(In honor of the tenth anniversary, today.)

I'm reminded of Where have all the cowboys gone? as well.

Where do we go from here?

Happy Buffiversary!

Here's a question which some of you are possibly the best people in the world to answer: my mother is tutoring a kid who reads at a fairly low level (perhaps 2nd or 3rd grade). He loves the Star Wars movies, and keeps asking for books "like that." Is there any good science fiction out there for younger kids? I remember I was reading Asimov and Herbert and Verne around that time, but I don't think he's quite ready for them yet.

Sheesh. Ten years. This passage of time thing is something of a pain in the ass. I recently subscribed to digital cable and have ever since been obsessively making dvds of movies I record on the dvr. I keep a little entry in my "dvd library" folder for each film which includes the year of production, of course, and I am *repeatedly* shocked to discover how UNrecent so many "recent" movies are. What is it with these people? I don't know why the world can't just agree to let me be as old as I see myself being in my own mind.

When I was in about 4th grade I loved just about anything by H. M. Hoover or William Sleator.

Mimi, you didn't mention the kid's actual age, which can make a huge difference in subject matter, but my first thoughts are Diana Wynne Jones, the Harry Potter books, and I suspect some Andre Norton would work for modern kids. If it's macho adventure the kid is after and he's about ten or so, try him on John Carter of Mars.

Happy Buffyversary. Anyone want cheese?

Depending on the kid's age and interest, the Bruce Coville Magic Shop books and My Teacher books are fun and not very difficult (although they're pretty earth bound--no space opera per se).

Madeleine 8: I wear the cheese. The cheese does not wear me.

I'm a lurker but I love this kind of question.

I would try Jane Yolen and Daniel Pinkwater. But most SF for that reading level will tend to be funny or involve kids as protagonists, which precludes the kind of gun & lightsaber action he would know and expect from Star Wars.

Also consider comic books. If the reading level is too difficult, the pictures will help draw him through the story. But do screen for content. Single-issue comics that say "All Ages" next to the barcode should be OK. Marvel has a whole line of these, including "Marvel Adventures: Spiderman" that are printed in collected editions about the size of manga. Ask your local comic store guy for help.

OK, does anyone know how I can tell if my computer has been auto-updated for the DST change? I've run various updates that XP has suggested, but I can't tell if the update described in this Microsoft KB article has been installed or not.

Microsoft KB articles are distinctly unhelpful, I find.

Just as a data point, Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid. Teresa's experience was the same. She remembers saying to her mother, "It doesn't make pictures in my head."

I say this fully aware that Norton's work is dear to many readers. They're not wrong. It's a value-free thing, like being able or unable to appreciate Tolkien or Dune.

mimi: Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books are the easiest reads I can think of. They may not be quite what he has in mind, though. How old is he?

Er (she said shamefacedly)... what about the Star Wars books for kids? My seven-year-old loves 'em. Jude Watson et al., I think. And if I remember correctly, there are a couple of different series at different reading levels.

Uh, never mind. I found this page, which Explains It All. I ran the thing and I'm already updated.

Patrick 12: Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid.

I wasn't even alive when Andre Norton was a kid.

Seriously, I read all the Andre Norton I could get ...but now I can't remember a single thing about any of it. I remember finding it really dark. I remember that I liked it better than books intended for kids my age. I don't remember a single story or character. That's generally a bad sign.

My favorite Buffy quote is "That'll put marzipan in your pie-plate, bingo!"

It's probably not actually my favorite, but it is the one I say the most.

Ten years, Jesus.

If he might be receptive to fantasy, how about the Diane Duane 'So You Want To Be A Wizard' series? Simple reading, but it gets into big adventures and serious issues very fast.

Hmmm... If he enjoyed Star Wars, why not try him on some of the as-it-were literary predecessors of Star Wars: Heinlein juveniles, Leigh Brackett (arrgh, looks like all out of print), Kuttner & Moore (arrgh, ditto.)

OK, looks like you're left with the Heinlein juveniles, but there's some great stuff there: Red Planet, Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, The Star Beast, ...

Reading Andre Norton is very tied up with my discovery of how much I loved SF, so while I recognize not everyone feels the same about her, I can't be objective about a discussion of her merits. I still clearly remembered the settings of Galactic Derelict, or the stories of Dread Companion or Moon of Three Rings, 30 or 40 years after I read them.

mimi@4: I can't recommend any specific books off the top of my head, but it might be worthwhile to check out the Golden Duck Awards site.

The Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl books might be good. They are caper/adventure stories from the viewpoint of a criminal "mastermind." With magic.

Ooh there are the new Tom Swift books.

And I second the My Teacher books (though definitely not Starwarsish)

10 years of buffy didn't hit me as hard as, say, finding out that Fight Club [the movie, that is] was HOW many years old?

I mean, going "season four... season five... season seven" helped give me a sense of scale, at least.

The buffy moment that comes to me isn't really a verbal one. It's when the scoobies see Giles playing "Behind Blue Eyes" and they just ... stop.

First comic of season eight, next week [they say.]

Ten years?!

Lots of things have been making me feel old lately, but for some reason this is really hard to take. :}

I feel a DVD marathon coming on ...

10 years of buffy didn't hit me as hard as, say, finding out that Fight Club [the movie, that is] was HOW many years old?

I've been having moments like that a lot recently, with all kinds of things but especially with music. Just the other day in my blorg I had cause to mention The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and as I did I realized it was nine years old.

Oh, hey, speaking of ME and my blog, I have a question that arises out of my stupidity and total inability to Just Google It, Stupid.

You know how it's possible to link to a specific part of a page? A specific line? Like how this is a link to my comment at #22 on this thread? I've been wanting to do it a lot recently on the blarg, to refer to a specific paragraph of a previous entry, and I have no idea how, or if it's even possible to do it the way I want to. Anyone? (If it matters, I use blogger, because of course I can't bear having any part of my life be untouched by Google.)

Heinlein's Between Worlds... It's got a teenage boy caught in a war against an oppressive regime. That should sound familiar to the kid. No robots, but the hero befriends a multi-limbed Venusian dragon who gets drunk on corn syrup.

Mimi: Perhaps A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, which I remember loving as a 10-year-old.

Thanks so much for all the suggestions! My mother says he's in fourth or fifth grade, so I guess around ten years old; she's taking him through How to Eat Fried Worms right now and he's really enjoying it, if that helps to give a sense of reading level. I think he has been reading the Star Wars books for kids on his own already and is looking for something new--though this is, apparently, a child so not interested in books that he hasn't heard of Harry Potter. I have trouble believing that, but mom swears it's true.

As for Buffy, it's weirder to me how long the show hasn't been around. Only three years? Really? It seems like forever.

Ethan, you need the anchor tag. I'm not sure how helpful this tutorial is but if it doesn't work for you at least it'll give the key words you need for googling ('name' and 'href', basically).

Ethan:

Assuming blogger lets you put in general HTML tags, the original and common HTML way to refer to such things is to create an HTML "anchor" with the <A NAME="foo"> tag, where "foo" is whatever name you want to give it, paired up with a </A>. You can then link to it with a regular <A HREF="..."> by adding "#foo" to the name of the page itself, or within the same page by just using <A HREF="#foo"> as the entire link (paired up with a </A>, of course.)

It looks like Movable Type won't let me put in the "name" attribute to an A tag, so I can't make this post an example.

A less well-known way to do it is with the "id" attribute to another tag, such as <P ID="mypar2">. Again, Movable Type is stripping out the example, so I can't use it here. No big loss.

ethan @23

The way I know how to do that is to use the name anchor

(a name="$name"),

replacing the paranthesis with less than/greather than signs, having the word you want the tag anchored to, for instance, the first word in a paragraph, and then closing the tag (/a), with the same replacement rules.

Then, to reference the tag, use the url of the specific entry and add #$name directly after the .html eg:

http://www.example.com/entry5.html#$name

There might be more elegant ways to do this, but I do know it works on blogger citing this example

Wow, I always wondered how to do that but never asked. I'll make use of that.

Y'all are the best, I mean seriously.

sharon, Clifton, Scott W, anyone who may have posted a response in the time it takes me to type this: thanks. It works, and it's easy!

Mimi, if he's a baseball fan John Tunis' books pleased me no end at that age. Chip Hilton and Rick Brant are high-school age boys, so he might not yet identify with them.

How about the Star Wars manga? It's never too early to get a kid into reading books back-to-front (though I think a couple of the issues we've checked out of the library recently have read plain old front-to-back).

My son suggests Mary Pope Osborne's Odyssey series and Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat as other possibilities he's enjoyed.

On the nonfiction front, in addition to the eighty-eleven DK Star Wars Encyclopedia-type books, we've recently enjoyed an awesome book called Incredible Comparisons by Russell Ash. It features side-by-side, beautifully illustrated rundowns of everything from the volume of various oceans (the Pacific Ocean could hold all other seas and oceans combined) to sundry natural and manmade disasters (the area destroyed by the Yellow River flood of 1887 was half as big again as the entire area of Ireland). Sadly, it seems to be out of print--we've renewed it twice from the library and need to bring it back, so I guess it will go on the "search at used bookstores" list in my planner. I've seldom seen a book that captivated my entire family so thoroughly; just needed to mention it.

will@7: Wow, I haven't thought of the John Carter of Mars books in years. I devoured those as a kid, but I think all my copies disappeared in the Great Book Purge of '88 or thereabouts.

I've also now reminded myself of how I plowed through the Alfred Hitchcock mystery series at that age. I wonder if those are even still in print?

Two of the three winners of the EFF Pioneer Awards are stfnal people: Cory Doctorow and Bruce Schneier! The third honoree is Yochai Benkler and I'm pretty sure he's mundane.

Mimi: At that age, I was just starting to get into SF. My trajectory into the series was via the Norby comics in Boy's Life, so I got started on the novellas by Janet and Isaac Asimov, and then some of the old Tom Swift books. I recall reading Bruce Coville, and some other juvenile series I can't remember at the moment. But it wasn't long until I got into "adult" SF - Asimov's and Niven's and Clarke's short story collections, which led me right into Ringworld and Foundation and such, and I was hooked.

I remember I saw the TV debut of Buffy when I was in LA for what must have been the spring Internet World of 1998. My team were just shipping the first residential broadband hardware at the time. That was a while ago, wasn't it.

OK, since someone else has already brought up an HTML question ... I'll take this one step further and submit a plea to the JavaScript gurus out there. I'm having a devil of a time tracking down an example of exactly what I want to do on the page I'm working on ... and my JS knowledge isn't yet to the point where I can just whip up a script on my own. (I can modify existing scripts to do what I want, though.)

What I want to do is this:

1.) image 1 loads when you first view the page.
2.) when you mouse-over image 1, it rolls over to image 2.
3.) image 2 is an imagemap containing links to the other pages on the site.
4.) when you mouse over the various hotspots in image 2's imagemap, new images showing the text of the name of each linked page appear. (these new images aren't themselves links, though -- they're just there for show.)

I've found several scripts allowing me to take care of steps 3-4 quite easily ... it's the bit about step 2 being a rollover from step 1 that is driving me round the bend.

If anyone knows of a page where this is done, or better yet, can point me to a script that would accomplish this, I would be most grateful... thanks much!!

re: kids/YA books

Are Asimov's Lucky Starr books still in print? Not only are they aimed at about that age, but according to the Wikipedia entry, supposedly the "Force-blace" may have inspired the Light Saber in Star Wars.

For a 10 year old, and allowed Fantasy as well as SF, I'd go for the kid's Pratchett (Truckers/Diggers/Wings and the Wee Free Men/A Hat Full of Sky/Wintersmith) although the latter triology might be a bit deep in places.

On the topic of Heinlein, I'd recommend a few of his other youth books including The Star Beast, Have Spacesuit Will Travel and especially Red Planet, which was one of my favorite books when I was in about fourth grade.

I read the hell out of E.R. Burroughs when I was a squirt. All the kids in my neighborhood did. We didn't care for Tarzan so much but the Mars books, the Venus books, Pellucidar... they were read with all the enthusiasm a bunch of pre-pubescent boys could muster, which is quite a bit in case you didn't know.

You can find some e-texts of his books here.

How about Heinlein's juveniles? Some of them are fine for kids younger than the books were ostensibly published for. Red Planet, for instance, or Between Planets might work. There's action, but the violence itself is usually offstage.

Bruce Coville: MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN, SPACE BRAT etc.

Jane

Will H @ #3: Thanks for the link! Now my life has meaning again.

Like beer!

Beer bad.

Klunk the guy who was mean to us on head with club and drag him out of danger.

Beer bad!

I loved that ep. (Thank you, Mad!)

Constance

#12 PNH: Just as a data point, Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid. Teresa's experience was the same.

I'm unreasonably fond of Norton (in the abstract, at least) because a couple of her books (Galactic Derelict, Time Traders) hit me hard when I was very young: it might have been the first genre fiction I found.

But, yeah, shortly thereafter, I discovered the Heinlein juveniles, and then I was off, alphabetically through the library stacks - and I've scarcely looked back at the Nortons....

Re children's SF, I remember enjoying Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left by Robin Klein.

I only got into Buffy recently, when my sister gave me season 1 for my birthday and season 2 for Christmas. I'm getting near the end of season 2 now (I've just been watching the one in the hospital with the monster only children can see). I think I'll have to acquire some more soon. I keep wanting to talk about it and have had to explain to certain family members the difference between being obsessed with something because it plugs into some hole in my brain (which I am not, yet, about this, and believe me I know what it feels like) and merely liking something very very much because it's good and wanting to talk about it because I have just been watching it.

Patrick @ #12: I read and loved a TON of Andre Norton in my late-elementary to early-high-school years, but it never made pictures in my head either. In fact, one of the reasons I stopped reading her stuff is I found it increasingly unpleasant to put down a finished book with the sensation that the entire story had occurred in a very dense fog.

Recommendations other than those already made: E. Nesbit, especially Five Children and It; Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead; Howard Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand (this might be too difficult due to archaic language--I don't remember--but I remember it pushed that "hero" button for me as a kid). And of course, Treasure Island.

Also, never underestimate the value of choosing a book to read TO the child, a chapter at a time (e.g. Treasure Island or The Hobbit); eventually you will be "too busy" to read and the child will pick up the book and struggle through a chapter on his own, if he gets hooked tightly enough.

Scott H @ #45:
You're most welcome. Did you click through the cover to the first few pages? The Serenity comic gave me a feeling of photoshoped weirdness with its actor-likenesses, but the pages of Buffy 8 resemble Sarah Michelle Gellar without giving the impression that she met a grisly end in a pressed fairy book.

Constance @ #46: Foamy!

"the pages of Buffy 8 resemble Sarah Michelle Gellar without giving the impression that she met a grisly end in a pressed fairy book."

Has that started being published yet? I'll be waiting for the collected edition, but I'll certainly want to track its publication schedule.

SF for a young reading level:

Katherine Applegate's Animorphs series
Jane Yolen's been mentioned upthread, but specifically, she has an early reader series about Commander Toad that is worth looking into.
Seconding Bruce Coville and Artemis Fowl.

The Star Wars: Young Jedi Apprentice books are also right around that level. And, in "books we can't keep on the shelves at our library," there's the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne, though that's time-traveling historical fantasy and may not be science fictionny enough.

Bob Oldendorf, #47, et al.: I've also got a possibly unreasonable fondness for Andre Norton, based in part on the fact that her Ordeal in Otherwhere just happened to be the first sf novel I ran across with a female pov. (I know there were others out there, even back in the Dark Ages of my childhood, but there weren't many in those days and that one happened to be the first I found.) I'd been reading sf for a while at that point, Norton and the Heinlein juveniles and a few others, and never noticed that the pov characters were exclusively male--and then there was this book that was different.

Mind you, I don't want to overstate the case--it didn't bother me that so much of the young adult sf I was reading had been written from the male pov, and I never had any problems identifying with a male hero. However, suddenly realizing that it was POSSIBLE for "the girl" to be the hero was a Good Thing.

I agree - Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville have many good 'reluctant reader' books. He might also like the Angie Sage 'Septimus Heap' books - they're like a step down from Harry Potter, but with terrific characters.

The "Butt" books and there's always Captain Underpants, which seem to be a hit with young boys, because, yanno butts that try to take over the world and toilet humor are funny when you're a ten year old boy.

I think bigger boys find them funny too...

Not to imply that HP doesn't have terrific characters. But SH is just less intense, and still has terrific characters.

You know what I mean.

I can't believe you guys are celebrating Buffy on my birthday!

mimi, my mother always read The Borrowers to her fifth-graders.

Happy birthday, Marilee!

If it's the adventure aspect of Stars Wars that he enjoys, he might like the Tintin books. In the last few months, they've been a big incentive for our kids to learn to read more proficiently, because they want to be able to read the adventures on their own. And the pictures make a good supplement to the text for newer readers.

Some of the books have SF elements too, like _The Calculus Affair_, involving a new invention coveted by the bad guys as a possible superweapon. There's also a pair of books involving them going to the moon (written before the Apollo program), though we have yet to read those two.

(I will note that there's some degree of ethnic stereotyping in the series, particularly the earlier titles, so you may want to review particular titles before buying. The early _Tintin in the Congo_ for instance was considered un-reprintable for a long time, and I've heard Tintin fans recommend it only for completists, though I haven't yet read it myself. On the other hand, the late title _Tintin in Tibet_ was specially commended by the Dalai Lama.)

The books are a lot of fun for us and our kids. And we're quietly amused that the "colorful metaphors" that kids pick up as they get older are turning out in our family to be from Captain Haddock's repertoire. (We nearly lost it the first time our younger daughter broke out with a loud "billions of blistering barnacles!")

Mary Frances #54: I felt the same way the first time I read The Blue Sword. Not only is the main character a girl, but she's carefully described as not pretty and she stays not pretty throughout the book. I first read it when I was a pudgy twelve year old. Twenty-ish years later, it's still as comforting as a hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Also, it has horses and big cats, always a plus.

Happy birthday, Marilee!

Rob Hansen, #52: I've heard conflicting reports about when the Season 8 comic will ship, but it'll either be this week or next.

John Mark Ockerbloom, #59: I can't believe it didn't occur to me to mention the Tintin books. I grew up with them and, as many people here know, I'm a total fan. I have a copy of Destination Moon in my office as a talisman of my seven-year-old proto-SF-fan sensibility.

The piece of Tintin pelf I truly covet is the matched pair of angel-Snowy and devil-Snowy cloisonné lapel pins I've been reliably told were made at one point.

Happy birthday, Marilee!

Happy Buffyday, Marilee!

I'm so very disappointed that the proposed Ripper miniseries looks like it's never going to happen.

What strikes me, watching the show again after all this time, is how very, very tired Buffy is by the end of season 5. There are episodes I can't watch now; they cut too close.

I notice, too, how much of an asshole Buffy is sometimes. And these days I more admire Xander's quiet, ordinary heroism. He's a mensch.

Aconite @ 64

Ripper just can't happen as long as Tony Head is happy doing what he's doing, and I suspect he's happier doing it in England. Which, I agree, is bad for all of us who would like to see more of Rupert, especially the angst that he always kept so carefully hidden, except when some high-powered nasty had him by the short-hairs.

You know, I really liked that Buffy was an asshole every now and then. People that focused on an extremely demanding and important job often are; nothing personal, mate. It made her a lot more believable than your average superhero.

That was what really made the series for me: Joss Whedon's absolute insistence on making the tone and themes of the show as wide-ranging as possible. Humor, horror, drama, and really bad puns, all in one episode, with the mix constantly changing from one ep to another.

The one that really got to me was the ep where Buffy's mother died. It was like ripping the backdrop away and revealing real people trying to deal with situations that fictional heroes always manage to shrug off after they've chewed the scenery long enough to register their distress with the audience.

Oh, by the bye, does anyone out there remember seeing Tony Head in "VR5"? For that matter, did anyone see "VR5"? Yeah, that's what I was afraid of, I guess that's why it only lasted 8 episodes.

Bruce: I was very fond of VR5, although I preferred the earlier half of the series with the stand alone episodes.

Mimi: What about the John Bellairs books such as The House with a Clock in its Walls.

The only Andre Norton juvenile I ever read as a kid was Outside, which I remember really liking. She doesn't do much for me now that i'm an adult. Don't dislike her stuff, don't love it. Of course, when I was seven I loved the Ruthven Todd Space Cat books, so what do I know.

My 10 year old son adores the Pendragon books - and there's quite a few, so they'll keep any reader going for quite some time...

Cathy @ 67: Jeezly-crow, I forgot all about the John Bellairs books. I read holes in every copy the Stockton Public Library had, I think. Some of his images still stick in my mind (every time I wear corduroy pants, I think of his line about "the kind of pants that go 'whip-whip' when you walk"). Wonderful, spooky and infinitely memorable. Thanks for the mind-jog.

Am I the only person on the InnerTubes who has never seen an episode of Buffy or any of the spin-offs?

Anyway.

Where is the conversation about knitting? Is that in the other open thread? I think I have discovered a temporary cure for Second Sock Syndrome.

Dark Horse has a preview up of Whedon's new Buffy comic. Cover and first five pages, and the publication date is this coming Wednesday, 14 March. (I'll probably wait for the trade.)

Whups, I see Will A beat me to it.

Another item in the "things to make you feel old":

After 36 years, the Gentle Strength Co-op in Tempe, AZ has closed for good.

Buffy is my best beloved. Don't usually go all googly that way, not ever. But compared to whatever else has come along since -- aiee.

Vaquero (a.k.a. the Spouse) does not comprehend any of this in any way -- he's never ever watched a single episode, and will never watch a single episode, and why, really should he, since there isn't a hole in his creative, inner, sensory world that needs Buffy to fill it? He is entirely sympathetic to my admiration for Buffy though. Just as I am to his always-opened heart for something that I don't comprehend.

The night of Buffy and Angel in the cemetery after Joyce's burial -- I have wept every time. And so perfect. A perfect night of love and support for Buffy. In a cemetery.

Constance

I'm a longtime reader, but not a con-attending fan. Books that grabbed me as a kid:

• The Danny Dunn series (somewhat obsolete in the seventies, really so now, but so much fun.)


• The Oz books (not so much the first famous one. A young friend had the opposite reaction (as did his mom, a poet: they found the first original and the rest derivative. I found the first melodramatic with a trite ending, but the rest sparked my imagination.)


• The new Tom Swifties were great (and so many!) especially since there were only the five Danny Dunn books.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)@65: You know, I really liked that Buffy was an asshole every now and then. People that focused on an extremely demanding and important job often are; nothing personal, mate. It made her a lot more believable than your average superhero,

Uh huh. Nobody gets to be spotless in Joss' worlds. One of the things I liked best about Spike is that even when he was good, he wasn't nice. One of the ironies I particularly loved is that even before that thing that happened in Season 6 (trying not to post a spoiler for those still working through the show for the first time), he--the souless monster of the group--was the most emotionally honest one of the bunch.

Ten years ago, my sister and I consulted and decided that we would try out that new show that was coming on TV.

Half an hour in, we consulted again and decided that it was boring.

What on earth were we thinking? I don't know--perhaps the same general squeamishness that kept me from watching Star Wars for so long (because it was about war). It's only thanks to the musical episode* and file-sharing and Netflix that I've started to catch up now.

And I listen to the Spanish dub to improve my Spanish (with the subtitles turned on so I don't miss the puns and one-liners). If any hispanic vampires frequent the library where I work, I'm golden.

*I love musical theatre on odd subjects. In my YA novel-in-progress, the characters are putting on a musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.

Thena #70: No.

Mimi.
When I was 10 I started on Roald Dahl and the like, next year it was Narnia and it's peers, then straight into Bradbury then next year P.K.Dick, then I got a crush on Carl Sagan and became a PBS addict. I was an odd monkey child.

#64: In fact it's very important to BtVS that Buffy herself is often, as you put it, an asshole.

Of course she's an asshole. She's been put in an impossible situation. She's never had even a fighting chance to be a reasonable grownup human being. Instead she's a horribly self-absorbed narcissist. She's grossly unfair and horrible to the people who love her the most. Spike in particular, but Willow too. Xander too. On a regular basis.

BtVS is in so many ways a tragedy. That's one of the many things that's great about it.

Mind you, I'm one of that crazy minority of people whose favorite season is #6.

I'm overwhelmed by the number of wonderful suggestions--thank you all so much! I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun winnowing these down to pass along to my mom. This kid will become a reader yet!

One of the things that I really like about the later seasons of Buffy is how they explore just what it means to be The Slayer for so long. After all, until Buffy came along, Slayers seldom reached their 18th birthday. Heck, Buffy got killed her second year in and only got to keep going on through a Plot Device.

Slayers aren't supposed to stick around that long. They aren't supposed to last for years, to gather friends and obligations, they aren't supposed to survive long enough to deal with all the trials of getting through highschool, collage, and into the adult world while still dusting vampires and battling demons.

Slayers are the hand-grenade in the arsenal of the Forces of Good. Small, compact, and they do a whole lot of damage when they go off, but they're a one shot. Until Buffy.

And they way they explored that in the final seasons worked for me in a weird twisted way.

Thena, if you've discovered a cure for Second Sock Syndrome, out with it! Tell us how you did it.

Mimi and all, I'll apologize in advance for recommending one of my own titles, but once he's gotten through all the Tintin books, you might want to try him on Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey.

In re Buffy: I staved it off for years. Then Anna Genoese got tired of waiting and tossed all of Season One on to Patrick's desk, with orders to watch it. And then, Buffy ate my brain.

My head is still full of Buffy. There's a map in my head of the automobile-oriented suburban ring around the older Sunnydale town grid. I can't discuss the universality of law, and the corruption that invariably grows up when the protection of the law is not universal, without thinking about the treatment of Spike. I have elaborate theories about the history and bad practices of the Council of Watchers, and how their social roles dovetail with Wolfram & Hart's. Strange things bloom in my imagination, like the localized Linux distribution used in the vicinity of the Hellmouth, the sneeze reflexes of Fyarls, and the universal role of proximate redundancy in prophecies. I wonder about the strange confluences of privileged information that would occur if Drusilla entranced Files & Records. For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.

Nobody warned me before I uploaded it that the Matter of Buffy isn't inert.

Not to break the Buffy theme going here, but I saw "300" tonight. Not great, but... decent. Probably give it a matinee rating, because you'll probably want to see it on the big screen if you're going to see it at all.

I staved it off for years.

I'm still staving it off, I guess. I'd watch an episode here or there, but maybe the lack of continuity kept me from really getting into it. There were lines like "fire bad, trees pretty" that stick with me to this day, though.

then, Buffy ate my brain. ... For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.

Hm. I still haven't caught up on BSG, and now I have this feeling I may need to add another series to the DVD stack.

Tom Swift is a good idea -- the text isn't challenging. Good for intro material. Tintin -- jeez, they're going to try another movie. Give me strength. Who would we cast? I'll just say Daniel Radcliffe in a wig. It's hard to know what to say for the purposes of someone who reads at a low level.

But what did I love? Ah... Half Magic and Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager (I only read his other five books in recent years). It broke my heart to pick up the latter title for a quarter at my library here. They discarded it! To make shelf space for more ghost-and-booger series fiction, no doubt. Grumble, grumble.

Freddy the Pig. The Mad Scientist's Club! Homer Price! The Mrs. Coverlet books. Alice in Wonderland, repeatedly. I'd say Marvel comics, but they've changed beyond recognition. I have a hard enough time just scanning recent comics. Lord help me, I'm o-o-o-o-old!

Also, I find I can't go wrong with anything by Beverly Cleary. She wrote adaptations of "Leave it to Beaver" stories that take us right into Beaver's head. Dunno how they go over with the younger set, though -- you know, people 40 and under.

PNH #80: You're certainly far from alone - Season 6 is my wife's favorite too. (Me, I'm in that rare made tribe of Season 7 supporters, though my personal all-around favorite is 4.)

We were also late converts (I actually, ahem, brought the first season home after it started coming regularly into the conversation around here). I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.

Just got back from a sneak preview of The Last Mimsey, which is loosely based on the Lewis Padgett short story, "Mimsey were the Borogroves," about kids who find a sliding-bead toy from the future that teaches them how to think in four dimensions. That story has a tragic ending (at least from the point of view of the parents); I was really curious how the film makers would let things play out.

I was kind of worried at first; the theater was packed with parents and little kids. What little I saw of the publicity suggested that it was more of a thriller. I imagined hordes of scared kids, or me bored by what turned out to be a kiddie movie.

Anyway . . . . this was a hoot! Maybe a hoot and a half. It takes the central notion of the Padgett story (toy from the future found by kids, who learn to Think Differently) and embeds it in a movie very much like E.T. in feel. The toys the kids find are really freaky and futuristic in a mineralo-organic way. The "Mimzey" of the title is a stuffed rabbit / supercomputer teaching tool.

Rainn Wilson, who plays the arrogant dweeb assistant manager on "The Office," is great as a space cadet science teacher.

There's some borderline new-agey stuff, but you can forgive it as technology indistinguishable from magic.

As I bonus, I got two miniature Mimzey dolls. I'm not sure whether I'll give these to my nieces or save them for ten years and then sell them on eBay.

Stefan's mention of The Last Mimzy reminds me that we also went to a preview showing of a movie this week, Starter For Ten. As the title implies, University Challenge is a central part of the movie.

My short description: it's a British version of the 1980s John Hughes movies, with a protagonist who'd be right at home in Making Light comment threads. Recommended.

Thena @70, Fragano @78, me neither. Not out of snobbery; just never heard of it when it began and I don't watch much episodic television anyway. I'm beginning to regret getting into "Lost" since I have other things I'd (almost) rather do for the last hour before the late local news on Wednesdays.

#70: No, I've also never seen any of it. Enjoyed the original Buffy movie with Kristy Swansen, and enjoyed Firefly (another tv series by the same guy who made Buffy), though. Don't want to give up n days of my life to watch all of Buffy, though; maybe irrational.

Also, the only cure I know for Second Sock Syndrome is just to knit two in tandem. Have two sets of needles of the base size; two skeins of yarn. Cast on and knit cuff #1, then set it aside and cast on and knit cuff #2. Knit down to heel turning #1, knit down to hell turning #2; and so on.

(notice how I snuck in that "hell turning"? I thought you might like that.)

Seriously, though -- parallel sock knitting is the only way. I do all my socks this way. Learned the lesson on my first sock, which was a pain, and I finished it, and have never even managed to cast on for the mate. The only way for me to finish a pair is for #2 to never be more than one section behind. That way when I finish #1, there's only a couple of hours of work left.

I avoided Buffy at first because it sounded silly. The movie was good, but where could they go from there?

But then, when I heard it was a smart and rich show, I avoided it because it sounded like too much of a monkey puzzle. Too much brain-share required to follow it. This is why I avoid Lost and why I feel bad, sometimes, about following the new BSG.

meredith #38: You had to upstage me, didn't you? Though I see no one's answered you yet...

Emily H #77: I love musical theatre on odd subjects.
Have you seen Jeanne and the Perfect Guy? French musical about AIDS; one of the very best movies I've ever seen.

PNH #80: Mind you, I'm one of that crazy minority of people whose favorite season is #6.
Oooh! Oooh! Me too! Although my favorite villain is the Mayor, I'm still season 6 all the way.

Actually, ooh ooh me too to just about everything everyone's been saying about Buffy. Especially the stuff about her being an asshole. She doesn't get to not deal with things just because she's the main character of a TV show. One of my favorite things about that show is that it seemed like every season (and, on a miniature level, almost every episode) stripped away another layer of comfortable illusion about the universe it took place in. You think vampires are all bad? Nope. You think watchers are all good? Nope. You think slayers are all good? Nope. You think the system of slayerdom is good? HELL no. Genius show.

Now I'm all pissed off, again, that Whedon's no longer on the Wonder Woman movie.

I can remember being in fifth grade or so and wandering through the stacks of my public library looking for a particular kind of book. Title and author didn't matter. It had to have a rocket ship on the sticker on the spine and the jacket had to be obviously old: sketchy cover art in two or three colors at most, dust jacket scratched and dulled by years of handling, pages thick and speckled with bits of fiber. The ones that had a blank cover, usually some color seen only on institutional furniture, with the title and author stamped on the spine were also worth a look.

I had no idea that I was immersing myself in the heroic age of science fiction. I just knew the stuff was good. A similar hunt in your public library might yield some gems as well.

Can't add anything to the recommendations except Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books, and to enthusiastically second Edward Eager and John Bellairs. And Narnia, especially "Prince Caspian," which a 10-year-old boy ought to appreciate, what with all the kids camping out on their own in the woods and the big swordfight between Peter and the evil King Miraz. As for Andre Norton, I've always felt that some of her books were wonderful and the rest terrible -- no in-betweens. I loved "Star Gate" and read it dozens of times when I was about 12 -- read it again recently, in fact -- but the Witch World books left me absolutely cold.

JamesK, it's only in the last couple of centuries that a teenager would have been considered non-adult for so long. OK, there's a lot of cultural variations, and being a woman complicates things enormously.

But it occurs to me that the death rate is a partial answer to the problem of how just one Slayer can cover the whole world. The Watchers are still a problem--how can they organise--but maybe if the Slayer isn't within reach of the most threatening place, she has to die.

And, until Buffy, nobody has ever been able to finally finish off a Hellmouth because, sooner or later, another becomes more threatening.

Patrick's initial quote recalls an earlier cinematic moment that may have inspired Buffy's and Giles's exchange, or that anyway hits a similar note. Though more compressed.

In Luc Besson's 1994 cult thriller/comedy THE PROFESSIONAL, Jean Reno portrays Leon, a reclusive, somewhat childlike European hit man living in NYC. Down the hall lives a tough kid named Mathilda, played by the 12-year-old Natalie Portman. Leon zealously ignores his neighbors, but he's seen Mathilda around.

One day he encounters her in the hall, smoking and gazing darkly into the stairwell. She sits so as to conceal her eye, blackened for no good reason by her worthless drug dealer dad.

After a pause, Mathilda asks, "Is life always this hard, or is it just when you're a kid?"

Leon considers a moment, then decides to tell her the truth. "Always. Always like dis."

Like Whedon and his writers, Besson expertly interweaves light notes and dark, tragedy and pathos and asskicking all shot through with humor ...

You know. It all definitely helps with the delightenment.

Happy Birthday,Marilee!

Season 6 of Buffy is not by any means my favorite, but I didn't dislike it the way so many other fans of the series did. (S4 was my least favorite, hands down.) I just think they could've expressed the same storyline in, say, half the episodes they chose to use, and been far less heavy-handed with the 'magic as a drug' thing. But it also contains a couple of my favorite episodes (the musical and Tabula Rasa come to mind), and while it may have not done it in the smoothest way possible, it was inevitable that they'd have to do at least one good arc on the downside of non-Slayer power.

Though frankly, I've yet to forget ME for the way they chose to set off that final storyline, as obvious a choice as it was.

I avoided Buffy for two seasons because I generally greatly dislike series spun off from movies. However, I was talked into watching it, and the first episodes I saw were the closing episodes of S2 and the first episode, then new, of S3. That hooked me, in a way I honestly think S1 would not have -- S1 is not by any means bad, but it suffered the usual growing pains of a new show and that probably would've lost me, at least for a while.

Dan Layman-Kennedy:

PNH #80: You're certainly far from alone - Season 6 is my wife's favorite too. (Me, I'm in that rare made tribe of Season 7 supporters, though my personal all-around favorite is 4.)

At the moment, my ranking is 3,2,1,5,4,7,6 but we're currently rewatching and this may change.

We were also late converts (I actually, ahem, brought the first season home after it started coming regularly into the conversation around here). I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.

I suspect that's certainly true of 7. Fortunately, the first time I saw it was as bundles of bootlegs, months ahead of UK transmission. I gather it was shown in the US just a couple of new eps at a time, interspersed with gaps and repeats, which given the nature of that episode in particular would have just killed it as a viewing experience. We're also interleaving the Buffy episodes with contemporary Angel episodes and so picking up continuity we missed first time around since the two shows were shown months out of phase and not even on the same TV channels over here. Great, great TV.

which given the nature of that episode in particular

Season, damnit, given the nature of that season.

Out of the books I read as a kid, I remember the Asimov robot books especially well: they were one of the few things I read as a kid that didn't seem radically different when I reread them as an adult.

I'm fond of Garth Nix, especially his Sabriel series, though it is a bit dark. Shade's Children, a stand-alone novel, is amazing. He also has a new series targeted even younger, which is nonetheless shockingly readable for adults.

(It's worth mentioning again that Dianna Wynne Jones can do no wrong.)

Biggles, if you can get it. Perfect for boys who are not sure if they like to read. Biff! Zoom! Watch out for ejaculating natives!

Seriously, a couple of the early wartime short story Biggles books might be perfect. Biplanes on the Western Front would no doubt seem alternate universe to him, rather than historical fiction.

#70: Am I the only person on the InnerTubes who has never seen an episode of Buffy or any of the spin-offs?

[sticks up an embarrassed hand]

Owing to general hearing difficulties I somehow lost the habit of TV. 2006 was an unusually indulgent year, when I watched subtitled DVDs of both Howl's Moving Castle and The Incredibles. I'm still recovering from this excess....

#87 Dan Layman-Kennedy: "I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades."

Well, I watched all of Buffy on DVD, in less than a year, and I love the hell out of seasons six and seven*. The friends of mine from whom I borrowed the DVDs, who had seen Buffy as it was aired, didn't like the later seasons at all.

#94 ethan: "Now I'm all pissed off, again, that Whedon's no longer on the Wonder Woman movie."

Joss Whedon was on the--*sigh* I hate it when I hear good news in the context of "Hey, did you hear about awesome thing X? Yeah, it's not happening anymore."

*Excepting the part where Joss Whedon KILLED MY FAVORITE CHARACTER, THAT JERK.

This thread confirms my suspicion that some of you are too intelligent for your own good. Mimi asked for recs for a kid who reads at a fairly low level, and people are suggesting Andre Norton and CS Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle and E Nesbit. Seriously, people! I can believe that no-one here ever struggled with reading, but have you never come into contact with anyone who doesn't devour highly complicated intellectual books effortlessly and with glee?

For a kid who is vastly intelligent but has a specific problem with reading, such as dyslexia, a sophisticated book can work for reading aloud or reading with a lot of support. But there's more to reading than just deciphering the words.

Apropos of practically nothing else in this thread, the "50 States in 10 Minutes" test (linked in Particles) is made much easier when one was made to memorize the song "Fifty Nifty United States" in grade school. I clocked in at 8:05 to spare without trying particularly hard, which almost made it feel like using the song was cheating. (Incidentally, Google informs me that the song was actually a Ray Charles song! I had no idea my teachers played me Ray Charles songs in school.)

Silly tests of memory recall.

JamesK wrote:

Slayers are the hand-grenade in the arsenal of the Forces of Good. Small, compact, and they do a whole lot of damage when they go off, but they're a one shot. Until Buffy. And they way they explored that in the final seasons worked for me in a weird twisted way

Okay, comment coming up with major spoiler for those who haven't yet seen season 7, which is why I've hidden it behind ROT-13:

V ybirq gur jnl gur frevrf raqrq, jvgu Ohssl ernyvmvat gur bayl ernfba gurer jnf bayl bar Fynlre ng nal gvzr jnf orpnhfr n ybat gvzr ntb n ohapu bs thlf unq qrpvqrq gung jnf ubj vg jnf tbvat gb or naq gung abj, jvgu n jvgpu nf cbjreshy nf Jvyybj ba ure grnz, gurl pbhyq punatr gung ehyr. Vg znqr cresrpg frafr va gur pbagrkg bs gur srznyr rzcbjrezrag gung jnf bar bs gur gurzrf bs gur fubj gung gurl qb guvf, naq jnf whfg fb *evtug* n abgr gb raq gur frevrf ba.

Just to satisfy my inner Trickster, I'll point out to all the people out there who have to yet to get serious about Buffy that after you've finished watching that show (or better yet, in parallel with it), you should really see Angel.

The themes aren't quite the same: Buffy is, at least partly, about growing up Slayer, and Angel is a bit older than Buffy (maybe a couple of centuries), although he's still not really comfortable with his true nature. But there's that same mix of comedy, tragedy, drama, and general geekiness that makes up anything that Whedon does.

Oh, and I just looked at the timestamps on the last few posts; I'm not the only one who's up talking about old TV shows at 4 in the morning. That helps a little when I get into arguments with the little voice in my head that tells me respectable people don't do things like that, you know, the voice that was implanted in early childhood by the Ministry of Social Conformance. It's nice to have something to say other than, "I've known for decades I wasn't respectable."

Teresa @83
For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.

Because some things can't be printed on paper with moveable type and perfect bound. Magical tomes have to be hand-written on vellum*, hand sewn and bound.

-----
* Or parchment. Or whatever you call it when it's made, not of sheep or cow, but of some other beastie (human vellum for the black-covered tomes on the left-hand side of the shop, demon** vellum for the white-covered tomes to the right.)

** The vampire vellum books, written in fluorescent ink, are in the windowless back room. If you buy one of them, do it at night, or we can wrap it in blackout cloth for you.

I knew a severely dyslexic* kid in school who got very deeply into reading with graphic novels. He was big into ElfQuest, but there's a lot out there to choose from.

-----
* he never noticed when I decorated a birthday cake in mirror-writing.

#111: no, grimoires are expensive for the same reason that university textbooks and scientific journals are. They're produced for a small and highly fragmented market - there aren't that many wizards around, after all, and with the exception of some of the most basic compendia (Huskbinder & Matterstraw, for example, or Kipvern & Tercell), each grimoire will only appeal to a small fraction of them. Also, wizardry is a fast-moving discipline; a grimoire rarely goes into a second printing before it becomes obsolete. So publishers have to break even on a small number of hardback sales. And then there's the hassle of peer review...

Rob Hanson @ 101
I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.

Probably so. My wife and I started watching Buffy somewhere into season 3, and Angel in the middle of season 1. We caught up with Buffy because the local schlock TV station was showing it as 3 different series: one in season 1, one in season 2, and one in season 3. Juggling who knew what and when was a job worthy of a Presidential assistant. But we picked up the thread of Angel on DVD much later, and the two experiences were very different.

I think I prefer to do it in massive loads if I can afford the time. In the case of Buffy I was recovering simultaneously from surgery and the dotbomb implosion and had a lot of time on my hands. And that's also how I read Sandman: after all the collections had come out, one huge, mind-boogying (stet) lump of Mythos every few weeks. I think I may have fried a few neurons in the process, but it was well worth it.

It also makes a difference if you see or read a series in the expected order or not. With Sandman, I started with "A Game Of You" which is somewhere in the middle of the 10 collections, but I think it burned out all my evaluation circuits, and I was hooked immediately.

ajay and abi

All true for your mass market grimoires and such (holy crap, I'm seeing recently published books in some of the scientific fields I track at over $180!), but there's another consideration for the books of great power. Any book containing power beyond your basic spells for sex, drugs, and violence requires infusion from a distilled source of the power. This usually means putting a human sacrifice in the juicer (sorry, that image popped into my head and it won't go away). As you can imagine, just paying protection to the local witchfinder ups the cost of production considerably, and sacrifice has a lot of other costs (the soprano chorus runs over $400 an hour at scale).

Now in the words of the bard (no, the other bard): "And now I hie me off to bed, to sleep off all the nonsense that I've said."

mimi @#4: For what it's worth, the first book that popped into my head when I read your question was Martyn Godfrey's The Vandarian Incident.

From the comments we have perused we do not judge the largely ignorant audience from this site to be our customers. Our clients are mostly high net worth magicians or magical firms that are well-versed with grimoire production. They recognize quality materials and workmanship and are knowledgeable about costs. This is wholly unlike many readers here who are bent on propagating sweat-scriptorium facilities, especially in less developed dimensions.

If you're willing to settle for machinery-sewn poor quality spellbooks or inferior grade typography passed off as Mystic Runes, etc, I suppose that's your choice. But that is book publication, not provision of magical tomes. You pay top grimoire publishers for accuracy, illumination, spells that don't require you to turn a page at the wrong moment, pronunciation guides in the International Phonetic Alphabet*, and quality materials meant to last no matter how much candle wax you drop on it. That's what differentiates our works from the rest.

Our customers are not just high net-worth magicians with a degree of refinement but also, more importantly, well- and broadly-educated. From long habit, they buy good quality and are not averse to paying fairly for it.

This may seem high-handed, but it is necessary to be so when dealing with riff raff. You may "have magical talent" - anyone can claim that nowadays - but you obviously don't know how to use it wisely.

Regards, CEO, Tome Home Enterprises
------
* so that your Southern accent doesn't summon a demon when all you wanted was a nice cup of Earl Grey, black, no sugar

My big problem with season 6 of Buffy is that it wasn't any fun. I watched the show for witty banter and cool magic and character interaction, not to see people working in fast food restaurants. Maybe that's escapism; if so, I'll make the most of it.

My season ranking is 2135764, although the first three are quite close and I can easily deal with people of other tastes ranking them differently.

I got into Buffy in the middle of Season 2, owing to all the buzz about it on RASFF, much the same way that I later wound up getting into Veronica Mars. I didn't have BitTorrent back then, but luckily I did happen to know someone who had most of the episodes on tape. (Also Buffy was a bit more new-viewer-friendly than Veronica -- which I admit is setting the bar rather low.) I remember that the first new episode I saw ("Phases") had a scene with evil Angel attacking a girl, and I could tell that even though of course I didn't recognize him, I was supposed to.

(I almost never watch new shows, I wait for the buzz to mount. This leaves me with more time for reading books and Usenet and Making Light. I'm toying with the idea of getting into Heroes.)

I note that -- for thems that have it -- Fox Movie Channel is broadcasting Buffy tVS (the movie) at 4pm Eastern Stand-- er, I mean, Daylight Time today.

Incidentally, at Worldcon last year they had a showing of the musical episode with audience singalong. I was afraid it was going to be excruciating, but actually nearly everybody was quite good, and it was a lot of fun. It was obvious that a lot of audience members owned the album. (Including me.) Perhaps the coolest bit was the audience spontaneously self-organizing by sex for Xander and Anya's duet.

#107: I didn't know any English when I entered first grade. I read below grade level until 4th grade. So I could knock this question out of the park... if I could better remember what I was reading then.

I was definitely reading Madeleine L'Engle. I remember skipping the first three chapters of _A Wrinkle in Time_ and reading them later. Even then, I had a thing for wordplay. So I kept reading stuff like Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth or anything by Ellen Raskin.

Other than that, I think I read more short story anthologies than novels. I was up for anything as long as I knew that, even if I was way over my head, it would be over soon. It's frustrating, but there's something to be said for getting over your head occasionally, as long as you're not left to drown. I may owe my ability to read to the SF anthologies that were in the library in the early '80s. However, even now, I favor short stories over novels. I think the reason I sped [heh] through Accelerando is because it's structured as a set of novellas.

I read LotR by 7th grade. So it's possible to catch up. (OTOH, I'm also not dyslexic.)

#119:That reminds me, I noticed that NPR has been exceptional about referring to the shifted time as "Daylight Saving Time" (singular, not "Savings"). Have they always been this diligent about this?

I don't mind the time shift now. I don't know I'll feel the same way in November. Does anyone else find it weird that we spend more of the year in DST than we do in standard time? (Then again, I also worry that, one day, the gov't will define sunrise at the middle of a time zone as 7am.)

I saw the movie "300" last night. It was worse than I expected, but better than the time I slammed my car's door on my finger tip. And better than Highlander 2.

Yes, yes, sigh, the Buffy season 6 where she didn't waitress [which she KNEW HOW TO DO] and worked in fast food instead. Some of the absolute best moments of the show, stuck into a whole lot of jngpuvat n sevraq fperj hc gurve yvsr ubeevoyl, bar jrrx ng n gvzr... naq vg qbrfa'g trg nal orggre.

It was either season 5 or 6 where a friend [who didn't watch] came up to visit on Buffy night. Every commercial break I was like, "And that's Anya, Xander's ex-fiancee who's a [long story], and that's Dawn, who's a [nother long story]"... Buffy was the exact opposite of a soap opera, where you can start watching after six years off and be caught up in a day.

Individ-ewe-al@107: We are, perhaps, not so clueless as you think. My sister teaches learning-disabled elementary-school kids. She regularly gets them to read several grade levels above their "ability" by giving them something they're really interested in. They rise to the challenge. One of her favorite things to do is to give her kids a particular Charles de Lint story, and once they've finished it, tell these LD 5th-grade kids that they just read a story on an 8th-grade level. The impact of that on kids who've been told they're dumb all thir lives is significant.

Back to Buffy: If Season 1 had been the first I saw, I wouldn't have bothered watching the rest. Season 6 is my favorite, although I have not forgiven ME for wimping out and going for the stupid, heavy-handed "magic as a drug" metaphor, and that completely lame reason for Buffy's sudden reinterest in life. Puh-leeze. It would have been more believable for Buffy to turn to Dawn and say, "I feel so much better now, because there are six minutes left in this season and we need to set up my emotional state for next year." (Barb of Sleeping Jaguars does a much better Season 6 arc-ending than ME did.)

That season is why I can't listen to Michelle Branch's "Goodbye to You" without bursting into tears, which is so wussy of me that I can't stand myself.

Re: Second Sock Syndrome -

I'm not sure if it's a cure as such, but what got me knitting the second sock of the first pair was that I'd *bought more sock yarn* and only had one set of #3 double points, so I had to finish the second sock to get it off the darn needles so I could use them for something else.

This obviously won't work for experienced knitters who have multiple sets of each size needles.

(As it stands I now have 1.6 socks and the heels have somehow turned out to be very different sizes even though I used the same yarn, same needles, same pattern, and same stitch count, so I can only conclude I've done something weird with the tension, and will have to just figure out which of my feet is smaller so I can put the smaller sock on it because I'm not undoing all that work.)

At that age - or what I'm guessing is that age, I'm not up on the grade system - I was reading juveniles by Asimov (Heinlein's came later, when I was old enough to look through second-hand bookshops on my own - until then, I was restricted to my local library and my family's collection), anything by Harry Harrison (I spent years looking for another copy of The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T.), and anything by Monica Hughes.

I also have very fond memories of anything issued under the Dragon Books imprint - the dragons on the spine were almost as good a guarantee of quality for me as the name 'Kay Webb' inside a Puffin paperback. Speaking of which, one of the books I fell most in love with at that age was James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks & The Wonderful O. It's a pair of funny, magical, poetic fairy tales, and for me it deserves to sit up there in the same golden-light-and-silver-bells category as Diana Wynne Jones.

I've never met anyone else who was brought up on it, though, and only ever seen three copies, two of which I own. Reassure me that others have encountered this book too?

I was once required to write a story for reluctant readers. It had to be action-packed, fast, exciting, SFNal (because that was what I was picked to provide) and short, because that was the name of the series. Ten thousand words, restricted vocabulary.

I did my level best, and, oddly, I'm quite proud of the result. Gave it the ol' elementary school try. But the thing is, I doubt that it hit its target audience. Kids that don't read, don't read. The problem is far larger than giving them something that they might read, if they read. They come from places, cultures, homes, backgrounds, where people don't read. So they don't read.

Beats me what the answer is. I seem to be saying that a lot, these days.

Ah, Buffy. I didn't start watching it for years (lack of TV always puts me behind on these things) - not until a friend decided to run a Buffycon and drafted me to help. At that point I figured I should find out what the fuss was about. The first concom meeting was utter confusion for me - discussing actor guests, shifting back and forth between actor names and character names, while I sat in a corner and went "what? who? huh?" and my friend tried to give me two-line character summaries by way of orientation.

I watched the first season over a few weeks right before Buffycon and enjoyed it. Then I started the second and spent most of the convention by myself in the green room with a laptop watching it episode by episode (not as antisocial as it sounds; I was running the green room and was supposed to be there. When feeling out of place at a con, find people and feed them.) When I left the room I wandered confused around the convention trying to stay unspoilered. The third season I watched a week or so later. The fourth nearly turned me off - least favorite so far. The fifth, I watched in one completely mad marathon over about 36 hours two years ago January, eating in front of the nonTV and barely stopping to sleep. And then I stopped dead. I've never gone on. And while I've watched the first four seasons a couple more times, I've never managed to re-watch five. It just hit so hard.

I've been thoroughly spoiled for seasons 6 and 7 at this point and I, um, downloaded some clips of what I consider the juicy bits of season 6. But I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the actual episodes. I did read some post-5 fanfic, which was mostly bad but occasionally excellent.

I had an amusing moment at the last show I sold at, when a customer wandered into my booth, pointed at a rather expensive piece, and said "See. Want. Buy." I added 50% to the price on the spot and he paid it and bought several other items without a quibble. I love customers like that.

I'd be curious to hear what other Buffy fans thought about Fray. I really liked it.

#88 ::: Stefan Jones

"Mimsy" was indeed horrific, and not just for the parents. So the kids jaunt off to another dimension, presumably a one-way trip. They may be time-distant from anyone else that will be there, marooned alone.

It's bothered me for decades. Did anyone else have this reaction?

Re: suggested reading for children - I have no idea if he's still in print, or whether his books made it across the Atlantic, but Nicholas Fisk's worth checking out. Cracking Good SF Reads which I devoured with great glee when I was a young'un.

Another non-Buffy viewer here, sigh. I'm putting it in the Netflix queue, along with various others recommended in this thread.

Thena, after the ML Blue Moon post, which prompted reading through the Yarn Harlot archives, I got back into knitting and am on my second pair of socks. The deal with myself was,
1) ONLY socks, and
2) finish each pair before starting another, and
3) not to buy more sock yarn until finished.

The excellent yarn store in Boulder and ebay have blown #3. I do find myself regularly, absent-mindedly, adding "another set of Addi Turbo circs and DPNS" to my shopping list. I will go cross them off again.

Andrew Brown #104: A couple of the 'Biggles' books might be less than perfectly suitable if the young man in question is not white (Biggles in the West Indies comes to mind). I say this as a man of colour who adored Biggles as a lad.

(They're also not easy to find in the United States.)

Abi #111: But where do you keep the books on elf vellum? The ones with the spells that will take one to any place in Middle Earth or Aman that one desires?

CEO Tome Home #117: That's all very well, but if your grimoires are only written in languages like Indian, with limited spell-casting capacity, then they're not going to be much use. A cheap grimoire, with spells in a language with real spell-casting capacity, like Fbcubzber or Yrrgfcrnx or Erchoyvpna or even Jungrire vg vf gung Ohfu fcrnxf, works as well or better as a well-bound grimoire in Indian or 54|35p17(h.

And, of course, Fbcubzber should have been Fbcubzbevp. Silly me!

Fragano @134
Long answer:
Elves don't seem to die quite like humans and demons. Some sentience seems to remain in them until long past the point where it's possible to make vellum out of their skins. Combining that residual consciousness with a teleportation spell is...problematic, because the book itself can invoke the spells*.

Short answer:
Go off in the woods and catch the damned things yourself. I'm done trying.

-----
* yes, even the ones with a spoken element. Page vibrations can make sounds, you know. Or sometimes they simply coerce the weak-willed** who come into their proximity to say certain things.

** student wizards, Elf Liberation Front*** activists, cleaning staff

*** yes, ELF activists; they're weak-willed and have bad taste in acronyms. We use them for the sinister-side books.

Karen #75: even better than the Oz books is Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, available from Dover. It's more tightly focused than Oz, with less random stuff and a smaller cast; more like a traditional fairy tale in themes and setting, but with Baum's wackiness (and puns) in full force. Also it could be regarded as a precursor of the X-Men, as there is a group of characters with weird and very limited powers who learn to use them to best effect.

Kevin @ #108: I "cheated" by using Rockapella's "Capital Song" and got done with about a minute to spare.

Dave Luckett @ #128: I don't disagree with your assessment, but I feel compelled to point out that many people of my acquaintance are "the only person in the family who reads". That had to start somewhere.

I think everyone agrees that the magic-as-drugs thread of Season 6 was badly-conceived. Also unnecessary. Vg jnf nyernql jryy-rfgnoyvfurq gung Jvyybj'f jrnxarff jnf n gnfgr sbe cbjre, sbe pbagebyyvat bgure crbcyr; vg jnfa'g arprffnel gb pbagevir na Rivy Pnpxyvat Chfure fgenvtug bhg bs n 1971 qeht-jneavat svyz va beqre gb znxr vg oryvrinoyr gung fur pbhyq tb bire gur yvar. That said, I think the strengths of the season survive its weaknesses.

I certainly agree that if I'd been watching it on a week-by-week basis, it would have been a miserable slog, because Season 6 is all about everything falling apart. Inhaling whole seasons of episodic TV at a time, via DVD or coughdownloadingcough, really is a different experience. I think I've made this observation before.

Ethan, #94: "One of my favorite things about that show is that it seemed like every season (and, on a miniature level, almost every episode) stripped away another layer of comfortable illusion about the universe it took place in. You think vampires are all bad? Nope. You think watchers are all good? Nope. You think slayers are all good? Nope. You think the system of slayerdom is good? HELL no. Genius show." That's as concise and perfect an expression of what I like about it as I've read anywhere.

Abi #137: Unfortunately, the state legislature has shortened the hunting season (usual nonsense about endangered species), so it's rather hard for me to track one down (though I do have convenient woods).

On the other hand, I am in the market for a grimoire written on unicorn vellum. There's a lot of demand for that kind of spell these days.

Fragano @140
Unfortunately, the state legislature has shortened the hunting season (usual nonsense about endangered species)

That only applies to sport elf book hunting. You can hunt them year round for scientific purposes.

On the other hand, I am in the market for a grimoire written on unicorn vellum. There's a lot of demand for that kind of spell these days.

Those have a long pre-order list.

Material supply has been a problem lately, because our prime unicorn vellum source (K Haggard & Son, t/a Red Bull Enterprises) appears to have gone out of business. We've been forced to fall back on exotica suppliers (Fortuna's, in particular), but the quality of their wares are uneven at best.

Happy birthday, marilee!

Recommendations for a kid... Yes, Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey. (More coming, Teresa?)

And Girl Genius... The later stories are available on the net so you can decide if they're appropriate for the kid.

CEO Tome Home... pronunciation guides in the International Phonetic Alphabet so that your Southern accent doesn't summon a demon when all you wanted was a nice cup of Earl Grey, black, no sugar

"I asked for a chtonic menace, not a tuna sandwich."

#130:

I always figured that the kids went off to the future to play. They couldn't understand their parents anymore, and vice-versa, so for them it might not have been a bad move. Your Mileage May Vary. Still, a gut-punch of a story.

The movie depicts some of the scary-alienation stuff, but has a happy ending.

Neat film.

Thena (70): No. I haven't either. In my case, it's because I can't handle vampires. At all.

#139
One thing I've become very conscious of ever since I watched the first 5 seasons of the Sopranos, one per week, is how the pacing of broadcast TV shows is so much different than it is for non-commercial TV. This was greatly emphasized by watching a few seasons of Buffy, Firefly and NYPD Blue where there isn't any commercials. So you really notice all the mini-climaxes, which now seem to have no real purpose. I've come to greatly prefer the uninterrupted block of TV as the pacing seems much more natural. Now I'm wondering how something like Buffy or Firefly could have been improved if they'd have been able to use the same format. (Not that there really can ever be an answer in this sector of the Multi-verse). But still.

Thena (70) and Mary Eileen (146): Vampires? Fine with me. Buffy? No.

Sam Kelly (127): I haven't seen that particular edition, but I adore both of those books. Look for Thurber's The White Deer, which is equally wonderful.

Carol Kimball @130

I first read "Mimsy were the Borogoves" at the age of 11, and it bothered me then. I've reread it several times since then, and it bothers me every time. Just because those kids learned more than Alice doesn't mean they've learned enough to survive either physically or psychically in what's clearly a most alien evironment.

It's supposed to bother you; however light the tone of the story, it is, deeply and most sincerely a horror story. That's what "Lewis Padget" did best, whatever pseudonyms they happened to be using. Read "Two-Handed Engine", or "The Devil You Know" or especially "The Twonky"; if they don't scare you, you're probably related to the boy who left home to learn about the shivers.

CEO Tome Home @ 117

I assume by "Southern accents" you mean London accents like Cockney and suchlike?

Abi #141: Unfortunately, it's been ruled that travel to Middle Earth and Aman is not a scientific purpose. I was advised to seek a scientific porpoise, but that might be a problem of accent.

You might want to consider J. Fallwell Enterprises as a source of mythological supplies. I gather they now have a surplus of eye of newt.

Patrick @ 139

While I agree with everything you say about season 6, I'm forced to admit 2 guilty pleasures in watching that arc: V ybir jngpuvat Wrss Xbore purj gur fprarel, naq V unir n pehfu ba Rivy Jvyybj. Fur'f fb zhpu zber sha guna Jvzcl Jvyybj, rkprcg jura fur'f va Cebgrpgvir Zbgure zbqr qrsraqvat ure ybire.

I was advised to seek a scientific porpoise

Ay Aay iye iye brgrgrgr klik.

Ok, that's not really the weird part. The weird part is that "porpoise" and "wookie" are actually the same language. The only difference that you might hear is really an outcome of the acoustic differences of water versus air.

How it evolved in this manner is a mystery.

PNH #139: Thanks! Also, re: Inhaling whole seasons of episodic TV at a time, via DVD or coughdownloadingcough, really is a different experience. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but TV shows on DVD is the greatest invention of the new millennium. (Thanks, spelling reference.) The only show I'm watching as it airs currently is Veronica Mars, and as each season ends I'll buy the DVDs and rewatch it all as quickly as possible. Even aside from the fact that I'm rewatching a mystery knowing its conclusion, it's an entirely different (and in some ways even better) experience.

Jason #147: So you really notice all the mini-climaxes, which now seem to have no real purpose. I've come to greatly prefer the uninterrupted block of TV as the pacing seems much more natural. Now I'm wondering how something like Buffy or Firefly could have been improved if they'd have been able to use the same format.

Whedon's said (er...somewhere) that the five-acts-broken-up-by-commercials format was a great help in teaching him how to pace a story. I think I agree; just about any truly great hour of television I can think of (right now the two that come to me strongest are the first season finale of Veronica Mars and the episode of Buffy that dealt with Joyce's death) are particularly strong in the way they took advantage of the act structure and commercial breaks.

Bruce 150: "The Twonky" gave me nightmares. And if there's one thing I hate more than horror movies, it's movies with happy endings based on stories without. If the movie of MWTB has a happy ending...that would suck.

I saw that story as a metaphor for the sentiments expressed in this poem. I've certainly moved on to places where my parents can't follow. They can understand what I do for a living, but little or none of what I do for enjoyment.

To chime in with the two (?) people upstream: no, I've never watched Buffy the TV show.

I've been thinking about renting the DVDs lately, on the grounds that anything which this many smart people adore this much can't be all bad.

re: SF for young readers

The first book that came to mind is the truly wonderful Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH , because I was the age your reader is when I first encountered it. Then I thought "but is it SF?" which is patently silly...I have somehow never thought of it in that context before, but of course it is! I remember how excited I was a few years later when I realized what those letters stood for and that NIMH was a real place.

It so happens I work for mental health agency these days, and have had to learn to spell the letters out, because I was clearly annoying my colleagues by referring to our major grant-giving resource as "Nim".

As far as the other major theme in this thread, I just want to say that, as someone who came way late to the party, I'm enjoying all the Buffy talk...after refusing to be drawn in for years, my wife and I devoured all 7 seasons in about 6 months (yay, Netflix).

I stopped watching TV two years ago, and have only recently come to realize that I can watch TV series on DVD. I loved watching Firefly on DVD. I enjoyed the hell out of Buffy when I did have a TV, and wouldn';t at all mind buying the DVDs. I never saw Rome or The Sopranos, and probably won't because the level of violence in those shows is so high, but if I want to, I can. This is cool. This also means that I need to get a larger TV set; the 13" TV I do have is simply too small for the lean-back-in-recliner-eat-popcorn kind of viewing that I anticipate. Oh dear. Is there a cheap flat panel TV in my future?

Xopher @ 156
Gotta agree with Gibran's sentiments. Especially after having my own kids grow up and take up lives I wouldn't have wanted, but which seem to suit them well. I "sort of" understand what they do, but then I was never well anchored to my own generation's norms, so I'm probably doing better than average.

There was a movie made of "The Twonky" in the 1950s; I haven't seen it, out of fear that the director, Arch Oboler, made his usual dogs' breakfast out of it.

#156: RE movies saddled with inappropriate happy endings:

If Kubrick had directed "A.I.", I believe it would have turned out much as Speilberg's version but vg jbhyq unir raqrq haqre gur frn, jvgu gur yvggyr obl ebobg'f onggrevrf ehaavat bhg juvyr jvfuvat, jvfuvat, jvfuvat gung ur pbhyq orpbzr n Erny Obl.

Gur gnpxrq ba sne-shgher jvfu-shysvyyvat ebobg raqvat jnf na njshy orgenlny.

* * *

I can forgive "The Last Mimzy" for its happy ending because it is such a different story. There's no real pretense of adaptation or hommage.

* * *

"The Twonky" . . . that was way creepy.

RedMolly:

If your local used bookstores don't have Incredible Comparisons in stock, abebooks.com has several copies, just fyi.

Xopher @156 - Wow, thanks for that poem link. I know Sweet Honey in the Rock's a cappella setting of it, but the song leaves out the last five lines, which give the parents some credit and also some hope, I think. The truncated version always seemed a little harsh to me, though it was a great song for both orientation weekend and graduation at college, getting parents to let go of their precious kids.

As for Buffy, I've watched on and off - I saw all of seasons 2 and 3 in real time, but only bits and pieces of the rest. I'm too interested in everything to have remained unspoiled, but when I get free time (hah!) I'm planning on going back and watching the whole thing straight through. I'm not much for horror, though (even with levity), so I may have to do it in measured doses.

SpeakerToManagers @ #114:

It also makes a difference if you see or read a series in the expected order or not. With Sandman, I started with "A Game Of You" which is somewhere in the middle of the 10 collections, but I think it burned out all my evaluation circuits, and I was hooked immediately.

Hell yes. I actually bought The Kindly Ones (volume 9) first. A few pages in I knew I had to go back and read the beginning. So the next day I bought and read the first book, but then there was that copy of The Kindly Ones sitting at home which wouldn't let me not read it. After that, I filled in the ones in between in order, rationing them out over a period of about a year. The effect was rather odd, because I thought there were things that had to happen before The Kindly Ones that never appeared (e.g. more stories about Thessaly, more stories about Rose) and as I read each book and didn't find them, I kept expecting them to be in the next one. In the end I was confident that they would all be in Worlds' End, but then Worlds' End was mostly about brand new characters. The impression I got, in the end, was that I had read only a tiny subset of the stories that were there to be told. Which was entirely in keeping with the philosophy of the series, and part of what I love about it.

Oh, something else I love, related to some of the Buffy comments, is that Dream is a complete and utter idiot, especially early in the series. The fact that, as the hero, I expected him to be entitled to my automatic approval, and the amount of suffering he causes for himself and the people who are supposedly under his protection, makes his idiocy even more stunning.

Another book recommendation: the Beaver Towers series by Nigel Hinton.

#134: But where do you keep the books on elf vellum? The ones with the spells that will take one to any place in Middle Earth or Aman that one desires?

Well, for a start, elfskin can be both very fragile and very flammable. So keep it away from naked flames, cigarettes, burning pipeweed and so on. Smoking can seriously damage your elf.

Leslie, thanks for the tip. I recently unloaded a bunch of clutter on eBay and invested the proceeds in a Powell's gift card (in anticipation of being very poor after our upcoming move and having no book money), so I was hoping to be able to buy it through them... but abebooks will work just fine. It's really a fascinating book.

All: Yes, the John Bellairs books are fantastic. I love the way the stories are built on the real surviving American folkloric magic of the "Powwow Books", hexcraft, the pseudo-Agrippa grimoires, etc., vs. the wholly synthetic fantasy-story pmagic.

Eleanor @ #164:

I was fortunate enough to get introduced to Sandman right after The Doll's House collection came out, and was able to find (most of) the missing issues between then and when the storyline had got to, and keep up with it monthly, so I got to see most of the storyline as it unfolded. (That's the only comic book I've ever done that with.) Anyway yes, Thessaly just srung into the story fully developed in A Game of You. When you're following along, it doesn't seem so disconcerting.

If you've been missing her, there have been some other light but enjoyable storylines involving Thessaly, done in the Thessaly: Witch for Hire series. They really play up the contrast between Thessaly as one of the most powerful human beings in the world and she presents herself - mousy looking college student.

Stefan Jones @ 161 on A. I.: I hated the ending too, but for a different reason.

Gung jnf abg n unccl raqvat. Gur yvggyr obl tbg uvf zbgure onpx sbe bar qnl - fb jung? (Naq jul qvq vg unir gb or bayl bar qnl?) Ur'f n ebobg jub srryf yvxr n uhzna, naq ol guvf cbvag ur'f frireny gubhfnaq lrnef byq naq unf fcrag gur infg znwbevgl bs uvf rkvfgrapr va pbaqvgvbaf gung whfg qba'g dhnyvsl nf uhzna yvsr. Naq abj ur'f tbvat gb yvir sbe rire va n jbeyq jurer ur'f gur bayl uhzna yrsg. (Hayrff, jung unccrarq gb gur bgure ebobgf?) Hayrff Fcvryoret'f cbvag jnf gb fubj ubj vauhzna gur obl jnf nsgre nyy, juvpu V qvqa'g guvax vg jnf, vg jnf na hggreyl fghcvq raqvat.

V frr n pbaarpgvba gb vffhr bar bs Fnaqzna urer, ohg gurer, V gnxr vg gung qrzbafgengvat Qernz'f ynpx bs uhznavgl jnf Arvy Tnvzna'f cbvag.

Clifton @ 168: my introduction to Thessaly was when she turned up in The Kindly Ones calling herself Larissa and looking for Lyta. Since she was angry with Lyta by the end, I'm still not sure what her motivation was, so I was hoping there would be some explanation earlier in the series. Did I miss something?

The Google ads aren't sure what to make of this thread. Three out of five ads are Buffy-related, but the other two are for textbooks - in one case, medical textbooks.

ajay @166
The flammability of elf vellum is another reason we don't spend a lot of time trying to keep it in stock.

There are magical booksellers who try, but the logical place to keep them is a locked room*. Unfortunately the only locked room in most such establishments is in the rear of the dexter side. You know, the lightproof one.

It's a little-known fact that the premises next to Thomas Farynor in Pudding Lane, London was a magical bookseller's. September 1666 saw the employment of a new apprentice, who didn't know why the recto rear door was always locked, and left it open in the late autumn sunlight**. The light hit the vampire vellum - WHUMP - which ignited the elf vellum - KABOOM!

The baker got the blame. It was the cow in Chicago, but the story was much the same.

-----
* Mind control, spoken spells, yadda, yadda

** Elf vellum misses sunlight. And sometimes it gets suicidal.

Individ-ewe-al (107):

"Seriously, people! I can believe that no-one here ever struggled with reading, but have you never come into contact with anyone who doesn't devour highly complicated intellectual books effortlessly and with glee?

For a kid who is vastly intelligent but has a specific problem with reading, such as dyslexia, a sophisticated book can work for reading aloud or reading with a lot of support. But there's more to reading than just deciphering the words."

You're right that I've never sorted books into easy to read and hard to read. If I sorted them at all, it was into boring and not-boring; and boring always came with the proviso that they might turn interesting later. I have a few vague memories of having to work at stringing together what had come before in the book, and relating it to what I was reading at that moment. I have clearer memories of looking at what had previously been incomprehensible marks on the page, and having them visibly melt and re-form into a readable word.

I know that early on I read some novels that were only partly within range of my reading comprehension (and thank goodness for that; one of them was by Frank Yerby), and what I remember about them is that they took place in a strangely flat, undetailed universe. What I didn't understand was simply not there for me. I understood enough of the story for it to drag me forward through the pages.

Sometimes I think the single biggest thing I had going for me was my faith that I would be able to read and understand. That's why I get so angry at pedagogy that goes out of its way to tell kids that they're dumb.

#107 Individ,
As some one who was pegged as learning disabled in elementary school I can tell you Fantastic Mr.Fox and James And The Giant Peach are not out of reach of poor readers nor is the first half of Narnia. Add to that Wind In The willows, Jacob Two Two and The Hooded Fang, and Lewis Carol. Unlike everything thrown at me for my 'level', which were duller than dirt and patronising, they engaged my attention. The stories engulfed me. I read them just a touch slower and more carefully but still read them and got hook on speculative fiction in general enough to want to take on the challenge of meatier work. Don't sell poor readers short. If it grabs their attention enough they will find their way through it. I've got one really bad young reader hooked on Kit Williams cause it's surreal enough to get out of him a "weird cool" response.
Some of the big comic characters like Batman and Superman have hardcover anthologies in libraries of specific decades so if you chose the golden age 40s & 50s it will be kid safe.

ajay #166: That's why you keep it in a dark, cool place such as a cellar. A salt-cellar is not an adequate substitute.

Greg London #154: Wise you are, but from even the wise hidden are such things. Well said it is that one should meddle in the affairs of Jedi not, for subtle and quick to anger they are.

@#84, Re: 300, & Buffy

I think the movie is potentially germane to Buffy, and might even take place in the Buffyverse.

The producers appear to have decided that in addition to having overwhelming numerical superiority, the Persian army included demonic forces, and perhaps King Xerxes was a demon of some sort.

Also Individ(107), once I was into stories I liked and enjoyed to be worth the struggle I caught up, then exceeded my grade/age levels by the hard sf phase and went on to hounors courses with the English teachers telling me to consider writing as a future as much as the math/science teachers wanted me to get the Nobel Prize. Were it not for the beatings by school thugs taking it all away in the final years I just might have.

Perhaps related to Teresa's response to Individ-ewe-al, or perhaps just piggybacking: My first introduction to Madeline L'Engle was A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I was determined to read it because there was a unicorn on the cover. But probably what kept me slogging through the first chapter (which, at age seven, I found profoundly boring with its politics and its absence of unicorn) was Mom's comment: "Are you sure you want to start with that book? A Wrinkle In Time is probably closer to your reading level." At that point I would have chewed ground glass sooner than put the book down. I had to finish it just to show her.

(If Mom had said, "A Wrinkle In Time is the first book in that series, you know," I probably would have dropped Planet immediately and taken her advice. I suspect Mom knew exactly what she was doing.)

Re: Second Sock Syndrome: I learned that the surest cure is knitting two socks at once, but not as Anne describes it above, but rather one inside the other alternating stitches. (Teresa posted a link to an excellent article on that some time ago. It mentioned chocolate a lot.) I'm fairly good at it from a "don't cross the streams" standpoint, and it saved my butt when I started late on a pair of sock-moccasins for a wedding present... but I find that the inside sock tends to wind up an entire shoe size larger than the other. I just can't seem to keep the inside sock's gauge from coming up much looser.

Does anyone have a cure for that? Is my problem that I knit left-handed, and carry the second sock's thread over the left middle finger? Does it work better if you carry it on the other hand and resign yourself to throwing thread?

Carol @132: Shuttles Spindles & Skeins would be the death of my "no new yarn" resolve, too, if it weren't that I live at the northeast end of Boulder and my husband always seems to have the car. We have an excellent bus system, but still, the BOUND/SKIP trip down there with its unnecessarily pain-in-the-butt change at Broadway & 27th means it's more of an undertaking than a walk to the nearest coffee shop. I try to go to Shuttles for third Tuesday's community knitting, but by the time I'm there, the shop part of the shop is closed and product-buying at that point is restricted to "Damn! You mean I needed a sixteen-inch circular for this? Not a twenty-four? *Sigh* Roxanna, sorry, would you open up the resgister and sell me one pretty please?"

(We should probably meet up sometime for in-tandem tandem sock knitting, btw. I mean, if you're still in the area.)

I am honor-bound via friendship with its owner's son to mention Mew Mew's Yarn Shop in Louisville. I mean, as long as we're talking about Shuttles.

All this talk about Madeline L'Engle is forcing me to add her to my already-too-long reading list, because while I remember loving those books as a child I don't remember a single thing about them. Not a one. Except maybe there was something about tesseracts?

#159: Is there a cheap flat panel TV in my future?

Lizzy, you may want to consider a projector and a good, grey screen. A friend of mind is a media-holic and has the latest, greatest everything, and was going to get a massive plasma to upgrade his LCD TV, but got a projector instead. He says it's a high def projector, amazing quality, and with the right screen (apparently the grey ones work better in situations where you have the lights on than white screens) it's like a movie theater, without the gum on the bottom of the seats.

He projects onto a 8x4 foot screen (10 foot/120 inch diagonal), and I gotta say, I'm fairly impressed.

Also, if you own stock in theater companies, I'd recommend you sell.

#176: Fragano: For you are crunchy and barbeque nicely with a light saber?

Aconite (125) completely lame reason for Buffy's sudden reinterest in life

It wasn't sudden. The recovery process took most of the season with multiple advances and reverses. And it was basically completed in "Normal Again" with the episodes from Seeing Red through Grave testing the solidity of the recovery.

Serge (143) And Girl Genius... The later stories are available on the net so you can decide if they're appropriate for the kid.

Also the earlier stories. The "Girl Genius 101" section contains the pages from the beginning of the story through (as of 3/9) Volume 4 page 25.

Greg London #182: Possibly. Or I might have tarried in Arvernién.

Greg, thanks for the suggestion, but no way. I don't want anything larger than a 26" screen, and will probably be most comfortable with 20". I have a small house, and more books than I know what to do with, even though I cull regularly, and I truly have no room for something that large -- and also, I would hate it.

Um, I usually see maybe one movie a year at a movie theater, and very few on DVD. By thinking that I might actually watch Buffy on DVD I am taking my first hesitant, tentative steps towards technology that you have all been wallowing in for years.

On the other hand, I've been using a computer for 26 years. Gotta be some points in that.

#97 Tehanu: I loved Dr. Dolittle as a kid, and my local library had all of them. When my kids were the same age, I looked for them, but all that was in print was heavily edited versions with (blasphemy!) new illustrations.

Eleanor #171:

That's odd, for me they're about knitting, ringtones and Buffy (and the last two in combination).

ajay #166: Well, for a start, elfskin can be both very fragile and very flammable. So keep it away from naked flames, cigarettes, burning pipeweed and so on. Smoking can seriously damage your elf.

So did I miss the bit in LOTR where Legolas or one of them told the hobbits to stop already with the pipeweed? Could have been a classic. (I know, Gandalf was considered slightly outre for indulging in such a declasse pleasure.)

Andrew @ #104, I have a collection of WW1 Biggles stories out from the library, The Camels are Coming, and I'm pretty sure that it's one I read aged about 8.

The first page of the foreword has two footnotes, the second, one, the third page, three. Flipping through the stories, I found one paragraph with three footnotes. It's very science fictional stuff with a whole world of strange technology, unfamiliar skills and alien characters explained for children.

The stories and action are much as I remember them, but I had completely forgotten all the spoon-feeding in the footnotes. Good stuff.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Pardon my language, but it is warranted.

We have achieved full parody status as a nation.

Halliburton to move corporate HQ to Dubai.

These cocksuckers run detention facilities, V.A. hospitals, shabby mess halls in Iraq . . . ah, fukkit to hell.

In a proper over-the-top comic story, this is when a masked genius starts dealing with corporate officers in horribly ironic ways.

Hello? Masked genius? Please get to work. Announce yourself. I don't want this to be reality.

#169: Yes, I agree. This makes the tacked-on ending even more problematical.

I was never a huge Buffy fan. I watched an episode here and there, never a hardcore, can't miss it fan. Charmed was the series I devoured, from first to the last, eight seasons lagter. Still watch re-runs, though my hubby remids me often I've already seen them. I miss that show.

Yes, Buffy was occasionally an a-hole. Remember the movie (which I LOVED, btw): she was a perky cheerleader who wanted to "marry Christian Slater and die."

She never wanted to be a slayer; she was a spoiled brat. She occasionally reverted, I think.

ajay (166): Ouch! I caught that pun.

Lizzy @ 185

Sorry, I meant to reply before, and have gotten snowed under all the posts, as well as the things I've been doing in RL today.

If you're cool with computers and want a relatively small screen, I suggest a flat panel computer monitor. It will be higher resolution than an equivalent TV (and more expensive :-(, so the picture will be as good as you're going to get in that size. And don't let anyone kid you, nothing but the very top end of plasma or LCD flatscreen TVs will have as good a picture as a good computer monitor.

And if you're got a recent computer, you can plug the monitor right in, straight digital, and not have to get any more additional equipment but perhaps a cable. Play DVDs on the computer; if you really want HDTV off the air, buy a tuner that plugs into the computer for less than $150 at this point (and everything gets cheaper over time). If and when you want to play high definition disks you can install a new drive in the computer for less than a player will cost you, and the monitor will show it all.

Joann @ 188

So did I miss the bit in LOTR where Legolas or one of them told the hobbits to stop already with the pipeweed? Could have been a classic.

That got dropped from the final draft and ended up in "Bored of the Rings."

Mary Aileen @ 193

Please. It's only a bid for attention don't provide encouragemen. Ignore it, and maybe the puns will go away.

All this talk about grimoires by people who obviously don't own or even read them, Fah!

I've been a Witch and a Magician for many decades. Elf-skin is far too fragile for bookbinding, though the bones are useful for various, uh, instruments. Most of what passes for elf-skin is either lamb or kid. Some of it kid as in human kids. Demon-skin can't be used for bookbinding because demons generally burn up when you destroy them. Demons are occasionally bound to a book, not by physical means but by magical linkage. There are certain books that it is NOT a good idea to own unless you have the proper container for them that includes the right pentagle.

The difficulty with grimoires is that most people tend to say what they are copying under their breath, which makes it very dangerous for the scribes. Some grimoire-publishers have taken to using scribes who do not know any of the languages used in the grimoire, and thus cannot accidently use the spells. Some even take the precaution of having one scribe write one word, another scribe the next.

Books of Shadow are FAR safer, since those are written yourself, and or by someone you know, passed on to a coven member or student. And they are usually annotated, so that you know that when old Agnes used this, she found she got the best results at full moon, for example. Grimoires seldom have that sort of personal touch.

Having said that, I will add that if you are looking for a grimoire, the best place is an old second hand store, bookstore or general odd and ends place. Ones with basements are preferable, because I have heard they are often found jammed under stairs at an angle.

Good luck grimoire-hunting.

(And a belated happy birthday to Marilee!)

Thanks, folks! I'm 52, 14 years older than the doctors said I'd get!

Individ-ewe-al, #107, my mother's fifth-graders were the special class. Most of them were slow, but back in those days, the physically disabled got stuck in there, too, and they all managed The Borrowers just fine.

John Christopher's White Mountains (Tripods) series is a classic for young SF readers.

I dunno, I bought a 27" Westinghouse (of all brands) HDTV a while ago for under $700 at Best Buy. It does the 1080i stuff beautifully, plus the lesser definitions. It does not have an HDTV tuner in it, but I'm using the cable box for that. It has a way better picture than most of the HDTVs I see in the stores, but maybe that's just because the sales staffs don't know how to set up their screens.

Off topic (or maybe Tolkein is on topic) & funny:

"A Balrog is come!"

Sam Kelly (#127) & Mary Aileen (#149) Oh yes, indeed. The UK/Australian edition I remember from my childhood was the combined illustrated paperback The Thirteen Clocks & The Wonderful O. It had a lovely cover drawing, black on sea-green/blue washes. Probably 1960s.
Somehow I have to deal with three or four household's boxed books — and the rest of their goods & chattels, stashed in different places across Sydney — mentally & physically it's a huge struggle, but I'm gradually, mentally, sorting a group of books & other things that will, I hope, fit into one home with many bookshelves & still allow me room to live. You've just reminded me of another book I'd want there. Do you remember the plaintive plight of Ophelia Oliver?

Lizzy (#185) & Bruce Cohen (STM) (#194): I have a television-hating friend who agrees with Bruce's idea of the large flat computer monitor to watch high quality images of films & the odd television-related DVD.

I kept thinking of John Wyndham with 'The Twonky'. A quick visit to www.isfdb.org shows I'm remembering Chocky, as well as reminding me of his lovely swag of noms-de-plume. It also says he died exactly 38 years ago; and that it's Douglas Adam's birthday, whose viewpoint on the world I sorely miss. Thank you Cushing Library at Texas A&M University; All Hail the InterTuben!

Stefan Jones @ 161
The ending of AI would seem, alas, to be exactly as Kubrick wanted it.

The New York Times ran a piece shortly after Kubrick's death but long before Speilberg took over, that detailed the last great Kubrick film that would never be... and described the ending pretty much as it eventually came to be.

It's still available in their archives.

Stefan 190: These cocksuckers run detention facilities, V.A. hospitals, shabby mess halls in Iraq...

I'd just like to point out that if there were no cocksuckers in the world, no one would ever get a blowjob. Please don't deride the cocksuckers of the world by comparing them to Halliburton, who would never do anything so selfless.

Maybe assholes are a better metaphor, Xopher? Or mother fskers, that's more abhorrent (like you, I have mixed feelings about the act you mentioned).

#203: That's a let-down. I imagined the happy robot ending as Speilberg's attempt to pull the story from the edge of unspeakable tragedy.

* * *

On the subject of tragedy:

I saw the Korean monster movie "The Host" today. Grim, grim, grim comedy of errors. Wonderfully made, but not your standard rip-roaring cheery adventure fare.

Now you're dissing fsck? :-)

Michael I @183: It wasn't sudden. The recovery process took most of the season with multiple advances and reverses. And it was basically completed in "Normal Again" with the episodes from Seeing Red through Grave testing the solidity of the recovery.

I didn't see those so much as reinterest in life as acceptance of her duty and an effort to conform to what she thought she ought to be and do. She would have been better off, I think, accepting what she really was, and learning to set limits for the parts she felt weren't acceptable to express while acknowledging that yes, those things were part of her. Then I might have been more convinced that she found joy in life, in her way.

I'm about to start Season 6 tonight, as it happens (I've discovered I can stockinette stitch while I watch, but Ghu help me if I try to do ribbing), so I'll see if I still feel the same way, or if I see the development you do.

... is it time to mention the thing that flew, not a cloud for it did not move with the wind, that was considered to be, perhaps, a Balrog? By some of the few living witnesses to the 'Rog ?

I didn't think so.

Er, I meant I'm about to start rewatching Season 6.

Demons are occasionally bound to a book, not by physical means but by magical linkage.

And to tie into the Buffy thread... one friend got hooked on Buffy (his SO was already watching) from the first season episode where a demon possessed a network when the book it had been trapped in was "read" (scanned) with a computer on the network. This struck him as sufficiently imaginative that he started paying attention to the series.

Me, I started watching when it went into syndication on FX, and got two episodes a day, five days a week.

Oh Resident Fluorospheri, glowing with resonant fluorescence,

I have a question about the slushpile.

Imagine a representative sample of incoming short stories. What percentage of them would count as "considered readable by an average (sf reading) audience?"

This would include not only publication quality stories but also the not-bad stories. I'm not sure how to define"not-bad": perhaps that if a bunch of readers spend time reading those stories, then those readers would consider that time to be at worse neutrally spent. The stories are no worse than, say, watching a basic news show, or browsing at a store, or reading magazines while waiting for a train.

Oh my god, Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. She's my girl forever. Oh, ten years that shook my world. I exist here on earth, but part of me is always in the Buffyverse...and also the Angelverse and the Fireflyverse.

Reading for younger humans: I enjoyed the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books even though I was a little bitty girl who didn't know she could dream of being a superhero.

I also loved the earlier Andre Norton books, despite having to picture myself as a boy in order to spin fantasies.

I also LOVED Joy Chant's "Red Moon and Black Mountain".

Also, I think that Ursula Leguin's "Earthsea Trilogy" is within reach of younger readers, as is James Schmitz's "The Witches of Karres".

And there you have it: the off-the-top-of-her-head recommendations of Larkspur, aka Betty Louise Plotnick of East Cupcake, Illinois.

Bruce at 194: can't do that. I am totally an completely self-employed, and my office (space, equipment, utilities, etc.) may not be used for anything other than work stuff. And also, I don't want to watch Buffy in my office. I watch to hang out in my recliner, eat Thin Mints (bought two boxes today) and be nowhere near my office for a few hours.

P.S. Happy birthday Marilee! The little bits you've mentioned of your life have left me incredibly impressed that you've survived to this point, let alone with the grace and humor you display. May you have many good years to come.

Xopher @ 204

Let's face it, all the really meaty obscene derogations insult people or acts which are at worst morally neutral. Bastards didn't have anything to say about their condition; why diss them about it? Any term for the performer of any consensual sexual act or the believer in any theology or the member of any race or ethnic group likewise.

But there are still politicians and lawyers, right? That's probably not enough variety, so I propose we start calling them what they really are: Bushes, Cheneys, Roves, etc. How better to insult them?

Lizzy, #214: "Bruce at 194: can't do that. I am totally and completely self-employed, and my office (space, equipment, utilities, etc.) may not be used for anything other than work stuff."

If you're paying someone for tax advice that has led you to believe this, then fire them.

The idea that a World Fantasy Award-winning novelist can't use her office space and equipment to watch fantasy TV shows is K-R-A-Z-Y. Yes, I know you haven't written lots and lots of novels lately. It doesn't matter. You are hundreds of miles--thousands--from being in any sort of peril. You are entirely entitled to use your office equipment to watch Buffy. Or American Idol, for that matter.

You're in the entertainment industry. Keeping up is a legitimate business expense. End of story. If someone is telling you otherwise, they're incompetent.

To be fair: Lizzy's take on the office space matter is quite common.

I once attended a superbowl party at a friend's house. He had a barren little office which he insisted could only be used for his freelance work. "We need a betting matrix." he said as I entered the house. "This is my office. That's my office computer*. I'm going to go in the living room. If you happen to turn on my computer and whip something up when I'm not looking . . . "

I'm not sure if I'd personally feel comfortable claming an office space deduction. I make maybe three hundred a year on my writing, and a lot of that is for royalties on things published years ago.

* An Osborne. Man, that was a ways back . . .

Happy Birthday Marilee!

And many happen returns of your confounding your doctors! Long may you run.

Fragano Ledgister: "But where do you keep the books on elf vellum? The ones with the spells that will take one to any place in Middle Earth or Aman that one desires?"

Those? Generally found in the sf/fantasy section, filed under "T".

Eleanor: "my introduction to Thessaly was when she turned up in The Kindly Ones calling herself Larissa and looking for Lyta. Since she was angry with Lyta by the end, I'm still not sure what her motivation was, so I was hoping there would be some explanation earlier in the series. Did I miss something?"

Thessaly's emotional state during the The Kindly Ones is complex. It helps to know that Gurffnyl unq n guvat sbe Qernz. Fur naq Qernz unq n syvat gung raqrq ubeevoyl, evtug orsber gur Jbeyq'f Raq fgbelyvar (Gur jubyr "Fur qbrf abg ybir zr" naq zbcvat nobhg va gur enva sbe zbaguf guvat.) Vf guvf rire rkcynvarq rkcyvpvgyl va gur pbzvp? V pna'g erzrzore vs vg'f ncbpelcun be pnaba, naq V'z gbb sne njnl sebz zl Fnaqzna gbb purpx. Naljnl, fur unf rabhtu bs n ybir/ungr eryngvbafuvc jvgu Zbecurhf gung fur pna obgu or pbzcyvpvg va uvf qrfgehpgvba naq srry onq nobhg vg nsgrejneqf.

(ROT-13 is fun! I'm tempted to learn to decode in my head, but on further consideration, that would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?)

Re AI

I'm not convinced the ending we saw is the one Kubrick would have ended up with. He was an incredible perfectionist, perfectly capable of throwing away large chunks of movie that was already finished in production if he thought there was a better way. Brian Aldiss, who was working on the story with him, wrote that Kubrick was not happy with it as it sat when he died; he just didn't know what he should do about it.

The other reason I'm not convinced is that, while Kubrick was willing to segment his movies into acts or chapters (viz "Barry Lindon" or "Eyes Wide Shut") he was always careful to keep the tone and pace of the different parts consistent if not the same. In my opinion, this is not true of AI.

PNH: "If you're paying someone for tax advice that has led you to believe this, then fire them."

I just figured she enforced this rigid segregation for the sake of her own sanity.

P.S. This thread led me to discuss Buffy with my SO, who hated 6 pretty hard and refused to watch 7. Over the course of explaining how I think the end of seven redeems the unrelenting suck of six,* I managed to convince her to try it again. So we just started watching seven. Thanks, Making Light!

*You can't really critique six on its own. It isn't meant to stand alone--six and seven are two halves of a single story arc. Buffy has to realize how absolutely terrible and abusive the status quo is before she can really challenge it.

Lizzy @ 214

My wife tried being a writer for a few years, before health problems got in the way. We set up the taxes showing 50% usage of the computer, printer, etc. for her work, considering the rest as either used in my work (I was not self-employed) or for the family, and therefore not deductible. We had a small house and 2 teen-age boys, so we didn't have a physical home office. But we worked out that we could do all that and up the deduction if her income increased.

The point is that even if you don't think that Patrick's right that it would be completely deductible (and I think he is), you could still take a few percent off the computer writeoff for personal use, and get it back by considering the monitor as dual-use. And depending on how you're depreciating the equipment, you might be able to adjust the accounting and pick up still more in deductions.

Re #196: Reminds me of a T-shirt I made for a friend:

"Incorrigible punster -- please do not incorrige!"

Ethan #180: the one about tesseracts is, indeed, "A Wrinkle In Time".

In re: Teresa at #83:

"the localized Linux distribution used in the vicinity of the Hellmouth

OK, I'll bite. Pray tell?

Buffy should have ended at the end of 5, diving into the light. A perfect end. On the other hand, even less than wonderful Buffy has to be better than no Buffy.

The scene of Willow and Terra dancing in the Bronze is my favourite tv scene of all time - so much said and no words used at all.

My reading challenged eldest got into reading via comics, whereas my reading challenged youngest got into reading via Warhammer books. Both now don't so much read as inhale books and write their own.

Kip W @ #86 wrote:
I find I can't go wrong with anything by Beverly Cleary. Dunno how they go over with the younger set, though -- you know, people 40 and under.

I have fond memories of Beverly Cleary's work from when I was a nipper, considerably less than 40 years ago.

(Just yesterday, in fact, apropos of nothing in particular, I found myself thinking about important lessons her books taught me when I wasn't looking.)

Paul A @ 228

If you get a chance to go to Portland (the left-hand one, not the one in Maine, way over on the upper-right), check out the neighborhood of Klickitat St. Beverly Cleary is remembered fondly there. There are statues of her characters in Grant Park a few blocks from Ramona's house.

If you're paying someone for tax advice that has led you to believe this, then fire them.

Patrick and Bruce: while I appreciate your advice -- I am a tax professional. I have been preparing other people's taxes for over 20 years -- it keeps food on the table and my mortgage paid. Believe me when I say that for my particular tax situation, which is quite complex, it is better if I do not turn my computer and its monitor into a home entertainment center.

But as a matter of fact, Heresiarch is precisely right. I don't want to use my computer for watching DVDs because if I were to spend any more time in the office than I do now, especially between February and April, I'd go batshit crazy.

So did I miss the bit in LOTR where Legolas or one of them told the hobbits to stop already with the pipeweed?

Two Towers, chapter 8, "Road to Isengard", and it was Gimli:

"You rascals, you woolly-footed and wool-pated truants! A fine hunt you have led us! Two hundred leagues, through fen and forest, battle and death, to rescue you! And here we find you feasting and idling - and smoking! Smoking!"

Greg @154
The weird part is that "porpoise" and "wookie" are actually the same language...How it evolved in this manner is a mystery.

Two words: Sea monkeys.

abi... Manymanymany moons ago, when she was a mere slip of a child, my wife bought sea monkeys from those comic-book ads. She was very disappointed.

TNH @ #83: In re Buffy: I staved it off for years. Then Anna Genoese got tired of waiting and tossed all of Season One on to Patrick's desk, with orders to watch it. And then, Buffy ate my brain.

My temptation to mail you Fullmetal Alchemist just went up by quite a bit, though if it ate your brain as much as it ate mine (I must have written well into 5 figures' worth of words on it while watching, including this recommendation post) you might not thank me for it.

Heresiarch at 220: The Sandman scenario you describe is indeed canon, and made more-or-less explicit, IIRC, in The Wake. It takes reading all of A Game of You, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake to really put it all together, but it's there.

Heresiarch again, at 222: You can't really critique six on its own. It isn't meant to stand alone--six and seven are two halves of a single story arc. Buffy has to realize how absolutely terrible and abusive the status quo is before she can really challenge it.

I agree, and this is one of the things that makes the post-resurrection story arc all work for me. (I think you could do a very interresting study of the way the two seasons mirror each other: the banality of the Trio versus the transcendent, omnipotent evil of the First; the explorations of the use and misuse of power; the two finales that deal with two different lenses of gender and destructive force; the bookends of the two very different kinds of sacrifice*; and of course, the general balance of Slayerhood with which that arc begins and ends.

*For all that I can appreciate some of the criticism leveled at the storyline dealing with gur snyy naq erqrzcgvba bs Qnegu Ebfraoret, I think it's a lot more nuanced than is often given credit for. For one thing, I have a theory (heh) that gur snja va "Onetnvavat" vf Gnen, jub vf gur *erny* fnpevsvpr jub zhfg or znqr gb oevat onpx gur gehr Fynlre, naq cneg bs Jvyybj'f gentrql vf gung fur qbrfa'g haqrefgnaq guvf jura fur frgf ure Jvyy ybbfr va gur jbeyq. (One of the things I appreciate about the way power works in the Whedonverse is that There's Always A Price - and that price is not only Too Much, it's more than you thought when you made the bargain.)

Susan @ 129... I'd be curious to hear what other Buffy fans thought about Fray. I really liked it.

What was Fray, Susan? I looked for it on IMdb.com, to no avail - unless one considers it a hit to get something called Saturday Night Frayeur...

Serge, Fray is a graphic novel set in a cyberpunk future of the Buffyverse, written by Joss. It's good, if perhaps not quite sufficient to scratch that post-Season 7 itch; we'll see if the new comic series does better at that.

(Actually, I have a couple of relatively minor issues with Fray, but not enough to really quash my enjoyment of it.)

Ah hah... Thanks, Dan.

Thena @ #70:

I have never seen any of Buffy or its spinoffs either.

Wait, vampire vellum? In the Buffyverse? Does that even work? Do we know what happens to chopped-off bits of vampire in that universe?

I can see three possibilities, in descending order of probability:
1) The chopped-off bit turns to dust immediately
2) The chopped-off bit stays around till the vampire it was chopped from is killed, then dusts
3) The chopped-off bit sticks around even if the donating vampire is dusted.

With 1 you clearly can't make vampire vellum at all absent some kind of elaborate ritual. With 2 you'd best make sure you didn't have anything important written on that vellum, lest your donor vamp have a Close Encounter of the Buffy Kind. (You could also keep him/her locked in the cellar, I guess.) 3 is the only one that allows for permanent vamp-vellum books, and I consider it extremely unlikely that it works that way.

It would work if the vellum was being sustained by blood from somewhere, wouldn't it?

Can't you just picture the small charm in the abattoir drain, and the sluicing tide of blood and bits trickling into a fine, fine fall of dust?

Stefan@190--I expect Haliburton is moving to Dubai because it's a fine tax shelter, near where they have a lot of business. But also, I expect, their execs want a bolt-hole, for protection from criminal prosecution.

Lizzy@230--are you not wanting to spend office time in between Feb & April because of darkness & rain?

Well, Tamora Pierce is what I tend to recommend for 4th graders who don't read all that well. Lots of books (some of them you have to watch out for content), enjoyable, if juvenile, stories.

Diana Wynne Jones is a much better writer (IMHO), but only some of her books are good for that age range. For science fiction, some of the Heinlein juvies are good (Star Beast, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, etc). Some of them are more difficult, and some you have to watch out for content.

I didn't see Buffy until 2001. WB wasn't available without an expensive cable format. I wasn't interested, no matter what people or critics said because all I had to go on was the movie.

However, when it went into reruns my wife introduced me to Buffy and has regretted it ever since.

"That's something you don't see everyday."

"Unless you're us!"

Bruce Cohen @ 229:

If you get a chance to go to Portland (the left-hand one, not the one in Maine, way over on the upper-right), check out the neighborhood of Klickitat St. Beverly Cleary is remembered fondly there. There are statues of her characters in Grant Park a few blocks from Ramona's house.

They put the statues in while I was a student at Grant. The stoner crowd figured out that the dents that form Ramona's eyes are just the right size and shape that you can stick lit cigarette butts in there to make her look possessed.

Not that I would recommend anything of the sort. I still have all of my Beverly Cleary books from when I was a kid.

Audrey #245:

You and other Beverly Cleary fans *do* know she write an autobiography, right? _A Girl from Yamhill_.

Jon Meltzer #231:

What I was speculating on was the "smoking's a nasty habit for hobbits" lecture, the one where it's suggested that elves disintegrate at a whiff of smoke. Or something.

(Note please that I don't smoke, but my father and various inamorati did.)

Graydon @ 241

Is that really any different from keeping a chicken heart culture alive? In one case you have to periodically invoke the power of the Dark Gods, in the other you have to periodically call on the Colonel. Hey, black magic is black magic, whatever Powers you invoke.

Lizzy, #230: "Patrick and Bruce: while I appreciate your advice -- I am a tax professional."

Oops. My apologies for lecturing you! Also, of course, Heresiarch's point is a good one.

Still, I hear all the time from writers and (particularly) aspiring writers that they dasn't surf the web or watch DVDs on their Official Writing Computer because the orbiting network of IRS spy satellites peering into every American home will then deny them their home-office deduction, and it's has always seemed to me silly, which was the context of my reaction. Leaving aside the spy satellites, the fact is, it's entirely legitimate for entertainment-industry professionals to pay attention to the entertainment industry. No, you probably can't deduct the cost of your $4000 home theater if you sold one short story to a web site last year. But if you're a working fantasy writer, the IRS isn't going to freak out over you using your office computer to keep up with your own industry. I'm sure you know this.

Dan Layman-Kennedy, #235: Wow, terrific theory.

Patrick, thanks! I think it fits in with the fact that the narrative cosmos of the Whedonverse pays attention and gives you what you ask for even if you didn't intend the consequences ("Don't speak Latin in front of the books, Xander"), and collects the bill with impartial and implacable exactitude. I get the impression that one of the defining characteristics of the Powers That Be is that they are relentlessly and terrifyingly just.

Patrick at 249: ah, yes, the ubiqitous IRS -- not! You are of course right, it is perfectly legitimate and appropriate for an aspiring writer or a published one to watch Firefly, Buffy, Angel, The Sopranos, whatever: who knows, she/he might want to write a screenplay some day. I remember that the one and only time I was personally audited, many years ago, I had deducted some amount -- about $800, I think, but it was a long time ago -- for books and research, and the auditor asked me what percentage of the books I purchased I had used for research. I said, quite firmly, "All of them."

After a moment, the auditor nodded, and continued. There were no more questions about books.

Randolph at 242: It stopped raining in my office after we got the troll off the roof...

Sorry. Ubiquitous. U after q, check.

Teresa, if this post transgresses the boundaries of polite usage just delete it and send an email to scold me.

Would anyone who has contacts in the professional photography community in the London area and is willing to help me contact a long-lost relative please email me at BruceCohenPDX at gmail dot com? I have tried various net searches, with no luck on contact info, and sending email to her agent got no reply.

Thank you.

Lizzy, I apologize for preaching to the bishop. Of course you know your situation best. I just hate to see people taken by the deceptive marketing of the entertainment electronics industry, so I tend to be somewhat vehement about alternative solutions.

I have a question for users of LiveJournal...

Let's say I want to post a comment on your LiveJournal blog, and an alternate userpic is more appropriate for this specific post - for example, Ming the Merciless instead of my default picture of Mister Scott inside the Jefferies Tube. Or maybe I want to post a new entry on my own LJ blog, but with a different userpic just for that entry. How do I do any of that without changing my default userpic?

I wonder what the IRS would do if I tried to deduct my bedroom, since I do most of my dance reconstruction work comfortably ensconced in bed surrounded by enough books and papers that I'm thinking of getting a bigger bed, since the books are almost squeezing me off the edge.

(Joke, it's a joke.)

(The deduction, not the bed-eating research material.)

Serge, there should be a field marked Userpic with a little drop-box above the subject field when you post or comment (if you're not in Quick Post mode, anyway) that when you click on it will have the keywords you listed for your various icons. Select from that list, and it will show the userpic you want.

On Geoffrey Chaucer's blog: "Thys Is Just to Saye": http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2007/03/buy-myn-anthologie.html

Dan @ 258... Thankyouthankyouthankyou, Dan!

Most welcome.

Carrie S @240:

It is indeed option 3. When Brum and Stohr wrote The Care and Feeding of Magical Books*, they didn't pick the title to be cutesy.

I could tell you more about the production of the various vella (the light of which constellations strengthens elf hide, how to pare a dragon thin enough, what salinity of solution causes a mermaid-skin to shed its scales cleanly, what to do with ticklish elves**), but they are trade secrets, and I would have to kill you. I don't want that; I like you guys***.

-----
* Romanian Library Institute, 1834

** You have to stretch them on...no. I really can't describe this without pictures. Never mind.

*** And besides, I have enough vellum for the black books for some time to come****.

**** That probably falls under Don't Ask as well.

abi @ 262... I would have to kill you. I don't want that; I like you guys

I feel so much better knowing that.

Susan @ 257

Fritz Leiber once wrote (in "Our Lady of Darkness") about the "scholar's mistress", the collection of books that shared the bed with his protagonist. Although he was writing a horror story, it always seemed a comforting idea to me, having an intimate relationship with knowledge.

Imagine a representative sample of incoming short stories. What percentage of them would count as "considered readable by an average (sf reading) audience?" This would include not only publication quality stories but also the not-bad stories. I'm not sure how to define"not-bad": perhaps that if a bunch of readers spend time reading those stories, then those readers would consider that time to be at worse neutrally spent. The stories are no worse than, say, watching a basic news show, or browsing at a store, or reading magazines while waiting for a train.

Fanfiction dot net is pretty much an enormous, unsifted slushpile. It proves Sturgeon's Law. Somebody online nicknamed it the Pit of Voles because if an infinite number of monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually produce King Lear, then whatever lurks at ff.net, it ain't monkeys.

It's also the place to find those magic carpets to Middle-Earth mentioned upthread. But if you decide to ride, beware of the sticky stains. (IOW, if you love Tolkien, DO NOT read at the Pit without a recommendation from somebody whose taste you trust.)

abi @262

And besides, I have enough vellum for the black books for some time to come

All well and good, but you should be sure to stock up on ice demon and Fenris hides. According to a recent report from the C. A. Smith Institute of Thaumaturgical and Eldritch Ecology, they are likely to be most affected by global warming in the next decade or so, possibly ending in their extinction before 2020.

Of course, there's always a bright side. Firedrake and salamanders are likely to become common enough to be neighborhood pests in some areas. Nature gives, and nature takes away; she's fickle.

Off topic (any previous topic), but in the open thread: Any good utilities for converting text strings to either ascii numbers, or HTML entity numbers?

I use the LeetKey Firefox extension for my ROT13 needs, but unfortunately it does not provide this option. Any ideas?

Working on a PC with Windows XP...

Rob, I don't know if there are any utilities for doing that, but languages like Basic have a function that returns ASCII values. (Numbers are, IIRC, 60-69 decimal, space is 32 decimal. Lower case letters start at 101, upper-case at 71. "There is no 'O' in army because 'O' is 4F.")

Several of my songs for Whisperado were partially inspired by BTVS.

One of the funniest moments, to me, in the whole series is Aimee Mann's line (I won't spoil). I think it is the only time when a BTVS musical guest had a line in the script. Pretty sure it was in S6 or S7.

Just getting caught up on this thread. Three comments, vaguely connected --

Re. Young reader recommendations: Whatever happened to short stories? When I was seven and eight, I gobbled up those Scholastic "Great Ghost Stories" anthologies that popped every October. One thing I liked about these is that they weren't necessarily kids' stories (Poe, Saki, Bierce, M.R. James, LeFanu, etc.), which is good for young egos. (Also, you can reread these stories as you grow older and find all kinds of richness at each stage in your life.) Also, they're short short stories -- short enough that you can read slowly and carefully and still feel like you're finishing something. And each story has that one powerful image you can hold on to. They're all in the public domain, too (hence all the Scholastic anthologies), so the tutor could, say, go to Gutenberg.org and grab "The Open Window," bring it into Word and bump up the font and add a quick glossary, and print it out to see if it appeals to the kid.

Re. Buffy: Speaking of short stories, I really liked season 1 of Buffy, when the episodes were mostly self-contained, the cast of characters was limited, and there was more menace and less mythos. As the story arcs became more prominent and the Buffiverse expanded, I lost interest. (I had the same problem with X-Files: Loved season 1, but progressively lost interest with each successive season.) But clearly I am in the minority -- every show's a soap these days. What I wouldn't give for a good, new, writer-driven anthology series.

Re. Knitting: I recently rewatched Belgium's only horror film, Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971). There's a scene in which a thoroughly modern Countess Bathory (played by the astonishingly glamorous Delphine Seyrig) is sitting in the lobby of an otherwise empty resort hotel in Ostend, knitting. She is knitting An Impossible Thing, using three needles. As far as I know, it is the only knitting-vampire scene in film history. You don't see Dracula or Carmilla knitting, that's for sure. Don't know about Angel or Spike.

#267: You know, I was about to mention Leet Key, which has been very handy for dealing with the outbursts of rot13 in this thread. Firefox users should install it. And, of course, all humans should be Firefox users.

<really_really_heavy_sarcasm>
Oh yeah, I can just see Spike knitting. He's certainly got the patience and the attention span.
</really_really_heavy_sarcasm>
Although it might make sense; he could knit a burkah to wear in daylight.

Patrick, thanks for reminding me of the obvious... I looked among the extensions for Firefox, and found ASCIItoUnicode, which does what I wanted.

Oh my. Those ghost story anthologies. The Monkey's Paw. The one about the ghost mother who came to get milk to sustain the living infant in the coffin. The vanishing-hitchhiker one that I first read with trappings of horse-drawn carriages and country roads, and later encountered as a fifties-sixties pop song called "Laurie." (She asked me if she could wear my sweater /She said that she was very cold.)

If he likes horror as well as adventure -- some of the Lovecraft shorts might actually work well. "Pickman's Model" kept me from changing for the Red Line alone for at least a year!

RE: #213 larkspur

Someone else loved Red Moon and Black Mountain! Hurrah! Though I didn't like the sequel much. Did you ever read Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laurenthal?

For kids, but probably older than 2nd-3rd grade unfortunately: Swallows and Amazons, all E. Nesbit, Emil and the Detectives, My Great-Grandfather and I, Big Tiger and Christian, The Adventures of Nils, Octagon Magic, Gone-Away Lake, Green Knowe, Eleanor Farjeon, The Pushcart War, best stop now, hadn't I?

Re: Buffy. Watched erratically. Am about to start from the beginning via Netflix. Viva Netflix!!
V

More Buffy stuff.

Best Season: 2 (one complete story, and all parts relate to the whole)

Best Villain: The Mayor

Best Season Premiere: 7 (despite the train wreck of the rest)

Favorite Season (note distinction made between "best" and "favorite"): 6

Favorite Moment: Last episode of Season 6. Tvyrf unf neevirq. Ohssl furrcvfuyl fhzf hc rirelguvat ur'f zvffrq fvapr ergverzrag (" . . . naq V'ir orra fyrrcvat jvgu Fcvxr"). Tvyrf ybbxf fubpxrq. Gura ur fgnegf ynhtuvat. Ohssl, vavgvnyyl bssraqrq (naq cebonoyl rkcrpgvat n fyvtugyl zber cngreanyvfgvp ernpgvba), wbvaf va. Gurl'er fgvyy ynhtuvat frireny zvahgrf yngre. Orfg cresbeznapr gubfr gjb funerq va frira lrnef.

Biggest Disappointment: I heard Nancy Kress describe the beginning of a story as a series of promises which the end must meet (put another way, each promise might be a deal struck in the Whedonverse, and each fulfillment is the anticipated-yet-surprising price of the deal). The show made a promise at the end of Season 4. Ohssl: "V'z abg n qrzba." Nqnz: "Bu ernyyl?" Svefg Fynlre (aneengrq ol Gnen): "Lbh guvax lbh xabj jung lbh ner. Lbh unira'g rira ortha." Gur riraghny oevrs fubjqbja orgjrra Ohssl naq gur Svefg Jngpuref qbrfa'g fngvfsl. Vg vfa'g gur qenfgvp erivfvba bs Ohssl'f frafr bs fynlrearff gung jr jrer cebzvfrq. Vg'f whfg n gvr-hc-ybbfr-guernq rcvfbqr. Fvtu.

213, 275: I, too, loved Red Moon, Black Mountain. In fact, I think I still have a copy around here somewhere. I should pull it out to re-read.

Video of crocheted hyperbolic manifolds

If you like that sort of thing. (via discovermagazine.com).

Re: Howard Peirce's suggestion of short stories in comment 270.

Dover has many books of short stories out in their thrift editions, if the kid in question finds a time period or theme that (s)he likes.

Will A, 276: Best Villain: The Mayor

Oh, hell yeah.

One of the best tricks I think the writing team pulled off was making the Mayor evil beneath his wholesome exterior, and yet not a hypocrite. The thing that makes Wilkins so unsettling is that he's thoroughly sincere in his aw-shucks folksiness and family-values convictions, and utterly sincere in the way he feels about Faith. (That's one of the more cleverly resonant metaphorical puns of the series: Faith is his weapon, but his devotion to her is genuine.) It would have been so easy to make the Mayor's persona a mask, and put something in his closet other than black magic; but they don't, and he's even more terrifying for it.

Another thought about the movie 300:

I've seen suggestions that it's "really" about the US vs Iraq, or the US vs Iran, or Free Society vs Slave Empire (that last was apparently Herodotus's intent, in his Histories).

But going by what they chose to put in the movie, I kinda suspect that the real visual intent was the more visceral "Freaks vs Jocks".

The Persians (in addition to often being of far darker skin hue than seems plausible for the region), are almost uniformly either physically deformed (often looking completely demonic, as noted), or have extensive body modification in the form of piercings, usually connected by chains. There's one particularly large and bloated fellow whose long, handless arms have blades attached (he's serving as an executioner).

The Spartans, in contrast, are white Europeans with heavily muscled bodies. Besides the cloak, all they seem to wear is... a jockstrap.

This thought was brought to the fore because a large proportion of the audience I was in was made up of loud, college-age youths, possibly frat boys (Greek letters...?), cheering on the carnage.

Hm.

Another tie-in to Buffy: Buffy (early seasons) as metaphor for high-school.

Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers@272: Oh yeah, I can just see Spike knitting. He's certainly got the patience and the attention span.

But he does. No, really. He just wouldn't use...yarn.

Oh my. Those ghost story anthologies. The Monkey's Paw. The one about the ghost mother who came to get milk to sustain the living infant in the coffin.

"The Monkey's Paw" sparked the first honest-to-God literary discussion I cam remember from my school. I've never heard the story about the ghost mother. Does the baby get out? (Eeeeergh.)

If he likes horror as well as adventure -- some of the Lovecraft shorts might actually work well. "Pickman's Model" kept me from changing for the Red Line alone for at least a year!

I dug a paperback book from a box in my attic when I was about seven. I then discovered why my mother had put it in the attic. It was called something like The Scariest Stories the Editors Have Ever Read, Mostly by Lovecraft. It was like watching a gory highway accident: I couldn't stop reading . . .

Besides scabrous hybrid tentacular cyclopean squooshy things from Beyond Rational Reality, there was this story about a little girl whose imaginary friends give her all kinds of neat out-of-body experiences and then promise that she will be free of her body forever if she just says "yes." The next day, her parents find her sweetly smiling, angelically sleeping HEAD on the pillow. And there was the one about a boy who figures out how to jump between alternate realities. But he's only seven, so he gets lost. I couldn't think of that one for years without icy fingers down my spine.

#280--Yep! Perfect summary. Love that the Mayor is the only successful parent-figure Faith ever had, and that this relationship is absolutely genuine for both of them. The actor had a few minor roles in West Wing, which was a bit surreal. "Don't let him in the oval office! He's a giant snake!"

#281-- I always thought there was a jocks vs. freaks rivalry between Boromir and Faramir . . .

#282-- I've just snorted my drink up my nose, thanks to you. I really, really wish I'd been drinking wine.

On a old topic, today's Kevin & Kell with a new use. Or sort of new.

One of the best anthologies of my experience is Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Guaranteed to scare the heck out of anyone age eight and up. It includes stories by Poe, Collins, Bierce, Lovecraft, Kipling, Blackwood, and MR James. Heckuva bargain, too: $17 for 1,000 pages.

"Lie to Me" is my favorite Buffy episode ever, and I think it's also objectively the best (for whatever value of "objective" you can use when you're talking about a story). S2 is definitely the best season, especially for those of us who (like me) look closely at plot and structure.

I thought the best seasons were 1-3, and I wrote off the show after watching the utter silliness that was "Wrecked." I kept watching till the end of S7, but I regarded it as a poorly-written piece of filmed fanfiction. I couldn't take it seriously as a story anymore.

For my money, the best villain was Angelus. "Passion" was another damned good episode.

I do not have SSS (I do have Second Mitten Syndrome, though...). My problem is that I prefer toe-up and a stretchy bind-off; the tubular bind-off that I favor the most is also the one I least enjoy doing. I will slip the stitches to scrap yarn and let the socks languish. Any recommendations for stretchy bind-offs which do not involve kitchener stitch?

DaveL at #186:

Yes, unfortunately, some of the Dolittles are no longer politically correct (the character Bumpo, specifically), so they (the copyright owners) felt they had to clean them up. I can't really fault them, although I loved Bumpo and thought he was funny when I was a kid. On the other hand, there's no excuse for trashing Lofting's illustrations. You can still find old copies secondhand, though.

I loved the Bradbury juveniles...R is for Rocket, S is for Space, but usually I just read anything with horses in it -- the Black Stallion series foremost. I also got into reading mysteries pretty early, and straight fantasy (Narnia, Earthsea).

Two of my three kids fought reading -- until they discovered Captain Underpants. Then we stocked our bookshelves with things that we and their brother had loved: Narnia, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Beverly Cleary, J.K. Rowling. No dice -- they stil hated reading.

But then the middle child discovered Agatha Christie. The youngest fell in love with E.L. Konigsburg and Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain and The Other side of the Mountain.

[Cliché alert] Reading really is such a personal thing.

About movie endings, I swear I read a review online for Zodiac which was disappointed at the lack of an arrest at the end. (I loved the movie, although I thought the ending could have been handled a little bit differently. Robert Downey Jr. was terrific.)

MK @ 288

Well, you could do crochet chain bind-off (best for lace, but, hey, it doesn't involve kitchener stitch).

Actually, if you don't have Montse Stanley on your shelf, you need to raid either a knit shop or a library and look at it. Abour a zillion cast-ons and bind-offs: surely one will work.

Abi #262: I would appreciate advice on vellum made from rolling calves, old hige (you have to scroll down), or moko jumbie .

Patrick, thank you so much for the link to the Firefox extension. I can't wait to go back through the thread and read all the coded parts!

Another idea for a kid who doesn't like to read might be nonfiction. Some kids just aren't into imaginative stories, but like reading about how to do things, or history, where they know the story is true.

There are books that are collections of short story biographies about historical people - I've seen this sort of book about scientists, or medical researchers, sports figures, politcal leaders, etc.

@283:

And there was the one about a boy who figures out how to jump between alternate realities. But he's only seven, so he gets lost. I couldn't think of that one for years without icy fingers down my spine.

Which connects to the earlier-mentioned Mimsy were the Borogroves (@88, @130, @150).

The boy and girl in that story were 7 & 2, respectively (although I think at some point they might have aged a bit), and while they figured out how to step outside our reality, it seems rather clear that they don't really know exactly what they're doing. I suppose we are supposed to hope that the toys programmed in survival reflexes sufficient to wherever it is they will end up traveling to, and through.

At one point, earlier in the story, salmon are brought up, and the boy appears to be under the impression that our world - our universe - is like the river that those animals spawn in, but there's a whole "ocean" that could be reached.

My own thought about the ocean analogy, though, is that the ocean is full of predators and other deadly dangers...

As to slushing, my wife Sally reads slush for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which is a paying market (just). This magazine's policy is that all, repeat all, submissions, are read blind.

From my observations, about a third of the submissions are unreadable - that is, they make no sense at all, have no idea of what a story is, or (frequently, alas, "and") are written in a language whose relationship to English is distant, at best.

Another two-fifths are merely incompetent - the characters are automatons, the dialogue wooden, the complications childish, the action contrived, the problems facing the protagonist picayune, the resolution simple, the description, setting and plot replete with obvious holes. (This last, I believe, is more often the case with fantasy than with science-fiction, for reasons that would require an essay.)

Of the rest, most are competent stories, but boring. Either they've been done before, and always much better, or there's just no spark to them, nothing new. The characters are believable, but they aren't memorable or engaging. The plot is logical enough, but hardly involving. The setting is plausible, given the premises, but humdrum - or at least its possibilities are not explored or exploited.

Occasionally, a story will arrive that at least manages to avoid one of those shortcomings, and in addition manages to be entertaining. These, generally, get into the magazine - on present performance, about one in every hundred of the submissions. Very occasionally, one is found that sparks on several different levels, for a number of different people, and whose appeal is more than simple entertainment. So far, I've seen three or four of these out of those published by ASIM - or about one in five thousand of those submitted and around one in fifty of those actually published.

I'm sorry to be saying these things in present company. I'm absolutely certain that Teresa or Patrick could say much more, but are observing a professional discretion that becomes them.

Ursula L, that was my youngest. He wanted science books -- he especially loved anything to do with physics, and has read things above his age level. His current knowledge of astronomy (he's ten) exceeds mine.

We have yet to find an age appropriate -- or any, really -- book on monotremes, especially echidnas, which are a particular obsession of his.

PJ Evans @ 291,
Oh, I've got Montse Stanley, who recommends tubular bind-off as the best for 1x1 ribbing. I don't really mind grafting so much, but at the finer gauges, I get rather cranky. I've tried simply binding off loosely, but I don't like the way it looks.

#269 Jon, which Whisperado songs were partially inspired by BtVS?

(Also, hi!)

Owlmirror @ 295

Yes, that's precisely why I called it a horror story way upthread. The finest horror stories are the ones that don't have to tell you what's going to happen, they just have to imply what might happen, and let you obsess over it. The horror for the parents is obvious, the horror for the children is only implied, and potential rather than actual, at that. But you can't help thinking ...

#251 Dan Layman-Kennedy: "I think it fits in with the fact that the narrative cosmos of the Whedonverse pays attention and gives you what you ask for even if you didn't intend the consequences ("Don't speak Latin in front of the books, Xander"), and collects the bill with impartial and implacable exactitude. I get the impression that one of the defining characteristics of the Powers That Be is that they are relentlessly and terrifyingly just."

Hmm, that casts the ending of seven in an interesting light. Whose comeuppence is being served there? Creuncf Ohssl'f riraghny erivfvba bs gur Fynlre flfgrz vf gur pngpu gung gur Svefg Jngpuref qvqa'g nagvpvcngr. "Url, lbh nfxrq sbe n Fynlre gb svtug gur qnexarff sbe lbh. Vs lbh qvqa'g jnag ure gb unir serr jvyy, lbh fubhyqa'g unir pubfra n tvey."

Heresiarch:

Oh, absolutely. Buffy is given her task at the beginning with the expectation that she'll be perhaps a somewhat better than average Slayer, amd we all know how long they last. But, fur unf orggre fhccbeg guna cerivbhf Fynlref (n uryy bs n ybg orggre, cha vagraqrq), naq yrff vagrerfg va sbyybjvat beqref. Gur cbvag vf znqr n ahzore bs gvzrf guebhtu gur frevrf gung bayl uhznaf pna znxr zbeny qrpvfvbaf, orpnhfr gurl nybar unir pbzcyrgryl serr jvyy. Ohg gur pbairefr vf nyfb gehr: znxvat zbeny qrpvfvbaf erdhverf serr jvyy. Fb lbh unir gb tvir gur wbo gb n orvat jvgu serr jvyy naq bapr lbh'ir qbar gung, fur trgf gb qrpvqr jung'f zbeny. Naq vs fur'f yvxr Ohssl, fur qbrfa'g pner zhpu ubj ure qrpvfvbaf jvyy or npprcgrq ol gur crbcyr jub tnir ure gur tvt.

Ba gbc bs juvpu, bs pbhefr, va gur raq fur znxrf gur qrpvfvba gb or n Fynlre, vaqrcraqrag bs gur snpg gung fur jnf erpehvgrq naq genvarq jvgubhg nal erny haqrefgnaqvat bs gur pbafrdhraprf. Univat npprcgrq gung, vg orpbzrf cbffvoyr sbe ure gb znxr gur ovttrfg qrpvfvba bs nyy, gur qrpvfvba bs ubj gb svanyyl qrsrng gur Uryyzbhgu. V guvax gung vs fur unqa'g znqr gung qrpvfvba, vs fur whfg pbagvahrq ba nf n eryhpgnag qensgrr, gur bayl cbffvoyr ivpgbel sbe ure fvqr jbhyq arprffnevyl vaibyir ure bja fnpevsvpr, tvira gur onynapr bs gur sbeprf. Ohg fur znxrf gung haarprffnel ol npprcgvat vg nf n fhpprffshy bhgpbzr.

Sounds more than a little paradoxical, but it makes sense to me in the context of the story. I might even be willing to accept it as a good way to run a universe.

Since I'm here, on kids-books I may as well weigh in: Diana Wynne Jones wrote the best books that I never understood when I was actually a child (but loved, nonetheless) and I came back to them years later, and even have a tattoo based on one of the haunting images in her work: the NOW/HERE NOWHERE vases from [i]Fire & Hemlock[/i]...

She's a keeper, in ways that few other authors have been for me. Very re-readable. Unmuddles my head. I hope she lives, and writes, forever.

#270: [Bathory] is knitting An Impossible Thing, using three needles

"Whateley, this sock was fashioned to fit no human foot."

It's possible to knit not only a Moebius Scarf but also a Klein Hat... "Put this on, it's cold inside/outside".

And, yes, the Mayor.

Xander, at the end of the Initiative arc: "Does anyone else miss the Mayor? You know, 'I just wanna be a big snake'?"

ROT13 for those who don't use Firefox (you could only stop me using Opera by taking my computer access away):

put this into a bookmark, drag the bookmark to a bar where you can click it (recombine the lines first):

javascript:inText=window.getSelection()+'';if(inText=='')%7Bvoid(inText=prompt('Phrase...',''))
%7D;if(!inText)%7BoutText='No%20text%20selected'%7Delse%7BoutText='';for(i=0;i%3CinText.length;i++)
%7Bt=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t%3E64&&t%3C78)%7C%7C(t%3E96&&t%3C110))%7Bt+=13%7Delse%7Bif
((t%3E77&&t%3C91)%7C%7C(t%3E109&&t%3C123))%7Bt-=13%7D%7DoutText+=String.fromCharCode(t)%7D%7Dalert(outText)

Owlmirror @295: At one point, earlier in the story, salmon are brought up, and the boy appears to be under the impression that our world - our universe - is like the river that those animals spawn in, but there's a whole "ocean" that could be reached.

My own thought about the ocean analogy, though, is that the ocean is full of predators and other deadly dangers...

There was a PBS series about evolution which ran a couple of years ago, which suggested one of the reason that limbs evolved is that it allowed their owners to get out of the water and away from their predators.

Speaking of salmon (and predators)...

Rob @ 306... There was a PBS series about evolution which ran a couple of years ago, which suggested one of the reason that limbs evolved is that it allowed their owners to get out of the water and away from their predators.

I much prefer Gary Larson's theory: they were playing baseball in the water, but one of them knocked the ball way of it and onto the beach.

Am I hopelessly dim? I've just been plugging the ROT-13 stuff into www.rot13.com.

Serge,

That makes us descendants of outfielders. I was a lousy baseball player in school, so I was always chosen last for a team, and always stuck way out in the outfield. Perhaps its hereditary?

Bruce Cohen: Yeah. I think that it's qlvat naq pbzvat onpx gung tvirf Ohssl gur zragny qvfgnapr gb ernyvmr ubj onq gur fgnghf dhb vf. Gurer'f n ybg va frnfba svir nobhg ubj rirel Fynlre riraghnyyl trgf n ovt by' qrngu jvfu (Znlor orpnhfr orvat gur Fynlre vf n evttrq tnzr?) naq trgf urefrys xabpxrq bss. Gura gur arj, anvir Fynlre gnxrf bire, shyy bs raguhfvnfz. Ohssl vf ab rkprcgvba--ohg ure sevraqf jba'g yrg ure bss gung rnfvyl. Jura fur whzcf va frnfba svir, fur'f qbvat rknpgyl jung fur vf fhccbfrq gb: fnpevsvpr urefrys sbe gur tbbq bs gur Jngpuref--hu, V zrna, uhznaxvaq. Ohg ntnvafg ure jvyy, fur'f fhqqrayl onpx ng gur byq tevaq, naq V'z abg pbaivaprq vg'f whfg ergheavat sebz gur qrnq gung znxrf gung fb uneq. Fur jnagrq bhg, naq qrngu jnf gur jnl. Gung qvqa'g jbex, naq fb gur bayl bcgvba yrsg vf gb punatr gur flfgrz. If it had ended with five, it would have been a status-quo affirming moral. Seven's ending is far more radical.

Back to Grand Unified Theory for the Buffyverse for a moment (I clearly spend too much time thinking about this stuff. ... Ughhhh ... Must ... get ... life).

It occurs to me that the Buffyverse differs from our mundane universe in 2 fundamental ways:

1. The power of will as a force of nature as compared to the power of gravity or the strong nuclear force is much greater there. For instance, a vampire's will can keep its body, and even portions of its mind from distintegrating after death, despite all the physical forces.

2. There is yet another fundamental force in the Buffyverse, and it is at least as powerful as any of the others: the force of drama. In that universe, dramatic arcs are a fundamental geometric entity, just as parabolas are here. (Corollary: in the Buffyverse Drama Queens are ever so much more important and powerful than they are here)

Bruce @ 309... That would explain a few things, wouldn't it? I'm not sure how that fits in with San Francisco's new ballpark being literally right by the Bay.

mk, I'm going to end up trying that tubular bind-off on something this year, having done the tubular cast-on (the one with chain stitch over the needle: it does look good). Ususally I just do a loose bind-off, it being easy. I'm not sure there are any really good ways, other than something weird like a sideways border.

Serge @ 312

Clearly that's just another example of the degradation and devolution of our society. Even our popular sports are regressing to their beginnings.
Western civilization has about 10 more minutes, I'd say.

#314:Clearly that's just another example of the degradation and devolution of our society.

Today's Washington Post has an article about the dumbing down of TV quiz shows.

Heresiarch@310: That fits. We know that Fynlref ner npgviryl qvfpbhentrq--ol Jngpuref, naq, vg frrzf gur fcvevg bs gur Svefg Fynlre--sebz univat erny yvirf naq znxvat sevraqf naq rkcrevrapvat yvsr va nyy vgf pbzcyrkvgvrf. Vfbyngvba vf fb unaql sbe xrrcvat lbhe gnetrg qbja. Gur Fynlre vf fhccbfrq gb or n frperg--lrnu, evtug. Sebz jubz? Nyy gur qrzbaf xabj nobhg gur Fynlre. Gur frperpl gur Jngpuref jnag xrrcf gur Fynlre sebz univat nyyvrf.

JVgubhg Jvyybj, gur fcryy znxvat nyy Cbgragvnyf vagb shyy Fynlref pbhyq arire unir orra pnfg, naq Jvyybj jbhyq arire unir unq nal ernfba gb qb gung jvgubhg ure sevraqfuvc jvgu Ohssl. Vfbyngvat gur Fynlre xrcg rirelbar ohg n unaqshy bs Jngpuref sebz rire xabjvat gur pbfg gubfr tveyf cnvq. (Tvyrf' erfcbafr gb gur Jngpure Pbhapvy'f fgngrzrag gung "jr'er svtugvat n jne" jnf: "Jr'er jntvat n jne. Fur'f svtugvat vg.") Pbafpvbhfyl pubbfvat gb or gur Fynlre jnf gur frpbaq fgrc va orvat noyr gb znxr nyy Cbgragvnyf Fynlref; gur svefg jnf pubbfvat gb unir n yvsr bs ure bja (Ohssl gb gur Svefg Fynlre: "Gurer ner gerrf va gur qrfreg fvapr lbh zbirq bhg, naq V qba'g fyrrc ba n orq bs obarf").

Ohg Ohssl'f fgvyy abg pbzcyrgryl oernxvat gur fgnghf dhb. Nsgre nyy, fur whfg qensgrq jub xabjf ubj znal tveyf gb or Fynlref, naq V znl unir zvffrq fbzrguvat, ohg V qba'g guvax gurl jrer tvira pubvprf nobhg vg.

Age-inappropriate monotreme thing:

http://www.cafepress.com/goats_all.2901234

On Buffy: There's the "Fray consequence"... Gnxvat na ragver trarengvba bs Fynlref naq rzcbjrevat gurz ng bapr frrzf gb unir yrsg abobql gb fgrc va sbe gur ARKG trarengvba. That tends to hollow out the victory a little, in my mind... but to have Fray, you need a starting place.

On 300: Seems to me there's ammo for nearly any reading- freedom vs. slavery, Iraqis vs. Americans, neonazis vs. lesser peoples, jocks vs. freaks. Kind of a Rorschach blot. My wife Helen is not just Greek by heritage, but specifically Spartan... so we were mostly seeing it as the thing itself. And, yes, we have had to explain to people already that there really is a stone at Thermopylae that says "Go tell the Spartans..." and there really are statues of Leonidas in the town square of Sparta.

Bodywise, on 300: Portraying the Spartans as anything but "heavily muscled" would be, actually, less realistic - think "Active duty soldier" for a start. [I have issues with the Spartan dress code- but it starts with round shields and lack of armor is the SECOND thing on the list. There are contemporary stories about Spartans wearing minimal clothing normally, by the way.]

Solely from memory, and I am, in fact, somewhat inebriated.

"Stranger who passes: go tell the Greeks.
Here we lie, in obedience to their laws."

Their laws, dammit, their laws, not to the whim of some King, some autarch. Their laws.

And by the way, made such a story as will live when the west is no more than legend.

I think of old Leonidas
The howling mob, the Asian mass,
And Spartan spears that barred the pass
Still called Thermopylae.

At the bottom of the pass is that stele to the Three Hundred. Not far away is the memorial to 2nd New Zealand, who also held the Pass against the barbarians. They're in good company, all of them.

Ohg Ohssl'f fgvyy abg pbzcyrgryl oernxvat gur fgnghf dhb. Nsgre nyy, fur whfg qensgrq jub xabjf ubj znal tveyf gb or Fynlref, naq V znl unir zvffrq fbzrguvat, ohg V qba'g guvax gurl jrer tvira pubvprf nobhg vg.

V guvax vg'f n ybg rnfvre gb or n Fynlre guna gur Fynlre. Sbe bar guvat, vs lbh ernyyl unir n ovt ceboyrz gb qrny jvgu, lbh pna trg gbtrgure n jubyr ohapu bs crbcyr gb tb junpx vg--abj gung gur pbaprcg bs "grnzf" unf orra cebira gb jbex--naq lbh xabj gung gur bgure crbcyr ba lbhe grnz unir lbhe ersyrkrf naq fgeratgu naq novyvgl gb urny; lbh qba'g unir gb chg lbhefrys va unez'f jnl gb xrrc gurz svtugvat, ng yrnfg abg nf zhpu.

Bar nyfb vzntvarf gung vg'yy znxr gur inzcverf naq nffbegrq bgure anfgvrf n yvggyr zber pnershy vs gurl xabj gung gurfr qnlf xrrcvat genpx bs bar tvey vfa'g tbvat gb phg vg. Jura nal enaqbz srznyr ba gur fgerrg zvtug or noyr gb qhfg lbhe inzcvevp nff, lbh fgneg ybbxvat sbe nygreangvirf snveyl snfg, V'q fnl.

Sandy B. at 317 - What's you're describing as the "Fray consquence" is one of the minor issues I have with Fray. I'll be interested to see if it turns out Fray is canon or not with the way Buffy's timeline develops; I'm sort of crossing my fingers that it turns out to be some sort of alternate timeline, or that the backstory is unreliable, only because I dislike "gur zntvp tbrf njnl" as a resolution to fantasy storylines. (Of course, I suppose that the point of Fray is that it doesn't, really; but still.)

the way I heard it [many translations exist]:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

I have to say, any time I hear one side of a long-ago war being characterized by the supporters of another as a "howling Asian mob," I start looking around for the propaganda staff responsible for dreaming this stuff up.

Given the choice between living in Sparta and living in Achaemanid Persia, I'd choose Persia and so would you. Sparta was a podunk city ruled by a kinky cult of hypermasculinity, who showed no particular loyalty in the crunch to their fellow Hellenes. Persia was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic superstate notable for its religious tolerance.

(It's particularly ironic to see Jewish neoconservative intellectuals blithering about the wonderfulness of 300. Haven't they read the Book of Ezra? Exactly which Spartan leaders are praised as righteous rulers therein? Idiots.)

My wife tells ne that Steven Pressfield's novel Gate of Fire is a much better treatment to the whole Battle of Thermopylae.

Say, Patrick, has anyone ever written a novel of what would have happened if the Persians had won?

Serge 324: Um...they did win. When are you talking about? They changed ownership when Alexander conquered them, but not policy...it was the internal squabbling after his death that tore the empire apart.

I'm really going to have to finish that post about Persia/Iran.

Xopher... I don't know what I'm talking about. This isn't the first time I've embarassed myself, and probably not the last. Sigh.

#324: "Say, Patrick, has anyone ever written a novel of what would have happened if the Persians had won?"

Beats me. Interesting idea, though.

I don't actually know much about ancient Persian culture. Several years ago, though, Teresa and I stumbled on an exhibition of ancient Persian ceramics at the Brooklyn Museum--vessels in the shapes of everyday things, like cows and boots. What startled us about it was the sheer whimsicality of many of the pieces. This wasn't a culture of inscrutable howling-mob alienness. This was a culture of people who found fun and humor in life.

I tell you, living in China during the Cultural Revolution would have been preferable to living in Sparta.

It was the most regimented society ever. Not a democracy. You know that phrase "spartan existence"? There's a reason for it. The laws specified everything you could own, everything you could eat (and when). What work you did, when you did it, and how. It was illegal to own a cloak!! Even in the winter. Every boy and man was a member of the military from weaning.

They were tough, no doubt about it. That was because if they weren't, they died. I would so rather have lived in Persia. They had literature, music, art, architecture and cuisine. Relative freedom (given the absolute monarchy).

#316 Aconite: "V znl unir zvffrq fbzrguvat, ohg V qba'g guvax gurl jrer tvira pubvprf nobhg vg."

Weren't they? V inthryl erzrzore n ovt tebhc zrrgvat evtug orsber gurl fgbez gur Uryyzbhgu jurer gurl nyy fvta ba. Also, what Carrie S. said.

#276 Will A: "Biggest Disappointment: The show made a promise at the end of Season 4. Ohssl: "V'z abg n qrzba." Nqnz: "Bu ernyyl?" Svefg Fynlre (aneengrq ol Gnen): "Lbh guvax lbh xabj jung lbh ner. Lbh unira'g rira ortha." Gur riraghny oevrs fubjqbja orgjrra Ohssl naq gur Svefg Jngpuref qbrfa'g fngvfsl. Vg vfa'g gur qenfgvp erivfvba bs Ohssl'f frafr bs fynlrearff gung jr jrer cebzvfrq. Vg'f whfg n gvr-hc-ybbfr-guernq rcvfbqr. Fvtu."

Though wouldn't this be a fun thread to pursue in season eight? Nsgre nyy, abj gurer ner n ohapu bs gurz. Ubj znal jvyy ghea bhg rivy? Jung vs Ohssl whfg jrag nf nppvqragnyyl perngrq n arj oerrq bs qrzba? It would be holding with the whiplash Whedonverse ethos.

I took Serge's "won" in #324 to mean "prevailed in world history the way the Graeco-Roman cultures did." Arguably you can say that Persia never really completely "lost" (indeed, it's right there), but it would be interesting to contemplate a world in which that empire, rather than Rome, is the thing to which dozens of modern cultures look back.

#297: Monotremes are cool.

Thanks, Patrick. I am very surprised that not even Turtledove has written an alternate History where Persia prevailed in Europe.

#322 PNH: "I have to say, any time I hear one side of a long-ago war being characterized by the supporters of another as a "howling Asian mob," I start looking around for the propaganda staff responsible for dreaming this stuff up."

I'm right with you there.

#328: "This wasn't a culture of inscrutable howling-mob alienness. This was a culture of people who found fun and humor in life."

I know! Almost as if they were human! Shocking!

One of the things I really liked about the movie Kingdom of Heaven, despite its thoroughly anachronistic protagonist, was how utterly human its portrayal of Saladin was.

Heresiarch 330: V inthryl erzrzore n ovt tebhc zrrgvat evtug orsber gurl fgbez gur Uryyzbhgu jurer gurl nyy fvta ba.

No, because gung jnf bayl bar grnz bs fynlref. Gurer jrer gubhfnaqf hcba gubhfnaqf guebhtubhg gur jbeyq. Erzrzore gur tvey uvggvat gur onfronyy vagb beovg? Gubfr ner gur barf jub qvqa'g trg n pubvpr. Ohg V org gurl jrera'g haunccl!

Persia was an eastern god-kingdom, ruled by a despot whose word was life and death to his subjects. Sparta's laws were horrid, but they were made by its people, capable of improvement and in fact improved. Sparta is long-gone, but its successor, after many travails, is a democracy. Persia is still a god-kingdom. Maybe I would have lived there, given the choice. That's testimony to my own indolence, cowardice, and lack of moral fibre. I would have been wrong. And so, Patrick, are you.

#330:V inthryl erzrzore n ovt tebhc zrrgvat evtug orsber gurl fgbez gur Uryyzbhgu jurer gurl nyy fvta ba.

I think Aconite is refering to gur zbagntr jurer jr frr tveyf nyy bire gur jbeyq trggvat gurve fynlre cbjref. Gunaxf gb Jvyybj'f fcryy, nalbar jub pna or n Fynlre unf orpbzr n Fynlre, abg whfg gur Fynlref-va-genvavat jub unccrarq gb or ng gur Uryyzbhgu.

Persia is still a god-kingdom.

With a government which is at least nominally democratically elected.

Their cuisine is very much worth meeting, their poetry is still being read in many translations, and their decorative arts are part of our cultural vocabulary.

Heresiarch@330: Weren't they? V inthryl erzrzore n ovt tebhc zrrgvat evtug orsber gurl fgbez gur Uryyzbhgu jurer gurl nyy fvta ba. Also, what Carrie S. said.

Bayl gur Cbgragvnyf ng gur zrrgvat tbg n ibgr, naq gura znwbevgl ehyrq; gurer jnf ab jnl gb bcg bhg vaqvivqvnyyl. Ohssl znqr gur pubvpr sbe rirel Cbgragvny va gur jbeyq. Gurl qvqa'g trg gb pubbfr; gurl jrer qensgrq, whfg gur jnl fur jnf, whfg gur jnl rirel bgure Fynlre unq orra.

V'z ubcvat gurer'f fbzrguvat nobhg Fynlre zntvp gung jba'g npprcg n gehyl hajvyyvat Cbgragvny nf n Fynlre; znlor orvat n Cbgragvny zrnaf fbzr cneg bs lbh unf gb nterr gb or jvyyvat gb or gur Fynlre vs Pnyyrq. Ohg V qbhog vg; gur zra jub perngrq Fynlref boivbhfyl qvqa'g pner nobhg gung xvaq bs guvat.

Hmm. As someone who's been pretty wound about seeing 300 (I plan on going this week) but aware that anything with Frank Miller's name on it is going to be, to greater or lesser degree, a load of macho bollocks, this discussion has had me thinking about to what degree and in what direction I'm willing to suspend my personal political convictions to enjoy entertainment-as-entertainment, and whether or not that says something about me that I ought to be uncomfortable about. (I mean, for context, I love both Sin City and Braveheart, despite knowing several good arguments why I perhaps shouldn't.)

I haven't really made up my mind one way or the other, but it's given me something to ponder.

Serge #324: There's Harry Turtledove's story 'Counting Potsherds'.

Serge (#333), Harry Turtledove did write a short story about a world where the Persian empire triumphed and set the cultural standard. It's in _Departures_, and I think it's called "Potshards" or something very like it.

I was confused by some of the references to "300" in the last few dozen comments. I thought people were referring to comment #300. (Page up...no, that makes no sense. Page back down. Maybe they meant some number close to 300 and typed it wrong?) I finally figured it out.

Dave:

So had Greek civilization lost the war with Asia during the '50s when Greece was ruled by a military junta? Or during the Middle Ages when it was ruled by feudalism? How about Iran - IIRC that was a democratic constitutional monarchy just prior to the (secular dictator) "Shah"s coup-d'etat? Does that make them the natural successors of Greece?

I am all for democracy, but it makes no sense to portray it as running in some geographical and temporal straight line from the Spartans. (In fact I recall Sparta had hereditary kings, unlike Athens.) Our heritage owes far more to the Athenians than the Spartans.

Dave, Iran isn't still "a god-kingdom", it's one again. They went through a brief period of democratic reform before somebody overthrew their government and reinstalled a puppet monarchy for the sake of controlling their oil. That somebody, of course, was us.

Thanks, Fragano and Adrian. I'll look for it.

Aconite @ 316:
Agreed, up to a point, but I suspect it's a little more complicated than that. Gur arj Fynlref qba'g trg n pubvpr nobhg gnxrvat ba gur cbjre gb or Fynlref, ohg V guvax gurl trg n pubvpr bs jurgure gurl unir gb qb gur wbo. Bs pbhefr, gur Ohsslirefr orvat jung vg vf, V fhfcrpg gurl'yy unir zhpu orggre (vs creuncf fubegre) yvirf vs gurl qb gnxr hc gur jbex.

The thing, Dave, is how do we know that Persian's conquest of Europe would have wound up like the Persia we are familiar with, only bigger?

Re Persia:

I vaguely recall that Poul Anderson wrote one of the Time Patrol stories based on the idea that Cyrus the Great was a Patrol agent who got stuck in the past and (in one branch) managed to keep Persian civilization dominant in Asia Minor for several extra centuries.

While I don't know much about Persian history, I have met a number of Persians, and to a person they have been open-minded, humorous, intelligent people. Makes me sad I didn't get to go on that trip to Teheran back in '76. It was planned up until 2 days before we left, then the company CEO changed his mind and went alone. Big mistake, too, his demo blew up on him.

Dan @ #340 -

I saw the 300 this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it - this despite agreeing with everything PNH has said on this thread.

It helps that ancient greek history is not one of my strong suits; not that I don't know how anachronistic/wacky the stuff in the movie is, but that I am able to "read" the entire film as complete fantasy.

Conversely,"Elizabeth" made me pig-biting mad, and upcoming "Golden Age" promises to once again squander wonderful cast and costume by ruining the story - at least that's my experience, being an aficionado of late Tudor England.

If you are able to view the film as completely make-believe with no connection to the real world, and don't mind feeling like you're spending two hours in the middle of a Boris Vallejo painting you will probably enjoy it.

Gur arj Fynlref qba'g trg n pubvpr nobhg gnxrvat ba gur cbjre gb or Fynlref, ohg V guvax gurl trg n pubvpr bs jurgure gurl unir gb qb gur wbo.

Bu, zbfg qrsvavgryl--jura lbh'er Bar Tvey Va Nyy Gur Jbeyq, lbh qb gur wbo be vg'f Senapvf Sbeq Pbccbyn gvzr. Jura lbh'er bar bs frireny gubhfnaq (be zber) fynlref, lbh pna va tbbq pbafpvrapr fvg onpx naq fnl, "V'z tbvat gb hfr zl rkprcgvbany fcrrq, fgeratgu naq urnyvat gb wbva gur Znevarf". Be ragre gur Bylzcvpf, be orpbzr n yhzorewnpx...be whfg unir n erthyne yvsr va juvpu lbh qba'g unir gb nfx lbhe oblsevraq gb bcra cvpxyr wnef.

nerdycellist... Would that be the "Elizabeth" movie with Doctor Who's ristopher Eccleston as Norfolk, and 007's Daniel Craig as a assassin monk?

nerdycellist, 349: ...not that I don't know how anachronistic/wacky the stuff in the movie is, but that I am able to "read" the entire film as complete fantasy.

Yeah, that's pretty much my outlook - I just assume that this takes place in some alternate Earth where "Persia" is some sort of Evil Fantasy Empire. The spending a couple of hours inside a Boris painting is more or less what's interesting to me about it in the first place.

(This has been my approach to "historical" film for a while now, actually; I assume there's more poetry than history in any of it unless given a very good reason to believe otherwise. Which is probably why I enjoyed Elizabeth too, despite knowing what a complete flight of fancy it was.)

CarrieS@350: Bu, zbfg qrsvavgryl--jura lbh'er Bar Tvey Va Nyy Gur Jbeyq, lbh qb gur wbo be vg'f Senapvf Sbeq Pbccbyn gvzr. Jura lbh'er bar bs frireny gubhfnaq (be zber) fynlref, lbh pna va tbbq pbafpvrapr fvg onpx naq fnl, "V'z tbvat gb hfr zl rkprcgvbany fcrrq, fgeratgu naq urnyvat gb wbva gur Znevarf". Be ragre gur Bylzcvpf, be orpbzr n yhzorewnpx...be whfg unir n erthyne yvsr va juvpu lbh qba'g unir gb nfx lbhe oblsevraq gb bcra cvpxyr wnef.

I'd like to think so. Rkprcg gung, tvira jung Fynlre oybbq qbrf sbe qrzbaf, qb lbh guvax na hagenvarq, hanssvyvngrq Fynlre vf tbvat gb unir zhpu punapr gb tebj hc? Fb qbrf fur ernyyl unir n pubvpr, bapr fur'f n Fynlre? Joss' worlds are never that simple.

Y'know, there's something in me that's just terribly tickled that we're quoting one another in cypher.

One thing that really annoyed me about "300" (besides the racism and the homophobia and... pretty much everything about it) is that its idea of larger-than-life means that you must shout every line of dialog. The movie could have taken a few cues from Lord of the Rings. (Speaking of which, wasn't the narrator of "300" the same actor who played Faramir?)

Serge @ 347
The thing, Dave, is how do we know that Persian's conquest of Europe would have wound up like the Persia we are familiar with, only bigger?

Right. How could we have predicted the rise of democracy in Western Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries looking at European feudal civilization of the 12th century? Or worse still, the Roman Empire of the 3rd?

And then the EFF goes and does something I support. The EFF's interest, money, and credibility got them into the Digital Video Broadcasting Project meetings where the new Content Protection and Copy Management for digital video was designed. I've just read the EFF's Who Controls Your Television? on the proposal and I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in such things, which I suppose is anyone who has a VCR or DVD recorder and would like to keep on using them.

#328: "What startled us about it was the sheer whimsicality of many of the pieces."

There's a piece in the "Pre Columbian" section of SF's De Young art museum that could fit that description. Incan, as I recall, but I'll need to double-check next time I'm in town.

It's a clay model of a ceremonial hat. Draped on the top is a little dog figurine. It looks like a clay model of a toy dog, with floppy limbs toy and the most amazing goofy expression. It's a caricature, and a really silly one.

* * *

I heard an interview with Miller on NPR a month or so back. He sounded like he had, to steal a line from Bruce Sterling, a great big cranky burr under his saddle.

I'll stick with Larry Gonick for comic book renderings of the Persian invasion.

My word, this thread has turned into the proverbial internet firehouse (and my RSS reader, FeedDemon, can't cope with the thread RSS feed. Woe, woe.)

By the way, Patrick, thank you for sidelighting New Mecca.

Well, the thing to really keep in mind with Joss Whedon's writing is that ardhr cbeeb dhvfdhnz rfg, dhv qbyberz vcfhz dhvn qbybe fvg nzrg, pbafrpgrghe, nqvcvfpv iryvg, frq dhvn aba ahzdhnz rvhf zbqv grzcben vapvqhag hg ynober rg qbyber zntanz nyvdhnz dhnreng ibyhcgngrz.

Well, you may want to inhabit a Boris painting for 2 hours, based on my reaction to Sin City, I doubt I'd last 10 minutes. It's funny, I've never been especially fond of his paintings, or of Frazetta's for that matter, but I didn't understand why until I saw a TV special on Frazetta last week. and got to look at a few dozen paintings in the space of a few minutes. It doesn't matter to me that Frazetta, at least, is a truly great craftsman, though that usually does matter to me, but I just don't like artists whose only theme is grim violence, with no sense of humor.

Give me Kelly Freas or Boris Artzybasheff for an illustrator. Unfortunately, they're both dead. Well, there's always Leo and Diane Dillon.

Bruce @ 360... Living in a painting would be as exciting as watching paint dry. Oh, wait...

Rkprcg gung, tvira jung Fynlre oybbq qbrf sbe qrzbaf, qb lbh guvax na hagenvarq, hanssvyvngrq Fynlre vf tbvat gb unir zhpu punapr gb tebj hc? Fb qbrf fur ernyyl unir n pubvpr, bapr fur'f n Fynlre?

Jryy, lrf. Tvira gung n fynlre qlvat haqre zlfgrevbhf pvephzfgnaprf vf tbvat gb oevat qbja gur jengu bs nyy gur bgure barf. Vapyhqvat gur Fynlre, nf ybat nf Ohssl'f nebhaq.

Demons may be bloodthirsty, but they aren't stupid (usually).

Jon Sobel @ 269:

The line Aimee Mann spoke was in the BtVS s7 episode "Sleeper," one of my favorite episodes partly because it aired when I had just fallen head over heels for the entire Whedonverse at once. I started with Firefly, which makes me an unusual Buffy fan. Within about two weeks of watching "The Train Job" and then "Deep Down" and then two episodes of BtVS a day on FX and a Hallowe'en marathon which included "Smashed," I could recite whole chunks of script from memory, had dozens of BtVS and AtS sites bookmarked, and was well on my way to being the nutcase I am today, sometime fic writer and primary contributer to the fanfic threads on the Reading Recommendations area at the Soulful Spike Society.

This post is by way of a coming out: my LJ is now linked, as it has not been previously because I really am not seeking attention for my fic or the pictures of my garden. Indeed, I've become lazy about posting because the social pressure to answer comments got oppressive after I hosted Nan Dibble's LJ wake on my journal, a year and a week ago.

Sorry for being incompletely informative before. Buffy got me out of a very long period of lurking online (after first participating in online fandom as part of The Borg Intergalactic Conspiracy, in about 1991-92) but I'm still, in 3-D, the person who stays on the farm and avoids social contact most of the time.

And also the person with at least one cow in labor right now, and a pressing need to rescue my elderly "Happy" rose from the clutches of a vampire Claridge Druse geranium.

#355:How could we have predicted the rise of democracy in Western Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries looking at European feudal civilization of the 12th century? Or worse still, the Roman Empire of the 3rd?

This reminds me of a question that I've had for a while now.

It's always seemed to me that English history has been relatively straightforward and stable. IIRC, England didn't have as many bloody revolution as did the rest of Europe. The country made more or less monotonic progress towards restricting the power of the king and increasing the power of parliament. OTOH, I've always had problems keeping French history straight. For a while, it seemed like France changed forms of government every few decades. IIRC, at one point, given a free choice, the French people effectively chose monarchy. Compared to England, France seems to have zig-zagged itself to democracy.

(I haven't forgotten about Oliver Cromwell. But didn't the Restoration happen by the consent of Parliament? So despite there still being a king on the throne, after the dust settled, the English Civil Wars did decide the question of the divine right of kings, right?)

Is this a fair assessment of English history compared to French history? If not, what am I missing? (European history is not my strong suit. I apologize for any errors I've made.) If so, why were the courses of their progress to democracy so different? (My best guess is that progress in England was slower and more incremental than progress in France. I guess that doesn't actually answer the question though.)

Anyways, this is a question that I've had for a while and I've never found a venue to ask it. (Also, it turns out to be pertinent to a story I'm writing.)

I second the graphic novel recommendation for people who need tempting into reading (and I'm reminded of some stories my father told me about tutoring students who scored in the fourth percentile. They had no exposure in their family lives to anyone who read for pleasure...)

I recommend the Dark Horse Tales of the Jedi series - good clean Star Wars fun, with more thought, care, and continuity than Lucas can muster. Not, ahem, that that is saying much.

One author I didn't see referenced was Beam Piper - I think a lot of geekish kids would enjoy Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and/or Little Fuzzy.

And because I can't pass up a good ROT13'd Buffy discussion... V'ir jbaqrerq jurgure gur pbfzvp onggrel gung cbjref gur Fynlre pna pbcr jvgu gur vapernfrq qenva. Of course, my perspective is that the role of Slayer is a Shadow of Deirdre, just so we're clear.

One last scattered comment - I think one aspect of grimoires is that they challenge our notion that the content of books is the important thing, not the structure and the form.

::bows to Avram:: I am but an egg.

CarieS@362: Dang, this is fun. I haven't had anybody to talk to like this forever.

Nffhzr gung'f gehr. Nffhzr arj Fynlref pna or rnfvyl vqragvsvrq naq jngpurq bire ol gur bguref. Nffhzr gurer ner rabhtu Fynlref va gur jbeyq gb qb gung.

Rira vs gung'f fb, rira vs gur qrzbaf jvfr hc naq yrnir gurz nybar, jung znxrf nalbar guvax gur Vavgvngvir be fbzrguvat nanybtbhf gb gur byq Jngpuref be Jbysenz naq Uneg be gurve rdhvinyragf jvyy? Gurer znl or n ybg zber Fynlref guna gurer hfrq gb or, ohg gurer ner fgvyy zber qrzbaf, zber fbyqvref, zber bs gur guvatf gurl svtug naq gur guvatf gung jbhyq yvxr gb rng be hfr gurz.

Ohssl'f erfcbafr gb nalbar jub fnlf, "V qba'g jnag gb qb guvf" unf nyjnlf orra, "Fb jung? V qvqa'g jnag gb qb guvf, rvgure. Fhpx vg hc." Fur qvqa'g tvir gubfr tveyf n pubvpr. Fur qvqa'g punatr ubj Fynlref pbzr gb or; fur whfg znqr zber bs gurz ng bar gvzr. Abj, znlor gung'f nyy gur zntvp pbhyq qb. Ohg n ernyyl enqvpny bireguebj bs gur fgnghf dhb jbhyq unir orra abg whfg gb znxr zber Fynlref, ohg gb znxr "Fynlre" n ibyhagrre cbfvgvba.

With all of you Buffy-enthusiasts here, I ought to ask you about this while I'm thinking about it. Does the show use a lot of visually-challenging tricks? I get sick if I try to focus on moving pictures, which means I shouldn't watch action movies. And flashing lights give me migraines. So my enjoyment of movies/tv/video is pretty well limited to watching scenes where good actors stay in one place and talk to each other. Or maybe sing. I can skip a few battle scenes, but I can't watch a show at all if it's mostly battle scenes. Or if the director thought all the stand-and-talk scenes needed to be filmed with the lights or camera mounted on a skittish horse.

I've seen a few bits and pieces of Buffy, and not been able to tell if the visual problems were intrinsic to the show, or if I was seeing it on an unwatchable tv. (Some tv sets just flicker too badly for me to watch them at all.) An awful lot of my friends speak well of the show, and I saw a very short excerpt recently that really caught my interest. Even though there wasn't any action, there was something weird and nauseating about the lighting and camerawork. I don't have the words to describe it. I don't know if it was an effect of the show itself, or of the YouTube excerpt.

Dave @ 318
Their laws, dammit, their laws, not to the whim of some King, some autarch. Their laws.

Upon sober consideration it may be clearer that you have placed too much weight upon a single poetic translation. The actual Greek form, "rhemasi", does not specifically refer to laws; it can mean anything spoken or uttered, sequences of words, phrases, and so forth. I have seen translations of Simonides that use "commands" or "orders"; probably "laws" is the most common translation because as a monosyllable it helps with the meter.

JESR... I was wondering where you were. I had figured that what you've described as an obsession about roses had gotten the better of you, what with Spring being almost back.

#366:Fur qvqa'g punatr ubj Fynlref pbzr gb or; fur whfg znqr zber bs gurz ng bar gvzr. Abj, znlor gung'f nyy gur zntvp pbhyq qb.

Jryy, V thrff jr qba'g xabj gur rknpg angher bs Jvyybj'f fcryy. Jr bayl unir Ohssl'f jbeq gung nal tvey jub pna or n Fynlre unf orpbzr n Fynlre. Znlor Jvyybj'f fcryy dhrevrf rnpu cbgragvny Fynlre naq bayl gheaf ba Fynlreubbq sbe gubfr jub jnag vg? V unir ab vqrn ubj lbh'q rire or noyr gb gryy jvgubhg fpbhevat gur Rnegu gb svaq n tvey jvgu gur cbgragvny jub qvq abg orpbzr n Fynlre.

Gur guvat V jbaqre nobhg vf fbzrguvat envfrq va gur ynfg frnfba ohg arire erfbyirq. Gurl rfgnoyvfu gung gur ernfba gur Svefg vf noyr gb nggnpx vf orpnhfr Ohssl vf fgvyy nyvir. v.r., fur fperjrq hc gur fhpprffvba sebz bar Fynlre gb nabgure. Fb jung ner gur enzvsvpngvbaf bs npgvingvat nyy cbgragvny Fynlref fvzhygnarbhfyl?

How odd. That familiar piece of dialog just made me cry.

I should clarify. The tears had nothing to do with Buffy.

Jesus wept.

Re the comments on Dr. Dolittle @186 and 289:

The first two Dr. Dolittles are out of copyright in the US, and the texts (but not yet the pictures) are posted on Project Gutenberg. Their _Story of Dr. Dolittle_ is expurgated but only slightly-- they're using the 1960s text that silently changed some of the less polite ethnic terms, not the 1980s revisions that omitted or rewrote chunks of the stories.

As far as I'm aware, their _Voyages of Dr. Dolittle_ matches the original. Since ALA for a long time didn't allow their Newbery medal to be displayed on expurgated books, that book didn't get the same little edits that some of the other books did.

Folks who are in Australia and countries that still have life+50 years copyrights (Canada and NZ being two English-speaking countries in this class) can download later Dr. Dolittle books from the Gutenberg Australia site. I don't know offhand what text versions they're using.

Jennie #283: yes, the baby gets out. After two or three repetitions of this non-speaking woman who takes a bottle of milk from the store without paying, they follow her out, and they wind up in the graveyard, where there's a grave with empty milk bottles on it, and they HEAR CRYING, and they dig and find the weak but living baby in there with its mother's body.

I may be remembering some of the details wrong, but the gist has stuck with me since I was seven.

Your stories sound even CREEPIER. I was thinking (besides Pickman's Model) of the Lovecraft one with the guy who gets shut in the mausoleum overnight and the skeleton grabs his ankles. Shriek!

Serge, it's spring here, and in my case that means even the roses take a back seat to the cattle. We spent the next-to-the last day of February dealing with a rolling bovine obstetrical disaster (one of those where I'm glad, at the end, that we managed to save the cow) and since then my life has been a festival of mud, blood, and occassional frenzied outbursts of pruning (and less frequently, cleaning house) and dentistry.

And of course the random amusements natural to living on a place that's been under the plow since the 1840s, like falling flat on my face after tripping over the latest piece of random ironmongery that's eroded out of the pasture. This time it was merely a modern hay rake spring tooth- the last time it was a 19th century plow shoe, buried vertically. Much less shovel work.

JESR @ 375... a festival of mud, blood, and occassional frenzied outbursts of pruning

That almost sounds like a capsule review of the movie 300...

Serge #376:

Not having seen it, where does the pruning come in?

stefan,

I'll stick with Larry Gonick for comic book renderings of the Persian invasion.

hear, hear. i've never read any frank miller, that i know of. from all the things i hear (here, & since i started lurking around the comics internet), i don't feel any need to.

No, joann, not the kind of pruning you'd expect from a bunch of guys clad only in leather hot pants. But there are few decapitations.

"Don't know much about history..."

Seems to me I remember that Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon, whose ruler Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the temple and enslaved the Jewish people ("by the waters of Babylon/where we sat down/and then we wept/ when we remembered Zion...". Cyrus freed the Jews, sent them home, and allowed them to rebuild the temple and to worship as they chose. I believe Herodotus is fairly complimentary about him, and the Old Testament is positively lyrical.

Dave at 336: Sparta's laws were horrid, but they were made by its people.

No. They were made by its free men. The helots (slaves) had no vote and few other rights. They outnumbered the freemen by about 7 to 1. Spartan women had no rights at all. That is not a democracy as I understand it.

Was Persia like Rome, in that it didn't care what you worshipped as long as you paid your taxes and as long as you recognized the king/emperor/whatever as the Final Authority on this Earth?

Too much going on here! Small de-lurk to add a recommendation to (I'm sure someone already recommended, though I didn't see it) Tamora Pierce, a great read for both boys and girls (girl-coming-of-age, almost always, in a boy's adventure kind of setting -- helps balance things out).

And it was wonderful to meet Texanne at Potlatch! Good conversations in person, as well as online. ML was well represented there.

Dave Luckett, #336: "Persia was an eastern god-kingdom, ruled by a despot whose word was life and death to his subjects. Sparta's laws were horrid, but they were made by its people, capable of improvement and in fact improved. Sparta is long-gone, but its successor, after many travails, is a democracy. Persia is still a god-kingdom. Maybe I would have lived there, given the choice. That's testimony to my own indolence, cowardice, and lack of moral fibre. I would have been wrong. And so, Patrick, are you."

To quote a British SF professional who will remain unnamed, there are almost as many errors in this passage as there are words. Where to begin?

Sparta's laws were "made by its people"? Spartan "citizenship" was restricted to those who had been trained in the rites and exercises of the ruling military cult--and the only people eligible for this training were male descendants of the founding families. No one else--civilians, serfs, slaves, and of course women--had any say whatsoever. By contrast, Athens at least sorta-kinda abolished slavery, and gave voting rights to the thetes, the landless poor. Glorifying Sparta as a wellspring of democracy is like claiming that Maoist China was a democracy because some groups of Red Guards occasionally decided things by voting among themselves.

Persia was certainly an empire, and (unexceptionally, in the fifth century BC) its ruler's word was law. Achaemenid Persia--the folks portrayed as slavering kohl-eyed punk-rock crypto-Orcs in 300--was, however, a place that produced rulers with crazy ideas like letting the conquered people have whatever religion they wanted so long as the taxes got paid. You can call the place a "god-kingdom" or whatever other term out of Conan the Barbarian you prefer, but you know something? If modern Saudi Arabia or Egypt were run by "despots" as practical and tolerant as Cyrus the Great, life in the Middle East would be healthier all around.

Most to the point, however, adducing special democratic virtue to Sparta because modern Greece is more or less democratic, and claiming that Iran's modern condition was foredoomed by the political arrangements of Persia 2500 years ago, isn't just wrong, it's fantastically wrong. It's "I invest in the stock market based on what unicorns tell me while I shave every morning" wrong. Avram has already pointed out (#344) that if modern Iran is a "god-kingdom," it's because, in 1953, Britain and America conspired to overthrow their fledgling democracy and reinstall their god-king. But more to the point, are we really to believe that the rocks and stones and watercourses of a patch of land utterly determine its political fate over millennia? If so, my goodness, I can think of a lot of patches of land whose inhabitants had better give up on these modern ways of organizing themselves, and go back to good old rule by big guys on horseback. I think not.

Finally, as for the idea that preferring ancient Persia over the totalitarian cult that was Sparta is "testimony to...indolence, cowardice, and lack of moral fibre" ... well, perhaps the less said the better. I would prefer to think that Dave Luckett is just a nice guy who really, really doesn't know much about the ancient world.

It is however important that we recognize Sparta for a few of its contributions to modern civilization:

• Infanticide;
• Slavekeeping;
• Regular massacres of unarmed and helpless civilians;
• and sodomy.

Damn, crossposted with Patrick. The two summaries go nicely together though.

I never thought that Dave Luckett at #336 was trying to convince any of the rest of us; I just figured he was trying to persuade himself.

Conservatism is a hothouse flower. It requires constant attention and artificial conditions in order to flourish.

I teach my students that the Spartans tend to get a bad press because all of the written sources come out of Athens, with most of them written during the Peloponnesian War. I'm not sure the helots were strictly slaves - and although this is hair-splitting, a little, in that they were certainly unfree, and more like serfs, it's worth remembering that the Athenians did have honest-to-goodness slaves; infanticide - at least, infant exposure - was common throughout the ancient world; and many of the stories about cruelty and unprovoked attacks on individuals and peoples seem likely to be just that - stories. It is hard to tell, though. Sparta tends to act most effectively as a way of bringing out people's own prejudices.

Airing my own prejudices, I suppose, I would mostly endorse Patrick's account (for what little my endorsement is worth). Whatever Sparta was, it wasn't democratic. It wasn't even democratic by the standards of Athens (limited, as Lizzy rightly says about Sparta too, to the minority of men who were citizens), what with the dual hereditary monarchy already mentioned and the apparent system of voting (when that was required) by acclamation. And according to the Spartans themselves, apparently, those laws they were obeying at Thermopylae were created at the whim of a king (Lykourgos) and handed down unchanged for centuries. This is not popular sovereignty. It is, I suppose, kind of impressive in a way. No doubt it makes for a good movie.

I find the Spartan system fascinating. I don't find it enviable, and it was anything but fair. And some vague idea of fairness is very important to me.

Season Seven has perhaps my favorite Buffy episode, "Story Teller". Andrew's narration and perspective on the Scoobies is comedy gold. But then the way Buffy confronts his storytelling and the specific wording of his confession is one of the best portrayals of true repentance that I've ever seen in fiction.

The thing that drove me batty about the series is that right up front they establish that a vampire that looks like your friend is not your friend. Your friend is completely dead and the vampire is a demon who has taken his place. (So don't hesitate with the stake.)

But then what's with all the guilt Angel has about what Angelus did? And what's with everyone acting like he ought to feel guilty? Angel didn't kill people, a demon who looked like him did. Same goes for Spike later on.

Now it makes sense that Angel, Giles, etc. would feel blame/guilt unjustly, but I never got the sense that anyone recognized this as unjust. Giles never getting over it, sure. But never once admitting, "of course it wasn't *really* Angel's fault"?

I realise I missed the sentence in Patrick's post talking about Athenian slavery, so obviously that had been pointed out before. As I recall, debt-bondage (ie. of Athenian citizens) was abolished by Solon. Aristotle, though, was still assuming the existence of "natural" slaves in the middle of the fourth century BC, and the Athenians clearly carried on enslaving "barbarians" until the Macedonians and the Romans made the issue of Athenian political organisation kind of irrelevant. (Although the big slave market at Delos kept on going for another few centuries.)

But I totally agree that making any of this into a struggle for the origin of "western civilisation" ignores most of the real development in between. Very little in the modern world descends directly from ancient Greece, and modern political organisation seems to me to stem at best from a romantic misunderstanding of the various institutions and cultures involved.

I think. It's late over here, and I figure I'll try to forget about Sparta and go directly to bed.

I don't know if the little boy is still looking for books to read after almost 400 posts, but why doesn't he try "Bone," by Jeff Smith? Comics really don't pollute your regular reading. Trust me.

Straight at 388 Angel didn't kill people, a demon who looked like him did. Same goes for Spike later on.

It's more complicated than that. There is a continuity in memory and self-identity between the original person, the soulless vampire, and the souled vampire.

Perhaps more to the point, everything that made Angelus Angelus is still there in Angel, just as everything that made soulless Spike soulless Spike is still there in ensouled Spike. The soul allows the possibility of being good, but the demon is still there, it hasn't been erased.

383: It's "I invest in the stock market based on what unicorns tell me while I shave every morning" wrong.

Ahem!

I take great exception to that, sir!

Good day to you!

candle: I don't mean to say that the rest of the world didn't do such things, but the Spartans codified them.

What I had in mind with the "massacre" reference - I should have been more specific - was the periodic Spartan slaughter of the helots. Quickly skimming some references suggests that despite the permanent declarations of war on the helots, wholesale massacres were a lot more rare than I had remembered, but there were several. I had remembered it as happening on a regular basis, like the annual ritual flogging of the helots.

Clifton,

Let's be fair, though, the Spartans didn't invent sodomy.

Someone mentioned the Steven Pressfield book Gate of Fire. I read it a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it a great deal, constantly thinking how little I would like even passing through Sparta. How accurate it is I can't say; it seemed so based on what little I know of the subject.

Seeing almost immediately from the trailer of 300 that it was about the same battle, I was turned against the movie because it looked very much as if it completely disregarded any consideration of the history, or the sentiments expressed by that stele, in favor of fancy graphics and superhero-style acrobatics.

Seeing almost immediately from the trailer of 300 that it was about the same battle, I was turned against the movie because it looked very much as if it completely disregarded any consideration of the history, or the sentiments expressed by that stele, in favor of fancy graphics and superhero-style acrobatics.

Leetkey vf .... . .-.. .-.. .- 66 75 6e .
Hm. 01010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100111 01110011

*********  ***   ***  ***   *******     ****    

*********  ***   ***  ***  ***         **   **  

   ***     *********  ***   ****            **  

   ***     *********  ***       ****      **    

   ***     ***   ***  ***         ***    ***    

   ***     ***   ***  ***    *******     ***

..oot ,sdrawkcab dnA.

Some people mentioned the Narnia books for kids who need some temptingly delicious adventures in order to get into reading. I vote instead for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books.
Two kid protagonists, Lyra and Will. Lots of swashbuckling, the kind where the kids have to decide, and act, beyond what they think they can do. Fabulous supporting grown-ups, including a female physicist, a Texan balloonist/ aeronaut, and a sentient, speaking polar bear. With armor. From Spitsbergen. Powerful, really nasty villians, but rational and consequently both believable and banal in their evil. And, of course, Saving the World in every book.

Pullman has discussed and written about how misogynist and racist and, apropos Frank Miller, violence-loving the Narnia books are (completely aside from the heavy-handed Christian indoctrination): "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on."
I *knew* there was something wrong with leaving Susan out at the end, even as a kid. And with the kid-kings being superior to the kid-queens. And with the badguys all being women: the snow queen, the underground green fairy, the Jezebel character.
Yuk. Read Pullman instead.

Oh, and the loathed Second Sock Problem?
Knit them both at once.

I'm knitting two fingerless mittens right now.
Much easier than fingerless gloves, but just as warm.

@395:

Among other things, I assume from the title that it ignores the fact that (according to Herodotus) the pass was defended by 700 Thespians in addition to the 300 Spartans. I further assume Frank Miller ignored this as well.

Of course. But Miller ignored so many other things about ancient Greece, ancient Persia, and much else deriving from actual historical sources, that that numerical difference is but a small thing.

And to give credit, they do show that some of the other Greek fighters were there, leaving only after the betrayal that leads to the Persian victory (which appears to have been what happened, except, of course, for the Thespians).

straight, #388: "The thing that drove me batty about the series is that right up front they establish that a vampire that looks like your friend is not your friend. Your friend is completely dead and the vampire is a demon who has taken his place. (So don't hesitate with the stake.) [...] But then what's with all the guilt Angel has about what Angelus did? And what's with everyone acting like he ought to feel guilty? Angel didn't kill people, a demon who looked like him did. Same goes for Spike later on. "

Reread Ethan's #94. What we're told early on in the show isn't necessarily true. Vaqrrq, gur zber jr svaq bhg nobhg gur Jngpuref, gur zber yvxryl vg frrzf gung fhofgnagvny nzbhagf bs jung gurl fnl nobhg, sbe vafgnapr, gur zrgnculfvpf bs inzcvevfz...ner syng-bhg yvrf naq cebcntnaqn.

#390: Jeff Smith's Bone is a great suggestion. Likewise, just about any of the Walt Kelly Pogo collections, if you can find them. (Kelly having been an obvious influence on Smith. I've been known to describe Bone as "Walt Kelly does Tolkien, with visits from H. P. Lovecraft.")

Most to the point, however, adducing special democratic virtue to Sparta because modern Greece is more or less democratic, and claiming that Iran's modern condition was foredoomed by the political arrangements of Persia 2500 years ago, isn't just wrong, it's fantastically wrong.

Indeed, by that logic, the Roman Empire was a democracy. Under Caligula.

I think Dave was pulling the fluorospheric leg here. He's too smart to believe some of the things he wrote.

I went to Michigan State, whose football team is called the Spartans. Sometimes we were all called Spartans. A more inappropriate symbol for a university cannot well be imagined.

straight, @288: the definition of the difference between vampires and the live humans they replace (which is the one stated in "Welcome to the Hellmouth) is from the ultimate unreliable narrator: the Council of Watchers. One of the long themes of BtVS is the many ways in which the COW "Doesn't know anything, as usual."

If I was all revved up, I'd expand on the COW as a mature institution, dedicated mostly to conserving its own authority, but at this hour, this day, I'm mostly revved down.

candle, as you probably realize, I'm not putting forth a brief for ancient Athens as a fun place to be any other than upper class.

#397: I would be slightly wary of recommending the Narnia books without knowing a child myself because of all their rather antiquated and culturally-biased squidgy bits, but I would not recommend Pullman to anyone I actually liked or wished to keep as a friend. If I'd been given the His Dark Materials books as a child, instead of as an adult, I can only imagine I would have slogged all the way to the end of book three, as at the time I didn't know I was allowed to stop reading a series I'd started just because I hated it. Which would, I suppose, have resulted in about 33% more residual loathing and snarling whenever the series comes up.

...which only goes to show, I suppose, that there's no accounting for taste, and that Pullman's at least as good a recommendation as any I'd make in its place. He's certainly better (in an objective quality of writing sense, as opposed to the sense where I want to read him) than my preferred reading at that age, which included a long series of highly stupid but entertaining stories about a magical bicycle and the struggle against such evils as Toys That Say Mean Things and LARPs.

PNH: I've been known to describe Bone as "Walt Kelly does Tolkien, with visits from H. P. Lovecraft."

And Dave Sim's use of solid black. And the sense of comedic timing that Sim got from Chuck Jones.

Xopher, #402: I love the fact that there are people in East Lansing with bumper stickers reading "I'm a Spartan Lover" who don't get that it's a joke.

#402: I went to Michigan State, whose football team is called the Spartans. Sometimes we were all called Spartans. A more inappropriate symbol for a university cannot well be imagined.

My high school's official mascot/team name for everything was also the Spartans. My high school, which was a small Christian missionary school, staffed almost entirely by the sort of people who my Republican-voting missionary parents found a bit too stuffy and hidebound and conservative...

Finding out what the historical Spartans were actually like has had me boggling at that particular choice by the school's founders ever since.

Holes by Louis Sachar. How could I forget that book? It was made into a movie, which could be a plus.

Adrian@367: Does the show use a lot of visually-challenging tricks?

Some episodes do. There are a few episodes that use visual tricks to indicate altered reality. In some episodes, the fight choreography is an essential part of the storyline; you can't understand "Fool for Love" if you don't see the fights, for example. Often, though, you can take a bathroom break during fight scenes and not miss anything critical. And there aren't too many episodes where the special effects are of the let's-set-off-an-epilectic-seizure variety. Usually, you will know when those are coming because of the musical cues.

Joss does often use techniques like long, unbroken scenes where the camera tracks characters across the scenery without cutting. Rarely, if ever, is this vertigo-inducing. It's not even something you consciously notice unless you're aware of the technique and how rare it is to see on TV.

Regarding objectionable aspects of Narnia, Dr. Dolittle, early Tintin, etc.: I think we should give kids, even kids with reading problems, credit for not being stupid. Let them learn early on that powerful storytelling can coexist with stupid and obnoxious views. There's nothing about being reading-disabled that makes that kind of realization harder, because it's the sort of understanding that's rooted in common-sense observation of the world, not the ability to quickly process written text.

Straight: Angel didn't kill people, a demon who looked like him did. Same goes for Spike later on.

No, a demon living in Angel's body did. A demon that took up residence in Angelus's brain, and used his personality as the template for its actions.

Whedon's vampires aren't totally distinct personalities that pop into your body after you die; they're motivating forces that pick up where you left off, but evil. The vampire version of you does all the things you would do if you (a) were super-strong, (b) hungered for blood, and (c) had no conscience.

And then, in Angelus's case, he got his soul back, and the conscience with it, but all the memories of the evil acts were still there, in first-person point-of-view, with the contextual chains of motivation intact.

Spike's case proves you wrong. Spike, re-souled, doesn't suddenly revert to being William, as he would if your totally-separate-person model were accurate. He's still Spike, just with a fledgling conscience.

For whatever reason I tried reading my Tarzan of the Apes books a few years ago. At 10 or so when I first read them, I had no idea of racisim. Oh My Farking Ghu. I was so appalled I quit and didn't try to reread the Mars, Moon or Pellucidar books.

(I'm also realizing how much freer kids were then, I bought my first book at the Crown Drugstore at 103rd and State Line, I lived about 15 blocks away and that was my premier book store. I rode my bike down to there. The Tarzan's are the Ballantine re-release starting with 1966. I bought most of the non-Tarzans at Scholastic school-affiliated or Weekly Reader-affiliated book sales.)

JC, #315, I saw that (haven't read the whole paper yet) and last Friday I was still online at 8pm and watched "1vs100." Not only did I know all the answers, but one of them could have been solved logically. You didn't need to know how much blood is in the human body to get the right answer.

Jeff Smith's Bone is a great suggestion. Likewise, just about any of the Walt Kelly Pogo collections, if you can find them.

A more inappropriate symbol for a university cannot well be imagined.

My high school's football rival was Vestal. They were officially the Bears, but, well ...

I like the various responses about how the nature of vampires is more complicated than the Watchers initial setup. But it smacks a little bit of fanfiction justifying things after the fact. I watched every episode, but I really couldn't tell whether the treatment of Angel and Spike was actually Subtle New Information About the Nature of Vampires or just inconsistent writing, bending the rules for the sake of keeping interesting characters around (waves at Harmony). You never see any of the characters saying, "Hey, maybe the Watchers were wrong about vampires."

If what you're saying is true (if any vampire could potentially be a Spike) then isn't it obscenely immoral for Buffy to stake vampires on sight the instant they rise from the grave, before they've ever menaced anyone?

Straight, who said that "any vampire could potentially be a Spike"?

Angel had his soul restored because an angry Roma cursed him. Spike had that chip implanted, which gave him an experience roughly similar to having a conscience, and let him live around humans long enough for some humanity to rub off on him. Neither was likely to come around on his own.

Interesting piece from the Toronto Star about the 300's slanted take on history:

Sparta? No. This is madness

"History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing."

Fade at 405: I recommend Pullman's books to adults, but I don't think I would recommend them to anyone under 13. They are complex, grim, and in some places, nightmarish. I like them but I understand why they make you (and others) snarly.

PNH, 411: ...powerful storytelling can coexist with stupid and obnoxious views.

...Which dovetails nicely with the Frank Miller/300 discussion, proving once again that all narrative threads are as one to Making Light.

I think we should give kids, even kids with reading problems, credit for not being stupid. Let them learn early on that powerful storytelling can coexist with stupid and obnoxious views. There's nothing about being reading-disabled that makes that kind of realization harder, because it's the sort of understanding that's rooted in common-sense observation of the world, not the ability to quickly process written text.

Yes. I was a big fan of Enid Blyton's various novels when I was 7 or 8, and even at that age I resented the sexist treatment of girls. I haven't mentioned these previously on this thread because they aren't SF/F, but Blyton wrote hundreds of children's adventure novels in the 1940s and 50s.

I can't remember which library those were in (I was cutting a swath through several branches of the Dallas Public Library by that age), but I can visualize a couple of shelves full of them just a few shelves from the Dr. Dolittle books in the YA section. I wonder if they're still there.

Gorsh, I go away for two days and I come back to this? I've missed participating in a huge part of the most fascinating discussion of Buffy I've ever witnessed. Wow.

Dan Layman-Kennedy #235, let me echo PNH at #250 and say, wow, what a great theory.

Re: the recent discussion of the whole "demon setting up shop" theory of vampires, I definitely agree with those who say that any information given to us by the Council of Watchers (directly or through what Giles learned from them) is suspect. straight #417 asked if it might be horribly immoral for Buffy to stake vampires left and right if there's a potential for them to regain their souls (after all, we witnessed it twice in seven years), to which I say, yeah, maybe it is. Isn't that a scary thought?

Sure, some of the seeming inconsistencies might result from sloppy writing (though I'm inclined to be more generous and say that it's not sloppy so much as thought-of-as-they-went-along), but pretty much all of it is explained beautifully by the revelation of the CoW's deep corruption. Which I'm probably more impressed with than if it were obvious that the Mutant Enemy crowd had had every little detail planned out from the beginning.

My goodness, but I wish I hadn't missed all this. Makes visiting my brother almost seem not worth it.

Crap, I forgot to mention one other thing.

Va gur qvfphffvba bs jurgure Ohssl'f qrpvfvba ng gur raq bs frnfba 7 gb znxr nyy cbgragvnyf fynlref jnf zbeny be abg, tvira gung nyy gubfr tveyf unq ab pubvpr va gur znggre (gung ceboyrzngvp zbenyvgl unq fbzrubj arire bppheerq gb zr orsber, naq vf abj tbvat gb xrrc zr hc avtugf, ol gur jnl) Npbavgr ng #366 fhttrfgrq gung n erny eribyhgvba jbhyq unir orra gb znxr gur cbfvgvba bs fynlre ibyhagnel.

V, sbe bar, pna'g vzntvar nalguvat zber greevslvat guna tvivat fynlre cbjref rkpyhfviryl gb crbcyr jub jnag gurz.

(Bs pbhefr, jura V fnl V pna'g vzntvar nalguvat zber greevslvat, gung'f zrgncubevpny naq rknttrengrq, ohg fgvyy.)

dr. doolittle was too racist for me as a kid. so was oliver twist, but i don't know if i would have felt that way about it if i weren't jewish.

i read tarzan & tintin as an adult. tintin i liked well enough to see the bad parts as mostly a product of the time, but tarzan was painfully, gratuitously, sensationally racist, & i couldn't take it at all.

but i think it wouldn't hurt a kid's immortal soul to read material with ... outdated ideas about people. some kids will be bothered & yanked out of the story for different reasons than other kids. basically like any turn-off or point of squick.

Lizzy @ #380: No. They were made by its free men. The helots (slaves) had no vote and few other rights. They outnumbered the freemen by about 7 to 1. Spartan women had no rights at all. That is not a democracy as I understand it.

Even the U.S. has only been even theoretically democratic for less than a century. I find it annoying that women tend to not count when people determine whether a country is democratic or not. Oppressing men = evil! Oppressing women = quaint cultural tradition which must be accommodated, especially if the country has oil.

My un-PC position on the first Gulf War (Bush I): we "rescued" Kuwait's women from an invading country that granted rights to women to return them to the authority of a government that repressed them? Big improvement.

(Yes, that position was overly simplistic, and taken partly out of sheer youthful contrariness, and took no account of Saddam Hussein's brutality towards his own people. But still.)

#359: Bad, bad Avram! Bad!

#366 Aconite: "Ohg n ernyyl enqvpny bireguebj bs gur fgnghf dhb jbhyq unir orra abg whfg gb znxr zber Fynlref, ohg gb znxr "Fynlre" n ibyhagrre cbfvgvba."

V'z abg fher gung gur crbcyr jub jbhyq ibyhagrre gb or Fynlref ner gur fbeg bs crbcyr jub jr jbhyq jnag gb or Fynlref. Cbjre pbeehcgf, ohg vg nyfb cer-fryrpgf gur rnfvyl pbeehcgvoyr.

#395 Dan Blum: "Among other things, I assume from the title that it ignores the fact that (according to Herodotus) the pass was defended by 700 Thespians in addition to the 300 Spartans."

Thespians, eh? From the descriptions of the film so far, I can only imagine that it would be greatly improved by the addition of 700 mimes in the background doing *Wall!*

Susan #426: Interesting how those who rail against "moral relativism" have no problem with it (though not in name) where oppressed women are involved.

Aaaand the unspoken subtext of that is....

Susan @426

And it's still the case, even in the US, that paragon of democracy, that woman don't count as much as men (nor do black men count as much as white men or ...). It cracks me up that everyone is so excited that we might actually be ready to have a woman run for the Presidency. Well, we should be excited that some of the barriers are falling, but, bloody hell, as Spike would say, this is where we should have been generations ago.

As long as I've mentioned Spike, it occurs to me that univat n cnffry bs Fynlref nebhaq jbhyq qb jbaqref sbe gur vzonynapr va cbjre orgjrra gur traqref. Fbzrbar zragvbarq gung qrzbaf jbhyq unir frpbaq gubhtugf nobhg fbzr bs gur guvatf gurl qb vs gurl pbhyqa'g or fher vs gurve vagraqrq jnf n Fynlre. Jryy, fbzr zra ner qrzbaf.

Spartan women did have some rights. Not equals to their men but more than what other Greek states gave their women(zero). Athens would bitch about how Spartan women had too many freedoms and power and that it was morally suspect.

Catching up on a buncha stuff here ...
*Indecision*: I'm really tempted to get that rot13 plugin, but OTOH, I'm now almost persuaded to start working my way through some hired Buffy DVDs. I saw a few minutes of a couple of episodes I taped for a friend who was away during the Sydney Olympics. Like almost everything decent, it was shown at odd, late & movable hours on Oz TV, so I'd check the top & tail to make sure of the tape.

Serge (#354) David Wenham, who played Farimir in Peter Jackson's LotR films, is listed in the cast of 300 as Dilios, who may be a narrator.
He's played a wide range of characters in his career so far, including funny, brainy, stupid, noble, & a very chilling one in The Boys (1998). But to Australian women over a certain age range, he'll always be, and own a place in our heart as, Diver Dan from the (Australian) ABC TV series Seachange. Sigh <melts> (Hmm. Youngest of seven, with five sisters, according to imdb, and in a long-term relationship, with offspring; curses.)

Rob Rusik (#306) "which suggested one of the reason that limbs evolved is that it allowed their owners to get out of the water and away from their predators"
From Werner Herzog's 'Minnesota Declaration': "Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species--including man--crawled, fled onto some small continent of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue." (Herzog's film, Lessons of Darkness, is one of the more astonishing feats of filmmaking I've experienced; *sublime*, in the more terrifying aspect of that definition.)

... and as others have mentioned Elizabeth; that was one of those rather frustrating films I could only 'lay back and enjoy' — and there were enjoyable parts — by periodic beating back of rebellious brain-cells with a sharp, heavy mental stick.

Also, 'hear, hear!' to Susan (#426) about how often the situation of women (and, often, the rest of the majority of the population) seems to get airily waved aside when considering how 'good' different societies through time were. And a breathtaking ignorance about the very short time that, say, reliable medical treatment for quite common problems, has been around. Not to mention communication that doesn't depend on someone carrying a message physically. <derails start of hobbyhorse ride before it gallops away too far>

I have a weird feeling about Pullman. I mean, I agree with him about Narnia, and I love the idea of Heavenly Parliamentarians, and so-on. And the writing, aside from a possible overdose of Smeerps, is fine.

But. I've always hated, absolutely hated the man's drivel about fantasy. It's the sort of Margaret Atwood, I don't write about talking squid, let's us all point and laugh at the books with dragons and overly muscled men on the cover rubbish. I have to wonder about:

The effect on fantasy's reputation if Pullman had come straight out and said that he wrote F/SF, that he thought it was a perfectly fine way to tell a story, and that if you disagreed you could talk to the awards. (I don't think that this would have changed much, but every time that dross about `I don't write Fantasy' gets repeated, he climbs on to the shoulder of a giant, puts on hobnailed boots, and jumps for the Apple of Critical Approval. So what that the poor giant is in agony? He was only a cardboard cutout, with no emotional development.)

Secondly, on his own writing if he was prepared to admit to himself that he was writing F/SF. I've always wondered if (frex) the preponderance of smeerps, and the odd technology level of his alternate worlds related to a NIH syndrome. Maybe reading more F/SF would have helped him work through that. I think that recently he has began to be more accepting of the fantastical nature of his books, but I'm not sure.

So, to sum: one, I liked the books. Two: I like the man's ideas, except for a very small subset, on which I differ in only a few ways. Three: I care too much about those differences, and probably am ascribing to him positions he doesn't hold anyway. Oh well. I enjoyed the rant.

Kate Nepveu@305: Thank you! That's much easier than cutting and pasting into rot13.com.

y@368: Darn you for beating me to discussion of the Greek. :-) I've seen the epitaph translated as "...obedient to their word, we lie".

Patrick Nielsen Hayden #383 "I think not."

I told my two year old it was time for bed the other evening, as she was trampolining about on the sitting-room sofa.

Her reply: "I think not!"

Pullman--my sense of His Dark Materials is that he made up the metaphysics and ethics of his multiverse as he went along. There's a lot of beautiful things in the books, but there's a philosophical incoherence which bothers me. Lewis drawing on neo-Platonism and Christian ethics, had a much easier time of it, but I like Pullman's characters much better; Lewis had a limited social life, and it shows in his books--he simply didn't know that many kinds of people.

Hunh. I suppose, really, we are still developing the metaphysics and ethics of the world we find ourselves in. 200 years ago, young earth creationism was defensible. And now time is deep, space is deep, and there are probably more species extinct in the history of the earth than there are now extant. One place I do agree with Pullman (and Ursula K. Leguin) is that creation is a work in progress--evolutionary. This is just so obvious at this point in our knowledge that I wonder we even have to debate it any more, but of course we have a lot of unlearning to do.

#419, Stefan: Ha! I came over here to post exactly that link, only to find you'd beaten me to it. Okay, instead here's Nick Mamatas's review of 300.

Clifton Royston #384: There were, however, no dinosaurs.

Dan Blum #395:

But we, actors and critics of one play,
Of sober-witted judgment who could see
So many ways, and chose the Spartan way;
What has the popular report to say
Of us, the Thespians at Thermopylae?
(Norman Cameron, 'The Thespians at Thermopylae'.)

Patrick @ 404: Absolutely - one of the things I keep emphasising to my students is that most of what we know about ancient history deals with the upper classes. It's like the way people who remember their past lives seem suspiciously often to have been Cleopatra and not her kitchen slave. Mind you, maybe those are just the ones who talk about it.

Clifton @ 393: I actually realised that you meant the massacres of the helots, although I tend to be kind of sceptical about those too. (Although I'm not supported by many of the specialists on this, so I don't really expect to convince anyone. The massacres look to me like they were in part made up by the Athenians in bafflement about how the Spartans could fight side by side with their helots (ie, they could, but they had to kill them afterwards). And I tend to explain the ritual declaration of war as mainly a way to maintain ritual purity if a helot was accidentally killed - because shedding the blood of anyone not officially an enemy of the state meant you lost your Spartan citizenship. That law, I think, was intended to discourage private feuds, and the helots had to be fitted in somewhere. I don't think any flogging was required (although it no doubt took place). And quite a bit of this is just me trying to see that there might be alternative explanations.

It still sucked to be a helot, though.

Stefan Jones #419:

Leaving aside the much-ignored Thespians,it was, of course, the oarsmen of the Athenian demos (among them Aeschylus, whose account in The Persians is still the definitive one)who put paid to Xerxes Greek ambitions at Salamis, but free artisans and peasants make far less attractive heroes than aristocratic bullies.

epacris @ 431... And last but not least, David Wenham was Hugh Jackman's sidekick monk in van Helsing. Hmm... Maybe I should have written 'And last and least'...

Susan... What is un-PC about your position on the Gulf War? True it is un-PC among the Right-wingers, who came up with the expression 'un-PC' to clad their bigotry in faux iconoclasm.

Avram's (395) rot-13'd text is a quote from M. Tullius Cicero's de finibvs bonorvm et malorvm (of the limits? of the goods and evils).

One translation (by Rackham) reads:

Abe ntnva vf gurer nalbar jub ybirf be chefhrf be qrfverf gb bognva cnva bs vgfrys, orpnhfr vg vf cnva, ohg orpnhfr bppnfvbanyyl pvephzfgnaprf bpphe va juvpu gbvy naq cnva pna cebpher uvz fbzr terng cyrnfher.

The reason I recognised it is that it forms the basis of the Lorem ipsum. I suppose that reveals me as a typography geek wannabe.

The full text can be found at The Latin Library. (Caveat: if you look to Cicero for moral guidance, be aware he was one of the wingnuts of his time. I read his de officiis and had to stop at his praise of Sulla the mass murderer. I shall have to resume my reading after that section.

Thespians

The Spartans were assisted by actors? No wonder they were rubbish (hence ignored) at Thermopylae.

Yes, Stephan, the Spartans were assisted by actors. And Xerxès was a drama queen.

Perhaps more to the point, everything that made Angelus Angelus is still there in Angel, just as everything that made soulless Spike soulless Spike is still there in ensouled Spike. The soul allows the possibility of being good, but the demon is still there, it hasn't been erased.

I disagree, and it's why Spike/William is a better person than Angel/Liam. Liam was a drunken, sadistic lout; becoming a vampire just made him free to ignore the repercussions of his actions and killed off the last bits of conscience he had. Note that Angel, upon getting a soul, spends eighty years or so moping about feeling sorry for himself because of how howwibwy giwty he feels over the things he did without a soul, and that the only thing that seperates his Angel behavior from his Angelus behavior is whether he has a soul and feels guilty about being evil--to the extent that being drugged enough to lose inhibition can cause him to revert to Angelus-like behavior.

Spike, meanwhile, actually changed his behavior on his own. He went and voluntarily got a soul because his behavior had already changed. When people talk about the horrid things he did pre-chip, his response is to say, "Yeah, but now I've learned better", and there's never any hint that losing the soul would cause him to revert.

It's the difference between an internal morality and an externally-imposed one. Spike, just by being around people and over the course of about five years, went from "Happy Meals with legs" to willing to sacrifice himself. Angel is one good orgasm* away from elaborate sadism. Which means Spike's the better person, because Angel had most of a century for "humanity to rub off on him" and it never did.

...Fbzrbar zragvbarq gung qrzbaf jbhyq unir frpbaq gubhtugf nobhg fbzr bs gur guvatf gurl qb vs gurl pbhyqa'g or fher vs gurve vagraqrq jnf n Fynlre.

Rknpgyl, naq irel fhppvapg.

Yrg'f fnl lbh'er n uhatel inzcver. Lbh tb bhg sbe n avtug ba gur gbja, naq lbh'er znyr naq fgenvtug fb lbhe cersreerq ivpgvzf ner tveyf. Lbh unir n ahzore bs pubvprf: lbh pna whzc bhg bs nyyrlf va nccebirq zbafgre snfuvba; lbh pna cvpx jbzra hc va pyhof naq trg gurz fbzrjurer dhvrg; lbh pna eha n ybat pba ba gur "inzcverf ner whfg zvfhaqrefgbbq" pebjq.

Va gur jbeyq orsber gur ovt Fynlre fcryy, gur bqqf gung lbhe pubfra ivpgvz jnf gur Fynlre jrer rssrpgviryl avy hayrff lbh jrer va fbhgurea Pnyvsbeavn, naq rira gura dhvgr fznyy rkprcg va Fhaalqnyr vgfrys.

Va gur jbeyq nsgre...jryy, jr qba'g xabj. Jr qba'g xabj n ahzore bs vzcbegnag inevnoyrf, fhpu nf gur abezny hccre naq ybjre ntr yvzvgf sbe Fynlre npgvingvba naq jurgure be abg gur fcryy punatrq gurz. Ohg nsgre gung gurer ner zber fynlref sbe fher.

Naq lrnu, n srj bs gur arj fynlref ner tbvat gb or nggnpxrq. Ubj znal zber bs gurz jvyy znantr gb svtug bss gurve nggnpxref guna jbhyq jvgubhg gur fynlre-cbjre? Naq gura fbzr hayhpxl inzc vf tbvat gb tb nsgre n tvey, ernyvmr fur'f n fynlre, naq obnfg nobhg xvyyvat ure nsgrejneqf...naq gur jengu bs gur betnavmrq fynlref jvyy pbzr qbja ba uvz/ure yvxr n gba bs oevpxf sebz n terng urvtug.

Univat bar fhcreureb vf pbby naq znxrf sbe tbbq GI. Univat gubhfnaqf bs gurz vf zhpu, zhpu orggre, rira vs fbzr bs gurz qba'g qb fhcreureb guvatf.

*: Yeah, "true happiness", whatever. It was code for sex.

On the question of whether it's moral for Buffy to stake brand-new vamps given that at least one (Spike) changed from evil to not basically through force of will...

I say, yes. Absent other influences, vampires will kill people and be generally evil. The Scooby Gang doesn't have anything resembling the resources to trap each individual vampire and rehabilitate it, and we've got an example (Angel) that shows that even the greater part of a century with a soul isn't going to rehabilitate every vampire. At best, even after the big Slayer spell, they might be able to catch and rehabilitate some vampires...so then how do they pick?

I'll tell you the big moral dilemma, though: Angel (and only Angel) knows of a way to make a vampire fully human again. How does he justify not using it on at least vampires like Harmony?

Happy Π Day everyone!

Have some PIe!

Don't forget to stand up and turn in a circle at 1:59:26 local time. It's good luck for the next circular year (I mean until next Pi Day rather than in 2008).

Reading over the '300' comments makes me itch, for any number of reasons.

One itch comes from the idea that a movie based on a graphic novel is likely to exhibit any degree of historical accuracy. Not that the concept is inherently ridiculous, but comics and Hollywood are famous for this sort of thing. So, a kind of beating-a-dead-horse thing is going on here.

Another itch comes from the rampant whiggism exhibited in the denunciations of Sparta (and Athens, for good measure). Yeah, Spartan civilization sucked by modern standards, and even by (many) contemporary Greek standards. Yeah, Athens ragging on Sparta was the pot calling the kettle black. And yet... must all references to history be whiggish? If so, we will find nothing to admire in the past, we risk discarding the good (Aristophanes, Sophocles, Pericles) with the bad (slavery, oppression of women, rule by aristocracy).

Much of this sort of discussion privileges the present over the past in a very disturbing way. The past was another country, as the saying goes. The institutions and habits of the ancient Greeks existed for social and economic reasons that no longer apply in much of the world. Marx, among others, seems to have understood this. I also find it odd that people are bashing the Spartans for engaging in sodomy (a common feature of the classical world) when the same sentiments would be considered impolite at best (viz., General Pace) if expressed in reference to homosexuality today. (As partial explication of the social relations of the ancients, I refer you to "The History of Private Life," recently recommended by TNH on these pages.)

Western civilization came to admire the virtues of the Greeks, and tended to ignore their faults. This was in many ways a failure of perspective, but so is doing the opposite.

402/408/416: My high school teams were the Red Devils. In Georgia. At the time I left, they were trying to tone down the icon a little to make it cute rather than menacing.

I also find it odd that people are bashing the Spartans for engaging in sodomy (a common feature of the classical world) when the same sentiments would be considered impolite at best (viz., General Pace) if expressed in reference to homosexuality today.

The reason you find it odd is because that's not what people are doing. People are saying, "Sparta had just as much homosexuality as any other Greek city, but Frank Miller decided to make them homophobic jocks because he's Frank Miller, and that sucks".

That is, one of the ways you can tell Xerxes is a Bad Guy, in the film, is that he's homosexual (I haven't seen it, so I'm going on reports here). Everyone who's commented so far thinks that's both bizarre* (given that Sparta had just as much homosexuality as any other Greek city) and bad (because homosexuality shouldn't be an indicator of Eville).

*Another one for the spelling reference?

I must be one of the few people in the world who is allergic to the works of Joss Whedon.

I don't recall ever watching Buffy. I watched all of Firefly (because it was so highly recommended,) and spent the whole time alternately (or simultaneously) fascinated and repelled.

My final verdict: Whedon is a great filmmaker (one who works in the medium of film), but I don't like any of his ideas.

DaveL, #448: "I also find it odd that people are bashing the Spartans for engaging in sodomy (a common feature of the classical world) when the same sentiments would be considered impolite at best (viz., General Pace) if expressed in reference to homosexuality today."

Nobody in this thread has "bashed the Spartans for engaging in sodomy." This is an egregious mischaracterization of the (rather few) references to the issue that have come up at all.

You're right that we should always be a little suspicious of the tendency to measure past human societies by how perfectly they live up to contemporary standards. But you're doing your point no favors by the way you're portraying the discussion so far. And, by the way, "whiggism," in historical studies, refers to the belief that history constitutes the tale of a struggle to become what we are today. It implies a belief that history has telos, has a direction and an end. To observe that this approach has flaws is not tantamount, as you appear to believe, to saying that we must never observe that some societies are verkakte. I said that I'd rather live in the Persian Empire of Cyrus, Xerxes, and Darius than in the Sparta of Thermopylae. This isn't "whiggism," it's a frank statement about myself. I also think modern North Korea would be a rotten place to live. This doesn't make me "whiggish," either.

As for whether discussing the gap between 300 real history is "beating a dead horse," perhaps you haven't noticed the number of right-wing blogs, web sites, and pundits that have been extolling the movie as inspirational. Perhaps you haven't noticed that works like 300 don't happen in a vacuum, but are, rather, part of a centuries-old tradition of characterizing the culture of whatever powerful polity lies eastward of Europe as sinister, hive-like, depraved, gender-ambiguous, and farting in airlocks. And perhaps you haven't noticed that in the world we live in right now, today, this morning, 10:30 on a pleasant Wednesday in eastern North America, the leaders of the most powerful country in the world appear to be doing their level best to gin up a new war with the country that used to be called Persia. Perhaps, in your view, none of these things make it worthwhile to discuss the ways we think about and talk about these things, because after all it's just a movie based on a comic book, so who cares. Perhaps you're mistaken.

When we talk about the Spartans' shortcomings, we might want to remember the conquest of the city of Messenia and the conversion of its people into neo-helots, so that the Spartiate class could increase its numbers. Of course, that playhouse got torn down by the last of the Pythagoreans, Epaminondas, who was capable of what the Spartan system made difficult--innovative thinking.

In fact, aside from any issues we may have with the inherent brutality of the Spartan system, this was one of the great weaknesses of the Spartan state--they trained themselves out of the habit of having new ideas. Of course, this was one of the things, besides their military discipline, that aristocratically-inclined Greeks from other cities (I'm thinking of Xenophon and Plato here, but they weren't the only ones) liked about the Spartans, because New Ideas complicate things so much.

One of the other great weaknesses of the Spartan system was the tendency to attrition among the ranks of the Spartiates. This was not all due to deaths in battle--in order to be a Spartiate, you had to have a set amount of land, which was considered to be sufficient to allow you to arm yourself and pay your mess bill. Wealth tended to do what wealth ususally does, concentrate itself for one reason or another, and the Spartans ended up with a group of men who were, by birth, qualified to be Spartiates, but who did not have the means to support this status. They did see to it that these men were given the "proper" military training, and some managed to come up with the wealth one way or another. But the maintaining number of available Spartiates was always a problems. They attempted several times to make reforms to fix this but never managed to reverse the trend.

FWIW, Lycourgos was not a king of Sparta. In fact, his reforms included things that turned the kings into near-figureheads.

And loincloths* are, as far as I can tell, an entirely non-Spartan notion. Once they shed their tunics (assuming they were wearing them at all) and dropped their cloaks, they were naked, and unashamed about it.

Mamatas' review rocks. Great is the snark of the son of Ikaria!

*Really, they could have made just as interesting an impression on the audience with this movie by resorting to cleverly-draped cloaks, and letting us speculate on whether the Spartans had anything on under them or not. Maybe even a more interesting one.

PNH #404: The complaint of the Athenian upper class in the classical period (as articulated by Plato) was, in effect, that it wasn't fun to be upper class with all these middle-class so-and-sos trying to run the country.

nerdycellist @ #349, Epacris @ #431: You might enjoy this.

(what it is: Mystery Historian Theater 3000 does Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth)

Re having the villains be flagrantly gay: I recently watched Mad Max on telly (first time I've seen it in decades), and was struck by the deliberate effeteness of most of the bad guys there. (Was that why this motorcycle gang actually wore helmets?) Powerful sissies as bad guys make the hero seem much more "manly", yes? Of course there was also a rougher type who baaaed jeeringly in one scene -- an indication of his preferences?

I wonder how much of the myth of the Spartans in the English-speaking world is a reflection of English history, and the general myth of the heroic last stand saving the day. Sparta itself doesn't get the attention until the era of the English Public School, and the study of the Classics, but it is an instance of a suicidal courage that is scattered throughout the history of England. And sometimes successful. There is the Battle of Maldon, and the Battle of Agincourt. There were the Whitecoats at Marston Moor and the Bluecoats at Naseby. Rorke's Drift, Gordon at Khartoum, the Great Mutiny.

Other countries have their own myths. The French Foreign Legion has Camerone. How much of Horatius at the Bridge was Roman, and how much Macaulay? And, as well as the great last stands, there are the little ones. Every Victoria Cross, every soldier who is remembered for not giving up, they are what make an Army, rather than an armed mob.

And it doesn't really matter what tune Piper Findlater played.

Patrick, another aspect of whiggism is to evaluate the past entirely in terms of how it contributes to the presumed forward progress you mention. That's the aspect I was referencing. Perhaps a better term to use would have been "presentism."

As for Frank Miller's contribution to the current tensions with Iran and how to resolve them, I just don't see it as a significant part of the work or the political situation. I think the person who characterized it as the Jocks versus the Freaks got it right, and that's about the level Miller and Hollywood operate at.

DaveL, #458: "Another aspect of whiggism is to evaluate the past entirely in terms of how it contributes to the presumed forward progress you mention. That's the aspect I was referencing."

Then I don't know what you're saying, because nobody here has been evaluating the past in that way.

Meanwhile... My wife came across some comments made by Frank Miller about the movie version of "300". I understand that Leonidas's Queen Gorgo was barely present in the graphic novel and that her role was increased so that the movie would appeal more to young women. Apparently Miller objected strenuously to the greater feminine presence because, well, this is a boy's adventure story.

Why do I find myself thinking of Calvin and how he hated having Suzie around?

Cooties!

#458 DaveL: "I think the person who characterized it as the Jocks versus the Freaks got it right, and that's about the level Miller and Hollywood operate at."

Sadly, that's also the level at which our current administration operates, along with most of our media.

The more I think about it, the more "crazy people like this so you shouldn't" seems like an unconvincing argument about the artistic and literary worth of anything. Crazy (and dangerous) people have from time to time found lots of things to like about The Nibelungenlied, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Beatles, and Batman too. (Some of which do indeed contain stupid and regressive ideas independent of what was read into them by nutbars of one stripe or another, but that seems sort of beside the point.) And I seem to recall a lot of right-wing pundits who got similarly whooped up and inspired by Return of the King a few years ago, for similar reasons.

Of course, Frank Miller really is something of a wacky chauvinist, in several senses of the word, and that's worth addressing, as are the problematic themes in fantasy of swarthy hordes and Dark Lands to the East. (And I'm certainly not crazy about the use of queerness/effeminacy as a way of upping a villain's Evil Quotient, either, thought I've grown accustomed enough by now that I can more or less sigh and let it go.) Was it somehow irresponsible to make a film like 300 in the current political climate? Well, maybe, but I'm not so fond of those arguments when they come from across the aisle, so I'm not finding myself inclined to give them much weight when Our Side makes them either.

Dave Bell, #457: Excuse me, and I suspect completely irrelevant to the current discussion . . . but how did the Battle of Maldon get into this list? I croggled slightly--and couldn't resist asking.

Mary Frances --

Standing and dying to man to defend the corpse of the idiot who got you into the completely unnecessary no-win situation strikes me as an excellent example of "suicidal courage".

(Yes, there's a poem about it, but also uncontested evidence that the events in the poem more or less really did happen.)

Graydon, #464: Okay, "suicidal courage," yes, if that's the criterion for the rest of the list, but--"saving the day"? I know the argument that Bryhtnoth was trying to pin the invading fleet to the shore, to protect other shores, but it's always seemed to me that he had about as much chance of succeeding in the long term as I do of becoming Pope--and I don't think it worked in the short term, either, did it?

But (as I said) it probably isn't really relevant to the discussion or to the point that Dave Bell is making (which I find interesting for its own sake, by the way)--and if you add "Charge of the Light Brigade" or something like that to the list, even I stop croggling. Maybe that's the problem--my knowledge of military history is, ahem, highly irregular. Are there maybe other unsuccessful (or less than successful?) last-stands on that list that I'm not aware of?

Trying not to weep at all the Buffy discussion in code; even if I was any good at adding programs to the tottering, whining hard drive of my geriatric iMac, I've got, at most, an occassional ten minutes here and there to indulge in Making Light.

A word about the relative virtues of Spike and Angel, a discussion which can still get you on Fandom Wank if you aren't careful: Angel, whatever else he is, is the result of evolution upon an 18th century spoiled rebellious alcoholic. Spike is a self-created construct on the base of a late-Victorian neoromantic, a vampire whose first impulse after rising was as idealistic as anything he did in BtVS s5 (see "Lies My Parents Taught Me"). Writing fic about Angelus is easy: he behaves like Angel with a hangover. I've got a novel/novella length 1867 fic to prove it. Trying to write a convincing and uncliched Spike is a different matter; I've had him stuck at dawn on a toll bridge for eighteen months.

And as to the whole retcon/ contradictions of canon question: there are themes and ideas which are consistent throughout, but, like any competent storyteller, ME was willing to tweak the interpretation of previous events when they got in the way of a good plot. It's an advantage BtVS and AtS have over, say, Bab5.

JESR #466: like any competent storyteller, ME was willing to tweak the interpretation of previous events when they got in the way of a good plot.

Thank you. Slavish devotion to 100% continuity gets you nowhere, and there's a difference between changing a detail or two and betraying the spirit of the work which the continuity squads don't seem to get.

Trying not to weep at all the Buffy discussion in code; even if I was any good at adding programs to the tottering, whining hard drive of my geriatric iMac, I've got, at most, an occassional ten minutes here and there to indulge in Making Light.

Open www.rot13.com in another window, cut and paste. That's what I do, I can't install things on my computer here.

#459 (PNH) "Then I don't know what you're saying, because nobody here has been evaluating the past in that way."

There have been a lot of comments about the deficiencies of Greek civilization, usually in "presentist" terms: they weren't really democratic (of Athens), they held slaves, oppressed women, etc., as though those weren't essentially universal characteristics of civilization until rather recently.

Sparta was no prize, but at least when the chips were down they held firm and helped save Greek civilization from conquest. In my book that forgives some other sins.

There have been a lot of comments about the deficiencies of Greek civilization, usually in "presentist" terms: they weren't really democratic (of Athens), they held slaves, oppressed women, etc., as though those weren't essentially universal characteristics of civilization until rather recently.

I hate Match Week, I hate, I hate, I hate.

Just saying.

The tension is making me twitch.

While I wait for the clock to count down to 2:00 and turn the suspense of not knowing into the pressure of keeping secrets (is there any employment system as insane as the Match???), I wanted to issue a general invitation to anyone attending Lunacon or in the New York City/Westchester area this weekend. This Lunacon marks the 25th anniversary of my first Lunacon, which was also my first convention, so I am throwing an anniversary party and inviting everyone at the con or who feels like dropping by. This will be Saturday night at the Rye Town Hilton, fondly known as the Escher Hilton. It will begin after the initial run-through of the masquerade and go until I or my suitemates feel like going to sleep. Much food and (nonalcoholic) beverages will be provided, and I expect good conversation to generate itself. I'd be happy to have ML'ers there, whether I know you in Real Life or not.

I don't expect to be on-line from the convention, so signage at the hotel will direct you.

For what it's worth, the effeminacy wasn't designed to make Xerxes look evil, it was used - along with the CGI to turn him all giant - to make him into a god. (the director was quoted as stating that a god would have both male and female aspects)

I for one thought the Spartans, with their heavily muscled, hairless, good-looking, all-boys club, came off as more stereotypically "gay" than the "orcs" on the bad guys side.

Haven't read the source material, and probably won't, since I'm having a hell of a time reconciling my general enjoyment of the movie with the fact that it's a hyper-violent plotless cartoon with a black & white misappropriation of history, and from what I've read, Miller would just push it over the edge. Hmmm... maybe I am easily distracted by manboobs.

JC: The answer to your question is that it's too complicated to answer in a little text box in a few minutes, which is probably why nobody has answered you.

The thing you want to compare though isn't just England and France, but all the other European bits and pieces as well.

I could offer you a reading list? But it would be quite a long one.

To the wider thread, it's not long since I was thinking how democracy in Iran these days was looking like democracy in Britain in the eighteenth century -- a franchise limited by religion and wealth, men only, but where the legislative body really passionately mattered and debate on issues was fierce. Interestingly, that parliament -- Burke's parliament, not Iran's -- is where Britain and the US parted ways, we both have democracies descended from it, but along different evolutionary branches.

Thinking of how we view Persia, and Thermopylae (they didn't change the film so much that the Spartans won, did they?) makes me wonder about the angle from which future civilizations will consider ours.

Straight @ 417:

Vampires being more than pure evil is supported in the first season by Giles. When Buffy is upset about falling in love with Angel (and who wouldn't be, he's a selfish SOB), Giles says that it's complicated, and that there are demons that are pure evil, but that Angel isn't necessarily one of them.

As for fan-wank, the one thing that Angel and Spike have in common is that they both drank the blood of their sires with indecent willingness. Oh, and Darla, too. I think that that willingness has something to do with their very human-like emotional existence as vampires.

fidelio:
FWIW, Lycourgos was not a king of Sparta. In fact, his reforms included things that turned the kings into near-figureheads.

Yeah, I was conscious I was doing that, and that it was kinda inaccurate. Lykourgos (if we trust Spartan tradition) was more of a god-king figure or (for historicisers) a warlord of some sort; but my point was that he was credited with setting up the (undemocratic) Spartan constitution by personal decree, which was then taken to be more-or-less unchangeable tradition. This was in order to suggest that Spartan laws are not easy to place in opposition to the whims of a divine (Persian) god-king. But obviously it all gets a lot more complicated if you look deeper, as does everything.

DaveL:
There have been a lot of comments about the deficiencies of Greek civilization, usually in "presentist" terms: they weren't really democratic (of Athens), they held slaves, oppressed women, etc., as though those weren't essentially universal characteristics of civilization until rather recently.

That certainly wasn't what I was arguing. I was mainly interested in opposing the Whiggish tendency which likes to see Athens (or Sparta, even) as modern civilisation in embryo. Stuff that identifies 'modern', 'European' civilisation as a direct descendant of Greek civilisation. Stuff that seems to lie behind this, in fact:

Sparta was no prize, but at least when the chips were down they held firm and helped save Greek civilization from conquest. In my book that forgives some other sins.

Why do we place so much importance on saving Greek civilisation? It seems to me that it is largely because we identify our own (modern, European) civilisation with it, or at least as having some connection with it that isn't there with regard to Persia. There are good things in lots of civilisations. The Greeks get all the attention, and it is worth arguing about why.

But in the end, I think, historians have to stand somewhere, and that somewhere is surely always the present. Escaping from "presentism" seems to mean pretending that your understanding of the past has nothing to do with what you think about everything else in the world. And that seems a little disingenuous.

Oh, what Patrick said, essentially. Now that we've all called each other whigs, can we move on? It's like Godwin's Law of historical debate. Oh, and I have nothing against sodomy - ancient, modern or prehistoric and saurian.

Various:

Spike did however long before he was chipped, stop a worldwide catalysm that would have changed the world, explaining that he liked the world the way it was and didn't want The Forces of Dark and Evil taking it over and changing it. He rather liked humans as they were to be his "Happimeals on feet" and such.

The life of women in ancient Persia I haven't heard that much regarding--Vashti the chief Queen was put into a no-win situation according the Book of Esther, her husband the King/Emperor of Persia insisted that she come dance in front of him and his [presumably all male] associates, she said no saying that that wasn't allowed by the society, so her husband put her to death....

That sounds rather like purdah combined with homicidal autocratic patriarchy. Esther got picked to take the empty spot that opened up in the emperor's harem on the basis of her beauty. She still could get messages out to her uncle after entering the harem, but her life in the harem didn't really much get dealt with as regards freedom or lack thereof that I recall.

How much of the Book of Esther is real, how much is fabrication, how much of it is compendium/conflation of various legends, histories, etc., I have no clue in bucket.

Jewish tradition (a fine word that, tradition--it covers a multitude of exigencies and situations, tradition may have something to do with literal history, it can also be based on legend, allegory, wishful thinking, fabulation, revisionism, necessity, etc.) put ancient Persia mostly in a heroic mold, regarding Perian conquest being instrumental in allowing Jew displaced out of Judea and Samaria back to the Levant, and regarding Jews being allowed to practice their religion with minimal repression and intolerance. There is also the tradition of the Book of Esther, but again, how much of that is historical is to my mind questionable.

Ancient Persia's accomplishments includes a lot in things like botany, Cyris the Great and others were very interested and proactive regarding collecting trees and plants and growing them, supposedly the spread of citrus and many other types of useful flora from more easterly parts of Asia, to Persia and lands west of Persia, was explicitly directed by Cyrus and other Persian rulers before and after him.

Regarding the ancient Greeks, they were not apparently on the most admired peoples lists of my ancestors...

Regarding treatment of women--Sparta was a more desirable locale than Athens for women who weren't slaves. For women who were slaves, I don't know enough about slavery in Sparta. In Athens, UGH! Persian treatment of women, it's not clear to me what the status was below the royal level of women-locked-in-purdah. Prior to royal bride status, Esther seemed to have some level of emancipation and self-determination, -maybe-. For that matter, the records that exist from the Genizah of Fustat, describe a situation that contrasts the restrictions on Muslim women which did not apply to Jewish ones--Muslim women in Cairo (Fustat was part of what today is Cairo) were locked in purdah; Jewish women ran businesses that include teaching reading and writing to small children, making textiles, selling textiles to women locked in purdah.. but Jewish women also had no rights for being freed from a marriage where the husband had run away or was suspected but not known to be dead. Therefore, there were women who betook themselves travelling all over the Mediterranean to track down their delinquent decamped husbands and require the husband to sign the official piece of paper agreeing to terminate the marriage [source--the volumes of A Mediterranean Society by S. D. Goiten]

In Fustat, there were multiple different cultures and religions and their members living under some very different legal and social rules, as evidenced by the very different lives of Jewish versus Muslim women, regarding freedom of movement, legal and social privileges and rights, status of control of funds, marriage, inheritance, attire, etc.

#462, Dan Layman-Kennedy: "The more I think about it, the more 'crazy people like this so you shouldn't' seems like an unconvincing argument about the artistic and literary worth of anything. [...] Was it somehow irresponsible to make a film like 300 in the current political climate? Well, maybe, but I'm not so fond of those arguments when they come from across the aisle, so I'm not finding myself inclined to give them much weight when Our Side makes them either."

What is this, Red Herring Day on Making Light? Who has been arguing that it was "somehow irresponsible" to make 300? Or that nobody should like and appreciate art that happens to get used by nuts to make odious political points? I personally like all kinds of things in that category.

The discussion I've been reading has been about the way the movie portrays the Spartans and Persians, the contrast with the historical reality as we now understand it to have been, and how all this relates to the way these historical actors have been portrayed in art and deployed to make various political points. If anyone in this thread was saying that anyone else "shouldn't" like the movie, or said it was "irresponsible" to make it, I certainly didn't see it. Perhaps these remarks were made in the same alternate timeline where DaveL witnessed thread participants dissing the Spartans for their evile sodomizating ways.

When I brought up the fact that various pundits are extolling 300 as a fable of Western martial virtue, and observed that all of this is happening against the background of leaders trying to start a war with modern Iran, I was answering DaveL's suggestion that it's silly to talk about this stuff because it's just an action movie based on a comic book. I don't think it's silly to talk about this stuff any time, and it seems to me to be particularly topical now. I really don't know where you're getting the idea that I or anyone else is wagging their finger and saying you "shouldn't" see the movie. As I felt when DaveL hallucinated a whole thread about Spartan sodomy that didn't actually exist, it seems to me you're mischaracterizing the discussion in order to build a platform for observations you wish to make.

Meanwhile, a brief swipe at James Fenton[*]

Thermopylae
is a pretty pass,
and dead men lie
beneath the grass.

And no-one knows
enough to care
how the story goes,
but the dead are there.

And no-one knows
why they came to die;
and the dead are there,
but dead men lie.

And no-one knows
who’ll take the blame
for Thermopylae;
but the Spartans came.

But the Spartans came
to a pretty pass,
and dead men lie
beneath the grass.

[*] Quite unfairly, since his heart at least was in it, whereas mine emphatically is not. And yes, I know the geography is screwed up.

Unrelated to anything:

Over on boingboing there's a link to a (really awesome) photo set from Bush's visit to Brazil. The protesters' primary slogan seems to be "Fora Bush," sometimes with the S in "Bush" turned into a swastika and occasionally accompanied with pictures of Bush as Hitler. I don't know any Portuguese, so I used my Mac's translator device thang, which, weirdly, tells me that "fora" means "it are." Which, y'know, can't be right for several reasons. Anyone know what "Fora Bush" means?

@461:

#458 DaveL: "I think the person who characterized it as the Jocks versus the Freaks got it right, and that's about the level Miller and Hollywood operate at."


Sadly, that's also the level at which our current administration operates, along with most of our media.

And, as the one who came up with the original characterization, I would just like to add that I don't think that that kind of simplification of any conflict is a good thing.

@458:

As for Frank Miller's contribution to the current tensions with Iran and how to resolve them, I just don't see it as a significant part of the work or the political situation.

Simplified narratives are always used as justifications for waging war.

There are people who supported (and perhaps still do support) the conflict in Iraq because they honestly believe that it was foretold in the book of Revelation, and that it is one of the signs of the return of Jesus.

There are people who believe that the Mongols were the "good" guys because in their time they fought and conquered the countries that in our time are currently labeled "the Axis of Evil". Yes, I know that's confused and stupid and wrong. But I saw the editorial for that one with my own eyes.

I don't think it was the directors or producers intent to make the Spartans map to Western civilization, since even though they toned down many of the homicidal, xenophobic, neophobic, nationalist-socialist and totalitarian aspects of the Spartans, and put in a totally specious appreciation for freedom and reason, they left in, and indeed, lead off with, the endemic infanticide of that city-state. But nevertheless, it should not be any surprise that some people would try and make pro-war political hay from the simplified conflict portrayed in this movie.

Thank you, Patrick! I spent some stupid time scrolling back through comments to find the argument I had evidently missed -- which wasn't there, which is why I missed it.

Good thread, though.

I have a request -- and perhaps it would be better suited for a new thread, rather than this one, which is interesting -- I am wondering what people here think of the fired prosecutor fiasco, and whether Gonzales is going to resign, or get canned by Bush a week after Bush tells the world he's doing a heckava job, a la Rumsfeld's departure. Any thoughts?

And I'm certainly not crazy about the use of queerness/effeminacy as a way of upping a villain's Evil Quotient, either, thought I've grown accustomed enough by now that I can more or less sigh and let it go.

It's always (!always!) a sign of a bad writer, bad director, bad actor, or some subset thereof. Example: Duke Harkonnen in Dune. (Yeah, I think Herbert is a cheesy writer.)