Now, now, the dang'rous storm is rolling
Which treach'rous kings, confederate, raise;
The dogs of war, let loose, are howling,
And, lo! our fields and cities blaze;
And shall we basely view the ruin,
While lawless force, with guilty stride,
Spreads desolation far and wide,
With crimes and blood his hands embruing?
To arms, ye brave, etc.

With luxury and pride surrounded,
The vile insatiate despots dare,
Their thirst of power and gold unbounded,
To mete and vend the light and air.
Like beasts of burden would they load us,
Like gods, would bid their slaves adore;
But man is man, and who is more?
Then shall they longer lash and goad us?
To arms, ye brave, etc.

O Liberty! can man resign thee,
Once having felt thy gen'rous flame?
Can dungeons, bolts, and bars confine thee,
Or whips thy noble spirit tame?
Too long the world has wept, bewailing
That falsehood's dagger tyrants wield;
But freedom is our sword and shield,
And all their arts are unavailing.
To arms, ye brave, etc.

-- Claude Joseph Rouget de l'Isle
Translated by Percy and Mary Shelley

For they marched up to Bastille Day
La guillotine claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn't all that money buys

(from Bastille Day by Rush)

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want our revolution -- NOW!"

Lee@955: My favorite, learned here, is Chino ("Christian in Name Only"). That's probably too obscure for mundane use; it's also prejudicial, but IMO the defining characteristic of all those groups is an un-Christ-ian intolerance.

Greg (from abi's substitute thread): Newsweek panned Phoenix, and the local reviewer was approving but not in raptures. A friend summarized it as leaving out (most of) one of the two plots; to me this was particularly grievous as they had time for a lot of cameos (instead of either making them real threads or dropping them) \and/ exaggerations or outright additions to what was in the book (which at ~350K words didn't need any additions, IMO).

When playing Monkey in the Middle with a mix of children and adults, the adults must behave like zombies. Slow, stiff-limbed, not too bright (vocalization optional)--this way the little folk have a chance at getting the ball (on the bounce, at least), and the adults get to be extravagantly silly.

It's called "Zombie in the Middle," of course.

It's a different version to the one linked to upthread, starting a few seconds earlier.

It's said that one reason for the effect of the scene is that a lot of the extras were refugees from Europe. But look at the dialogue--there's hardly any, and so much is carried by the expressions of the lead characters. As long as you realise there is a difference between French and German, you don't need to understand a word you hear. You have a group of people in one tyope of uniform singing a song, you see the faces of the rest of the people in the bar, both civilians and in different uniforms--why do you think there are people in French uniform still wearing their Kepi--and it all builds from there.

It's not a silent movie, but it has the portability of being wordless.

But, srsly, President Bush announces that, yes, someone in his administration leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative in order to punish her family, and tells us all just to get over it and move on and it passes with no comment whatsoever from y'all?

Some of the old fannish net-haunts have been killed off by politics. There's more apparent awareness of SF in uk.business.agriculture than there is in rec.arts.sf.fandom (If you've ever had to deal with DEFRA, you'll know what Speculative Fiction is).

If I (or other folks here) have a question about your comment, are you going to be back to answer it?

For example, if you were going to be back, I'd first want to ask you which threads you'd read to test your theory.

I don't know if anyone has posted a specific reaction to the administration's confession and its view that with Libby's "punishment" has handled matters. (The posting gets fast and furious some times and I don't always keep up.) However, I do know that chastising people for not reacting is not the best way to introduce a topic to an open thread. I guess it works, but it's liable to make people think less of you, whether you want them to or not (cf. #17).

As for the administration reaction, I'm unsurprised that it doesn't make any sense. Libby wasn't convicted for the leak. He was convicted for lying about the leak to the grand jury. So the matter is no where near settled. Say that there were a governmental process which regularly disclosed classified information as an unintentional side effect. Wouldn't you want an investigation to to find and repair the process? Now imagine if disclosing classified information was the intention. Isn't finding the leak's source even more important?

I'm also not surprised because it's exactly the same reaction Republicans, in general, had to the 2000 election. It pretty much boiled down to "This may not have been the fairest election, but what's past is past. Let's just move on." (This is not to say that Republicans in general have this reaction to the White House leaking classified information. This is just to say that we've seen Bush reaction similarly in similar situations.)

So, Samantha, the answer to your question might be: Well, it'd be like reaction to the notion that, yes, the sky is chartreuse. But it's been chartreuse for the past 2442 days. At some point, it ceases to be unusual. One might also think that not only is the sky chartreuse, but it has always been chartreuse. It says so in all the science books.

As for my opinion on Bush and shenanigans, if the ending of Harry Turtledove's story suits FDR, then it certainly suits Bush.

Even among the admins, what gets posted is dependent on where the roving spotlight of transitory attention comes to rest for long enough to start a thread. Of late, that spotlight has been on matters outwith the site, and rarely on politics. They, too, have lives.

My suggestion would be that you take advantage of the openness of the thread to post something on the subject. Maybe you can start a discussion going. Then this aching gap will be filled.

Shorter me: the soapboxes here don't always come pre-populated.

-----
* that I am aware of. This is not to say that there isn't one, but Ockham is stropping his razor.

You forgot to say "You people..."

Your statement is not exactly accurate. The President said that he was aware that "perhaps" someone from his admisitration leaked the name of a CIA operative. He didn't admit knowledge or that is was a vindictive act. He just simply said that Treason against the United States of America is beneath his notice. We kind of already knew that.

So, yeah, thank you, Bastille day was happy. As far as I could see people did what you ought to do on such a day: strolling, shopping and invading restaurants, overall having a good time.

My favourite version of the Marseillaise must still be Serge Gainsbourg's, if not only because it keeps ironically closer to the original manuscript.

1) While watching a whole bunch of Sharpe episodes over the weekend, I noted that many of French the soldiers are wearing what appears to be a flour sack over their hats. Is this a cheap costuming thing* or is it somewhat accurate. Also, if it was accurate, why did they wear flour sacks on their hats?

2) In the Elizabethan era, the fashionable gentleman wore his cape jauntily draped over one shoulder and fastened under the armpit. Was there a reason for this too? I can see the peascod belly mimicing the shape of armor, but I'm not sure where the diagonal-armpit-cape comes from.

* Well, bad cheap costuming - "We've run out of budget for our French soldiers; here, throw these flour sacks over some extra top hats; no one will ever know!"

We might, fannishly, quibble about inaccuracies in your statement (as per CosmicDog) but I think most of us -- even the most grumpy, like me -- prefer to reserve our political ire for blogs & threads that are specific forums for that. (My own attention, at the moment, is directed mostly towards the recent bill, which passed the Senate with no dissenting vote, that accepts as fact the idea that Iran is guilty of acts of war against the U.S., and authorizes Mr. Bush to take certain steps, without furnishing much of a leash or toddler-harness to prevent him from taking the additional and probably-disastrous ones that he almost certainly plans on.)

I don't know that I necessarily agree with that, but it's certainly a justifiable statement. The animation is amazing, and the story-line is fantastic.

Complaints: It occasionally felt as though the story were a bit rushed, and I personally felt that the could have done more with the whole synaesthesia aspect of things.

I don't know that I necessarily agree with that, but it's certainly a justifiable statement. The animation is amazing, and the story-line is fantastic.

Complaints: It occasionally felt as though the story were a bit rushed, and I personally felt that they could have done more with the whole synaesthesia aspect of things.

I agree with you re visual beauty. Before this the only animated films I'd seen that made me gasp with pleasure were Miyazaki's (some of the shots in "My Neighbor Totoro" brought tears to my eyes). It did feel a bit rushed, but part of that may have been the false "ending" about 2/3 of the way through.

How about yours?

Malthus @#28: Ratatouille was a hoot. I particularly liked the swarming effect. And the synesthaesia was neat--reminded me of Fantasia, a bit. However, I'm a little tired of the Pixar fish-out-of-water plotline, which is becoming like the kiddie version of the hero's journey. Having seen most of the others (I skipped Cars) I already knew what the beats would be in this one. And the little preview for the next one--about a Robot who "discovers what he's really meant for"--just reinforced that tired feeling. The dang robot even looks up at the sky and gets STARS IN HIS EYES in the tiny clip they showed. I'm going to bet that his fellow robots will try to hold him back, but his wacky non-robot friend will encourage him to follow his dream. Any takers?

I did enjoy the movie, though, and the short alien-abduction thing they played with it was really funny.

Please forgive my ignorance. I don't understand. Why would it be unpatriotic (or whatever) to sing the Marseillaise?

Thanks!

Covering shiny helmets makes a lot of sense, but then forces me to question why they went into battle with shiny helmets in the first place.

Same reason the Brits wore bright red coats?

The wands of smoke are rising
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal

The Kings have all departed
There servants are nowhere
We burned out their mansions
In the name of Robespierre

And still we wait
To see the day begin
Our time is wasting in the wind
Wondering why
Wondering why, it echoes
Through the lonely palace of Versailles

Inside the midnight councils
The lamps are burning low
On you sit and talk all through the night
But there's just no place to go

And Bonaparte is coming
With his army from the south
Marat your days are numbered
And we live hand to mouth

While we wait
To see the day begin
Our time is wasting in the wind
Wondering why
Wondering why, it echoes
Through the lonely palace of Versailles

The ghost of revolution
Still prowls the Paris streets
Down all the restless centuries
It wonders incomplete

It speaks inside the cheap red wine
Of cafe summer nights
Its red and amber voices
Call the cars at traffic lights

Why do you wait
To see the day begin
Your time is wasting in the wind
Wondering why
Wondering why, it echoes
Through the lonely palace of Versailles

Wondering why, it echoes
Through the lonely palace of Versailles

Al Stewart

Uniform regulations for armies usually come from the fertile imagination of rear-echelon chair-warmers, who have absolutely no idea what goes on in the field. For at least the first two or three years of the big buildup of American troops in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, the standard rank badges and name tags issued to army soldiers were bright yellow on green. There was another type, black on green, that was *optional* for combat areas, but often wasn't available at stateside bases. Of course, no soldier in anything close to a state of sanity would wear the yellow ones, which one of my drill instructors called "neon stripes, designed to advertise you to the Viet Cong". So as soon as they got to Vietname they changed all the yellow stuff on their uniforms to black.

Somewhat later sense finally penetrated to the windowless office in the Pentagon where uniform regulations are dreamed up, and everyone going to Vietnam was automatically issued the right rank badges and such. In the case of Napolean's troops, I'll bet the penetration took longer.

Thanks for that post. Sometimes I get to thinking that nobody else remembers Al Stewart. Nice to know I'm wrong about that.

I just finished Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract. I have access to a whole pile of other books by her through my school library. What should I read next?

I am not much enamoured of The Grand Sophy, but I know many Heyer fans are. I'll let someone else speak on that. Nor, sadly, do I tend to appreciate her non-Regency stuff.

Venetia and The Grand Sophy both have strong-minded, determined heroines who are willing to buck convention to get the man they want. However, they are very different characters; Venetia is more the type to work within the system, while Sophy proceeds along her chosen path with a sublime disregard for the opinions of lesser mortals. I've always felt that Sophy would be a very uncomfortable kind of friend to have in real life, although she's extremely entertaining to watch from a distance!

The Quiet Gentleman and The Unknown Ajax both feature the kind of male lead who is initially underestimated, but proves to have much more strength and substance than one might first imagine; watching them effectively confound all opposition is a lot of fun.

I second the recommendation for Devil's Cub, but in order to fully appreciate it, you really need to read These Old Shades first; the protagonist of the latter is the father of the male lead in the former.

Also, The Black Moth is clearly a precursor to These Old Shades; although the names of the dramatis personae changed between books, there's a very clear reference to the plotline of the former in the latter. Some characters from the same family line make an appearance in An Infamous Army, but that's one I don't recommend; if you really want to read a Regency romance set during the Napoleonic War, look for Prior Betrothal by Elsie Lee instead.

The Masqueraders and False Colours are almost-Shakespearean comedies of mistaken identity; the former has some political intrigue (from the Jacobin uprising) thrown in.

Cotillion is a classic illustration of "the nice guy finally gets the girl" -- even though she initially thinks she wants the handsome, dashing asshole instead.

The Nonesuch features a beautiful, tempestuous diva of an ingenue (think "the head cheerleader") who finally gets her well-deserved comeuppance; the real heroine of the story is her long-suffering governess, who ends up with the rich, handsome hero. If I had the talent, I would LOVE to adapt this story into a musical, for the sheer thrill of having the soprano and the tenor be the Bad Guys!

One Heyer that I don't recommend is The Reluctant Widow, because it pings one of my negative buttons. The heroine is flung headlong into a confusing, distasteful, and (eventually) dangerous situation, and yet all of her perfectly understandable qualms are treated as trivial female whining by the hero and his adoring coterie of relations and servants. This is a story which could easily be rewritten into a much darker form, featuring emotional abuse and horror, and I have real trouble seeing it as a light-hearted romance.

But I read These Old Shades after Devil's Cub, and didn't like it, nor need it to understand DC. I kind of like the father as a shadowy figure.

And if you like strong women and men who deserve a strong woman, add Black Sheep to the list.

But actually, I am reporting some mild weirdness on the site. The right hand column typeface is very large compared to the center and left hand columns, and the typeface of the comment thread to Jim's Trauma:Shock post is also quite large. The post itself is a normal size. Odd.

I havenb't noticed that with the type sizes myself. But I'm using WinXP.

Unknown Ajax, yes! Lady of Quality? Faro's Daughter? The Toll-Gate?

Wow. Thanks for the links.
Looks like exactly where I need to start.
I've got a lot of studying to do.

P J Evans @54: I am using WinXP myself, so it doesn't seem that could be the variable.

I am using Firefox/1.5.0.12, if that bit of info helps any.

What do you mean, my logic's deficient too ? @_@"

Hum... anyway...

For loads (you could say left leaning, but in my experience it's not always as clear cut as that) of people of my and the preceding generation the Marseillaise tends to feel like a pompous, needlesly militaristic chant with more than dubious xenophobic undertones (whether the feeling is justified or not is open to debate). Open singing of the Marseillaise out of official displays has long been the thing of the far right (the pseudo-controversy there was in France some years ago about the - clearly marked for the occasion as second generation immigrants - players of the French national soccer team not singing the Marseillaise along while it was being played was ridiculous: no one I know does, not even those in the military when they're off duty). I guess not singing was for us akin to sending this protest message: "this is not what we are", and was patriotic in the sense that none but us could actually do that.

[Cynical me wants to add this other way to read events: that's not something we'd do at the time. We were not used to doing it. We didn't.]

Hope I make sense.

The controversy about the actual text of the Marseillaise isn't new (see Jaurès's take on it, and he wasn't first), but I guess it was particulary prevalent in post 70's France, given its political climate. It would have been easy to find the hymn being ridiculed in mass media then (Gainsbourg was not alone in this). This has become rarer recently, though. There's been a gradual switch on the political scene in the 90's with a - for me disquieting - strong bipolarisation on republican symbols: some (among those our sometimes uncomfortably protofascist new President, which doesn't help) try to see their value renewed, while to others they've become reviled objects in, I think, an interesting reversal. The way I see it, that second faction is the republican equivalent of satanists, validating in displays of hatred the sacrality of what they claim to reject.
Fiercely interesting times ahead.

One of the quirks (reported often) of firing so many pieces at once, was a stillness which settled, no matter how the breeze was behaving when the shooting started.

Secondly, knowing where one's supporting troops was matters; so being able to look and see that, the 14th Fusilliers was moving forward could be the difference between staying in square, and moving forward.

And knowing which unit was which (at a detailed level, not just "French") also mattered. It's why commanders paid attention to the Order of Battle (because a company of skirmishers, even in ranks, was an easy-ish mark to a company of grenadiers).

The introduction of smokeless powder, and the adoption of open order, put paid to flashy uniforms on the battlefield. Being able to hit someone, reliably, at more than 400 yards; without huge amounts of training and equiment, well being seen became less useful.

Bruch Cohen (STM): Yeah, I like Al Stewart. Been to a couple of his shows, and (because I used to be active on the "Making Light" of Al Stewart fandom, I was the amazed recipient of his autograph on a birthday card.

That he signed it wasn't notable (he will sign his name to anything one offers him), but he appended a note (good luck). Since I was in Iraq at the time, it meant a little.

Greg London: What aspects of nutrition are you trying to find out about?

At one level, "On food and cooking" by Harold McGee, is great (there are specific appendices on nutrition, and how Americans deal with it) as well as really detailed writing on how food works.

Er, well, at the most basic level, something like: This stuff is good for you. that stuff is bad. (in what way it is good or bad might be informative.) These foods contain this good stuff. those foods contain that bad stuff. Look for this on a label, avoid if it says X, use if it says Y.

I have been completely oblivious to what I eat and nutrition in general for, well, for ever. I've been informed that won't work anymore.

The hypothetical book would be something analogous to "Impatient Perl", practical, do this, don't do that, some description of the underlying functionality as to why, but to the point, action oriented.

Knowing the way I make excuses, if it's too complicated, or if I have to read an encyclopedia of books before I can even go to the grocery store, then I'll weasel out of it. I get easily frustrated around certain things, and food is one of those things.

Thanks all for the military uniform insight too. I knew that 19th century uniforms were not so big on camoflauge, what with the red coats, shiny epaulets and braid and some hats with truly redonkulous plumage. I guess they had to draw the line somewhere and that line was at "reflective headgear". It sounds like they wore their little muslin hat-cozies when they were sneaking about trying not to be noticed, but removed them when facing the enemy on the field of battle.

Yay! Learned something new today!

You wan a book like the American Heart Association cookbook, or one on diet. ('Nutrition' tends to tell you more than you want about minerals and vitamins, and I gather you want more general information than that.)

This is where label reading is useful. Generally speaking, sugar, fat, and salt are bad in large numbers.

Ingredients get listed in order of content, so if sugar is in the first three or four, and you're avoiding sugar, don't eat it. Same goes for most other things: if it's at the top of the list, and it's on your no-no list, don't eat it. Flour (and wheat gluten): real problem, because one or the other is in almost everything.
Liguid oils are generally better than solid fats (palm and coconut oils are an exception). Monounsaturated fats are generally better than polyunsaturated.
Avoid high-fructose corn syrup if you can.

Muskets were really poor tech; noisy, smoky, slow, short-ranged and inaccurate. The Duke* actually asked the government to look into raising a unit of longbowmen for his army; but the skill base had atrophied. It takes years of training and physical conditioning to make an archer, who can fire twelve to fifteen killing shots a minute at 300 yards - British troops couldn't do that again until the introduction of the Lee-Enfield - but (the musket's only advantage) only weeks to make a musketeer.
Funny to think of red-coated archers fighting at Talavera or Assaye...

*You know. The Duke. There is only really one Duke.

Also, the obsolete word "camisade" meaning a surprise attack:

"What about the armed multitude, then? Easy does it; we shall know more o' them anon... oh, all right then, they're Spanish soldiers from Cartagena, wi' arquebuses primed, d'ye see, and naked blades, preparing a camisado [which is not a highly-seasoned Catalonian stew, but a night attack, so called because they wore their shirts over their armour]. Eddication, by th' powers!"

-- The Pyrates

On the other hand, as regards sneaking and hiding, I'll note that Sharpe's men seem to have the closest to camoflage as uniforms, but Sharpe normally gives away his advantage of suprise and range in an ambush by shouting "Rifles!" and charging into the middle of the enemy.

* I think it was Sharpe's Sword but I can't be sure. Since she was on the opposite side to most of her friends every bayonet was aiming for her - if you know what you're looking for, you can see this for about half a second.

The rules carefully specified how the figures were to be painted. One of the forces -- the Starguard marines -- had gunmetal helmets with a colored stripe indicating their "element" (like a platoon) with a box in that indicating their rank.

Somewhere along the line it became practice to just paint the whole helmet the bright color. It was just easier. My cousin suggested that troopers would try anything to avoid being assigned to elements with red or yellow colors, or to avoid having a promotion that led to having a gold officer's box painted on there.

That's one of the areas that causes my eyes to glaze over. So, based on that rule, the numbers on the second table over here explain why people say canola oil and olive oil are good for you?

I feel like I just wrote a "Hello World" in nutritional language and am waiting for it to tell me I have a syntax error somewhere. Maybe I need to readjust my expectations on how long this is going to take me to figure out...

One of the advantages to working in a hospital and socializing with the dieticians is I can call them up and ask for information. I described you as a computer geek that would deal ok with a RTFM approach, but it better be user friendly. They suggested the following:

American Dietitic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide

Nutrition for Life

Hot, new, explosive discoveries regarding nutrition seem to come up about every two months. And they contradict previously accepted dogma, as seen in last week's Telegraph article on full fat dairy products.

Knowing what is going into your body and how to keep yourself healthy is good, but it sure is confusing.

*whole kiwi fruit look wrong to an eight year old that was raised with livestock, but they sure do taste good
**except foods you're allergic to!

If I remember correctly, in the Sharpe movies, he was referred to as Nosey, when he was nowhere near. I wonder what else they called him.

Greg, this is probably the single best thing you can do to improve the overall healthiness of your diet. If you lack the time and/or enthusiasm to cook regularly, one-pot meals and Ziploc containers can be your best friends. We have a large freezer which normally contains lots and lots of individual-sized servings of things like chili, chicken soup, pasta with sauce, black bean soup, curry with rice, already-baked frozen potatoes, etc. It's terrifically convenient to just pull out one of those and heat it in the microwave; add a side serving of frozen veggies and a piece of fruit, and you have something quite like a TV dinner, only better for you and (often) more filling.

If you get into this sort of thing in a big way, or if taking a homemade lunch to work has become critical, you might want to look into Bento boxes -- a step up from "put everything in Ziplocs and shove it all in a paper bag". I have several friends who swear by a combination of make-ahead and bento boxes, so that putting a lunch together is a matter of two minutes' assembly in the morning.

High-fructose corn syrup (generally abbreviated as HFCS) is the biggest thing I'm trying to eliminate from my diet right now -- and it's hard. The manufacture of it is heavily government-subsidized, to the point where it's cheaper than sugar, and as a result it's in damn near every processed food there is. Soft drinks are Right Out for the most part, though I've found a few brands that don't use it. Virtually anything sweet, and a lot of things that aren't (soups, sauces, etc.) will have it. An awful lot of stuff marketed as "healthy" has it, too. I have issues about most artificial sweeteners, so I look specifically for things made with sugar, but if you need to cut back on sugar you may not have that luxury.

Thanks. I decided to order the "American Dietitic..." book. After reading the summary, and skimming through the two websites (one from you and one from Mary), I figure I need a hardcopy I can mark up and make notes on. I don't think I can read a website and remember all this. The book is 600+ pages, so hopefully I don't have a meltdown when it shows up on my doorstep.

PJ @ 61 (and Lee @ 70): Avoid high-fructose corn syrup if you can.

good lord, you've wiped out 90% of what I eat.

:(

It has brief descriptions of the various types of nutrients, what they do, and how to eat them; it also has some surprisingly lively prose, for example this excerpt from p. 70:

Consider an English gentleman, who, with his mad dog, walks out in the mid-day sun. He perspires heavily in the intense heat and loses water and salt, but proportionately more salt. The concentration of sodium in the fluids bathing the cells rises above the desirable level. Thirst ensues. The gentleman abuses his dog, curses the colonies and adjourns, hastily, for a cold lemonade. Later that evening, he feasts on salted groundnuts and anchovies, leading to a sudden rise in sodium absorption (sodium freely crosses the gut). Once again, there is more salt than desired in the fluid bathing the cells and he becomes thirsty. This time he abuses the servant, curses the colonies, thinks of England and downs a thirst-quenching beer. Thirst, real thirst, is a most distressful experience, aptly summarized by Coleridge's hallicinating Ancient Mariner: [Coleridge quotation omitted]

More than I can say.

"A Civil Contract" is definitely one of my favourites. It grew on me as I got older; I could better appreciate the dynamic of the pretty adolescent crush being a terrible personality match! I think the complexity of personalities is way beyond the usual "romance" while still having the style and interactions (and some of the stock characters) that make Heyer so much fun.

I don't think anyone here has mentioned another of my favourites, "The Spanish Bride". It is based on the real-life marriage of Harry and Juana Smith, and as I discovered when I put Harry Smith's autobiography on-line at the Celebration of Women Writers website, many of the most enjoyable incidents in the book are taken directly from Harry and Juana's own writing. One of the things I lover about Heyer is that she puts lots of period detail in, without making it annoying.

I should also mention that I've put up an on-line edition of "The Black Moth" at the Celebration. The original printing is in the public domain in the United States. I had lots of fun finding period illustrations that matched the descriptions of the characters in the book, and adding them to the on-line edition. It's definitely one of my favourite books on the site. (Another is Dorothy Sayers, "Whose Body?" as first published in the U.S., but that's a whole other line of posts...)

I... have no idea. I'll have to ask around for that one.

My partner has a button-making machine, and we will have dealer tables at NASFIC. If there is sufficient interest, we could bring along a bag of buttons to help Fluorospheroids identify each other. My design concept: the word "Fluorosphere" around the upper rim, with a light bulb beneath, and space at the bottom to write one's posting ID with a Sharpie marker, on bright-yellow paper (the better to represent light and catch the eye of fellow travelers).

It would help if we had some idea of how many to make. If you're going to NASFIC and would be interested in having a button, please comment below and/or drop me an e-mail at the mailto link from my name. Thanks!

Marion Nestle's What To Eat might also be something you'd want to check out. Structured around a trip down grocery store aisles, she details what can be found, what the words on the labels actually mean, how nutritionally useful the food is for you and some various potential hazards from foods.

Probably the best place to go to get support for your writing is Absolute Write - it's a very helpful community of writers, and many ML regulars are regulars there as well. That said, I'd be delighted to read your story and offer comments (speaking purely as an amateur, but one with some experience of loss, at least). Just email me with the best way to find it and we can take the conversation offline - I'm alchemist@canary3d.com.

Thank you for your suggestions (both here and over there). I really appreciate it.

Really, I'm not a difficult person to make happy. Of course, I now realize just how many cookbooks are AWOL, and I need to find them. Rascally little buggers.

Faith Hill before and after retouching

Couple of links to help cultivate a healthy cynicism: Michael Pollan in the NYT earlier this year says: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. and then goes on to explain why this works and why a lot of dieting advice is nonsense if not positively dangerous. And Steven Bratman on orthorexia, his term for the mental disturbance that can result from making a near religion out of following arcane rules for "healthy" eating.

Good luck, though. Educating yourself about what you eat is a really good idea, if daunting.

(Which is not to say it was wonderful, fully funded, and had enough inspectors even prior to Bush, but at least I didn't feel it was actually conspiring against me back then).

I love to bellow out the chorus of the Marseillaise -- both the words and the tune are transcendently inspiring -- but I suspect that the verses sound better if one doesn't understand French.

On another hand ... the Shelley translation, like the Bill of Particulars in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, seems to me to have special significance in the modern (American) political context. (*sigh*)

Yes, but I didn't think John Wayne was around during the Napoleonic wars...

:-)

@Don Fitch (#88): "MD∑"

Shhhhh... that's my secret ridiculously overpowered japanese cyborg self. Don't want that info to spread too much. At least not as long as I haven't done my software update and my spamdar hasn't be properly recalibrated.
How do you know, anyway ?

Oh, and songs almost always sound better when you don't understand them.
Well, at least I think so.
(French comic Antoine de Caunes had a sketch in which all he did was translate carefully selected english pop songs in french. Though he sometimes resorted to voluntarily poor translations, most of the time he didn't even have to. People were laughing. Which didn't prevent them from buying and enjoying the original records.)

Re song lyrics: one of the things I like about listening to Bollywood songs is that I don't understand the lyrics and therefore can't be annoyed by their banality and/or failure to rhyme and scan, as I so often am with English lyrics.

I will second the recommenations for _The Unknown Ajax_ and _Frederica_.

The last of the kilted soldiers shuffled into line on the top of the ridge behind Belle Alliance. Their austere chief swept a critical eye along their ranks before turning to his staff.

"Waa-al, I dunno what they'll do to the French, but darn it, they frighten me," drawled the British commander from his position atop Mont Saint-Jean. "And stop that darn chawin', Yer Majesty."

The Prince of Orange spat out his tobacco and looked guilty.

"Now, whar the heck are those Proosians?"

"I think I see them over there to the east, Your Grace," suggested the Earl of Uxbridge, pointing vaguely in the direction of Ligny with his telescope. The great general regarded him with disdain.

"Son, if you can see 'em, they ain't Proosians."

Thanks for that. I just got finished responding to my sister in law, who requested a picture of my new haircolor. I told her I wasn't sure I wanted to take pictures anymore; that while I've made peace with the wacky fat chick in the mirror (even bad dressing room ones! and I don't take my glasses off first anymore), I still somehow have problems with photgraphs. Of course I knew about airbrushing and all that - but I guess it just never sank in until looking at that little transformation.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about The Spanish Bride!

---
Greg, I'm supposed to be on a low-fat diet. (Mostly it is, just not as low as it maybe could be). Label-reading is a good habit to get into. As far as the nutritional labelling goes, the stuff at the top is important, the vitamins/minerals less so, unless you have weird needs (I tend to have a low banana level; it's actually a legitimate reason for eating fries, but I can't do that often).

"BLUE BLOBS"
(INSPISSATED
MUCUS)
PRESENT

It's so reassuring to know these things about my office.

I saw this anti-war slogan on the side of a building not far from BART's Oakland West station yesterday.

hm, better book mark it while I'm thinking of it...

It's a good thing I finished the bagel before I read that, or I'd have to clean both monitors ....

"BLUE BLOBS"
(INSPISSATED
MUCUS)
PRESENT
an evening of improv comedy and music on the theme of the Decameron
Tonight, 8.30 at the East Mudflat Community Center
Tickets $15 from wwww.inspissatedmucus.com

"BLUE BLOBS"
(INSPISSATED
MUCUS)
PRESENT
FOR
NORMAN DAVIS
WHO IS RETIRING TODAY
FROM ALL HIS COLLEAGUES AT MIDSTATE

GOOD LUCK NORMAN!

(ANGIE, PHIL, SUNIL: YOU STILL OWE ME $10 EACH FOR YOUR SHARE OF THE MUCUS! THANKS - K)

"BLUE BLOBS"
(INSPISSATED
MUCUS)
PRESENT

"WEIRD ORANGE GLOW" (TRANSPLANAR KORCHAKOV RADIATION SIGNATURE)
PRESENT

TENTACLES
PRESENT (EST. 6-8)

SQUAMOUS EXTERIOR
PRESENT IN PATCHES (10% OF SKIN AREA)

HORRIBLE SMELL
ABSENT THANK GOD

REEK OF WRONGNESS
PRESENT

Recommendation:
Maintain surveillance and await further developments. Two further surveillance teams authorized for short term use - review by 8/12. Incursion status maintain at HOLD-A. DDO/NE, DDOPS, RDO/MA informed.

Signed: Katherine J Levi
Acting Senior Agent
Arkham Field Office
FASU

CORRECTION PRE-SENT
GREEN BLOBS AND YELLOW PUDDLES TO FOLLOW

REGARDS
HEINZ-PETER LIEBESHANDWERK
I.G. SCHLEIMFARBEN
DORTMUND

I do wonder just how close the "before" picture is to the starting point for the cover shot.

(I tend to have a low banana level; it's actually a legitimate reason for eating fries, but I can't do that often).

Low potassium leading to possible muscle cramps. (Trust me, you don't want to go there, especially since they like to happen in the middle of the night.) Also Does Things to blood pressure. I now eat a banana every day; orange juice is also good.

MUMAKIL RAMPAGE & NAKED ON A FUTON
with Special Guest
TORPID CORGI

18+ SHOW - DOORS @ 8:00

For those of you who want to increase your potassium intake but don't like bananas, go here:

High Potassium Food Summary

No ingredients list: Good. This means it's something like fresh produce, grains, unprocessed meats, milk, eggs.

Short, comprehensible ingredients list: Pretty good. Your eyes don't glaze over from the length, and you don't need an organic chemistry book -- or a "nutrition" book -- to figure out what stuff is.

Long lists of multisyllabic ingredients that don't correspond to recognizable foods -- Bad. Now we're into the realm of heavily processed foods.

And don't sweat the details. Cut down on the animal products, increase the veggies, and you can hardly help but improve your diet.

The "don't eat something your great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food" advice (which may in fact be in that NYT article linked above) got a lot of bad press, from people complaining that *their* great-grandmother wouldn't recognize things like most fresh veggies or any form of spices, but in the spirit it was intended, of "try to avoid foods that were invented in a lab in favor of things that *someone* on the planet a hundred years ago would have recognized as food" there's a lot of truth to it. My own personal great-grandmother may never have seen an avocado in her life, but guacamole has a long history indeed, and plenty of people's grandmothers' grandmothers would not only recognize it but have a much better recipe than I do.

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

High Potassium Food Summary

Teresa, have you seen Ravelry yet? I got my invitation to the beta a little while ago and it's a curiously addictive little site.

I don't know what this phrase means either, but I'll be trying to work it into my conversation from now on.

Baked potatoes are high-potassium; so are fries. Broccoli. (I have a list. Unfortunately, some of the good-for-me stuff is also stuff that doesn't help the potassium count, like whole-wheat bread.)

Some studies have shown that the rise in Type II Diabetes in the US maps to the rise in use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in processed food.

You are actually better off if you eat real sugar in moderation.

One of the simplest strategies for eating healthy is to buy most of your food from the outside aisle of the grocery store (unprocessed foods) rather than the center aisles (processed foods).

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007203.html

Ja, wir haben kein Bananen
Unter den Bananenbaum,
Schreib' sein Antwort in die Spannen,
Auf der Seite gibt's kein Raum.
Hier Bananen sind betrunken
Wie von Foster anbesicht,
Bring die Freude, bring das Funken
Ach, Bananen sieht man nicht.

Yes, we do have no bananas
Under the banana trees.
Answer briefly if you can, as
Space is short. (Use margin, please.)
All bananas here are drunk
Just as Foster saw them done;
Bring the joy and bring the funk --
But bananas? We got none. (trans. by elise)

MD^2, #90: What was wrong with the original? Go read the annotated version (linked further down in the article), where they extrapolate the art director's commentary. Don't do this immediately after eating.

1. A pervy-looking garden fountain.
2. A kind of door knocker.
3. A traditional decorative element.
4. A band.
5. A film maker.
6. A threatening piece of jewelry.
7. A source of confusion to persons other than yourself.

2: For Cavalry, when scouting (it's most crucial role), being seen was bad, and relieving the glint of the most visible aspect (e.g. a hat/helmet, some eight feet off the ground) would be a good thing.

I think, vis-a-vis firing, that the Martini would allow a rate of fire (with trained troops, but the Long Service Armies had that, even the Victorian short service armies had that) could be gotten to 12 rds per minute. The Rifle Muskets (the famous minie ball, of the US Civil War) would allow a rate of fire up to about six rds per minute (for crack troops) because, unlike the muskets which preceded them, the bullet was smaller than the barrel, and so didn't require as much force to get the bullet seated. They also didn't foul as quickly.

Aimed fire? Not so much. Even now, with auto-loaders, getting one shot off, aimed, is figured to take 6 seconds (US Army standards).

That's at target up to 300 meters away, and assumed to be, at least, kneeling.

Since brilliant uniforms had gone the way of the dodo (saving the French, with the high command's belief that élan, was what won battles) after Sedan. The Brits were in khaki, the Germans in feldgrau and the Amis in a muddy green, that's probably accurate for the period from 1870 on (with the introduction of the Mauser, Krag, and Lee-Enfield).

The British were the best, at rapid fire, with it being desired that a soldier could fire (IIRC) 20 rds per minute, hitting the target with all shots.

That required a reloading of the magazine (which was 10 rds. the largest of the day, and in a detachable magazine; also innovative, though the standard practice was to load it with charger/stripper clips).

It should be noted, the idea was (and in practice, until well into WW1) was to fire at masssed troops, so the targets were fixed, which aids in keeping up an accurate, rapid rate of fire.

The smoothness of the action also made a big difference. It's much easier to cycle the SMLE, without dismounting ir from the shoulder, than it is with any other issue rifle I've used (the sniping rifles, such as the Remington Model 700 are a completely different beast. I can work the action on of those, out of the box, no modifications, with just my thumb and forefinger which means it's almost never needful to dismount it from the shoulder).

Re Wellington: There's a portrait of him three miles from my house (The Huntington Library, Museum and Gardens). His nose was, if the portrait is to be believed, not large, but very sharp, almost bladelike.

"You! You, with the purple blobs, go call 911. Come back and let me know when you've done it."

*The Fluorosphere vs. The Blob. After an unusual meteorite crashes into the Flatiron Building, only a ragtag international crew of sf fans, paramedics, knitters and nuclear physicists stand between New York and the alien creature that absorbs everything in its path!
High concept - "it's Tremors meets the Algonquin Hotel group!"

121: Gothic Dolphin Therapy:
"It's wonderful! When you swim with them and touch them, you can sense this overpowering suicidal gloom and self-obsession..."

Lila (#92), re song lyrics: did not dare to state things that bluntly. ^_^"

nerdycellist (#95):

/restrained mode off

No, no, no, no, no !

Oh, damn it, FUCK the imagery thugs. Don't let them strangle you. Don't let the noise they make mask their crime. I've had enough of people around me fucking their life away because they feel constrained in the ugly, narrow perspective imposed by people whose sole idea of beauty is looking at a sunrise through a photochromic window !

I know all this might sound ironic coming from someone who only allows to be taken on photo once every ten years, and then only for admistrative purposes, but seriously, I've had enough of that. I've had enough of people starving themselves for fear of looking plump. I've had enough of people not daring to grasp what's right in front of them because they wrongly feel undeserving. I've had enough of people not being beautiful because they can't believe they are.
Fuck that !

/restrained mode on

edit: was about to discard that, as I think it's infinitely less useful than actualy showing the photo manipulations. And somewhat pretentious. But, well, I guess it can't hurt to restate the obvious till it's engraved on people's mind.
Sorry anyway.

Lee (#120): You almost made me have a heart attack for a second there. Don't know why but upon reading you I thought I had misunderstood the fact that the commentary was a re-imagining.

On another, completely unrelated notice: finally received the first shino of my ceramic collection.

*does the snoopy dance*

you have killed me.

We've come under swift attack
there is no safety in the bay,
we can observe, both night and day,
these moping dolphins dressed in black.
We've taken quite a lot of flack
for saying what we had to say
but these are not of common clay
we've nothing here to hold them back.
A lot of us would use a bomb
to drive these creatures from the sea,
still we have got to recognise
they wear their garb with true aplomb
their sadness comes from being free
and they view us with weary eyes.

Why I don't buy 'reduced fat' peanut butter: they replace the fat with sweeteners. Same number of calories, and the fat is, in fact, not much less than the regular stuff. (I should use 'old fashioned' because it's lower in trans/hydrogenated fats, but having to use a jackhammer to get it out of the bottom of the jar is ... well, I don't like jackhammers that much.)

I'm not participating in the food discussion as I am at one of my low points for feeling happy about what I can and cannot eat; there are points where I just get tired of being diabetic, and would like to quit and go look for some other chronic condition which didn't have so much math involved.

I particularly liked the lists of state quarters ("Abraham Lincoln stepping through the irregular outline of a time portal into an unspecified point outside Chicago."), dinosaurs ("This creature's name means "egg stealer." It is so named because it does not steal eggs. When the first Oviraptor fossil was found, it was on top of some eggs, so the discoverers drew the obvious conclusion that it was stealing them. This is because it was discovered by the LAPD."), D&D monsters ("Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It's genetically adapted to graph paper, for God's sake!"), angels ("Your job may suck, but you have to admit nobody has yet asked you and your co-workers to form a vehicle."), and aspects of Santa ("big ol' Santa and his big ol' sleigh being hauled around by a bunch of shar-pei sized ungulates").

"GREEN SLIME"
(TOY AND
FOOD SUBSTITUTE)
PRESENT

"BLACK PUDDING"
(HELPFUL
CLEANUP CREW)
PRESENT

"GRAY OOZE"
(ACID
SECRETIONS)
PRESENT

"ADVENTURE PARTY"
(INCL FIGHTERS,
MAGIC-USER, CLERIC)
ABSENT

"Why would it be unpatriotic (or whatever) to sing the Marseillaise?"

Embarrassing, more than unpatriotic. A short and dirty explanation would be that it's a national pride to consider oneself, as French, above all this, but :

- it is (arguably) self defeating
- it is not true enough anyways
- most of the rest of Europe does it better

There are places, times and rituals for that kind of things (footbal games, that 14th of july weird military parade) ; school is definitely not one of these.

I think that explain MD²'s silence, and his answer.

After trying DPNs and double circular needles (what a sense of being in Nebraska too close to a suddenly loosed roll of baling wire), I have with delight fetched up with the Magic Loop for both individual socks (32") and two-at-once (47"). I am working up the courage to do a steeked vest or sweater with self-variegating yarn, inspired by the Yarn Harlot's current project. Or one of them.

Ha, went to the dictionary to add "steeked" and LeetKey asked if I wanted to ROT-13 it.

JESR: you are welcome. Please allow me to extend the hand of sympathy re diabetes. I don't have it (yet -- could happen) but I took care of a brittle diabetic for many years -- it sucks big time. One good thing I can say; it's a whole lot easier now to check your sugar (remember Clinistix?) and the drugs are better (Lantus, yes) and we have pumps and stuff. But it still sucks.

Gah. Should have refreshed that thread before posting.

At least you can compare and contrast now, Xopher :)

Coming soon, a SciFi original picture, Frankenstein vs Flipper...

What I had in mind when advising to avoid trans fat saturated food is all those products that have an anormaly high ratio of it.
I've seen some waffles you people wouldn't believe...

Personally, the only time I would even think of using peanut butter is to cook some mafé rice.

yabonn (#133): A short and dirty explanation would be that it's a national pride to consider oneself, as French, above all this [...].

I really like that explanation for the silence, not so much for the answer ( :? if by answer you meant my subsequent post). Not sure I understand the "most of the rest of Europe does it better" part, though.

Lizzy L: thank you, on both accounts. ^_^ Fell in love with shino as soon as I saw some. It's what got me into ceramics in the first place.

I can imagine. The waffle recipe I use (yeast-raised) calls for two eggs and oil. But it makes enough for four people at least. Great waffles, though. My parents usually decorated them with applesauce, or berry preserves.

Peanut butter: sandwiches that can be made at 5:30am for eating at 4pm, with no refrigeration available. Wher I work now, there's a fridge, but it's usually full. (At the moment, I'm sharing a cube with 4 dozen tamales, split between chicken and cheese. It's ... difficult (shut up, stomach).)

The answer was the one you gave to the american student, about the "principled no-Marseillaise".

About the other european countries : seen from there, we are already a tad high on the flag-o-meter. Sing Marseillaise a lot (in the ritualised occurrences : political reunions, strikes, etc), and that military parade, for example.

Catchy tune, though.

Q: Why is there no emo porn?
A: Emo boys would love to make porn, but they're too sad right now.

Q: Why is there no Goth porn?
A: There is: Dracula, The Hunger, The Lost Boys...

Like lorax @ 112 says: short (or no) ingredient list = good. Long list full of polysylabic chemical-sounding names = bad.

Veg and fruit = good.

Eat "bad" (high-fat, high-sugar etc.) things that you like by all means - but in small amounts.

I'll second the recommendation to read the "Unhappy Meals" (Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants) article recommended by Individ-ewe-al @ 86 as well. The ten numbered points at the end give the main recommendations.

I go for organic fruit & vegetables if I can - can't help thinking that consuming less agrichemicals is a good thing.

So you were issued whith a shako-cover to keep the weather off. It might be rather ugly oiled canvas, a bit more than a flour bag. Likewise your greatcoat: rather plain, and not at all brightly coloured, but it survived the weather.

Terry, the minimum requirement for British infantry in 1914 was 15 hits in a minute. The record is 38 hits, held by Sgt. Snoxall, shooting at a 12-inch target at 300 yards. Some contemporary accounts claim that 30 rounds was thought unremarkable for a good soldier.

The British Army apparently did a lot of dry-firing training, with gadgets intended to ensure that the soldier learnt to keep the gun aimed while he worked the bolt.

Meanwhile, on YouTube

...Pop Tarts on fire, in the toaster of Orion. I've heard Special-K crunch in the dark near the Bran Muffin Gate. All those breakfasts will be lost in time, like oatmeal down the drain....

As late as 1940, this was still of value. Rommel records that he and a staff group, dismounted from vehicles in northern France, came under disconcertingly accurate rifle fire from "tommies" who were at least a mile away at the time - too far for the shots to be heard. He only realised that he was being shot at when someone dropped dead. Probably troops trained to this standard were as effective armed with SMLE's as with assault rifles, and much more so at long ranges. But of course the lead time was far too long when raising a mass army.

I can't believe they did that. Wow, I know Allison's password. That might be useful if Global Dynamics were a real place.

John Walker pushes hard on exercise, but doesn't mention the most important fact: diet without exercise tends to make your metabolism slow down to live on what it's getting, where the whole point is to get your body to live beyond its means.

Greg: one thing that's been touched on a couple of times here but often gets hidden under elaborate prescriptions in books: eat \less/. Eat slowly and stop when comfortable (not "full"). (Even in a restaurant; aside from piece-order places (tapas/sushi/...) there is only one restaurant in this city that I don't take a doggie bag home from -- which also means I have pre-cooked good stuff on hand.) That and working my way from whole milk down to skim have kept my cholesterol under control and my weight ~15# under what it was when my doctor started grumbling about my post-college bulge (at age 28; I'm 54 now).

Any word on the dance stuff?

Damn, this living on a spherical planet stuff! It's so very much the opposite of instant gratification.

Yup. And when you wake at 3 a.m. with that agonizing and board-hard muscle between knee and ankle, it's really difficult to avoid thinking "Gee, and the heart is a muscle, too", which is not conducive to getting restful sleep even after the pain has gone.

Nathan's, on the other hand, was abguvat V erpbtavmrq. (It's possible that's some overly paranoid spoiler-protection.)

*Applause*

It takes real talent to make high tragedy out of breakfast.

Xopher, #148, the cable was out. I think I'm taping it now (rather than a different episode).

The French did it. The Germans did it. The Japanese had done it against the Russians, and made it work.

Since the "Mad Minute" involved aimed shots, I reckon that, man for man, you were getting more hits with SMLEs than with the Vickers guns. And the poor dumb bastards who think all they have to do is run fast enough so you don't have the chance to fire many shots before they can bayonet you; they're dead.

Yes, the Japanese proved that sort of attack could work. Against the Imperial Russian Army.

SCENE 129. SEA WORLD EXPERIMENTAL FACILITY. EXT. NIGHT. FLIPPER confronts FRANKENSTEIN in the ruins of the HIDDEN POOL. Rain falls all around them.

FLIPPER: (series of squeaks and buzzing noises)
SUBTITLE: You created me, Frankenstein. You taught me to jump through hoops in exchange for fish and to dance around on the surface of the water like some sort of demented clockwork bath toy. And then you rejected me. You, my father!
VICTOR: Back! I should never have brought you into this world. I intended you to be a creature of grace and beauty! Instead you are abhorrent to me - an unholy aberration!
And another thing. Where the hell did you get that copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther?
FLIPPER: (SUBTITLE) I found it on the beach.
VICTOR: It's waterproof, then?
FLIPPER: (SUBTITLE) Yep. It was just lying there.
VICTOR: How on earth do you turn the pages?
FLIPPER: (roaring) That is your work, Frankenstein! YOU GAVE ME THUMBS!

But the fact was that even with Martini-Henry single-shot rifles, trained regulars in lines - especially behind breastworks - produced beaten ground that no bayonet charge could cross, and that was in 1875 or so. Hell, Pickett's Charge got stopped mostly by musketry, though, true, there was artillery in support. In the Crimea - 1854 or so - the dear old Thin Red Streak shot a whole heap of Russians to pieces before the latter could close. And even before that, Du Picq was saying that the greater mass of fire was decisive, and that you couldn't "repress the flesh". Why anybody thought you could take steady entrenched infantry with the arme blanche, as a rule, I have no idea.

Yes, sure, there are wildly unlikely events in any war. Good infantry squares that got busted by knackered light cavalry, and were then sabred to hell and gone. Captain Bluntschli's remarks are absolutely true. But, as has been said, though the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, that, nevertheless, is the way to bet.

Julie L (#146): I knew someone would bite. And what a bite... ^_^

***

I once heard a remark among archers that there were very few wars in which some archery had not taken place - some bright spark in WWI brought his bow along, Special Forces in Vietnam even got the bow and arrow classified (actually, an explosive arrow), etc. Fred Easton (inventor of the compound bow) claimed once that more casualties in all of history have been from arrows than rifle bullets. He might be right, but it's special pleading given that it isn't "all gunpowder-propelled projectiles".

Crossbows at least were in the 1960s Green Beret manuals for sentry removal. A bow is 'silent'. And the mountain tribesmen (Montagnards) of the Central Highlands and Laos used bows.

The story of the bow falling out of use is interesting (see John Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys):

- a bow takes a lifetime of training and practice. A musketeer can be trained in a few weeks. The Tudors struggled via legislation to keep their militia bow-trained (with only mixed success).

- plate armour got good enough to stop arrows at long ranges. So it was more efficient/ economical to switch to arquebuses.

(in the case of naval combat, an arquebus can penetrate a plank, an arrow loses its kinetic energy penetrating a plank).

Then the troops abandoned plate armour, because they weren't fighting bows any more (and musketry had gotten good enough to defeat it). And arquebuses (heavy balls, lots of powder) were replaced by muskets with lighter balls, and less powder (no armour to penetrate)

So by the late 17th century, troops would have again been vulnerable to archery, were there any archers left (in Europe).

In North America, of course, the bow was a staple weapon of warfare until the rise of the smokeless breachloading carbine.

The fantasy thrillers of Glen Cook (especially The Dread Empire but also The Black Company) are quite good on the tactical deployment of archers.

Greg @101, sorry I didn't warn on the length of that article. I'm pleased to hear it's pitched at the sort of level you're looking for at the moment. (Now I'm slightly paranoid that I found it originally because of a sidelight or particle here, which would be rather embarrassing.)

Lorax @112, yes, the great-grandmother comment is from the article I linked. It makes a very poor soundbite out of context, but within the setting of the article and not taken too literally, it's sensible advice, as you explain.

MD² and others, I agree that the key thing is to avoid additives that shouldn't be there. If what you want is an icecream cone, then it's supposed to contain a high percentage of fat and a fair amount of sugar. That's healthy, (in moderation, like anything healthy). If what you want is a meat pie, it shouldn't contain sugar, or highly processed fats of dubious origin. Neither of them should contain stuff you can't identify without a serious background in organic chemistry.

A lot of "diet" and "low-fat" (or "low-carb", depending what's trendy right now) alternatives are worse for you than the natural products they replace. You end up ingesting things that the body doesn't easily recognize or process as food, many of which turn out to be poisons on long-term exposure. And even if not, they mess with your body's ability to determine when you've eaten enough of a particular foodstuff.

Dave(s): Part of what made the battle of Mons so devastating was that the British practised firing in pairs, with only one memeber of the team firing, while the other was reloading/getting ready.

So the fire, from every point, never slacked.

German reports were of encountering a batallion of machine guns.

But Mons was the death of the British Army, because the training time to replace them wasn't there.

It wasn't just the firing drill, but the sense of identity. Those were professionals. They saw their duty not so much to the country, but to the regiment, and they took insane risks to see the regiment's honour was saved.

It certainly didn't help that the Army didn't think civlilians could be trained to anything like the standard of fire, much less ésprit de corps; which was part of why the insistence on mass attacks, it was all they thought the citizen soldier could do.

As for Gettysburg, the US Civil War was strange, in that it's the only war, since the invention of gunpowder, in which the long arms of the troops killed more than the guns of the artillery.

It led to more skirmishing, and some open order combat (Grant's army, in the Battle of the Wilderness). The rifle musket was effective, in volley, at greater ranges than the cannon of the day. Even at closer ranges the rifle was still problematic (esp. to more open formations) because the rate of fire was so disparate, and at 600 yards a company could shoot a battery to pieces before the battery could do more than kill, at best, a couple of dozen troops.

At Cold Harbor there were several batteries which had the carriage and limbers of the guns knocked to splinters by rifles.

But the european powers wrote it off as a silly artefact of the ignorant Americans, not relevant to a real war; esp. because the new guns weren't vulnerable to rifle fire, so the tried and true ways were once again the way to go.

Faren #165: That spacesuit is beautiful. I can't wait to wear one.

Faren @ #165, that spacesuit is going to spin off multiple technologies of use in physical therapy. For example: compression garments for burn victims (they prevent scar hypertrophy).

-----
* Which is to say, a NT that uses one and only one word to map to each Greek word. To a material degree, anyway.

I still don't know how last week's episode ended (I posted a plea for help over in Abi's living room away from home, but nobody answered before here came back up).

So, can you, or anybody else, make up for some temporal discontinuity and let me know what happened in the last 6-7 minutes of the "Phoenix Rising" episode that the Tivo declined to record? (The last thing we saw was Allison visiting Nathan.)

Mucho thanks.

Any bets on whether Newman read Have Space Suit, Will Travel at an impressionable age?

Not disagreeing for an instant but inviting more comment along the lines of my interest.
#171 - thought the citizen soldier could do

As noted various places here and discussed in other threads command and control for many years involved visual supervision by high command.

High command including prince commanders took the field - for many years sometimes in armor that did provide protection at long visual range - and took to the battlefield - Waterloo was a bet the country battle under direct command in which the respective commanders could see and direct most of the action on the battlefield - granted that off the battlefield action, mostly joining up, could equally affect the battle.

In the fine old military tradition of being prepared to fight previous wars, it has been suggested that among the desiderata of WWI high command was to maintain direct contact from the high command to the individual soldier for purposes of this command and control. And so conceptually each solder advanced trailing a telegraph wire for constant contact all the way to supreme headquarters - only in this way could the hypothetical breakthrough be properly exploited when it came.

Interesting to look at the divide between the citizen soldier and the command in Europe then and ponder the relations between the citizenry and the high command in general.

#171 the US Civil War was strange

My favorite discussion of the shift in tactics forced by the rifled musket is Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (the thesis explains too much and so weakens the argument by moving beyond tactics to explain grand strategy but a good read filled with lots of references just the same) Offensive tactics, which had been used so successfully by Americans in the Mexican War, were much less effective in the 1860's because an improved weapon, the rifle, had vastly increased the strength of defenders.anon Amazon reviewer

Hence the Southern high command was prepared for their last war and so such things as Pickett's charge with the attendant losses - and again perhaps a willingness by the high command to bleed its own side.

Isn't that thing gorgeous? I'm a sucker for color and I'm trying very hard not to get inspired because I don't need another project right now...

"Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass"

joann 175: Gur arj qverpgbe jnf ubyqvat gur byq qverpgbe'f unaq, naq gur furevss fnj vg. Gura ur jrag naq gnyxrq gb gur bgure thl jub erzrzorerq gur bgure gvzryvar, ncbybtvmrq sbe npphfvat uvz, naq fnvq onfvpnyyl qnza guvf fhpxf. Naq gur bgure thl fnvq ur'q vairagrq n zber fcrpvsvp zrzbel-renfvat qrivpr, naq gung gurl fubhyq obgu sbetrg. Gur furevss jnfa'g fher ur jnagrq gb...fb gur bgure thl fnvq "V'yy znxr vg rnfl sbe lbh," naq oynfgrq gur furevss jvgu vg. Nsgre gur furevss yrnirf ur fznfurf gur zrzbel guvat va n entr naq fnlf "V'yy ARIRE sbetrg." Qver zhfvp. Raq bs rc.

For values of "10 Minutes" that probably don't include the water boiling, that is.

I can sympathize with exactly that sort of situation he is describing. I recall a school project I had to build an FM modulator and demodulator, from scratch, no IC's to do the work, and the thing was amazingly sensitive to noise, air temperature, proximity of humans, weather patterns, and the beating wings of a butterfly in the south pacific. It would work perfectly one day, and then complete crap the next day. When I was ready to check off with my professor, we sat down, I explained what I did, described the basic design, listed the some of the problems, and when the prof asked to demonstrate on the scope, I said, "well, first we'll have to get everyone to leave the lab". Everyone laughed. I said, "no, seriously".

I think that was my last analog class. I couldn't take it anymore. It's been all digital, all the time, ever since.

Something to be grateful for in the program from which I recently graduated: good, well-maintained equipment, and appropriate practice subjects (each other).

Thanks! It makes sense. Now here's a weird question: this is the first Eureka episode I've ever seen. Epiguides.com is no help, and as near as I can tell, the scfi.com site is only doing stuff for the current season. Is there anywhere I can go to get up to speed on certain important details, like who the hell is Henry anyway?

Looks like we have a shared problem vis-a-vis Edouard de Pomaine's French Cooking in Ten Minutes

Coming soon (maybe): sleek, sexy space suits!

So I pointed out on 16 May.

Apparently MIT has seen fit to issue a press release, so we're seeing some news coverage of the Biosuit. Note that they haven't built an entire suit, just an arm here or a leg there, and so the photos show a sort of mock-up of a suit.

It may also interest you to know that the institute that financed this research, along with some of Jordin Kare's propulsion work and other advanced spaceflight studies, will close its doors permanently next month. NASA needs the money for other stuff.

He's a scientist, like everybody in Eureka who's not the sherriff or the sherriff's daughter. I'm not sure that the town's dog isn't a scientist either.

JMO (YMMV):

Henry is the genius do-everything engineer, who used to work for NASA. He tinkers.

The sheriff is a former US Marshal who wandered in (with his teenaged daughter) and stayed - he's actually slow compared with the rest of the community.

The red-headed shrink is a Bad Guy for whom you should not feel sorry, since she's killed a few people already.

Stark is a sort-of-bad guy for whom you can feel sorry, but don't make a habit of it, since he gets into trouble quite well on his own.

Fargo gets into trouble very well, because he doesn't think before acting; he's a sucker for stuff because he likes feeling Important.

Thanks ever so. Why does the kid Kevin need occu[ational therapy? Or is this not a plot point?

Whatever zeitgeist we've got going on right now, (I think it's Harry Potter overflow), I'm not sure I like it.

Greg 192: The 4400 have weird powers because of where they were taken. The inhabitants of Eureka have come there because they have weird powers (mostly just being really, really smart).

If that's not enough of a mnemonic for you, try this: Eureka is smart and funny, while The 4400 is stupid and boring.

"Evil AI House"?

Does it suffer from poltergeist events?

Xopher @ #194: Hey, don't go knocking my 4400! I am frustrated as all get out with the pacing.

Stark is who Rodney McKay would have grown up to be if he was tall, dark, and handsome (or had started to shave before he got his first PhD).

Also, about independant experiments in aid of education: my last semester at WSU I attempted to run a simulation to test one parameter of an elaborate computer model which was supposed to map hunter-gatherer population change onto an optimal environment with a coherant settlement system. The project was chosen with the purpose of helping me understand the author's definition of the decision matrix around mating and reproduction. Problem was, using his assumptions about mortality rates and population size, I could not keep the model going long enough to test anything: his figures resulted in population extinction in five-ten years.

I can only assume this was a useful thing to prove, as I got an A- in the graduate seminar class.

However, I did like how April negotiated a clothing allowance. Very nice.

Our mystery cable has gone away again, so I missed Eureka this week. And John is mourning the absence of TCM from our screen.

Taggart, the weird pseudo-Aussie who's great with animals and has real trouble with people (which is why he's usually out in the woods).

The guy who runs the restaurant and can make pretty nearly anything you ask for.

The deputy sheriff who's an ex-Ranger and gives the sheriff a hard time about the really exotic weapons stored in the (very odd) gun safe.

(You know, Eureka looks like a fun place to live, if it doesn't kill you first. A lot of residents seem to be redshirts.)

And Jo, the Deputy Sheriff, is a complex and fascinating woman, to say the least (and the closest thing to Aeryn Sun currently available on TV).

Please excuse random and senseless acts of capitalization.

Ah. I was afraid that something truly abominable must have happened to the last guy. Maybe that would have been too obvious.

Thanks, everybody, for all the expo.

Not your average SF show. Characters with pasts, conflicts, motives, all kinds of potential futures.

There is, you will probably not be surprised to learn, Atlantis/Eureka crossover fanfic. Some of it's a lot of fun too, at least if you like slash.

Now that I've gotten round to actually reading the article, I'm way impressed. I noted that there was a link for readers to share their 10-minute meals. I'm not about to float my ideas all over a Newspaper Of Record, but I'm quite willing to expose them to the gentle light of the Fluorosphere.

Any takers?

To get the ball rolling, I'll offer:

* half a tin of sardines (I like mine with the hot sauce) over pasta, cheese on top. (Serves 1; my other half is too appalled, but the cat is intrigued.)

* nachos (more prep time, very little cooking time): spread restaurant-style flour tortilla chips with bean dip (I use Guiltless Gourmet spicy), place on cookie sheet, sprinkle with grated cheddar and/or jack, top with jalapeno slices. Broil until bubbly.

I particularly cherish Fargo's reaction to the news that McKay will be working at Global Dynamics.

Combine:
1 can tuna
soy sauce
sesame oil
wasabi

Pour over hot rice. Yum.

Clean the fridge quesadilla surprise is fun:
tortillas
cheeses
odd condiments/sides that need used: capers, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, etc.
Combine ingredients on the premise of "if it works on a salad or in another dish, try it on a quesadilla".

I've never tried pickles on a quesadilla, but after the raclette thread, I'm tempted. I'm not sure how tempted, but tempted naetheless.

I will happily steal any recipe someone posts here.

The first season is available via iTunes, and they have some info on each episode there, too. (But there isn't a season pass option for season 2 yet. And the second episode isn't up yet. Shoot.)

I know that Godwin's Law, roughly stated, says that in an online discussion, whoever is the first to bring in a Hitler/Nazi comparison has lost the argument, and that no further meaningful discussion can be had after this occurs.* Is there any equivalent shorthand description for the first person to use an Ayn Rand reference in support of their ill-thought-out position?

* With obvious exceptions for things like James Dobson saying that gays should be made to wear identifying labels. When someone is advocating a thing that only the Nazis have done in recent history, Godwin's Law does not apply to people pointing this out!

cause boy do those get an argument nowhere. & right & left seem to be equally fond of them.....

If you're really dedicated to the proposition, you can also throw some peanuts and salt into a food processor and grind your own -- but we've clearly left the realm of convenience food behind at that point.

And a little kim chi if I have it on hand.

I also love mango chutney on buttered toast, or English muffins.

In the first half of October, 2005, a number of digital camera and camcorder manufacturers issued service advisories involving a range of digital camera models (as well as some digital camcorders and PDAs that incorporate image sensors). In each case, the story was similar - CCD (image sensor) failures, particularly in conditions of high heat and humidity, led to cameras capturing images with either no picture at all, or with extreme distortion and severe purple or green color casts.

Further info here.

In my case the playback mode showed pictures from the memory card just fine, but when I moved to record mode the LCD monitor was black.

The good news is that if your camera is on the list the company will usually repair it for free, regardless of warranty status (although different companies may have slightly different policies).

I took mine in and was told it would have to be shipped to the Mainland for repair, but I'd have it back in 2-3 weeks free of charge.

Warning: the Jurisimprudence Wiki crashed Safari, so if you can move to another browser, it may be wise to do so before clicking that link.

Warning: the Jurisimprudence Wiki crashed Safari, so if you can move to another browser, it may be wise to do so before clicking that link.

The oil will have at least partially migrated upward into the peanut butter, making the stirring operation much simpler.

My mother used that trick. It works, for a while. Then you have to get out the jackhammer again.

I figure as long as I don't go overboard on regular pb or other high-fat stuff, I'm reasonably safe. I'm much more likely to get gallstones than fall over from clogged arteries - my mother, again.

Thanks for the link to the S'cubie thread; I'll have to dig into it to see if there's anything I missed

Thanks for the link to the S'cubie thread; I'll have to dig into it to see if there's anything I missed.

ROTFLLMAO

I couldn't stop laughing for almost 5 minutes. Good thing I wasn't drinking at the time.

This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting "to first order"

After reading this gem, I formulated a converse of Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced performance of ceremonial magic is indistinguishable from technology."

What are the effects?

a. People who think Rand was God feel obliged to jump on the bandwagon, while singing hosanahs?

b. People who think Rand was the Devil feel obliged to disagree, while saying something snarky about Rand calculated to cause group (a) to start flaming wildly?

c. People who read some of Rand's stuff, think she had some interesting ideas/points but wasn't God, maybe get some reference from the conversation and move it along?

d. People who never read anything by her scratch their heads, say "huh?", and skip to the next message?

(c) and (d) don't hurt anything, but (a) and (b) seem like they belong in a more generic category.
Maybe invocation of faith. I say something which requires members of a certain faith to feel obliged to speak up, and which polarizes a discussion along these lines. Useful conversation ends as people choose up sides, neutrals and sensible people flee, and flamage commences.

There are all kinds of examples of this, and it's based on community beliefs/assumptions. I've made reference to Rand's writing before, but as there's not a large community of her followers here, it doesn't seem to do much polarizing. (In other communities, it would have a different impact.) In some communities, fairly common comments about Christian fundamentalists here would be polarizing comments that would lead to a flamewar. And so on.

ISTM that intentional polarizing comments are made to kill a discussion, or to draw in help when losing the argument. And sometimes, they're made unintentionally, leading to a sort of brushfire.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2129738,00.html

I'm sure I remember reading about something similar done in the US? Not that I'm convinced the trick demonstrates what its author thinks it does. Or indeed anything.

A thought: perhaps they're doing it as an exercise in Godel-Escher-Bach-style self-reference. They submit the story to their editors, who are too ill-versed to recognise the blatant unoriginality of the idea, so they print the stupid thing. Our expressions of outrage here then neatly mirror the ones in the story and voila, the circle is closed. Anyone want to say "I was staggered" to start the ball rolling?

I was more than a little dissapointed by that film. I can't come up with any reason for the guy to bother going to the police and telling them, indirectly, that he is He Who Shall Not Be Named. If he's supposed to be hyper intelligent, I'd think he'd either disappear before hand, or go in and tell them nothing and dissappear after.

Plus, by the time the credits roll, I was thinking "Then what was the point of all that stuff before hand?"

But yeah, I think any story could end with the Usual Suspects ending mainly because there wasn't anything in the ending that was signalled by the rest of the movie. it was sort of deus ex machina, if you ask me.

As for Mister Potter, as someone who has seen every movie before reading the books, and who hasn't read all the books, I just want to get it over with. The movies, without reading the books first, are pretty flat, the "Phoenix" being the worst so far.

I've read the first two books so far. I've decided that I'm not going to bother reading the rest until I know Rowling doesn't jump the shark in the ending. She reminds me of another author (who shall remain nameless) who has a word smithing style that I love to read, but who can't seem to come up with a sensible/interesting/logical/non-shark-jumping ending in anything of theirs that I've read.

No, suppose not.

I've probably seen three episodes of 4400, and the last one ended with me thinking, "why was I watching this?"

I need to reprogram the DVR to grab Eureka instead of 4400. As soon as I get a DVR.

Russ (#236): the trick is so common here it's more than probably done at least once a year (or maybe it's just the same article being recycled again and again, wouldn't put that past some papers people, given what I know from my dealings with a few of them).
Someone should point to them that, practical and economical constrainsts aside, there still are many reasons why highly successful and/or meriting authors from the past might not get published today.
Just because they're good doesn't mean they're marketable. How many "great classics" wouldn't even be sold today, hadn't they been recognised by competent authorities as belonging to a pool of meriting works that need to be read/studied ?
Just because they were significant to the general public at the time they were published doesn't mean they still are.
Just because no comments were made by the editor doesn't mean the fraud wasn't identified.

But I guess it's more fun to flatter readers by propagating the idea that the art world is mainly composed of a bunch of overpaid cynical idiots that couldn't find great (make it "good", great is rare enough that we can spare them, can we ?) art if it kept coming back to punch them in the gut every morning.

Andy Wilton (#238): love that self-reference theory. Makes the world a much better and interesting place than mine.

Rand references seem to work differently. The corollary still seems to hold (at least in any forum with more than a smidgen of Rand devotees), but the base law doesn't-- at least in most forums I've seen, Rand doesn't seem to have the same tendency to eventually pop up as Hitler does.

Basically, I think there's a breadth-vs.-depth difference here; everyone knows and (almost everyone) loathes Hitler, and he's generally treated as an epitome of modern evil. Relatively few people care about Rand, but those that do tend to get passionate about her.

There's a class of subjects that work a bit like flypaper: to riff on the original Godwin's law, as mentions of a "flypaper" subject increase in a forum, the odds of it being dislodged (at least in an unmoderated, active forum) approach 0.

The first flypaper subject identified by Usenet admins was abortion (see the history of net.abortion et al.) Ayn Rand also probably falls into this category: once she *does* pop up, she can stick, either from Rand devotees and detractors in the forum battling it out, or (in sufficiently high-profile forums) from Rand devotees airdropping in to defend her and her doctrines.

And I think we can thank Godwin's Law itself (and its propagation) for preventing Hitler from being flypaper in online forums.

If I were an agent and saw that line, I'd think the person submitting it was quite unoriginal, and therefore not someone I'd want to represent. Same goes for all the times I hear Shakespeare getting quoted. Or any other classic work.

I'd be thinking "Write your own damn lines", not "Ah HA! He wants to see if I recognize a good novel, as if the original had never been published." Only problem is, the original WAS published, and that reduces any interest in any book that happens to be just like it.

An author's job is not only to write stuff that is "good", but also to write stuff that is "new".

Imagine an article about some guy who submitted a patent application for vacuum tubes, and when the patent office rightly rejects the patent, the article uses that to say that the patent office doesn't respect new inventors. That's basically the argument being presented here.

This reminds me of Milan Kundera's argument in Le Rideau about the importance of context to a work of art: he says that a work of Beethoven, if newly created today, would be "perceived as ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstruous"*. In other words, anyone who didn't recognise the Austen would be perfectly right to reject it anyway.

Dave Luckett @ 241: Bending over backwards to give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, he may have missed the obvious explanation simply because the slush reader's behaviour (ignoring a loony so as not to encourage that kind of thing) is the exact opposite of standard UK journalistic practice. I mean, if you ignore lunacy and it really does go away, what are you going to write about instead?

* "ressenti comme ridicule, faux, incongru, voire monstrueux" - that man's French is a continuing admonishment to me on my own clumsiness. Still, I can honestly say that I never thought I'd be able to read him in the original: of course, it helps that he changed languages sometime in the 90s. :)

Which to me says that Penguin need to rewrite their form rejection letter, or alternatively, the journalist missed the reader's irony.

I think the way to do the experiment properly is to set up two (or more) large modern english-speaking civilizations that have no direct connections, then try to sell bestsellers/classics/critically acclaimed work from one into the other*. Or has someone come up with that idea and turned into a story already?

* Has anyone read any books that seem to come from another universe? Other than Ayn Rand, obviously.

He says he bought the book at a local store, so that makes it OK. I'm surprised Rowling and company managed to keep it under wraps as long as they did. Information wants to be free, and all that.

If the bookstore (or a library) gets caught at it, the fines are five figures, I'm told.

Amazon just sent me email that my copy is being prepared for shipment.

I picture a chain of giganormous UPS cargo-blimps lined up in the sky over Amazon's secure storage facility* in Nevada, being loaded one by one with palettes of Harry Potter #7 under the watchful eye of bonded security guards.

* Which, now that the Potter series is over, will be turned over to Halliburton to use as an Undisclosed Location.

Last time some drug store sold copies early because the clerks weren't aware of the release date policy.

I'm just staying away from any website that might 'spoil' the book. The hardest decision I'll have when I get my copy is controlling my desire to sneak a peak at the ending.

Uh, figure skating, stick figure, action figure, figure of speech...

hm. I wonder what the fifth one is.

Go figure.

Claudia Black's, maybe?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44WCUKIK2Y

Yeah, Fred Roger's empathy and kind words could go a long way to explaining why I feel like repeatedly whacking Fox News commentators in the face with a greasy moped chain.

Really funny.

I wonder if that's a recursive call.

Serge: Claudia Black's, maybe?

I decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me.

Which I've been humming to myself a lot this week, especially Monday, when it was 85F and about a thousand percent relative humidity, I was trying to write, and there were four other people in the house all working on a different piece of my last nerve.

I am suffering from some literary whiplash at having read both HP6 and Glasshouse in the same 24-hour period. (Note to self: the next time you get the urge to read all the novel nominees, allow more than five weeks for the task.)

Only if I yell it at you more than once.

(1) Claudia Christian, drunk as a skunk and not nearly as entertaining as she thinks she is.

(2) Being nicknamed Romana in my office after someone actually picked up a Who reference.

(3) Realizing that this cool and very danceable bit of music is actually a hymn.

I don't think anybody would hold Claudia's figure against you.

I'm helping out with a bookstore's party tomorrow night, and working on a Tonks costume for the event. I'm probably about 10 years too old, and a little bit too curvaceous/upholstered to be Tonks, but she is a shapeshifter...

must... resist... naughty... pun... must... resist...

figure-and-ground.

Good. After upthread, I was afraid I'd have to avoid the Arts section today.

No, I knew about that one, and prefer it with the "Lord of the Dance" lyrics. This one is "In the Name of the Dance". Poor dance, it gets so overloaded with metaphor.

You don't have to speak, you can do it in the Dance
You don't have to hide, you are safe within the Dance
All of us are free in the heart of the Dance
So mote it be in the name of the Dance

Fragano @ #267: Illiteracy and obesity blamed on "C is for cookie"?

Linkmeister @ #265: GGK sucks me in every time. I adore the series because of reasons that might be considered spoilerish. If you haven't read Tigana, check it out next. Until I listed to an Agony Column interview with GGK, I never thought of Tigana as being an allegorical tale of genocide.
::slaps forehead and says 'duh'::

Oh, sorry, should have mentioned that part.

It does delve into some details, explaining the phrase "and the deathly hallows", and giving a slightly more specific body count than Rowling did (For Pete's sake, it's like the military reporting casualties, "light", "heavy", or something), but nothing I'd call a spoiler.

If you're trying to maintain total information lockdown, avoid the review.

Hey, I can count just fine. The only problem is whenever I count out loud, I have an uncontrollable to insert a vampiric laugh.

One.. Two.. Three.. Ha ha ha... Four... Five...

Well, it only just came out. I provided a link above if you want to hear an excerpt.

Bill & Fleur's wedding crashed by [REDACTED]

Aunt Petunia discovers latent magical powers, saves Harry's ass.

Dumbledore's shade orders Harry to study with Hogwarts' professor turned hermit, now living in a swamp in Cornwall.

Draco, reduced to taking evening classes at the Islington Community Magick College, takes on soccer hooligans and has the snot beat out of him.

Hermione strangles Black family house elf; frames Percy.

We meet Murray Cooper, an American wizard, whose familiar is a possum.

Last Horcrux is a cute bunny which Harry is forced to beat to death with a chamber pot.

And well she should although I am having difficulties visualizing how that'd work out. Claudia must be very flexible.

Anyway, once I finish this set, it's on to his later works, which get universally high praise over at Library Thing.

Well, move it to the front. Now. It will make a great after-wotsis to HP. (I actually found it as intense as Glasshouse, but MMV.)

Tigana is one of my top re-read books, and is right up there for desert-island action. (In fact, I once took it to a Large Bunch of Islands and Bridges where I didn't expect to find much fiction in English.)

That's what I get for reading BBS News, I suppose....

a great after whatsis?

I have to work at my bookstore Friday morning and then at our party that evening. I'm going to spend the interim at the theater watching Order of the Phoenix, just so I don't embarrass myself too much talking to customers. Never read them, you see.

Greg@250, Michiko Kakutani is a woman. Quite a polarizing figure, too, seeing as how powerful her opinions are.

I've always wanted one of the suits Robinson talks about in the Mars trilogy. Plus, green visors are the kewlest. Is that a specific sort of UV filter, or is it designed to fight off some sort of red-fatigue that might trouble Martian colonists?

And I agree that mention of Orwell's 1984 is a similar conversation ender. If you're going to make extreme comparisons, why not use 1937 Russia? Using Orwell just makes his book, really one of my favorites, a punchline. The upside, I guess, is that it does make people curious. Sold a copy to a vapid woman the other day who had to pull out a scrap of paper to remember what it was she had been recommended*. Even then, she asked for 1985. I hope she actually reads it.

*I don't have my stylebook handy. Any thoughts on whether I can use this construction?

Jura Uneel unf ivfvbaf bs Fvevhf orvat gbegherq ol Ibyqrzbeg ng gur zvavfgel bs zntvp, qbrf guvf bpphe va n havirefr jurer Rzcver Fgevxrf Onpx qbrf abg rkvfg?

V zrna, ernyyl, ubj uneq jbhyq vg unir orra gb znxr n pnyy gb fbzrbar bire ng gur Cubravk urnqdhnegref gb svaq bhg gung Fvevhf vf fvccvat zbpun naq zhapuvat n jrer-ovfphvg? Cevaprff Yrvn, V zrna, Urezvbar rira fnlf "Vg znl or na Rzcvevny genc". Juvpu fur nggrzcgrq gb qb va Rzcver Fgevxrf Onpx nf gur Fgbezgebbcref ner qenttvat ure njnl. ("Yhxr! Genc! ... Genc!") Ohg ng yrnfg gurl jrer ernyyl orvat gbegherq.

Vs gurl unq gur gvzr gb sneg nebhaq gnxvat gur rivy ynql va cvax gb gur Qnex Sberfg, trg ure unhyrq njnl ol pragnhef, svaq fbzr jvatrq ubefrf bs gur ncbpbylcfr, fnqqyr hc gur tnat, naq syl gb Ybaqba, juvpu ol genva gnxrf n pbhcyr ubhef, gura pbhyqa'g nalbar or obgurerq jvgu n sevpxra GRYRCUBAR!!!!

Be gur zntvpny rdhvinyrag?

TNE!

thanks

Uneel frevbhfyl qvfgehfgf gur Zvavfgel. Jub jbhyq ur pnyy?

Vg'f rfgnoyvfurq va rneyvre obbxf gung jvmneqf qba'g unir cubarf naq qba'g xabj ubj gb hfr cubarf - Ze. Jrnfyrl nggrzcgf gb pnyy gur Qhefyrl erfvqrapr jvgu irel onq erfhygf.

Urezvbar naq Uneel obgu xabj nobhg naq ner noyr gb hfr cubarf, ohg vs gur jvmneqvat pbzzhavgl va trareny qbrfa'g hfr gurz, gurer cebonoyl nera'g nal rvgure ng Ubtjnegf be ng gur Oynpx erfvqrapr/BC UD.

Gung vfa'g gbb fnl guvf vfa'g xvaq bs n cybg ubyr, ohg vg'f orra gbb ybat fvapr V ernq gur obbx gb xabj jurgure vg'f orggre nqqerffrq va grkg.

Brings to mind some interesting mashups:

Harry Potter and the Router Virus of Doom

Harry Potter and the Open Sourcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and the Redaction of Memory

Va gur abiry (V unira'g frra gur zbivr lrg) Uneel hfrf n zntvpny pbzzhavpngvba zrgubq (nf qvfphffrq, jvmneqf qba'g hfr gryrcubarf) gb ernpu BBGC urnqdhnegref; ur'f nafjrerq ol Xernpure, gur rivy ubhfr-rys (qba'g xabj vs gur punenpgre vf va gur zbivr be abg) jub yvrf naq fnlf ur unfa'g frra Fvevhf.

Gur Jvmneqvat jbeyq qbrfa'g unir cubarf.

Gur zrgubqf bs pbzzhavpngvba ninvynoyr gb Uneel naq uvf cnyf ner orvat zbavgberq ol Hzoevqtr naq cbffvoyl ol gur Qrngu Rngref nf jryy. Ba gbc bs gung Ibyql unf n qverpg yvar gb Uneel'f zvaq.

Uneel qvq unir nabgure zrgubq ninvynoyr gb uvz, ohg sbetrgf nobhg vg hagvy nsgre Fvevhf qvrf.

Fb sylvat gb Ybaqba jnf gur orfg gurl pbhyq qb.

I haven't seen the film yet, but it sounds like some vital info isn't being communicated to the viewer...

I've actually seen that claim made seriously, accompanied with cries of "Well, it's not good enough for us!"

No spam here, move along...

Understood. Just give Tigana priority as soon as the devoirs are out of the way, is all I ask.

Harry Potter and the Gibblet of Fire...

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Kidney Stone...

Possibly NSFW

Nalbar jvgu gur beqre bs gur cubravk gung pbhyq gryy uvz Fvevhf vf jngpuvat gryrivfvba naq abg orvat gbegherq ol ibyqrzbeg.

---
to everyone who's read the book:
---

Rira vs lbh qrpvqr gur orfg guvat gb qb vf tb gb ybaqba naq uryc fvevhf, vg fgvyy qbrfa'g znxr frafr gb tb fgenvtug gb gur zvavfgel jura ur pbhyq tb gb gur beqre bs gur cubravk naq trg ervasbeprzragf.

Gurl jnvgrq ybat rabhtu gb trg gur ynql va cvax pncgherq ol pragnhef, svaq rabhtu ubefrf bs gur ncbpnylcfr, trg rirelbar fnqqyrq hc, syl nyy gur jnl gb ybaqba, naq gra zvahgrf gb fgbc ng gur beqre bs cubravk, rfcrpvnyyl jura vgf cerggl boivbhf gb nalbar ernqvat gur fgbel gung guvf vf n genc, vf gbb ybat gb jnvg???

Zber naq zber vg vf gheavat vagb fgnaqneq ubeebe fgbel gebcrf. Fraqvat bar crefba gb vairfgvtngr gur abvfr va gur onfrzrag, nsgre frireny crbcyr unir ghearq hc qrnq, vf gur fbeg bs guvat V ybngur.

I love most of Guy Gavriel Kay's books, my favorite still being "Song for Arbonne", which is widely considered to be one of his weaker efforts. But it was the first book of his I "discovered", and first read it when I was a shy young singer at a ren faire. Make of that what you will. The only ones I couldn't get into were "Last Light of The Sun" (seemed like a Boy's Only tale - never finished it though) and Finoavar, which despite involving drama students and a cellist, never engaged me enough to get past the first few chapters. Maybe I'll try it again in a couple of years. To this day I remain grateful that I didn't attempt LOTR until I was nearly 30; I think I might have rejected it out of hand during high school and college.

(rot13 for your convenience.)

Gur jubyr guvat jvgu Qhzoyqber abg gnyxvat gb Uneel, sbe na ragver frzrfgre be zber, orpnhfr Qhzoyrqber jnf nsenvq Ibyqrzbeg jbhyq hfr Uneel gb trg gb Qhzoqber, vf whfg qhzo. Vg'f yvxr n qbpgbe qrpvqvat abg gb gerng na Oynpx Cynthr cngvrag orpnhfr ur'f pbagntvbhf. Abg gerngvat n ceboyrz bayl znxrf vg jbefr. Whfg yvxr abg gerngvat n uvtuyl pbagntvbhf crefba pbhyq xvyy n ybg bs crbcyr ba gru cynarg, unatvat Uneel bhg gb qel, yrggvat uvz oybj va gur jvaq, pbhyq yrg ibyqrzbeg xvyy n ybg bs crbcyr ba gur cynarg.

Vg'f lrg nabgure pbairavrag jnl gb rkcynva jul Uneel zhfg fnir gur jbeyq jvgubhg nal bhgfvqr uryc, ohg gung'f n jevgre'f gbby, abg arpprffnevyl onfrq va nal sbez bs pbzzba frafr.

Ng yrnfg va ybeq bs gur evatf, vg vf rfgnoyvfurq gung gur evat bs cbjre unf n uvfgbel bs gnxvat bire gur zvaq bs nalbar jub jrnef vg, gurersber sbe Tnaqnys gb nibvq gbhpuvat vg znxrf frafr. Rirelbar jnagf gur evat naq vf jvyyvat gb xvyy sbe vg, orsber gurl orpbzr vgf znfgre. Juvpu vf jul vg jnf fhpu n ovt qrny gung Sebqb jnf zbfgyl vzzhar gb gur evat, naq jul vg jnf fhpu n ovt qrny gung Snevzve jnf noyr gb fhccerff nal qrfver sbe gur evat ur znl unir unq.

ohg va "Cubravk", uneel vf cerfragrq nf gur evat bs cbjre, univat fbzr fbeg bs zragny pbaarpgvba gb ibyqrzbeg. Naq qhzoyrqber pna'g pubfr abg gb "jrne" Uneel. Ur rvgure vagrenpgf jvgu uvz be ur qbrfa'g. Va nal cnegvphyne vafgnapr jurer ibyqrzbeg pbhyq pbzr guebhtu uneel gb qb unez, vg jbhyq nyjnlf or orggre vs qhzoyrqber jnf gurer gb uryc uneel. Rira va gur ovt svanyr, gur ovt svtug va gur zvavfgel bs zntvp, jura ibyqrzbeg npghnyyl gevrf gb gnxr bire uneel naq cbffrff uvz, Uneel bayl fheivirf orpnhfr qhzoyrqber gnyxf gb uvz naq erzvaqf uvz gung ybir vf jung znxrf uvz fgebatre guna ibyqrzbeg.

And the first time I heard the "Lord of the Dance" lyrics it blew my mind, since that title equates Christ with Shiva, a comparison I've read in comparative lit texts but did not expect to encounter in a Missouri Synod (fundamentalist) Lutheran Church.

Don@16 and Dave@25, yes, I understand your points.

To everyone else who responded: I was surprised. I expressed surprise in an open thread, which I believed to be the appropriate place to do so. I did not chastise anyone, I wasn't chewing anyone out, and I wasn't rude. I really didn't deserve the dogpile.

Vg'f jnl bss jung'f va gur svany svtug fprar va gur obbx. Va gur obbx Qhzoyrqber vf svtugvat naq fcrnxvat gb Ibyql abg Uneel.

Vg'f Uneel'f ernpgvba gb jung Ibyqrzbeg fnlf gung fnirf uvz. V guvax lbh arrq gb ernq gur obbxf.

Bu, naq gur xrl gb jul ab fgbc ng gur Beqre'f UD vf gung Uneel unf n "ureb" pbzcyrk. Ur'f tbggra hfrq gb fnivat gur qnl naq yvxrf vg.

::Vg'f jnl bss jung'f va gur svany svtug fprar va gur obbx. Va gur obbx Qhzoyrqber vf svtugvat naq fcrnxvat gb Ibyql abg Uneel.

Lrnu, va gur zbivr, uneel ybbxf yvxr ur cnffrf bhg, naq ibyqrzbeg qvffnccrnef. N unmr fheebhaqf uneel, naq uneel'f rlrf punatr naq gura uneel fnlf fbzrguvat (V sbetrg jung), naq lbh trg gur vqrn gung ibyqrzbeg vf gelvta gb cbffrff uneel fbzrubj, naq uneel vf gelvta gb svtug uvz, ohg ybfvat. Qhzoyrqber xarryf orfvqr uneel naq fnlf fbzrguvat gb uneel yvxr "erzrzore, jung'f vzcbegnag vf ubj lbh ner qvssrerag, abg ubj lbh ner nyvxr", ng juvpu cbvag, uneel fnlf fbzrguvat nobhg ubj ur unf sevraqf naq crbcyr jub ybir uvz, naq ibyqrzbeg qbrfa'g, naq uneel fnlf ur srryf fbeel sbe ibyqrzbeg, naq ibyqrzbeg yrnirf uvz.

:Vg'f Uneel'f ernpgvba gb jung Ibyqrzbeg fnlf gung fnirf uvz. V guvax lbh arrq gb ernq gur obbxf.

V'yy jnvg gvyy V svaq bhg ubj onqyl qbar gur raqvat vf.

:Bu, naq gur xrl gb jul ab fgbc ng gur Beqre'f UD vf gung Uneel unf n "ureb" pbzcyrk. Ur'f tbggra hfrq gb fnivat gur qnl naq yvxrf vg.

N ureb pbzcyrk gung trgf fbzrbar xvyyrq vf hanpprcgnoyr, VZB. Gur zbivr gevrf vgf orfg gb cerfrag gur ceboyrz nf vs Uneel unf ab bgure bcgvba, ohg jnyxvat vagb ibyqrzbeg'f genc, vtabenagyl tenoovat n cuebcurpl fcurer jura lbh qba'g xabj jung vg jvyy qb, pbhyq unir whfg nf rnfvyl tvira ibyqrzbeg pbageby bs gur jbeyq. Gung uneel jnf noyr gb xrrc gur fcurer sebz ibyqrzbeg jnf n znggre bs yhpx gung bayl znxrf uvf ureb pbzcyrk npprcgnoyr jura hfvat uvaqfvtug. Unq ibyqrzbeg tbggra gur fucrer naq ibyqrzbeg gnxra bire gur jbeyq, uneel'f fghcvqvgl, ureb pbzcyrk, enfu guvaxvat, jbhyq unir orra gur ernfba gur jbeyq jnf cyhatrq vagb qnexarff.

The combination of
1. looking like a first time poster- I looked at the "view all by" which had only one post under that email and
2. the use of "y'all"-- which to me read as a variant of "you people"

made that post look like a drive-by, that is, like a form of trolling. I can understand it was an accident to use that email address, but if what looks like your first post has an accusatory tone, then reactions (even from people who might remember names well) will be changed accordingly.

If instead you'd asked "hey, it seems like no one has commented on this here?" you might have either/both started a good discussion or heard any of these:

1. It has been discussed in other blogs [with links].
2. Making Light had melted down over the weekend, so overall volume of comments and particles had dropped
3. One political thread on ML had overheated, and so was being let alone for a bit to cool off.

She's worse when she's sober, and has foolish/lousy taste in hangers on.

Gung'f whfg vg -- nyy gur fcurer vf, vf n cebcurpl. Vg'f abg n jrncba, vg jba'g tvir Ibyql gur jbeyq.

Gurer jnf arire nal arrq sbe Uneel gb tb gb gur Zvavfgel. Qhzoyrqber jvgarffrq gur bevtvany cebcurpl naq pbhyq unir gbyq Uneel nobhg vg ng nal gvzr.

Vs nalbar vf gb oynzr sbe Fvevhf' qrzvfr, vg'f Qhzoyrqber, abg Uneel. Naq va gur obbx, Qhzoyrqber gnxrf shyy erfcbafvovyvgl sbe guvf zvfgnxr.

Uneel vf va znal jnlf na vzchyfvir wrex. Be, zber punevgnoyl, n genhzngvmrq becuna jub qbrfa'g gehfg nhgubevgl naq erthyneyl gnxrf ba zber guna ur pna purj. Guvf unccraf va rirel obbx.

The screenwriter did a better job of it than was done on "Goblet," which was kind of frantic.

::Uneel vf va znal jnlf na vzchyfvir wrex. Be, zber punevgnoyl, n genhzngvmrq becuna jub qbrfa'g gehfg nhgubevgl naq erthyneyl gnxrf ba zber guna ur pna purj. Guvf unccraf va rirel obbx.

Nu, V thrff gung, va gur raq, gurl ner puvyqera'f obbxf, naq V fvzcyl pnaabg znvagnva n flzcngurgvp ivrj bs Uneel jura ur qbrf fghcvq guvatf gung pbhyq trg n ybg bs crbcyr xvyyrq. Fgnaqneq gebcrf sbe puvyqera'f obbxf ner "Gur nqhygf whfg qba'g haqrefgnaq" naq "gur nqhygf ner vapbzcrgrag be rivy", jvgu gur pbzovarq bhgpbzr bs "jr xvqf jvyy unir gb fnir gur jbeyq bhefryirf".

V'ir ernq gur svefg gjb obbxf, naq V'yy or tbvat nybat whfg svar, naq gura V uvg n cbvag jurer guvf gebcr vf pyrneyl gur bayl cbffvoyr jnl gung gur fgbel znxrf nal frafr, naq V fhqqrayl svaq zlfrys guebja pbzcyrgryl bhg bs gur obbx.

V pna pbzcynva gung gurl qba'g znxr frafr sebz na nqhyg'f cbvag bs ivrj, ohg vg vf n puvyqera'f obbx, jvgu puvyqera'f snvel gnyr gebcrf, gur znva bar orvat gung gur puvyqera zhfg fnir gur jbeyq gurzfryirf orpnhfr nyy gur nqhygf ner gbb fghcvq naq pyhryrff gb qb vg.

Nu jryy, vs gung'f gur bayl jnl gb rkcynva gur cybgf, V qba'g guvax V'yy or noyr gb ernq gur erfg bs gur obbxf. Vg'f znqqravat gb jngpu uvz or na vzchyfvir wrex, trg gur jbeyq va gebhoyr, naq gura fnir vg guebhtu jung zbfgyl nzbhagf gb yhpx be qrhf rk znpuvan'f.

::Vs nalbar vf gb oynzr sbe Fvevhf' qrzvfr, vg'f Qhzoyrqber, abg Uneel. Naq va gur obbx, Qhzoyrqber gnxrf shyy erfcbafvovyvgl sbe guvf zvfgnxr.

Vs Uneel unq fcbxra jvgu nal nqhyg va gur Beqre bs gur Cubravk naq fnvq "Ybbx, V whfg unq n ivfvba gung Fvevhf Oynpx vf ng gur zvavfgel, orvat gbegherq ol ibyqrzbeg, gelvat gb trg fbzr fcurer", gur ragver abiry jbhyq unir pbyyncfrq.

Rirelbar va gur beqre bs gur curbavk jbhyq unir fnvq, "Gur cebcurpl qbrfa'g qb nalguvat, ohg vs lbh jnag gb xabj jung vg fnvq, vg jnf oynu oynu oynu. Bu, naq jr'yy fraq va Fvevhf naq gur beqre bs gur cubravk, jvgu n ohapu bs cbylwhvpr, fb gurl ybbx yvxr lbh (Uneel) naq lbhe tnat, naq frg n genc sbe ibyqrzbeg naq nal qrngu rngref gung fubj hc."

Jvgu gur zntvpny rdhvinyrag bs negvyyrel naq nve fhccbeg va gur arkg ebbz bire.

Naq vs jr pna'g xvyy ibyqrzbeg, jr pna ng yrnfg pncgher rirel fvatyr bar bs uvf qrngu rngref jub fubj hc.

(Nz V gur bayl bar jub unf n ceboyrz jvgu gur ahzoref va gur Uneel Cbggre jbeyq? uhtr fpberf bs Zntvpvnaf tenqhngr sebz Ubtjnegf nybar rirel lrne, jvgu fvzvyne fpubbyf nyy bire gur jbeyq, naq gur beqre bs gur cubravk unf bayl 5 pbzong zntrf va vg????????? Gurer fubhyq or sevpxra cyngbbaf bs pbzong zntrf ba fgnaqol gb svtug guvf fbeg bs penc. Naq juvyr zhttyrf unir fngryvgr enqvbf, gurer qbrfa'g frrz gb or n jnl gb unir vafgnag zntvpny pbzzhavpngvba. JGS?)

bs pbhefr, gung engure vagryyvtrag erfcbafr jbhyq unir pbzcyrgryl erzbirq Uneel sebz gur cybg yvar, naq ur jbhyqa'g unir orra va gru ovt svtug.

Vafgrnq, gur jubyr fgbel vf razrfurq va guvf abgvba gung gur nqhygf fubhyqa'g gnyx gb Uneel. Fvevhf gevrf gb gnyx jvgu Uneel naq crbcyr cebgrfg. Qhzoyrqber tbrf bhg bs uvf jnl gb nibvq uneel. Uneel nfxf jung'f tbvat ba, naq abar bs gur nqhygf jvyy gryy uvz, naq ur'f nyernql snprq, naq sbhtug, gur qnex ybeq ubj znal gvzrf abj?

Xrrcvat Uneel va gur qnex jnf gur bayl jnl sbe gur fgbel gb unir gur raqvat vg unq, ohg gura xrrcvat Uneel va gur qnex qbrfa'g znxr nal fbeg bs frafr, rkprcg sebz n "Vg'f n puvyqera'f obbx, jvgu puvyqera'f snvel gnyr gebcrf".

Uneel pna or n xvq tebjvat hc naq znxr puvyqvfu be vzzngher qrpvfvbaf, gung'f svar. Ohg, tnqqnza vg, gur nqhygf fubhyq npg yvxr nqhygf, abg yvxr ubj puvyqera ivrj nqhygf.

Bow before Voldemort! Bow before Voldemort NOOOOOOW!!!
Voldemort is a very demanding Voldemort.

(sigh; I miss those guys)

She was, so far as I could tell, sober on both of those. She was reasonable quiet when drunk; though she wasn't stinking drunk, just a bit past happy; so far as I could tell, on the occaisions I saw her less than sober.

1) Gur BBGC vf ABG na bssvpvny betnavmngvba. Vg vf znqr hc bs n fznyy pnqer bs ibyhagrref jub ner tbvat ntnvafg gur bssvpvny yvar gung Ibyqrzbeg unf abg erghearq. Zbfg bs gur zntrf ner rvgure va qravny be gelvat gb xrrc n ybj cebsvyr be fvzcyl nera'g gehfgrq rabhtu ol gur BGC gb or oebhtug vagb gur pbafcvenpl.

2) Gurer ner inevbhf jnlf bs vafgnag zntvpny pbzzhavpngvba. Uneel hfrf fbzr bs gurz va obgu gur zbivrf naq gur obbxf. Ubjrire, nyy bs gur jnlf ernqvyl ninvynoyr gb Uneel naq uvf cnyf ner haqre fheirvyynapr (be ng yrnfg cbgragvny fheirvyynapr) ol Hzoevqtr.

3) Gur nqhygf nebhaq Uneel bsgra graq gb or cebgrpgvir bs uvz va fbzr pbhagrecebqhpgvir jnlf. Vg unccraf.

My message@331 above is in response to Greg's message@326.

I just remembered that there is another Michael who also sometimes posts here. On the occasions when I do post here, I usually post as "Michael I" in order to distinguish my posts from those from the other Michael.

For some reason I forgot to do this for 331 and 332 above.

Yes! "Archer's Good" was the first of her books I read, and I just loved. Went out and found everything of her's I could get my hands on. Absolutely delightful, even if you're middle-aged and not reading it with your kids.

Frank Zappa had a Bosendorfer.

What's standard for an accordion? Harpsichords?

Note: comments to this subthread do not need to be ROT-13'd

Weirdly, that doesn't really look like rot13 to me.

I was loaned some to read in hospital, and still think of them as 'switch off your brain and go along for the fun of the ride'. And there have been a few serious themes touched on, maybe enough for a thoughtful child to go on further, as well as all that punning fun, which might lead into further study.

Michael I @ 333: I'm so glad that one of my namesakes doesn't post here. He spells his name "Earle" but it's frequently typoed to "Earl" by his myriad detractors, which has, in the past, lead to some unfortunate confusion; he's a lawyer for a cult, the name of which I will not mention here, because ML comments are indexed by Google these days, and I'd rather not get sued.

re t's Addendum: <g> I agree. Plus I found a new word that might be a useful insult — 'you inspissated clod!' — rather more useful than scirrous/scirrus (~hard & knotty), which was in the last pathological report I had to translate.

Huh. One of my friends just posted his own treatment of that concept.

Is this some weird psychological thing, about finding evil designs in childrens' characters? Remember how the Teletubbies were going to make all the kids gay, except for the ones who'd already been converted by Ernie and Bert? And Cookie Monster is going to make them fat, and violent cartoons are going to make them all axe murderers, and....

It's just odd....

It's interesting to ask why 1984, "Orwellian," etc, are conversation-killers in so many contexts. They are, I'm just not so clear on why.

It's also odd that bringing up Stalin or Mao (who both presided over even more murders that Hitler, though mainly by sticking around longer and ruling larger populations) doesn't have quite the same impact on a thread.

I have mine out, waiting for me to get around to re-reading them, especially with the "newer" books that have been released in the last 10 years.

My alternate take on the Teletubbies is that they were bioengineered by a secretive morlockian underground society (they're the ones who raise the speaker horns out of the ground to say "Time for Tubby bye-bye" and provide for the Teletubbies' every need; they also created the advanced technology of the Windmill) in order to placate Baby Sun, who is a hideously powerful madgod who would destroy the underground society in an instant if he found out they existed.

In Teletubbies they're friendly children living in an intact spaceship; in Barbarella they're evil children living in a wrecked one.

In Barbarella they're in the middle of an icy wasteland; in Teletubbies they're in a sunny meadow.

In Teletubbies they play happily with their toys; in Barbarella they have their toys attack and kill people.

Hell, even the rabbits get in on it: in Teletubbies they're normal cute little fluffy white bunnies, while in Barbarella they're diseased-looking black rabbits crawling around ookily.

The parallels are, at the very least, uncanny. I seriously think it must have been deliberate.

The Morlocks are gray felt clad, skinny, big-eyed Tubbies.

I also wonder whether the Chinese and the Soviets had that bureaucratic compulsion the Germans had to document everything they did, down to the amount of Zyklon B ordered in a given month. If not, the full truth may never be known.

As to the Russian twenty million dead in WWII, there is no doubt whatsoever. The war against Hitler was won in western Russia, Georgia and the Ukraine by the Red Army, which was in turn a reflection of the courage and endurance of the various Soviet peoples. By comparison, the suffering of all other peoples save the Jews of Europe and the Romany pales into insignificance.

Even today, the average Russian would express contempt at the efforts of the western allies during the "Great Patriotic War". The whole of Russian history and culture lies behind their extraordinary paranoia, but their suffering during that war only contributed to it anew. The pity of it is that the British, at least, did their utmost to help, and the Soviet government was itself one of the main architects of the Russian agony, while piling on agonies beyond reckoning entirely of its own making.

Is there anything else he could have done - save ordering outright surrender - to make German victory more likely?

There's a particular version of the Manifest Destiny of the White Folks that SF succumbed to in the first half of the 20th century especially, that has great resonance with the theme of this movie, something that I thought at the time Steve Stirling's Draka books were an expose of. However much we at ML, or even SF fans in general may find this view of the world repugnant, the American culture in general has rarely been willing to listen to critiques of it, and even more rarely been willing to allow the critiques to be made from within. The only mass-distribution US films I can think of that have been this open in showing the deepness and intensity of the racial tensions in American society are some of Spike Lee's movies: "Bamboozled" and "Jungle Fever" in particular.

"CSA" made me cringe in the same way that "Bamboozled" and the Draka stories did. They all made me see that a) a lot of the basic attitudes I absorbed from the culture around me, growing up when I did, are at best morally bankrupt, and b) just how horrible thay can appear to someone who is the target of them.

To my knowledge, the only doubt about the number of Soviet casualties of WWII or of their own fratricidal policiesi is just how much higher than 20 million the real number is. I have heard figures cited between 40 and 50 million, and I have no way to refute the arguments for them.

As you say, most of the reason for the relative ignorance of the Soviet genocides is the lack of records kept and the lack of access to the records in the West. I worked for several years with a survivor of the planned famine in Ukraine after WWII; I had heard about the Ukrainian pogroms against the Jews, but not about the Russian campaign against the Ukrainians.

ajay @ 357

If Stalin had truly been an agent of Hitler, (We've been reflectively and recursively Godwinized!), he would never have kept Vyacheslav Molotov on as his co-conspirator and foreign relations right hand. Molotov was unrelentingly xenophobic; he would never (did never, despite his treating with Von Ribbentrop) have made any deal with or submitted in any way to a foreign power except as it favored his long term goals of personal power and protection of Russia from outside forces.

As for military blunders, I think that's an occupational hazard of autocrats. Hitler was a large part in Germany's losing the war (the bombing of London and Coventry, delay and then cancellation in the invasion of Britain, failure to destroy the RAF when he had the chance, etc). Why should Stalin, who was at least as mentally disturbed as Hitler, and at least as naive in military matters, do any better?

I once heard a speech Mr. Rogers made to the National Press Club. Three things stuck with me:

1. WYSIWYG. Mr. Rogers spoke to adults in the same tone he used to speak to children, as you see in the clip.

2. He had a great sense of humor. The host asked him what two famous figures he could be considered a cross between, and he said, "I like to think of myself as a cross between Albert Schweitzer and Arsenio Hall."

3. It's easy to regard Mr. Rogers as a milquetoast who had no idea how harsh the real world was--if you forget what kind of work he did when he was off camera. He described to the press club a young client of his who had been unable to learn to read. They found that the problem was that the child could not focus on a page of print. Why? He was unwilling to look closely at anything after witnessing the murder of his mother by her boyfriend.

Maybe they might have got three or four divisions ashore, but they could never have resupplied them. Although the British were certainly threadbare, they could surely have dealt with that.

Hitler certainly did make enormous blunders, but the failure to invade Britain wasn't one. The two worst were invading Russia when he didn't have to, and declaring war on the US, also when he didn't have to.

Disclaimer: my spouse plays the concertina.

I will not turn myself into a snake. It never helps."

Wait, my big butt is Cookie Monster's fault? To whom should I complain? And does this make Bert and Ernie responsible for my heterosexual cohabitation with a roommate even in my advanced (post college-age) years? Perhaps my own housekeeping skills have been unduly influenced by Oscar. It all begins to make sense. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

A while ago, the folks at CTW decided to give Cookie Monster a new song - "A Cookie is a Sometimes Thing". For pete's sake, if you need to make a puppet tell kids about eating vegetables, develop an Asparagus Monster or something. Leave my blue fuzzy gluttonous buddy alone.

C is for carrot, that's way too crunchy
C is for califlower, that's not so yummy
C is for coleslaw, that's sour and yucky, oh
Cookie cookie cookie starts with C!

(Munchmunchmunchmunchmunch)

Whatever he did became, "Cookie, cookie, cookie," and so failed.

So obsession was shown to be counterproductive.

I think adults give kids far too little credit.

Still, that character was meant to mirror the behavior of a certain age of kid - I think 3 years old - so that younger children would undertand and empathize with him. And yes, as Terry mentioned, his thing for cookies was counterproductive, showing 3-year-olds how silly a cookie monomania can be. But done by example without lecturing, perhaps it was probably too subtle for some adults.

Could be wishful thinking on my part.

On the sending Jane Austen to Publishers thing, the Independent got a publisher to write an opinion piece explaining why he and other publishers are always missng good books. Covers most of the points made here, this time and previously.

From Wikipedia: Having solved all problems which required strength, intelligence or virtue, they have slowly become dissolute, frail animals. While one initially has the impression that the Eloi live a life of play and toil less abundance, it is revealed that [...] (full article, with spoilers, here).

I did try the search box, but since I can't remember any of the specifics, it's not getting me very far.

Mary Dell #380: Ah, but how do you explain their complex relationship with the Noo-Noo?

There's also a neo-Pagan version in which the Lord of the Dance is the Goddess's son. I'm not sure about its copyright status.

Yabbut...how could anyone possible mistake words like "In Bethlehem I had my birth" for anything but a religious reference? Even I caught that one. One has to seriously wonder about Michael Flatley.

"In the Name of the Dance" is rather more dancy and less hymnlike (and non-Christian). I haven't decided quite what I want to dance to it (slow cross-step foxtrot? hustle?) but it makes me feel dancy.

Today's lesson: read through the whole thread before posting. I see the Jane Austen rejected thing got mentioned many comments ago. In case anyone's still looking for the previous post, I did find it at January 2, 2006.

Sorry for the repeat.

When she danced on the water and the wind was her horn,
The Lady laughed and everything was born;
And when she lit the Sun and the light gave Him birth,
The Lord of the Dance first appeared on the Earth.

Sarah 385: I open a second window (in IE) or a second tab (in a civilized browser) to write my comments in. That way I comment the thread as I read it, but I can delete anything that's been covered later in the thread. When I get to the bottom, I hit Refresh, then post.

Noo-Noo isn't explained in his article.

*SF Author and Critic and (also) Professor of English

President Bush has ordered the CIA to comply with the Geneva Conventions' Article 3 ban on torture.

He seems to be all over the place with the Executive Orders these days. At least this is a good one (IMHO).

He was perfectly willing to admit a conscious influence on "Lord of the Dance" from a statue of Shiva he kept on his desktop...

I am seriously worried after reading Bear's post:

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1177809.html

There are similar posts on Daily Kos.

I don't think the $100 recommended for jump bags will be enough if they start seizing bank accounts. Drawing out more cash in the next few days or weeks might not be a bad idea for some of us.

Or my tinfoil hat is too tight, take your pick.

They'll be easy to find; look for the only people left gushing about how wonderful Dubya is.

Rneyl ba, Fvevhf tvirf Uneel n cnpxntr gb hfr vs Uneel arrqf uvz juvyr ng fpubby Uneel fjrnef ur'yy arire hfr vg (jba'g rira bcra gur cnpxntr gb svaq bhg jung'f va vg) orpnhfr ur'f nsenvq vg jvyy cebzcg Fvevhf gb yrnir gur fnsrgl bs gur ubhfr naq ohevrf vg va gur obggbz bs uvf gehax. Naq gura sbetrgf nobhg vg.

Uneel qbrf gel gb gryy Fancr va Hzoevqtr'f bssvpr, ohg gura nffhzrf Fancr qbrfa'g sbyybj hc ba vg. Fancr qbrf, svaqf Fvevhf dhvgr jryy ng Tevzjnyq, naq arire trgf onpx gb Uneel.

Gur jubyr cbvag bs gur obbx vf gb chapgher Uneel'f ureb pbzcyrk. Gurer'f n fprar ng gur raq bs gur obbx jura Uneel svaqf gur cnpxntr va uvf gehax naq yrneaf ur unq jung nzbhagrq gb n frpher yvar gb ernpu Fvevhf, bar bs n cnve bs vagrepbaarpgrq zveebef gung Fvevhf naq Wnzrf unq hfrq gb pbzzhavpngr lrnef orsber.

Bu, naq Ibyqrzbeg jnagrq gur cebcurpl orpnhfr ur bayl xarj unys bs vg. Gur erfg bs vg zvtug unir tvira uvz fbzr uvag ba jung uvf rarzvrf jbhyq qb arkg.

Assume you have a friend who wants to read Hallows sometime before the spoilers leak everywhere. However, he's never read any of the previous books.

What would be a minimum path to Hallows making some sense? Could it be done in 600 pages (not all the same book) and 2 movies, for example?

I came up with a partial recommendation, but I don't have all the books on hand, and I won't go online to search, not today:

1. Read the first third of Stone, and then see the movie.
2. Skip Chamber.
3. See the movie for Prisoner, and also read chapters ?? of the book.
4. Skip Goblet.
5. Read ??, see the movie?
6. Read at least ??

Just when I thought I might have *some* free time, I see that the Girl Genius 101 class has caught up with the start of the advanced class. This means I have 2 and a half years' worth to read...

I might be some time.

(Although it seems their server isn't coping with the load particularly well...)

It's 1330 HST right now, meaning England is 2230 or 2330, meaning either .5 or 1.5 hours till the book hits the stores, meaning he or she has about 3.5 to 4.5 hours to catch up.

Yes, but let's also assume he's got an internet that can be turned off, and he's capable of doing so, for up to the entire weekend.

I've heard that my internet can do that. However, I don't know what would happen to me if I tried to turn it off.

Today's been an interesting experiment in my ability to ignore the web. I'm not good at it.

Ebfrohq vf n fyrq.

Znygrfr Snypba vf znqr bs yrnq.

Xnvfre Fbfr vf gur perrcl ynzr thl.

Oops. I've been reading Advanced Class from the beginning over the last week or so, and having a really nice experience on my new laptop. All was fine at lunch today, and now I'm getting Internal Server Error along with a Page Not Found trying to get the Error Page.

Obviously, these things ain't real, but I was wondering if anyone had any idea what the gooey liquids might...er...might be supposed to be. Or however I should have phrased that.

For this weekend:

* Long walks with the dog while listening to an audio book

* Movies, hopefully without blabbermouth kids in the audiance.

* Long sessions of Colonization with CDs playing.

Man, this is getting silly.

It isn't silly- it's just that with most books we don't have to worry about spoilers. You put that much time into a series, you'd like to maximize the delight / intensity of the ending.

I've got my pre-ordered book ready to pick up at midnight. I have to admit I've been tempted by that dreadful leaked photo version, so that I'm not up all night reading.

Oops. I've been reading Advanced Class from the beginning over the last week or so, and having a really nice experience on my new laptop. All was fine at lunch today, and now I'm getting Internal Server Error along with a Page Not Found trying to get the Error Page.

Yabbut he won't say what he means by that. He can't give any instance of a practice that this changes. In particular, he won't say if waterboarding is in or out.

Is this really a good thing, or just bumf? It's not hard to read his lips—if they move, he's lying.

ROFL!

Oops. I've been reading Advanced Class from the beginning over the last week or so, and having a really nice experience on my new laptop. All was fine at lunch today, and now I'm getting Internal Server Error along with a Page Not Found trying to get the Error Page.

Take your point about arquebuses. The deciding factor re longbows may simply have been the manpower one.

What you are hinting at about the British Army in 1914 was the impact of the Boer War on their doctrine and tactics.

The humiliation a bunch of Dutch farmers administered to the British troops led to a whole new way of fighting: camouflage uniforms, aimed rifle fire, entrenchments etc.

Other than the Russians (who had their own problems) in 1905 arguably no one else 1865-1914 quite had the same bloody nose.

Although of course the warning signs were there at Solferino and in the Franco-Prussian war. From memory the Prussian Guards division lost 8,000 men at Gravolette-St. Privat in 30 minutes of aimed fire from the French rifles.

Despite the widespread use of machine guns in colonial battles, just about everyone (even the British) underestimated the impact of their introduction on the Western Front. Hence the Royal Machine Gun Corps, rather than organic machine gun units. John Ellis (the Social History of the Machine Gun) reckons it was the aristocratic refusal to see that the world had changed, and that Europeans could be bested by the same weapons as the dark natives.

Bruce Cohen

Very surprised you had not heard of the Ukrainian famine (which included Russians and Byelorussians as well), aka 'the Liquidation of the Kulaks'. It's well known, historically.

If you want a science fiction treatment of how this rule by starvation would have worked, Cyril Kornbluth's 'Not this August' about a Russian conquest of New York state, is pretty good (call it the 1950s Red Dawn or Amerika, but being CM Kornbluth, not at all predictable). Kornbluth had fought at the Battle of the Bulge (the stress to his heart eventually killed him) and it makes his battlefield descriptions incredibly gripping.

In ranks of number of people killed, I think history ranks it:

- Genghis Khan (who knows, but in the millions)
- Josef Stalin
- Chairman Mao
- Adolph Hitler
- (I'm not sure where we'd put Pizzaro & Cortez - 10 million people died, but perhaps mostly to disease?)

That ranking takes into account the people Hitler willing starved to death (Tooze shows the invasion plans for southern Europe and Russia were predicated upon sub-survival diets for prisoners of war and conquered civilians) and the Holocaust, but not the 25 million (latest number I believe) Russians killed plus the millions everywhere else as a result of war, rather than direct action.

It does rather put fears of Islamic extremism into some context: the greatest murderers of history (bar Genghis Khan) were inspired by western political ideologies.

Can't speak to that issue, but I am more-or-less inured to rampant ignorance on dance/music issues. [insert standard rant here]

What I was thinking of was his show, in which he casts himself as Lord of the Dance, complete with one "miracle" (featuring rather lame sleight-of-hand), a staged quasi-crucifixion, and a return from the "dead". I mean, the guy's quite a good dancer and definitely highly scenic with the bare chest and leather pants, but he seems to have mistaken himself for Jesus.

Ubj qvq Arivyyr trg gur fjbeq?

"You can now go on almost any fossil marketing website and find mammoth hair for $50 an inch. It has grown beyond anyone's imagination."

(Source)

I don't claim special knowledge about music, but I do know a little about it (and am married to a musician and musicologist).

Me, I'm so very over hardcopy these days.

A meta question on having read it:
Ner lbh univat n uneq gvzr svthevat bhg jung rkcerffvba gb chg ba lbhe snpr jura abg gnyxvat nobhg gur obbx?

Whfg svavfurq vg guvf nsgreabba, naq zl cnegare (jub unfa'g ernq vg lrg, naq jvyy gnxr n srj qnlf orpnhfr jr'er ohfl gur erfg bs gur jrrxraq) unf orra jngpuvat zl ernpgvbaf. Fvapr V'z abg n tbbq cbxre cynlre, V'z univat gb guvax uneq nobhg bgure zrzbevrf fb gung ur pna'g gryy rknpgyl jung rzbgvba V'z srryvat ng obbx'f raq.

V nz na rkcrevraprq chg-ba negvfg, naq V'ir orra univat ab gebhoyr gryyvat crbcyr guvatf yvxr, "V ungr gb gryy lbh guvf, ohg, fbzrobql qvrf va guvf bar," be, "Uneel qbrfa'g jnxr hc naq svaq bhg vg jnf nyy n qernz."

Ba gur bgure unaq, zl oebgure-va-ynj jub vfa'g ernqvat gur obbxf jnf irel unccl gb pnyy zr hc naq nfx zr jung gur frperg jnf. "Jung frperg?" V nafjrerq. "Jub qvrf," ur ercyvrq. "Bu," V fnvq, "Ibyqrzbeg qvrf." Gung fngvfsvrq uvz. Gura V fgnegrq va ba, "Jryy, naq Fancr. Naq Serq. Naq..." Nobhg gurer V urneq uvf rlrf tynmr bire.

Sincerely,

Wbua N Nexnafnjlre

V tbggn fnl, nalbar jub qvqa'g xabj ng yrnfg bar fnq guvat jnf tbvat gb unccra va guvf obbx unfa'g orra cnlvat nggragvba gb gur cerivbhf fvk.

And the rot13 of book contains it's own phoneme.

My partner and I will be at two fan-heavy parties this weekend. He's suggesting I make badges: "Yes I've read it" "No, not done yet." But since I'm on the faster side of average for reading, I'm not sure how many other Yes's there'll be (at least ones awake enough to talk about it).

V'z gelvat gb guvax bs hafcbvyrevfu pyhrf gb pnyy gur frg bs crbcyr jub'ir svavfurq vg. Pbhyq whfg pnyy vg gur Frira Svsgl Avar pyho, sbe rknzcyr.

Naq rira jvgubhg uvz ernqvat vg, jr'ir orra pbzvat hc jvgu n yvfg bs gur gbc gra fcbvyref, guvatf yvxr:

Jub'q n guhax n uryyzbhgu pbhyq fjnyybj nyy bs Ubtjnegf?

Kathryn: V'z gelvat gb guvax bs hafcbvyrevfu pyhrf gb pnyy gur frg bs crbcyr jub'ir svavfurq vg. Pbhyq whfg pnyy vg gur Frira Svsgl Avar pyho, sbe rknzcyr.

Ubj nobhg "Sebqb yvirf!"? Or is that too spoilerish?

http://www.healthcastle.com/nutrition101basics.shtml

Oops. I've been reading Advanced Class from the beginning over the last week or so, and having a really nice experience on my new laptop. All was fine at lunch today, and now I'm getting Internal Server Error along with a Page Not Found trying to get the Error Page.

God Damnit.

Overheard in the men's room: "I think everyone in the country should watch that movie."

Yes.

Yes they should.

1. Cook fresh fettucine
2. Heat up cream to slow simmer & add smoked salmon to warm through.
3. Add #2 to cooked fettucine, stir to mix & season with salt (if needed) and black pepper.
4. Chop up fresh dill & sprinkle on top.

Worked well as a quick-cook camp dinner on our last holiday.

Gurer'f tbvat gb or ng yrnfg bar irel cvffrq tboyva.

Post-book conversations last night saw many variations of a paraphrase from Star Wars:

Thousands of [insert fan group here] suddenly cried out in agony and were suddenly silenced.

Perhaps I'd better read HP pretty quickly. I've never read any of the books, so I have to get cracking.

Sigh. And even if I do read the first six, it'll probably be seven or eight years before I get to the end of the library's waiting list for the seventh one.

But.

It seems to be having a "Big Red Button" effect on me (<ShatnerMode>Must ... Not ... Look</ShatnerMode>)

(Yes, I went to the midnight release party and then stayed up all night. Finished about 7:45 a.m. Would have been sooner, but one of my dogs had massive diarrhea sometime in the small hours all over my beige rug and I stopped to clean that up.)

Good recipe. We use plain yogurt (when we can find any) and something, anything, other than dill, as my husband is of the opinion that any place other than pickles is dill blasphemy. (Something tells me it's going to be rather hard to ever get him to vacation in Scandinavia.)

Pickled, it loses most of its flavor. In fact I would say that he fundamentally doesn't like dill, since he dislikes it fresh and flavorful.

But then I grew up in Michigan, where dill grows wild.

The fish was longer than the kettle, or any cooking vessel he possessed. All I could do was cut it into steaks, sear it, and, noticing that he had dill in the garden, try to remember how to make dill mayonnaise.

My God, it was wonderful.

The real winner is A Thousand Splendid Suns, the new book by the author of The Kite Runner: 1470 holds on 519 copies! (That's at least twice as many total holds as I've ever seen before.)

Harry Potter: 1159 holds on first copy returned of 412 copies.
A Thousand Splendid Suns: 1548 holds, 324 copies.

For comparison, another highly requested item was Nora Roberts' High Noon. There were 240 holds on that one in its publication week two or three weeks ago.

Just singing, people. Sheesh.

And no, it's not any good.

I taste the soap in cilantro, but I'm not a supertaster. If you don't taste it- imagine covering a sprig of cilantro with Ivory soap before you eat it. That's what a sprig of cilantro tastes like to me.

I'd thought that the cilantro effect is like the artichoke effect- although in a different direction.

With artichokes, there's a chemical that- if you're affected by it- makes everything else taste slightly sweeter. If that chemical does nothing for you, then artichokes would seem like an odd and pointless cooked flavorless leaf.

And in other good news, my lipid panel results came back and my triglycerides dropped 100 points! Only 19 above good! And how did this happen? Almost certainly the change from Gatorade's high fructose corn syrup to Sqwincher Lite's Splenda. Still hydrated, and I hope my sugar is under 103, which is what prompted the change because kidney patients are at high risk for diabetes.

Cilantro to me tastes like rotting death, and is overpoweringly awful in any quantity. Oddly, coriander tastes delicious to me, slightly soapy, and utterly unlike cilantro. Cilantro being the leaves and coriander being the seeds, that is.

Wikipedia tells me that cilantro supposedly tastes like parsley but "juicier," whatever that means, and slightly citrusy, which I didn't know until just now and which clears up the mystery of why everyone seems to love it so much. That sounds good. It's just when my mouth fills up with the stench of death that I get turned off.

And it was indeed available last Saturday and I went and got it and read it that day. (Not quite in one sitting, I took a short break in the middle.)

(Last I checked, there were something like 155 holds on two dozen or so copies...of course, this is the library for just one city, not a whole state.)

I consider this less geeky than camping out overnight to be first in line to buy an iPhone, anyway.

Happy wedding anniversary, Abi.

(actually I've never smelled a bedbug, but coriander smells pretty rank to me)

Soon Lee #474: It is, but at least in my local usage (and I think general American usage as well), coriander is used only for the seed, and cilantro, only for the leaves. It's a useful distinction to have, seeing as coriander is an odd but tasty spice and cilantro is an obscenely horrific deathweed.

Lila #480: Hmm. Maybe I like the smell of crushed bedbugs. I don't plan on researching this issue. Sometimes a spirit of scientific curiosity is trumped by the gross.

Serge, I think you're in an alternate universe there. The actual sequence of events required (among other things) an earthquake, 15% partial thickness burns, and a snowstorm so bad the RAF had to come to the rescue. Dancing would have been easier.

I don't believe he's a supertaster, but he does also dislike cilantro. (He's basically OK on the other herbs.)

Of course, not all aversions can be put down to supertasterism. I've got several dislikes based entirely on smell; if for some reason the smell is masked, I'm fine with whatever it is as a taste.

Mysterious envelopes with money found in Japanese government office restrooms.

I think you need to be more specific in Step 2. (Not to mention the other ones, but that's a direct quote.) You've tantalized us enough ...

Happy Anniversary abi and Martin!

PS - I'm trying to run out the door to drive for eight hours, so I'm a little distracted. But, my good wishes are sincere, even if my verse is a bit weak.

That is to say, coriander and cilantro come from the same plant, but the latter is an herb (leaves) and the former is a spice (all other planty bits; the seeds, in the case of coriander).

I personally love cilantro, but then the amount of habanero oil I mix with my gouda (yes, gouda) would make Teresa shudder. Which makes me wonder if there's a negative correlation between liking spicy food and hating cilantro? I don't taste anything icky on cilantro, but us eaters of the extremely spicy are well known to have fewer tastebuds.

Those of you who taste the ick factor in cilantro: how spicy do you like your food? Very mild, mild, medium, spicy, very spicy?

Actually, same question to the people who (like me) like cilantro just fine?

Like cilantro more than somewhat, like my food spicy but prefer that my tongue not develop smoking blisters.

I've recently found some jarred jalapeno slices (Vlasic) that are almost too hot; I regard most of the other offerings, excepting Mrs Renfro's and Shotgun Willie's, as either too squishy or too wimpy or both. Hmm, is there some kind of connection between cripness and hotness?

And I generally like medium to spicy on that scale, and for the most part very spicy is Right Out.

Joanne: He's not going to like Central Europe either. Ukrainian mess halls, in the summer time are wonderfully redolent of dill.

Cilantro/coriander = same plant. Also called chinese parsley. I recall the look on a guys face when he asked why all us gringos tried to be Mexican by eating cilantro. When I told him of it's being brought to Mexico from Europe, and all the other places it's used... well it's rare to see someone actually crestfallen.

I like cilantro, but Italian Parsley tastes soapy to me.

I also dislike artichokes, because I have the sweet receptor reaction. It ruins everything else I'm eating, and what it does to wine ought to keep it out of everything on the menu of restaurants which serve wine.

I realise this is an extreme position, but there have been all sorts of good looking meals I've had to forgo because they had artichoke.

I'd describe the de-soaped taste of cilantro as somewhat resembling cumin-- rather earthy, but also slightly musty/musky as well as somehow greener/leafier.

I like things moderately spicy.

I like my food sort of spicy. I don't like really hot (and jalapeño I don't like the flavor of, though in cheese it's changed enough to be nice).

Thai food I can take hotter than I can take mexican.

Chinese varies.

Indian is a different beast altogther. I like it hot, but lots of the spicing isn't based on peppers.

That's exactly why I have an aversion to it. I spent a couple of weeks in Ukraine in the summer of 1991, and every meal featured dill. Potatoes with dill! Tomatoes with dill! Cucumbers with dill! I reached my dill saturation point very quickly.

To this day, I can't stand the smell of the stuff. Only exception made is for pickles, because dill pickles don't actually taste like dill.

(Don't believe I've ever had cilantro. Can't stand coriander, though; reminds me of anise and licorice and all that other icky stuff, and just smelling it for a few minutes can make me queasy. I don't like cumin, either; it's like eating dirt. Or so I imagine, not having eaten actual dirt.)

But I've had lots of food which didn't have dill; restaurants, were less dilly than mess halls (by which I meant army mess halls).

I've eaten a lot of dirt (both in the metaphoric sense of landing hard in it, and of having it in my food).

Cumin doesn't taste like dirt, though I might call it earthy. I like it a lot.

(I also like artichokes, but mainly as a vehicle for garlic butter or lemon butter. Never noticed the sweetness factor. And just to round out the picture, I like fresh dill, don't care for dill pickles, and dislike anise/licorice sorts of things, except for fennel, which to me has only a very faint anise flavor.)

I'm another one who loves coriander-the-seed and loathes cilantro-the-leaf to the point of not even wanting to be at the same table as someone eating it. Personally I'd describe cilantro-contaminated food as smelling as if an elderly and ill tomcat had sprayed over it.

Thanks!

Like hot food but am particular about the source of heat: white pepper, to me, smells of diaper pail, and I vastly prefer Habnero to Cayenne sauces.

Which is exactly how my husband characterizes some plant (not cilantro) that comes up every spring around here and which I can't smell at all. Hmmm. Maybe it's a sensitivity to catbox smells? (Although we have a catbox complete with senior female cat and it doesn't offend him anything out of the ordinary.)

The other probable stink-fest suspect is Dog Fennel, which is not actually a fennel (another member of Apiaceae) but intead a kind of chamomile, which is a member of Asteraceae.

The unifying factor on all these plants is that they're biennials with fleshy rootstocks; I suspect the unfriendly chemicals are all just ways of keeping the burrowing rodents and root weevils from eating the roots.

Horseradish (and wasabi, which is different; though most wasabi powders are mostly horseradish) I can eat in big bites.

I recall a friend saying once that horseradish was as nothing. I told him it was potent. He took a chip (Frito's scoop, or some such) and ladled up a teaspoon or so. His face folded in on itself, like a Tex Avery cartoon.

In a fit of, minor cruelty, I took a chip, and ate at least as much, while he chugged a beer.

JESR: I find the restructuring, to make all the plants have ceae endings really annoying. I miss umbelliferae.

Curly Parsley has a toxin, which prevent all but one bug from attacking it.

I generally prefer my food medium-spicy, to my own definition, which means I am able to taste other flavors besides heat in it, but what's medium-spicy to me is unbearably hot to less spice-tolerant folks. I find most commercial "hot" salsas are my "medium," and I've been known to spike V-8 juice with three drops of Dave's Insanity.

This is not meant as boast, as I also know plenty of people whose preferred heat level leaves me grabbing for the milkshakes.

I also think dill is wonderful and chicken soup is incomplete without it.