIL of you to disagree with me" trolls?

"I don’t read for pleasure,"

Oh, thank goodness. I thought for a second he might require an actual rebuttal, but he undercuts his own arguments far more effectively than I ever could.

Somewhat related: I thought up this evening what I'm pretty sure is a Christian heresy, and I was wondering what its name was. And ML has more knowledge of odd offshoots of Christianity than any place I've ever been. So: If God made man in His image, why aren't men omnipotent? If you decided not to fund your kid's college education although you had plenty of money and were college-educated yourself, you'd be considered a jerk. Why don't those rules of what is good behaviour apply to God?

Maybe it's just plain old heresy, though.

The Web site isn't yielding up a schedule of panels for me, though. Am I missing something?

(If I go, I'll have to resist giving Tad Williams an earful about the ending of Otherland... I can probably manage that.)

I think I need a bath, now.

BTW: www.godchecker.com

I enjoy debate, thoughtful exchanges that reflect differences of opinion.

are probably not going to be my favourite partners in conversation.

Mind you, there are plenty of people whom I like who would agree with that statement. But they wouldn't say it within the first thousand words of communication.

I hate that he might leave with the erroneous idea that one must agree with our delightful hosts to stay around. No, one must be civil. (And, if you're like me and lack some basic social skills, one must also be very careful, edit like mad, and proof read. I'm convinced that anyone can eventually figure out what is uncivil. It's doing it in real time that's tricky. This medium is terrific in that I don't have to do it in real time. This is not to say I always get it right. D'oh!)

As for his blog posts, I skimmed the one about SF. It made me quite sad for him. If he wants my pity, he has it. What a joyless existence. I'm going to take a shower now. (Fortunately, I needed one anyway.)

Coming from Ashkenazim, Filipinos and Norski Midwesterners, I have to admit I do the same thing, alternating "oy," "ay," and "Heavens to Betsy!"

Really, it works.

As soon as they had driven from the door, Elizabeth was called on by her cousin to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings, which, for Charlotte's sake, she made more favourable than it really was. But her commendation, though costing her some trouble, could by no means satisfy Mr. Collins, and he was very soon obliged to take her ladyship's praise into his own hands.

(Yes, Serge, I know, more attention than the matter is worth...but even a pearl starts as an irritant.)

I find "oh dear" useful in a lot of conversations. I think I picked it up from the Snuffleupagus.

True. On the other hand, sometimes an irritant remains just that, like that time last year when my foot collided with a cactus and one of its spines lodged itself into one of my toes, broke off and remained there until it oozed its way out a few weeks later, pushed out by my body, but I digress. And your point is well taken. If his utterances can launch us into a discussion of what makes a writer terrible, and if there is such a thing as a writer who is universally reviled by all as terrible, then, yes, let us make pearls out of this irritant.

___ 171: We can do better than that:

We love Chalchiuhtecolotl
"Precious Owl God" in Nahuatl
Raise a cup of tshocolatl*
And it's good enough for me!

* Yes, that's the Nahuatl source word for exactly what you think it is.

'Mmhmm' is also very useful.

At least it was only in you for a few weeks. I got a rose hair (one of those stiff sticker things that's way too small to be a thorn) in the back of a hand. Two *years* later it finally got close enough to the surface that I could dig it out.

I don't recommend it, although it wasn't painful except for the digging-out bit.

...the creepiest part about that is how amazingly Christian-sounding it came out.

It's okay to worship Hera
just as long as you are wary
of that lecher that she married
and that's good enough for me!

Cthulu's made a promise
That he'll return to doom us
Now I'm getting kind of squamous
But that's good enough for me!

So, no recommendations for which Nalo Hopkinson novel I should read first?

I don't believe that's a heresy, because it concerns what should have been, rather than what is. That is to say, in order to be a heresy you would have to state that man IS omnipotent, and that God DID endow man with all of his knowledge. We can call that the Madelinian Heresy, if you like :)

I suppose it's heretical to suggest that God screwed up or fudged when making us, though...but I can't find a specific heresy for that one.

In God's defense, however [tongue planted firmly in cheek], in order to make us in His *image,* we just have to LOOK omnipotent.

[checks mirror]

Oh yeah. Totally!

Plums? Icebox? ...cannot...resist...urge to pastiche...

i didn't eat
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
hoping
that I would take care of.

Forgive me
they were pernicious
so many
and so repetitive.

Three cheers for Quetzalcoatl
With him, victory is toatl!
(Well, the proof is anecdoatl,
But it's good enough for me!)

Now, can anyone think of a good continuation for "Huitzlipochtli keeps things humming"?

It was good enough for Dagon
That conservative old pagan
He still votes for Ronald Reagan
And that's good enough for me

Then there was Tezcatlipolca
The Aztec "Loki" jokah
Piss him off and he will chokyah
And that's good enough for me

Huitzlipochtli keeps things humming
though he's often kinda grumpy
he'll get your heart a-pumping
and that's good enough for me!

I do not like that second line, but my brain stalled at 'seven drummers drumming' and would not move. Someone, please improve upon it.

tshocolatl

And my contribution:

Moloch and Mammon--that's a double-- They provide a world of trouble, But they make such a a lovely couple, And that's good enough for me!

Yeah, it was transcription. Classical Nahuatl spelling I know from nothing.

Btw, everyone, that 'tl' at the end of the Nahuatl words is not an apical-alveolar 't' (as in English) followed by a liquid 'l'. It's an affricate composed of a voiceless bilateral stop followed by a voiceless bilateral fricative. It's not a sound that exists in English. Not that for something as cheesy as verses of Real Old Time Religion we have to worry about the finer points of pronunciation!

(I'm enough of a pedant about these things that I never got the joke of the title of Mighty Aphrodite until someone said it out loud. I always say "aff-roh-DEE-tay" even inside my head. I say "dee-oh-NÜ-sohss" too, though I don't fuss if people say "dee-oh-NEE-sohss"; "die-uh-NIGH-suss" is right out.)

We will praise Amaterasu
Or in darkness she could toss you
Lay the veil of night across you
And that's good enough for me!

Thank the heavens for Izume
When it's getting kinda gloomy
Her sweet dancin' will illume me
And that's good enough for me!

Moloch and Mammon--that's a double--
They provide a world of trouble,
But they make such a a lovely couple,
And that's good enough for me!

Ok, Ok, I bow to your superior poesy. *grumble* I write a lousy little throwaway joke and they turn it into superior rhyming *grumble*

Nicely done; don't mind gollum, he just gets ornery if he spends too many millenia without his Precious.

On a slightly related note; there is no vehicle in the driveway because my truck died at a stoplight on the way home from the airport last night. I'd like to thank the person who mentioned in the Hurricane thread that Costco carried crank-powered flashlights. They come in packages of two, so I put one in the truck, and it came in very handy last night.

Apical - Articulated with the apex, or tip of the tongue.

Alveolar - Articulated against the alveolar ridge, just behind the teeth.

Lateral - Articulated with the side (or sides) of the tongue. In English only /l/ is articulated in this way (well, idiolectic /r/, sometimes, but it sounds like /l/).

Voiceless - pronounced without vibrating the vocal cords. Examples: /p/, /f/, /t/, /s/

Stop - A sound made by entirely interrupting the flow of air momentarily. Examples: /t/, /p/, /d/, /g/

Liquid - Essentially a vowel functioning as a consonant, as /r/ and /l/ in some dialects of English (including mine).

Fricative - A sound made by occluding but not interrupting the flow of air. This produces a sound reminiscent of friction between two objects, hence the name. Examples: /s/, /f/, /z/

Affricate - A stop followed by a fricative, and regarded as a single sound by speakers of the language. Examples: the beginning and ending sounds of 'church' and 'George'.

Never mind.

A friend of mine once related the story of how her mother, a teacher who worked with children with speech impediments, would use "yeah" to respond to her students. One day she absent-mindedly replied with "yeah" to something one of her students said to her that didn't quite parse. It was only later that she realized that the student had said, "My mom said she saw you at the bar last night." (This is in semi-rural Iowa, where such proprieties matter much more than in more-urban areas, and the teacher hadn't been at the bar.)

It was at this point that the teacher switched to "hunh" as her monosyllabic conversation-carrier of choice.

Wouldn't that be pretty close to how some regional speakers would say "li'l", as in "cute li'l thing"?

English-as-she-is-spoken actually uses a lot more phonemes than English speakers consciously notice. For instance, almost every English speaker can make a correct glottal stop in saying "Uh-oh" but most have never noticed and have no idea that that's a distinct consonantal sound.

Sorry to bore you with this little detail, but ever since that thread about "whinge" and the various cross pollinations of language, this has been in the back of my mind.

Tom Whitmore (#207): Note that the music video for "The Safety Dance" has a group of Morris dancers in it.

We bear the mark of the White Hand
And 'neath the Tower ready stand
To lay our waste upon your land
That's evil enough for me.

We holds so close our Precious ring
And keeps it safe from everything
Except for Baggins and his Sting
That's evil enough for us.

Oh my yes. But then, I've also been known to slather on the "duckling," "bubbeleh," and "querida," so.

But, well:

Pueo's eggs got sat on
Then blasphemers got shat on
The priest, he kept his hat on!
And that's good enough for me.

Well done. I gave up on Middle Earth when I found myself trying to rhyme "Sauron" with "tire-iron".*

* or should that be "tyre-iron"?

Sauron
War-on

It's gratis, no royalties required.

My problem with plums today is that I've got 50 pounds of them, and I cannot give them away. Quarantine due to a godzilla moth.

[And yes...couldn't...resist*...

This is Just To Say:
We will be eating
the plums
that are on
ice, in the fridge, in boxes and bowls and the oven and stove.

And which
We are more than probably
sick of
and need a break.

Please give me
some more recipes,
mine are getting
old.]

------
* though if I've got more than 20 pastiches in my view-all-by, maybe I'll memorize a new poem.

Speaking of which, yes, a difficult sound to get right. There's a wikipedia page for it here: Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate. I've looked for sound samples - the clearest I've found are here, demonstrating the pronunciation of John Quijada's conlang Ithkuil, in which the sound is represented by a q-háček. There are two samples, pronouncing the sound both word-initially [q̌am] and word-finally [lâq̌]. (The Ithkuil phoneme isn't exactly the same as the Nahuatl – it's aspirated, for one thing – but probably close enough.) It's also found in Klingon (there spelt "tlh") and there's a sample, along with pronunciation advice, here. These are artificial languages, though, & therefore not native speakers. You can listen to a Nahuatl speaker saying the day-names of the Aztec calendar, some of which contain "tl" (text here, if you can get that page to display legibly).

Incidentally, the word-final "tl" isn't syllabic (i.e. "chocolatl" has only three syllables), and the Nahuatl stress falls regularly on the penultimate, so some of these verses don't quite scan if pronounced "authentically".

De Gustibus, by Marian Burros, has a scrumptious plum torte that freezes (apparently extraordinarly well). I copied the recipe and sent it to you.

Spicy plum chutney; use any of your less-sweet preserve recipes, and throw in a lot of whole spices -- yellow mustard seed, ginger, hot pepper (Szechuan if you have it), cardamom. Nice as a side with Indian food; jollifying on a plain cheese sandwich. Freezes ok if you aren't up to canning.

ohai i is kitteh i can has Bast
queen of da kittehs both prezent n past
slow lik a sunbeam, ketchin mice fast
she has a flavr lik cheezburger

Fade @ 152: I think you're exactly right. At work (I'm a lawyer), I strike almost every "clearly," "obviously," and "simply," that appears in any brief I'm editing. My rule of thumb is that if you have to tell the judge that your proposition is clear, obvious, or simple, you either haven't done your job, and the proposition isn't any such thing, or you're being redundant and taking up space in my page limits...

D. 211: I think 'plosive' is an old term for 'stop', but I'm not sure. At any rate we didn't call things plosive when I was taking linguistics.

Clifton 215: You mean the 'tl'? No, the 'li'l' just has a back /l/, which is one allophone (non-contrastive variant) of the /l/ phoneme. Compare the /l/ in 'like' to the one in 'bell', and if you're American and don't overpronounce the latter, you'll notice that they're different.

English has more sounds than most people realize, and possibly more phonemes, but the glottal stop isn't really an example. It's an allophone of some consonants in some dialects (Cockney 'bottle' is sometimes said /bo'l/, where the apostrophe in this case indicates a glottal stop) and is an automatic separator for vowels in most dialects. No word begins with a vowel in English, phonetically speaking, because if it begins with a vowel phonemically it gets an automatic g-stop phonetically.

That's in the majority of dialects. In some (notably British BBC English) if one word ends in a vowel and the next begins with one, the automatic separator is /r/, not /'/. A BBC announcer would pronounce 'Cuba and Africa' /kyub^ rænd æfrik^/, where an American would say /kyub^ 'ænd æfrik^/ (using /^/ for schwa; spaces only for clarity).

To call something a separate phoneme you generally have to be able to cite at least one minimal pair for the proposed phoneme and each other sound in its class, i.e. a pair of words distinguished only by the difference between the two sounds. For example, /f/ and /v/ are distinct phonemes, and part of how we know that is that 'ferry' (/feri/) and 'very' (/veri/) are distinct words. Thus 'ferry/very' is a minimal pair for /f/ and /v/.

When people say the wrong phoneme, or leave a phoneme out, they say the wrong word, or a word that doesn't exist. When they use the wrong allophone, they just sound like they have an accent. If you say "Uh-oh" and leave out the glottal stops, you will still be understood; if you substitute /r/ you will be speaking Scoobese, which is a bit more than just an accent!

John F. Kennedy is an example of an American who spoke an r-separated dialect, and I wouldn't want to leave HIM (or any of the fine people who talk like him) out!

I suspect this is because it's revealed in other movies that she's his sister...and the censor recoiled from the "incest" idea. I sure hope that person never works on Back To The Future!

plosive In many ways it is possible to regard plosives as the most basic type of consonant. They are produced by forming a complete obstruction to the flow of air out of the mouth and nose, and normally this results in a build-up of compressed air inside the chamber formed by the closure. When the closure is released, there is a small explosion that causes a sharp noise. Plosives are among the first sounds that are used by children when they start to speak (though nasals are likely to be the very first consonants). The basic plosive consonant type can be exploited in many different ways: plosives may have any place of articulation, may be voiced or voiceless and may have an egressive or ingressive airflow. The airflow may be from the lungs (pulmonic), from the larynx (glottalic) or generated in the mouth (velaric). We find great variation in the release of the plosive (see release below).

stop This term is often used as if synonymous with plosive. However, some writers on phonetics use it to refer to the class of sounds in which there is complete closure specifically in the oral cavity. In this case, sounds such as [m] and [n] are also stops; more precisely, they are nasal stops.

(I posted a comment earlier about Nahuatl "tl", with links to some sound samples, but it's being held for review.)

I'm Icelandic and I bonded with a girl who spoke Welsh as her native tongue over L sounds at a party once.

I.e it's an l sound that's voiceless and feels like you're letting air out the side of your tongue?

But it's just a matter of convention. So as long as it's clear where your category boundaries are, I'm not going to dispute on it.

Madeleine @168: I'm not sure if there's a specific term for that heresy or type of heresy; it seems to consist of a denial either of God's goodness or his omnipotence, right? <theodicy> I suspect it's a logical contradiction for there to be more than one really omnipotent being, -- unless their wills are perfectly united. So since God wanted to create us with free will, he couldn't make us omnipotent; and since he necessarily had to make our power finite, on what basis can we say that he should have made it greater or less than he actually did? Any specific level of power would be open to nitpicking from somebody or other... </theodicy>

Mew!

Grind up 2 lb pitted plums, 1 c seedless raisins, 1 medium orange. Add 3 c sugar. Bring to boil. Stir in 1/2 c coarsely chopped walnuts. Pour into hot scalded jars and seal at once. Makes six 1/2 pint jars. Murky but good.

The peach conserve from the same book is also good -- a golden delight of peaches and oranges with bits of red maraschino cherries suspended in it.

Oh my. Really. Gracious. Uh huh. I never.

and more that aren't coming to mind. I don't have to think of them, they just come out of my mouth at the right time.

Serge, #178, my brother and a little girl were playing in the sprinkler when one of them tripped and her tooth went into his head. They both got hauled off to the base clinic and the doctor said the tooth wasn't in his head, it must be in the grass. Four days later, when Mother changed the bandage, it was stuck to the underside of the bandage. Too late to put it back in the girl's mouth. And in a less organic mode, the screws and pins that were stablizing my ankle after breaking it in nine places in three inches, started coming out. My body rejected them, so they and the plates all came out via surgery which is more organized than letting them do it by themselves.

Great Ghu, I call him often
The other gods he'll soften
He puts them in a coften
And that's good enough for me!

abi, I read your verse glancing up at the statue of Bast, who watches over our entryway (and the cats as they frolick around the living room). I think she is pleased. (I told the cats once that that was their goddess and they should be properly respectful. They gave me looks that said "We're incarnations, not worshippers. Don't you know anything?" For once they did not speak lolcat.)

Xopher again, at 235 -- But did Han shoot first? I'll forgive them that edit if he did.

On a sort of related note, apparently people from New England pronounce merry, marry and Mary differently. College friends of mine tried to get me to hear the difference but it's all one sound to me (lifelong midwesterner here). I also drink pop and put my groceries in a sack.

Can anyone confirm the merry/Mary thing? Were they maybe just pulling my leg?

Mary Dell 247: They are not pulling your leg. I can (barely) hear the difference if I try hard, but I still can't make it. I'm told the isogloss (line dividing two dialects) between pronouncing them the same and pronouncing them differently is the Alleghenies. However, national TV has been homogenizing dialects, so who knows.

I can still hear the difference between merry and Mary, when spoken by someone from out East. I grew up in Upstate New York and Pittsburgh. My parents are both Bostonians. Marry and Mary are so similar that I rarely hear the difference. The vowel sound is the same, but the length of time that it is held is longer for the girl's name. At least, that's what I remember. I've been in the Midwest for 25 years, now, and I'm getting a bit vowel-deaf. But yeah, three distinct words, honest.

Now me, I can't for the life of me say "uff-da" in any convincing tone. It's the Minnesotan "ayup," sorta. Maybe. You can tell I'm not a _real_ Minnesotan because I don't understand uff-da, even if I have learned to call casseroles hotdishes.

I heard a story once that there was a guy who grew up in an Eastern European country where American films were banned. When he finally got to see American movies, he was disappointed.

So he went on to make a movie that was based on his idea of what American movies were like before he was allowed to see them. This movie was called Liquid Sky.

So I suggest that some of the effect of the room you couldn't get into may be mirage, and your own recreation of said room might be better than the room itself. Take that room and liquid-skyify it.

I tried to come up with some of my own:

aaaamoral;
not not not not moral (that is to say an even number of negatives is a positive, so it's moral)

neo-eo-eon: the new dawn of an era

aa-aardvark: an anteater that inhabits lava formations

canoe-oenophile: someone who likes to drink wine while paddling a canoe

EEE-e e'en: an evening spent looking at Japanese woodcut depictions of narrow shoes

Can anyone do better?

*really, it warrants that many e's.

Xopher @ 233: "Glad it was helpful. I say ZOH-fur (/zofr/), but as long as it's mental I don't care how you pronounce it! It does bug me when people put the 't' back in - you wouldn't write *Xtmas, would you? - but by that same token I can't get too upset if people think it's pronounced EKS-ah-fur."

Xopher...Xmas...Christmas...OH WOW. WOW. Can you believe that I just figured that out just now? I r not-brite kitteh.

(Speaking of kittehs and pronouncing written names, I just remembered that someone on abi's catz thread asked me how I pronounce my name, and I forgot to reply. If that person is reading this thread and is still curious, I say "her-REEZ-i-ark" in my head, but I'm notoriously bad at pronouncing things I've only ever seen written.)

That can't happen in this case. You have to carry your bags on the train (Amtrak doesn't even have checked baggage service on most Northeast Corridor trains), so you pick them up from baggage claim yourself (and check them at the airport, not the train station, in the other direction).

Allen Baum @ #101: "I don't know if you need to check into the train like you do for a flight"

You don't.

Oh my yes. And if it's weird now, imagine what it was like in 1973 when the only TV in the Yokosuka barracks was always tuned to Japanese cartoons. I suppose they were forerunners to anime, but I didn't get them worth a darn and probably wouldn't have even had they been in English.

*What's the acceptable way to describe, uh, white-folk?

The yawning realisation that The Matrix has you.

I'm not from New England, but...

merry = sherry, ferry
marry = Harry, Larry
Mary = fairy, wary

At least, that's what they sound like in my head.

As for the troll-du-jour, I'm reminded of one or two Yahoo!Group encounters in which the unpleasant person said something like, "Yes, I can see how you'd get that impression from what I wrote, but" (if they haven't said, "How could you possibly get that impression from what I wrote?!") "anyone who knows me in real life can attest that I'm actually the most generous, kind, warm, sympathetic person on the block." My mental response to that is, "Presumably you don't talk to your friends the way you talk to us, then. Or else you're fortunate to be surrounded with friends who like abuse."

I left Minnesota fifteen years ago, but I still catch myself saying "Uff da" out of the blue. It's an expression of surprise or fatigue, in my experience. "Uff da! The Vikings beat the Packers, 59 to 14!" or "Uff da! Glad we got that tree branch moved," or "Uff da! That was one heck of a potluck. I won't need to eat for a week!"

...even if I have learned to call casseroles hotdishes.

Yah shure yu'betcha!

(Coming to Massachusetts, I was terribly confused when I ordered a 'grinder' out of curiosity and got a sub sandwich. "But if I'd wanted a sub, I woulda' ordered one!")

By some slightly improbable coincidence of timing, Tony Blair quits as Prime Minister nextweek, and the story centres on a new Prime Minister. (Everyone has known it was coming for months, so the story was easy, but the broadcast date?)

I wonder what people are going to say about Gordon Brown's first Cabinet meeting. Maybe Paddy Ashdown knows something that we don't.

Altho he broke with tradition in a number of ways, such as travelling overseas while Crown Prince, he was said to be rather shy, diffident and not easy with small talk, tending to use the non-committal "ah-so" frequently, which was picked up by the Western press following him on his visits.

"On a sort of related note, apparently people from New England pronounce merry, marry and Mary differently. College friends of mine tried to get me to hear the difference but it's all one sound to me (lifelong midwesterner here).

I can't speak for New England but here in Merry Old they are definitely different. So much so that I goggled at the idea that they weren't. I'll second Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @262's suggestions - but I don't know how you pronounce those words.

We also pronouce "Patty" (female name) and "Paddy" (male name) different from each other - and I got really confused in the USA (Wisconsin) where "Patty" was pronounced "Paddy".

For vowel shifts, I've always enjoyed Bill Bryson's story of somewhere in the USA where "were you born in a barn?" has become pronounced "were you barn in a born?" Can anyone remember where that was (I don't have a copy of "Mother Tongue" handy).

I feel really creepy "explaining" about any language except English, though. It feels super-presumptuous of me.

My mother was from Massachusetts, and my father from Brooklyn. So I have four uncles, two ahnts, and two ants.

Re: Nalo Hopkinson, I've never read her, but weirdly I came across three of her books in a very peculiar manner just as this discusion of her started. So they're mine mine mine!!! now.

Nicole 262: To me, ALL those words rhyme.

As for trolls, I've had lots of them, mostly but not always young, protest what nice people they are "in real life," as if being nasty online somehow didn't count. One particularly vile excrescence said "I'm the nicest person I know," to which I responded "Then everyone you know should be killed."

dcb 268: That intervocalic reduction of /d/ and /t/ to an apical flap /D/ is a common feature of American English. This rarely leads to ambiguities; for example the name 'Paddy' is very rare here (the usual nickname for 'Patrick' is 'Pat'*). I had to strain to come up with a "vicious overlap" situation for it; if your friend is trying to change a lightbulb, and you're not sure s/he can reach it from a chair, you might ask "You want a stepladder, or can you make do with a chair?" Your unusually erudite partner might then respond "/ð^ læDr/"—did s/he say "the ladder" or "the latter"?

* Not used if the last name is Nielsen Hayden.

I grew up in Atlanta with a mother from California and a father from Germany by way of China. I don't have a Southern accent but can fake a pretty good one; overall I think I sound pretty generic-American/midwestern.

In 1980's Flash Gordon, when Ming the Merciless is about to marry Dale Arden, wasn't there a spaceship going across the sky with a banner that said "Be merry... Under penalty of death..." ?

I spent several days trying to work out why a woman was called "Paddy". I didn't work out her name was "Patty" until I saw it written down. They I still had problems because every time someone said her name, my brain provided the printed word "Paddy" and another part of me objected "but her name is "Patty"" (I key into printed words better than into heard sounds).

You could have "Patty is in the paddy (field)".

How about a meat patty (as in, before the hamburger is cooked)? Is that also pronounced with the "apical flap /D/"? (in quote marks because I'm trying to get to grips with these phonetic symbols and descriptions but don't claim to understand them yet).

I knew an Englisman once who discovered that the New York City token clerks didn't understand him when he asked for twenty tokens. He had to learn to say "twenny" to get what he wanted.

Madeleine@168: because "image" is literal rather than metaphorical?

Praise to Popacatepetl
Just a tiny cigarette'l
put him in terrific fettle
(from Greer Gilman, who rattled off half a dozen of these in ~15 minutes one night.)

Xopher: No word begins with a vowel in English, phonetically speaking, because if it begins with a vowel phonemically it gets an automatic g-stop phonetically.
That sounds a bit absolutist; I'm probably off-median due to chorus training, but what I hear when I say "ominous" or "average" doesn't seem to start with a stop. (Starting with an 'h' is a trick I'll use on difficult notes in concert, but not for this example.)

Kevin@263: what's "grinder" where you come from? I grew up with "sub" around DC and was startled by "hero" when I lived in mid-state NY; "sub" now seems common in Boston, possibly due to chains that have uniform labels instead of matching the local vocabulary.

I differentiate, although Mary/marry is less obvious. I grew up in the Bluegrass, with parents from slightly further west in KY, so I'm well out of the Alleghenies (although Grand Old Opry was apparently on the menu when my mother was a child).

I've just now done clever things with mail filters that will, I hope, cause me to notice more quickly when a comment needs approval. For the zillionth time I wish we had the time and skill to implement a more sophisticated forum system, but for now we're making do with this one...

If I really try, I can imagine a slight distinction in sound between ferry and fairy, but that's about it from your list, at least as I've heard them pronounced hereabouts.

As for dialects:

Mom's from Watertown, MA, as were her parents; Dad's from Manhattan, his mother was from Connecticut, and his father was from Alabama.
My godparents, with whom I spent huge chunks of time in my childhood, hail from Zimbabwe (godfather) and Oxford, England (godmother). I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and most of our aqcuaintances & friends were associated with ND university, so weren't native to the area. Spent a lot of time with neighbors from England & Germany.

My whole family was living in Oxford, England for the first two years that I was verbal, so I had speech therapy in early grade school to train me out of my English accent.

Lived in Bloomington, Indiana from age 18 to 25, and picked up a bit of a south-midwest drawl. Have been living in Chicago for 14 years now and am married to a southside-irish Chicagoan, who, like all his bretheren, says "trow" for "throw" and "frunch room" for "living room." (He thinks he's saying "front room". I've taken to calling it the French room.)

Anyway, thanks to all the TV I watch, I seem to pass for mostly normal around here, but I will continue to say "howdy" and "y'all" til my dying day.

Re. hearing the distinction: are you saying that you cannot hear a distinction even if someone pronounces them differently, in the way we're trying to describe, or just that where you live there is little difference in the pronunciation? I ask because I remember hearing that when toddlers are told "don't say "tree" say "three" it's not that that they are having a pronunciation problem, but that they cannot hear the difference - to them, you're saying "don't say tree, say tree".

You had speech therapy to train you out of a British accent. Why? Was your speech unintelligible to your peers/teachers? Or were you getting laughed at (being bullied is no joke, I know)?

Me, I'm a Mancunian by birth (i.e. born in Manchester, UK). Took about three or four of my six years at university in Cambridge to remove most of the accent (and I was north Manchester, but never had a very broad Bury/Lancashire accent, for anyone reading this who knows the difference I'm talking about), and I've lived in London for about 14 years now, so I've got a reasonably neutral but still Northern British accent: "bath" has a short "a", not "barth" as it is pronounced down here. I pronounce "garage" as "garidge" (ga (short a)- ridge). Y'know, I really wish I knew all those symbols and descriptive terms Xopher et al. can use - would really help at this point!

are you saying that you cannot hear a distinction even if someone pronounces them differently.

When my friends CLAIMED to be pronouncing merry/marry/Mary differently, I could not hear the distinction.

As for speech therapy, there were about 4 kids in my class who went to speech class with a special teacher a few times a week, up through the end of second or third grade. All of us sounded fine to me. I know the accent was a big part of why I was there, but I also had some hearing trouble at that age, so I probably was somewhat unintelligible to my teachers, or had murky consonants, or somesuch.

I was mercilessly bullied, but that was mainly for other reasons, and the powers that be didn't pay any mind to that sort of thing back then. Ah, school days, those dear old golden rule days.

Note: my hearing was fine at the time I was learning about the m/m/M thing, so that doesn't explain my not hearing the difference, either...

Our goddess is Teresa
We all write verse to please her
(No plums left in the freezer!)
But that's good enough for me.

The vowels in merry and Mary sound pretty similar, sure enough, but merry is shorter. Or the R is more pronounced. I think that if I sing "We wish you a Mary Christmas" without changing the rhythm it still sounds different (and makes me want to swing the rhythm), and it definitely doesn't feel right to sing "Little don**key, carry Me**rry safely on** her way" (where the double-asterisked syllables are long notes) because to put the E in merry on such a long note just feels as if it doesn't work.

The A in marry is like in cat the way I say it. Sort of. There's probably some slight difference due to the following consonant being different, but I wouldn't know how to identify it or what it was called.

* Childhood spent in Yorkshire. Parents from north London. Moved to the south-west as a teenager and went to a school full of other kids whose families were recent arrivals in the area. Sometimes I wish my accent was a pure example of something.

I just watched the new Fantastic Four movie, and until today I had no idea that something so shoddy could also be so reprehensible.

In other words: it bit, hard.

Locus is reporting that Roger Elwood has died.

I just saw your post with the links to the sound samples etc. and the tl sound there is pretty much the Icelandic one. I mean it differs a bit. Because the same sound varies depending on the other sounds around it.

At the start of words, it's spelled 'hl' in Icelandic and it's lacking the 't' starting part and is I think more like the welsh ll. In the middle or end of words the l is usually pronounced normally and voiced unless there's a t,k or a d sound before it and then you get a sound that to me sound exactly like in those samples you linked to. However I might not be hearing the subtle differences.

Icelandic has aspiration contrast so I think that l sound has come from that, we've also got a more normal unaspirated 'standard' l. Anyway I had a few friends who were trying to learn Icelandic and they really struggled with that sound. They pretty much couldn't manage it at all.

Ogden Nash, on what come out when you thump a ketchup bottle, but I don't have the specific poem. "First a little, then a lot'l"

I think you're referring to:

Shake and shake
the catsup bottle,
none will come,
and then a lot'll.

It's by Richard Armour.

When we went to worship Venus
Well, ye gods you should have seen us
Now the clinic has to screen
But that's good enough for me.

We will gather in our saunas
When the spirit comes upon us
To perform the rites of Faunus
And that's good enough for me.

Let us go and worship Loki
He's the old Norse god of chaos
Which is why this verse doesn't rhyme or scan
But it's good enough for me.

I've been singing this song for 25 years, I could keep singing for another 25, I'm not proud... or tired.

I wish I could stop doing that. Sometimes it pops up again even when I've reset it -- I think when I've started writing a comment and then thought better of it.

As for pronunciations, I'm Northern Californian, and it's not the same as So-Cal speak. Still, everyone can tell us by our blatant vowels. On the other hand, inhabitants everywhere seem to slur the names of their home towns/cities in such a way that outsiders always stand out. (For me it's Oakl'nd and Pressc't, not Oak-land or Press-cott, not using apostrophes here in any technical sense but just for missing vowel sounds.) For an extreme example, there's Edinbourough (and probably a lot of other long-established places in the UK).

You may have thought you'd sneak an Arlo reference by, but not so!

All hail the mighty Squat
Who grants us nearby parking spots
Who's goodwill can't be bought
And that's good enough for me!

Jules @ #267:
Dinosaurs & sodomy, presumably.

Strangely, *my* nickname among many friends is Mary Dell, run together as if it's one name. Which must be how I say it, because when I give my name to people at the bank or whatnot, they often continue to look at me expectantly as if there's another name coming, until I explain that Dell is my last name.

We talked about knives in another thread and the sciplus catalog came yesterday. They have the Solo Alox (put 93215 in the keyword search), the Compact (93216) and the Outrider (93217).

That would have to be annoying. As annoying as Paula NMN Helm. (what do you mean you don't have a middle name? My Southern parents couldn't thing of anything to match with Paula.) When I got married I took the free opportunity to give myself a middle name!

Oh, and unrelated to that, I have two utterly stupid questions for anyone at large.

1.) The BSG "webisodes" come after Season 2.5 and before Season 3, right? And there are ten of them?

2.) Since people have brought up Cthulhu, I think it's time for my embarrassing admission that I've never read any Lovecraft, ever. (This is especially stupid considering my rabid Rhode Island pride.) Since all y'all have been very kind and helpful and effective in pointing me in the right direction for this kind of thing before, I'll ask: where is a good place to start? Is there a good collection to go to? A particular work to begin with? I'm frightened, but I want to learn.

I think what that is is the 'multiple first names' version of what my parent referred to as 'having three last names'. (One of the more distant cousins actually did have three last names, haveing been given first and middle names that were 'last names'.)
One of my mother's cousins suffers from this also: her married name is Gay. We usually use all four of her names, just so it's clear there's a last name involved.

Well if you will insist on seeking out horrors beyond the ken of mortal men...

...I'd probably go with "The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre" (ISBN 0-345-35080-4). Apart from "At the Mountains of Madness", it's got pretty much what I consider to be the essential Lovecraft.

Thee are websites around where you can access various Lovecraft stories but I understand that there are issues involved regarding copyright; disputes on whether the works are Public Domain or not.

Also, I didn't realize for a long time that many of his stories that I had read had been either finished from his notes or "improved" by August Derleth, who was a much worse and more cliched writer. Stick to the stories entirely written by Lovecraft and published in his lifetime.

The only part of the whole movie that was any good, I thought, was when the Human Torch took off after the Silver Surfer the first time. I'm not usually a fan of big special-effects extravaganzas, but it was breathtaking. Unfortunately, they kept screwing it up by having the Torch make weird "humorous" remarks, which completely destroyed any wunda I might have sensed. Also, they rushed it--it could have gone on much longer and still been good (and that way maybe it wouldn't have been NYC, NYC, NYC, DC! so jarringly), perhaps if they had taken out some of the endless snoozy-sexist wedding buildup schmaltz. And on top of all that--I'd seen it before, almost in its entirety, in ads. What a frack-up of something that could have been incredible!

Soon Lee #321: Great, thanks! That specific edition is available at my local library, according to the catalogue online, so I'll pick it up tomorrow. Much obliged.

Soon Lee @321: My understanding is that, now that Lovecraft has been dead 70 years (since 15 March 1937), the copyright disputes are now moot; anything that wasn't public domain already, should be now. But maybe that doesn't actually take effect until January 2008 for some reason? Anyway there is evidence that the copyright of many though not all of his works expired from want of renewal before the 1976 copyright act. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Intellectual_property.

BTW, re the difference between merry, marry, and Mary in Oz, there's definitely a difference with "marry", and usually the other two, but the suburbs Merryland and Maryland can be hard to distinguish with some people.

d dh t th [5th letter in this line, that I've forgotten]
d dh t th [as above]

and both lines sound identical to me. When I went to school in India briefly*, when I was nine, I pretty much flipped a mental coin during dictation to figure out which 'd' or 't' to write down. Since Hindi has purely phonetic spelling, I was the only kid who regularly spelled words wrong.

Faren Miller (#306): Seconded on the hometown spelling. I pronounce 'Toronto' as 'Trawna', and more than one listener has heard it as 'China.' I'm also reminded of M'waukee.

*It was a convent school. Me and nuns, not so much. The hep A I came down with seemed like an excellent alternative.

Fragano @301, Carol Kimball @299: I was at a funeral recently where a boy recited what we thought was Ogden Nash - The Catsup Bottle. I see now that version was a bit Nash and a bit Armour. There is a Nash poem on the topic. I haven't been able to discover which came first.

The Catsup Bottle

First a little
Then a lottle

Ogden Nash

My godparents' tradition goes the other way, with 4 names each, so the youngest in the clan has 5 names because she has both of her parents' last names.

Eleanor @#318: Same sound, but a little more sing-songy, the vowel is more drawn-out, and there's a strong emphasis on the first syllable when she's saying "Mary." Possibly because she's generally invoking my name to get me to do something, like "oh, MAry, bring that bowl over here!" Sorry I don't know any of the proper terminology for this stuff!

There is a dispute on copyright ownership (see August Derleth & Arkham House), on whether copyrights were renewed & on length of protection if so. All this to the extent that Project Gutenberg doesn't hold any Lovecraft stories but the Australian sister site does. Australia has a clear-cut 'life+50 years' copyright.

Small children can generally hear the difference between difficult word pairs; their speech problems usually come down to lack of mouth/tongue/lip coordination, and will sometimes correct adults who imitate the incorrect pronunciations.

For adults, on the other hand, it's very hard to hear a distinction that your language doesn't have, and I've heard anecdotal reports of Japanese speakers, very fluent in English, who could nevertheless not hear the l/r distinction even when they had learned how to pronounce it.

"Paprika" is the latest flashy anime import that has jumped the fandom fence and is making the rounds of indie theaters.

The guy who did this did "Tokyo Godfathers," which I thought was a hoot (and very nonstandard for Japanese animation) so I gave this a try.

It's kind of like a Philip K. Dick story: Odd gadget (in this case, the "DC Mini," a semi-licit device which lets the wearer's dreams to be visualized) results in reality and fantasy and dreams getting mixed together.

The title character is a rogue cyberspace / dreamworld psychotherapist. As the film opens she's helping a angsty police detective figure things out. Meanwhile, the engineers behind the DC Mini discover that some samples of a easily-hacked version of the device have been stolen, and their project faces termination.

The visuals of this one are pretty neat, and the characterization offbeat, but it left me kind of cold.

Reviews for fence-jumping anime always seem to have a line like: "Americans think cartoons are for kids, but Japanese do them for grown ups!" Nyaahhh, not so much; "Paprika" had some interesting ideas, but it was mostly about the eye-candy. And like too damn many anime movies, there's a big loud apocalyptic thing going on, with the usual squirming tentacles.

The right setting helps: I find that the spine-tingling quotient of the stories go right up if read in a creaky old house, in the middle of the night, during a storm, while alone, with the soundtrack of a Hammer Horror playing in the background (on a battery powered stereo because the powerlines are down on account of the storm).

Not having been back to the old sod in several decades, I can't ssy from observation what the popular usage is, but I do know the hoagie has been declared the official sandwich of the city. But you know politicians, they tend to lead from behind, temporally, spatially, and morally.

Mmm. Hoagies.

I moved from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg to take my first job after college, and was shocked to discover I'd moved out of hoagie country. I could buy all the subs I want, but they were cold, pale, imitations of the True Hoagie. Of course, at the time, no one west of Carlisle could make a proper cheesesteak, so there were compensations. But I'd grown up on hoagies.

Finally, I taught the pizza place down the street how to make a proper hoagie - meat, and cheese on the bread, into the oven open-faced, then add the lettuce and onions and (no tomato slices for me, thanks) and then the seasoning.

I haven't lived there for 25 years - I wonder if the place still exists (it's on South Union street in Middletown), and if so, is there anyone there who can still make a hoagie.

Now I'm hungry.

"The Color out of Space" is another favorite. I recall liking "The Shunned House" as well, but I haven't read it in over a decade and my memory may mislead me as to its quality.

In Newark, Delaware [1], a grinder is a hoagie with melted cheese. If it had meatballs, it was a meatball sandwich.

In Philadelphia, there are subs rather than hoagies. I've been here 12 years, and I still want to call them subs.

[1] Newark, New Jersey is much better known.

He had been hospitalized and he definitely wasn't having any fun. The tumor turned out to be a fibrosarcoma, which is very painful and fast-growing, and the vet told us the only possibility keeping him alive was to amputate his leg. I doubt even that would have saved him.

My only regret is that we didn't come to this decision sooner.

It's always a tough decision; sometimes you get faint signals that things look OK and hang too much hope on them.

My family waited way too long when our old cat Ziggy was quietly fading from kidney failure. His last hours were just awful.

* * *

I just heard that a young pit bull my sister was fostering and trying to rehab will probably have to be put down. A nice dog, but she freaks out and nips people who wave their hands.

It's never easy, even when an dire illness is present.

Prayers for peace and grace going your way. And hugs across the e-ways.

I'm very sorry to hear about Wade. I've had to put down three dogs now, and it never gets any easier. I hope that it isn't long before it's easier for you to remember the good parts of Wade's life than the bad.

Here in Brooklyn, I've just caught up on Doctor Who, 21st Century Season 3, having got about six episodes behind. Via, of course, that utility to which we tactfully refer as The Great TiVo In the Sky.

And all I have to say is OMG OMG Paul Cornell 1913 "Blink" Derek Jacobi JOHN SIMM OMGWTFBBQ!!!

[tiny mind blown to geeky smithereens]

That's not just an illustration, it's a true story -- they've been married 20 years now. (Hint as to accent: the wedding was at the Sheraton Station Square in Pittsburgh.) And yes, all those words sound the same, except of course the T in Terry. :-)

It's really not just him--it's absolutely epidemic. "So (そう)," as much as it has any literal translation, means "like that." Japanese speakers tend to expect very active listening from their audience--a lot of "Oh really" and "Huh" and "Is that so?" "So (そう)" fills that role admirably. "A sou desu ne" is the hyper-mega-charged Japanese equivalent of an American non-committal acknowledgement like "Oh yeah?"

(Though it pales in comparison with the hyper-mega-charged Japanese hesitation noise "anone", which is so prevalent among Tokyo-raised Japanese women that, in Singaporean slang, it has become synonymous with them.

Xopher @ 280: "I knew an Englisman once who discovered that the New York City token clerks didn't understand him when he asked for twenty tokens. He had to learn to say "twenny" to get what he wanted."

I've found that the way that we Americans distinguish between the numbers 13 and 30 (or 15 and 50) has little to do with the "n" at the end and everything to do with whether the internal "t" is sounded "d" or "t" (and also which syllable the emphasis is placed on ). 13 is "thir-TEE(N)," and 30 is "THIR-dee." It's often impossible to tell whether ESL speakers meant one or the other, especially if they studied British English. They keep trying to emphasize the "n" (or lack of it), when that just isn't what we are listening for.

Bruce @ 350: Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Thanks!
If all works out, then the theme food for at least one Westercon party shall be torte.

It was a rather good run of episodes wasn't it? I wasn't too impressed with some of the earlier episodes this season but starting with the Paul Cornell eps the show really hit its stride.

Is it next Saturday yet?

Where I'm from, a grinder is a machine we make hamburger with. The oblong sandwiches, we call subs -- Subway is probably mostly to blame. Is "sub" New York City slang that got exported to the rest of the country?

Kathryn@355: If all works out, then the theme food for at least one Westercon party shall be torte.

Ooer, that sounds wonderful. What night is it? If you're inviting Fluorospherians, I might have to drop by to help you with such a tragic situation as a surfeit of plum torte. :-)

Thus, as a 'Franconian', I view 'Pfannkuchen' as meaning 'Crêpes / Pancakes', and I view 'Semmeln' to mean 'bread rolls, in general'.

However, at the bakeries in Thuringia, each spring at Carnival time, there are specials on 'Pfannkuchen', which here means doughnuts, and if I ask for 'Semmeln', I get a specific sort of white, double, plain bread rolls that were very characteristic of communist East Germany.

The bread roll distinction took me several months to figure out.

JESR, #73: My partner, who knows damn near everything about cars (including how to research what he doesn't know), says that Voyagers have long been known for needing transmissions more often than they ought -- which is a Bad Thing for people who can work on their own cars, because they are otherwise real workhorses and common as dirt, meaning that spare parts are easy to find. This is one of the main reasons why our most recent minivan purchase was a Pontiac Montana.

However, he also notes that Chrysler/Plymouth has now been bought out by (IIRC) Mercedes-Benz, who have Put Their Foot Down about the shoddy transmissions, so in another 5 years or so you should be able to find a good used Voyager that won't blow out the transmission as soon as you start driving it.

Xopher, #124:
Well, I always let old Zeus do
Just whatever he should choose to.
He can't do it like he used to,
But he's good enough for me!

Fade, #135 and Joe, #142: That, and one of those people who view anything short of complete, worshipful agreement as intolerable rudeness. IOW, a twit.

Xopher, #143: Tolkien was not, in fact, a professional writer -- he was a professional linguist -- and there are places in LOTR where the difference is profoundly obvious. Being aware of that doesn't mean I love it any the less; like one's beloved, the flaws are part of the whole. But if I were editing LOTR as a manuscript (and mind you, I'm no more a professional editor than JRRT was a professional writer!), there would be some things said about chronology, integration thereof, and pacing.

Tom, #207: Interesting! And a lot of disco music has the perfect rhythm and pacing for dancing Korobushka, a Russian folk dance. Which has been demonstrated by dance-geeks on a number of occasions, to the drop-jawed amazement of the "normal" people in the room. :-)

Mary Dell, #248: Native Michigander here. "Marry" amd "Mary" are homonyms to me, but "merry" is different. At least in my head -- I won't necessarily vouch for what comes out of my mouth if I'm talking fast!

I normally say "soft drink", but occasionally "soda" will pop out (pun intentional!). OTOH, I'm definitely on the "bag" side of the bag/sack divide, while my partner (who grew up in Miami) is on the "sack" side.

CHip, #281 and Carol, #299:
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle --
None'll come, and then a lot'll!

Various, on paleontology smut:
Across the herd, he spied her generous curves (she had curves!);
A thrill ran down all seventy feet of his saurian nerves,
And thirteen tons of amorous male
Went chasing after eight tons of tail --
The earth moves when dinosaurs fall in love!
- "When Dinosaurs Fall in Love", words & music copyright by Dr. James Robinson

J Austin, #331: It confuses me when people don't pronounce the aspirated "wh"!
"Which" is NOT the same as "witch".
"Where" is NOT the first syllable of "werewolf".
"Whales" are in the ocean; "wales" are in corduroy (and Wales is in the British Isles!).

Dan, #341: My sympathies. May he be remembered with love.

On the other hand, I doubt I'd be able to tell the aspirated ("+h") from the non-aspirated consonants, even if I (intellectually) understand the difference...

J. Austin @ 331 and Lee @ 362:
I'm another of those who pronounces the "h" sound at the start of those words. I seem to recall one or two posts on Language Log that suggested that the distinction ("which" vs "witch") was in the process of disappearing, so that most Americans didn't do it anymore.

#306 ::: Faren Miller
"Edinbourough" - you mean "Edinbru" (short "u" to end on), I presume?

JESR @ 293 (and others) merry/marry/Mary. My British accent uses the schwa only for "merry". Well, maybe a sort of drawn-out version of the schwa (if there is such a thing) for Mary. "Marry" is definitely a short "A" not a schwa, with the emphasis coming on the first syllable of the word.

Multi-syllable words pronounced with the schwa are the ones I have problems spelling (e.g. sentence, separate - the second vowel in each of those). At least I've learned which words I have problems with and keep a list of them handy. Then I just have to contend with the UK/USA spelling differences...

What? E'mbra?

The regional sandwich of choice where I grew up is the beef on weck. The regional food term that surprised me the most when I moved to eastern MA was "milkshake." (It's made with ice cream where I grew up, but not around here.)

#348: Yeah, the 3rd series has been terrific overall. With "Blink," I wonder if Stephen Moffat has just earned himself another Hugo nomination (or possibly another Hugo).

The last episode of the season could be totally mindblowing. If I have the right read on what's left to happen though, I do wonder how they're going to squeeze it all in. (I could be making it all more complicated than necessary. The preview makes the episode look like non-stop explosions.)

"Crazily optimistic" is how I summed up my case.

Computer jobsearches, in particular, seem to distort the information presented to fit in the underlying database.

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers' hearts were light and felt no sorrow...

(More here

Further detail/speculation would be something of a spoiler, ohg vfa'g ohvyqvat n sylvat nvesvyrq jvgu pebffjvaq ehajnlf n cerggl penml guvat gb qb?

On my uncharitable days, I consider McGonigall's rhymes as a great formative influence on modern poetry, encouraging as they do the trend toward blank verse.

I also find myseklf wondering about the possibility of William Topax McGonagall's War of the Worlds

Then I wake up screaming.

Do you have any pictures of Wade you'd like to share?

Incidentally, re: the mentions of Paul Cornell... did anyone know his episodes this year were based on a (really very good) novel he wrote back in the 1990s?

Do you waste precious time trying to come up with something that rhymes with “Cthulhu” and “Quetzalcoatl”?

I know, I shouldn't be going and looking over there, but I can't help myself! Argh!

Evidence that "Cthulhu" is pronouced "Quetzalcoatl" will be considered.

...felt no sorrow...

You mean you don't pronounce it "sur-rah" where you live?

(j/k!)

When you're hunting with Diana
You can shoot or else you can'na
And the moon is her banana
And that's good enough for me!

If you want to see Rhiannon
Take a horse that you can plan on
She's a bit of a loose cannon
But she's good enough for me!

Mighty Thor can wield the thunder
He drinks ale and gives us plunder
And he piques my sense of wonder
And that's good enough for me!

And Saint Anthony of Padua
Finds lost things however mad you are
And he seeks the stars per ardua,
And that's good enough for me!

Long ago old Quetzalcthulhu
worked some tent'cled, feathered voodoo
Needs a heart-- I bet that you'll do
ia ia Tenochtr'yleh!

I just watched it for the second time and it made me laugh again.

1. Write a column in which you condemn the writers of an entire genre.

2. When someone in another blog disagrees, go over there and scold them for being rude.

3. Go back to your own blog and make fun of the people on the other blog for continuing the conversation they were having before someone made mention of your blog.

Way to go, Mr. Burns! You are a model to us all. (Hey, an exemplum in malo is a model.)

>And all I have to say is OMG OMG Paul Cornell 1913 "Blink" Derek Jacobi JOHN SIMM OMGWTFBBQ!!!

>[tiny mind blown to geeky smithereens]

Yeah, that's pretty much been my reaction, too. Been watching since 1963 and I think this may be the best season ever. Loved the first three eps, thought the next four merely OK, but from 'Human Nature' on they've been hitting it out of the ballpark. Don't know if your viewing included last Saturday's 'The Sound of Drums' or not, but holy hell that episode pressed all my fanboy buttons! Wasn't entirely sure about it on first viewing, but it definitely rewards a second viewing. Can't wait for next weeks season finale. (Which, incidentally, is being broadcast the same day as the Gay Pride parade, so a giant screen is being erected in Trafalgar Square and John Barrowman will be there to introduce the episode for the revellers. Dr Who - not just a geek favourite but a national institution!)

There's another upstate specialized sandwich that I met fairly recently. Spelled "Spiedie" and pronounced "speedy," I think they hail from Binghamton. They were prepared for us here in Western Mass by the parents of one of my students; Binghamton natives. Anyone familiar with them?

Also, Kenneth Hite, who's nearing the end of his story-by-story analysis of Lovecraft's oeuvre, lists his ten favorite Lovecraft stories here (footnote at the bottom of the post). Which is not a bad place to start: look for a collection with most of those stories....

I'm frightened, but I want to learn.

Once you've read some Lovecraft, you may get an idea of how funny/creepy that remark is...

Thank you very much. In similar vein:

L. Ron's religion has no peer;
it needs no shrinks, we're taught to clear.
It's true the tithe is rather dear,
but that's all right with me!

We've been versifying about you, in a pumpkinifying way (vide 189 and 292).

Go rest.

My Doctor Who supplier* just got to work to inform me that his computer's in pieces and he's stuck waiting for a new power supply before it'll be any use.

This is Very Bad Timing Indeed.

Maybe I'll watch Blink again instead.

* I can't get DSL at home, and the cable TV is unreliable enough that I'm not remotely inclined to trust Comcast with something as important as my net connection, so I'm stuck with dial-up. I let other people do my downloading for me.

We have got the light of reason
Which is intellect'ly pleasin'.
We shut down for baseball season,
And that's good enough for me!

How would you distinguish it in speech from the capital of Albania? I'm just curious.

#386: Yup. I've always wondered how chicken wings turned into something I can get at my local supermarket, but the beef on weck is some sort of regional secret. (Well, not anymore. I've blabbed on Making Light. The whole world knows now.) I guess a salt and caraway seed encrusted hard roll is an acquired taste.

I've only driven by Binghamton so I've never had a spiedie. My advisor loved them though.

#385:This season has been terrific so far. But I've been watching these last few episodes with the constant fear that RTD is going to screw it up.

Gur eryngvbafuvc orgjrra gur Qbpgbe naq gur Znfgre pna or gevpxl. Bar bs gur ernfbaf V yvxrq gur vqrn gung Qbpgbe vf gur ynfg bs gur gvzr ybeqf jnf gung vg zrnag jr'q arire unir gb qrny jvgu vg. Jryy, jr'er qrnyvat jvgu vg. Jungrire unccraf, V ubcr vg'f vagrerfgvat.

#389: Welcome back, Teresa. I hope Foo Camp was everything it was cracked up to be and more.

Got it. Considering the progression though, what's next? The city of Bro?

Okay, no problem. 'Brisbayne' is next door to San Francisco, anyway.

And to Dan, my sympathies as well for your beloved cat's passing.

Buffalo Wild Wings, aka BW3, used to be "Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck" and tried to introduce beef on weck to the rest of the nation.

Didn't work, but I'm not sure why.

Is there anything scarier in Icelandic than the aspirated l thingie? Because I have hopes of someday (in my copious free time) learning Icelandic, and if the aspirated l is the worst of it, then I'm much encouraged, at least as far as pronunciation goes.

You know, I'm coming to the conclusion that people who describe themselves on first acquaintance with phrases like

I enjoy debate, thoughtful exchanges that reflect differences of opinion.

are probably not going to be my favourite partners in conversation.

I once read a website that humorously translated lines from personal ads. The one that sent me into helpless giggles of recognition went something like:

"We will challenge and question each other's deeply held beliefs and assumptions" = "I will disrupt your life for reasons I do not fully understand."

D.C. Judge Loses Pants Suit
Judge who sued his dry cleaner for $54 million over lost pants will get nothing for his troubles.

(The story's behind their subscription wall, but the teaser is enough.)

In British dialect, the lawsuit was, indeed, pants.

Well I don't know. The grammar is quite tricky with lots of inflections for adjectives, nouns and verbs but nothing worse than latin I think.

Pronounciation wise we do have a rolled r and it can be tricky in combination with the softer 'th' sound. I.e a lot of the local tongue twisters tend to have the th sound and r in various combinations like:

"Eg bjo hja Nirthi nithri i Northfirthi nyrthri"

That's an extreme case though. Then we do have a fair bit of glottal stops and pre aspirated consonants and there's an aspiration contrast in the language so you have words where aspiration or no aspiration in some bits of them is the only difference.

Our V is halfway between the English W and V and actually most Icelandic people can't hear the difference between the English W and V. I can hear it now after lots of exposure to English, but I was in a party once in Iceland where an Australian and an English girl were having lots of fun talking about wiolins that vere wery vicked sounding and no one had a clue what they found so hysterical.

Anyway the consonants are a bit harsher than in English, it comes with the glottal stops I think. Icelandic is also quite fast and somewhat singsongy although not as much as Swedish for example. I find I speak with a brighter more loud voice when using Icelandic vs. when I speak in English. I was once doing vocal samples for a friend of mine and we needed to recalibrate the recording software when I switched languages.

Anyway I don't think I've met a single non-native speaker that doesn't have a very strong "I'm not from around here" - accent. However you don't need that to be understood, fortunately.

Mostly though I'd dread the grammar.

If they are stealing them when you aren't home, I don't know.

On the personal level of wanting to make them regret having stolen them, I might seed the pots with nettles.

But I'm not always a pleasant person.

Christopher Davis (#217): Yes, I did have a brain cramp and put those two together. Which is just wrong.

Sink a ring bolt into the porch through the hole in the bottom of the planter. If the ring is wider than the hole it'll hold the planter down; if not, run a bolt or sturdy stick through it horizontally.

With cables, this also works to keep your porch furniture where it belongs.

For containers on the ground, you can bury a bolt and run a cable up from it, and loop it around a horizontal stick or bolt in the bottom of the planter.

[today's fascist majority Supreme Court pronouncements]

Thomas, Alito, and Roberts lied under oath in the hearings for confirming them to the Suprement Court. They deserve immediately -removal- with prejudice from the bench.

Gur eryngvbafuvc orgjrra gur Qbpgbe naq gur Znfgre pna or gevpxl. Bar bs gur ernfbaf V yvxrq gur vqrn gung Qbpgbe vf gur ynfg bs gur gvzr ybeqf jnf gung vg zrnag jr'q arire unir gb qrny jvgu vg. Jryy, jr'er qrnyvat jvgu vg. Jungrire unccraf, V ubcr vg'f vagrerfgvat

Me:

Gurl jrer nyjnlf tbvat gb oevat uvz onpx - naq fb sne, V yvxr ubj gurl'ir qbar vg.

[reads said results]

Holy...dude. What a duded-up way to dude the 1st amendment. "Ass-kissers for Bush," indeed.

Also, I am newly obsessed with Torchwood.

Sympathies. :( I had to have my cat Dani euthanized a couple of months ago, so I know just how you feel.

I think getting new (not "replacement") cats right away was the right thing to do, but I still miss her.

Lee, Daimler has Chrysler on the market, or has possibly put it in the market place and said "I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee." It matters not, because we now have a Toyota which will last forever, as long as we do something in the way of major construction to the steep bit at the middle of the driveway, where it bottoms out with four of us in the car.

dcb, I almost wrote "values of schwa," which is what my Structural Linguistics prof actually said, but I didn't feel up to explaining that term if challenged. Besides, I always suspected that he conspired with the members of the class who got there on time to say things just to flummox me, as payback for always being seven minutes late and for telling him (in a social setting, and before I ever enrolled for his class) that I didn't think archaeology majors should have to take 400 level linguistics classes, since there was no chance to talk to our subjects.

There was something else; I've forgotten what. Oh: on Mr. Burns. He tempts me, for a moment, to accept Keen's bloviating on the dangers of Web 2.0. Just in his particular case, you know?

Has anyone read this? Is it worth searching out? One of the reviewers at Amazon said it's wonderful but full of inside jokes aimed at con-attendees. Since I've never attended one, would said jokes go right over my head?

Inferno, 9th circle, Judecca, under the ice. Treason to one's masters, i.e. in a "democracy", the citizenry.

The level of hypocrisy involved is breathtaking--there's a website entitled something like "The only moral abortion is my abortion" which details such appalling acts of hypocrisy as women who've been out picketing clinics calling hellfire and brimstone upon abortion providers, going in for abortions and after having them, heading back to the picket line to return to calling down hellfire and brimstone. In some cases clinics have either refused outright to accept such people as patients, or have said, "We will provide an abortion to you HOWEVER the conditions include that you have NO PRIVACY in the matter and we are going to tell the world about your hypocrisy."

Mayo, sweetened, is "salad dressing".

They sure do. We had an 83 Tercel and an 86 Camry that each lasted 19 years before we sold them. Both of them were still running great and had required no major repairs; the only issues had been paint and rust things, and some work on the Tercel's air conditioner.

It has its moments; you really have to read it for the bed-racing scene. (Actually, I'm not sure about who did the takeover, since one result was making SF illegal, but the Greens were certainly involved.)

If you read here, then only the really obscure jokes will be over your head. I know who Flash is ....

Has anyone read this? Is it worth searching out? One of the reviewers at Amazon said it's wonderful but full of inside jokes aimed at con-attendees. Since I've never attended one, would said jokes go right over my head?

I read it a long time ago, when it first came out (early '90s?). Since I have never been to a con either, the jokes went over my head completely. Some of the descriptions of fan behavior sounded realistic (I've know some fans), and were fun to read, but I had to fight the urge to hit the book with something large and heavy, failing the ability to do the same to Pournelle, whom I blame for the polemics.

In pursuit of Grand Unified Open Thread Theory, given the suggestions near these posts for the ultimate destinations of much of the government, it's worth noting that Niven and Pournelle also wrote _Inferno_, full of in-jokes about SF. (I must admit I lost patience; I suspect my copy did a runner several moves back.)

That said, I don't know Flynn, but I suspect that Niven and Pournelle wouldn't co-author with someone who didn't share their [Godwin filter has censored this text] point of view, or their taste for blunt and tedious polemic.

It's also true that I don't know anything about this particular novel other than what you say in your post, but it seems their particular Foxification this time is the "environmentalists are anti-technology" lie.

If you must read it, please borrow a copy from a friend. Don't give these bastards any more money.

Xopher (whose screen name I have been pronouncing properly, I'm delighted to learn), what's the significance of the comment number (see, there might be an example of an inside joke I missed)?

Used books pay no royalties.

Actually, this one isn't too heavy on the polemics, mostly because they were having too much fun with fans being the last vestiges of (relatively free) society. At least, it didn't make me want to throw it at a wall; I will admit that it's one of the read-twice-a-decade books.

'420' was allegedly some police department's code for "possession of marijuana." Whatever the truth of that matter, it's now common slang/code for "smoking grass." "I like 420" means the speaker is a pothead. In the dotcom I used to work in all the younger staff would disappear at twenty minutes past four, which also was the end of any serious work each day, even though they came back. April twentieth is also sometimes the occasion of...herbal festivities.

A judge in the District of Columbia has dismissed a case against a dry cleaner who was sued for $54 million in damages over a pair of missing pants....[Judge] Bartnoff awarded court costs to the Chungs, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the case. They are attempting to have their attorney's fees paid by Pearson.

The book apparently is available on-line without payment from the Baen on-line library.

(also 331): When I was small, we briefly had a maid who pronounced my first name MAY-ree. Drove my mother crazy.

I used to read your screen name as, "Zopher" (a la xylophone).

Then I learned what your given name is.

And I started to read it as Christoper.

Now I'll go back to Xopher.

What amuses me isn't that I was reading it, "right" and then "wrong" but that I was able to recode it, and then recode it again; because, in all those cases, I didn't have to stop and think about it, it just read that way.

My pot-smoking days are some 35 years in the past; that might even have pre-dated the alleged police code.

Paula @ #437, that looks like it might be fun. Thanks!

Linkmeister 441: My pot-smoking days are also in the distant past. I learned this at the dotcom, where the phrase "age-appropriate beverages" did not mean "diet soda for you fat oldsters" but rather nonalcoholic drinks for the 40% of staff who were under 21.

Serge 442: If he's the one who worked on The Mote in God's Eye with Niven, you're right.

Before you read Fallen Angels, you should go to a few cons.

And at those cons, you'll go to panels where writers you haven't yet read talk so delightfully that you must go out and read their books. And other writers you have read will recommend books that sound so intriguing that you again go and search out those books.

You'll make new friends, and deepen existing relationships, and as they'll often not just be book lovers but book reviewers you'll happily add more to your to-be-read list. The connections you make might also bring you new clients*, and you continue to put time into satisfying work projects.

Perhaps you yourself- if you don't already write- will be inspired to write your own stories or novels, or to help other writers brainstorm, or to critique early drafts. Or you'll discover a love for costuming, or filk, or volunteering with cons themselves.

And after many years, rich years filled with great books and deep conversations, you might think to yourself "wasn't there some book I was thinking about long ago, had to do with fandom, should I try to remember what that was?" and the answer is no.

But first, go to a few cons.

-----------
* I noticed you're a data wonk via your website: I do that too, and I found one client through a con-related recommendation.

We have an Icelandic horse. The woman who bred him named him Kvelrudi.

We call him Rudy, but I was wondering how to properly pronounce his full name.

Can you help?

(As an aside, empirically I know why some convention planners avoid Hawai'i, particularly after those photos of Tom Ridge on a poolside vinyl chair appeared a few years ago, but it's a shame they do. I imagine that literary cons have smaller budgets than Homeland Security does; on the other hand, they don't have media chasing them around for "gotcha" photos.)

Icelandic Horses yay! best horse there is! (I'm well aware I'm not neutral on the issue) I had a horse of my own for four years while I still lived back home. I've gone on several multi-day horse treks as well, absolutely fantastic.

As for how to pronounce your horse's name. Are you sure you're spelling it correctly? Kvelrudi isn't a name I recognize at all.

I would assume the Icelandic spelling for it would be Kvelrúði or Kvelruddi since 'rudi' doesn't fit, i.e it's not combination of letters you'd find in Icelandic

Anyway ruddi means thug in Icelandic so I hope that's not an apt name for your horse. Kvel is also not really fitting as a part of a name. It's one of the inflections of a verb (first person nominative) which means to make suffer.

Kveld means evening though. Could the name be supposed to be Kveldúlfur? That's a proper name although not too common in horses (means evening wolf if you parse through it).

Úði means a mist or spray so that could work as a name meaning evening drizzle if it were Kveldúði.

Anyway assuming it's Kveldúði you've got an aspirated Kv at the start, so that's like the sound at start at quite but with a little extra gust of air through it. ð = a soft th and ú = oo so to spell it in a more english way the best approcimation would be Queldoothi. If it´s Kvelrúði it.d be Quelroothi with a rolled r.

In the Kvelrúði version the L is pretty much the 'normal' English one but in Kveldúði you get the unvoiced l sound that there was some discussion earlier in this thread about. It's basically made so that the tip of your tongue touches the top of your mouth just behind your teeth and you let air out through the side of your tongue. If you can pronounce Llangollen correctly you can do it.

Ok that turned out rather longer than intended.

The WashPost is running a four-part series on Dick Cheney and some of what they've found is really chilling. He pushed executive orders through without review from anybody; he devised how to state the torture legally so it wouldn't technically be illegal. He's not only the hand in the puppet, but he's a terrorist.

The news prompted me to look into his work in a little more depth than I had before, and I note that he edited the anthology that was my first "real" SF book, and which first prompted me to go looking up older classic stories. I had almost forgotten about that book, and those stories...

I dunno, I think that's a good name for a horse!

I've never attended a con and have read it. I certainly enjoyed it, but I do get the feeling at least some of it went over my head. A lot more of it has to do with the history of fandom, which I was at the time I read it nowhere near as familiar with as I am now, and I certainly now understand what a lot of it was talking about that I missed at the time.

But there is still stuff in there that I still don't understand. It isn't essential for enjoying the book, but if you're planning on attending a con in the near future, I'd suggest waiting until afterwards. Otherwise, enjoy it now. I liked it a lot.

"Originally, Pearson had asked for $65 million, but by the time the case went to trial two weeks ago, Pearson had lowered his demand to $54 million."

Well, of course he did. I mean, who could reasonably demand $65 million in such a case?

I’m tired of apologizing for having a terrific site that isn’t afraid to offend or make people think (often it’s one and the same).

Really, is there any surer marker of a boorish bore?

And to keep it on-topic, feel free to discuss pronunciation differences/similarities between "boor" and "bore" (and "Boer").

Cool! I remember that there was a minor character in Egil's Saga named Kveldulf, and that this meant something like "evening wolf." (The implication supposedly being that he was in fact a wolf part of the time.)

(Now that I think of it, this might have been Egil's grandfather...)

Before the "good enough" subthread vanishes completely, though I don't know if this has all been based on the song *I'm* thinking of, in light of the Lovecraft discussion the chorus could be:

Give me that Old Ones religion
Give me that Old Ones religion
Give me that Old Ones religion
It's good enough for me!

On another note, I say "y'all" and "howdy" but they're totally affected. English needs to find its way back to a separate plural pronoun of address, goddamnit, and I've staked my claim on the home grown variety. Better than "you guys." As for "howdy", I just kind of like it.

He's a swell horse; right now he's go no go-signal (he's only four, and freshly under saddle). Because of what we want him to do (working animal in a hippo-therapy clinic; a discipline of occupational therepy), this is fine.

Because kicking, hitting, clucking, rein shaking/snapping, etc. don't cause him to spook.

So he'll look to the ground crew when a client goes spastic.

He's a little thuggish, but 1: only a little, and 2: that probably wasn't apparent when he was named.

I forget what the naming conventions were, but I know that at least part of his full name has to with sire, and location of birth.

When he's fully trained, he's going to be a great trail horse, and I understand your bias. I don't know that I'd say, without reservation, that they are the best breed in the world, but I've never ridden one I didn't like.

Don't fret the length, it was really useful. I studied Russian, and French. The "l" sound you describe, is close to the "soft L" of Russian.

+++++

Post scriptum:

I found him on the registry. Kveldrodi from California

Well sort of, the only problem is it's not grammatically correct, you need to inflect the noun coming after the verb so it'd be kvelrudda but that doesn't really work either, having a proper noun not with its main case in the default one (i.e not affected by a verb)

Kvalarruddi or Kvalaruddi (I think not doubling up on the r's is ok for a proper noun) would work as "The Thug of Suffering" which isn't half bad really.

Peter 547

Yep that's the name, Kveldúlfur is in Egil's Saga.

I just did a quick search through the Icelandic census (yes it's available online and free to look through as part of online banking, of all things) and there are currently three men in Iceland named Kveldúlfur so it's still a name in use, although not common.

As for Lovecraft and The Color from Out of Space, I always associate it with a very pretty girl I knew in high-school, who had lent me her copy of the book.

Kveldroði means evening glow, i.e a sunset. Roði is related to rauður which means red.

I'd pronounce it something similar to Queldrothi with the o long and pronounced like in song or often and the th soft like in there. The stress goes on the Que and the l is like I described before but still pretty soft.

As for the horses I'm very biased because I grew up riding Icelandic horses and I'm completely addicted to the tölt.

To be fair though I've only twice ridden a non-Icelandic horse and everything was so alien to me I just couldn't cope and being treated like I was a liar for saying I was used to horses when I couldn't do the sit up stand up thing you do on the bigger horses when they trot, even though I'd said before that the way I was used to riding was completely different, wasn't fun either.

I really wanted to put those kids with a herd of 20 horses on top of a mountain with a 4 hour ride back to the farm and see how they'd cope then, hmpf.

I learned to ride on trotting horses (and Icelandic's trot). I've been spoiled the last eight years, as we've had five different breeds of "gaited" horses (Missouri Foxtrotter, Tennessee Walker, Spotted Saddle Horse (related to Walker) Paso Fino Mule, and a Paso Fino; not to mention Rudi.

Now that I know, better, how to pronouce his name, I'll tell Maia, but I bet he remains Rudi, not Rothi.

Thanks.

When I get home I'll link to a picture, or two, of him.

Re: Fallen Angels, I read it when I was about eleven, and even then I hated it because a) I could tell it was neo-con tripe and b) I could also tell it was full of snoozy self-satisfied in-jokes I didn't get. I had, and continue to have, no patience for such nonsense.

Mind you, the amount elided depends on the person I'm talking with. To someone from Manitoba, I'd say Terawnta. To an American -- or to anybody who asked for clarification, having not parsed my sloppy pronunciation -- I'd say, carefully, "Toronto".

#410: I'm not an Ottawa native, but I visited my brother there last week, and got great pleasure from visiting the Treasures from China exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization across the river in what used to be called Hull, but is now Gatineau.

"You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn."

and:

"'You would not object to taking an oath, however,' he said, smiling...."

Of course, if anyone does feel compelled to Do Something, I hope you'll post a link.

Like Mr. Burns, I'm not necessarily enamored of science fiction (except for the works of Connie Willis) -- unlike Mr. Burns I recognize that to be a personal preference that says nothing about the talents/abilities/general goodness of those who write or those who enjoy said fiction, and hanging around here I feel really sheepish about even admitting it -- and I have never really liked any SF television, except for Red Dwarf. I sat through many episodes of Doctor Who when I was younger as a social thing (my husband and most of my friends are fans); the only Doctor I liked was the Fifth, mainly because Peter Davidson is IMO really cute.

But I love Derek Jacobi. (His portrayal of Alan Turing in Breaking the Code I found to be tremendously moving.) And I will even watch Doctor Who if he's in it.

Another Buffaloism that just popped into my head (besides the fact that we also say "pop"): "creek" is pronounced "crick," especially when it's the Cazenovia crick. Or maybe that's just a South Buffaloism...

'Crick' for 'creek' is common in the Mid-Atlantic states. Not sure what the exact distribution is. That's how I was raised to say it in PA. Somehow, it never quite took, and when I moved west, I just dropped it and called them 'creeks'.

Me, I have a plastic ear. I don't know if this the result of my various points of habitation (born in Pittsburgh, lived in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, suburbs of Cleveland, South Side Chicago, upstate Indiana (on the UP border), E. Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, Mojave desert, and a summer in Phoenix.

That takes me to age 17. I also studied French, and then Russian.

Add an ecclectic reading habit (from as soon as I could read), and hanging out with people from lots of places/ages/educations/backgrounds, and one gets a very flexible pronunciation, and a decent ear for detail in dialect.

Which is good, and bad. I get frustrated when subtitles get put on things which I can plainly understand (someone from India, or the Deep South of the US), as though it were a foreign language.

Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives Computer Geeks protect us from the Elder Gods.

P.H. Cannon's Scream for Jeeves Jeeves and Wooster and the Elder Gods.

Nick Mamatas' Move Under Ground Jack Kerouac and the Elder Gods.

There are many other Lovecraft pastiches, but these three are my favorites. PNH recommened Move Under Ground a few months ago, and he was correct, it is good.

Zoinks, I almost forgot. Shadows over Baker Street An anthology where Holmes and Watson investigate the Elder Gods.

Speaking of that: I was almost 10 when we moved from San Diego to Buffalo, and afterwards the kids in my class were constantly asking me to say words like "cold" and "gold." Apparently I dropped the "l" in some way (though I don't think we pronounce it very strongly here in any case), but I never heard what they did. Eventually they stopped asking, so I presume I adjusted.

Say I ask you to hand me a couple of those olive rolls over there. How many am I asking for? And what regional dialect do you speak?

I've never been interested in reading Lovecraft. I understand the jokes, I recognize the squidgod, and as long as I know a pastiche when I see it, I'm good.

Relating to crick/creek. Depending on where I am, I'll use one, or the other. Local affect will color it.

So far as I'm concerned they are the same.

When I cashed people's checks at the bank when I used to work there, if they asked for, say, "a couple fives," I might give them anywhere between two and four, depending on the amount.

A couple is more than one but less than a few. Idiotic, I know, but there it is. I've gotten into arguments about it both with people from my area and with my parents, who are from elsewhere, so I don't think it's regional at all. Just wacky ol' me.

Has anyone else ever had to sing the Xian version of "That Old-Time Religion"? My chorus was once hired to do that, for an episode of Spenser: For Hire

Jo@380: Thank you -- if I \had/ a favorite saint, Anthony would probably be it; not only does he have his own waterfall (in Mpls), his sermon to the fish inspired one of the most wonderfully creepy scherzi I've ever heard (in Mahler's Symphony #2).

JC@397: beef on weck isn't much of a local secret any more; I think I had heard of it (possibly from a Clevelander?) even before a Boston specialty-sandwich shop opened.

Linkmeister@420: as I recall, the in-jokes were amusing but obscure, while the science and politics were appalling. I finished it, but there are very few things I haven't finished.
Bruce@429: based on later work and local interaction, Flynn could also be responsible for the polemics.
But they weren't particularly making \fun/ of cons -- not even friendly fun (as opposed to the viciousness of Sharyn McCrumb).

How about 'several'? What range of numbers is appropriate for that? I remember discussing this with some (mostly British) friends awhile ago and getting a much wider range of responses than I expected, and I'm curious whether this holds true generally.

Heh. There might be some disagreement on exactly how Buffalo any wings outside of Buffalo really are.

The rule I've always known is that if the place selling the wings feels the need to call them "Buffalo", they aren't. If breading or flour is used, an exorcism is called for.

Wings are "mild," "medium," "hot," or various euphemisms for "extra hot.

How common is it to have regional food as localized as it is around here? Thinks like beef on a weck in Buffalo, white hots in Rochester, salt potatoes in Syracuse, spiedies in Binghamton, etc.

Agreed. And even within Buffalo, I have my preferences. My brother worked for Pasquale's Pizzeria in West Seneca for some time while in high school, and they not only did a consistently perfect job with their wings, he learned the secrets! Of course, he hasn't told them to me...

On the couple vs. few issue: my partner considers "couple" to mean 2 or 3. I think he's quite wrong; for me, couple is precisely 2. He's from Vermont, if that helps with the data sampling.

*The Texas version, I mean. I have no idea what they're like in Bohemia.

Xopher, you just kicked my baby hypothesis -- I was so sure Chicago was going to come down in favor of variable "couple." Then again, Ethan might be right about it coming from a non-regional vector.

Anyway, I got bitten by this one several moons ago when I started cashiering at the bakery -- I use variable "couple" (it's in the same family as "few" [3-4] and "several" [4-9], a fuzzy quantifier that is somewhat more exact than "lots" or "a bunch"), and ended up in something of a Who's On First exchange with a customer who didn't understand why I needed him to elaborate on just how many olive rolls he wanted.

The reason I was leaning toward a regionalism hypothesis is that, near as I can tell, the Twin Cities area is standardized on fixed "couple" -- every time I've caught a customer using variable "couple" and asked them about it, they turn out to be from Chicago, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, or the Pacific Northwest. On the third hand, it could be that some dialects lean more towards standardization of "couple," while others are more agnostic.

(And to blow that right back out of the water again, I caught Vlad Taltos using variable "couple" at the end of chapter 4 of Jhereg, and isn't Steven Brust from around here? ARGH.)

Ursula, #492: At my favorite wing place in Houston, the divisions are mild, medium, hot, extra-hot, and Mario hot. This being Texas, the medium is plenty hot enough for me; I don't think I'd have the nerve to try anything hotter. (One of the things I have to remember when I travel is to recalibrate my "hot" scale -- in most of the rest of the country, if it's not Indian or Thai, even the "hot" isn't going to be very.)

Re Fallen Angels -- I read it about 10 years ago and enjoyed it as a silly romp, didn't take any of the political wanking seriously, enjoyed the jokes I could catch (and knew enough to recognize that there were some from Old Phart Phandom that I was too young to get), and I basically think of it as professionally-written fanfic. ISTR that for a couple of years, various cons were putting up the chance to be in the book at charity auctions. I think it's one of those books that you either enjoy or loathe, no middle ground.

Here's in Chicago I'll cheerfully pass you two of nothing, because I've never heard of an olive roll. My husband will give you three, or just hand you the whole darn bowl of whatever an olive roll is, because he's a generous guy who has never learned the difference between a couple and a few, except, mercifully, as it pertains to dating. That's just him, though; it's not the region.

Mary, on the off-chance I ever date again, would you mind telling me what region is so very enlightened?

Fragano (#396): I concur that 'Trawna' has two syllables, and I don't have enough familiarity with Tirana to use less than three.

JC (#397) and CHip (#490): I had definitely heard of beef on weck, which is why I ordered it at the All Star Sandwich Bar in Cambridge, MA (the place, I suspect, that CHip was alluding to). It was fantastic. Sadly, however, their poutine wasn't. Poutine, that is, although it was pretty tasty.

On a new note, I am currently in Honolulu for a conference. I have a couple of questions for locals. One, why are there interstates in Hawai'i? I guess it has something to do with the technical specs and/or federal funding. And two, why are so many palm trees encircled with a metal band at about eight feet above the ground?

Also, Hawai'i is beautiful. And I discovered why there is a rainbow on the license plates yesterday, when I experienced a rainshower, sunshine, and a rainbow simultaneously and suddenly.

A few years before I was at Ft. Devens. I had the chance to drive to Maine an do some white water rafting on the Kennebec (before they undammed the river).

We stopped in Bangor, at a place which said it was mexican. I looked at the menu and vetoed it. Something about, "El Nachos Deluxo" which was more than I was willing to risk.

Skip ahead a few years. I'm again at Ft. Devens. Coffe wanted to eat at the mexican place in Ayre, Mass. I lobbied against it, but was overruled. Since she'd paid for the second hour of horseback riding I figured she'd earned a little leeway and didn't fight too hard against it.

Looking at the menu I was thinking of ordering the enchiladas. I did, however, have reservations about the word, "gravy," in the description.

I asked (thinking, and hoping, it was a shorthand for molé) about it, and was informed that it was, "brown gravy, like on pot-roast".

I ordered a tostada salad.

"Couple" = two. More than that is "a few", and a few more than that becomes "several." Around 7 or 8 is where it starts to edge into "several." This is the distinction I settled on when I first pondered this problem; I was 9 then, and it's served me well for 47 years.

And on the sandwich topic: oddly, Subway makes fairly decent hoagies, despite their refusal to call them that.

But what's an olive roll?

Like the initial theory behind all interstates, the goal was to connect military bases (although E. Honolulu has none; somebody did some fast talking there). Pearl Harbor to Kaneohe MCAS to Schofield Barracks.

During rush hours H-1 and H-2 can give the Santa Monica, Harbor, Ventura, and any other ones you name in LA a run for their money in gridlock.

The metal band around palm trees is a rat shield.

I just caught up to the latest. Squeee. Many, many things to love. Gur yvggyr qvt ng Ohfu jvgu gur "H.F. cerfvqrag bhgentrq ng Cevzr Zvavfgre Fnkba'f havyngreny npgvba." Naq gung njrfbzr yvar bs gur Znfgre'f gung unq hf ebyyvat: "Orfg bs nyy, ur qbrfa'g fgnl qrnq ybat, fb V'z tbaan trg gb xvyy uvz NTNVA!"

*happy sigh*

So is everyone just really fond of Derek Jacobi and John Simm, or am I reading the fannish conversation online right when I get the impression that, just by them being announced as cast for the season finale, a bunch of long-time fans knew what was coming?

(I suspected, but for other reasons. I am not very fluent in classic Who, however.)

Kevin, #358, subs are short for "submarine sandwiches" because people thought the shape was like a submarine.

JC, #397, there's a new chain restaurant here in NoVA called Glory Days Grill and their special is beef on weck.

Linkmeister, #420, I'm one of the rare people who like Fallen Angels.

Nick, #483, a "couple" is two and I grew up on Navy bases and will unconsciously mimic wherever I am.

Pick up "Live at Leeds."

Oh, oops. Wrong Who.

Furthermore, I was taught that the tense/lax distinction was an urban/rural distinction. Rural speakers in many regions use lax pronunciations, while urban speakers use tense ones.

Since I spent my childhood holidays in a rural area, talking about forest things, but only discussed civilisation matters at length in the city, I say "crick" and occasionally "rut" (though that is mostly gone to a Scottish "ruit", but "pen" and "roof".

And using such names in a season finale has implications about what role they have. The long-time fans can speculate about what major past enemy there might be, and how these actors could fit in. You don't put them inside Cyberman suits; you can infer an enemy with an essentially human face. And one of them might be a dupe, but two?

I suppose it could have been Davros, but that still throws away most of the famous face.

Incidentally, RTD claims in Radio Times that the "Mister Saxon" thing was an accident.

Curiously, a little Googling comes up with a claim that it's used by some older Tasmanians.

Nick @ 483:
A "couple" is two, or sometimes three, but I've never heard of "olive rolls." (I'm from LA, if that help.)

I'm a Brit, grew up in Saaaaaarf London of Yorkshire parents, moved around the UK and Europe as a child, back in London for Uni and the past few years. These days I sound vaguely RP with northern vowels (or so I'm told).

Mary, merry, and marry all sound different.

'A couple' is exactly two, 'a few' is 3-5, and 'several' is 5-10. After that you hit 'many'. Does this mean it's time for a discussion of the magical number 7(+/-2)?

Nicole #512: Have you seen Life on Mars? If not, RUN do not walk RUN to your nearest source of bits and see if you can get hold of it. This should explain the John-Simm-Love. Even if some of the old Whovians of my acquaintance thought his performance was to extroverted for The Master - not enough silent menace. Come to think of it, didn't Patrick and/or Teresa mention that they had a post about Life on Mars queued somewhere?

Talkin' 'bout my regeneration?

Oh, and please pass the olive rolls. I haven't heard the term before, but I love olives.

Speaking of the Doctor, I've been getting the new Doctor in a highly anachronistic way (how else, with a Time Lord?): programs from the second and third seasons jumbled together mostly out of order even within those seasons because I'm getting them from two different networks. This is the way I was originally introduced to the Doctor: the first shows I saw were from the last season of Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor. That was when Douglas Adams was working on it (as Script Supervisor, IIRC), and the scripts showed it. Then I got to see the a mix of the third Doctor and the fourth for a few years, with the latter in approximate season order, though not always in strict episode order.

Being as it were adrift along the Doctor's timeline is occasionally frustrating, but it also adds a bit of mystery and resonance to connected events and characters seen out of order. Sort of like the difference between watching "Momento" normally, or in reverse scene order.

* This seems to have changed over time. As a child, ISTR that "couple" meant 2 or 3; that may have changed in adult life because "couple" is a technical term in physics meaning 2 connected ("coupled") subsystems, and I've spent too much time with scientists and engineers even before being assimilated myself, not to have picked that up.

** several has the feel of not very many, but I couldn't usually give a quantity. It feels like a handwave rather than a number to me.

*** Clearly there'a a gap in here; I don't have a common word I use to refer to numbers between 4 and about 7. If you think about the cognitive mechanisms of counting, this sounds reasonable, but that may just be a rationalization on my part.

Does this mean it's time for a discussion of the magical number 7(+/-2)?

Surely. This forum has gotten me a lot more insight into ADD than I've been able to get from books, blind web-surfing, or talking to therapists who are almost as old as I am, because I'm hearing from a very diverse (and articulate!) group of people who have the disorder and have investigated it. So here's a question: would you agree or disagree that people with ADD or similar cognitive disorders on average use or have fewer short-term memory slots than people without? In other words, are we more likely to be on the -2 end of the spectrum most of the time, as opposed to the +2 end of that magical number range?

Introspection on cognitive states is a notoriously slippery and sharp-edged tool, easy to cut yourself with, but FWIW, when I'm particularly AD, it feels like short-term memory items get pushed out by new ones with fewer total slots than at other times, and I can almost feel them dissolving, "leaving not a wrack behind".

My dad's the best.

But seriously...from the Aspie side of the fence, what I get is plenty of slots but too much trivial information to fill them. Ceaseless, obsession-compelling visual detail. Sounds attracting my attention. Then my skin starts to, well, not itch, but become hyper-conscious of the feeling of clothing against it.

It snowballs - once I'm into overstimulation mode, I have to go somewhere still and quiet and scale it all back down to zero. Purge the stack.

My kids know that I get all hassled, then go hang some wet laundry on the drying rack. When we live in a house with an effective tumble dryer, it'll be clothes folding.

Guvf vf gur Znfgre sbe n arj zvyyraavhz. Ur qbrfa'g pnpxyr nalzber; vafgrnq ur zhtf. Lbh xabj jung? V yvxr vg.

N abgr ba gur anzr "Unebyq Fnkba": Onpx va gur qnlf jura Jvyyvnz Unegaryy jnf gur svefg Qbpgbe, gurer jnf n fgbel pnyyrq "Gur Gvzr Zrqqyre", nobhg bar bs gur Qbpgbe'f crbcyr (abg lrg pnyyrq Gvzr Ybeqf) jub, qvfthvfrq nf n zbax, jnf gelvat gb nygre gur bhgpbzr bs gur Onggyr bs Unfgvatf. Sbe dhvgr n juvyr, snaf fcrphyngrq gung guvf Zrqqyvat Zbax yngre orpnzr gur Znfgre. Ng guvf cbvag V qba'g guvax vg'f tbvat gb or fcryyrq bhg, ohg gur anzr Unebyq Fnkba vf pregnvayl n fubhgbhg gb guvf gurbel.