Good. I always thought that actor Louis Jourdan was icky.

Of course, that would only work for scholars who could read Aramaic and Hebrew, then Greek and Coptic, Church Latin, etc... It would also be fascinating to me to see what was lost and gained in translation.

But wouldn't it be cool?

Once I took a class with a textual critic who was, at that time, editing the Satyricon of Petronius. He told us how he absolutely horrified the librarians at Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale by bursting out into loud laughter in the manuscripts room. Apparently, in a section where most manuscripts of the Satyricon read "with many pens" (or something like that), the BN manuscript read, "with his penis in his hands." (I wish I could remember the Latin, but I do remember that there were only one or two letters different between the one reading and the other.) The Satyricon being what it is, this was a peculiarly appropriate misreading.

Now I have the urge to go sell that hamburger bun in the fridge to the nearest goy, and do all the verses of Chad Gadya in one breath.

*Rabbi Nathan Goldberg, Passover Haggadah: A New English Translation and Instructions for the Seder (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1966), p. 25.

Who Knows Thirteen? in one breath was my real party piece, but I do it in English which means I'm cutting out the singsong repetition of verse one, so it's much easier.

Dinosaur: Win!

Sounds to me like an earthquake.

But the landscape skipping and jumping is in the Hebrew, basically as the KJV has it. This isn't the first time that an archaic metaphor has tripped up a modern reader, of course, but it's really there.

The Andaman Islanders seem to have understood this a few years ago. I reckon Pericat has it right: earthquake. Or Santorini going ker-blooey.

If you're at the shore, and you look out and think "Hmm, that's weird. The water's receding."

Run. Uphill. Possibly in a car. The earthquake may have been on the other side of the world.

There's a bay near us called Useless Bay, mainly because It looks great but it's maximum depth is 10 feet or so when the tide is out. Big, flat, and a nice gradual runup, so that tides go waaaaay out and in.

But that also enhances tsunamis. We keep that in mind in our earthquake enhanced side of the world.

I too would love to be able to see the different translations side by side. If that information was ever gathered together in one place, the fundies would poop their pants.

Is it bad that I have those? Every time google fails me on some subject*, I make a little note to ask the Fluorosphere the next time the opportunity presents itself. Usually it's in an open thread.

I brought this up in a thread that had mostly petered out, but I'm looking for books or audiobooks that have good representations of Northern English accents. I'm working on a project that requires dialect writing for a fantasy universe. I've got a general handle on a lot of the stuff, but I'm looking to give individual characters more variety within the dialects. One of the sample pieces I was looking at has "You know where you are with a good ____" as a line, and that immediately brought my mind to Pratchett. I was also given Fred Dibnah as a good starting reference, but I don't know where to go from there. I'm looking for something that reads like Pratchett's middle-to-low class, both Lancre and Ankh. I know he's riffing/modeling off of some real world dialect or set of speech patterns, but I don't know what. (If Pratchett's stuff isn't strictly North Country influenced but has other clear influences or you know of other writers with similar dialogue style, I'd like to hear about those too.) With the amount of British comedy I've watched in my lifetime, you'd think I'd have a better handle on regional accents, but alas, I am a babe in the woods.

The second question is a textiles one: does anyone know how to determine the composition of unlabeled fabric? I have a lot of fabric scraps and remainders and recyclable old clothes I've been meaning to do something with, but I'm often stymied because I don't know the composition of it - is this blue broadcloth 100% cotton, or 50-50, or 35-65? Is this red scrap even cotton poly at all, or is it linen or rayon? Is this old dress silk, or an artificial blend? Any method is fine, but I can't seem to find a good list of them. I've heard of burn tests before, but they seem pretty limited. If anyone knows a good reference, or at least a few simple tests, I'd be grateful.

*Technically, I guess it's my Google-fu failing, not Google itself.

Biblecc.com offers the ability to see a single verse in multiple English translations all on the same page.

Hm. Unhelpfully, I usually use "my fingers know" first, followed by a burn test. Generally I do a rough split for fabrics of "artificial stuff melts", "animal stuff smells like burning hair" and "cotton & cellulose smells sweet".

There's some information here, here and here, fwiw.

My father (who decided to visit me at Denvention...) is looking for a story he read as a kid.

Published prior to 1960
Family on Mars, and Mars has to be evacuated. Protagonists are a father and son. One of the moons of Mars is discovered to be an alien spaceship.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone at all?

* Given the topic, an especially appropriate word.

** A representative, I hope. The senators are supposed to have more smarts.

"We're from the other moon," he spat. "Phobos!"

Jirkatang police have had a love-hate relationship with the Jarawas. In 1997, a year after the tribe made its first-ever contact with government authorities, they stormed the Jirkatang police outpost and shot a guard dead with their arrows. Relations have since improved.

I had to look back to the top of the page to make sure it wasn't the BBC News!

JJ Fozz, #16: Well, for (some of) the Baptists, you'd only have to hide it in the New Testament...

Obviously a novel by a dilettante, as Zeppelins of Phobos would by signification be an alternate-history novel, not sciencelike fictionism. Tech period would be somewhere between Victorian and Edwardian brasstech,* probably with pre-WWI imperial politics. Lowell grass** a distinct possibility. Plot must involve airship assault on something, somewhere, probably to include aero-infantry wearing personal gasbag/hang glider combinations, and of course leather helmets with goggles, armed with rapid-fire small arms (product of Vickers or Krupp, depending). No trenches; battle is fast-moving and fun for everybody who doesn’t die.

Names for Martian cities chosen for easy national identification: Tombstone, New Grinstead, Ploetzlich bei Stumpf, Novaya Ladoga.

Book concludes with Romantic Couple standing in cover-painting pose as moons hurtle like all get-out and full Earth hangs large enough in sky to create Roche limit problems, while discussing future of Mars (promise to rebuild Olympus City sealed with handholding).

Pulp is like Legos. You can build really swell things out of it. Or not.

*The shiny fittings and decorative plumbing of steam with the operating qualities of internal combustion, i.e., none of the cantakerous complexity of actual steam power.

** Plant, genetically engineered by Old Martians or Upstart Humans, intended to concentrate water and drip it on Martian soil, releasing bound oxygen, meaning that martiforming is in progress and people can do without helmets (impediments to kissing) in low-lying areas. Traditionally planted along lines of canali.

TV series such as The Last of the Summer Wine and Heartbeat are definitely Yorkshire accents. Fred Dibnah is from Lancashire: the accents on t'other side of the Pennines are more influenced by Norwegian vikings.

This side, it was the Danes.

For written Yorkshire accent/dialect, the magazine Dalesman is the obvious starting point.

If anyone has any suggestions, fire away. I'm no stranger to science fiction, but it's been awhile.

Premise: Planet smashes Earth, but brave nucleus of American civilization escapes on rocketships, then discovers other countries managed to get off doomed planet too, and they have existential conflict on smaller fragment of colliding planet after landing there.

Um - I too do the "my fingers know" but besides the burning test there is the water test. The way in which a drop of water affects particular fabrics of similar weaves is fairly distinctive. I'll take a crack at describing it.

You dip your finger in water (well, really you spit on your finger, but you can't say that in public, except I am) and apply it to the back of the fabric. Poly and artificial blends the water doesn't come through the same way (or at all).

If you are trying to make a cotton/linen determinations the water distribution is fastest on linen.

Silk changes texture when you moisten it in a way most artificial fabrics don't.

They also taste different, but I can't begin to describe how.

I should perhaps mention that with that opinion I am part of a tiny minority; nearly everybody else absolutely loved the ending.

Could use a little of that (stability, that is) right about now.

It's probably a good thing Hollywood isn't aware of them, or the next Egypt movie would feature some really interesting CGI that unfortunately made no plot sense... oh, wait.

I am intrigued by your idea, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

(Why yes, I am aware of all internet traditions.)

Can't do this in a fabric store. Also, not sure if it would apply to fibers like Tencel.

But she had big family meals on Rosh Hashanah (coming up next week), Thanksgiving, and full Seders on Passover.

That's part of the series of psalms (114-118) called Hallel, or Praise, which we say on holidays and New Moons.

End of Jewish Minutia for now.

Have a good and sweet year, y'all.

Confused by the apparent movement of the city, they are then utterly destroyed when the guns open fire.

The book shall be entitled Advance, Reading Copy.

I have done this in a fabric store :) It's one of the reasons why I, a non-smoker, carry a lighter.

Tencel is functionally a 'natural' fabric, just highly processed in the process of becoming fabric. It burns to ash, and has a slight sweet smell, a bit like burning sugar (go figure, given what it's made of ;) )

Anyway, one of our readings for 16th c Brit Lit this week was a side-by-side presentation of a few passages of the Bible: Tyndale's translation (which got him executed, of course), the KJV, the Geneva Bible and the Douay-Rheims Bible. Translation theory is one of my interests, and for these four, what was most interesting to me about them was how the later 3 all took their lead from Tyndale. Certain choices he made have persisted through most English translations. My favorite would be the word "firmament."

I think that's Wollheim's Secret of the Martian Moons

Does anyone know how rayon reacts to the burn test? I would assume it would produce a powdery ash like cotton, but I've never tested it.

*Mom's a quilter, mother-in-law is a quilter, grandmother made a lot of clothes for me.

I've had a similar idea - I've long wanted a flow chart that shows the history of Christianity as it schisms (is that the correct verb?) down through the years, and to note the theological landmarks.

IF (Nicene Creed) THEN (mainstream western?...)
.
.
.
IF (95 Theses) THEN (Lutheran)
.
.
etc.

And here's a collection of online books about various heresies.

A few books of special note in that collection: Belloc's The Great Heresies has a readable overview of the concept and some of the major types (again, from a Catholic perspective). Hippolytus' Refutation of All Heresies lists a lot of heresies popular in the early days of the church, from the perspective of an early church writer.

There are also some books specifically on some of the better-known heresies further down the list.

How cool! I've noticed a tendency in engineering like this--the first person to tackle some problem sometimes establishes the baseline assumptions and approach to solving it, and many years can pass before anyone changes it. I wonder how similar this is.

It seems like there are a couple parallels, though I probably can't do them justice. First, on a simple level, once you've seen some Greek or Latin word translated to "firmament," it's easier to just stick with it. That was an acceptable choice, and even if there are other possibilities, they take work and aren't better. But on a more interesting level, reading a translation of the Bible that uses the word "firmament" in that place might be one of the only places you see "firmament" being used. It could change the meaning of the word over time, so that most everyone's definition of firmament is basically drawn from "the way it's used in the bible."

That seems parallel to the way the engineering/inventing thing works. Once someone has defined the problem of, say, building a steam engine in a certain way, most other people may start from that sort of definition. Their meaning of "steam engine" is "like the thing that guy over there built." It can take awhile before someone else realizes that the set of ways to build a steam engine is much larger than that. In my own field, public key cryptosystems, hash functions, and block ciphers all have this going on. A lot of hash functions designed in the last 10 years look like they were done by people whose internal definition of "hash function" was "something that looks like MD4, only wider and stronger."

(This is all making me wish I had more time to study translations and the history of technology....)

Man, you're capturing my mood today. (Too much weird and unsettling national news!)

I like the poem, but I can't make that fourth line scan. (I suspect this is a difference in accent or something, but I can't work out what.)

unwashed hands waving pitchforks
stinking mass of sweaty rage
the peasants are revolting!

Alternatively, watching the latest crazy of the McCain campaign:

toward the puppy farm
the burning piano falls
the puppies are us

Does anyone know how rayon reacts to the burn test? I would assume it would produce a powdery ash like cotton, but I've never tested it.

Rayon burns slowly, smells like rope, and the ash tends to retain the shape of the swatch.

Overheard: "It's the publisher's way of saying, 'This book sucks so hard that we're not even going to put a synopsis here, and instead use the back cover to rave about completely unrelated books so you'll go read them and save yourself from this one.'"

I figured you'd recognize that reference. Now, without peeking at imdb.com, do you know which SF movie he was the star of?

You mean something like this?

Allan, #65: Now, that's an interesting hypothesis. I think I'm going to have to see how true it holds by personal experience.

Does Phobos or even Mars have an atmosphere dense enough to support bouyant aircraft? (indeed does Phobos have an atmosphere at all?)

On the Events Surrounding My 21st Birthday

My university was a "dry campus." The joke ran that this meant "don't spill" but in practice this meant that there wasn't supposed to be any liquor on the premises.

There were notable exceptions. The Chancellor's Dinner was one; the champagne brunch following graduation was another. But what university can resist casually bending the rules it sets for its students? And truly, the rules were easily broken by the students as well, especially with the ambiguity involved as to whether a building were "on" or "off" campus. My apartment at the time was "off-campus", yet it was tied into the "on-campus" telephone system, and the patchwork of houses owned by the school were similarly ambiguous.

Such a house was that of the Honors Program. It was an actual house, though nobody lived there. The door was key-coded and everyone had a passkey. And often the attic floor— Olympus (nobody said we were modest)— was used for gatherings when the person hosting had no location to otherwise use.

That Friday was Passover, and Mike had decided to hold a Seder meal. The fish mostly fell through the grill, to the delight of the raccoons, so we ordered New York-style cheese pizza, as this Passover also was Good Friday and we were being good Catholics by going meatless. This is how I discovered that New York-style cheese pizza goes very well with White Zinfandel.

We were downstairs, washing up, when a knock came at the door. There was a security guard there, and his friend from the city police. We politely invited them inside, and asked what the issue was. Apparently, somebody had called and said there was a raging alcoholic party on the top floor. They looked very confused by the lack of said party, but took our names regardless and left, at which point we got angry.

We knew who was to blame. B— and J— were froshlings in Honors who were, to put it mildly, jerks. Apart they were fairly harmless but together they had managed to piss off most of the rest of the program, which is pretty talented. One of them had popped his head up into Olympus, had been invited to share the meal, and had declined. And apparently had gone off to invoke the dry campus statutes.

Something you should understand about me is this: I don't handle anger well. Not in me, and not around me. I find it actually painful to sustain it, and this is a classic example. I called the mentor of the Honors Program and left a message, saying that I wanted to speak with him, but I couldn't let it go.

This was a holiday weekend, and I was spending most of it in the editing room on the top floor of the Ad Building. Anyone in Broadcast Studies could sign out the keys at any hour that the room was not otherwise in use, and I was using the time to edit together the spring musical. Yes, analog post-production editing of a musical with no in-camera sync. And I wanted it done before Sunday because I wanted to show it at the cast party.

That's probably why I ended up on the phone with Mike at 2 in the morning when I just couldn't handle the anger. I knew his roommate was out of town, so hey, what the hell. He finally managed to calm me down, keep me from throwing things. I finished the tape.

(The production itself garnered very little attention, but when we got to the credits— where every actor had a face credit— they watched it, stopped it, rewound and called everybody else in. I got requests for copies of the credits for the next year. I've never forgotten how much actors love credits.)

My birthday was Easter Monday that year, so at midnight a couple of friends took me to a bar for my obligatory free drink. (I had hard cider. I don't much care for alcohol.) I went to bed knowing that I had a meeting with Fr. K—, the mentor of the Honors Program.

So I showed up bright and early on my 21st birthday to meet with Fr. K—, only to find that he'd brought along Fr. S—, who was the substance abuse counselor.

It was a horrible blow. First off, I'd wanted the meeting so Fr. K— would hear what really happened before hearing rumors. Secondly, I was still emotionally raw from being so angry over the weekend, and feeling that I'd already been judged was terrible. I can't stand being accused of dishonesty when I'm dealing fairly.

And mostly, it was a hell of a way to start off a birthday.

So they questioned me, and one of the questions that came up was how much alcohol was consumed. I honestly couldn't say— at that time, I didn't know what a fifth was even. (Told you I don't much care for alcohol.) So I went to the recycling bin and brought back a bottle, whereupon Fr. S— snorted and said that nobody would try to get drunk on Manischewitz.

So I won, but I had to go to a friend's place and fall apart all over her bed for a while.

I hated holiday weekends. Almost everybody left the campus, and extraverts hate being alone. So I moped for a while. It happens. I don't think I wrote any bad poetry that day.

And five guys took me to dinner. They showed up, gave me the front seat of the sedan (which meant four adult males in the backseat. Ah, college), and took me to the Old Spaghetti Factory, where we ordered the obligatory bottle of chianti and we all got carded. Then the birthday spumoni came and everybody sang.

The servers looked fairly astonished and said, we've never heard it sung that well before. I pointed, saying, "Choir, choir, musician, chorale, choir." Not everyone gets "Happy Birthday" sung in key, and this was the first time it happened to me.

The next time was with an orchestra, but that's another story.

What about the fat lady? The story can't be over yet!

ready to talk about meeting some locals around the Small Press Expo in Bethesda 10/4 & 5?

what works for you?

Bill @68, A quick guess: mebbe they are confusing US-style billions (aka milliards) with UK billions?

No, sorry, the author of the message spells out the zeroes explicitly.

2) The Old Spaghetti Factory! There's one in Nashville which I remember fondly; it's in a restored warehouse on 2nd Avenue, and the decor is palatial in a 19th-century-wretched-excess sort of way. If you're ever there, I particularly recommend that you make a special trip to the ladies' room. I like the food, too; Spaghetti Warehouse is NOT even close, despite the similarity of names. Sadly, when I finally got to take my partner to the one in Seattle last year, his reaction was "I don't see the big deal." But I wish we had one in Houston.

Singing at restaurants reminds me of my junior year Concert Choir tour at Vandy. We went to DC and Williamsburg, and ended up having a lovely dinner one night at a restaurant whose name I can no longer recall. It so happens that we were doing a lot of arrangements of spirituals that year, and somehow we got started singing a cappella in the restaurant... and the waitstaff loved it. We ran thru every spiritual in our repertoire (I think the upperclassmen even did one from the previous year), and the staff had us all autograph a menu for them. It was a really nice impromptu moment, and a memory I still enjoy.

Maybe you could use Microsoft InExcelsis?

Rocketeer with the young and lovely Jennifer Connelly.

Also, he was the obnoxious American in one of the Dracula films. The one with Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.

I also heard (somewhere once, a very long time ago), that British stage actors use Devonshire accents deliberately as a sort of indication of, um, the opposite of urbanity.

(Dang, it's hard to keep up with ML these days. Sooo much good stuff, too little time.)

He writes:

"You must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: 'When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion'. If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave-taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means 'other' or 'different'.

Now that we have seen this, it is obvious that the subject around which the two senses turn must be twofold. And therefore it is to be determined about the subject of this work when it is taken literally, then about the subject when it is understood allegorically. The subject of the whole work, taken only from a literal standpoint, is simply the status of the soul after death, taken simply. The movement of the whole work turns from it and around it. If the work is taken allegorically, however, the subject is man, either gaining or losing merit through his freedom of will, subject to the justice of being rewarded or punished."

"Are you married?" --[yes]--> "To each other?"...

It's online somewhere, if only I could find it.

This is my first comment here so let me introduce myself.
I'm a long time reader of Making Light from France, areas of interest: politics, sf/f, computer science, RPGs. Yes, I'm a geek.

I started reading blogs in the fall of 2003, to try to get an understanding of what the f**k was happening with US politics. Let me say it's been quite an education! I'm so glad I live in such a secular country as France, even though we have our own issues (Must...not...rant...about...Sarkozy).
ML is now on my daily reading list. I stayed, as they say, for the jurassic buggery.

Anyway, I'm de-lurking because I'm looking for intelligent conversations about sf/f books and authors but I've noticed that TOR authors are not (often) discussed here. It might be an official ML policy, for understandable professional reasons, but I have not been able to find it on the front page. Do you have any recommendations for sites where such conversations can be had?

And, Teresa, take good care of yourself. Some people you don't even know felt very concerned by the news about your health trouble.

I'd recommend Tor.com for discussion of Tor authors and books, as a great place to start. The conversations section might be just what you're looking for.

Good luck, and congratulations on de-lurking. It's a rather stressful act, isn't it?

Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle is set in Devon and some of the night people have strong Devon accents.

And then, of course, it's old and I don't know how accurate it is, but the Yorkshire "dialect" is a major component of the the Secret Garden.

But get them from the library, because Steve's turned into a bit of a whackjob lately.

Since the receipt of the first two notes, we've already stopped wearing shoes in the apartment, and structured our clothes storage to minimize the opening and closing of drawers in the morning and evening.

I at least take comfort that Miss Manners is firmly on our side, saying iirc "It is reasonable to ask your neighbors to remove their shoes at home, but not their feet." And it is only the thought of the disapproving looks that would be cast at us from that quarter that has put the kibosh on our plans to engage an Irish step-dancing troupe for nightly command performances.

So, does anyone have good advice for dealing with passive aggressive neighbors with unreasonable demands? Or just good stories to make our situation not seem so frustrating by comparison?

B Durbin - that's a bummer of a story. One way to get back at those two jerks, without being really mean, is to shove pennies in between the door and the doorframe of their room. They can't get out until you let them

My name is Sylvie, I live in Ottawa and I'm a French/English writer/editor for the federal gov't up here in Canuckistan. Though I also have aspirations to someday turn the jumble of words in my head into a novel or two.

I've been lurking here for ages trying to get up the nerve to dip my toes in; I've been known to pun, but my poetry is deplorable (I'll spare you the details of the poem I wrote with a friend in grade 7 in which we re-told the plot of the fourth Star Trek movie in rhyming couplets. cough.)

I'm far more interested in your upcoming election than in our own (I'm afraid the Conservatives will get in, here, but I'm terrified the Democrats won't, there). Though whenever I see Palin's name mentioned I keep expecting her to break into a rendition of the Lumberjack Song...

Now I'm off to have a surgical procedure to remove my tongue from my cheek.

I lived in an apartment for many years, and the people who lived above me were a mother and her son. The son was the creepiest dude I have ever seen, and I'm not being mean. He had the look of your average mass murderer. He was also a night owl and his bedroom was right above mine.

So I wake up night, around 3 am and I'm laying there, listening. And I say out loud, to no one, "I know what a power saw sounds like. That's a power saw running. At 3 in the morning." I think he was slicing up his latest victim.

Sad to say, he freaked out one day and tried to kill himself and was committed.

A second story: freshman year in college, I didn't have class until noon and would sleep in. Every Tuesday, like clockwork, I would wake up to this clicking sound above my head. I could not figure what it was. About a month later, I'm walking out of my dorm and this slim, Gregory Hines looking dude walks past me, wearing TAP SHOES, and I yelled out, "That's what the fuck it is!"

I scared him pretty bad, and then explained myself. He apologized, but I was basically at fault for laying in bed until 11 every Tuesday.

Serge @101
Merci mon ami!

If I may presume to correct you, you mean "Vous êtes les bienvenus!" (plural masculine form).
The wonders of sexist language: in French, when addressing one thousand women and one man, you have to use the masculine form...

My campus was not technically a dry one. It was a public one, meaning that no alcohol could be served at public events or in public spaces, so any drinking had to be done either off-campus, or in one's room. However, you were not allowed to store alcohol in your room, and you were not allowed to drink it in the presence of anyone under 21. (Most people who lived on campus were under 21. Seniors tended to move to apartments.) This meant you had to drink everything you had purchased, alone in your room. Very healthy.

RAs tended to look the other way at people coming back drunk, as long as they didn't create a disturbance. But they would bust you for underage possession. One day, I was coming back from a communal grocery trip (as all of them were -- I lived in the kind of dorm where you would go out in the hall, yell "I'm going to Walmart, who wants to come?" and leave with a carful of people). All of us were freshmen or sophomores, 18 and 19 (maybe 20). One of my friends was carrying a six-pack of rootbeer in glass bottles, and a very large glass bottle of cream soda.

We passed our RA in the hallway, greeted him cheerfully, and tried to continue to our rooms. He whipped around and, pointing at the cream soda, said "WHAT ARE YOU BRINGING INTO MY DORM?"

Eventually we were able to show him the markings on the bottles and prove that it was cream soda and root beer, not Miller High Life and brown ale.

However, I think that even he would have turned a blind eye to a bottle of Manischewitz at a Passover seder. It's practically grape jam.

Nobody cares what stubborn breezes blow,
nor what the colour of the morning sky;
no one must see where tired phrases go.

Tomorrow comes the radioactive glow,
for now we punish those who dare to pry;
our motives are as pure as day-old snow.

We gave our bank accounts a chance to grow
and watched as all the numbers mounted high,
no one must see where tired phrases go.

We do not care if you hatred bestow
upon our heads, we have the time to fly;
our motives are as pure as day-old snow.

This is the hour that you will come to know
when all our assets have to go bye-bye;
no one must see where tired phrases go,
our motives are as pure as day-old snow.

Noted cartoonist Chester Brown (Louis Riel, etc.) is running in my riding. For the Libertarian Party -- oh, well. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics lives in the same riding, as far as I know -- maybe next time he could run as a Neo-Rhino.

Is there really a chance that Harper could get a majority? McCain + Palin = fail, but McCain + Palin + Harper = EPIC FAIL.

[/politics]

It doesn't affect the functioning at all. But, like a hangnail, it's driving me buggy.

Any suggestions on how to repair it? Type of adhesive? Methods for clamping?

Or should I just cultivate an ability to ignore it?

Yes, definitely London. But Ankh-Morpork IS London. It didn't used to be - it started out as Lankhmar (even if Terry claims not to have noticed) - but by about less than nine books in it had become early modern London with overtones of Tuscany.

Of course though Ankh-Morpork was once an affectionate parody of Lankhmar, Lankhmar is itself an affectionate parody of Shadizar, which itself harks back to the Samarkand of story and the Baghdad of Harun al Rashid (and the Golden Road between them). And that version of Baghdad itself referenced (I suspect consciously - in that both the Caliphs and the storytellers played up to it) both Constantinople and Babylon, the grand-daddy of them all.

London - in story - isn't quite that kind of city. We don't do God-Kings and we've been telling people that our streets are NOT paved with gold for six hundred years. (Most cities never feel that need) We are, though, the Heart of Darkness. Not so much topless towers as mud and mist and the metropolitan line. We do have William Blake though :-)

A few months ago I overheard a man on a train in London using "CMOT" as a verb. Pronounced "see-mot". Context in this link

Is there really a chance that Harper could get a majority? McCain + Palin = fail, but McCain + Palin + Harper = EPIC FAIL.

And here I was just thinking about who their third stooge might be. Harper fits the bill nicely.

Sadly, it looks like that majority might be in the cards (gods help us all) depending on what the Bloc does or doesn't get up to in Quebec.

Serge, you live in Quebec? Whereabouts?
I visited the area a few years ago and I had a great time. Even with the snowstorms and the freezing cold.

re 13: I don't have a bible with textual apparatus at hand, but I'm guessing that v. 7 may vary in the MT from older translations (and maybe the DSS). My Greek isn't good enough, but there seems to be something in the LXX corresponding to the missing bit; it's certainly there in the Vulgate.

re 19: Another good bible lookup is the Unbound Bible, which has a particularly good selection of ancient versions. Then there's the Hexapla and the English Hexapla.

I'd be very tempted to be horribly sympathetic -- "Ohhhh. You must have just moved in, poor people. We're doing our best to be quiet for you, but it's the building, you know. We hear other people too, but we understand that's what happens with shared buildings, and all you can do is be generous and forgiving. Have you tried talking to the landlord? Maybe he can help..."

Overall though -- if they're going to be passive-aggressive and difficult, there's not much that's going to help. I'd stick with being polite and reasonable (where reasonable doesn't include making lifestyle changes beyond taking your shoes off, and not rehearsing riverdance at 2am) -- and squashing the temptation to respond in kind.

I grew up in Québec City's suburb for the first 30 years of my life, until they finally threw me out. I mean, until I married a California Girl in January 1986. By the way, this coming Sunday will be the 23rd anniversary of our being together, and of my buying Roger Dean's Magnetic Storm.

In our attempts to be accommodating and neighborly, we have already stopped wearing shoes in the apartment, and structured our clothes storage to minimize the opening and closing of drawers in the morning and evening. We cannot see what more we can reasonably do to make things quieter for you.

Please note the use of the word 'reasonably' in the paragraph above. To make things quieter we would have to cease all movement in our apartment between the hours of 11 PM and 8 AM; any reasonable person would agree that this is too much to ask.

If, despite our efforts, the noise level is still unacceptable to you, we suggest that you look into soundproofing your ceiling, as no further changes will be made to our floor, or above it.

Sincerely,

JJ, i've been picking up random post-apocalyptic novels from the kids section at the library - I recently read a pair of YA books, one of the is called Dead and Gone, one is called Life As We Knew it, that were really good. And I picked up a YA post-apocalyptic book called The Sky Outside that was really well done as audiobook.

Sharon Astyk has been running a post-apocalyptic reading group on her web site, but the readers are mostly not wide SF readers. They just finished Dies the Fire, but I hadn't gotten through it yet so I didn't participate (I'm reading it now. Or, I will be as soon as I get through these Elizabeth Moon books that were near it on the shelf...) The reading list sprang from a discussion of how much we hated Kunstler's World Made By Hand.

I find myself re-reading Always Coming Home in little pieces, because it's a really comforting post-apocalyptic vision. But it doesn't really fit with the doomer books like the Stand.

Also try David Palmer's "Emergence" and, if you've never read it, the classic "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of person I would be, if they didn't have those little planet stickers to help me pick out SF books in the public library when I was a kid.

...which I just looked up, and he didn't say that until 1984. But I'd already gotten the impression prior to 1981 that he WANTED to do just that.

Is it any wonder I preferred fantasy set in other times and places?

This one?

I can't be the only one who had nightmares about walking through empty streets...

(P.S. My 21st birthday started off kind of bad but ended pretty good. I just thought of it and decided to write it up. And the jerks didn't continue at that school the next year. "Didn't fit in.")

(I do sympathize. Strange building acoustics and/or passive-aggressive neighbors, oy.)

But writing perfectly-polite "fuck off and die" letters is such FUN! (Oh, very well...be nice. Hmmph.)

Julie 129: Wow, that's really astonishing. Apparently Christian Europe only survived through sin. Isn't almost every day Feast, Fast, Lent, Advent, Wednesday, or the weekend?

Sex isn't allowed on weekends. Wow. That's absolutely stunning. I'm tempted to go through the calendar and figure out if there really are ANY days when it IS allowed. I assume every saint's day is a "feast," right?

Not to mention the fact that you're supposed to abstain when the woman is pregnant (Heinlein's Hell) or nursing, which IIRC could be up to TWO YEARS at that time.

Oh, wait, I get it. This was just to make everyone feel they were sinning all the time, so everyone would be miserable and easy for the Church to control. We hates them, we hates them for ever.

Now, surviving in a world depopulated by the flu? THAT seemed, by comparison, awfully attractive. I had picked out some houses I'd consider claiming in such an event. The empty streets weren't a nightmare, because I always pictured my school tormentors as having succumbed. (Don't we all?)

Of course, one post-apocalyptic scenario that STILL gives me cold shivers is the original Twilight Zone episode "All The Time In The World." Thank all that's holy, I've had LASIK now.

Kévin, #107: Your English is very good; I would not have guessed that it wasn't your first language had you not stated that you were French. Et bienvenue de moi aussi.

Rosa, #124: You made me giggle. I've lived in a 2-story townhouse with 2 cats, and it was amazing how much racket it made downstairs when they started playing chase games upstairs! I used to joke about how weren't cats supposed to be light-footed critters?

You haven't lived until the entire cast, soloists, chorus, orchestra and all, of a midsize semi-pro opera company does "Happy Birthday" for the general director.

Also, there was the time when I was a college sophomore when a bunch of us repaired to the annex of a local German-style establishment. There were several former high-school chorus members at my end of the table, and we began singing, fueled by at least enough pitchers of something cheap. The high point was undoubtedly the Hallelujah Chorus, which we actually got all the way through in reasonably good order.

Of course, the Black Death meant all bets were off...

I'll admit your choice of music is better, but on or about St. Patrick's Day in 1972 I remember a similar occasion in Tucson; I think the entire bar sang "American Pie" about seven times in succession, no verse left behind.

So ... Lazarus was actually a piece of unidentified cloth?

("Dip your finger in the water, come and / cool my tongue, 'cause I'm tor-mented in the fla-ame!")

Also, this thread being wide open, I want to ask if anyone else has odd things float into their head every so often while waking up. This time, a few days back, it was influenced by reading Erikson's _Toll the Hounds_ (not done yet, either), and arising to find that

Nyx knocks
hollyhocks
give a dog a throne
This old man came tolling home

sumamrized portions of the saga... (Mother Night and her failings; the 'scarecrows' on poles; the two wolves who currently hold the Throne of Beasts, I think it is; and Kallor wandering through all of it.)

Is this a sign that my unconscious is more literarily-enabled than I?

(And after finishing the thread so far - the Malazan series is definitely post-several-apocalypses, not all of them human, so it ties in there too...)

--Dave

I don't care that they sacked Atlantis
And Poseidon came burning down
I have to clear the site of your town
I have to step on your star
And that's the way things really are.

Well, that's obviously missing a line at the beginning, so when more fully awake I reworked it:

Even though it was your home
I don't care that they sacked old Rome
And Colossus came tumbling down
We need to raze the site of your town
I have to step on your star
And that's just the way things are.

But then a dream interpreting friend pointed out the water imagery in the original version.

Apparently my subconscious is clever enough to paraphrase its sources, because Google hasn't yielded anything. But I think I can spot the opening of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lurking behind this.

And now you all know that I can actually write poetry that isn't in lolcatese, but I have to be asleep to do it.

JJ, #102, there is no fault in being on a non-Puritan schedule.

And two things I ran into in other people's LJs today: 1) How to make chocolate cake in a mug in five minutes (from Zeborah) and 2) The Subprime Primer (from Pat Cadigan who got it from Janice Gelb).

He's no longer a regular, but he does make the occasional apprearance.

All these are set after some sort of world collapse, although they vary in how much they're about the immediate aftermath. Ones marked with an asterisk involve nuclear war specifically.

Brilliant:

John Crowley: Engine Summer
*Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker
*Walter Miller: A Canticle For Leibowitz
*Suzy McKee Charnas: Walk To The End Of The World; Motherlines

Very good:

*Leigh Brackett: The Long Tomorrow
J.G. Ballard: The Crystal World
George Stewart: Earth Abides
Brian Aldiss: Greybeard; Barefoot In The Head
Stephen Vincent Benet: By The Waters Of Babylon

Good:

*Kate Wilhelm: Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
*Pat Frank: Alas, Babylon
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend
*Joan Slonczewski: The Wall Around Eden
*Harlan Ellison: A Boy And His Dog

Decent:

*Roger Zelazny: Damnation Alley
*Edgar Pangborn: Davy; The Company Of Glory
*Vonda McIntyre: Dreamsnake
*David Brin: The Postman

Not really worth it:

*Sterling Lanier: Hiero's Journey
Mary Shelley: The Last Man

The Polyglot Bible
Schisms of Early Christianity

We have a three-storey house (including loft conversion). Often my husband asks me whether I just saw a herd of elephants go past - 'cos he heard one. We have two cats. Small ones. And both flights of stairs are carpeted. Even so: herd of elephants.

Looked forward to reading it; after I read it, I was creeped out.

My family's house has two big staircases and one hefty cat. Visitors are often freaked out when they hear a person coming downstairs and it turns out to be her.

Oh, yeah. About three years ago, I was sort-of waking up, and several things collided in my head: Cally Hills' lovely song "Mountain Man", several female friends having recently referred to or addressed their husbands by by name in my presence, and social contact the previous day with a female acquaintance who might be described politely as "promiscuous". I was slightly appalled by the result, which appeared more-or-less full-blown. It's not bad, but it's not at all my usual voice/style/content, and it shouldn't oughtta happened to Cally's song.

I suppose it's an odd state of consciousness, with the mind flitting around from one conceptual group to another. It enables finding partial correspondences and patterns.

I can understand your being creeped out; I was irked, but not shocked, at how the story was handled.

Sing a song of sixth sense,
Apocryphal, awry

Did you know that he almost played Lije Baley? Circa 1976, there were plans for a movie adaptation of Caves of Steel and he was mentionned as being involved with that. Then again I may have made assumptions, and he really was going to be Daneel Olivaw.

Did you ever see him in The Silver Chalice. That was one bizarre biblical epic, and not just because of the sets. I mean, Jack Palance wearing tights and convinced that he is the Messiah?

I need a bit of vacation help; I will be in London between 11/5 and 11/9. Some nights will be occupied with theatre, but the days are all open. I've seen the big tourist stuff (except St. Pauls, which I will be visiting this time) during previous visits - does anyone have any suggestions for cool stuff to do that tourists usually miss? I'm a big fan of history, culture and music.

Also, as the first day I will be in town will be Guy Fawkes night, is there anything I should be aware of?

The Return of Shyama Mojumdar

Only victory will bring me peace
Only the resting of your head on my chest
Only victory will bring me peace

you turned away from my night-black skin
my mouth like a joba hanging wide open
and I am just a murderess
I am just a poisoned kiss
I am Shyama Mojumdar
and I am back for blood.

I'm a hooker from Babylon
bring your rapture on
I'm more than a mother
in seven layers of muslin
and I am just a feminist
I am just a loud brown bitch

I am not the opposite of what you choose to be
my body the battleground for the clash of civilizations
Huntington's disease of self-fulfilling prophecy
I lit the spark
you fanned the flame
and I am just a terrorist
I am just a little fist

Only victory will bring me peace
Only victory will bring me peace

I am Shyama Mojumdar
never look for me again

Funny thing about that...

(Okay, so we're a little closer to "community theater" but the talent level is semi-pro. *And* it was for my 30th birthday. LOTS)

Fireworks, I'm told, although perhaps not so much as in past times...

You've probably already been if you've been hitting the Big Tourist Stuff, but I can still spend a while in the British Museum even though I go there every trip.

Your trip is long enough that buying a 7-day Travelcard for zones 1-2 might be worth it. Get it on an Oyster card[1], and put some stored value on if you're planning to make any trips outside of Zone 2...the system will only charge you the add-on fare from the zone boundary to your destination, and the Oyster fares are significantly cheaper than cash.

[1] I'm not sure you can even get the 7-days as paper tickets any more.

But of course, one can entertain oneself indefinitely without leaving London...

Also, as the first day I will be in town will be Guy Fawkes night, is there anything I should be aware of?

No matter how tempting, don't dress up in old clothes and a mask and fall asleep on any piles of wood that have been left lying around.
More seriously, if you want to see or avoid firework displays try this page. I note that some displays take place the Friday and Saturday after (7 & 8 November)

Given both of them living here, it's a lot easier to take a book and set it in physical places you know (and there is a lot of roman a clef with the casting, I know (or knew, some have died) a host of the people on whom the characters in the book were based.

So setting them in the places they inhabited was easy too.

The politics, well there are some aspects of it which are creepy. Some which are just foolish, and some which are ugly tropes. By, and large, I dislike the stronger elements of Jerry's beliefs/fears as they invade the books.

I think I saw a climactic scene while channel surfing once. Jack gets all glassy-eyed, and declares he can fly. He climbs to the top of a column, throws himself off — turns out he can't fly after all.

Was he supposed to be Simon Magnus in this movie? Looks like. This book (scroll to last paragraph on the page) claims:

Simon traveled around as a prophet, miracle-worker, and magician, apparently with a great deal of showmanship. The extant sources, of course, being Christian, draw a none too sympathetic picture of this person and doings. According to them he performed at the imperial court at Rome, and met a bad end there while attempting to fly.

[footnote]: According to at least one source, however, this was an attempted ascension meant as the end and consummation of his terrestrial mission [..] Peter then by prayer really "caused him to fall" from mid-air, thus bringing his career to an end.

Somewhere (I thought it was this book) I had seen described that the 'column' might have been a hot-air balloon, which apparently failed catastrophically.

Was Peter a saboteur? One of the ways to get results from prayer is to take a direct hand in the outcome.

What got me, and still does, is the line about being sorry for the people in the SF Valley because of the tsunami. I just keep trying to map something large enough to cross 1,800 feet of mountains, ten miles across, and it doesn't work.

...and bringing Lois Lane back from the dead in the process.

Apart from the bits which date it (black gardeners... ?) and the oddities of how they presented politics (handouts to blacks to keep the ghettos quiet) the rest of it hangs togethe tolerably well.

Once back at home, I tried to examine her to see what the problem was, but she resisted, trying to scoot away under the desk and such.

So I had to manhandle her a bit, and shine some extra illumination on her, to finally get a good look.

I tell this story just to let everyone know how sad and pathetic my life can get: it took me both hands and a flashlight to find my dog's butt.

(Oh, the problem? I thought she'd gotten an infected rectum, but the vet the next morning diagnosed it as overly-compacted anal glands. I was just as glad to let one of the veterinary assistants squeeze out the excess, rather than trying to do it myself.)

My dog is really shaggy down under. The back of her thighs are covered with heavy "feathering," concealing the back door. When Kira goes in for blood donations I ask the vet to carve a poop shoot with the shaver used to expose the needle site. This lets crap tumble out without sticking to any fur.

Although, lately, it's been briquette city. Kira has been chewing up a giant bone. The calcium shavings turn into poop cement. Kind of like pumice.

geekosaur's link to the Overview of World Religions site shows proof-of-principle (and hey, it's interactive!) - that flowcharting this question does make logical sense; but I still dream of seeing a version that also shows the decision point for each split.

I'm still trying to find out if 'White Grease' is the same as 'Lithium Grease' or is the same as "Singer 2129 Lubricant" or none of the above -- and searching for either "singer lubricant" or "singer grease" is an education in things completely unrelated to sewing machines...

Said education might, however, help with your dog's stoppage ;)

Come, Gentle Bombs
www.aslan.demon.co.uk/bomb.htm
"I am glad to see that Armageddon is coming back into fashion. Nuclear holocausts were a tremendously important part of my childhood … "What do today's children use as raw material for their nightmares? Failing their accountancy exams? It is healthy for an adolescent to picture his mortality in terms of a nuclear fireball sometime before his thirtieth birthday; it keeps the untidy, depressing future firmly off the agenda.

The sad demise of the nuclear bomb is also to blame for the chronic decline in Church attendance and religious belief. Am I the only person whose first serious prayer was 'Please God don't let Mrs Thatcher start a nuclear war, however much she might want to'?"...

Larry Niven admits to having the earth rotating in the wrong direction in Chapter 1 of the first printing of Ringworld.

When Garth Ennis revamped Dan Dare, the first issue has a scene of people in a space station looking down at Earth and at what's left of America after its nuclear war with China. Dare himself has been living alone on an asteroid that's a giant holographic reproduction of a British village of the 1930s.

*Even though every veterinarian knows (or should know) that these are sacs, and not glands, we universally name them glands to avoid the obvious problem with owners.

And xeger, I'm exhausted after a sewing-supply conversation yesterday, and am sure that neither of the two other points of the triangle still has their maternal grandmother's half- full tin of Singer 2129 Lubricant. I was being treated as if I was Making Things Up because I asked if the store stocked buttonhole twist silk. No, embroidery floss won't work, and no, 100 gauge silk thread is not the same thing, and no, they're not adequate substitutes because they're not spun tightly enough... If you need the right stuff, you need the right stuff, whether it's thread or grease, and having to deal with people who think you're wrong because you know things they don't... argh. There's points in life when I just don't need another demonstration of the tendancy of people to perceive those more than 20 IQ points smarter than they are as "stupid."

In actual answer to your question, there's a chart of lubricants online somewhere, put out, if memory serves, by a group with Petrochemical Engineers/Engineering in their name. It shows chemical and physical characteristics and substitutions, and I wish I could give you a url, but I wasn't the one who found it.

Heh.

I can't wait for the next installment of 'The Mouse in God's Eye'.

The sad demise of the nuclear bomb is also to blame for the chronic decline in Church attendance and religious belief. Am I the only person whose first serious prayer was 'Please God don't let Mrs Thatcher start a nuclear war, however much she might want to'?"...

Replace "Mrs Thatcher" with "President Reagan" and I'm right there.

Ugh, yes. That one reminds me of a discussion about why rigelene isn't a reasonable substituted for sprung steel boning when doing corsetry...

If you need the right stuff, you need the right stuff, whether it's thread or grease, and having to deal with people who think you're wrong because you know things they don't...

Heh. That's got me thinking about work, where it currently appears that somebody is (a) eating up most of a 300G filesystem by not cleaning up after themselves, and (b) has sent out a nastygram about how their scripts got deleted... when they simply can't navigate directory structures...

In actual answer to your question, there's a chart of lubricants online somewhere, put out, if memory serves, by a group with Petrochemical Engineers/Engineering in their name. It shows chemical and physical characteristics and substitutions, and I wish I could give you a url, but I wasn't the one who found it.

Hm. There's a reference to the Interchangeable Lubrication Guide[0] which unfortunately appears to be commercial...

I'm irrationally fascinated by the idea of Industrial Lubrication and Tribology as a topic name -- it seems like a fine way to describe scenes like this from the Matrix Reloaded.

[0] If I could only yank my brain up out of the gutter...

The Tailor of Gloucester! And the mice! And the little note, "No more twist!"

Singer's hotline: 1-800-877-7762.

As regards #2129: one ebay guide says it's unique, and white or lithium grease not a good substitute at all.

Then there's this:

"Use only SINGER LUBRICANT to lubricate the bevel gears and the motor. SINGER lubricant is a non-flowing lubricant that will stay on the gears and it will not dry out. I have cleaned old machines where someone has used white grease or some other grease that has dried and caked so badly it had to scraped off. You can image how long this can take. SINGER lubricant can be purchased at most fabric stores, it comes in a 1/2 oz tube and is called just SINGER LUBRICANT, Singer item #2129. The reason one should use Singer lubricant on the motor and not oil, oil can run onto the commutator and cause sparking of the brushes and will shorten the life of the motor. The lubricant, being non-flowing will stay on the bearings where it belongs. The motor and the bevel gears should be lubed at least once a year and more often if the machine is used daily."

and this:
"Margaret, thanks for sharing your research with us. A tube of Singer Lubricant costs about $2.25. It is in a red and white 1/2 oz. tube with the words "SINGER Lubricant". I bought mine at Woolworth's. This is a fairly common item wherever Singer products are displayed."

both from this page on Oiling Your Featherweight

And Rikibeth, the store is, in fact, one of my favorites, Shibori Dragon in Lakewood, which carries a million wonderful other things (and is where I go for beads not available at Shipwreck) but has mostly Japanese import fabrics and threads and items for the quilting craft. And (for those in this sector who have wondered about the store without ever being curious to make that left turn on Gravelly Lake Drive) there's also a pretty rad selection of yarns.

Also, today's nonfunctional keyboard letters are e, r, z, and x. I really need to see if any of the surplus are less horrid.

Part of the reason why I'm trying to find out what "white grease" is, vs "white grease with a lithium base" vs "lithium grease" vs "Singer 2129 Lubricant" is that it seems deeply strange[0] that Singer would have managed to develop some unique non-flowing lubricant with no other known equivalent.

There's certainly folk out there that swear by lithium grease for sewing machine bevel gears/drive shaft/motor, as well.

I have cleaned old machines where someone has used white grease or some other grease that has dried and caked so badly it had to scraped off.

One thing I can definitely say -- whatever grease was used before was awful :)

The reason one should use Singer lubricant on the motor and not oil, oil can run onto the commutator and cause sparking of the brushes and will shorten the life of the motor. The lubricant, being non-flowing will stay on the bearings where it belongs.

It seems obvious to me that it's a bad idea to use oil on parts that could squish the oil out/splatter it/get into the electric motor -- but then again, I suspect that the standard audience for sewing machines may not be expected to be accustomed to the idea of having to lubricate much beyond baking sheets.

I've currently got (handy in the house) "white grease with a lithium base", which apparently has something like "white grease solids" in it (and if that's the same thing as the pig fat related white grease -- ew!), some sort of generic sticky yellow lubricant, and the screaming pink-purple lithium grease that I use for motorcycle axles and other rotating parts. While I suppose lanolin might work, it seems like it's more likely to stink ;)

[0] Given that their research focus appears to be elsewhere

Or 'The Mouse That Roared in God's Eye'. First contact with the tiny alien race known as the Mousies goes awry as the aliens fail to solve their intractable overpopulation problem when they defeat the Second Empire of Man instead of losing as they had planned.

(I was also looking at the website of TS Moly, an oil and lubricant company (MolyD), which has greases for fishing reels and motorcycle splines. Probably not exactly what sewing machines need.)

For an older, all metal machine, I'd suspect the use cases aren't all that different... ;)

I still get "Husqvarna? Don't they make [chainsaws|motorcycles]" as a routine response to having a Husqvarna sewing machine :) It quite has me understanding why they started selling as Viking!

I'm in the process of switching my RSS feeds from Google Reader to Akregator (built in feed reader in Kontact (KDE/Linux) and I'm finding that the last few rss feeds haven't transferred over. When I try to add them using the address at the subscribe link, it claims that the feeds can't be found.

Anyone have any ideas? I was so happy to see that it actually listed the comments in order, I'd really like to switch over.

The odd thing is that it doesn't seem to be consistant. The Brian Thompson thread transfered over, but the ones before and after didn't, so it isn't date related. It also found some feeds from old threads that I hadn't bothered to delete.

If anyone has an alternate suggestion for a rss reader in KDE/Linux (specifically Kubuntu), I'm open to suggestions.

Buttonhole twist silk? Is that like button thread but of silk? If so, bookbinders use it for sewing headbands.

(Meaning that if you can't find it any other way, check out online bookbinding suppliers like Talas.)

And yes, lots of groomers do anal gland expression regularly. My cat sometimes gets problems with them getting stopped up, and it wasn't until I started working in a vets office that I realized what the toxic liquid farts actually were. The more you know...

I suspect most of the people who might be affected by this news already know it, but it occurs to me, some who visit here might not have heard. Jim Killus (smog scientist, technical writer, sf writer, aikidoist, friend) died 9-23 in Grand Rapids, MI. He is survived by his wife, Amy Sefton, his mother and sister, and grieving friends. Anyone who wants more info, feel free to e-mail me.

For those who are curious, some of his writing can be found at his blog, Unintentional Irony.

Mike's exegesis of some of the Nth Millennium novels suggests the last word is unnecessary.

JJ Fozz: opinions on Emergence vary, even if you don't know enough biology to be outraged by his claiming a polar bear is a weasel; it's very ... sticky? manipulative? Try Brain Wave or Twilight World by Poul Anderson, or (half-holocaust) War of Omission by K. M. O'Donnell. Earth Abides is one of the prototypes, but IMO it hasn't aged well; similarly creaky but less obsessed with symbols are the "Meg the Priestess" stories by Nelson Bond.
For more recent post-post-Holocaust work (if that also interests you), see Masters of Solitude and Wintermind by Kaye and Godwin, or Richard Cowper's The Road to Corlay and A Dream of Kinship (paired), or Twilight of Briareus (standalone, in which the world doesn't so much fall as vaguely saunter downward). NB: the only post-apocalyptic part of A Mirror for Observers is the epilogue -- but it's very much worth reading.

nerdycellist: I thought backstage at the National Theater (south bank) was interesting; YMMV (I did theater for several years in school). Have you seen \all/ of the interesting parts of the V&A (there are a lot of them)? The Museum of the City of London needs to be skimmed or taken in pieces; try walking up to it from Tower Bridge following the arrows that connect sections of the old wall. The London Transport Museum is also fascinating for geeks. If you want to get off your feet, take a boat from Westminster down to the Thames Barrier and back (or at least to Greenwich -- I second Christopher's recommendation).

My condolences to those who knew him.

The readon it kills me is that, for most of my sewing life, the Coats and Clarke thread case, the standard one that was at Penney's and Sears, and places like Wolf's in Yelm that had a small selection of fabric and patterns and findings, had 100 colors of regular sewing thread on small spools, plus red, blue, brown, green, yellow, two black and two white on larger spools, and a row of twenty colors of buttonhole twist. That was it- for more colors, or for pastels on large spools, you had to go to a specialty fabric store; there were two of those in close driving range.

I'm looking at the internet, since it's unlikely I'll get down to Portland any time soon, and who knows, maybe even Fabric Depot has replaced tailor's necessities with more spools of fuzzy nylon for machine embroidery. I'd rather spend money near home, but things less and less work out that way.

Chart of Good, Bad, and Meh Things to Say During Sex

*No, that does not make this a "you people" comment.

Each wants to reap what other folk have sowed
without a pause for any to explain
we lack a sense of truly human mode.

No one waits here at the most urgent node,
the place where all the symbols stand out plain;
there is no way for us to read the code

We've come too far along this narrow road
to discount all the moments of small gain,
we lack a sense of truly human mode.

It's far too easy to let time erode
the certainties for which you should campaign;
there is no way for us to read the code.

A grain of powder would make things explode
and halt at once the long-prevailing pain;
we lack a sense of truly human mode,
there is no way for us to read the code.

Have you tried London Walks? They are fun and kind of quirky.

And don't go doing that kind of thing again. It's very irresponsible. The Fluorosphere would be most put out by a repetition.

Not that I'm eager to go back to chemical process photography, but there are days when I find myself screaming "why don't you want to focus NOW?" and it would be nice to have something to fall back on.

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West -- the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail -- were distributed by mail in Ohio, a "chemical irritant" was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers.

Went down the road and figured I'd gone the wrong way. Turned around and disovered the other way was straight onto the airbase.

Turned back around and discovered it was just around the corner.

Wonderful shop, great people. They do in house chemistry. Before Tech-pan went away it was a little longer (the chemistry is only good for 24 hours, so no one keeps it on hand), so if I wanted it same day it had to be in before 1100.

When I decided to go digital I called Dana, said I wanted the camera. She asked if I was serious. I said I had the credit card in my hand, and she said, "I'll tell Todd to take it away from the guy who's looking at it."

They have used gear, added framing in 2005, and all in all are really supportive.

When I replace the D2H, I'll call Dana up, and have her ship me the new one.

...I'm exhausted after a sewing-supply conversation yesterday, and am sure that neither of the two other points of the triangle still has their maternal grandmother's half- full tin of Singer 2129 Lubricant. I was being treated as if I was Making Things Up because I asked if the store stocked buttonhole twist silk.

Oh lord. *sympathy*

I suspect you can identify with how elated I was, a couple of months or so ago when the rubber ring for the bobbin winder on my 1913 non-electrified Singer broke, to find a replacement available, online, for two or three dollars.

glinda @220- Old sewing machines, and especially the old precision-engineered Singers, benefit from having a huge installed base, internationally: a lot of export clothing economies in the developing world are based on that technology. And it was stable for a long time, compared to most other manufactured consumer goods, like my OM-1s. The only thing I can compare a classic Singer to is the AK-47: tough, simple, and easily repaired.

Christopher @ 166 -

Thanks for suggesting the Docklands and Greenwich. I'm beginning to get interested in maritime history and that sounds like it might be a nice day. Also appreciate the suggestion for the Oyster Card. Last time I was there they still had the paper passes available. (I have promised myself I won't spend even more time at the British Museum and the Tower of London this time around.)

Neil @ 168

Haven't climbed the monument yet, but I checked and it looks like it's going through some renovations at the time I'll be there. And thanks for the website with the fireworks info. I'll have to see if I am more amenable to crowds when travelling.

Juli @ 214

Thanks for the link. We took a wonderful London Fire walk with this group a few years ago. They don't have their days trips up yet for the winter, but it looks like they might have a few really cool ones when I'm there.

Chip @ 208

I'm keeping my eyes out for boat related trips, and the hint about touring the National Theatre should come in handy should I fail to obtain rush tickets for Oedipus. (sigh) We had originally intended this trip as a theatre trip, but by the time airfares had become reasonable, it seems all the theatre we wanted to see in London had sold out for the dates we were going to be there. I will have to content myself with the RSC.

Which I found to be really good, but at the same time, it is a book you need to make time for, both the read and to get your head into and then out of the headspace required to make your way through the language.

Bread and Jam for Frances it is not! :)

OKTHX!

Has anyone else been watching Bones this season? WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, AND WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH OUR CHARACTERS? Booth is being a flaming asshole, and Brennan is letting him get away with it! Angela dumped Hodgins... well, that's not completely out of character, we knew she had commitment issues, but the way she did it was just weird. Witty lab repartee -- gone, in favor of ham-handed sexual innuendo and toilet humor. Everyone's IQ seems to have dropped by at least 20 points. And don't EVEN get me started on Sweets, the Least-Professional Psychologist of All Time! All the character development that happened over the course of the first 2 seasons is just... gone. They've turned the show into a romantic comedy, and I'm sick to my stomach.

I put the DVD right in the trash.

I'd love to see some millionaire distribute a DVD containing Jesus Camp and a new documentary based on scary excerpts from sermons given in crazy-ass Christian Identity churches.

I believe that you owe me a new lining for my nostrils, and several wipes for my screen... ;D

Here's a photo of the interior.

Joel Polowin @153: I've been in the headspace of your song, too, more often than I care to admit. I rather like it (the song, not the headspace).

Rosa @146: Agreed about The City, Not Long After -- hauntingly beautiful. In some ways it's still my gold standard for character-driven SF.

JJ Fozz: Arguably Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem, is a post-many-apocalypses book. Whether it's also a pre-apocalyptic book or not I don't know, since I'm not finished with it yet. (Enjoying it greatly, though.)

Also, in my world it's perfectly normal to be operating a saw or doing fairly major construction at 3a, but I'm well aware that the world I inhabit and the world most of the rest of humanity inhabits share relatively few points of congruence. (Some of that is the product of a particular culture and some of that is the product of wonky sleep schedules. When you woke up at 7p and ate breakfast at 9p, why wouldn't you be building things at 4a?) Does suck to live nearby, I'm sure.

Joel Polowin @153: I've been in the headspace of your song, too, more often than I care to admit. I rather like it (the song, not the headspace).

Rosa @146: Agreed about The City, Not Long After -- hauntingly beautiful. In some ways it's still my gold standard for character-driven SF.

JJ Fozz: Arguably Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem, is a post-many-apocalypses book. Whether it's also a pre-apocalyptic book or not I don't know, since I'm not finished with it yet. (Enjoying it greatly, though.)

Also, in my world it's perfectly normal to be operating a saw or doing fairly major construction at 3a, but I'm well aware that the world I inhabit and the world most of the rest of humanity inhabits share relatively few points of congruence. (Some of that is the product of a particular culture and some of that is the product of wonky sleep schedules. When you woke up at 7p and ate breakfast at 9p, why wouldn't you be building things at 4a?) Does suck to live nearby, I'm sure, so I guess it only works when everyone in the area is comparably weird-shifted.

Kevin, I'm glad you like the cake! I'd have to buy the first four ingredients to make it (I don't cook anymore), so if I was at the store, I could just buy cake!

One thing that seems strange to me is how the Dayton Daily News account of the incident https://www.daytondailynews.com/n/userreg/ursignup/signup.jsp?UrUsecase=800100&SendBackURL=%2Fn%2Fcontent%2Foh%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Flocal%2F2008%2F09%2F27%2Fddn092608evacweb.html%3Fcxtype%3Drss%26cxsvc%3D7%26cxcat%3D16(mostly based on the police report) makes it seem so much *smaller* than the Daily Kos account (an eyewitness account.) Not pepper spray. Not a hate crime. One child and one adult got sick and they don't know why...the newspaper doesn't deny anything in the eyewitness account, but it makes it look like it might be an accident, no big deal.

It shouldn't seem strange to me. Not after I've seen the mainstream media coverage of "riot control" near the Republican National Convention. Not when the beginning of this story was that newspapers were distributing DVDs to encourage fear and hatred of Muslims. I just looked it up. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erik-ose/pro-mccain-group-dumping_b_125969.html
The Dayton Daily News was one of the papers distributing the DVD, either Sept 14th or the 21st. It's just that I'm so accustomed to finding amateur fanatics online, that I want to confirm factual reports from "reputable" sources. This sort of thing bothers me.

Riverboat to Greenwich and back on the DLR is a good combination, but a lot of service details have changed since I did that. You pass through the middle of the Canary Wharf complex on the DLR.

I cry thee yay!

Check out what will be at the Design Museum (Butler's Wharf) -- unlike most of the museums, it isn't free, but flash an old student card for a discount. It's a small place with two temporary exhibitions going at a time.

7-day Travelcards can still be bought as paper tickets. If you decide to go for an Oyster, though, please do get your technique down. Don't make the common beginner's mistake of standing too close to the gates, or it'll give you an error (code 94, I think) telling you to Seek Assistance. Take a step back and try again. Also, it's "plinky-plonky, not swipey-wipey".

(Why, yes, I used to change at Baker Street.)

The Bonfire Night fireworks at Blackheath -- a few stops out of London Bridge by National Rail, or you can get there from Lewisham on the DLR -- are truly something to see, but be prepared for epic crowds. If you're not going to see fireworks, stay in, because transit is hell.

You could always design a historical pub crawl for yourself -- the John Snow and the Ten Bells come to mind. There's a few pubs around Wapping and Shadwell which are centuries old.

Re: the Greenwich foot tunnel -- weekend before last there was a pirate-themed party there in honour of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Great fun.

If you're in town for most of Sunday, spend it in Brick Lane, when the street becomes one big garage sale. Unfortunately, there are loads of hipsters with skinny jeans and side parts; but why miss the joy of getting a fresh bagel from a shop that's been around since Whitechapel was the Jewish area?

(East London bias, here.)

(looks around for Ducky-Lucky and Turkey-Lurkey, and up to see if the sky is falling)

Nope. Explain, please?

I shall be staying in Dusseldorf for a couple of evenings (22/23/24) in lateish October. What's a Must See for someone with an evening to spare? I'll be based a few minutes from the hauptbahnhof and will be walking or U-bahning with Definite Directions. (I speak enough German to order a latte and explain that I'm English ...)

My first offering in trade is a bit obvious: if anyone is visiting Bath (in England ...) then the Roman Baths are IMAO a Must See: not too pricey, of the order of an hour or so to go round, and very revealing as to history &co.

The less obvious second offering from Bath is the Herschel Museum of Astronomy. History and artifacts, yum.

Thanks to nerdycellist for a topic I was going to raise in an open thread anyway ...

Vernor Vinge's Marooned In Realtime might fit. Something mysterious disappeared all the humans alive as of a certain date (early 22d century IIRC), and the only people left after that were those who had time-traveled into the future (one-way) and skipped past that event. They keep jumping into the future farther and farther trying to join up with each other and re-found a new civilization. It's a sequel to The Peace War, good but not as good as Marooned In Realtime, where the one-way time-travel was invented.

Here are a few random ideas if you only have an evening or so of free time. You might want to go to the top of the Fernsehturm (TV tower). Lovely view. The Medienhafen quarter has a lot of interesting architecture. The Altstadt (walking distance from the Hauptbahnhof,) has a nice atmosphere, and there are a lot of pubs serving Düsseldorf's specialty beer, Altbier.

Interestingly, Düsseldorf also has a lot of Japanese restaurants; this is the center of Japanese business in Germany, if not Europe. Most of them are also pretty near the Hauptbahnhof, although I can't give you a specific recommendation.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have more specific interests.

If you were going to be in Helsinki later this month (business in Helsinki, time to travel as well), what might be the best two places nearby (on the Baltic) to visit? Saint Petersburg (Hermitage Museum alone) seems to top travel lists.

Seeing the archipelago between Stockholm and Helsinki wouldn't be as good as in summer--the ferry schedules are mostly in darkness.

Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant's Palace is set long-after-apocalypse. Haven't read it in way too long, so don't remember much detail about it.

JHomes.

I was just thinking that _The Peace War_ sort of fit the genre, in terms of the history between now and when the story takes place.

Rosa:

I don't remember any home nuclear plants or racist fearmongering in Lucifer's Hammer. There were cannibals, probably modeled after the Lord's Resistance Army. (But it's been about a decade since I've read it, so take my memories with a grain of salt.) There was an existing nuclear plant which was an important part of the story, though. (And there was at least one really good surfer in the story.)

The racist bits are questionable. One of the bad guys is a black activist who is painted as a thief and a crook. A murderous thug who was out to scam the man, and pissed off that an "Uncle Tom" was elected who turnd off the tap to free money.

So he goes back to a life of cheap stick-ups.

He hooks up with the mutinous army guys, and the are all part of the canibalistic army.

The commune types are shown to be inneffective, and the only other "crooks" with any organisation are the bikers who get blown up.

The forces of law, order and authority are the only ones who really thrive. The proto-feudalists are the good guys, the indepenant locals are seen to be valiant, but in need of protecting, and everyone else looks to the lord of the manor, with his geographically defined fortress as the bastion of safety and life.

Step out of line and be cast out of the valley, to die in the outer darkness.

And that with me, basically, thinking it's a good read.

I don't have an Oyster card myself (not useable from my rail station) but from having seen people using them, he means you press the card to the yellow reader and lift it away again, rather than swiping it across the reader.

Thanks for the suggestions, Debbie. I shall consult maps and decide what to do ... probably on the Thursday evening after wearing my feet out at the Essen Spielfair.

If anyone's looking for a good book to read, I just got my hands on a copy of this book, and I'm finding it to be a rollicking good space yarn.

I do know the authors, and am partial to Dave Freer's works, but I get no monetary compensation for pointing out this book. Occasionally, I get killed in one of their books, so it all works out.

So, I should look for the veterinarian in the red shirt?

Yeah, I remember all that pretty well. Having some black characters that are bad guys is pretty different from writing a racist screed. The whole quick return to feudalism was an interesting notion, and seemed vaguely plausible to me, though I simply have no experience with anything like the collapse of civil order after a disaster, so I don't know. The cannibal army seemed bizarre and implausible to me, but I think it may have been modeled after the LRA, which is real and about as scary.

It would be interesting to read about what happens when the normal civilized order falls apart in different places. I know in some places you end up with warlords and something that looks a lot like feudalism.

"I'm a doctor, dammit! Not a bricklayer!"

Maybe. Oath of Fealty worked with a premise that the Saints had much more loyalty to Todos Santos than to Los Angeles (or probably to the US), and that this loyalty bound tighter than race. There was definitely social class involved, however, as there weren't any poor people living in Todos Santos, and the people themselves were in some sense weird to the point of near-cultishness.

*Non-Freerian book

In re the mosque attack: Is it plausible that all the physical evidence would have evaporated?

Singer All Purpose oil (see upper right hand product under "tools") is, according to that link, an ISO Viscosity Grade (VG) 10 lubricant with "advanced adhesive properties". ISO VG 10 is generally classified as "Spindle Oil".

I can't find anything on the Singer site for the little 1/2 ounce tube of #2129 lubricant that others here have mentioned, but I did find a forum or two that described it as a thin clear grease. Anybody here handle the stuff before? I'm not having much luck digging up any grade or weight or base information.

Grease is just oil with a built-in "drip cup" - the thickener (usually a metal soap like lithium soap) acts like a "sponge" that the oil drains out of over time to keep the moving parts slippery. When about half the oil is gone, the grease should be replaced.

The main thing: don't mix different greases if you don't know exactly what's in them. The term for what could happen is called "catastrophic failure" as the soap (the stuff that holds the oil in) breaks down, the oil runs out everywhere, the additives fall out of suspension and the parts start to grind together. Nasty.

For small, (relatively) delicate moving bits as in a sewing machine where you need smooth movement over a widely varying speed range, you probably want a relatively "soft" grease, and you'll want to clean and re-grease on a regular basis. Loads are probably low enough that a plain lithium grease would probably work just fine. I'd hazard a guess at an NLGI 0 or 1. NLGI 2 is good for roller bearings on vehicle axles, for comparison. A thin moly grease would probably be excellent, just don't use too much so it doesn't fling off everywhere.

The guy who mentioned dried up, caked-on white grease? All "plain, ordinary" grease will do that if it isn't replaced regularly, and the caking can be accelerated by storing in a hot attic or garage. Some synthetics will last longer, but you'd really need to ask someone more familiar with sewing machines.

I would not suggest silicone oil or grease be used in this application. If it drips out onto your fabric, it ain't coming out without a fight, and the fabric may lose that fight.

This evening I stopped in at an Algerian bakery on Blackstock Road to bring wonderful crumbly almond bars back home. Ramadan sweets are well-suited to Rosh Hashanah as well. Pleasantly full of apples and bread and honey and almonds and wine.

(On googling around, I find out it's around Eid time, too. A גוט יאנתיף all round then.)

Carol Kimball @243 and dcb @255: yes, some people don't realise Oysters are just touchcards. Lately Internet tutorials on how to remove the RFID chips have been circulating. City boys have taken to putting the chips in their watches. I would like to stick one in an oyster-shell and make an actual Oyster.

Have they been putting them in their Rolex Oysters?

You could generate bloviation by the paragraph.

Just a thought.

* Roasting garlic

Pull a good length of tin foil. Fold it in half. Fold the edges together, a half-inch or so, to make a seam. Fold it in half again. Fold a seam along the sides, leaving the top open. See what you’ve made? A tinfoil pocket. A shiny silver scrotum from the future. Now get a garlic, a whole head. Find a knife and slice the very top off, so you can see the tops of the individual cloves inside. Put it in the tinfoil pocket.

Open a bottle of beer. Not fucking Budweiser or Labatts — a proper beer, damnit. During this experiment, I used the outstanding Black Adder ale from Mauldons. A good bitter, an ale, an IPA — a proper fucking beer, you know what I mean. Pour some down your throat. Now pour some in the tinfoil. A mouthful or so. Spit your mouthful out into the pocket if you’d like. I mean, it’d be disgusting, but the person you’re cooking for will never know, right? Close up the pocket, so you now have a sealed tinfoil bag full of a head of garlic and (possibly regurgitated) beer.

Sling it in the oven. Your oven is set to 190 degrees C, which is 375F or Gas mark 5. It’s going to be in there for an hour. Have some more beer. Swallow it this time, you freak.

This Singer All Purpose Oil -- can one use it with lasers or fluorescent porcelain?

ConFurvatives.

I use pretty much the same method, except I use a good glug of olive oil instead of (regurgitated) beer. Roasted garlic is unbelievably tasty. I like mushing the cloves into mayo for an easy roasted garlic aioli.

Personally, I find made up words cromulent.

(Although I still get the point of the cartoon... epic fantasies that replace heaps of perfectly good words with ridiculous, linguistically disassociated invented words for no particular reason are usually not the cream of the genre.)

Personally, I find made up words cromulent.

(Although I still get the point of the cartoon... epic fantasies that replace heaps of perfectly good words with ridiculous, linguistically disassociated invented words for no particular reason are usually not the cream of the genre.)

"Zwilniks" > "Bobble"

For those of us from the Ithaca/Cornell area, that brings to mind two local towns arguing about water rights.

(No, there isn't a Treckle, NY. But there should be. )

As tends to happen every year, yesterday somebody on a local (Arkansas) email discussion list asked where she could find hedge apples (aka Osage oranges or horse apples or bodark balls). She'd heard these bumpy green fruits have traditionally been used as an insect repellent, and she wanted to try it out.

So somebody else posted a link to a pdf Facts and Myths Associated with "Hedge Apples" published in 1997 by the Department of Horticulture at Iowa State University. The article says:

The use of hedge apples as a pest solution is communicated as a folk tale complete with testimonials about apparent success. However, there is an absence of scientific research and therefore no valid evidence to confirm the claims of effectiveness. Although insect deterrent compounds have been extracted from hedge apples in laboratory studies, these do not provide a logical explanation about why hedge apples would work as claimed. At this time, there is nothing to recommend the use of hedge apples for pest controll.

I was curious if there had been further study since then, so I did some Googling. Turns out this article is linked to from the Wikipedia article on the Osage orange and I see it used on various sites as an authoritative refutation when people tout the insect repellent properties of these fruits. But further search led me to read of several articles (full text not available online--to me, anyway) by other people at the same university studying the use of Osage oranges and their extracts in repelling various insects. They had even filed for at least one patent concerning the extracts from this fruit.

So I started to write the original article's author to point out that there has since been new research that does "recommend the use of hedge apples for pest control" but then I reread the above-quoted paragraph and realized he was almost certainly aware of them--he refers to extract studies---but doesn't think they "provide a logical explanation about why hedge apples would work as claimed."

His logic seems flawed to me: (1) Generations of people report insect repellent properties of these fruits; (2) scientists note these anecdotes and study extracts from the fruits, finding significant insect deterrent effects; (3) this author concludes the extracts do have deterrent effects but there's no good reason to think the fruits themselves would be useful for insect control.

Am I missing something?

This Singer All Purpose Oil -- can one use it with lasers or fluorescent porcelain?

Lasers:

One might could use it as "way oil" on the X/Y axis positioning tables or as a "spindle oil" for rotating fixtures for lasers, but it is quite light so it may not be suitable for heavy load applications. If the refractive and transmissive properties are correct for the laser in question, one could possibly use some of it as an oil lens. It could be used as a coolant, but there are much better fluids for that purpose. With a sufficiently powerful laser of the appropriate wavelength, one could ignite the oil from a distance. If it is a darker oil or has poor refractive/transmissive characteristics, one could smudge it on one's competitor's high-power laser's optics while muttering "Buddy boy, buddy boy." to cause a meltdown of said laser. (A note of caution: Said method of attack may lead to finding one's Citroen 2CV placed in one's sleeping area and having its pneumatic suspension modified and enhanced to make the vehicle appear to be snoring while sleeping.) I'm not sufficiently enlightened in the laser area to be able to comment on whether the oil itself could be used as a lasing medium in the solid ("Ice is nice!"), liquid, gas, or plasma phases, but if anyone wants to fund the project I'm willing to experiment. All funding must be accompanied by an "I (heart) Toxic Waste" T-shirt, a pair of silver-ball-tipped springy false antennae, and a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers to produce the correct experimental mindset.

Fluorescent porcelain:

I'm certain it would slick the porcelain up quite well, unless the surface hasn't been glazed and is too porous. One could also use the oil to support a fluorescent substance in suspension and let it soak into a porous unglazed "plain" porcelain to create the fluorescent porcelain. How good it would look would depend again on the refractive and transmissive qualities of the oil. Ignite the oiled porcelain with the laser mentioned above and one gets flaming fluorescent porcelain, for double the ffun.

xeger @#277:

Fortunately the greasy end is at the opposite end from the head -- you'd have to be doing something rather wrong (and probably getting caught in the belt) in order to get grease on the work.

While I respect that, silicone oil (the slick part of silicone grease) can travel quite far. It is banned from certain manufacturing areas due to how badly it can contaminate various processes. (One can utterly ruin a paint shop with the stuff...) Plus, it is water clear, so one may not notice the presence of it on a spot where fabric may get until it is too late. Hence the caution. Incidentally, there are many silicone lubricants that are FDA and USDA approved for use in food processing machinery, as it is unlikely to be visible in food it gets into. (Plus it is largely inert with respect to digestive chemistry.)

Here's cartoonist Don Asmussen on McCain and the bailout:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/26/DDASMUSSENBR.DTL

I want to try Fragano's "weird" recipe, but I think maraschino cherries are loathsome beyond description. Do you suppose I can just leave them out? Put in soused dried cherries instead? I'm not concerned about their flavor or texture effects, so much as their sheer volume and water contribution.

I suppose I could chop them to oblivion in my cool new food processor, and dump in the resulting puree. That wouldn't be TOO horrible, though of course the evil dye would still be there...but this isn't something we're going to make a steady diet, so maybe that's not a big deal.

Opinions?

___
*In a search that would no doubt prove—I ask no forgiveness—fruitless.

I have my entire lj on "adult content" default, and often forget to click on a different rating when I'm posting the 99% of my content which is G rated (like my one and only stated interest, this dates back to Strikethrough, and is only, barely, true when I recommend NC-17 fic). I've wondered if the Russians are looking for porn.

JESR@299: It really doesn't look like a recipe that has "balance" so much as "momentum". Or perhaps "knock you on your ass". :)

Disclaimer: I have a notably "what the hell, it might work" attitude towards cooking.

JESR is right about the "cyanide kick" though. Hmm.

I have had this invasion too, nor, according my flist, am I the only one by any means.

Judging by the avatars and photos that accompanied these russians I'm assuming they are sex workers come fishing, or some other sort with nefarious or at least larcenous intent.

I ban them immediately.

Their ljs are all in cyrillic. I haz no trust.

So I now feel the need to check my flist every few days, just in case another one shows up, whereas previously I never bothered, unless adding a new 'friend' to one of the filtered lists.

Love, C.

I was going to put up Bing cherries in brandy this summer, adding five cracked seeds to each jar, but things went all sideways early on and never got much better, and I can only put the project on the list for summer 2009.

At the moment, I'm attempting to find a way to lay down some fennel in alcohol to have on hand when bronchitus season comes; I'm stymied today by lack of vodka or brandy or, as per usual, slack in the budget for purchase of same.

It appears to mean "something that has failed" or "a situation in which a failure has occurred." I think.

Usage pointers welcome, so that I may avoid embarrassing myself in using the new version of "fail" incorrectly.

http://failblog.org/ is normative for this.

Then "fail", as a noun, is a situation which can correctly be tagged FAIL.

Ewww.

Warning: Veterinary Information Contained in Link. Do not click if you are squeamish.

And yes, I have handled one of those. Never have I seen a more surprised bull, but I blame the resident for cranking up the power really fast. Typical male, I suppose Moo?!?

I can say that using a spray bottle to moisten the cakes is a great idea. (Plus, spray-rum is always fun!)

This year, though, I think we'll stick with truffles. There's nothing easier than truffles, but people think they're hard to make, so they make great presents.

I think it likely started from "[foo] fails at [bar]", as in "I fail at math", "She fails at life", etc. I remember that going around a couple years before "Fail" and "EPIC FAIL" became common.

I bet he was.
It gives a whole new meaning to "Where's the beef?"

Lee@292: They shrivel up. They only last 2-3 months (depending on where you are) but usually by that time, it's winter and the insect problem isn't so...problematic. I was told to put the fruits on something (such as plastic wrap) so they won't harm the wood or whatever they're placed on. One great-aunt said she cut them in half to use outdoors (at the base of trees for some particular sort of insect pest? don't remember details) but indoors they're used whole.

Frankly, I doubt they're all that effective--certainly not compared to the concentrated chemicals (naturally derived and otherwise) available today. But historically even a slight efficacy would have made it a no-brainer. These thorny trees were widely planted in pasturelands to make thick, impenetrable hedgerows (before barbed wire) and so there was always a great deal of fruit just lying around on the ground (and inedible to humans). As a family put up their crops for the winter, placing hedgeapples in the barn, attic, cellar, etc. would have been a smart use of a plentiful resource.

Is this it? Alton Brown's Free Range Fruitcake

Cat Meadors @309: Here's AB's fruitcake recipe, from Food Network. The show transcript is also available from the Good Eats Fanpage

I just saw a dire panic "they are destroying our copyright sign this petition" post regarding the US orphan works bill 2008 flavour(s 2913). Is there a neutral breakdown of it somewhere?

I've been hidin' my yarn in the closet,
How I wish I'd fastened the door,
You have found the big sweater I started,
And you're askin' me who is it for.

(via Ravelry)

I went to the link. I swear to Ghu, I will never encounter a warning as vivid as:

You cannot diagnose a corkscrew penis when electroejaculating a bull.

Of course, it may depend on the kind of insect you're dealing with.

It definitely should be.

It just came in the mail today, from Amazon. I opened it excitedly...and exclaimed in horror. Not only is there no key to his eccentric transliteration system, but the entire book is a reproduction of a handwritten manuscript. In Professor Fowler's "clear and elegant" (legible only with difficulty, like disemvowelled text) cursive hand. Using 1950's handwriting conventions, gawdzhelpus.

Ranting about this to a friend, who said "Oh, Fowler is useless when studying Egyptian." How I wish I'd sought advice before buying it!

I can probably return it to Amazon, but at this point I'd rather tear it to bits and stomp on the bits.

Betsey @ 315: The poor bull was quite incredulous. All the information hadn't gotten to his brain yet, and here was his back end - er, working hard.

Serge @ 312: Also, the expression "Hold the pickle".

Very reminiscent of the opening chapter of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe book "Gambit," in which Wolfe is destroying a new dictionary for its grievous crimes against English.

One of those crimes: Infer and imply may be used interchangeably.

Pfui. It was full of tortile taradiddles.

According to a well-read friend of mine, whatever source he disparages in the movie is, in fact, notably bad.

And yeah, Budge is even worse than Fowler.

I love that sort of geekiness.

On 'Fail': my first memory of hearing it used this way is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that font of new language, though I've heard it said that it came from some of the odd English usage in gaming.

JESR #330, well at least they defriended you and didn't defraud (or defenestrate) you. And thanks for your nice words before on another thread.

You just reminded me that it's been some time since I've read an adventure of Amelia Peabody.

I vaguely recall running across his name when I worked in the 4-H office one summer; he lived in the same county and must have been on the Cooperative Extension mailing list.

cajunfj40 #293: *applause*

*bows*

The closer a question gets to my area of obsessionfocused interest (motor vehicles and related machinery/engines/etc) the more convoluted the ideas can get...

Somewhere in the recent past I linked to my Nuclear Parking Brake idea. (click, tapitty tick tap) Here it is. That was my second post on ML.

Actually what you should do is tear it to bits and use them as stuffing the next time you mummify a crocodile.

(I am alluding to the fact that several ancient papyruses were discovered because they were used as stuffing for mummified crocodiles)

I've been annoyed at the lack of reporting on the aftermath of Ike. Sadly the news can only keep track of a couple of stories, and the popular consensus was that it wasn't a bad storm. However, at least 300 still missing, according to CNN today. I feel bad them and their loved ones.

The program "Life After People" was produced for The History Channel, and now the production company is making another 10 programs. The request was for speculation on "without the presence of humans, what types of things could primates learn to do? What tasks are they capable of doing now?"

This sounds like a neat idea to toss around the Fluorosphere, even if we don't share it with the producers. What do you think will happen to primates (monkeys and apes) if humans suddenly disappeared?

Interacting with people, oh god

"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape."

No, wait, that's a different future....

An interesting question is whether any of the gorillas, chimps, or oranguntans[1] that have been taught language by researchers would manage to teach it to others of their kind. Imagine you're a primatology researcher who comes to realize that humans will all be extinct soon. Is there anything you could do to encourage uplift? Maybe try to get the chimps to pick up some kind of farming, or come up with better tools that are within their ability to make once they've been shown how?

Someone could build highly stable museums along the lines of the ones in The Mote in God's Eye, intended to reward sufficiently advanced/intelligent beings with the gift of a whole bunch of science and technology primers and working models.

[1] Is that somehow supposed to be two words?

2: All of the references are to real masters of fence, from the dawn of fencing as a described art.

3: It's beautiful.

That's an interesting idea about chimps with language -- they do teach some of those skills to their offspring, but as far as I know they haven't created a society with chimp language/signing.

I am not sure apes will progress further than they have already; after all, they've been part of our evolution and haven't made the leap to language yet. They do use tools, and communicate with each other.

Crows are another species that use tools, communicate with each other, gather in family groups, protect young from predators, and so on. I'd think they would be a interesting group in the post-human world.

Clifton @ 347: Ah, bears! Yes. Another species with tool use, but they don't have the same society or social groups that crows (and primates) have. Maybe raccoons. But if we have crows, "we must need bears."

Diatryma @ 354: Perhaps it's an offshoot of the drive to produce offspring? Leaving a mark on the world, making things happen after we're gone, etc.? It is reminiscent of Ozymandias.

Palin did *way* better than I expected[1]. If she weren't running with that tired, old guy, she might stand a chance.

[1] This may be an example of the subtle bigotry of low expectations....

Do they have a wide stance on all four paws?

Did you notice that for the first two or three sentences of every answer, she'd stare into the camera and just blurt out a rapid stream of talking points in a monotone voice? Then she'd slow down and remember to have facial expressions and pause and stuff, but then for the next answer, it was back to the monotone stream. Weird.

I am really happy. She didn't make a fool of herself--I hate seeing people humiliate themselves. But she got so pwned anyway. Best of all possible results. And Biden really seemed like a person. I loved how he acknowledged that he was in a nice house and doing pretty good... Showed honesty and humility and an understanding of what's actually going on with most people in the world. I loved that he was so passionate in the debate that his emotions got away from him for a bit when talking about his family tragedy. His answer to the heartbeat away question made it sound like he'd actually thought about what his emotions would be, how he would go on. And way to drag in the Supreme Court!

I loved that Ifill asked great questions, about Darfur, and the Cheney 4th branch of government, and use of nuclear weapons. Interesting stuff, man.

I still get "Husqvarna? Don't they make [chainsaws|motorcycles]" as a routine response to having a Husqvarna sewing machine :) It quite has me understanding why they started selling as Viking!

Rifles

But, do they make a rifle with a chainsaw-bayonet? And, what the heck, put a sewing machine on the off side and mount the whole thing on the handlebars. Blow holes in 'em, run 'em down, chop 'em up, and stitch 'em back together, yeah!

Were you thinking of the Lancer Assault Rifle, from the game Gears of War, which has a chainsaw bayonet as a standard attachment?

Doesn't that concept go back a lot farther, to the British comic periodical 2000 and the like?

I know that the Space Marines in Warhammer 40k (which dates to the late 80s - early 90s for the Rogue Trader edition) had a variety of chain-weapons - Chainfists for Space Marine armor, chainswords for the Imperial Guard elite figures (and Space Marine assault troops), and the like....

My expectations were based on the Couric interview. I expected her to place Iran in South America[1], babble incoherently about nonsense in response to serious questions[2], and maybe melt down entirely in the middle.

Her performance at the debate makes me wonder how much editing/excerpting was done in her interview with Couric. Was she really mostly coherent, and they took the most damning five minutes? Or was she really incoherent and shaken during the whole interview, and they took a representative sample?

One thing I found really annoying with Biden was that he had several really effective points to make, but he more-or-less interrupted himself making them. It was possible to infer what he was trying to say, but I'm not sure how much of the audience untangled it in time, or how often I didn't successfully untangle it. I didn't notice it as often when I was watching with closed captioning, and I suspect that's because I lost some of the tone-of-voice cues.

As with the last debate, I listened to some of it on the radio, watched some on TV with closed captioning while I was at the gym, and watched the end (with my wife, this time) on TV with the sound turned on.

Now, as far as her answers, they were mostly reassuring nonsense or carefully crafted talking points. But honestly, Biden's answers were meatier, but not nearly as much as I'd have liked, and he did a fair bit of dodging.

I felt like there were areas where she really didn't like what she had to defend. I had the sense (maybe this was projection on my part or good acting on her part) that she wasn't too thrilled with the stance she had to take on gay marriage, which is weird, given her widely-reported fundamentalist religious beliefs. (But if you look at survey data, support for gay marriage/rights is very much age dependent.) I also had the sense that she had populist instincts on economic policy, and little or no ideology or knowledge of economics to cause her to resist it[3].

Biden never attacked her, only McCain. That was interesting, and helped her stay afloat in the debate. As with Obama needing to come off as "above the fray" and reassuringly polite and sensible (and definitely not a Scary Angry Black Man), Biden couldn't afford to rip into her sillier answers, for fear of being the pit bull ripping into the poodle.

[1] As opposed to her running-mate, who places Spain there.

[2] And she did this, but not enormously more than Biden did, and not beyond what I expect of a politician in a debate.

[3] Though explanations of the current financial mess that attribute it to greed on Wall Street are like explanations of a building collapse that attribute it to gravity.

Also, I aged my cakes for four weeks, not two. I think he mentioned that in the show but not the recipe. They were amazing.

Mez @ 331 - "dried fruits macerated in rum" is surely the standard starter for fruitcake recipes?

Well, it ought to be. Then again, I saw a video where a woman was using sweet and sour mix in a mojito. Words mean nothing to these people! (Don't even get me started on "martini".)

Albatross @360 - that actually depresses the hell out of me. The WaPo had some talky guy saying that Palin would win this no matter what, because expectations were so low that all she had to do was not screw up horribly, and everyone would be impressed, and if she did screw up horribly, everyone would blame Biden for being "mean". I said, of course not! People will notice that all she does is ramble around talking points, doesn't answer questions, and is never specific about anything, under any circumstances!

Listening to/reading post-debate analysis, I see that I was utterly wrong.

(But I did notice the nukular thing too! We cracked up. Briefly. Also, Palin always looks like she's smirking to me. I realize that I am the only person in the world who interprets her "smile" that way, but there you go.)

I noticed that too, but I interpreted it as her being annoyed that condemning them to the fiery pits of hell wouldn't play well on national tv.

explanations of the current financial mess that attribute it to greed on Wall Street are like explanations of a building collapse that attribute it to gravity.

Ha!

Also, I'm glad I didn't play the drinking game where you take a drink every time someone says "maverick". I wonder how many post-debate alcohol poisonings EMTs had to deal with? (I liked Biden's tearing into that, even though it sounded utterly scripted - it still needed to be said. Also, I was really happy that there was a "Palin made rape victims pay for their own rape kits" commercial after the debate - something more people should know about. Of course, since it was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, I expect that anyone who'd be surprised by this will put it down to brtn-loving libruls twisting the truth for partisan politics.)

Yeah. I am not sure how this affects the voters McCain and Palin need. There wasn't a possible performance from her good enough to get my vote, and Biden's only opportunity to lose my vote involved overt and scary insanity (I mean like "we must fight the space aliens on Mars so we don't have to fight them in Peoria" sort of crazy, not "we're going to be energy-independent in ten years" innumerate nonsense), which wasn't real likely.

I showed my parents a "Palin's greatest hits" video. Aghast giggles and dropped jaws.

The debate was very odd. Palin seemed to have a teleprompter full of GOP talking points in her glasses. When she was at a loss for words she'd babble.

Who was it who pointed out that leaping around the battlefield in your power armour (as in Starship Troopers) would be a quick way to get yourself killed, and real power armour would probably include not jump jets but a large powered shovel for quick shellscrape digging?

And interestingly, most of the professors argued that the current bailout bill is a bad one -- not from a partisan political perspective, but from the perspective of their knowledge about how markets work, and how the bill interacts with that. That agrees with the Marginal Revolution post you linked to.

An article about the panel can be found at Duke Today, so you can get some background before watching the video.

albatross #360: Palin did *way* better than I expected

My guess would be wireless teleprompter glasses.

At times I *still* think recent events are all being scripted by some whacked-out second-rate sci-fi writer (in the sky)!

Or maybe they took the advice offered here?

Who is Laura Teresa Marquez?

I'm proofing a book that includes a quotation attributed to her, but my editor hasn't been able to find any biographical or source info. My own (limited) Google-fu has turned up several quotations on various sites of a motivational/self-empowerment nature (she seems to be quite popular in that field), yet not one of them lists so much as a birth year. I even gave Wikipedia a try, just for giggles, but there's no entry for anyone by that name.

The quotation in question: “Like being the pilot of a large airplane, you have, at your command, massive unseen resources and your small actions result in big improvements – keep taking those small actions!”

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Many thanks, regardless of the results. :)

Xopher @297:
Depending on how you look at it, this is either the best or the worst possible time to look for good quality fresh citrons.

T.W @316:
I'm under the impression the bill expired with no action because the bailout bill was more important.

Cat Meadors @371:
No, you're not the only one who noticed her smirks.

Ohhh, is it citron season? I'd forgotten about that.

Tonight I'm going to a friend's miracle fruit party. This fruit has a a molecule (miraculin) that affects the tongue* to turn sour sweet. But it doesn't simply make a lemon taste like lemonade, because the sourness-turned-sweet enhancers flavors.

Coffee finally tastes like it smells, I've been told. Bad beer tastes good, good beer great, and balsamic vinegar becomes a wonderfully rich drink (such that you have to remind people they can't drink it).

The Making Light party next August may very well have a miraculin-based citrus tasting section.

hmmmm.

-----------
* similar to artichokes, which for the people who 'taste' artichokes makes everything else lightly sweeter.

Citron? Citroën!

Also: miraculin + MSG = ?

You know how people were worried about the Large Hadron Collider? Well, they were being foolish.

I would like to try miraculin + coffee -- I've always been terribly disappointed by the lack of flavor (compared to the aroma) in coffee.

Just found out that James Killus, occasional ML poster, sf writer, and odd person died of malignant melanoma.

The name sounded familiar, so I checked my bookshelf... I have a novel titled Sunsmoke by him. (Demonically possessed pollution... but well-done enough that I remembered the author's name!)

Ginger @ #355:

That's an interesting idea about chimps with language -- they do teach some of those skills to their offspring, but as far as I know they haven't created a society with chimp language/signing.

I actually suggested "encouraging" that to a budding primatologist -- though as she pointed out, that would be activism rather than research.

I am not sure apes will progress further than they have already; after all, they've been part of our evolution and haven't made the leap to language yet. They do use tools, and communicate with each other.

And do you think the human transition happened within, say, 10,000 years? (I.e., less than the length of recorded human history?) For that matter, when were the first true sign languages developed? The past 100 years or so?

Evolution doesn't stop, but for something with multiyear generations, it's very slow compared to the development of human culture, much less the flickering blur we call "history".

Crows are another species that use tools, communicate with each other, gather in family groups, protect young from predators, and so on. I'd think they would be a interesting group in the post-human world.

Midsummer Century. 'nuff said....

However, if I thought they had a chance, I'd vote for the bonobos, since they are more social and less aggressive towards each other as well as other species. Bonobo civilization would be out of this world.

Actually, I've overlooked the marine mammals up 'til now -- whales have large brains, communicate in "language" and could well have something going on in those brains that we just can't grasp. Their lack of grasping hands was an evolutionary change, so we could postulate a reversal of that change. Forget cats with thumbs, let's try whales with hands.

But in any case, that's exactly my point -- we developed language first, took over the world, and blasted the populations of the other great apes down into five digits or less. We only invented sign languages recently (as opposed to local gesture codes) -- and we should be surprised that chimps and gorillas haven't caught up in our lifetimes? If we wipe ourselves out (while those apes miraculously survive), it wouldn't be at all implausible for one of them to have a similar change within a million years or so (our own change was apparently lightning-fast... in evolutionary time).

At the same time, we don't really know what particular issue might have been the trigger for our own transformation! It seems likely that any new language-users will be expanding into a new ecological niche, but beyond that... ???

Also, there are a bunch of other possibilities, with favorites depending basically on what points you think are "most important". A whole bunch of critters have grasping paws, so that's not necessarily a good guide -- but rats and squirrels both resemble an even earlier stage in our evolution, and both are already widely invasive. If the larger mammals get hammered (likely) that's where I'd look.

Otherwise, raccoons are notably bright, if not terribly social. Dogs may not have grasping paws, but they probably have a head start on the social thing, due to our manipulations. (Maybe even after they revert to their dingo-like base form.) Of course, that assumes they survive our own departure, which is dubious (IIRC, feral dogs don't even self-replace their populations).

In other venues, octopi have arguably better "hands" than us, are already bright and curious -- but they're mostly-solitary predators, not to mention short-lived. Cetaceans have social structure and communication (long-distance, even), but that's adapted for underwater use. If they leave the water, they get to start all over! (And never mind the issues of trying to develop technology underwater!)

Various birds, as previously noted, are a prime contender -- basic communication and tool use already, let alone if they repurpose their wings! (They'd pretty much have to do that -- the energetic costs of flying would compete with those of an oversized brain like ours!) Many of the corvids are opportunistic scavengers too, and that was our own original niche.

My own prediction would be that the remaining great apes die off, leaving long race to see whether ur-rodents, birds, or octopi make it to a suitable transitional form first. I would not expect dolphins to re-emerge from the water, simply because they're well-adapted to being fully aquatic. But if any seals, walruses, otters, etc survive, those would be decent candidates for a somewhat faster jump. (They already come out on land occasionally -- if the continents got cleared out a bit, that looks like a decent starting point.)

PS: Firefox's NoScript seems to think ML is trying to do cross-site scripting. Say it isn't so, JoePatrick! I'm also getting an error saying "no entry_id", unclear if that's related.

Oh man, I've always wanted to try miracle fruit! Lemons and other sour things taste sweet to me, so I wonder if everything would taste hyper-awesome.

Interesting... is that a family thing? IIRC, miraculin also zaps the bitter receptors, so you'd still get some changes.

Lemons and such don't taste (entirely) sweet to me, but I like them anyway, and I've never been impressed by those "super-sour" candies like "Cry-babies". On the other hand, I don't much like tamarind -- have you ever tried that?

Also: miraculin + MSG = ?

Probably no difference -- glutamate is yet another different taste receptor.

Two years I've been living here without a sign of them, and I'd started thinking it would never happen. I heard them opening the gate, saw them through the window, but the years of safety have dulled my instincts and I didn't realise who they were until it was too late, until I'd already opened the door. And once they'd started talking, I didn't know how to stop them.

I have the same problem with telemarketers, but telemarketers don't give you a free copy of The Watchtower and promise to come back next week to see if you have any questions.

The sun is shining, but there is a chill in my bones.

Hm. I've had pretty good results with one or more of:
(0) a polite "No thank you"
(1) being obviously on the phone
(2) being obviously just awoken (housecoat and fuzzy)
(3) being obviously in the grip of a migraine (housecoat and pained)
(4) being utterly confused at them, and telling them I donate at the office
(5) allowing my housecoat to start sliding off one shoulder (best done to persons of the opposite gender... unless it's obvious to them that you think they're the appropriate gender)
(6) giving them a donation in memory of my dear sainted mother, in return for their watchtower, on the grounds that while I'm not religious, my dear sainted mother ... but it's ... I just can't talk about it any more...

A former housemate had a habit of inviting them in for tea and theology. That was equally effective at insuring a year-or-two's failure to return.

In general, though, a polite-but-firm "Thank you, but I'm not interested" is all that most cultures require as a retort.

L'esprit d'escalier is telling me that I should have responded to their opening gambit, a query as to whether I read the Bible much, by saying, "No, I'm a Catholic."

(1) "Ye be unclean, and have brought foul anxiety and misfortune to me! Will ye be cleansed with fire, or wilt thou depart forever into the beyond..."
(2) "Clearly you mistook politeness for invitation. Thank you, but you are not welcome here again."
(3) "Didja bring the cute chicks this time? Doesn't the bible say that the faithful will be rewarded with thousands of virgins and an amazing party?"

You've said "failed to contradict" -- but that sounds an awful lot like "They presumed, I didn't say no", rather than "Sure, I'd love to see you again".

(4) "I'm sorry - I'm busy now, and for the foreseeable future. No, there is no better time."
(5) "Sorry, I'm busy. I'm have to [wash all of the dishes in the Q continuum party box|sort my sock drawer by size, shape, colour and texture|wash my hair, one hair at a time]"
(6) See who's there, and fail to open the door, whether they've seen you or not.
(7) Accuse them of having [peed in the hallway|disturbed the plants|upset your pets], and say "After last time, no thank you", or words to that effect.

When I was a kid, acquaintances of that ilk started showing up on Christmas Morning to preach to my family. So I have uncharitable thoughts about them with are pretty ingrained.

However, watching a car full of them who I had just shooed off my front step by telling them I had to go check a cow in labor (true- I was out in the field when the rest of this happened) open the latched driveway gate at my cousin's place and nearly let the horses out onto the road pretty much put paid to any chance of me being polite in my dealings with them. As soon as I see a copy of Watchtower I tell them they are trespassing and have ten seconds to get off the place or I'm calling the Sheriff. I haven't seen any for years.

What I wonder most is how they find my driveway, which Fed Ex, UPS, DHL, and invited guests often miss.

And that's why Ghu invented those little fisheye-lens peepholes for doors... :)

JESR @ 411:

Never underestimate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Those Who Are On A Mission To Bring The Sinners To God. Sometimes I think they can smell the psychic emanations given off by People Not of Their Faith. Sort of like religious catnip.

I actually did have three or four fairly interesting and respectful front-door meetings with a nice JW lady ten or fifteen years ago, but she stopped showing up when she finally realized I wasn't going to convert. These days, I just don't answer the door.

I find that informing them I'm Jewish and perfectly happy with my religion usually works.

A friend of mine invites them in, offers tea, engages them in a bright religious conversation (showing good knowledge of their particular brand) and gets them to assist her with tasks such as putting up shelves...

I forget the name of the technology that was commercially available starting no later than the earlier 1990s that was a computer display on glasses. It wasn't filthy expensive, either.... and technology has had massive advancements since then. (A 100 MB hard drive was a substantial size for a home user at the time, 32 bit micrprocessors were state of the art, a gigabyte of memory was far more than the typical user aspired, and 1200 X 1024 was a huge display except for some very high end commercial workstation systems).

I do like tamarind. Especially candied.

Paula Lieberman @416: Shades (heh) of Spider Jerusalem?

On missionaries:

I grew up in a small town with two stoplights and seven churches, where your best friends are cosplaying with you one weekend and out on the side of the road waving pro-life signs the next. I'm quite used to being witnessed to.

So it threw me for a loop when I came over here. The national religion of the UK seems to be understated agnosticism -- while people may embrace the outward trappings of religion (having their kids baptized, being the Archbishop of Canterbury, etc.), it's considered extremely gauche to actually believe in it. As a result you hardly ever see the kind of evangelism you would in North America.

Once I opened the door to two girls my age who said, "We'd like to tell you about Bahá'í." "I already have a religion, thanks, and I don't intend to convert," I said firmly, going into release-the-hounds mode. "Oh, we respect the diversity of religion," they replied, "we just want to share the message of Bahá'í, which is peace and unity among all people." Totally took the wind out of my sails: "Um, that sounds good, yeah."

The Jehovah's Witnesses actually came to the door recently; the only person home was my girlfriend, who was raised solidly Pagan. They had a long amiable conversation in which she educated them on the parallels between Buddhist tenets and the teachings of Jesus, and she made them promise to come back. I can't wait.

I'd like to point to this account I wrote last year on how a simple prayer agreement led to 20 years of them never coming back. As I wrote later--they were warned, they just chose not to believe it.

That thread contains a long discussion of the ethics of proselytizing.

Who is Laura Teresa Marquez?

I'm proofing a book that includes a quotation attributed to her, but my editor hasn't been able to find any biographical or source info. My own (limited) Google-fu has turned up several quotations on various sites of a motivational/self-empowerment nature (she seems to be quite popular in that field), yet not one of them lists so much as a birth year. I even gave Wikipedia a try, just for giggles, but there's no entry for anyone by that name.

Interesting. As far as I can tell, all of these supposed quotes were originally posted by a Jim Stegall. It is clear from what he says here that he's really into pushing these quotes, and he has his own site, MetaphorSky, for quotes from Marquez and like-minded people.

To me this suggests three possibilities:

1. Marquez is a real person who has published books from which Stegall gets these quotes, but somehow there is no trace of the books online. Possible, but I expect that any sort of book - self-published, available only in the Christian bookstore network, etc. - will have some mention online.

2. Marquez is a real person whom Stegall knows. All the quotes I looked at on Gaia are sourced to "Early Morning Conversation," which could be the title of something, but which could be, y'know, an actual conversation.

3. Marquez is an invention of Stegall.

Maybe that's an apt metaphor for the way this country decided to go to war.

The last Mormons who were here, I just opened the door, smiled, and said "I'm not interested." One asked me if I thought anybody else would be and I said no.

We had an Obama Van today! One of those painted all over vans and it deposited three pairs of people who went, as near as I can tell, only to the doors of registered Democrats. So they were only here about a half-hour.

Open thread query: Does anyone know of a source or two of nice downloadable Victorian fonts? Free or fairly inexpensive preferred.

Someone came by the other day, and handed me some flyers for Obama, and for Tom Udall, who's running for the Senate. I'm not sure why they've been going to registered Democrats (and proud of being one!), but I reassured him that the only way I'd vote for a Republiocan in any office is if they put a gun to my head.

That reminds me of the joke a buddy once told us about how, after capturing a magical elephant, a guy should make sure of its gender before demanding to be made as well endowed.

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, stands a household of SCA folk called Ironhold, decorated with many medievalist items, whose denizens have been known to wear VERY old-fashioned garb, even mundanely. Nice people, with utterly wicked senses of humor.

House Ironhold also apparently stands on a heavily used route for door-to-door evangelists, particularly Jehovah's Witnesses.

As you might expect, the residents have developed ROUTINES.

...

Sign at freeway exit:
No Trucks Over Two Axels Allowed

On an icy road, do they do double-axels?

Missionaries: Call me Mrs. Boring, but I found that a single "no thank you" has also led to me not being visited by JWs in over a decade. No theatrics necessary, honestly. (I even live just a couple of blocks from one of their... churches? Temples? Houses of worship? I never remember what different religions call their gathering places.)

Politicians: I wonder what they do in states like VA, where you don't register by party. I've had way more political hopefuls than evangelists at my door (one broke my daughter's jack-o-lantern, another pretended not to be a Republican.) Generally I find these visits equally amusing and irritating, and none of them have any bearing on my voting habits, but I guess it keeps them busy.

Alternatively, this is the right sort of music to listen to while reading the financial news right now....

Kingdom Halls

I was wondering that, too. I don't really understand the rules for this stuff. I at least know the names of the rules I'm getting confused about in Spanish ("Damn, is this supposed to be in the conditional or the subjunctive?"). But I just have some intuition about what sounds right in English, and when that fails me, I'm lost.

If the subjunctive should disappear from the English language, we should all be the poorer for it. (Or is that messing it up somehow. It sounds right, in my "pre-20th-century-writing" mental model.)

P J Evans, #431: Hee! That provides an interesting mental image of leaping, spinning trucks...

Rosa, #442: That's the point at which you document. In particular, file a police report about religious harassment every single time; that way, if it escalates, there's a paper trail to prove that it wasn't just "someone losing their head while drunk" or whatever excuse they decide to proffer.

They gave up. And as far as I know, have never returned.

Jim wasn't at home, but I talked to Doyle, who declared that she was speaking with Jim's voice, and that Scraps should go to the ER. Which was the right answer, of course. I felt stupid. I think I was flustered.

I phoned back and talked to Velma and then to Scraps. He wanted to stay home and rest, and see whether that didn't make it go away. I told him firmly that there aren't many fast-onset lateralized neuromuscular disorders that aren't serious. So Scraps and Velma went to the Lutheran Medical Center, where they decided he was having a stroke, and sent him off to New York Methodist in Park Slope, where they have a stroke center. NYM got him CATscanned pronto, and found he had a hemorrhage on one side. Last we heard, they had a neurosurgeon coming in.

Velma said his blood pressure was 220 over 166. She also said his speech was now affected.

He is a beloved friend. We've known him since he was 17.

I feel stupid and useless and full of dread.

His remarks on "voting your conscience" have become my sig on sites that allow them. I will pray "an it be his own will" prayers until and unless permission to do more is communicated.

My best wishes to Scraps and Velma for a good recovery.

On Sraps: OMG. Hemorrhagic stroke is ... not good, but not necessarily fatal, depending on location. My wishes for his health.

I only know him through Making Light, and Velma through here and her LJ... but I've gotten very good, these past few months, at folding paper cranes. If anyone wants my contribution toward 1000 for him, I'll be happy to fold.

May things turn out to stablize.

Love, C.

fuck

Teresa, GOOD JOB.

(Serge, thank you for the picture. It gives a focus for visualizations of health and strength.)

(And everyone else, well, take care of yourselves, okay? That's a poor attempt to control what isn't controllable, but you matter to me even when I only know you as your words here.)

Words. The one in the middle is certainly and deeply true. The ones on the sides, my wishes for Scraps.

Teresa -- please see the profound good you did today. It's so easy, all too easy, to see our failings, so hard to see the multitude of ways in which we help. Today, you helped.

May the night and the morrow bring good news. Please, please, please.

When I was considerably younger and 'stoneder,' I would come home from my med transcriptionist job and dream of entities who called themselves "The Lords of Anastomosis." I'm sending sober prayers in that direction now.

I don't know either of them. But who gives a crap. They're people, and people I care about care about them. So, so do I.

Best wishes to Scraps and Velma, and hope for a rapid and complete recovery.

I wish I could just put Soren's brain back together.

Teresa, you did the right thing.

Best of wishes to Scraps and Velma. Fingers crossed here.

Teresa -- you -did- something, and it was the right thing. You didn't freeze -- you didn't fall apart. It's dreadfully easy to sit back and nervously worry should-haves to death... but in the end you did do the right thing!

I am home from the hospital, dehydrated and exhausted, and trying to remedy the former before I fall over. To clarify: Soren called me in mid-afternoon, and said, "I don't want to alarm you, but I have numbness and trouble gripping with my right hand...". He was going to tough it out, and I asked if I should come home immediately. When he said, "Thank you," I hauled ass into the nearest cab.

Once I got home, we had something of a disagreement about going to the hospital (as he has no insurance/health coverage). That was when I called Teresa to get Jim's number. We were going to take a cab to Lutheran Hospital, but Soren couldn't walk down the stairs, and I couldn't carry him. That's when I called 911; the ambulance came within about ten minutes, and they had him in the hospital in another ten or less. He got a room in the ICU at 1am.

Prayers, good wishes, good vibes, what-have-you are all appreciated. And if there's anything that might affect the universe positively in his direction, it would be one of his other great loves: music. So make music, or listen to music.

Today is the eighth anniversary of our first date, which happened, in part, because of Patrick and Teresa playing matchmaker.

Here we are 44 years later still trying to get it.

Kudos to Teresa for doing what she's best at: saying the right thing at the right time.

And what Tom@454 said. To notice that something was wrong, ask for help, listen, then act is doing the right thing.

Common warning signs of stroke

Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body

Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding

Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes

Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination

Sudden, severe headache with no known cause

Don't wait--call for emergency medical help, or get to a hospital on your own if that's faster. It doesn't get better on its own in most cases*. In many cases, damage can be limited by prompt treatment. In no cases does just hoping it goes away make things better.

*Transient ischemic attacks have similar symptoms, but should still be taken seriously, even though they may improve on their own--they often lead to worse problems. Do not risk your life and well-being (or let someone else risk theirs) on the off-chance that it's "just" a TIA.

abi @ 439 - Kingdom Halls? Really? Wow. I knew it said that on the sign, I didn't realize that's what it was.

Rosa @ 442 - Well, there's enough JW's to have their own Kingdom Hall (woo!) within walking distance of my house. Maybe they figure they've got the neighborhood covered. I used to go hang with the Adventists annually when they had their huge food festival (and I mean HUGE - room after room, each one themed to a different area of the world, full of tables overflowing with delicious vegetarian dishes, a dollar per serving) but they stopped inviting me when I missed a year, and I never remember to get back on their mailing list. I've been cornered by the occasional fanatic there, but it's worth it for the food.

Marilee @ 477 - I had no idea you could do that! I don't remember being given a choice, but it's been over a decade since I moved here, and I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, so that's not especially surprising. I think no-party registration is the best thing since sliced bread, and can't imagine why anyone would want to declare an affiliation. (Ok, really I can, I just think they're dumb reasons.) I seem to be on all the Democrats' mailing lists anyway, so it looks like they've got some way of figuring it out.

He said that the top priority right now is to bring Soren's blood pressure down from the scary heights it was at. There is definite progress on this; yesterday it was at two-hundred-mumble over oh-god, and now it's at one-hundred-something over well-that's-better-than-yesterday-at-least. (I'm sorry I don't have the exact numbers in my head, but I went from "sound sleep" to "phone call" without stopping to grab my number memory.) Get the blood pressure down and this reduces the risk of further bleeds, and the risk of all sorts of other things. Get him stabilized at a safer level, and then everything else can be addressed.

"Everything else" includes stuff like finding out exactly what the damage is and then working to get back as much function as possible. As Velma and a number of other people said, he doesn't have speech right now, though he's made some words here and there, and PNH reports that Velma said he achieved a couple of phrases during the night. ("Oh, come on!" being the most memorable, apparently; last night Patrick said that Soren's pissed off, which is kind of a good sign, you know?) Patrick says that though Soren's not talking, he is answering questions with eloquent gestures. TNH asked him point-blank, "Do you have language?" and she got a strong affirmative nodding in reply. This is major goodness, because he's in there processing, even if his speaker isn't working at the moment, and he can communicate that he is processing. That's somewhere to start, when getting things back, and it's a pretty darned big somewhere, even though we're not to the "OK, what's the recovery and rehab plan?" stage yet.

Getting to that stage is the goal right now. Sounds like they're making progress, but there's no official word yet on what's what. But Soren's in there, and he knows we're out here, and messages are being exchanged.

So that's where we are right now. (Hope I got it right; still kinda sleep-foggy.)

Short form: still scary situation, not out of the woods yet, but recovery definitely a possibility. Encouraging signs: BP coming down, and Soren is definitely in there and communicating even if he can't speak.

So now we hope and wait and do the things we do, and let the docs and nurses do the things they do, and we see how it goes.

And bless you, Elise, for the updates. I'm getting all this in one sudden lump and seeing there are hopeful signs is a good thing.

As to passing the hat, I believe that's my job.

This is what I put my mind to for Scraps and his circle: there is reason to hope.