Of possible interest to Making Light readers, given some of the things that are discussed here: at happy hour last week, an English professor spoke very enthusiastically of a book called Poets Thinking by Helen Vendler. From the Amazon copy:

"Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers."

(The four poets are Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats.)

I haven't actually read it, you understand, but I thought some people here might be interested in the subject.

Posted October 13, 2004 11:14 PM by Chad Orzel

I saw him eat the rat and I have to tell you, it looked dee-licious! There just ain't enough rat eating in the world.

But there are plenty of asswits.

Here's a question: Does anyone out there have a website that they feel everyone else MUST visit every day? (and don't include this one, you arse-kissing sissies!)

Mine is cursor.org.

Posted October 13, 2004 11:47 PM by Randall P.

The only one I'm sure to visit is Google.

Posted October 13, 2004 11:56 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Other than my own and John Scalzi's AOL journals (and yes, Google), there's nothing I visit every day. I do try to keep up with SaveDisney.com and a bunch of blogs, but not on a daily basis.

The rat thing inevitably reminds me of Angel, immediately pre-Buffy.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:11 AM by Karen Funk Blocher

Other than livejournal, I've been spending a lot of time at the NaNoWriMo forums lately (www.nanowrimo.org), especially the Character & Plot Realism Q&A (although some of the questions make me want to get snarky).

I've only ever visited this site once, but my hubby and I spent about an hour last night showing each other funny videos and pictures:

http://www.funnyjunk.com

This one was the best:

http://www.funnyjunk.com/movies/3/Matrix+Ping+Pong/stream/large

Posted October 14, 2004 12:26 AM by Tiellan

So.

What would you toss into Mount St. Helen's crater, now that it's filling with bubbling lava and lighting up the clouds overhead with an eerie red glow?

I was thinking that this would be a dignified yet spectacular way to end the existence of my original IBM PC.

Maybe my Civilization III discs as well.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:29 AM by Stefan Jones

I was living in Seattle when it blew. If Mount St. Helens is misbehaving again, only characters specially beloved of the author should go anywhere near it.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:46 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Stefan Jones: What would you toss into Mount St. Helen's crater, now that it's filling with bubbling lava...?

Umm, the world's largest marshmallow?

Posted October 14, 2004 12:46 AM by Larry Brennan

Teresa: I was marginally closer, living in Steilacoom at the time; still well out of range of the mountain (and, helpfully, not in any of the Rainier lahar paths either).

All I have to say to people who want to get close to St. Helens: have a Very Good Reason, one you're willing to die for, as David Johnston did.

"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

There's a Chicago Sun-Times article where his parents remember him, since the memories naturally come back.

I can't quite believe I'm older now than he was then...but it's been 24 years. It doesn't seem like 24 years.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:02 AM by Christopher Davis

Volcano Cam

http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

If you look at the pictures at night, the camera isn't broken. It's just suffering from a lack of sunlight.

But you can probably see that little glowing dot of magma at the top of the screen.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:10 AM by Harry Connolly

I remember reading the National Geographic magazine covering the eruption, complete with pictures of the whole thing, and being at once fascinated and terrified by the article.

When Gaia gets stomachaches, she sure gets them something awful. :P Glad I'm up north.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:17 AM by Nishiko Takeuchi

Er, the eruption in 1980, that is. Wow, do I need sugar or what?

*goes to ransack fridge in search of that little tub of cake icing*

Posted October 14, 2004 1:19 AM by Nishiko Takeuchi

“You don’t think anyone actually saw him eat the rat, do you?”

"Well - he's been walking around the house with the tail dripping from his mouth for most of the morning - somebody must have seen something."

Posted October 14, 2004 1:36 AM by xeger

Jill and I went to a *great* concert tonight -- Artisan is three-person acappella folk harmony and one of the singers, Jacey Bedford, posts to rasfc and has published fantasy stories. Brian writes songs with rhythms and chords you wouldn't expect to hear in folk. I was surprised it was 11pm after the second encore -- the time had passed like under the hill.

They're only going to be in North America until the end of the month this time, they're well worth hearing.

http://www.artisan-harmony.com

Posted October 14, 2004 2:13 AM by Marilee

OK, I followed the Particles links for "The art of coding p0rn", and I have two thoughts:

1) I'm once again startled to learn just how sheltered a life I've led;

and

2) A parallel coding system would be useful in the SF section of the bookstore.

Posted October 14, 2004 2:19 AM by Bob O

Marilee wrote:

[Artisan are] only going to be in North America until the end of the month this time, they're well worth hearing.

Blast! I could have sworn that I'd signed up for their notification list! Fortune smiles, however - and I should still be in time to see them :) Thanks for the reminder!

Posted October 14, 2004 2:29 AM by xeger

Would you believe the papers have been full of articles about tourists going up to some park or ranger station or something that is as close as you can get to Helen and camping out and hanging around to see what happens? I mean, all the vulcanologists keep saying it probably won't be anything spectacular (i.e. dangerous), but...

And so far it's mostly steam.

Oh, and Marilee and Jill: We'll be in DC this weekend and will be at Capclave for some of the time.

MKK

Posted October 14, 2004 2:53 AM by Mary Kay

What is worse than a rat? Half a rat, that's what. We have honkin' big rats here, and the killer cat--the one who looks too little and frail to do anything, the one that sort of flutters and wrings her hands like a Dorothy Sayers virgin,--that cat is never eats the whole rat. She's partial to the front end.

What's even worse than half a rat is stepping on the cold rat tail in the dark and thinking it is a snake, and levitating so that you come down on your wrists in such a way that you can barely drive, let alone type.

Oh, and the every-day site? BoingBoing, but that's only cause they send me emails. And I forget who told me about the brainy trouser trout, but I think it was one of the other lists that send me email.

Posted October 14, 2004 3:11 AM by liz

Just got a postcard:

GREETINGS FROM MT. ST. HELENS

Picknicking so good, almost forgot what I came up here for in the first place. Tough to be Byronic when you're having fun.

/s/ Sir Frankie Varney

Posted October 14, 2004 3:21 AM by John M. Ford

Reminds me of Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett. Angua and Carrot are in a dwarf bar. The menu says (among other things):

Rat and Ketchup 7p
Rat 4p

Angua asks why the ketchup costs as much as the rat. Carrot replies:

'Have you tried rat without ketchup?'

I have my home page set to Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Each day when I log on I get a new beautiful astronomy picture to ogle.

Posted October 14, 2004 3:52 AM by Elese

Randall P. - More slang for you:

If something did my friend's head in (for example a pernicious academic colleague, or the general state of the world) he'd call it a head-fuck.

Posted October 14, 2004 4:08 AM by Elese

Say, what's the policy on shamelessly begging the readers of an open thread to help you track down the author and title of a book that you read in childhood that, judging from previous attempts at finding it, may not actually exist?

Posted October 14, 2004 4:52 AM by Kass Fireborn

Re: rats

Whenever our Office Cats, Jasper and his successor Zak, practiced their pest control duties, they were unusually diligent in enforcing the 50% deductible provisions of our policy.

Posted October 14, 2004 5:46 AM by Harriet Culver

...although, since it is company policy to hire only Kliban lookalikes, it's really been more of a Mousies thing. (No dirty rats here)

Posted October 14, 2004 5:48 AM by Harriet Culver

Chad,

The poetry-has-logic argument is Vendler's schtick; she's been doing it for years, writing about all sorts of poets, and it does tend to produce some very insightful criticism. She is possibly the most famous critic in the Harvard English department. I seem to remember that she originally trained as a chemist.

Posted October 14, 2004 5:54 AM by Sarah

Sancho, Custard and Lilith are unamused.

Not as unamused as I was when I heard that a TV series on channel 10 over here (called The Cooks) has a promo involving someone deep-frying a live rat. I hope and pray it wasn't a real one. I've phoned and complained anyway, and will be writing for confirmation that no rats were harmed.

Because I'm really that humourless about animal rights. And no, I still don't approve of PETA - as far as I can tell no one does.

Rats with ketchup would probably cause most people on my local rat list to have a heart attack, by the way: red foods are scary with animals for whom red discharge can be either blood *or* a symptom of mycoplasma pneumoniae (rat snot and tears have porphyrin in them.) We've talking about just that on the list, the foods most likely to momentarily horrify the rats' keepers.

Posted October 14, 2004 5:57 AM by Vassilissa

I check geekpress.com every day, but I'm not sure I want everyone else to. If they did, I wouldn't have the pleasure of telling them about square bacteria.

Posted October 14, 2004 7:59 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

It was a lovely night of great singing. Xeger - glad you found out in time to hear them. You're sure to enjoy. Would have bought a CD or three, but just going was my splurge on my unemployment budget!

The dog's early wake-up this morning, was unwelcome, though. (My husband, John Smith: International Terrorist, usually deals with him, but he's away).

MKK - if you have time this trip, I'd love to see you and Jordin. I won't be at Capclave, but can buzz around the Beltway.

Posted October 14, 2004 8:12 AM by Jill Smith

urgh. Pardon the mishmash of unclear, third-person pronouns. Clearly I need more caffeine.

Posted October 14, 2004 8:14 AM by Jill Smith

He didn't eat the rat. He said he was going to, but he sacrificed it to the Bastard instead.

(Sorry. Too much Bujold.)

Posted October 14, 2004 8:48 AM by Eleanor

“You don’t think anyone actually saw him eat the rat, do you?”

I don't think anyone noticed.

Posted October 14, 2004 9:23 AM by Ellen

Eleanor, clearly not enough Bujold yet. She would have had 17 adjectives in there. You had none.

Posted October 14, 2004 10:19 AM by Greg Ioannou

Chad-

That seems to me to be exactly right. The best poetry is the best because it knows how to think, and it has interesting things to think about.

Sometimes Vendler's analysis of poetry strikes me as slightly cold-blooded, occasionally ignoring the heat that runs underneath the best stuff. But I've always felt about myself as a poet--and about most other poets I know--that we're essentially a cold-blooded crowd. Certainly, who other than a poet (or other writer) will undergo an intensely emotional experience and--while experiencing it--think, "This is going to make an absolutely kick-ass symbol!"

Actors, maybe, I suppose.

Posted October 14, 2004 10:22 AM by Sarah

Websites to visit daily: Critters, Démodé, Google, and, er, my own. I used to visit Belle de Jour every other day, but she closed up shop. I usually check the Particles a couple times a week.

A friend's daughter has several rats, gerbils and other four-legged friends. The first time I went to their house, Signy popped up next to my chair, hands behind her back, and asked, "Do you like rats?"

I said I didn't know any. We became acquainted.

Posted October 14, 2004 10:38 AM by Holly Messinger

Sarah: I know just what you mean about the "kick-ass symbol" bit. My bit of luck came in mid-August during a thunderstorm, when three hummingbirds came to my feeder and drank simultaneously instead of squabbling as they usually do. The result: "Lightning and Three Hummingbirds" (a poem *I'm* proud of, at any rate).

As to daily online reads, I live in a hick town whose newspaper tends to have truly toxic editorials (and mediocre cartoons), so I nostalgically read the San Francisco Chronicle, plus the New York Times and Locus Online -- which gets me to this site as well. Those, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day already mentioned. In all it's even better than a dining table piled with newsprint!

Posted October 14, 2004 10:46 AM by Faren Miller

Vassilissa said: We've talking about just that on the list, the foods most likely to momentarily horrify the rats' keepers.

I vote strawberries. Every time my girls get strawberries, they leave red juice all over the cage. It looks like a massacre.

Posted October 14, 2004 10:58 AM by Tiger Spot

Say, what's the policy on shamelessly begging the readers of an open thread to help you track down the author and title of a book that you read in childhood that, judging from previous attempts at finding it, may not actually exist?

Based on historical precedent I'd say it's fine. Although of course for finding a book that does not exist, we charge extra.

Posted October 14, 2004 11:00 AM by Dan Blum

What am I missing in not going to google every day? Is there constant entertainment? Are there links to interesting things? Sure, it's a search engine, but I don't have time to search every single day. I use sites like boingboing, cursor, and metafilter to sort out all of that information for me.

Someone please explain to me what I'm missing.

Posted October 14, 2004 11:03 AM by Randall P.

In addition to Making Light and BoingBoing, I try to get to Arts and Letters Daily every day: http://www.aldaily.com/. Run by the Chronicle of Higher Education, it's like an uncondensed Reader's Digest for the intellectually inclined and magpie-minded, if that makes any sense. I think most people who like Making Light would like this as well. Oooh, gotta go read the article on Ghenghis Khan...

Posted October 14, 2004 11:31 AM by Janet Croft

I go to at least two comics online:

www.pvponline.com
www.scarygoround.com

And every other day I go to:

www.dorktower.com

And, as it looks as if I'm going to be embarking on my MS in Publishing soon (W00T!) I go to www.pace.edu daily, just to make sure the program isn't going to mysteriously disappear and that it was all just a dream.

Posted October 14, 2004 11:34 AM by Chryss

Randall P wonders:

What am I missing in not going to google every day? Is there constant entertainment? Are there links to interesting things? Sure, it's a search engine, but I don't have time to search every single day. I use sites like boingboing, cursor, and metafilter to sort out all of that information for me.

That's interesting. I don't have time to not search every day. It sounds like you've got a perfectly reasonable way of finding the information that you want, though - so there's no particular reason to expand it.

I use Google to find a wide variety of information, from software and mailing list archive searches, to information on how to do things, to the names of websites that I don't quite remember. It's like having Hugin and Munin on my shoulders, murmmering into my ears [as an example, I just ran a quick search to check that I had the correct spelling for Munin]. Google Images [http://images.google.c*m - for some reason google.c*m is being tagged as questionable content] is a really wonderful resource as well - perfect for finding the picture that's worth a thousand words.

In combination, it's useful for things like trying to explain why I was so cheerful about having found a Moulin-Legume to somebody that had no idea what I was talking about. Google provided links to discover that the one I now own was made between 1932 and 1957 - and that they're better known in english as 'Food Mills'. A quick search on Google images provided this link to an example of what I was talking about.

Moving on to other sites that I frequent regularly -

LiveJournal, both for fiends and syndicated feeds.

I believe that Today in alternate history was a link from Making Light originally, but it's a fun read in the morning, and prompts occasional trips to another excellent site, Wikipedia which I should really visit more regularly.

Overall, though I've moved to using an RSS reader for any site that I visit regularly that has a feed. A quick check shows that I'm getting 27 feeds. Out of those, folks here might enjoy:

Boing Boing of course!
Sensory Impact which is a design blog, about the culture of objects.
ScienceDaily Magazine, which is a summary of interesting advances in science.
Patently Obvious which is a blog about various things in the world of patents. Geeky in an oddly fascinating way.

Posted October 14, 2004 11:41 AM by xeger

xeger recommends:

LiveJournal, both for fiends and syndicated feeds.

Sounds like interesting reading! Who are some of the most notorious fiends?

Posted October 14, 2004 12:15 PM by Jimcat Kasprzak

"What am I missing in not going to google every day?"

The holiday logos. Of course, you could just look at the archive.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:15 PM by Kathy Jackson

Can't think of one specific site, because I generally use the Newspaper option in my RSS feed reader. Which has about a hundred billion sites in it, because I tend to do the full pack-rat thing with web links. Blogs, news sites, weird and wacky link collections...all kinds of things, with different sites popping out different pearls every day.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:21 PM by Richard Cobbett

"Never mind the rat, our learned opponent here has repeatedly failed to accept blame for an incident of mouse eating in a work of fiction written by a former staffer for a business associate of his ex-wife's. Clearly, these two events are not only equivalent, but the other side must bear a greater share of the blame for reasons that I will bzzzzzk Let me finish! Breaker Breaker! One Adam 12! You are clear for landing..."

Posted October 14, 2004 12:35 PM by Kip W

Jimcat pointed out that my fingers escaped me:

| xeger recommends:
| LiveJournal, both for fiends and syndicated feeds.

Sounds like interesting reading! Who are some of the most notorious fiends?

Uh - I think I'd recommend my finfers, imomus, and this as fiendish.

Posted October 14, 2004 12:44 PM by xeger

Let me see...

I have far too big a list of sites that I visit every day and wish some of them would stop being so interesting, or would at least post less frequently, so that I could cut down. That said, the one I'm sure to never, ever miss is Rebecca Sean Borgstrom's Hitherby Dragons. It's a trip and a half of short fiction.

As for Mt. St. Helen's, I absolutely love the immanent eruption. As someone newly transported to Seattle from New York, I'm taking the opportunity to enjoy having a nearby site of natural disasters. I'd always felt so left out, previously. No hurricanes for us, oh no. No earthquakes, tsumani or tornados. New York is, of course, a helluva town, but our excitement and danger was always of the man-made variety. It's nice that I'm in a place where nature can try her hand.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:00 PM by Jason

I have 83 subscriptions in NetNewsWire and over 100 LJs on my friends list, but every weekday I still try to hit Computerworld's Shark Tank.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:04 PM by Christopher Davis

Long time "lurker", occasional "poster".

A friend put me on to Extreme Pumpkins last night. She has about 20 extra pumpkins and has been trying to figure out what to do with them.

The Siamese twins design is clever and Carrie at the prom is appropriately gory. But this one is the best.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:10 PM by Dan Lewis

Artisan! Yay.

In Pittsburgh! On Halloween! House concert!
Oh, my heart. I win.

As for web sites I read daily, I probably
shouldn't list them all. I read them at work.
(On the internet, you never know whether a
dog is your manager.)

Posted October 14, 2004 1:13 PM by Andrew Plotkin

Mt. St. Helens: Some of the younger people in the office were hoping it would be a huge eruption like last time, exclaiming how much fun that would be.

It was not fun. It was scary. The ash fell like snow, except it irritated your skin and made breathing hard. The tv, radio and phones were erratic with lots of static. Public transit shut down--we don't have a lot of snow plows (not having much snow in winter), and chains don't work as well on ash. People died, the land changed, river courses were silted up, plants and animals smothered.

Fresh produce was minimal and expensive that year, as most of the local crops were smothered in ash (which proved to be an excellent fertilizer, though, so the economic impact was ameliorated the next year).

It's unlikely to repeat, at least at Mt. St. Helens, because the sheer mass of material that was pulverized in the explosion last time is now spread out over the world (the ash cloud circled the world, IIRC). However, Mt. Hood is only a dormant volcano, not an extinct one, and Mt. Rainier is likewise, and even bigger.

Posted October 14, 2004 1:30 PM by Kai Jones

I think my neighbor's cats got to the rat. And after I told them to concentrate on squirrels, too.

Aside from Livejournal, Comics.com, and Making Light, I usually hit Talking Points Memo and Informed Comment for my daily dose of indignation and frustration. Because, you know, my kids don't provide enough...

Posted October 14, 2004 1:42 PM by Tayefeth

What do I read every day? Calvin and Hobbes of course.
http://www.calvinandhobbes.com
It doesn't matter that I've read them all before. It's something to look forward to every morning.

Posted October 14, 2004 2:10 PM by Michelle

I use bloglines.com to keep up with 31 different sites most days. Half of them are technical computer geek-type sites. The rest include this site, Eschaton/Atrios, Echidne of the Snakes, fafblog, etcetera.

But the only certainty is Google. I use it constantly at work. At home, I use Google instead of bookmarks..

Posted October 14, 2004 3:33 PM by Douglas

"When One made love to Zero, spheres embraced their arches and prime numbers caught their breath." -- Raymond Queneau (French author, 1903-1976)

Posted October 14, 2004 3:53 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Randall, my reasons for going to Google are such a fundamental part of my universe that I can't explain them. It's what I do, as evident and obvious as loving semicolons and hating closed-stack library systems.

Kass, around here, asking about books and stories you can't quite name is a basic conversational trope. How much do you remember about it?

Posted October 14, 2004 4:38 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"But the only certainty is Google. I use it constantly at work. At home, I use Google instead of bookmarks.."

I downloaded Google Desktop Search at the office, and it was on my home computer within five seconds of getting home. I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documents, and finding them is a true nightmare. Now, I can find them all in about three seconds flat.

Posted October 14, 2004 4:51 PM by Richard Cobbett

Mary Kay, the rasff party is at 9pm Saturday, I hope you can make it! Jill, the hotel is the Marriott at Tyson's Corner. If you get off the Beltway on the Route 7 West exit, it'll be about a half-block ahead on the right (some small businesses in front). It has a *fantastic* extremely expensive restaurant (plus coffee shop, bar, and snack bar with Starbucks stuff). You can read my hotel review here:

http://www.wsfa.org/capc04/review.htm

Posted October 14, 2004 5:09 PM by Marilee

Re Particles: I hear my brother John will be on the NBC news tonight, in his capacity as a pundit covering the cable-TV industry, to comment on the Bill O'Reilly affair.

Posted October 14, 2004 5:10 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

I can't imagine what life without Google would be like. The first thing I did when I switched to Firefox was install the Googlebar extension, because I had grown so addicted to the original IE version. I'd estimate I average around 4 google searches an hour for any given hour I'm on the web, spread between web, image, usenet, and news searches.

In other cool Google/text-geek news:
Toogle

Posted October 14, 2004 5:21 PM by Skwid

Bill: that's cool. Any idea what time? Any links for it?

Posted October 14, 2004 5:37 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, 6:30-7 PM EST or about forty-five minutes from now.

Posted October 14, 2004 5:46 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

I find myself using Google in just about every function of my computer. It's my e-mail, my search engine, my popup blocker, my toolbar (yes, same thing, I know), my news, and now, it'll be how I search my computer's files. It will also likely be my book source when that upgrade comes out.

Somehow, the idea that Google will have such a stake in my computer doesn't alarm me.

Should it?

Posted October 14, 2004 7:37 PM by Alice Keezer

On the O'Reilly link, I liked this line from page seven:

"O'Reilly's eyes became glazed and bizarrely strayed in opposite directions."

Posted October 14, 2004 8:10 PM by Andy Perrin

The extreme pumpkins freaked me out.

mommy!

Posted October 14, 2004 10:24 PM by Harry Connolly

John Kessel story banned

Posted October 14, 2004 11:00 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

For no particular reason (and thus appropriate to an open thread),

Making Light->
Early Days of a Better Nation ->
LanguageHat ->
http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/Davis.html

A very enjoyable article about the difficulty of translating poetry between languages and cultures, particularly medieval Persian to modern English.

Of course, I speak as a more or less monolingual person who has never translated more than about two pages of prose, but what the hell...

Posted October 15, 2004 12:59 AM by Steve Taylor

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Vote2004/story?id=166434&page=1

I missed the debate Wed. night, the TV set in the NESFA Clubhouse remained off. However...

I watched Frontline Thursday night and Nightline from 11:30 PM Thursday night to its end at 12:05 AM or whatever today. The URL above is a nont complete transcript of the show--it doesn't for example show that stinking slime O'Neil with his selective repeated misleading quoting -- "only one man with a rocket launcher" is misleading, when it was a group of Vietcong and there was "only only one man with a rocket launcher" of the group of TWENTY Vietcong attacking the patrolling Swift boats in a planned ambush against Swift boats. The OTHER Vietcong continued fighting....

O'Neil refused to answer Koppel's question, instead acting worse than the author of The Pleistocene Redemption regarding picking up books and putting them in front of his face cover out and brandishing them and reading the -same- passage out of them as a "response," multiple times and pointing out the excerpts (again, selectively quoted from books other than his farrago of lying screed, and from his lying screed) also putting the printed pages toward the camera. Koppel finally said, "please stop putting books in front of your face and please stop putting pages in front of the camera, we can't read the pages anyway."

Dropping O'Neil in the volcano might cause it a bit more indigestion but would get rid of an impressively vile piece of stinking lying vituperative scum.... Frontline aired an the exchange from 30+ years ago between Kerry and him. O'Neil challenged Kerry about Kerry's claims of having committed atrocities. Kerry asked O'Neil if O'Neil had not like Kerry operated in "Free Fire Zones killing anyone who moved, men, women, and children." O'Neil admitted he had. Kerry then cited free fire zones as violating the Geneva Convention, with the interjection "You know what the Geneva Convention is?" as atrocities. O'Neil shut up. Unfortunately he failed to -stay- shut up and it's a generation later.... O'Neil was also colluding with Tricky Dicky about going after Kerry and his anti-war activities, Nixon wanted Kerry silenced. There were rumors that Nixon was getting O'Neil government funds... the rumors apparently were never proved either true or false.

O'Neil's smarmy hardline deflection and misinformation extended to blustering about "what about the other incidents in My Book? What about Kerry being a hero in North Vietnam and talking to North Vietnam and [other actions in South Vietnam.} Koppel responded that they had looked at this one particular incident and might look at the others, but he wanted O'Neil's response to what Nightline had discovered, whereupon the smarmy lying scum proceeded to insinuate that the villagers who were eyewitnesses were lying on behalf of Kerry!

Koppel also asked O'Neil about the two people, an interviewer and cameraman, who had gone to the village months ago saying that Kerry had lied and they wanted to film the villagers [to show Kerry as a liar.} One villager said that he had told them that the award of medals to US servicemen was done by the USA and had been up to the US Government and he had nothing more to say on the subject to the interviewer and cameraman (the anti-Kerry pair). Koppel asked O'Neil about them, O'Neil disavowed them as "not being one [of us]" and then veered off that subject and veered off from any further probing by Koppel on the subject.

Frontline pointed out that every time Bush II has run for office, there have been vicious slur campaigns in consonance with his campaigns which could not be -directly- tied to Bush himself. There was also the sliming of Max Cleland, Bush spoke up saying how Cleland was a hero, but NEVER condemned the slimers/slime campaign. Familiar? Bush has never said one word directly against O'Neil and his fellow lying scum....

What a loathsome dispicable self-serving tapeworm.

Posted October 15, 2004 1:45 AM by Paula Lieberman

On the angle of Lynne Cheney and her reaction to Kerry mentioning that her openly out daughter is a lesbian, I saw an interesting bit at Atrios with the cover of Lynne's 1981 historical novel "Sisters," which has of course not been reprinted, but is up (I'm guessing for a brief time) here:

http://www.livejournal.com/~lynnecheney/

From what I've skimmed over, it looks like Lesbian Separatists of the Purple Sage, but I was interested to hear Teresa's take.

Posted October 15, 2004 3:18 AM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

One of the juiciest bits so far here:

She looked inside the book's front cover and found an inscription in the same ink: "To my Helena, my dearest lover. You are the joy of my life. If ever you fail me through my fault or your own, I will forswear thenceforth all human friendship. Thine always, A.T."

Helen and... Amy Travers? No, it couldn't be, simply couldn't. But "...my dearest lover"?

No, it didn't bear thinking about.

Posted October 15, 2004 3:24 AM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Just a brief sanity check here - I'm not being unreasonable in objecting to the use of "dialog[ue]" as a verb, am I?

Posted October 15, 2004 8:21 AM by Paul Walker

Paul, Shakespeare used "dialog" as a verb. So did Coleridge. It's not a new usage, just a reappearance of an old one.

If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.

Posted October 15, 2004 8:58 AM by Harry Connolly

Fair enough. I shall slink away into a corner.

(Doesn't mean I have to like it, though... ;-)

Posted October 15, 2004 9:13 AM by Paul Walker

How and why did "disconnect" become a noun?

And what's wrong with "disconnection?"

Posted October 15, 2004 9:41 AM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

While we were dialoging, the whiteboarding got out of hand and we had a disconnect, so we'll have to liaise again later.

Posted October 15, 2004 12:40 PM by Larry Brennan

Steve Taylor writes:

http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/Davis.html

A very enjoyable article about the difficulty of translating poetry between languages and cultures, particularly medieval Persian to modern English.

Reminds me, yesterday in rec.arts.sf.fandom a student (minie_moe@hotmail.com) asked politely for a discussion about how humorous writing survives translation, with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a particular example.

I conjecture that correspondents here might have something to share with this person. Take a look. Subject line is "The Importance of Being Funny - Are you a Fan of DNA's?" (DNA being Douglas Adams, I presume.)

(I can't post a link or URL to the article via G o o g l e Groups because, for some reason, Making Light refuses to accept a posting that looks like it refers to g o o g l e.com. I wonder why.)

Posted October 15, 2004 12:40 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

I'm gonna pull a Randall P. here and ask for some book recommendations. I have been tense and neurotic due to current events. I need bookish valium.

So...

Really good comfort reads, funny reads? Old favorites? Adult versions of Harry Potter?

Posted October 15, 2004 1:35 PM by ElizabethVomMarlowe

Teresa kindly gave me permission to post this link to a charitable auction. My beading friend Layne Schilling died of colorectal cancer (diagnosed too late, because her doctor thought her reported symptoms were just a middle-aged woman whining) two years ago. Since then, many beaders have made items to go to auction each year to benefit the National Colorectal Cancer Association. One of the beadstore owners in the group makes up identical kits and we buy them. We have to use at least one of each type of bead in the kit, and we can add one other type of bead.

I'm leaving for Capclave soon, and Beki hasn't got the auctions up yet, but here's where you can see them tonight:

http://members.ebay.com/ws2/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=beadingforacure

If you want to take a sneak peek at the items before they go up, look here:

http://whimbeads.com/BFAC.html

Posted October 15, 2004 2:34 PM by Marilee

Speaking of translations, I've always wondered why Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Fire in the Steppe) has never been marketed to fantasy readers. It always gets stuck in the Serious Literature section, where it finds too few buyers and too much dust. The books are terrific -- memorable characters, lots of swordly action, epic sweep, tragedy, romance. What's not to like?

The external tropes of fantasy are there, except the magic is more mysticism and more hinted at than truly present. The imagined world is both distant and consistent. The plot twists and twists again.

And an enterprising publisher could take advantage of their length, maybe breaking each part of the trilogy into its own trilogy. (Plus it's got a track record of more than a century of bestsellerdom in its native Poland...) Rights too complicated? Or are the books just too unknown?

Posted October 15, 2004 5:11 PM by Doug

Elizabeth:

Sorcery and Cecilia, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, and its recently-published sequel, The Grand Tour. They're Regency romances with magic, and great fun. Patricia Wrede has also written two books of her own set in the same world: Mairelon the Magician and Magician's Ward.

I also find Robin McKinley's Beauty to be very soothing, but that may be a function of having loved it for 25 years.

Posted October 15, 2004 5:36 PM by Adina

It wasn't a rat, it was a nutria. And you only eat the hind saddle. The rest goes in stock.

(Okay, I just finished the first complete review draft of a new manual. I need to distribute copies for technical review, and I feel myself paralyzed by a sudden and irrational attack of violent procrastination. It's a tech review; no one's going to be judging my writing. If anything, I'm going to have to pull teeth just to get basic feedback. Why am I stuck like this for the last hour and a half? Why do I feel no sense of accomplishment?)

Posted October 15, 2004 5:53 PM by HP

Elizabeth said: I'm gonna pull a Randall P. here and ask for some book recommendations. I have been tense and neurotic due to current events. I need bookish valium.

There is no better bookish valium than P.G. Woodhouse. Even helps toothache. Some people prefer Jeeves, others Blandings, still others Uncle Fred or Psmith -- take your pick.

Of course, Terry Pratchett's good, too. But he may get a little too topical for true distance from current events.

Or The Hobbit. That's good chicken soup, too.

A little Jane Austen? Some Dumas? Or George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman?

Or the video option -- if you're even too wrung out to read. Noises Off, Oscar, Ocean's Eleven, Austin Powers, The Princess Bride, Romancing the Stone...or going back to the beginning, Fry and Laurie's Bertie and Jeeves videos.

Posted October 15, 2004 6:03 PM by Janet Croft

Except of course that it's Wodehouse.

Now going off to hit head against hard object.

Posted October 15, 2004 6:05 PM by Janet Croft

"How and why did "disconnect" become a noun?"

I've never thought about it. It's always been standard usage in anything related to electrical engineering-speak that I've run into. "A disconnect" is just the state of two or more things -- components, thoughts, ideas, etc. being not connected, or disjunct. Disconnetion is the the result of usually an intentional disconnecting of two or more objects which had been connected, as in me having taken great glee in yanking the power plug out of webcache servers while they were operating, making the computer disconnecting the computer from the power and -crashing- it, intentionally. [I was getting -paid- to pull the plug, it was part of the testing I did, simulating a power failure on servers).

But, the state when the power cord had been pulled out of the computer (any of deliberately pulled while the computer was running, pulled with the computer shut down, or pulled out from someone tripping over a cord, moving the computer and not disconnecting the power cord first, etc.) was "disconnected." "It's disconnected" got used rather that "There is a disconnection," or "I see a disconnection." "Disconnection" didn't get used, possibly from laziness/viewing the additional "ion" as extraneous, or from a a difference in sense of terms--"disconnection" denoting formerly connected but not no longer connection, while "disconnect" had the sense that the object hadn't necessarily -ever been- actuall connected up explicitly in the past.

That is dis-connection was the undone result of a former connection which isn't now a connected, "disconnect" is the state of there not being a connection, regardless of past state.

It does matter, when troubleshooting. It might be that there shouldn't be a connection there and that it was working perfectly without connection, and that the disconnect is the correct operational configuration. Or, it may be that the disconnect is the problem, that the disconnect is actually a disconnection and the disconnect is the source of the problem. Or, the system wasn't working and the disconnect is the problem because the connection hasn't been made yet. Or, there's a disconnect and that's because those things do -not- belong together.

Posted October 15, 2004 6:18 PM by Paula Lieberman

I've been reading Dan Gillmor and John Paczkowski daily for years now. I also hit Google News (which "could not be submitted due to questionable content", specifically google dot com) every day and go from there, and the O'Reilly Weblogs page. Talking Points Memo is a must-read, too, and I usually get to Slashdot.

Posted October 15, 2004 6:33 PM by adamsj

Oh, and Salon. Gotta visit Salon.

Posted October 15, 2004 7:23 PM by adamsj

"... Great equations change the way we perceive the world. They reorchestrate the world -- transforming and reintegrating our perception by redefining what belongs together with what. Light and waves. Energy and mass. Probability and position. And they do so in a way that often seems unexpected and even strange...."

The Greatest Equations Ever

Posted October 15, 2004 8:28 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Bookish Valium:

Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books. Comic caper novels, brilliantly crafted with something good on every page. Unfortunately, the latest (_Road to Ruin_) isn't good (and the one before, _Bad News_, is fairly subdued), but _What's the Worst that Could Happen?_, _The Hot Rock_, or any of the others but _Drowned Hopes_ are delightful and perfect comfort reading.

There are others, of course, but Westlake is one that might not come up as often.

Posted October 15, 2004 9:05 PM by Kate Nepveu

I still think that e^(i*pi)=-1 is the greatest mathematical expression, ever....

Posted October 15, 2004 10:18 PM by Bill Blum

I saw the Nightline too. O'Neill just freaked me out. I kept expecting him to start fondling those books and start hissing "Precious, Precious." I remember the Frontline clips. He has aged horribly (has the face he deserves).

I was over at Washington Monthly(.com - a great site) and the trolls on the Swifties/Nightline thread were now claiming that the Vietnamese villagers account discredited Kerry's because they said they never saw Kerry. Duh! If they'd seen Kerry, he'd be dead, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Posted October 15, 2004 10:21 PM by Mary R

Elizabeth: extending Adina's suggestion, Stevermer solo in College of Magics; there's \something/ about a book in which the chaperone can say to her charge, "Faris, your hat is ticking" -- and it has a very satisfactory resolution. I'm also partial to Merchanter's Luck, but that's a sort of male gothic that isn't to everyone's taste (but the ending is a knockout). For wish fulfillment, Parke Godwin's Waiting for the Galactic Bus: dealing with the next It Can't Happen Here, with style.

Posted October 15, 2004 11:17 PM by CHip

Adina, I read my first copy of Robin McKinley's Beauty to pieces about four years ago, it's a comforting tale to re-read for some unknown reason. Found a newer one (untrashed) at the Philly Worldcon with guideance from a friend. But the again, I have the first or second Ballantine Lord of the Rings set with the beautiful magenta covers that I'm am afraid to re-read it, it's breaking up on the spines though I'm a careful reader (I did buy another, 'modern' set to re-read because I do it often enough). Plus that first set has things like the tailfeathers of the first pet I ever had and loved (Otis, a mis-named female budgie... she did things like start chirping when I got home from school because she knew she would be Set Free under my supervision). Sigh (feeling very nostalgic -- though I've had lots of pets, her gentle beak grooming my face is the first pet contact I EVER had, and she was very sweet and loveable for a bird).

Posted October 15, 2004 11:31 PM by Paula Helm Murray

Sigh. No time to read most of the comments here, so I don't know if anyone has posted this link yet:

http://www.lepow.com/tag/

Posted October 16, 2004 12:50 AM by Joy Freeman

Tiger Spot wrote:

I vote strawberries. Every time my girls get strawberries, they leave red juice all over the cage. It looks like a massacre.

True, but I'm voting tomato-based pasta sauce just because it spreads thicker.

Posted October 16, 2004 12:59 AM by Vassilissa

Steve Taylor wrote:

A very enjoyable article about the difficulty of translating poetry between languages and cultures, particularly medieval Persian to modern English.
Of course, I speak as a more or less monolingual person who has never translated more than about two pages of prose, but what the hell...

Thank you for the link. So many poets and translators are working on bringing more Islamic literature into English, and the English results are terribly uneven. Not having any of the relevant languages, I just have to assume when one of the famous Arabic or Persian (or whatever) poet falls flat for me, it's the translator's problem. I've actually tried to get a Hafiz translation that could give me any kind of clue as to why he's such a major poet--at least now I know more about the particular difficulties in translating him.

After 9/11, I raided the university library for Arabic poetry, etc., in my effort to Make Sense of It All. Didn't make sense of it all, of course, but came across a volume called Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu, that probably came as close as anything can to addressing the translation problems discussed in the article Steve linked to.

Aijaz Ahmad translated Ghalib from Urdu into painstakingly literal, unpoetic English, and then sent his translations to an impressive roster of American and British poets to see what they'd do with it. Each poem in the volume appears first in Arabic, then in literal translation with Ahmad's explanations of idiom, etc., and then in multiple poetic translations by the Anglophone poets, so you can see the same piece filtered through the very different styles and sensibilities of, for instance, Adrienne Rich and William Stafford. Gorgeous stuff, and highly recommended, if you can find it.

Posted October 16, 2004 2:16 AM by Sarah Avery

Dropping right into the middle (taking advantage of the Open Thread), knowing that there are some Elders of Knowledge concerning religious history here. Below is an apology from a local opinion columnist.

I must add a mea culpa about last week's column The story of the council of Macon, where it is claimed bishops voted on whether women had souls, appears not to be correct, even though it is mentioned in several reference books. What happened at the General Synod the week before, however, is entirely factual.

Also; was the opening of this thread inspired by this story?

Cambodian chef and villagers gear up for dry season rat craze
Fri Oct 8, 1:29 PM ET
PHUM BEK KROANG, Cambodia (AFP) - Soeung Thy is praying for the monsoons to end so he can begin frying, grilling and currying rats to satisfy the hundreds of Cambodian villagers anticipating his feasts ...

Posted October 16, 2004 9:15 AM by Epacris

Another vote for McKinley's _Beauty_. There's something about the vivid descriptions, the no-nonsense heroine, and the unsoppy-yet-lovely portrayals of romantic and family love. It all comes together to make a book that IMO is as comforting as a mug of hot tea and a warm fire on a cold winter's day. My copy's pretty battered as well!

Posted October 16, 2004 9:33 AM by Jill Smith

To whom it may concern:

i am trying to locate a book i read in the 1970's; it was sci fi - involved a woman crashing a motorcycle which propelled her to another dimension that eventually started leaking into her everyday life... I don't know the author or title. I thought it was "Nightmare" by (last name) Chilton) but nothing has come up so I must be mistaken. Any ideas on how to hunt? Don't ask why - it's just one of those things...

Thanks in advance
Kflofritz

Posted October 16, 2004 10:10 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

Hello sci fi expoerts,

I am trying to find a title to a movie I saw when I was a kid in the 1960’s.

I do not have much to go on, but the best description I can give is the following scene:

A car is driving down the road with two people in the front seats.

A monster cut off hand is clawing its way up the riders back of the seat.

I thinks the hand was capable of protruding nails or metal pins from its finger tips.

That’s all I remember…

Is this enough for someone to ID the movie?

I had thought it was “I Married A Monster From Outer Space” but I recently bought the DVD and did not see that scene in the movie.

I think the movie came out about the same time as “The Blob” and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space”, which I saw as double feature

Sometime in the 1960’s

My email address is xxxxxxxxx

Please [let me know here, Jonathan Vos Post can email it to me] if you know the movie

Douglas Hadland

Posted October 16, 2004 10:44 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

I intended this for the "Wedge" thread, but it's not very active.

American society has changed since I was born, fairly early in the Baby Boom (1946-1964). Here are some data:

In September 1951:
Mickey Mantle, age 19, joined the New York Yankees. "Dennis the Menace" began as Hank Ketchum's great comic strip. Convertibles flocked to drive-ins, carrying boys in crew cuts and girls in strapless gowns or 2-piece bathing suits. TV debuted "I Love Lucy" and "Search for Tomorrow" and Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now." General MacArthur gave his farewell speech, with the line: "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." The US population was 154,287,000 (compared to 292,648,691 in 2004). A 3-bedroom home averaged $9,000 ($159,000 in 2004). Average income was $3,709 ($39,879 in 2004). The price of a new Ford was $1,480 ($21,885 in 2004). A gallon of gas cost 27 cents ($1.49 nationwide Sep 2004, over $2.20 in Los Angeles in Oct 2004). A pound of bread cost 16 cents (97 cents in 2004). A First Class Postage Stamp was 3 cents (37 cents in 2004). We had a war president who was weirdly inarticulate in press conferences. And nobody was terrified that Social Security would go bankrupt.

Posted October 16, 2004 2:59 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan, I remember that scene, I think. I'm pretty sure it was from THE CRAWLING HAND. The hand belonged to an astronaut who crashed his ship off the California coast. It wasn't a monster's hand, but it was damaged enough from the crash that it might be remembered that way.

Also, THE BLOB and I MARRIED A MONSTER were from the fifties. Not that it matters much.

Posted October 16, 2004 8:04 PM by Harry Connolly

How about INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050545/

"A teenage couple making out in the woods accidentally runs over an alien creature with their car. The creature's hand falls off, but it comes alive, and, with an eye growing out of it, begins to stalk the teens. Meanwhile, Joe the town drunk wants to store the body in his refrigerator, but some of the alien's buddies inject alcohol into his system, and Joe dies of an overdose."

I remember the hand had injectors . . .

Posted October 17, 2004 1:09 AM by Stefan Jones

Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine has a long article ("Without a Doubt") by Ron Suskind on Bush's faith-based approach to leadership:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html

It includes a description of an encounter with a White House staffer that is both entertaining and utterly terrifying:

'The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."'

Oh, Man . . . we're talking serious deep-fried solipsistic lunacy here.

When they make a TV mini-series about how a pack of raving moonbats took over the country back in 2000, the actor who plays that aide will affect a hideous facial tic and read his lines while a Theramin plays in the background.

Posted October 17, 2004 1:30 AM by Stefan Jones

Re The art of coding porn in Particles, I'll mention that the jargon of video porn is somewhat less choate than for the written stuff. I learned this a while ago when I tracked down the meaning of an "RCA scene". Turns out there's a fair glossary on rame.net, though not recommended for the faint of heart, pure of soul, nor good of taste (nor safe of work, of course).

Posted October 17, 2004 2:17 AM by Dan Hoey

The hand with the needly fingers is from Invasion of the Saucer Men. The gimmick of the picture is that the needles, for some reason unexplained by evolutionary dynamics, inject ethanol, and after they attack necking teenagers, nobody will believe the drunk kids. (They also blow out car tires real good.) There are also some comedylike reliefish military types.

Wait, it gets better. The movie is so bad someone decided to remake it, as The Eye Creatures, which despite the presence of Frank Gorshin is actually worse than the original, with "day-for-night" filming that consists of kinda stopping down the camera so things get a little darkish, especially the sharp shadows on the ground. And then movie collector Wade Williams bought it and sold it to TV as Invasion of the Eye Creatures . . . except that the new title card in fact reads . . . The The Eye Creatures. MST3K ran this version, but they could hardly improve on it.

Fandom is just a goldurn relational database.

Posted October 17, 2004 3:02 AM by John M. Ford

Sarah Avery: the book sounds interesting, although since Amazon only has a used copy for £49.95 I might have to wait. :)

Stefan - thanks for providing a link which is sufficient to scare the bejeezus out of me...!

Posted October 17, 2004 10:21 AM by Paul

John, you're pulling punches.

_The Eye Creatures_ was such a cheap production that they only sprung for one full monster suit.

So in the scary swarm-of-monsters-advancing climax we get treated to the sight of one marginally convincing ugly alien leading a charge of guys with alien heads who are otherwise clad in dark but identifiably human clothing.

I think of _Saucer Men_ every time I see a car with an accessory spotlight. Damn useful for blasting photophobic martians.

Posted October 17, 2004 12:11 PM by Stefan Jones

Paul: copies at ABE run from $5 to $84. Once again -- unless you are very lucky, Amazon is a good place to get fleeced buying out of print books.

ABE is at www.abebooks.com. I also recommend www.bookfinder.com.

Posted October 17, 2004 8:45 PM by Tom Whitmore

A disconnect, noun, is among other things a two piece railroad car used for logs, the disconnect is joined only by the logs. There's one parked outside the City of Renton History Museum with logs that rot and have been replaced over the years.

Posted October 17, 2004 10:02 PM by Clark E Myers

I've just been reading the wonderful linguistics blog http://www.languagehat.com and I've come across a mention of STEDT - the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project, and I can't help thinking what a wonderful name "STEDT" would be for a blog on copyediting.

Posted October 18, 2004 1:06 AM by Steve Taylor

If I were doing a blog about copyediting, I'd call it Latitude of Interpretation. Or possibly The Comma Sutra.

Posted October 18, 2004 1:41 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

It's finding the longitude of interpretation that's the hard bit. It's especially tough on the ship's dog.

Posted October 18, 2004 2:20 AM by John M. Ford

JMF: One hopes it will not come apart under gravitational stress!

Posted October 18, 2004 7:58 AM by cd

Dang! Beat me to it.

Posted October 18, 2004 9:02 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I had the idea years ago that snake owners concerned with problems of fat and fang decay would pay a premium price for sugar-free mice: normal rodents, lightly killed, with their regular body sugars taken out and replaced with low-calorie Nutria-Sweet.

By the way, I Toogled on "Sarah Xihuan" and was rewarded appropriately. Impressive, to me anyway.

Posted October 18, 2004 10:18 AM by Kip W

Horror season is approaching. I keep seeing previews on the idiot box for Gremlins. That movie still makes me twitch, and I don't care how funny it was supposed to be.

Back in high school, some friends and I had a tradition of renting movies on halloween. We had a few classics, but we mostly got the weirdest and worst we could find.

I have been reading the last few posts with interest. Any recs for gleefully superlative terrible scream flicks?

Posted October 18, 2004 11:27 AM by sundre

When I was in college, my school had a "bad movie fest". They showed three old, bad, sci-fi films back to back. You could get in for free, but you had to pay if you left early.

The only title I remember was "Plan 9 From Outer Space". I peeked in at one point, and one of the characters was an alleged police officer with a gun in his hand. He pointed the gun at someone and said "You, go that way and see if you find anything". A couple of people in the audience caught the stupidity of it and yelled "BANG!"
as if he had shot the guy.

I think one of them might have gone off to create Mystery Science Theater 3000.

But if you want a movie so bad that it makes you scream, "Plan 9" might be required viewing.

;)

Posted October 18, 2004 11:43 AM by Greg London

Thanks to nielsenhayden.com, I'm now in the running for a signed copy of Art Spiegelman's latest.

A friend of mine just got the Samsung 4-megapixel camera she got from an instant-win web contest I steered her to. More useful I think than the bare-bones computer system I won, which was supposed to be the more impressive prize.

Some of the websites I will probably visit every day:
dilbert.com
nielsenhayden.com
thehungersite.org
quote.yahoo.com (well, on weekdays)
iwon.com
redhotsweeps.com/forum

Posted October 18, 2004 11:44 AM by Richard Brandt

If you want to see a scary clip, watch the vice-presidential debates. At one point, Edwards mentions Halliburton:

>We also thought it was wrong to have a $20
>billion fund out of which $7.5 billion was
>going to go to a no-bid contract for
>Halliburton, the vice president's former
>company.
>
>It was wrong then. It's wrong now.

If you watched the live debate, for a split second, Dick Cheney's eye's morph into large bulbous spheres, he grows fangs, and briefly lungs towards Edwards muttering something that sounded suspiciously like "precious".

In the replays, Fox delays a split second before switching the camera to Cheney, and you don't even see it, but if you saw the live footage, it is clearly there. And it's pretty clear that Cheney is under the influence of the ring of power wielded by Haliburton.

Posted October 18, 2004 12:02 PM by Greg London

Ya'll should read this book: The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry, whose book about the great flood of 1927, Rising Tide, has been mentioned on other threads. Buy it, borrow it from the library, read it in bits in the bookstore on your lunch hour, whatever. Read this book.

In addition to war, politics, diplomacy, public health policy, epidemiology, pathology, and all the other crunchy goodness Barry can import into a text, it has this quote from Judge Learned Hand: "That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-confrmity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, becomes a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent."

Posted October 18, 2004 12:15 PM by fidelio

sundre: I can recommend looking through the review archives at jabootu.com, Stomp Tokyo (and its hosted sites), 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting, Badmovies.org, and the sites they link to. Such a wellspring of snarky reviews of schlocktastic movies as the eye of man has never before set eyes upon (to put it in an Ed Wood-ian way).

Posted October 18, 2004 12:41 PM by cd

Just a (probably unneeded) reminder to all California ML readers... Today is the last day to register to vote in the upcoming General Election.

Which, if you've seen our ballot, is not all that far off from the horror movie thread. And our voter's guide is as long as a mid-career Stephen King epic.

Posted October 18, 2004 12:49 PM by Larry Brennan

All the Cthulhu stuff that appeared on this page recently inspired me to write this:

(To the tune of the theme song from the "Little Lulu" cartoons)

Lurking in the ocean
Rampaging through the street
Stealing all our spirts
Eating human meat
How can an Ancient One as evil as you
Raise such a ruckus and a hullabaloo?

Mighty Cthulhu, mighty Cthulhu, with tentacles on your chin
Always in and out of trouble, but mostly always in
Research at Miskatonic on a book that you write
Can make people catatonic for the rest of their life

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange eons even death may die
Though you're lonesome and hungry, lying in the deep
We are thankful that you're usually asleep

Your're usually quite quiet in your city near the pole
Except when you're devouring our soul.
Though I pity any fool who would take your name in vain
mighty Cthulhu, we fear you-loo just the same!

Posted October 18, 2004 1:17 PM by Erik Nelson

Greg London: The Ring of Mass Destruction?

Erik Nelson : That was fun!

Larry Brennan :long as a mid-career Stephen King epic? I saw King interviewed during the 3rd Red Sox game in the American League Championship Series. But last night's 4th ["Make History or We're History"] game was more of a Kin