Of course, there are many who would argue that that sentence would still be true if you remove the words "a hamster does".

I don't know what to say.

Fighting Foo?

Or a small child. Or a teenager. Or a dog. (I must admit I immediately heard Teresa's voice intoning "Dude" in several different ways, and pictured several different hamster reactions).

Or a small child. Or a teenager. Or a dog. (I must admit I immediately heard Teresa's voice intoning "Dude" in several different ways, and pictured several different hamster reactions).

Teresa's at Foo? That means she's only about 10-20 miles or so away from me!

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

And the non-commutative reciprocal corollary: a hamster absolutely cannot respond appropriately to anything you do by choosing the right inflection of the word ‘dude.’

Ooooh. Foo camp.

{{jealous}}

That is all.

Not a hamster, but "Dude" is still appropriate

"Stashed away in the rolling hills north of San Francisco, the town of Sebastopol, California, used to be remarkable for two things..."

Sabastapol is also the setting of "Peanuts."

I /love/ the word "dude." You can have satisfying conversations consisting of no other words. I have a set of friends where a common pattern on meeting is, "Dude!" "Dude!" "Duude." ::nodding:: "Dude."

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

I am reminded of Stan Freberg's classic record, "John and Marsha."

The Dude abides

Wait a minute: she's in Sebastopol? My sister-in-law and family live there. Teresa's on this end of the continent? If she gets tired of being all cool and stuff, she could call...

And, for Open Thread 86, it seems appropriate to offer this to anyone for whom it's appropriate: Sorry about that, Chief. :-)

The Dude Abides (t-shirt form)

"And, for Open Thread 86, it seems appropriate to offer this to anyone for whom it's appropriate: Sorry about that, Chief. :-)"

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

Shameless self-promotion -- but not spam, I hope, since I believe it will be of genuine interest to a number of the people here.

Guild of Radical Militant Librarians T-shirt.

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

I went to Foo camp once. My memory says that it was quite good*.

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

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

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

Anyone remember the VW commercial that was on TV a few years ago? A bunch of twenty-somethings in a VW, all of them holding large lattes. As the driver guns it to go over some railroad tracks the passengers warn him that the coffee cups are full and will spill, he replies that nothing wil happen, they go over the tracks, and when no coffee is spilled the passengers congratulate him. All the dialog consists of "Dude" with appropriate inflection.

A few seconds after I posted that last comment I started to wonder if the significance of the ad is that there is a close analogy between the young, urban, and hip, and hamsters. Come to think of it, weren't they all sitting up with their hands stuck out in front of ... oh, wait, that's prairie dogs.

Wait a minute: she's in Sebastopol? My sister-in-law and family live there. Teresa's on this end of the continent? If she gets tired of being all cool and stuff, she could call...

Will she be leading a session on Moderation-Foo?

Hey, who here is going to be at Westercon?*

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

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

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

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

Stefan Jones@9: Sebastopol gets snow every year? Please forgive me if I find myself skeptical.

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

"Dude" is a semantic wildcard -- just like "fuck". For example, the phrase "the fucking fucker's fucking fucked" uses the same word as adjective, noun, verb, and (I think) pronoun. (My English grammar tends to break down when confronted with regular expressions.)

I knew it. Teresa, one of the leaders of the Foo-orosphere, is a Bene Gesserit, and her Voice works even on rodents. Coming soon from Tor, Hamsters of Dude...

David @24,

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

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

There's a similar claim that Yorkshiremen can keep their side of a conversation going with a well timed and inflected "aye".

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

Ayup?

Today, I found what does happen when one drinks a cup of coffee brewed by Agatha Heterodyne.

Aye!

::little voice:: Help?

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

Thanks in advance.

Wait, Teresa's in Sebastopol?
Would she be willing to support me in an attack on Rumania?

Aconite @ 32... I am driven to overcome my terror of sweaters

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

Charlie,

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

Serge,
I stumbled across Girl Genius and the Foglio kingdom a few months ago and now my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are "sparked" with wonder.

Aconite: I would suggest holding the yarn for something else. Not because there aren't good patterns for sweaters, and not because you can't work out (or find) a pattern for bulky-weight yarn, but rather because alpaca is very heavy, and an alpaca sweater knit out of bulky yarn would probably be warm enough to wear outside as a top layer in a Maine winter. Alpaca sweaters are beautiful, but IME unless you've got a metabolism that keeps you on the cool side they aren't the sort of sweaters you can wear inside; they're the sort of sweaters you wear to go cross-country skiing, or keep in the back of your car so you can stay warm while you walk to the nearest gas station if you break down in January.

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

Oh, and also... no matter what you make, you're going to want to make sure you swatch properly. Homespun can be unpredictable, and coming to the end of a large project to find it changing size in the wash is a horrible feeling. (Swatch? Swatch. Swatch.)

Paul@28: Oh aah.

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

Oh, aye?

For a first sweater, I'd suggest getting a cheaper but equivalent-weight wool/wool blend yarn and trying out the whole pattern. Then you can redo the pattern in the alpaca. But, as said above, it's going to be WARM, but then we all need attractive sweaters for cross-country skiing and curling, don't we?

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

In re: semantic wildcards.

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

Hmmm?

I have a big cone thing of alpaca (I hope) from Peru-- not handspun, though I have a bit of that, but really difficult three-ply fine yarn. I meant to make it into a scarf for my mother, but between my natural crocheting inclination (make it tighter!) and the yarn, I couldn't work with it. I cannot figure out a sweater thing, but I will piggyback on your request for help!
Do I have to learn to knit to use the yarn? Are there tricks to crocheting with it?

#23: I'll be at Westercon. The only definite plan I have is to be at the Stardust County CD release party Saturday; other than that, well, I commit filk and plan to commit tourism.

#23: I'll be at Westercon. The only definite plan I have is to be at the Stardust County CD release party Saturday; other than that, well, I commit filk and plan to commit tourism.

It's always so nice to see virtue rewarded.

Oops. Only one of me will be at Westercon; the other will be at the Emergency Backup Facility. We draw straws to decide which of me goes where at what time.

Man, I wish I were going to FooCamp this year. I hope she enjoys it. :)

Teresa's at Foo Camp? Too cool!!

Dude.

Diatryma-

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

Aconite--

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

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

Patrick Connors #48: You're a paratwa?

Wait, Teresa's in Sebastopol? Would she be willing to support me in an attack on Rumania?

It strikes me that speakers of two different single-phoneme tonal languages are likely to have access to a mutually-intelligible trade pidgin suitable for a wide variety of purposes.

Consider:

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

could be rendered as:

"Dude?"
"Aye!"

or

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

as

"Dude..."
"Aye."

And so on. What elegant conciseness!

Oy.

I am compelled to tell the old joke about two bubbes meeting on a park bench.

"Oy" says the first one.

"Oooyy" says the second.

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

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

Heh - my alpaca challenge of the moment is trying to decide what to spin with it. I have a complete fleece in a lovely gold-brown. I also have some variegated brown silk. The two need to be brought together in some way at some weight, but beyond that, I'm stumped.

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

Who *are* all you people who just fall into piles o' alpaca??!!

And why am I not one of you?

My uncle (on the South Dakota Dansker side of the family) has custody of an all-purpose response phoneme which can mean either yes or no, depending on the intonation and accompanying (nearly imperceptible to outsiders) body language. It should probably be transliterated as "nyup" or possibly "nyop."

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

I've just fallen into a bunny, if that's any help. Maybe people could knit alpaca bunny-sweaters? If you DID put a bunny in an alpaca sweater, wouldn't that be just about right for winter at the South Pole? ... dang, teach the little buggers to knit for themselves and you'd be halfway to an cheap Mars terraforming project. Of course, then they'd probably just invade Earth carrying signs like "MARS NEEDS MORE TIMOTHY HAY."

Charlie@25: Adjective, noun, adverb, verb.

me@62: That's what I get for posting before seeing the bottom of the cup of coffee. The final "fucked" isn't a verb, it's a past participle acting as predicate adjective.

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

*raises hand re: alpaca*

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

I'm glad I'm not the only person who finds grammar hard before the first cup of coffee ...

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

The M-497 jet-propelled commuter train

Jet-propelled Sinclair C5 conversion

I was honored to be present when my friend Dave T, with no self-consciousness or irony whatsoever, uttered the immortal, "Fuckin' I'm stayin' fuckin' here; fuck you fuckers!"

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

Considering where all that grammarians' jargon cm from, plaguing generations of schoolchildren who were being faginised by their birth-language, how do you say it in Latin?

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

Dave Bell @67: Did you find that one one of the bumper stickers following Lee's link @ #17? I did!

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

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

Dave Bell @ 67:

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

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

Is there an echo in here?

Serge @26 wrote:
Hamsters of Dude

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

I went to Peru for a class trip some years ago. I decided that I wanted some alpaca yarn, because we were being sold alpaca and false-alpaca everything else. Forty dollars later, I have this big lump-o-yarn and a few random balls. I don't know how to tell if it's real alpaca, although I think synthetic wouldn't be as tough to crochet. Ten or fifteen rows into the scarf, it wasn't wider than a strip of bacon.
I have to learn to knit, I think, so I can participate fully in the knitting conversation. Same with spinning, which might be more interesting because I know a couple alpaca farmers. They might find me in the pen, drooling over the fiber.

self @ 68. Duh. If you had followed Dave's link, you would have seen that, in fact, yes.

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

G. Jules @ 37, thanks ever so for reminding me to wash my hooded alpaca sweater and put it in the new car.

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

Magenta Griffith @ 70... Then my diabolical plan has worked.

Serge: I see you beat me to it. I need some of Agatha's coffee this morning; mine isn't doing it.

Clifton Royston @ 75... I want some of Agatha's coffee too. Unfortuntely, if such a thing existed in the real world with such... ah... colorful effects upon the visual cortex, we'd probably wind up with the government waging a War on Dregs.

Aye!

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

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

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

#58: Have you considered spinning each of the fibers individually and then plying the two singles? I've seen some lovely lace yarns spun with one ply of silk and one ply of something else.

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

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

G. Jules @79: I'm not clear on whether my longies from Llamajamas are their alpaca or merino wool. But, in either case, they're treated with extra lanolin, as all wool diaper covers are. I'm not sure how much that makes the alpaca viable, if, in fact, it's used.

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

Caroline, ecce vox in clamantis deserto was the opening of my big speech in a Mystery Play at school.

I have been reduced to helpless giggling by Senex MacDonald.

I'll probably not be at Westercon, but for those coming in today who don't want to go to a baseball game this evening, Flax is having its warehouse sale... OMG, money will leave you and amazing paper and funky designed art-related or otherwise things will enter your life... Last time I was there my sister got a little foot-moved sit-in tin roadster; I got a blue aluminum art portfolio case. Very, very cool store.

There's a scriptwring job going locally.

Am I crazy to think of following it up?

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

I never did finish The Exploding Shampoo Plot

I've been trying to come up with nice mathematical properties of 86. So far the best I can do is

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

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

Maybe other math-geek Lucifices can do better.

I've started reading Ken MacLeod's book "Newton's Wake", and I'm enjoying it quite a lot. About a third of the way through the book, he's included the first two scenes of a play, "The Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy". As a fan pf Shakespeare and Marlowe, and a once (and perhaps future, if Vladimir Vladimirovich has his way) amateur Kremlinologist, I loved it, and I recommend it. Maybe if enough people like those scenes, he'll write the whole play.

the Canadian contribution to complete(*)monosyllables, of course, is

eh

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

Patrick, Teresa, (anyone else) - are you going to Readercon this year?

Argh!

Nothing more need be said.

Doonbogglefrog @ #88, Now there's a conversation-stopper.

Not.

So, I'm hunting around for cheap airfares from Portland to New York. I start with Newark as the destination airport. Prices are around $366.

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

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

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

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

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

Locus's latest ran an interview with Nalo Hopkinson. I must confess never having read anything by her, for some reason. Which of her novels would you recommend starting with?

Eighty-six.

Stefan Jones @90
I wonder how much trouble I'd be in if I missed the connection.

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

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

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

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

Stefan, I went looking for business class air fares from Edinburgh to Tokyo (because I am not -- as long as I can afford to go at all -- going to put up with 14 hours in economy class if I can help it). The online service I was using quoted £1800 return via Air France. So I went to AF's website to see if they could beat it. The fare they quoted, for the same class on the same aircraft, was ... £7700.

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

I hope she does better at Werewolf than I did. I'm still smarting from the poorly chosen defense strategy I adopted in my second game when I was wrongly accused of lycanthropy. (It was certainly innovative, but it didn't work.)

Chad Orzel (#33) / Dan Blum (#54): Y'know, a Diplomacy PBEM game among various Making Light commenters would be...interesting. In the apocryphal Chinese curse sense, perhaps.

Alex Cohen (#87): Dude.

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

Kathryn @ 18: ditto*, ditto**, and ditto***. </aol>

----

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

Diplomacy is a great game to play with people you wish to remove from your friends list, especially if you can convince them to play Austria-Hungary.

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

abi #93:

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

Dan @99
Yeah.

I never get the M-states right.

Stephan@90

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

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

The Romney dude: Trivial but far from unimportant reason not to elect (another) conservative GOP businessman president.

Chang Tsung-ch'ang, one of the Chinese warlords in the 1920's, had "the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger" and was "also known as 'Lao pa-shih' or 'Old Eighty-six' because the height of a pile of that number of silver dollars reputedly represented the length of the most valued portion of his anatomy in action."

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

As it happens, a few days ago I picked up a copy of the computer version of the Diplomacy game, and I think know where my old-style copy is in the attic.

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

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

Stefan @90,
What @96 said. With airplanes you will lose your return flight if you skip a leg. With a plane-train, it'd depend on the database integration. I know where you could ask...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stefan 90: They will cancel your return trip if you don't take ALL the legs of your trip out. The whole thing.

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

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

Wait, Teresa's at Foo Camp?

Dude!

(Xopher see bandwagon, jump on)

Wait, Teresa's at Foo Camp?

Dude!

(Xopher see bandwagon, jump on)

I'm not seriously intending to use the train connection. Just too many ways to screw it up. I may even pay more to fly to the airport near my parent's place.

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

Fly to Las Vegas: $350

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

Debra Doyle #63: There are languages that use intransitive verbs to do the things that Indo-European languages use adjectives for, or where there's no clear dividing line between verbs and adjectives.

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

Stefan @ 90 - While I have no idea if your airline (I guess Continental, BTW) would catch you for not taking the train connection, you might want to check out farecast.com. I've used it to time ticket purchases with some success. There's an element of risk involved if you wait, but it's paid off for me in the past.

Dave Bell @ 104

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

Give that to every player and call the game MAD.

I second the recommendation for Farecast. It saved us a bunch of money on our winter trip to see my Mom and family, and our trip in May to see my daughter for her college graduation. It does an excellent job both of finding the best available fares at present, and telling you whether to buy now or hang on and wait for them to drop.

Hey, I just said that about "dude" - minus the hamster - in the "British words are useful and cool" thread, not to be mistaken for the "British words are pretentious and redundant" thread next door (this is a full-service blog).

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

People who say English isn't a tonal language are, like, duuuude.

Aye?!

104, 112: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

On a more serious new-version-of-classic-game note, I've found Risk 2210 A.D. to be a blast.

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

I forgot to pass on my Bloomsday greeting in a timely fashion, so here it is, belatedly: Hypertextually speaking, yes they said yes.

Hey Xopher,

Do Pagans say "Drude"?

Speaking of knitting-over at the Tomato Nation blog,someon'e looking for help on identifying an old knitting book for teenagers. If anyone can help,just leave it in the comments.

Dori @97
:sigh of agreement:
'04.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Henry at 110: Thanks. I had a suspicion I was using that word wrong; it's good to know what the right one is.

Dave Bell @104:

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

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

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

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

Bruce 119: No. They say

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

Fragano@53: <pause, looks up paratwa>.

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

Looks like a good series, though.

Cliff J. Burns dropped into the Digby thread to suggest that we should all check out his blog on the writing life.

So, I checked out his blog.

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

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

Well, there's one more piece of evidence supporting the theory that someone who makes the admission "I'm a snob" is really saying something like "I'm a bullying jackass who's unable to distinguish between a preference and a virtue."

Xopher @#124:

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

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

Xopher #124:

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

Regarding the blog post in question, I'll remark only that seen more convincing arguments for the utility and justice of elitism.

Patrick Connors #125: Liege Killer was pretty good, your mileage may vary a great deal with the other three books in the series.

My word, Mr. Burns post is an ugly one. On the other hand, the previous post is entitled, "Pride: An Exorcism" and in general makes me want to beat the man over the head with a copy of Delany's About Writing.

Folks:

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

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

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

PNH, 130: Well, it's certainly difficult to imagine a less convincing one.

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

But I'd like to think that at all times the discourse be civil and reasoned...or perhaps your etiquette only goes one way...

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

Charlie@65: Have you seen Night Watch. I want one of those jet-propelled utilities trucks to deal with the traffic jams caused by amateurs in the middle of commuter time....

Hostile reaction? No, no, no. The opposite, in fact. I think a careful reading of what I say in the essay would mitigate against some of the harsher judgments the piece makes. I enjoy debate, thoughtful exchanges that reflect differences of opinion. I'm not a "bullying jackass", I'm a credible individual making an assertion based on 20+ years of experience, service to the printed word. My points are intelligently and cogently presented. If you've got opinions, supportive, contrary, I'd love to hear them. Perhaps I'll leave it there...seems I've stepped on some toes here and that was not my intention. Honestly.

From Burns' site:
Fantasy writers…well, fantasy writers are uniformly terrible. Their audience is made up of pointy-eared boneheads who can’t wait for the next installment of the latest Robert Jordan abomination, a thousand pages of muck he manages to churn out on a monthly basis. Airheads. Twats of the first order.

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

Cliff @ 137

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

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

Cliff @ 137

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

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

Lenny Bailes @ 138... He really said that fantasy writers are uniformly terrible? Hmm... I'd better tell Lisa Goldstein, M.K.Hobson and my wife among others.

Mr. Burns appears (from my reading his writing at his blog, yes, all of it) to be a confrontational sort of person. I won't go so far as "troll". But no need to feed him either, as it's bound to be interpreted either as "those SF bozos" or "see, I'm completely right". There appears to be no more nuanced ground available.

JRR Tolkien, a "terrible" writer? An interesting perspective.

I can understand the impulse to say that SF is too much science, not enough story-- I say that about *parts* of the genre. But only parts, and I know that those weaknesses apply only to those parts. It's a big genre. I don't like all of it. My reaction to the essay was approximately, "Dude*. Have you *read*...?" The world is full of books. Many books are better than many others.

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

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

Xopher, Mr. Burns may be referring to all the space that Tolkien wasted on exposition and world-building. Or, he could be objecting to the way Tolkien's SF predictions didn't pan out - for example, his prediction that the forces of Mordor would use a token ring architecture.

"But I'd like to think that at all times the discourse be civil and reasoned...or perhaps your etiquette only goes one way..."

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

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

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

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

Oh, bullshit.

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

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

FungiFromYuggoth @#145: They don't? I have to work on token ring from time to time, and it's eeeeevil.

Patrick @#146:

*grin*

Cliff Burns @ #147:

...Dude...

"Secret billionaire" made me laugh harder than...well, harder than a lot of things.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

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

Best wishes to you--

Cliff Burns @ #137,

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

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

Mr. Burns' oeuvre (as listed by Locus) has certain features of interest, as do his collaborations with Mrs. (Harmon-)Burns. Unfortunately, this margin is too small to contain a list of cross-references to previous other threads on ML.

Henry at #86. Oh, Henry. Dude. The vexed "eh". Heh.

What CnAyjuns say is *A*, ay?

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

Charlie at #115 knows.

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

Cliff Burns @137, etc.,

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

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

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

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

Anyone notice a draft? Oh, did the door bounce off someone's ass? Well, I guess it'll help clear out the stink.

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

Oh, Odin is our master.
He keeps us from disaster.
So each year we kill the pastor.
And that's good enough for me!

FungiFromYoggoth @ 145

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

I'll show him bad fantasy!

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

The awful thing is, it seems to me Mr. Burns has some talent. But if he spends all his time on "sophomoric attempts at self-praise and self-justification", well, it doesn't matter that he has talent. If you're still reading, Mr. Burns, think on that. If you're upset and unhappy enough--and you are unhappy at least, it oozes from your words--and want out, go do something about it.

Cliff Burns is a dolt.

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

Cliff Burns: Admitting that it's a knee-jerk reaction, you've either read so little of "fantasy" and so little of "hard SF" that you don't know whereof you speak, or you can't really read.

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

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

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

Skipping back up to the alpaca knitting discussion: it's really good for lace or anything you plan on stretching. Most alpaca has something of a slinky quality.

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

Damn. Anyone know a rhyme for Chalchiuhtecolotl? Oh, frell it anyway.

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

...and if everybody sings a verse of "Real Old Time Religion", we're never goin' to get outta here.

If I'd known Teresa was coming I'd have invited her to talk at Google too (Scalzi and Cory seemed to enjoy it).

Cliff Burns @ 133: "But I'd like to think that at all times the discourse be civil and reasoned...or perhaps your etiquette only goes one way..."

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

"I don’t read for pleasure,"

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

#165: True dat.

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

Maybe it's just plain old heresy, though.

Whoa. Err, I guess that should be, "Dude". Westercon is *right next door* to me. Well, next door in California terms.

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

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

I had to go and read that Cliff Burns blog post.

I think I need a bath, now.

Owley Chalchiuhtecolotl
Doesn't give two hoots for rhyming;
That might drive you to the bottle,
But he's good enough for me.

BTW: www.godchecker.com

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

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

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

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

With respect to #151, at least Cliff gets points for the most civil "I'm taking my toys and going home" post that I've read. So maybe he figured it out just too late. However, unless he wants to make himself look worse, I suggest he does not come back to defend himself. A respectful waiting period before returning might be useful (possibly in a different thread).

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

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

Dude.

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

Really, it works.

I guess Mister Burns wanted to draw attention to what he does, and attention is what he got. Is it PT Barnum who said there is no such thing as bad publicity? I personally think we've already granted our visitor too much attention, but that's just my opinion.

Aha! Found the source of the tickle that Cliff Burns' form of self description (eg "My points are intelligently and cogently presented.") roused in me.

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

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

174: "Heavens to Betsy!"

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

abi @ 176... even a pearl starts as an irritant

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

Dave 165: True, if we just sing our favorite verses (and I admit to a moment of "what have I done" about that), but not if we create new ones, like the one above.

___ 171: We can do better than that:

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

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

Rob (177): I don't know about you, but that can't be where I picked up 'oh dear' because I never watched Snuffleupagus.

'Mmhmm' is also very useful.

Serge @ 178

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

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

We will hang out with Anansi
He's the spider god we fancy
And he wears eight legged pants, He's
got enough legs there for me!

Cthulu's dead it's true
But not the same as me or you
He'll rise again from the deep deep blue
And that's good enough for me!

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

This thread is wonderful-- I often get the song stuck in my head and only had the chorus and the Aphrodite verse I posted. It got repetitive after about two rounds through.

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

(I felt it just wasn't right to have a Cthulu one without at least one Lovecraftian ten-point word, so:)

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

(cont'd from #91)

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

Madeline F. @#168:

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

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

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

[checks mirror]

Oh yeah. Totally!

Kathryn @ 121: :goes to mashup 30 lbs of plums waiting in the icebox:
:Tired of plums for breakfast, this week. Still, saving them from the compost heap, me:

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

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

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

Forgive me
they were pernicious
so many
and so repetitive.

Our Goddess is Teresa
And we're sure to always praise her
Lest she gets out her eraser
Whch s gd ngh fr m!

(If any mangled versions of my attempts to reply to Serge's question at #91 show up here, please ignore/delete them. The site kept eating my link to the Locus Review Index, so I gave up and emailed him directly.)

I promise I'd already come up with this before I reached the part of the thread where people started going on about Chalchiuhtecolotl:

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

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

And there's the good ol' Southern "Bless your heart" which means anything but.

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

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

If I start belting out "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me!" would it be too obvious that I have a two-year-old at home?

I haven't read a great deal of Nalo Hopkinson, which is strange because I like almost everything I have read. I liked Brown Girl in the Ring much better than Midnight Robber, but I was young then, and I've found that many books I didn't like were just a little ahead of my brain in terms of maturity.

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

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

Let us all go worship Zeus
Although his morals are quite loose
He gave Leda quite a goose
But it was good enough for me!

Xopher @ #179:

tshocolatl

You can keep your copper kettles
The china for your tea
C is for cookie
That's good enough for me!

Okay, I guess now is the time to officially become the artist formerly known as adamsj.

And my contribution:

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

Tim 196: I substituted 'sh' for an 's' with a hacek (which should have a hacek over the c). That's how I first saw the Nahuatl spelled. OTOH I also should have used a 'k' instead of the 'c', and there should be a join mark over the 'tl'—I think. It was a long time ago.

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

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

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

Serge@186: I think Brown Girl in the Ring is a good place to start, but I also feel Midnight Robber is a bit more SF-oriented, if that is to your taste.

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

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

So blockquote doesn't like me. Fine. At the risk of boring you as I repeat myself when I'm distressed:

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

I really have to learn phonetic vocabulary so comments like Xopher's will make better sense. What words I have are in Spanish and poorly demonstrated-- most of what I remember is a class involving all sorts of sibilants and the evolution from one to the next. Every time the professor gave us a new one, the room erupted into quiet hissing.

CHip @ 136: While viewing Nightwatch, I was reasonably convinced that young Mr. Stross was piloting the rocket-fired wagon in question.

Dave Bell and Xopher

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

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

Let's tell stories about Raven -
He's sneaky, clever, brave, and
He keeps us misbehavin'
And that's good enough for me!

The one syllable word for everything in northern Swedish is "jo". It's originally the form of yes you use when you reply positively to a negative question. ("I guess you don't want any more tea?" "Yes, I do want more tea.") In northern Swedish, it became the standard word for yes, and it can even be pronounced on the inhalation. There's no way to write that down sensibly, so I've taken to writing it *schuuu* with different number of u:s depending on the length and infliction.

re "White people dancing" -- I just note that "Safety Dance" has the perfect rhythm for Morris dancing, a style of ritual dance done almost exclusively by white people (and difficult, interesting as one learns more about it, and ultimately resulting, mostly, in problems in the knees or low back). I won't say it's offensive, but I'd bet one could put together a similar video about any ethnic group from what's out there on YouTube.

On old time religion ...
I just had two guys come to the door. (1/2 mile for the nearest paved road and no vehicle in the driveway. I have to admit they are thorough.) Not sure if they were JW or Mormons, probably JW: when they mentioned the Bible I said "I'm Heterodox Shinto. Thank you, Good Day." And closed the door.

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

Diatryma 202: Mini-Glossary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Xopher. I'm still not clear on everything, but it's better than I had-- I'm working from the Spanish linguistics class (which is why I mentally pronounce Xopher as either Zopher or something between Shopher and S(h)opher) and a fair amount of voice lessons where the idea was to make it both pretty and right, slanting toward pretty when necessary. Just knowing 'affricate' has brightened my day immensely.
I'm also glad I'm alone in the office. They already know I'm weird about words here, but still.

#209: Where are the plosives? And the -- oh, there are affricates.

Never mind.

Now that's what you can call a Cabinet reshuffle....

Chemical Creationism!

On the topic of monosyllabic conversation-carriers---

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

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

Xopher @ 199:

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

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

Speaking of "hunh", I have picked up the Japanese habit of responding with "ngg." It basically means, "You spoke." It's an acknowledgment and little else. Not a negation, nor an affirmation. Sometimes when my wife asks me to do something, like put my socks in the dirty laundry instead of on the floor, I'll say "ngg." To which she'll reply, "Ngg janai!" Which means, "Don't nggg me!"

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

Terry Karney (#162): Are you confusing (presumably Robert) Jordan with Joel Rosenberg?

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

We Orcish serve the fiery Eye
And hope we never draw too nigh
Because there's worse to do than die
That's evil enough for me.

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

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

For a moment, I wondered how they'd managed to get hobbits for that Safety Dance video.

#192: And there's the good ol' Southern "Bless your heart" which means anything but.

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

But, well:

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

Serge #186: Why don't you try Midnight Robber first? I think you'll enjoy it.

abi @ 218

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

* or should that be "tyre-iron"?

We Nine set forth upon the Way
though where it goeth none can say;
Gandalf, we hope, will save the day
and that's good enough for me.

Bruce, you gave up too soon.

Sauron
War-on

It's gratis, no royalties required.

Heresiarch @188

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xopher@ #199:
Ah, you studied the language in a modern orthography! How fascinating. That would explain everything. (Although to be consistent I suppose you should have spelled "Chalchiuhtecolotl" something like "Tšaltšiwtekoloƛ" (OK, you probably didn't use the barred-lambda for "tl" in that system, but I kind of like it, & you couldn't remember exactly what you did have...)

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

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

Raise a glass to good old Bacchus
And his ongoing drunken fracas
Although his rites are prone to shock us
They're still good enough for me!

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, check the email tht your name leads to.

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

plum cobbler, plum kuchen - that one usually wants prune-plums - plum jelly, um, I need to check the cookbooks ... they should freeze okay, though: I'd use sugar-pack, like peaches. Plum butter, which is plums cooked down, sieved, and cooked some more with sugar (half as much as fruit). Plum juice for plum-ade (can be frozen, I think)?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale --

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

Maybe not the right kind of plums, but you could try making plum wine...

In case anyone has recovered from the last game:

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

PNH @ 146: I always read you, always admire you. But sometimes, you make me grin. It's a grin I haven't used a lot this past year, and I always love the way I feel when something inspires it. It's all teeth and crinkled nose. So thanks.

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

Diatryma 210: Glad it was helpful. I say ZOH-fur (/zofr/), but as long as it's mental I don't care how you pronounce it! It does bug me when people put the 't' back in - you wouldn't write *Xtmas, would you? - but by that same token I can't get too upset if people think it's pronounced EKS-ah-fur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops. Please substitute 'most Americans' for 'an American' in my antepenultimate paragraph above.

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

Btw, I was just watching part of Star Wars on TV today. They edited out the split second where Leia kisses Luke "for luck". Just the bit where she actually touches her lips to his, so it looked like she kissed him on the cheek.

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

D. & Xopher on plosives:
The word "stop" is used in a narrow sense which is synonymous with "plosive", but also in a broader sense in which all plosives are stops but not all stops are plosives. From "A Little Encyplopaedia of Phonetics":

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

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

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

Is the Nahuatl "tl" l sound like the l sound found in Welsh and Icelandic?

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

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

Tim 236: I was taught to use the term 'stop' only when ALL airflow is halted. Since /m/ and /n/ allow air to pass through the nose, we gave them their own category, and didn't count them among the stops.

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

Xopher @233: "li'l" in my idiolect has glottal stop followed by a syllabic /l/.

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

Abi, kittehs has lurv fer yer verse.

Mew!

Jim @ #239: Right, that's the one I'm talking about. It doesn't sound at all like "lill".

Ohhhhh! I thought you were talking about the 'tl' sound. Yeah, there's a glottal stop there.

Kathryn #225:
Plum Conserve from the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook

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

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

little light, #174, I was reared by fundamentalist Christians and taught to listen to boring older folks. I know lots of little interjections:

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

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

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

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

Xopher -- yay! I've been pronouncing your nom d'internet correctly! (You'd be surprised how often it gets spoken aloud in this household. We frequently have dinner table conversations about Making Light threads.)

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

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

Cats in the belfry; Cats in the dark
Cats on the hot stove; watch for the spark!
Cats loaf and linger; cats lurk and lark
As they revel in the joys of --- syncopation!

Xopher @#233: Oops, here I was thinking it was "stoh-fer" as in, um, Lean Cuisine. Sorry!

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

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

Caroline 245: Ooh, now I have to imagine what you're saying about me. And I didn't see if Han shot first; I was channel surfing.

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

Mary @247:

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

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

I don't know if I pronounce merry, marry, and Mary differently; the only person I have on hand to test is myself, and I *read* them differently. It's like knight and night. 'kn' is pronounced differently from 'n' in my head, and the vowel is a little different. But it's mostly in my head.
A past roommate once made fun of me for some time because I say 'bury' like 'burry' rather than 'berry'. It's a peril of getting so much through text.

Nalo Hopkinson has written four novels. They are all different. I would suggest reading them in the order she wrote them, although my personal favorite is Midnight Robber.

Diatryma, your observation reminds me of Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics, long ago, one, during a class on IPA, one of my friends asked the professor "How do I say thing?" Of course, since she was from Memphis Tennesee, it came out more like "Ha du Ah sahy thae'eiang?" (darn for not being ablt to do superscript notation).

Let us now praise old Haepheastos
He makes the moutains restless
and he's covered with asbestos
and that's good enough for me

Let us now praise old Haepheastos
He makes the moutains restless
and he's covered with asbestos
and that's good enough for me

Kathryn at 121 and the room you couldn't get into:

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

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

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

re the four-letter-words particle with words like zoooogenous, etc.

I tried to come up with some of my own:

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

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

aa-aardvark: an anteater that inhabits lava formations

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

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

Can anyone do better?

Sean Sakamoto @ 216: I think my favorite Japanese verbalization is "eeeeee?" meaning approximately "Universe does not PARSE!" I remember a particular show where the studio audience would be shown a funny video clip (a dog playing a piano or something) and the contestants had to guess what was happening based on the length and the particular intonation of the audience's "eeeeeee*?" It was awesomely weird, as only Japanese TV can be.

*really, it warrants that many e's.

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

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

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

abi @ #93: "Don't try this with checked bags. You'll probably never see them again."

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

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

You don't.

Heresiarch @ #257, "It was awesomely weird, as only Japanese TV can be."

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

Serge #186:
Either "Brown Girl in the Ring" or "Midnight Robber". I read & enjoyed both years ago, liked Brown Girl (her debut novel) more, and found both to be fresh & unusual; not many SF/F writers use 'non-Anglo'* cultural traditions in their story settings?

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

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

The yawning realisation that The Matrix has you.

Ah, ye beat me to Hephaestus. But that's just as well. The rhymes I was contemplated made much of his "manly, hairy chest-us", which might have been good enough for me but not for prime time.

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

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

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

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

Now me, I can't for the life of me say "uff-da" in any convincing tone. It's the Minnesotan "ayup," sorta. Maybe.

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

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

Yah shure yu'betcha!

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

Well, the first part of the end-of-season Doctor Who has been broadcast.

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

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

Our first line names a random god,
we'll then use one quip to show what's odd
with her, it, him, or the full pod,
And that's good enough for me!

I just deleted a spam email before its subject line had a chance to register. "Paleontology smut". Now I'm left with just my imagination as to what might have been inside...

I've heard that the stereotypical (at one time) "ah-so" Japanese generic vocalization came from the then Crown Prince, later Emperor, in the earlier part of the 20th Century, father of the reigning Emperor. (He is mostly called Hirohito outside Nippon, Emperor Shōwa (Shōwa Tennō) within it.)

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

Mary Dell @247

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

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

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

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

Jules @ 266 Paleontology smut? Hmm... Maybe Gardner Dozois how has his own spamming outfit.

Marilee @ 244... Ouch. Luckily for me, the only piece of metal in my body (that I know of anyway) has shown no sign of being rejected as it is in my jaw. I don't mind flapping my jaw around when I'm among friends, but not in such manner.

Thanks for the Nalo Hopkinson recommendations, Faren, Laurel, Fragano and Soon Lee. Sue and I went to the local Borders last night after having dinner and of course they didn't have a single book by Hopkinson. I could have ordered Midnight Robber from them, but I'll be working in San Francisco the week of July 15. My employer is only a few blocks from Stacey's Bookstore. Abd there is Berkeley with the Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival.

Mez @267: I don't know about that story, but so is a very basic word in Japanese, with a meaning like the "so" in "is that so?" This leads to one of my favorite Japanese phrases, "sosososososososo!", which means basically, "yes, that's right!"

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

#250: Dialects are fun.

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

Lydia Nickerson's #249 is a perfect description of the difference between merry, marry, and Mary. The Alleghenies might just be where the division is, because my fellow Rhode Islanders distinguish them, and so do both of my parents, one from New York City, and one from the Finger Lakes region of New York, while none of the large contingent of North Carolingians that live here do. One of my friends from NC is named Kerry, and she hears no difference between her name and the word carry, but I sure do.

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

Soon 260: In America, 'European Americans'. Elsewhere, 'European-descended people'.

Nicole 262: To me, ALL those words rhyme.

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

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

* Not used if the last name is Nielsen Hayden.

247/249/250: I usually pronounce 'Mary', 'merry', and 'marry' the same, although I can distinguish 'marry' from the other two if I think about it. I literally can't imagine how one would go about differentiating the other two.

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

merry vs marry...

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

Xopher @ 275

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

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

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

dcb 278: Yep, pretty much any /t/ or /d/ in that position can be pronounced that way.

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

Bruce@164: I remember a 3rd line "If a little, then a lot'l!" but not who it was for. (Rhymes not mentioned: throttle, mottle, crottle (if you have greeps).)

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

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

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

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

Sica @ #237:
Roughly speaking, Nahuatl "tl" is to Welsh "ll" (and I guess the equivalent Icelandic sound) as English "ch" is to English "sh".

CHip 280: Well, I'm talking about naïve speakers. Just because you CAN pronounce it without a glottal stop doesn't mean it's normally said that way. And I'd have to listen carefully. Sometimes the g-stop is stronger than others.

ethan #274:

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

Tim May's #226 got stuck in the moderation queue, and is just now approved. Unfortunately, as a result, all the comments between #226 and this one have had their numbers incremented forward by one, thus throwing several references-by-number off by one.

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

Jules @ 267:
Paleontology smut.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @#262 & dcb @#268:

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

As for dialects:

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

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

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

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

Dave Bell's #189 is wonderfully clever, and only a little bit marred by the fact that TNH pronounces her first name ter EE sa instead of the Romance-language ter AY za.

Mary Dell @ 287

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

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

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

dcb @#289:

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

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

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

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

dcb @#289:

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

Patrick @288
So more like...

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

I think what bothers me most about that alleged dialect test is that, while my regional dialect does not distinguish between merry, marry, and Mary, the vowel in all of them is reduced and back: the default vowel in the PNW dialect (according to my actual Professors of anthropological linguistics at WSU) is schwa. This causes flatland furriners to think we say "beg" for "bag" when, in fact, both words, in the mouth of a mossback, use schwa.

Marry merry Mary: in my (mainly southern*) British accent they all sound clearly different and I can't imagine them sounding the same. How odd.

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

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

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

Unrelated to anything:

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

In other words: it bit, hard.

(Open thread)

Locus is reporting that Roger Elwood has died.

Roger Elwood has died. Actually, if Locus can be believed, he's been dead for four months.

Tim @ 282

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

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

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

#281 ::: CHip "If a little, then a lot'l!" but not who it was for.

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

For Teresa and other roses & cooking fans here: Dorrie Greenspan writes about the Julia Child Rose given to her.

Carol Kimball #299:

I think you're referring to:

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

It's by Richard Armour.

Let's sing praises to Osiris
And if you are desirous
Write His praises on papyrus!
It's good enough for me.

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

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

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

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

Jules @267: I have a novella in an anthology which also includes something which could be fairly described as paleontology smut, at least in venues where the readership will not get upset about the use of the word "smut" to describer erotic romance. So it's out there in the commercial small press.

Julia has once again failed to notice left-over spam tags in her saved information...

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

When I began #297, I had not seen #296.

No one has mentioned Cthulhu
Although he'd love to rule you --
A tentacle or two'll do,
And that's good enough for me!

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

Magenta, @ #302 "I'm not proud... or tired."

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

For Xopher:

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

Well I met a girl named Mary
and we decided to marry
Now we're really not so merry
but it's good enough for me.

Oh, speaking of Cthulhu... given Lovecraft's odd & inconsistent advice on how to pronounce that name, I've wondered in the past whether the correct rendering of the initial "cth" (or, at least, the closest approximation producible by a human vocal tract) might not be the very lateral affricate discussed above. Similar sounds have been transcribed with similar combinations of letters before. Anyway, I sometimes read it that way in my head.

Jules @ #267:
Dinosaurs & sodomy, presumably.

Eleanor @#294: Now that you mention it, I can definitely hear a difference in how my British god-mamma says Mary and merry...but not in how my New Englander friends do. My godmother says my name with sort of an elongated aaa in the first syllable, so it's two strong syllables. Whereas the usual midwestern pronounciation is more like "Mare" (as in horse) with a quick long E tacked on the end....and "Mare" is the most common nickname for it.

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

Mary Dell (311): For such people as doctors' offices and mechanics, I tend to drop the 'Aileen' and just go by 'Mary' (it saves on the explanations). When I thus introduce myself as 'Mary Buss', a significant number of people wait for another name; I think they're hearing it as 'Mary Beth'.

Mark Atwood commented in rasff yesterday that he ran into Teresa at the FOO camp intro dinner and they spent their time comparing their LDS legacies.

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

ethan @ 295... I thought the Fantastic Four movie was better than expected. Kind of like when you expect to come down with the stomach flu and all you get are the sniffles. But it still sucked the big one.

(cont'd from #314)... And the FF movie's director/writer may be called Tim Story, but I think he knows less about drama and storytelling than I do, which is pretty scary. Compare the movie's events after Galactus shows up with how the comic-book originally told that tale.

Mary Dell, when I was working in the KU Library Interlibrary Loan, my boss was Mary Kay (surname altered on Ellis Island a couple of generations previously from a mouthful of a Polish name). She always said it was frustrating because people would go Mary Kay what? when she told them her name.

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

Serge, in the wikipedia entry for the FF movie, it quotes The New York Times as calling it an "amalgam of recycled ideas, dead air, dumb quips, casual sexism and pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo," which I think is only inaccurate in that it's too nice.

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

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

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

Mary Dell @ 311: I can't quite understand the distinction you're making. I bet if you asked your British godmother to say "mare" it would sound much like the first syllable of her "Mary".

Paula @ 316

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

ethan @ 317... When a movie is based on something that's been around for over 40 years, there's bound to be some recycling. Look at the X-men movies, as an example. The worst sin of both Fantastic Four movies is that they are BORING.

ethan#317:

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

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

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

The Shema admits just YHWH,
And he says "There's only My way,
So it's that -- or there's the highway!"
And He's good enough for me!

Ethan: Probably any collection which includes The Dunwich Horror or The Color From Space is a good starting point. His fans tend to either love or hate the novella At the Mountains of Madness so I wouldn't start there as you might be one of the haters. Be warned, the quality of Lovecraft's writing, in the sense of style, ranges from over-florid but solid to atrocious. It's his ideas that are fantastic in both senses of the word.

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

Serge #320: That's true. Still, don't you get the feeling that they recycled ideas just to make sure they wouldn't be asked to have any of their own?

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

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

Also Clifton Royston #323, thank you. I didn't know that and will keep it mind.

ethan @317: If you like Lord Dunsany's stuff, you might like Lovecraft's early Dunsanyesque work -- one of my favorites is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is weird fantasy, not really horror. The best of his later horror stories include At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "The Dunwich Horror", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Thing on the Doorstep". I'm not sure which of the currently in print collections would be the best place to start, but maybe the Penguin The Thing on the Doorstep or The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories would be good.

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

High-flying cranes, Uzza, Manat--
Intercessors, (adding al-Lat)
('Till the Prophet, he loaded birdshot!)
Still, They're good enough for me.

Jon @ 274, Aunts and ants play an important part in Sredni Vashtar, one of Saki's (or HH Munro's) more disturbing stories, tho the competition is keen. I'm lucky enough to have a large (complete?) collection, but recommend they only be taken in small-to-moderate doses. Here's a good appreciation, with links to more information.

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

dcb (#289): English is my first language, and I literally can't hear the distinction between certain letters in the (phonetic) Hindi alphabet, and I can barely hear the distinction between the ones that have an 'h' sound after (Xopher et al., is that 'aspirated?'). The relevant bit of the Hindi alphabet goes something like:

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

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

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

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

CHip @281: I have a friend from Massachusetts who uses the term "grinder" to refer only to a sub made with meatballs. It makes sense that way.

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

The Catsup Bottle

First a little
Then a lottle

Ogden Nash

My Gran says Mary as "may-ri," so there's a difference for me when she says it. She also says "say-ruh" for Sarah.
We've also always pronounced the "h" in "which" "whale" and "where," which seems to drive people nuts once they've discovered it. I didn't really know some people considered it wrong until an episode of Family Guy, though, when Stewie and Brian get sidetracked because one of them pronounces it and the other doesn't.

Paula Helm Murray @#316: Both of my folks came from a tradition where only boys get middle names--women use their maiden names as middle names once they get married, as you do. I'm the exeption, because Mom wanted to give me an extra name (Elizabeth) to commemerate her late sister. ("Mary" is because after 5 boys in a row she prayed to the BVM for a girl!) My sister uses her confirmation name as her middle name and has a hyphenated last name...and all of the kids in the next generation have first, middle, and last names regardless of gender.

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

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

Jim @326:
Yeah, but.

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

As far as I can remember from my linguistics classes:

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

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

Hmmm. Movie talk. Gotta do me some of that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agree with Clifton Royston@323 about Lovecraft's florid writing style.

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

Where I grew up it's called a "hoagie". Some people called a toasted hoagie a grinder, but I don't think that was universal; most people of my generation didn't make the distinction.

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

Bruce@337:

Mmm. Hoagies.

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

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

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

Now I'm hungry.

#317: The first Lovecraft story I can remember reading--not necessarily the first one I read, but the first one that made an impression--is "The Dreams in the Witch House." It still creeps me out. (Don't bother watching the "Masters of Horror" adaptation--it dumped everything that made the original story work. Also, its Brown Jenkin looked like some sort of small, unfunny alien stand-up comedian.)

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

I have a Delaware/Philadelphia accent, and I distinguish between merry, marry, and Mary, so that distinction isn't limited to New England.

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

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

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

I euthanized my cat, Wade, tonight.

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

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

#341: Sorry to hear the news.

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

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

* * *

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

I'm so sorry, Dan.

Dan Hoey - I'm sorry for you and your family. The decision you made is never an easy one, I've had to make it twice myself, for a cat and a dog. I'm certain that Wade had a good life full of love and affection, and you should cherish those memories.

Oh, dan I 'm crying. That is soo bad, I've had to do it once on a cat that was way too young but turned into a hissing, spitting, pooping, pissing monstor at the vet and got kidney disease.

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

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

I got it backwards--there are hoagies here and subs in Delaware.

Dan,

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

Dan, much sympathy. That's hard.

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

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

[tiny mind blown to geeky smithereens]

Ethan@217-the answer to your BSG question is yes,and 10 yes.

The cargo, so the shamans say,
will land upon the new runway;
all whites' goods will come our way.
And that's just fine with me!

My youngest sister, Mary,
Met a guy whose name is Terry,
And when they chose to marry
We were merry as could be!

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

Dan #341: My sympathies.

Dark Ages scribes spent lives to save the wisdom
of philosophs renowned from former times.
Copying and recopying used their lifetimes
while error crept in, turning order random.
Invention of the press soon increased freedom,
dividing Church from Stately pow'r betimes.
The spread of words recorded, prose and rhymes,
became an acid, soon dissolving kingdom.
Now the Net spreads words to ease our boredom,
and helps us spread both wisdom and pastimes.
A few, oft those accused of thought crimes,
essay to keep words from being struck dumb.
Words, set free, return to free their speakers;
words held hard will wound when used in fight.
Words offered as gifts to make us ponder
are words we often see on Making Light.

Mez @ 268: "I've heard that the stereotypical (at one time) "ah-so" Japanese generic vocalization came from the then Crown Prince, later Emperor, in the earlier part of the 20th Century, father of the reigning Emperor."

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

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

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

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

Bruce @ 350: Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Paula @228,

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

Patric @ 348

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

Is it next Saturday yet?

There is (to my ears) no difference between the words stair & steer, or peer & pear, or beer & bare, when spoken by Kiwis with a strong accent.

CHip@281: Kevin@263: what's "grinder" where you come from? I grew up with "sub" around DC and was startled by "hero" when I lived in mid-state NY; "sub" now seems common in Boston, possibly due to chains that have uniform labels instead of matching the local vocabulary.

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

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

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

For some reason it went without saying in my last post that I'm from Iowa, and thus have the safe-for-television Midwestern lack of accent. This forgetfulness is a sign I should be in bed already.

Slightly late for this, but 264: I've ran into similar foodstuff confusions by going from one part of Germany to another. I learned my German in Nürnberg, which is in northern Bavaria, and I now live in Jena, which is in Thuringia. The Franconian dialect of northern Bavaria is very similar to the Thuringian dialect, but the Thuringian involves Saxon influences to a degree not presemt in Franconian.

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

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

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

Dan Hoey @341
I'm sorry about Wade.

Home from ApolloCon, have had a few hours' sleep, catching up...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

debcha @ 329:
I'm guessing you're talking about the "dental" (tongue pressed up against the teeth) versus "retroflex" (tongue curled back and pressed against the roof of the mouth) consonants, yes? I sort of learned to pronounce the first variety in college, when I had a crush on a woman whose name I wanted to pronounce correctly... The second one I had explained to me during a visit to India, but I can't twist my tongue properly for it.

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

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

Dan Hoey @341
My sympathies about Wade. It's never easy is it? At least we can say, for our pets, "enough suffering; let's end it now". I've always seen euthanasia, a gentle death, as the last gift we can give them. Doesn't always help us to feel better, however. Getting the timing right is difficult. From what you've shared with us, it sounds like you waited while there was hope, but not past that.

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

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

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

dcb @364
"Edinbourough" - you mean "Edinbru" (short "u" to end on), I presume?

What? E'mbra?

And as everyone knows, two Australia's (Uhstraylya's) cities are Melb'n and Brisb'n. Not Melbouuurne and Brisbayne.

#358: sub is short for submarine, not subway. Wikipedia suggests that the term may have originated in Boston, or Groton, CT.

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

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

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

Following up on my own post, upthread, it turns out the job advert I saw in the local paper was part of a package deal, a week late because of deadlines, and they already had the killer slushpile in the mail room.

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

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

abi, on the pronunciation issue I stick with Scotland's Greatest Poet, William Topaz McGonagall - ("Topaz"? Really?) yes, Topaz - who perpetrated the following couplet in "The Tay Bridge Disaster":

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

(More here

One of the features of the old Doctor Who, back in the days of (nominal) half-hour episodes, was the way in which there could be whole episodes without The Doctor, as the situation steadily fell apart. If the current story were an old-style 4-parter, you could quite cheerfully leave The Doctor out of the next episode, and follow Martha and Jack.

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

ajay @369
On my charitable days, I remind myself that pronunciations shift over time, and maybe they did pronounce it "Edin-borrow". It's plausible, though these days only tourists try to close the vowel in any way.

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

For some reason. ajay, I find myself wondering if McGonagall's verse might be performable to such tiunes as "California Dreamin'".

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

Then I wake up screaming.

Dan @#341: I'm so sorry. We had to do this for one of our kitties a couple of years ago...it's so difficult.

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

#370: Often, during the black-and-white era, this happened because the actor playing the Doctor had gone on vacation for a week.

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

Ooo, Mr. Burns is dissing us in his newest post:

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

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

Oh, and I will send 5 dollars via paypal to the first person who comes up with a word that rhymes with both Cthulhu AND Quetzalcoatl.

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

ajay @#369:

...felt no sorrow...

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

(j/k!)

Mr. Burns has such pride in his writing
--though it's sneers he's inclined to inciting--
Yet I don't see his book
Any place where I look;
Pray tell, it is all that exciting?

Mr. Burns has such pride in his writing
--though it's sneers he's inclined to inciting--
Yet I don't see his book
Any place where I look;
Pray tell, it is all that exciting?

121, Kathryn -- I think what you describe is a problem, and the solution isn't for you to join SFWA but for the writers to stop closeting themselves in their suites and to hang out with everyone else.

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

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

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

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

I realized a bit ago that part of the reason these are easier for me than sonnets are is that part of my brain is convinced these don't have to rhyme. Songs are about vowels! Even if I'm not happy with what I have, it's fun.

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

Seen via a friend's blog, I offer Who's On First, The Movie. (Note: that's not a link to the original Abbott and Costello sketch.)

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

Hmm, let's see:

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

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

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

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

abi @ 371... You mean that the locals pronounce it 'edin-bor'? Groan. After years of reminding myself to say 'edin-borrow', I find that the current pronounciation is actually quite close to the one I grew up with, which is the city's French name, which sounds close to 'Ay-dain-boor'.

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

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

>[tiny mind blown to geeky smithereens]

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

JC @ 367: Beef on weck? I take it you're from Buffalo as well then?

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

ethan @ 317:
There's some more advice on finding Lovecraft in this thread, particularly earlier on. (Also a few minor spoilers later on, so be careful.)

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

I'm frightened, but I want to learn.

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

Heresiarch @ 354

Thank you very much. In similar vein:

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

Home again, v. tired. Bragged about you guys at Foo Camp.

Serge @384
No, we pronounce it "Edin-bruh". Or, as I said above, in a rush, E'mbruh.

Teresa @389
Welcome back.

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

Go rest.

*whimper*

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

This is Very Bad Timing Indeed.

Maybe I'll watch Blink again instead.

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

Mary Dell #375: I had to look, too. My mistake. I can't remember when I last saw anything quite so nakedly forlorn. It was pitiable.

Any Unitarians out there?

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

A question for gardeners, ish: I have lost plants this year-- people keep stealing them from my porch. I'm planning to anchor them with a cinder block or something next year to discourage it. Is there anything I can do this year that won't be visible enough to be a challenge? Standing guard all night seems impractical, however satisfying it might be to step from the shadows with a squirtgun and say, "Nice plant you got there."
Of course, that would be *flirting*.

Debcha #329 wrote "I pronounce 'Toronto' as 'Trawna'".

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

#383:D'oh. I was totally wrong about him perhaps having figured it out. Now he's getting my pity even though I'm pretty sure he doesn't want it. What a willfully sad way to live.

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Hoey #341: You have my sympathy. Having a beloved pet euthanised is a hard thing to do.

abi @ 390... No, we pronounce it "Edin-bruh". Or, as I said above, in a rush, E'mbruh.

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

Dave @ 366

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

397: Heh. There might be some disagreement on exactly how Buffalo any wings outside of Buffalo really are. But I see your point: they've been exported, whereas beef on weck is still obscure. I've never actually had it myself, but one summer while in college I worked in the Kaufman bakery's thrift store at Main and Fillmore, and we sold lots and lots of kimmelweck rolls every Friday.

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

re: weck

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

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

sica @ 298

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

abi @ 172

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

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

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

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

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

From the Washington Post this morning

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

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

PJ Evans @405:
D.C. Judge Loses Pants Suit.

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

Sandwiches - they are, of course, po'boys in New Orleans. That part didn't surprise me when we first moved there. What surprised me was being asked if I wanted my sandwich "dressed". That means with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, not teeny little coats and pants.

elise @ 403

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

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

"Eg bjo hja Nirthi nithri i Northfirthi nyrthri"

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

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

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

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

Mostly though I'd dread the grammar.

Diatryma (#395): It's a little to late to grow nettles around them (which is a little drastic).

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

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

But I'm not always a pleasant person.

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

Is anyone else going to be at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa this week? Or, failing that, does anyone else here have good advice about cheap-but-interesting places to go in Ottawa? I'm tagging along to the symposium behind my spouse, and not exactly being a Linux user myself, expect to spend my time wandering the streets of the city when not clinging to the free wireless and air conditioning of the conference center. I'd rather not spend my entire time in Canada playing Puzzle Pirates and reading library books, as I can do that perfectly well from home.

Diatryma @#395:

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

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

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

The Dung Pits of Glyve are much too nice an environment for Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito. MUCH too nice.

[today's fascist majority Supreme Court pronouncements]

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

JC #397 re Doctor Who:

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

Me:

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

Paula @412,

[reads said results]

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

Dave Bell #370: That reveal was the one moment in the episode where I said out loud, "Oh, that's just silly."

Paula Lieberman #412: There are some very nice descriptions of suitable residences for said Justices in Dante's Inferno.

Alex @ #87: I am going to Readercon.

Also, I am newly obsessed with Torchwood.

Dan Hoey @ #341:

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

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

(Adds the ability to keep plants and fountain where they are without hardware to the list of compensations for living at the top of a long, ugly driveway).

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

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

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

Open threadiness: I recently discovered C. Dale Brittain's Yurt series and finished the second book last night. Paging through to the end-cover I saw an excerpt from Fallen Angels by Niven/Pournelle/Flynn. The premise seems to be that the US has fallen victim to radical Greens with an antipathy toward science and technology, and the heroes have to save the country from them. Trouble is, the only allies the heroes have are all science fiction fans, and they've been driven nearly underground.

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

#412: Not the Dung Pits of Glyve. It must be a place that they can't come back from.

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

Fragano--being pricks, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, and Roberts will never personally experience toxemic pregnancies. The five of them DESERVE them.

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

#407 ::: OtterB
What surprised me was being asked if I wanted my sandwich "dressed". That means with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, not teeny little coats and pants.

Mayo, sweetened, is "salad dressing".

Thanks for the plant-keeping tips, and for listening. I talked to a friend here who has a friend who steals plants, or stole, or had; instead of getting a motion-sensing light I think I'll do what I can to physically attach the plants to the porch. I have fantasies of pressure-sensitive air horns and bank-robbery Day-Glo paint, but those will have to wait a while. Next summer, next summer....

Linkmeister, 420: I read it a number of years ago. I thought most of the in-jokes were about sf, not cons--except for the Worldcon being about 20 people. I wouldn't spend money on it, but it's an okay beach book.

JESR #419: we now have a Toyota which will last forever

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

Linkmeister @ 420

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

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

Dan Hoey @ 341: I'm so sorry about Wade. We had to have a much-beloved cat put to sleep a few months ago, and I think it's impossible not to second-guess one's timing afterwards.

Linkmeister @ 420

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

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

TexAnne #425:

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

Linkmeister 420: The number of this comment makes me want to ask you what you're smoking, but instead I'll just remind you that anything written by the Niven/Pournelle team is going to be right-wing propaganda of the most obvious and heavy-handed kind.

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

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

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

Thanks, all. My library doesn't have it, so I'll probably give it a pass. It's not like I'm out of books to read.

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

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

Used books pay no royalties.

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

Linkmeister 432: I'm also delighted that you've been pronouncing it correctly!

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

For anyone who's still following the famous lawsuit for $67 million over a pair of pants allegedly lost by the dry cleaners: the case has been dismissed. CNN Online news reported:

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

All praises to Coyote
For his growl is low and throaty
Except when he's on peyote
And that's good enough for me!

http://www.larryniven.org/reviews/fallen_angels_review.shtml has a partial list of real persons versus characters in Fallen Angels.

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

J. Austin (331): My first grade teacher very carefully instructed us on pronouncing such words *with* the 'h'. This was Atlanta; the teacher retired after my class.

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

It didn't take much SF about SF people for me to get sick of it-- I've never seen the book in question, but a couple others were very self-congratulatory about how different and strange SF people were. Disguising aliens as congoers who were in costume for travel, things like that. It bugs me more than characters who are writers, for some reason.

Xopher:

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

Then I learned what your given name is.

And I started to read it as Christoper.

Now I'll go back to Xopher.

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

Xopher @ #434, Ah. I was trying to come up with something like "it's 10 x 42, but what's that got to do with smoking?"

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

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

Xopher @ 431... How can you associate Pournelle with the word 'tedious'? You must have been dealing with the Pournelle from Star Trek's Evil Universe.

Terry - that's extremely cool!

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

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

Linkmeister @420,

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

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

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

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

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

But first, go to a few cons.

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

Sica: re pronunciations:

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

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

Can you help?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 444... Indeed, one can easily make fun of cons, but maybe Niven & Pournelle have been around so long that they forgot what it was like for them in the beginning. I haven't forgotten. I also haven't forgotten that, if not for cons, I'd never have met the one who'd become my wife, and there are probably a few people around who thus found their Significant Other.

Xopher @443: the term my university used for such "age-appropriate beverages" (which all dorm and frat parties were supposed to supply in adequate numbers), was "equally-attractive non-alcoholic beverages", or EANABs (eee-nabs). I will admit to still thinking in that term, because it's useful in the non-drinking-and-driving frame as well. For instance, last winter I attended by a party hosted by some young work collagues of mine, who I did not quite trust to provide adequate EANABs. So I brought some mango lemonade (to go with their tropical theme), which was in fact gratefully consumed by some others who felt that the host-provided choice between mai-tais and tap water was a bit stark.

Kathryn @ #444, Makes sense to me.

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

Olivia at 447, I know what you mean about the tap water vs alcohol. One professor here tries to have big, departmentwide parties, but he often misses the point a little-- why aren't people out back where there's room and chairs? Because all the food is upstairs-- and one of his mistakes was having a big daytime party... and not having *anything* nonalcoholic available. It is not unreasonable for people not to drink. It is irresponsible for everyone at a party to drink when no one lives within walking distance. It is ridiculous to invite entire families and then not have anything for the kids to drink.

Terry Karney @ 445

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok that turned out rather longer than intended.

That lawyer who sued the dry cleaners for $54 million? He got nothing. He has to pay the dry cleaner's court costs and their attorneys will sue him for their legal costs.

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

Re: Roger Elwood (296, 297).

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

Sica 450: So would 'kvelruddi' mean "I cause suffering to the thug"? Or "Thugsbane," maybe?

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

Linkmeister @420:

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

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

Marilee@451:

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

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

Tried to read Cliff Burns' most recent tryout for the Self-Congratulation Olympics. I had to stop at:

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

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

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

Sica said (#450):
Kveld means evening though. Could the name be supposed to be Kveldúlfur? That's a proper name although not too common in horses (means evening wolf if you parse through it).

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

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

Con-going for introverts: try it once or twice (helps if you're there on an official job, as I was with Locus). From then on, do a lot of reading, and pursue contacts via the Web. One of my best friends now, practically a "lost sister," is a woman I've never met in person.

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

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

I read and enjoyed Fallen Angels not long after it was published, at a time when I hadn't yet attended any sf cons. So in-depth knowledge of fandom isn't necessary to enjoy it. But, though I've attended a fair number of cons over the years since then, and would get more of the jokes this time if I reread it, I still haven't had any serious urge to reread it. Too many better books to read, too little time.

ethan I was going to recommend some Lovecraft to you, but once my list hit 15 stories I decided it would be best to abbreviate it to "everything". Though "The Color Out of Space" is one of my least favorites, so you might want to save that one. It is the titular story in the pretty great NYRB weird tales anthology I picked up recently. Even Henry James tests his ethereal extra-planar horror chops in there. Good stuff. These writers nailed sensawunda in its skin-crawliest inflections decades before most others. One of my only gripes is how damn insistent they can be that you understand just how "nameless" and "alien" their horror is.

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

Sica: I am recalling the name from memory. It might be kveld, but I don't have his papers ready to hand. When Maia gets home I'll ask her to drag them out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++++

Post scriptum:

I found him on the registry. Kveldrodi from California

Xopher 453

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

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

Peter 547

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

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

Faren @ 458... Now, I'll never be able to watch the movie Inherit the Wind without thinking of your hymn.

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

Terry Karney, Ok the name makes sense now.

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

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

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

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

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

Spica: That makes sense. He's an Orange-red horse.

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

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

Thanks.

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

I just got home from fetching the Best of HP Lovecraft volumey text at the library, and I feel like my life is about to explode. Thanks for the advice, y'all.

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

#396: The difference for me is that Tirana is three syllables, whereas Trawna is two.

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

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

Dude. Today I'm very glad that the fanfic gene passed me by. Because otherwise I'd feel compelled to Do Something about the following two sentences:

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

and:

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

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

Wait wait wait wait!!!! Derek Jacobi is on Doctor Who?!?

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

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

@ 467: You could say "Trawna" to someone from Buffalo and be understood.

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

Sylvia 467: The Torontonians I met in Toronto all said 'Chronno' (two syllables, 'ch' as in 'church', 'ron' as in the name 'Ron', 'no' as in not yes).

kouredios @ 420

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

kouredios: Crick is an Ohioism too.

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

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

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

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

ethan - Once you've finished the Lovecraft collection, you could consider reading some of the following:

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

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

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

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

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

472 & 473. Ah, that would explain why I haven't heard it elsewhere. My particular migration pattern was SoCal (San Diego) to Buffalo to Massachusetts. My family is all Buffalonian though. I haven't been in the other mid-Atlantics enough to have heard "crick" anywhere else.

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

"Crick" seems to be an Americanism that pops up all over the place. It must represent some instability in vowel pronunciation. I have some vague sense that it is the preferred form on the Eastern Shore but in Dead Central Maryland I learned "creek".

Tania #474: Among the many reasons I want to catch up on my Lovecraft is that I want to read el señor Stross.

Sylvia Li #467: That makes sense, although I've heard Canadians pronounce Toronto in such a way that I hear it as Tirana. But then, I live in Etlanna....

Kouredios #470: You'll also hear 'crick' for 'creek' in Jamaica and Belize ('Dat is Haulover Crick' a Belizean taxi driver said to me.)

Pat Greene, #469: Derek Jacobi guest-stars in the 11th episode of season 3 of the revived Doctor Who, broadcast in the UK a couple of weeks ago. It's not a regular role.

For those who do have at least the fanfic-appreciation gene, there's also a post-Season One AU Veronica Mars/H. P. Lovecraft crossover fanfic here.

Debra Doyle #481: Well, well, well. Looks like my Lovecraft initiation might end up being my fanfic initiation, too. I heart Veronica Mars.

Forking away from pronunciation while staying on the topic of regionalisms, I have a question for people.

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

Two. Chicago.