I love the ad at the side:

Discover the taste of Olde English

I suppose that'd help if I ever had to eat your words.

As I was sounding out the excerpt, it took me right back to one of my favorite college professors, who spoke beautiful old and middle English, and taught me the Pearl Poet one summer.

I love texts like this because my eyes won't scan them, but if I say it aloud phonetically, the words magically resolve themselves into something familiar. A delightful form of code-cracking - thanks!

That makes me wonder again why English got rid of thorns and eths. They seem like very useful letters to have. Anyone know?

'Souþeron' is spelled "Southeron" in the third line from the bottom. Sic?

Sic.

Makes one yearn for the days before English was "modern."

I wonder why we lost nice words like 'wone' (reside). Not to mention why we lost the yogh. (It was years before I understood that Puck, by swearing his oaths -- in Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies* -- 'by Oak, Ash, and Thorn' was invoking lost letters of the alphabet.

* It was from the poem from which Kipling took that title, by seventeenth century bishop Corbet, oddly, that I first learned the world 'slut'...

Farewell, rewards and fairies,
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.

Fragano @7
The morpheme "wone" (to dwell) was ceded to the Dutch in the Treaty of Breda (1667), which ended the second Anglo-Dutch war*.

-----
* It is a little-known fact that the war started with the forcible annexation of the word "liefer".

Coolness! Startlingly readable.

abi #8: Thus the Dutch exercise I did years ago -- ik heb een broeder, die in Chicago woont. Hij is matroos.

My first thought was "Ah, Teresa's drunk again!"

Not much changes in seven hundred years over here...

Why moderation matters: a case study

I did a little googling, and this was one classic toxic waste dump of a community.

Avram, if I were that drunk I wouldn't remember to code the special characters.

Technically speaking those should probably be yoghs (Ȝȝ) rather than ezhes (Ʒʒ), which Unicode regards as separate characters.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the English teacher that required that we learn the first 34 lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English before we graduated.

It's always a fun party trick to pull those lines out. But I can't say that I go to many parties where I manage to work it into casual conversation.

"Plus ca change, plus la meme."[0]

[0] apologies for the lack of accents - I've eaten all my memory

This is the followup to PNH's xkcd Sidelight.

Teresa 16: You haven't been to a party at the Nielsen Hayden house, have you?

In partial recompense for being clueless about spoilers, I present a visitor at the farm of a rather more fictional sort than usual.

Julia @13: And I thought 4chan was rough....

I've just now reading Pullman's The Golden Compass. Am I alone in picturing the villainous Mrs. Coulter as -- you know -- Ann?

Yoghs fixed.

I think it must have been the photo with the Tommygun that got Teresa the job.

JESR, bright visitor!

Lloyd at #22: I'm reading the Golden Compass as well and had the same thought. I also can't help picturing Nicole Kidman from the trailer for the movie, but she has blond hair, (like Ann) which only confuses matters.

It's odd how easily movies influence how we visualize characters in books. And hoe easily those of us who follow politics are influenced by current events.

I guess it's only natural that we reach for a familiar face but still, I've tried picturing Snape as someone other than alan Rickman and all I get are soft focus faces.

Teresa @ 16: I had to do that, as well, and I was tickled to recite it for my college Chaucer professor! I think he was tickled, too.

Also, I think my next story has to be called "Aliens That Speketh Strangelych."

Wone is alive and well in Scots/Lallans.

Anyone else going to NASFIC?

Marilee, bright indeed; I want to go into the Comicbook Store and see where they might have put it, as the place is jammed, already, but then I remember that they've moved the Serenity action figures right up front, and I don't trust my shaky impulse control not to spend money I don't have.

Keith #26: I've been known to mentally substitute a young Trent Reznor for Alan Rickman when I need to visualize a younger Snape.

Keith, I pictured Snape as Alan Rickman from the get-go, well before they announced the casting for the first movie, primarily based on his work in Dogma. Had they cast someone else as Snape, I don't know what I would have done.

Er, that should be Alan Rickman as Snape. I think.

#22, #26: Well, that's damn odd. I just picked up The Golden Compass and was planning starting reading it Any Minutes Now.

Pat, I arrived at the same place after seeing An Awfully Big Adventure. If I'd known then what I know now about the character I'd've thought it was even more perfect.

Bonus: one of those rare evil spoiled little shit performances in which Hugh Grant is not annoying.

Warning: neck and neck with Breaking the Waves and Limbo as movie you really, really don't want to watch if you're feeling at all vulnerable.

Saw, this afternoon, a wonderful documentary called Dr. Bronner's Magical Soapbox.

It is, duh, about the man behind the liquid soap that comes in bottles whose labels are packed with bizarre religious ranting.

Doctor Bronner was nuts. Certifiably crazy. In fact, he was committed to an asylum in the late 40s. (In his delusional universe, it was a communist concentration camp.) He got away (when his sister checked him out for a few hours so they could have lunch) and left his kids behind (well, they were in orphanages and foster homes anyway) to go to California and start his soap company. Apparently, his work ethic was as strong as his desire to rant, and his liquid soap became a hit with counter-culture types.

Bronner's kids and their families eventually took over the business. They're an interesting bunch too; hard working and off-beat.

The real star of the show is Ralph Bronner, who is the company's goodwill ambassador. He's kind of nuts too, but in a really nice way. He travels around putting on a one-man tribute show to his dad, dispenses free samples of soap, and offers hugs. He is unworldly, saintly nice. Like a Health Store guru version of Mister Rogers.

Poul Anderson used liefer in at least one of his books, Three Hearts and Three Lions, maybe.

Others are probably already aware of this, but I just found out that Zachary Quinto--as in, Sylar from Heroes--has been cast as Spock in the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie.

Part of me is like, oh, yeah, I can totally see that, he could totally pull that off, but then the other part of me is gonna be all, "No, Cadet Kirk! Don't trust him! He's going to chop off the top of your head and steal your special powers of self-righteousness and sexual atavism!"

I can already tell it's gonna be at least as weird as when Sarah Michelle Gellar was a Dead Dumb Blonde in I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I kept going, "God, Buffy, you know you shouldn't have just run up those stairs. Seriously! Just stake him, for frack's sake!"

Stefan Jones @#35: Awesome! I used to use Bronner's all the time back in college...back before I realized that my skin is as dry as tissue paper, so castille soap is verboten.

It is really good soap, and you can do your laundry (hand-washing, anyway) with it, as it says on the label. The label also has instructions for using it as a contraceptive douche, but I never tried that (and don't recommend it, not least because "contraceptive douche" is a contradiction in terms).

And Dr. Bronner's can be identified using field drug tests.

The theater gave away little sample bottles of Dr. Bronner's.

Too small for the rants, and the skipped the Essene birth control directions, but it does suggest using it to wash your car.

ALL-ONE! ESSENE MORAL ABC BRINGS TOGETHER ALL PEOPLE OF ONE-GOD SPACESHIP EARTH!

#26 Keith:

You might have ended up with that mental-imagery combination even without having seen the trailer. I read the books a few years ago and was flipping back and forth between Ann and Nicole in my mind; that one bit of casting alone got me really excited about the movie.

I think it's the descriptions of Mrs. Coulter which add up to, roughly "this person *should* be beautiful, according to society's standards, but is terrifically creepy anyhow" that does it.

ethan @ 37... Is JJ Abrams's movie a reboot of Star Trek, or an origin story in a setting where very few unexplored nooks and crannies remain? I hope it's the former and I'll drink trania to that.

While we're on the subject of casting, something everyone here already knew: Johnny Depp to play Barnabas Collins in big-screen Dark Shadows. Personally, I think he can and will pull it off without having to out-Collins Jonathan Frid, in the same way that Jack Nicholson recreated the role of the Joker without deposing Cesar Romero from his iconic place of honor.

(And with the trailers and preview stories for The Dark is Rising convincing me that they won't get my money even if they offer to show it to me free, I need something to look forward to. Of course, The Golden Compass looks awesome, and that will be out first.)

Um/Er/Uh/Whatever mumbly non-word indicates genuine confusion/mild disbelief and doesn't offend:

People don't use the words "lief" and "liefer" in everyday conversation? Are we supposed to be paying some sort of import duty or tariff in each instance of use?

::wails:: Why didn't anyone tell me??

On other topics, I too had to learn parts of Canterbury Tales in the original. However, I've always been jealous of the Italian exchange student that was in the class with me, and she shared that back at home, she had to read Dante and Boccaccio in the original. I quit feeling sorry for myself over a little bit of memorization.

me, previously. Floggings for grammar errors. Don't post when tired and monitoring multiple household situations. ::thwack thwack::

Apropos of nothing, I'm watching a HILARIOUS Miami Vice rerun from a season I apparently missed the first time around. Sonny seems to have gotten amnesia and became a smoove crime kingpin, complete with a blond moll and a pet black panther. He's wearing his mullet in a daggy little ponytail, too.

He's having flashbacks of Sheena Easton right now. Ooo, now he's walking out on the blonde girlfriend, who is wearing a headscarf in the same pattern as her dress.

Girlfriend (hollering): "You think you can just turn me on and turn me off whenever you feel like it? After I slept with Nicky and helped you take out the old man you think you can just walk out on me?" (Throws pillow)

Oooh, now there's a car blowing up! And a different blond girl running to Sonny's rescue. I wonder if being knocked out by the explosion will have any affect on his amnesia?

*effect,* damnit

FLUOROSPHERE BUTTONS FOR NASFIC

If anyone else is going to be there and wants one (and hasn't already responded), let me know NOW, preferably by e-mail to the mailto link on my name. We leave on Wednesday, and the next few days are going to be very busy. The buttons will be available at the Instant Attitudes table in the dealer room. We'll have some extras, of course, but so far the response has been limited.

Teresa R., #16: I can still do most of the opening to the Prologue and the naughty bit from the Miller's Tale (starting with "The nicht was black as pitch or any coal..."). I adored my college Chaucer teacher -- he had what I, at least, perceived as a very good Middle English accent.

JESR, #20: Coolness!

Bruce, #43: Even more coolness! If anyone can do justice to that character, it's Depp.

A dear recently departed friend, and John of Trevisa scholar, Dr. David Fowler, Professor Emritas at the University of Washington would so have loved your post. I'm enjoying it for him and for myself.

Linguistic worriting and close analysis compels me to wonder if perhaps "fluorosphere" is not quite right for Making Light.

"Fluorescence" derives from "fluorspar", which in turn derives from "fluorine", which does not, in point of fact, have anything in particular to do with light.

Of course, habit and custom being what they are, it is no doubt Too Late to change or modify. Still.

Phosphorosphere, anyone?

Well, there's always "dixitque Teresa fiat lux et facta est lux"....

Or photosphere, which, despite being taken by astrophysicists, has a particularly light-filled meaning, and is full of gravitas as well.

Incidentally, I was browsing the online OED, looking for the earliest citations of "sphere". While the earliest is 1300, I also found this, which seemed appropriate somehow:

c1340 HAMPOLE Pr. Consc. 4867 Alle þe fire þat es in þe spere, And under erthe, and aboven erthe here.

And speaking of appropriate citations, I went looking for the earliest ones the OED had for light, and found these:

c1000 ÆLFRIC Gen. i. 3 God cwæð þa: ʒeweorðe leoht, and leoht wearð ʒeworht.
c1250 Gen. & Ex. 44 Al was ðat firme ðrosing in niȝt, Til he wit hise word made liȝt.
1398 TREVISA Barth. De P.R. VIII. xxviii. (1495) 339 Lyghte shedyth itselfe fro the hyghest heuen anone to the mydle of the worlde.
c1460 Towneley Myst. i. 23 Darknes from light we parte on two.

Hm. This character—"ᵹ"— should be an "insular g". Does it work at all for anyone? I get a question mark (Firefox on Windows). I wanted to use it above, but ended up going with the ezh, because insular g failed.

For a good chuckle, check out:

SF writers as high school student/cliques

Sege @42-The movie isn't really a reboot I don't think,this comes from Lee and-it's going to feature Kirk and Spock on their first voyage of the Enterprise together,and maybe some stuff from Starfleet Academy. Not much more has been said-Lee was at that panel at Comicon,so I'll see what I can find out.

Lisa Spangenberg @28
Wone is alive and well in Scots/Lallans.

That I haven't heard these 14 years in Edinburgh. Ken, kirk, and kist, yes. I missed out!

I seem to recall that there was an exception written into the Treaty for Scots dialect, in honour of the Dutch gables in the Kingdom of Fife.

Tania @44
People don't use the words "lief" and "liefer" in everyday conversation? Are we supposed to be paying some sort of import duty or tariff in each instance of use?

Yes; the rate is calibrated by the size, importance and average cubic volume of hair (uncompressed) of your listeners. It is denominated in guilders, however, which are no longer valid currency since the Euro came to the Netherlands. I doubt anyone will be around your place to collect.

Top five Dr Bronner's bottle exclamations:

5. Essene, Chinese, and other birth control methods must reduce birth or Easter Isle type overpopulation destroys God's Spaceship Earth!

4. As teach astronomers Abraham-Israel-Moses-Buddha-Hillel-Jesus-Spinoza-Paine-Sagan & Mohammed, inspired every 76 years, 6000 years by the Messenger of God's Law, the Messiah, Halley's Comet: WE'RE ALL ONE OR NONE!

3. More good is caused by evil than by good, do what's right!

2. Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!

1. All-One! All-One! Exceptions eternally? Absolute none!

Zander @12: At least in the middle ages they had a Council of the North.

Yoghs fixed. This is my favourite comment of all time, anywhere.

Keith @26: It's odd how easily movies influence how we visualize characters in books.

I saw a talk by David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) which had been carried on CSPAN. He said that after Alec Guinness had played his character George Smiley in the TV adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, he was not able to visualize Smiley as anyone but Guinness.

Apparently they became good friends. During his talk, Cornwell slipped into an credible imitation of Guinness.

Nina Amrstrong @ 54... The movie isn't really a reboot

Thanks, Nina. I think it's a mistake not to reboot, and it's not like the public wouldn't have accepted it. They did it for James Bond. They'd have done it for James Kirk. Hmm... Daniel Craig as Kirk... What a concept.

Speaking of Daniel Craig, I watched Renaissance last night. It was very smart and visually amazing, though I'd suggest you watch it in a darkened room. Highly recommended.

Julia #13:

Great story. I'm just amazed that more of that sort of thing doesn't happen. In many ways the internet is just a high-tech bathroom stall.

Lisa #28:

Keep an eye out for the mug.

Scott H @ 60... A few weeks ago, The Cate Blanchett movie about Queen Elizabeth was on TV. We were sort-of watching although we got a kick out of recognizing Christopher Eccleston. Then that assassin monk showed up and my wife said "Hey! That's Daniel Craig!"

61: that's the problem with a lot of Serious BBC Dramas: they star a lot of the same people over and over again and you get quite sick of them after a while.

Re liefer: it's spelled liever these days in modern dutch. Me mum always said liever koekjes worden niet gebakken ("rather cookies" won't be made) when we were whinging for something.

Martin Wisse @ 62... Actually that movie about the Virgin Queen was a big-screen thing (with Fanny Ardant as the Queen of France - be still, my heart). And from what some people said in these parts, it had so many inaccuracies that I doubt it could have been considered a Serious BBC Drama. (Then again, a couple of years ago there was a Serious BBC Drama with Ray Winstone as Henry VIII. Talk about weird casting.)

Just thought I'd mention.

"Ripper" may finally get filmed. Joss Whedon said yesterday at Comic Con that things look good for filming "Ripper" in 2008 as a 90 minute TV-movie for the BBC.

("Ripper" being a BtVS spinoff movie focusing on the character of Rupert Giles.)

#16, Teresa R, from memory:

Whan that Aprille with hys shoures soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And beythed every veyne in swich liquoure
Of which vertu engendred is the floure,
Whan Zephyrus eek with hys sweete breethe
Inspired hath in every holte and heethe
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram hys halve course yronne,
And smale foules maken melodye
That slepeth all the nyghte with open eeye
So nature priketh hem in hir corages,
Thanne longen folke to goon on pilgrimages.

(my pronunciation is worse than my spelling, though, so not much good at parties)

Bruce @#43, I did NOT know that and I am GOBSMACKED! I used to run home from school in the 4th grade to catch Dark Shadows! Thank you for the heads-up.

Since this is an open thread, I present this random comment: my new favorite word is "toerag". Thank you, J.K. Rowling.

The Cate Blanchett movie about Queen Elizabeth was on TV.

A sequel will be coming to the big screens this October.

It's going to focus on the Spanish Armada, with a side-order of infatuation with Ralegh (Clive Owen)

When I watched the concluding naval battle in POTC3, I thought it was about time for a big-screen version of the Armada battle.

Scariest thing about the "for lack of moderation" particle:

"Tavares took leave from his post as a weapons systems operator at the AEGIS Training and Readiness Center in Dahlgren, Va...."

Holy cow. Al-Qaeda is apparently ignoring a vast untapped resource: easily tweaked unstable nerds with access to useful military intelligence.

From Dahlgren's website:
The AEGIS Training and Readiness Center (ATRC) is staffed and maintained by a team of professional military and civilian instructors and technicians who provide training to both enlisted and officer personnel in the skills they will need to operate the United States Navy's most sophisticated warships, the Ticonderoga class cruiser and the Arleigh Burke class destroyer, both equipped with the AEGIS Combat System and the AEGIS Weapons System.

I had to memorize the opener to the Canterbury Tales as well, back in high school. Coincidentally, this class was in the fall before "A Knight's Tale" came out in theaters - a fluffy movie that happens to have Chaucer as a secondary character (played by the lovely Paul Bettany). I went to see it with a load of friends who'd been in the class with me, all unsuspecting, and we rolled about in the aisles and left chorusing the prologue together. Oh, to be young and geeky.

Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap: scent of my childhood, bane of my stinging eyes and dry skin. Dad still gets the giant gallon jugs and can't believe that my sister and I use - o heresy! - body wash.

I'm half and half about what this new Trek movie could be...part of me thinks a reboot would be a great idea (as it most certainly was for Bond), but then if they reboot they're committed (it seems to me) to retracing the continuity from the early Kirk-Spock days. I've already been pissed for a while now that we got left in the 24th century at the end of Nemesis and never came back--I want more of that world. New creative team, new creative direction, that would definitely be ideal (the old one was getting mighty stale), but I wish it didn't have to start over entirely.

Although the movie poster is pretty awesome.

ethan @ 69... The important thing is that a reboot would have allowed them to keep the essence of Star Trek without being bogged down with the specifics of the existing continuity. Look at Galactica... It took the original concept and ran with it.

Yes, photosphere is perfect for Making Light. Chromosphere is also nice...

Owlmirror, I use "fluorosphere" based on "fluorescence." A material is fluorescent if it absorbs light, then emits light at a different wavelength. (Fluorite does it, but so do lots of other things.) It's not just the raw photons, it's the conversation, and the way we inspire each other.

Adrian @ 72... Let's not forget that ML is sometiems refered to as the flourosphere.

#4: Speaking as someone who spent 15 months fighting with character representation:\any/ variations in a widely-used alphabet are a pain in the neck; having a common character set across languages is a Good Thing, even if you disagree on how they're pronounced (cf 'x', 'j'). Teresa: any comments on where the assorted continental "th" pronounced "t" come from? Was the Scandinavian parliament once pronounced with a thorn? (I've heard of massive vowel shifts but had the impression consonant pronunciation tended to be stable.)

#55:
Yes; the rate is calibrated by the size, importance and average cubic volume of hair (uncompressed) of your listeners.

Doesn't that give preference to the tribe of the hair-inflating? Not that I imagine they'd make all that much use of it, but still.

chris y (#57): Yoghs fixed. This is my favourite comment of all time, anywhere. But now they can no longer reproduce!

I too had to memorize that passage in college, though the only bit that really stuck is the opening, about showers and drought. Teresa, as an Arizonan did you want to update that a few months so it would fit monsoon season? It has been very soggy here lately, though Prescott's mostly too hilly for actual flooding.

@#72:

A material is fluorescent if it absorbs light, then emits light at a different wavelength.

Granted. Yet consider that phosphorescence is an extension of the phenomenon of fluorescence; hence phosphorosphere.

Do we stop making light when not on Making Light?

chris y (#57): Yoghs fixed. This is my favourite comment of all time, anywhere. But now they can no longer reproduce!

I too had to memorize that passage in college, though the only bit that really stuck is the opening, about showers and drought. Teresa, as an Arizonan did you want to update that a few months so it would fit monsoon season? It has been very soggy here lately, though Prescott's mostly too hilly for actual flooding.

@#73:

Let's not forget that ML is sometiems refered to as the flourosphere.

With many the jape about Baking Light, too. "I got this excellent set of croissant recipes from the flourosphere."

Owlmirror @ 77... Do we stop making light when not on Making Light?

Think of us as the light that comes on only when you open the fridge door. (Does that mean there are elements in ML's hidden corners that's turning into horrible biological experiments, the equivalent of that bow of potato salad?)

@#80

(Does that mean there are elements in ML's hidden corners that's turning into horrible biological experiments, the equivalent of that bow of potato salad?)

You mean like the spammers and young punks who use old threads (and sometimes new threads) as their own personal graffiti walls?

I think we all make light in different ways, some folks are positively incandescent, some have a soft little phosphorescent glow of their own, some of us need the input of some outside energy to fluoresce, others reflect or even focus the brilliance of others. Bill Higgins, of course, scintillates by the decay of high-energy sub-atomic particles.

Owlmirror @ 81... Yup. As for your suggestion to rename the site to Baking Light, I think that, should that be implemented, an image should then be displayed at the top showing Kenner's EasyBake Oven.

Lila at 67, yes, that scared me too. I also wondered if Tavares was/is a member of the NRA. Just askin'.

If the movie The Golden Compass looks as good as the material on the website, it's going to be f*cking awesome.

Laura, I like chromosphere...

BTW, I saw Sicko last week. If there's anyone left who hasn't seen it, go thou and do so. It's tremendously entertaining, and you get to see some great footage of Richard Nixon, with subtitles.

Serge #70: I'm a bit embarrassed to say it, because I made ruthless fun of all the BSG purists, but I don't want anything that extreme happening to my Star Trek.

Or, OK, maybe if it's that good, I could handle it. But I don't have nearly the faith in JJ Abrams that I do in Ron Moore.

Lizzy L @ 84... I like chromosphere

Remember the following episode of The Outer Limits?

The Mice
Original Airdate: 01/06/64

"In dreams, some of us walk the stars." - narrator

Henry Silva pops up again, this time as a prisoner who is given two choices: life imprisonment on Earth or the chance to take part in the so-called "inhabitant exchange" with the planet Chromo. Of course he chooses Chromo, but it seems the Chromoites have a slightly more devious plan in mind, and only Silva can potentially save the day. Dabney Coleman has a supporting role in this episode.

ethan @ 85... I didn't mean to suggest making Star Trek into the pit of despair that BSG is for those who are prone to depression. BSG's very premise in both incarnations is that humanity has pretty much been wiped out and must try to survive. Star Trek without the optimism that we can keep from killing each other and that we can indeed flourish? That wouldn't be Star Trek. But starting all over again would give us some suspense. There's no suspense when you know that Kirk dies from falling off a collapsing platform while defeating Malcolm McDowell...

Let a thousand light-related words and phrases bloom. Or rather, shine.

"Jim McDonald's post on emergency tracheotomies had quite a photoelectric effect on me"

"It's quite fascinating how an idea will propagate through the luminiferous æther of Making Light."

OK, I just wanted to use the 'ae' ligature there.

I was pondering other light-related compound words like "luminasphere", but I think that sounds like something vaguely steampunk. Which I suppose isn't entirely inappropriate either.

"Luxosphere" makes me think of vacuum cleaners. I would prefer not to associate Making Light with sucking.

A question to the fluorosphere: would someone who knows something about cosmology take a look at this (scroll all the way down to the last item) and tell me whether or not the writer is barking mad?

I'm correcting a glaring omission in my exposure to the classics by reading Earthsea, and I want to applaud the author and publisher (Bantam) for including maps. If you're going to make up a world, it surely helps the reader if you draw the geography.

Fragano at 89: I scrolled up and found this.

Our group is studying coherent population control of electrons in atoms. We are developing analytic methods to understand how to move electrons from one state to another in an atom when we want, where we want, as completely as we want, as fast as we want, keeping it there as long as we want, using simple mathematics.

I don't know how to answer your question.

Michael I @#64:

"Ripper" may finally get filmed.

Oh, crap, another chance for Joss Whedon to xvyy n snibevgr punenpgre.

Fragano:

I have gathered that Tipler is or was a fairly respected physicist, but that does not preclude barking mad. I think he started out by drawing some interesting conclusions that if certain conditions were met or assumptions made as to physics principles, then information would be conserved over the lifetime of the cosmos, including in the Big Crunch which occurs for some ranges of the cosmological constant. He then went on to argue this meant there would be a kind of apotheosis at the end into an omniscient intelligence, or ultimate Singularity. It now sounds like he is taking that conclusion as an article of quasi-religious faith and arguing that therefore physical constants and laws must meet the requirements for it to be true. Current discoveries in physics, however, seem to be pointing the opposite way. So, yeah: if not barking mad, meandering in that direction.

Fragano @89, Lizzy L @#91:

I followed the link to the head researcher's web page...

In a compelling example, he illustrates how the God depicted by the Jews and Christians is completely consistent with the Cosmological Singularity, an entity whose existence is required by physics. His discussion of the scientific possibility of miracles provides an impressive, credible scientific foundation for many of Christianity's most astonishing claims, including the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.

I suspect his work is a bit on the fringe.

Lila @65, if memory serves, "Toerag" was also the name of an evil little character in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul," by Douglas Adams.

Thanks, Mary. I read the first chapter of Tipler's book, The Physics of Christianity, online, and I think the response to Fragano's question should be, Sadly, Yes.

I mean, he talks about Jesus's DNA and asserts that an analysis of the Shroud of Turin can be used as evidence for what he claims, with not a footnote in sight... Nuh-uh.

Eternel baptême d'une luminescence et ses origines: coruscation d'une photo-genèse, by the Making Lighters, soon in an online shop near you.

Grumble... one accent and the French title would have perfectly worked.

Serge-I do think a reboot is necessary-I agree that J.J. Abrams is not the person to do so. I do have hopes the film will at least be entertaining,which is more than the last couple.
What I would've liked to have seen was the J. Michael Straczynski reboot of the show-it sounded really interesting.

Nina Armstrong @ 98... What would Straczynski's reboot of Star Trek have been like? I'm one of those people who were very unhappy with Babylon 5 after Sinclair got whisked away, but I loved its first year.

Lizzy L @ 96

Sadly, indeed, I have to echo what you said. Tipler was in fact a very well-respected physicist; he published a paper in the early '70s which was the first* to show that closed timelike curves were possible in an Einsteinian universe in which General Relativity applied. In other words, that time travel is at least theoretically possible. This is quite orthodox physics, these days.

Reading the first couple of chapters of "The Physics of Immortality" was extremely painful for me, because it was clear that much of it was written as a result of emotional trauma, not from rational thought. Some of the physics is fascinating, but has a highly questionable basis in observed fact. Some of the later conclusions are, to be kind, shakey.

Since then, Tipler and his work have become the basis of a cult related to the Extropians: they believe in the resurrection and subsequent immortality of all intelligent beings, as the work of beings resulting from the evolution of intelligence through something like the Singularity. It sounds to me a lot like a sort of scientific cargo cult based on a retelling of the Christian myth of the Resurrection and the Final Judgement.

"Barking mad" is a little too harsh, I think, but Tipler and his followers are not what I'd call sane.

* Actually, I believe Gödel did some work on this towards the end of his life, but I don't believe he published it.

Re: Tipler.

I have to confess to not having followed the evolution of the Tiplerite cult, any more than I've paid much attention to the Extropians in the last 10 years or so. If anyone in the Fluorosphere has had more recent contact or at least knowledge of them, please let me know, by email if you think it offtopic enough. I've been thinking about writing a story based on some of the Tiplerite mythology, and I'd appreciate an additional objective view of their current beliefs.

Fragano @ #89 - my cosmology is about 10 years out of date and never really on that level, but it reads like a lot of possible or conceivable (but mostly not the most accepted) ideas put together into one grand theory. Or, as other commenters have said, on the fringe. Which may or may not mean barking mad; they are all things to investigate, but maybe all together at the same time is putting the cart before the horse.

pat green @95, yes, Toerag is the old man's minion, although not responsible for the vital work of changing his high-count linen sheets every day.

Lila says,

Holy cow. Al-Qaeda is apparently ignoring a vast untapped resource: easily tweaked unstable nerds with access to useful military intelligence.

What makes you think this firebombing wasn't an Al-Qaeda plot?

Tonstant vigiwance is the pwice of fweedom!

Serge 2 99-I don't remeber the details-when Lee gets home from San Diego I'll ask him.

I'm now reminded: fans of both Alan Rickman and Kevin Klein should add January Man to their queue of obscure, under-appreciated films..

Nina Armstrong @ 105... Or the two of you could tell me in person, provided you're still planning to come to Albuquerque for Bubonicon. I'm not attending, but it's a 10-mile drive from here to there so there's no reason I couldn't meet you at the con's hotel.

Serge, 73: "Let's not forget that ML is sometimes referred to as the flourosphere."

Well, we were originally hosted on Panix.

Taking a break from domestic chores, I was watching a rerun of the first episode of Brimstone, still one of my favorite supernatural stories from TV. And I suddenly realized, the hero, Detective Ezekial Stone, is the only character on television who has a real excuse for always having a one-day growth of beard: he is dead, but is resurrected every morning, always with a day's beard, his clothes and a raincoat, and $37 and change in his pockets, the only money he ever has.

#7
I think in England 'slut' means 'lazy housekeeper'. The USA meaning of 'good date' is much younger- Kipling probably meant the housekeeper thing

þeos offereode; þisses swa meag.

Now if only I could remember the other phrase, the really good one that's a variant of, "Well, I guess we're going to die, then."

Lizzy L #91: That wasn't the one, it was the astrophysics research piece at the end, which Clifton Royston, I've just noticed, picked up on.

Clifton Royston #93: I'm no physicist (my older son is planning to start grad school next year, and I've been encouraging his search which is how I came to find this page -- my lad wants to do astrophysics, after discussing this strange piece, the conclusion was that Tulane is probably not the place for that), but the life at the final singularity will be 'collectively intelligent computers' trope gave me the willies. I think you're right.

@#110:

I think in England 'slut' means 'lazy housekeeper'.

It occurred to me that I could check that.

The first def in the OED says "A woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul slattern."

Random thought: Could a shining magic crystal ball on Discworld also be called an octarine phosphorosphere? ("Bloody useless thing's been stuck on 'Reply Hazy, Try Again' for nearly a year. I think it might be traumatized from when the Librarian sat on it.")

Mary Dell #94: A bit on the fringe sounds like an understatement.

Fragano, I know -- I saw it. See my comment at 96. I just wanted to bring attention to the idea of population control of electrons...

But as I said upthread, yeah, the guy's bonkers. Wacko. Three queens short of a deck.

Lizzy L #96: Thanks. I thought so, but not being a physicist or anything near one, couldn't be sure.

(I'm not looking forward to one of the tasks I have tomorrow, which is asking the editor of a volume of essays what persuaded her to include a collection of apodeictic assertions about Greek myth in the volume -- I'm copyediting/critiquing the thing.)

pat greene, sorry for the lacking "e."

I need to wear my reading glasses more regularly, although they only solve the smaller of my posting problems.

HOLY CRAP RIPPER!!!!

Ahem, sorry.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #100: That is sad. However, when I read about life becoming 'collectively intelligent computers', I tend to think 'barking mad' about right, but that may be an overreaction.

Neil Willcox #102: Thanks, that does clarify things.

B Durbin #111: You mean, of course 'Hige sceal the heardra, heorte the cenre, mod sceal the mare, the ure maegen litlath', which a friend of mine used to recite frequently when we were undergraduates. Never having studied Old English myself, I have to resort to a translation, which goes: 'Mind must be firmer, heart be keener, courage stronger, as our might grows less' (though, frankly, 'littleth' is a fine word).

Bruce #110: Originally 'slut' was synonymous with 'slattern', but the terms have diverged.

B. Durbin, Fragano: You mean that quote that is revealed when you mouse over the Making Light title thingummy?

Fragano, my dictionary says that "apodictic" -- that's how The American Heritage Dictionary spells it -- means "clearly proven or demonstrated; incontestable." Please tell me why you object to including a collection of such statements in the volume you are editing. I think I know -- there are no incontestable statements about Greek myths -- but I am mightily curious...

To whom it may concern: eye-of-partridge sock heels in super-stripey handpainted yarn are made of awesome.

@#124: ? Title thingummy? What... oh, you mean the ... subtitle. Motto. Epigraph. Thing.

<a title="Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.">
<div class="description">Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light.</div></a>

You know, my HTML checker is unhappy with the above code. Among other things, <a> tags aren't supposed to cross <div> tags. That is, the "a" should be inside the "div" rather than outside.

There are similar issues with the boilerplate code.

Fragano:

Thinking about Frank Tipler later today, I was reminded of Fred Hoyle (astronomer, cosmologist, and SF author) and his "constant creation" or "steady state cosmology" theory which involved cosmological expansion through continuous slow creation of new space and particles. IIRC at the time he proposed it, there was no conclusive evidence in favor of the Big Bang, and his theory was an intriguing alternative. However, within a few years the evidence for the Big Bang started turning up in spades - microwave background radiation was recognized as red-shifted emissions from the Big Bang, different populations of stars when you looked back in time far enough, etc. I believe Hoyle never managed to retreat from his theory and say "Oh well, it sounded good at the time but I guess it was all wrong."

With the growing recent evidence for accelerating expansion of the cosmos, I think any theory which hinges on a final singularity, aka "Big Cruch", is now in the same shape.

Chip 74: Consonant pronunciation is anything but stable. In many languages 'th' spells an aspirate 't'.

TexAnne (#126): Picture! Picture!

It's been a good weekend for finishing knitting projects in the debcha household - I sewed the buttons on a sweater that was complete except for that (this is the sweater that prompted the question about how to pick up and knit over on Open Thread 87) and I finished everything on a second sweater except the buttons - I plan to drop by my Local Knitting Shop tomorrow and buy buttons to finish it, together with yarn for the next project.

Julia (13), thank you. It's a sad and scary story. I found myself feeling sorriest for Tavares.

Lisa (28): allas, no hope of it. New job, major deadline.

Ethan (37), I know the feeling. It's when you want to say "Guys, that's not an evil mind-controlling alien god from another dimension; that's Zoe Washburne, and you're in real trouble."

The one there's no help for is when you get your first look at Lethe's Bramble, shake your head, and say "No, Statice limonium."

Mary Dell (38), I've seen it recommended by some sex techies for removing nasty-tasting substances from prospective tasting areas, but they're careful to recommend the almond, not the peppermint, for use on sensitive tissues.

Tania (44), some of us do. Then we get looked at funny.

Lee (48), is there any way to get a fluorosphere button without going to the convention?

Owlmirror (50), where were you when the word was being invented? But yes: too late.

Scraps (56), that's beautiful, is what that is.

Adrian (72), you get a gold star pasted to your forehead.

Chip (74), vide JEGP, passim.

Faren (76), I gave up on expecting literature to match Arizona's climate when I started school and was told that leaves turn bright colors in the fall. Britain came as a surprise: it not only matched the literature, but the language.

Except in the Canterbury Tales, at least according to one of my instructors. He explained that Chaucer was picking up the weather sequence from Italian models, and that it wasn't correct for GC either.

I've been doing a practice run on one of Lucy Neatby's 'Fiesta Feet'. It's going to be a Christmas stocking, simply because I'm using worsted weight instead of fingering. (Variety of patterns (mostly textured) and I haven't done one from the top down, so there's new techniques involved also.) I'm down to the foot, having gotten around the heel corner.

re Depp: When I was looking that up, I also found a link to his doing a Sweeny Todd.

The heart rejoices.

Teresa notes:
The one there's no help for is when you get your first look at Lethe's Bramble, shake your head, and say "No, Statice limonium."
and I feel that old shock of recognition. I will add, in mitigation, that the next year they got Passiflora caeroleum right, at least. But it's that kind of small stupidity that kills a story dead, for me; which is why I have no business at all reading fanfic for The Sentinel, being an anthropologist and a mossback. A perfectly engaging story can be killed dead by an archaeology site with pottery or a venomous snake in the wrong environment. Of course canon in that verse is just as bad as the worst fanfic; the show is apparently based in the same part of Washington as "Here Come the Brides."

TNH #132, JESR #135: Maybe Lethe's Bramble just looks like Statice limonium. That's why Tara didn't recognize it! She was like, "Aww, how sweet, Willow left me some Statice limonium. Ha ha! Good thing it's not Lethe's Bramble, that'd be weird, right?"

That's what happened. I understand now!

Teaberry and wintergreen are the same plant. And wintergreen leaves are a traditional ingredient for a luck pillow for a child. If I called it Child's Luck, would you say "no, that's wintergreen"?

Perhaps Lethe's Bramble is just one of the names for statice limonium. Wouldn't be the first time magical practitioners called a plant by a different name.

But, Xopher, see, thing is, the names for herbal ingredients are consistent within themselves; Statice spp. aren't brambles- brambles are trailing thorny vines, usually roses or blackberries. I know why they chose to use Statice limonium: cut at the right time and properly dried, it's durable as iron and photographs well, is easy to burn, and a ten-stem bunch is about two bucks at the florist's supply places. Dried roses are not sturdy, and rose or blackberry cane dry enough to burn is utterly sucky to handle without gloves, what with the thorniness. That's the other thing about Statice- it looks convincingly thorny, but isn't a bother to handle.

Those are all valid production reasons to use that plant material for that series of shots, but when you've got a mind that runs to botanical Latin, the end result is a small rift in the third wall.

ethan, #119: That's almost exactly what I said; I just didn't post it. :-)

Giles is sexy enough just as Giles. But the absolute dead-sexiest moment in the series was when he reverted to the Ripper persona in "Band Candy"! When he broke the shop window to get Buffy's mom that coat she wanted, my hormones went nuts. (My brain wasn't so impressed, but my body wasn't listening.)

Teresa, #132: Drop me an e-mail with your mailing address, and I'll send you a couple once we're done with the Two Weeks From Hell. (Cons in St. Louis and Louisville on successive weekends, and we have to drive back to Houston in between. Not Fun. I'd rather take a week's vacation in Nashville, but that's not feasible.) I assume you want at least two.

Xopher, #137: Teaberry and wintergreen are the same plant.

Wow, a decades-old mystery solved! Some kids' book that I read involved a character who loved teaberry (gum? candy?), and I never could figure out what it was. Thanks!

Serge, #42, it's a prequel.

Did y'all know that Blair Underwood wrote a book with Tananarive Due and Steve Barnes?

open thread announcement:

Over on the Harry Potter thread, I was talking with some folks about Harry Potter and the way the story employs the use of force at various stages. Seeing the use of force, violence, war, and similar concepts presented in fiction in a unrealistic manner is a personal pet peeve of mine. Which caused me to not like some plot turns in the Harry Potter series.

The gist of it is that the whole thing got me to thinking about the fictional portrayal of violence/force/war in sort of the same fashion that one might study the phenomenon of what is a "Mary Sue".

I think think what it basically boils down to is a term someone already came up with called "war porn", although it doesn't have to be limited to a fictional war. Force, violence, and similar acts would qualify.

Anyway, I wrote up my own attempt to describe war porn and came up with a sort of litmus test to see how close a work of ficiton is to being pure war porn or just gratuitous violence.

Anyone interested can read it here.

If anyone knows of similar discussions on the web, litmus tests, etc for war porn, I'd be very much interested.

Thanks.

Fragano Ledgister @ 120

As I say, they, especially Tipler, are not at all sane. I just feel sorry for Tipler himself (his followers AFAIK are generic acolytes from Cults R Us, a dime a dozen to anyone who's had to deal with Ufologists, Flat Earthers, or Extropian Singularitarians). His reasons for believing are made amply clear in his book, and they have to do with emotional pain that he could not square with his physicist's view of the world. Maybe it was because I wasn't expecting anything like that in a book ostensibly about eschatalogical physics, or because not long before I had finished reading* his and Barrows' "The Anthropological Principle" which I thought a tour-de-force of mathematical reasoning, however much I disagree with the conclusions. For whatever reason, I was primed to be hurt by his pain, and I still feel sad that the classic Problem of Pain is so hard for some people to deal with.

* I doubt there are very many people who did finish reading it.

Greg London @141: It would be an interesting homework assignment for the reader to apply your War Porn Scoring method to an evening of Fox News coverage of the war in Iraq.

Greg London @141: While waiting for my previous message to post, it occurred to me that your War Porn Scoring method would be easily translatable into a War Porn Drinking Game. Best not played solo or within easy access to firearms, though, as it could be really depressing....

Terry Karney @134, the heart rejoices even more because Judge Turpin will be played by Alan Rickman. Helena Bonham Carter will play Mrs. Lovett.

Oh, and JESR? Don't worry about dropping the terminal "e" -- even my boss forgets and does it sometimes.

Open thread/packing rant:

Why can't children's book publishers standardise the sizes of their books?

URGH

Marilee @ 140... Bummer.

JESR @ 135... "Here Come The Brides"...

abi #146: Because books are too fine and individual to be limited by restrictive standards?

More seriously, I know there are traditional (quarto 8vo etc.) book sizes; how widely were they adhered to?

Terry #134 pat # 146: I hear from reliable sources involved in the production that the lad can *sing*. Apparently there was some worry about this as Depp wouldn't let anyone hear him until his first day on set...

Teresa #132: 'sex techies'? Not a coinage I am familiar with - is this similar to theatre tech? It certainly sounds like advice to heed...

#126 ::: TexAnne

To whom it may concern: eye-of-partridge sock heels in super-stripey handpainted yarn are made of awesome.

Link to photo(s) please?

Teresa #132: 'sex techies'? Not a coinage I am familiar with - is this similar to theatre tech? It certainly sounds like advice to heed...

Do they have a helpline?

"...OK, well, have you tried getting completely out of bed and then getting back in again? That sometimes works..."

Lee, #139: Was the book character a New Englander? Teaberry chewing gum was relatively easy to find when I was in high school, and, as you can see by the link, is still available if you poke the Web.

I liked clove chewing gum better, though.

Ajay @151: "Bad sex usually occurs when the relationship has crashed, you'll have to restore from backup.... You didn't backup your relationship?"

JESR @#135: A perfectly engaging story can be killed dead by an archaeology site with pottery or a venomous snake in the wrong environment.

My solution for all problems of this type is to assume that the thing I'm reading is set in an alternate universe. It works amazingly well.

#143: Or anyone else's coverage, for that matter. I wouldn't be surprised if Fox outscored other networks, but *most* US media are predisposed to glorify the war. (Contrast the media of some neutral nation? I was going to say BBC, but they're a cobelligerent, although the BBC still manages to retain some journalistic standards and credibility IMO).

Teresa @ #132 and JESR @ #135, my version of the Statice limonium problem is illustrations in children's books that show, e.g., narcissus and asters blooming together.

But alas, I am a total Sentinel slut. The anthro howlers pass right by me, but having Peru look just like Cascade was hard to take.

Jakob @#149:

Teresa #132: 'sex techies'? Not a coinage I am familiar with - is this similar to theatre tech? It certainly sounds like advice to heed...

Once you move beyond basic organic practices, the proceedings can become astonishingly technical.

There seems to be a problem with seeing Girl Genius on the web today. Maybe it's just me. ("Of course, Serge. It is all about you.")

Earl@143: apply your War Porn Scoring method to an evening of Fox News

Yeah, it occurred to me this morning that there shouldn't be any reason the test could not be applied to alleged non-fiction as well as fiction. I'll add that next time I do an update.

Need to add some stuff about good intentions, and whether the world follows good intentions or whether the world is more like reality and good intentions don't mean a damn.

@Bruce Cohen

I think you have to be very careful tarring people with the same brush. Not all those are the same wicked folk, and not all those believe in nonscientific ideas.

Serge-- the problem is that the 101 class has caught up to the advanced class. So now everybody like me who has only ever read it on the web is clicking through the ~300 pages of the rest of the story. There *was* a link on the page to a backup server, but as the page is now completely inaccessible, and I was idiotic enough not to make a note of it, I can't give it to you. :(

#161: The advanced class is having the same problem, which is that the site has exceeded alloted monthly bandwidth. The trials of being popular ...

The clack currently blocking access to Girl Genius will unlock the door on August 1st, allowing the hordes clamoring at the gates access to catch up. Or at least that is what happened last month - just not as early. I don't think it makes sense for the Foglios to pay for more bandwidth unless this becomes a regular event, not just due to the transition from 101 to Advanced Class that caught so many of us.

Just today's Girl Genius is here:
http://kajafoglio.livejournal.com/121100.html?thread=2468364#t2468364

Along with "war porn", the media also offer something more like "war cutesy" -- soldiers with happy little kids who have just received their official US candy bar (or whatever). You see this in the military service ads too. I don't think it's really "war pedophilia," but some opinions may differ. Whatever it is, it's exploitive and looks pretty darn phony.

Faren Miller: @#165: That's just good old-fashioned propaganda art.

The letter ash - æ - is alive and well in Danish. I had to learn how to pronounce it when I lived there (lived in Denmark, not inside a pastry). Along with the å which is a modern shortened form of double-a, and the ø which was a Danish latter before it became the computerese way of indicating zero.

My mother's doctoral thesis was the generative phonology of Danish. Come by any time if you'd like to have a look at my copy.

Faren: The "war cutesy" you refer too is a piece of iconic coverage, going back to WW2, when the GI's, being, basically, decent, would toss kids things from their C-rats.

There are no small number of Germans who report the first tastse of chocolate they ever knew was from a C-rat Hershey bar. I recall one which was incredibly poignant (though it was a French child) becaues he went on to become a chocolatier.

That same sense of liking kids was seen in Korea and Viet-nam. I think part of the outrate about the water-bottle incident in Iraq was that it violated this mythic-trope, that no matter how battle hardened and brutal our guys might be to adults, they were nice to kids.

re the suspension of disbelief: I have a number of things which shock me out of acceptance. Weapons, military relationships; and a bunch of things which relate to social interactions at a cultural level. The whole "social justice" subplot/text of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which was put in Christian Slater's mouth bothered me more than anything else; though the witch in the garret pulling all the strings came a very close second.

Thanks, all... I need my Agatha fix, but, if I must wait, then I shall. I'll refrain from sending in my dingbot army. For now.

168: watching Robin Hood: Piece of Tosh with various compatriots...

OLD WITCH: You must seek help. Hire the men of the North.
ALAN RICKMAN: The Scots?
(curls lip, sneers)
ENTIRE FEMALE AUDIENCE: squee!
ALAN RICKMAN: (in disgust) But they drink the blood of their dead!
ENTIRE SCOTTISH AUDIENCE: Hurrah!

Lila, I can take the anthro howlers in TS canon by reminding myself that one of the creators is from a family which has not worked outside the movie industry since before the turn of the 20th century (Danny Bilson) but I expect better from fic writers, who are not trying to shoot on a shoestring and with limited time.

And the big howlers make me regret the inability to dope slap the writer through the internet: there's one long story that, after a promising start, devolves into a long digression on how dangerous it is to take women on anthropological expeditions, at all, ever. The sheer offensive wrongness of that assertion is given a particularly strong odor of irony by the fact that the lead up to the discussion has pretty much pinpointed the expedition's territory as the same part of Melanesia that Margaret Mead was working in in the 1920s. The fact that this also violates Blair Sandberg's characterization (re his mother) is also special.

The Sentinel canon has a botanical blooper to end all bloopers: an episode where a big deal is made of a gun runner's dedication to his orchids, with several scenes shot in a "greenhouse" which has not even one orchid. Not even a few stems of silk orchids stuck in the Deiffenbachia and Arum to lend versimillitude to an otherwise unconvincing story.

And Serge at #148, you are an evil, evil man.

Lila, I can take the anthro howlers in TS canon by reminding myself that one of the creators is from a family which has not worked outside the movie industry since before the turn of the 20th century (Danny Bilson) but I expect better from fic writers, who are not trying to shoot on a shoestring and with limited time.

And the big howlers make me regret the inability to dope slap the writer through the internet: there's one long story that, after a promising start, devolves into a long digression on how dangerous it is to take women on anthropological expeditions, at all, ever. The sheer offensive wrongness of that assertion is given a particularly strong odor of irony by the fact that the lead up to the discussion has pretty much pinpointed the expedition's territory as the same part of Melanesia that Margaret Mead was working in in the 1920s. The fact that this also violates Blair Sandberg's characterization (re his mother) is also special.

The Sentinel canon has a botanical blooper to end all bloopers: an episode where a big deal is made of a gun runner's dedication to his orchids, with several scenes shot in a "greenhouse" which has not even one orchid. Not even a few stems of silk orchids stuck in the Deiffenbachia and Arum to lend versimillitude to an otherwise unconvincing story.

And Serge at #148, you are an evil, evil man.

JESR @ 171... And Serge at #148, you are an evil, evil man.

Flattery will get you nowhere. So says General Zod.

Faren@165: soldiers with happy little kids who have just received their official US candy bar

I am working on a story and the chapter I just finished has a scene to that effect. The thing is that individuals often natually want to help, to do the right thing, and so on. So I don't have a problem showing it. The next combat scene will show the same protagonist have to shoot a different kid because the kid's got a gun and is shooting at the protag and his unit. And there's a whole lot of ugliness that comes with that action which I think disqualifies it as war porn.

Even adults can have good intentions. It's whether or not those good intentions are what controls the story, or whether good people end up committing terrible things because, well, that's what a war really is.

ajay@170, w00t!

(wipes spittle off monitor...)

Samuel Kleiner @ 160

You're right, they're not all the same. I was referring to the ones in all those groups who really believe, for whatever reason. I've met enough of them to feel sympathy for the some of those reasons, and to not want to make fun of them (except in the most gentle and understanding way, the way I hope people make fun of me). The con artists and control freaks are another story entirely.

Mary Dell at 184, I meant to say that it is my guiding goal, as a writer, to keep my readers from having to work at maintaining their suspension of disbelief, because it is, in fact, very difficult for me to do so. I am not the ideal fiction reader; out in the real world I am prone to see the forest as made up of individually perceived and catalogued trees.

I'm at work, catching up on my surfing during a break. I came by Making Light, and I read Patrick's latest Particle. The last time I had a comment on a Particle, I did it in private email to pnh, and Patrick was emphatic that I should post here instead, in front of everyone.

Patrick, your comment about Ellen Tauscher shows how ignorant you are of how Washington works. *TAUSHER* didn't write that letter; some 19 or 20-year-old intern did (It's summer time and we flog the interns with having to do this crappy job). The issue isn't Tausher's intelligence (which I know nothing about one way or the other) but the operation of her office staff. Who is supervising the interns who are doing the mail-answering scut work? Anyone? Bueller?

Letters had to go through at least two other layers of scrutinity in the two Congessional offices I worked in -- and you can be sure that my principal -- the Senator or the Congressman I worked for -- had no idea of what letters I *ever* wrote.

Tauscher is guilty of having a problem on her staff, or with her staff, or with the organization of her office; a letter like that should have *never* been mailed out.

And until the blogosphere makes her staff aware of it, um, she won't be aware of it. Nor will her staff be.

Letters to Congresscritters don't mean much, folks -- not most of the time. (That's the subject of a couple of thousand words on techniques of what works and what doesn't...) And that's why the interns are doing it, when they're in the offices on the Hill during the summer. The LA's get to foist their letter-answering job (done in addition to their core job) off on the interns. A learning experience! Heh.

JESR @#177: An excellent goal. I'm not suggesting it's good for a writer to screw up facts, but when they do, my alternate-universe trick is a handy one. It made HBO's ROME very enjoyable, for example. I've read some history books about the Rome in our universe, so the show would have been frustrating for me if I thought it was taking place on Earth One, as it were. Mainly I have to do this when people write about computers. Computers on Earth Two respond to standard written English, and if you want to encrypt something, you just have to put it in Klingon font.

A particularly fun game, if you're a real geek, is to spontaneously fic about the turning points where the Earth you're reading about or watching diverged from Earth One. If you're a botanist, for example, try to figure out what evolutionary events could have made something look just like plant A, but behave like plant B.

You can apply the same technique to unrealistic human behavior, too. After reading a review of Star Trek: TNG that pointed out how stupid the humans of that future are, Hub and I went on to therorize that some kind of mutation occured between TOS and TNG that removed everyone's natural agression and sex drive, and reduced their overall intelligence, so that they constantly let people shoot at them and so forth.

Marilee@140: I found Casanegra to be a lot of fun, though somewhat eye-rollingly smutty.

Mary Dell @ 179

Well, that might also explain the Klingons and the Romulans.

TexAnne #124: Aye.

Lizzy L #125: The OED gives both spellings but the same meaning. The problem with apodeictic assertion is precisely that it is presented as indisputable (Was Ouranos so called because he urinated rain?) in conditions in which the very meaning of concepts is contested (and in this case because the Freudian conceptions the author uses are highly contested).

Teresa #132, Lee #139:

This might be a useful thing for cons other than Nasfic, ala the rasfc cat-vacuuming pins. Perhaps a larger supply could be envisioned?

Bruce #110, Owlmirror #114:

ISTR "slut's wool" as an earlier locution for dust bunnies. Which would certainly go along with the slovenly housekeeping thing.

Clifton Royston #129: I gather that as a physicist Hoyle was a good writer of sf (at any rate, I enjoyed The Black Cloud when I read it back in 1968). Thanks for that clarification.

I should preface this by saying that I'm definitely a lazy housekeeper. That said, my favorite synomyms for 'slattern' (for obvious reasons) are dowd and malkin.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #142: That is interesting. Most of the nuts I have to deal with are people who write long letters (and send out self-published books) with simplistic solutions to complex problems (or truly dumb explanations of very complex matters), or who have grabbed hold of batsh*t insane ideas available from specialty bookshops (a quick turn of my head shows me a copy of The Isis Papers by Frances Cress Welsing, a book that causes me to apologise to random trees)which satisfy their need to have the world be even more evil than it actually is.

I can understand emotional pain driving people to religion, in much the same way that it drives some people to drink or drugs.

abi@146

Amen. I gave up on packing the silly things and transported them in bags.

Jakob @ 149
I was about to say "pretty widely" until I remembered the b**** of a time I just had packing, esp my academic works. Those boxes were the worst- what standardization I have in my older works is completely abandoned with anything published in the last 15 years. I think some fields have managed it, but in my library they've just become catagories meaning These Books Don't Fit on That Shelf.

And now I get to go experience the joys of home ownership. Roof bids, fixing plumbing, and unpacking boxes.

Teresa? I have the Collected Proceedings of the Pseudo Society to mail to you once I dig it out of the box- I'll need a snail mail and I'd been planning on sending it in to Tor. ;) drop me a mailing address at dimmi004 at umn dot edu?

Mary Dell @ 179... After reading a review of Star Trek: TNG that pointed out how stupid the humans of that future are, Hub and I went on to therorize that some kind of mutation occured between TOS and TNG

Therorize? Is that what Klingon academics do? If so, it gives an interesting meaning to the phrase publish or perish...

Julia #187: Fortunately, I had just put down my mug of tea.

Serge @190:
Theorize or agonize, as they say at the U of Klinzhai...

Fragano at 183, thank you.

Tim Kyger at 178, thank you also, and could you, would you tell us what techniques work to get one's Congresscritter to pay attention? I call DiFi's San Francisco office when I want to let her know what I'm thinking. The staffer on the other end of the phone always asks for my zip code. I e-mail Boxer and George Miller in the House. What should I be doing? I don't have random wads of cash to donate to anyone's campaign -- and I shouldn't have to donate money to get my representative to listen to me. Right? Right?

abi @ 192... And Klingon grammar teachers mean it when they talk about split infinitives.

Serge @#190: I have the version of the mutation that makes me unnabel to sphele porperly.

Mary Dell @ 195...Time for you to put on the agonizer dunce hat. (I wonder if Klingons have nuns who are also teachers. What a scary concept, to me, considering my experiences with the human ones.)

Xopher (137), it doesn't have thorns, it doesn't grow like anything that gets called a bramble, and it's no relation to the real brambles. Roses, strawberries, and potentillas are all closer the mark.

Serge:

Just substitute a batlef for the ruler. Otherwise, it's the same experience.

TNH @ 132: I'm used to the funny looks for using "archaic" words.

I figure if people I know are still using them, they are in current usage, and not archaic. Hah!

abi - I don't have any guilder, but I might have some kroner on hand. Would that work? I'd liefer pay now rather than later.

Greg 141: I think your cannon fodder score is messed up; it's +1 for nameless death on either side, which doesn't fit your discussion.

it's +1 for nameless death on either side

ah crap. cut and paste error.

I'll fix it as soon as I can log in.

tnx

Serge @ 190

There's a reason it's called a thesis defense

Fragano @ 188

"Religion is the opiate of the masses", no? More seriously, that is the purpose of a person's religion, to clarify the relationship between self and universe. If that relationship involves great pain, acquiring simple convictions from others who profess no doubt is often an easy way to relief, and it is quite understandable why someone might choose that. What that says about the morality and character of those offering the relief is left as an exercise for the reader.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #203: That's exactly what Marx meant when he coined the phrase: 'Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering, and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the opressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.'

My slightly surreal Amazon.com email from earlier today:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated The Chantry Guild (Dorsai/Childe Cycle) by Gordon R. Dickson have also purchased Steiner, Marx and a New Paradigm: Technological Progress as the Way of Following Christ and Concretization of the Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. by Vladislav Stanko. For this reason, you might like to know that Steiner, Marx and a New Paradigm: Technological Progress as the Way of Following Christ and Concretization of the Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. is now available. You can order yours for just $29.99 by following the link below.

This is certainly one of the more interesting suggestions Amazon has offered.

Is there a word for words that look like they would rhyme but don't, such as 'good' and 'food'?

Tania @#205: I wonder if that's spam from the book's author. The book in question is from BookSurge publishing, which is a self-publishing/POD outfit, and it was just released a couple of days ago. Any chance you have your email address attached to a wishlist or something with Dickson's book on it?

Amazon's suggestion for me today is to upgrade from Adobe Photoshop to the new Adobe Production Suite: "You can order yours for just $779.99...."

Serge @#196: Mary Dell @ 195...Time for you to put on the agonizer dunce hat.

Already grafted on, I'm afraid...have I not mentioned that I'm an I.T. middle manager?

Jen, 206: "Sight rhymes."

Various people: No sock heel pictures, alas; my camera is misbehaving. The effect is a lovely pointillist blending, if that helps at all.

TexAnne @ #209, do these symptoms afflict your camera? If so, most of the manufacturers seem to be willing to repair free of charge. My Canon SD110 is in Illinois being fixed right now.

Mary Dell @ 208... (doing my best William Daniels / John Adams impersonation) Oh my God! Full power on the agonizer for you!

I chanced upon something that has "Making Light" written all over it. It's The Poetical Cookery-Book, from Punch. It looks like you could actually cook from many of these, and they have (often familiar) tunes. So it's a sort of filkish cook book at that. Sample follows:

ROASTED SUCKING-PIG.
AIR--"Scots wha has."

Cooks who'd roast a Sucking-pig,
Purchase one not over big;
Coarse ones are not worth a fig;
So a young one buy.
See that he is scalded well
(That is done by those who sell),
Therefore on that point to dwell,
Were absurdity.

Sage and bread, mix just enough,
Salt and pepper quantum suff.,
And the Pig's interior stuff,
With the whole combined.
To a fire that's rather high,
Lay it till completely dry;
Then to every part apply
Cloth, with butter lined.

Dredge with flour o'er and o'er,
Till the Pig will hold no more;
Then do nothing else before
'Tis for serving fit.
Then scrape off the flour with care;
Then a butter'd cloth prepare;
Rub it well; then cut--not tear--
Off the head of it.

Then take out and mix the brains
With the gravy it contains;
While it on the spit remains,
Cut the Pig in two.
Chop the sage, and chop the bread
Fine as very finest shred;
O'er it melted butter spread--
Stinginess won't do.

When it in the dish appears,
Garnish with the jaws and ears;
And when dinner-hour nears,
Ready let it be.
Who can offer such a dish
May dispense with fowl and fish;
And if he a guest should wish,
Let him send for me!

Linkmeister, 210: No, thank goodness. It's just taking for-freakin'-ever to download to my computer. Then again, it's something like 7 years old...my solution will probably be to poke around on that handy website you linked to and then go to Fry's.

TexAnne, good, I'm glad it's not that. It's highly disconcerting to look at the LCD display and see nothing when you're attempting to frame a picture. Particularly when you can play back photos from the card on the same screen just fine.

Greg London, I thought about your war porn theory today when I was stuck in a movie theater watching Transformers: the Movie. It made sitting through a movie with the logical consistency of Independence Day more bearable.

Mary Dell @ #207: Nope, I just checked and it is a genuine Amazon suggestion email. How weird.

Kip W @ #212: That is wonderful!

Serge, #148: What a blast from the past! I'd forgotten that Bobby Sherman was in that; I mostly remember him as a minor pop singer from that era. But I thought there were words to that theme. "The bluest skies you've ever seen, in Seattle..."

Rikibeth, #152: I don't think so; my memory of this is really hazy, but it seems to me that the story was set in England. However, I looked at your link for the teaberry gum, and damned if I don't remember that commercial with the Tijuana Brass music!

Mary Dell, #154: That's exactly how I handle the dichotomy between Kathy Reichs' books about Temperance Brennan and the Bones TV series. Reichs has said that TV!Brennan is an earlier version of book!Brennan, but I just don't see any way for that to have happened -- Bones is never going to be as diffident as book!Brennan, no matter how old she gets. So I think of them as being in different universes.

Faren, #165: This is actually a different advertising mechanism, called "babysell". The idea is that when the viewer sees a picture of a smiling baby or a cute kid, the critical-analysis part of their brain is supposed to shut down cold, leaving the path wide open for the advertiser's message. When you're childfree, you really start noticing just how many things are sold using babies and kids in the ad, even for products (and ideas) that have nothing at all to do with children.

JESR, #171: ...to lend versimillitude to an otherwise unconvincing story

Don't you mean, "to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative"?

Joann, #184: They're easy enough to make, now that we have the design. Perhaps we should just keep the leftovers in with our stuff for future cons.

Julia, #187: Interesting -- is that usage of "dowd" related to "dowdy" meaning unfashionably dressed?

TexAnne @ 209: Thanks!

pat @ 215: I saw HP&tOOtP at a drive-in theater a couple of weeks ago. During the intermission, the radio station that was playing our soundtrack switched to oldies music, and we turned around and watched Transformers playing on the other screen while listening to "Monday Monday" and such. It was like a kind of surreal music video. It may have made just as much sense that way.

Lee, I was alluding to rather than quoting, y'know?

pat@215: It made sitting through a movie with the logical consistency of Independence Day more bearable.

Hm, I'm not sure that was my intended effect for writing a war pr0n litmus test. Are you saying I've encouraged the watching of bad movies?

;)

The HP thread now has a very minor two-person subthread about Spiderman, but is otherwise still HP.

Re: Girl Genius

They ran out of bandwidth at the end of last month. So they switched to a new provider. Unfortunately, the script they use to serve the pages overloaded the new provider's server. So they switched back to the old provider...which ran out of bandwidth again. On top of that, this last weekend was the big Comic Con in San Diego, which both the Foglios attended. Plenty of people have offered to help them get a new provider and/or improve their script; with luck, now that the con is over they can turn their attention to making things work.

Faren Miller #165: As for "war cutesy", you've seen the Hello Kitty Darth Vader costume, right?

One example which comes to mind is Michael Palin's disturbing baby faced torturer mask from the movie Brazil.

Therorize? Is that what Klingon academics do? If so, it gives an interesting meaning to the phrase publish or perish...

Well, their society is (IIRC) ruled by a Chancellor.

Hmm. Presumably his role is largely ceremonial; the day-to-day running of the empire is the responsibility of the Klingon Vice-Chancellor. And a hierarchical society where reputation is the most important asset does sound pretty much like a university. Sports are also fairly important in both Klingon and university culture. As is Beer.

Loosely connected to War pr0n; our semi-regular bad-ish movie* night reached the Chuck Norris classic Missing in Action. Watching 80's-style action movies makes you appreciate the wit, characterisation and storytelling of 90's-style action movies. Seriously. (And now I'm thinking about scoring Die Hard)

* mostly they're bad movies, but sometimes they're just ones we haven't seen and they turn out to be good.

Neil Wilcox @#225: We keep our Die Hard DVD shelved with the holiday films, and come Xmas it gets shown in rotation with It's a Wonderful Life and the other more obviously Xmassy stuff, to, you know, lighten the mood a bit.

"Now I have a machine gun, Ho Ho Ho."

226: It was long a tradition on British TV to show "The Great Escape" on Christmas Day. It was only recently that I thought "wait a minute. This is a film where basically every sympathetic character gets massacred by the Gestapo at the end? And it's considered suitable for Christmas showing?"

Lee @ 217... You're right. There were lyrics to "Here Come the Brides". Maybe they were in the ending credits. I just checked in YouTube but found no other version of the opening credits, or of the ending.

But I did find something that might interest you. (Ready for this, JESR?)

Bruce Lee in "Here Come the Brides"

Here's a vocal version of the Seattle song -- sounds like Perry Como, instead of Bobby Sherman (who I heard sing that on an hourly basis for what felt like years, on the radio station my school bus played). The lyrics are there too.

Caution: It'll start singing after a couple of seconds. Brace yourself.

Kip W @ 229... I thought this sounded like Burl Ives.

The bluest sky you've ever seen, in Seattle.
And the hills the greenest green, in Seattle.
Like a beautiful child
Growing up, free and wild.
Full of hopes and full of fears,
Full of laughter, full of tears,
Full of dreams to last a year
In Seattle.

When you find your own true love you will know it
By his smile, by the look in his eyes.
Some set pine trees in the air
Or some stand around and stare
Look out everyone, Here Come the Brides.

albatross@200, I managed to upload a new version of the war pr0n document, fixing those numbers.

I also added some text at the intro, and two new sections called "Meat Puppets" and "The High Road Bypass on the Road to Hell", with scoring rules for each.

Lee @#217:

is that usage of "dowd" related to "dowdy" meaning unfashionably dressed?

I am not julia@#187, but I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that when she had "dowd and malkin" in conjunction with "slattern", we were meant to infer "Maureen Dowd and Michelle Malkin".

But perhaps I am overly catty. Meow?

Scotland's popular poet in the news.

I wonder if it's a coincidence that one of Harry Potter's professors is named McGonagall?

Serge, it should be Perry Como- I remember him singing that song on a Christmas Special.

And YOW: Bruce Lee!

(Not awake, and in a bad way with the words, which have dried up to a trickle)

"Dowdy" is derived from the same root as "dough", as used in "pan dowdy" to this day. Hence connotations like "plain", "unshapely", "ungraceful", "inelegant" and "commonplace".

Well, it seems reasonable to me.

After reading Lee (#217) on a different advertising mechanism, called "babysell", I started thinking, but what of puppies and kittens? Lo and behold, Early Cooley III (#223) comes along with the link to a Hello Kitty Darth Vader! It could inspire a whole new generation of Marine recruitment ads (cue the nursery music, with twinkly little xylophones).

JESR @ 234... A few years ago, there was a Green Hornet marathon on TV and they showed Bruce Lee's audition. Let's put it this way. The middle-aged white stuntman he was demonstrating his skills against wouldn't have stood a chance against him in a real fight.

Tania #205:

Yours probably beats the Amazon mail I got yesterday, touting the large print edition of Robert Service (this likely also links in to the McGonagall citation further down the thread) just because I'd rated an M.M. Kaye book.

(On seeing the subject line, I'd figured it was because I'd bought my husband some Sandburg a year or so ago.)

Mary Dell writes of Die Hard as a Christmas movie in #226:

"Now I have a machine gun, Ho Ho Ho."

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

Lloyd Burchill @ 22, Keith @ 26, & Stephan Jones 2 33, and anyone else who might be interested:

I've been meaning to reread His Dark Materials for a while now: would any of you be interested in discussing it over at my livejournal?

We could set something up - maybe have finished reading The Golden Compass by a certain date, and I can set up a post for it for everyone to comment on. I could put in a cut so that it's not spoiling anyone.

We could also go chapter by chapter, at an agreed upon reading rate, if that would be preferable.

#226:

For many years, one of New York City's local stations ran "King Kong" every Thanksgiving.

Neil@225: (And now I'm thinking about scoring Die Hard)

If you want to save the time, the movie pretty much boils down to this:

Mr Addison: I'll be home soon. Love you.

(Snape drilling into safe.)

Mr Addison: I'm just a fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench.

Snape: I'll take it under advisement. ... Hit it again.

Hans: Shoot the glass!

Mr Addison: Yippie-kai-yay, mother f****r!

Tania @ 199:

I'm doing practice tests for the GRE/English Literature exam, and the questions that I consistently get wrong are the horrible "which of these words is used in a sense that is archaic or no longer idiomatic" ones.

Does anyone have a hack for that? It doesn't really address it in the study guides. It seems a bit rude, really, to expect someone to immerse themselves in the canon and not absorb the speech patterns.

Sarah @#243: Oo, yucky. The test didn't have any of that when I took it (back in 1066 or so) but it did have "whose style is this a parody of?" questions.

Maybe the thing to do is to re-cast the question for yourself thusly: "Which century would this phrase be most at home in?" or even "Which author can you imagine using this phrase?"

That might jog hidden parts of your memory so if you think "Aha! Mallory!" or "18th century!" you can figure it's probably not contemporary.

Another trick is to picture a typical denizen of our century saying the phrase aloud, to see if it seems to fit. *Typical denizen,* not bookworm, so think TV anchor or store clerk, not the folks you've been spending your time with while getting edumacated.

Sarah @ #243:
It seems a bit rude, really, to expect someone to immerse themselves in the canon and not absorb the speech patterns.

Yes! Also, the vocabulary, and some of the really wonderful words that deserve to be in regular and customary use.

I'm not good at identifying archaic words. My grandmother uses liefer. I use nought. I would cynically say, if it is an interesting word, it is probably an archaic word. Or try the "Have I heard this on PBS? Archaic. On network TV? Not archaic." test.

Vocabulary and appropriate usage depend on the audience. Dang it, the people writing the tests should realize that.* You have my sincere sympathies.

*And it makes me glad my grad work was in project management.

Stefan Jones @ 241: My husband grew up in New York, and the annual Thanksgiving kaiju marathon has become a tradition around our apartment. While I'm planning a menu and visiting markets to make sure we have what I consider the essentials (you know, things like food and drink), he's stacking the Netflix queue with what he considers the essentials (things like Destroy All Monsters and Mothra).

Lexica @ 246... Nothing but the best turkey for Thanksgiving, eh? My wife and I have quite the MST3K dvd collection, and tapes of our favorites, such as The Day the Earth Froze... And we have a non-MST3K tape of Jessie James meets Frankenstein's Daughter...

Serge #247:

Yes, but when, oh when, will Hammer's Moon Zero Two be released?

Bill Higgins @ 248... Ah, Moon Zero Two... I remember it well. It's hard to believe its director was the same man who directed Quatermass and the Pit.

As for myself, I am hoping for the day when the following non-turkeys are realeased on DVD... Scarecrow, with Patrick McGoohan as Father Syn.... Master of the World, but what can I say? Vincent Price's flying ship looked so great... Robinson Crusoe on Mars, where, if you look beyond the title, you find a neat little movie about being stranded on an alien planet and surviving by one's wits...

Serge @#249: Quatermass and the Pit kicks ass. Seriously, it's one of my favorite movies. I particularly like the helmet that lets you see the memories of the dead grasshoppers...it just DOES, dang it! Don't ask questions!

Bruce @110
The USA meaning of ['slut' as] 'good date' is much younger

You know, it's been two days since I first read this comment, and the usage still squicks me.

Mary Dell @ 250... Quatermass and the Pit is also one of my favorite SF movies. It's smart, and is well served by good actors. A few years ago, I read that someone wanted to remake the movie, to launch a new series about Quatermass. It's probably just as well that it didn't happen.

Assuming we're talking about the movie where an ancient martian spaceship is dug up, Quartermass and the Pit was shown under another name, at least on TV. "Ten millions years to Earth" or something like that.

Scared the buggars out of me as a kid.

Stefan Jones @ 253... Quatermass and the Pit is the original British title. What you're thinking of is the American title, Five Million Years to Earth...

Regarding the sidebar link on printing the Constitution in passports, have you heard of the "Liberty Bill" project?

It was the idea of a middle-school civics class, to change the back of the one dollar bill -- replacing the current masonic symbol and Great Seal with a condensed version of the U.S. Constitution.

I blogged this back in 2003, complete with a photo of the proposed design and a link to a news article about the project. Unfortunately the official site that I linked to is down, but it's still a cool concept that I'd support.

Those of you who are Steven Brust fans would probably like to know he has a new grandson. Here's his wife's account.

#249: Robinson Crusoe on Mars will be released in September by--believe it or not--the Criterion Collection.

Wesley @ 257... Yay!!! Huzzah!!!

There's this movie that my wife has long longed to see released on DVD. It is. Her joy now knows no bound.

Frankenstein meets the Spacemonster

It is also known as

Duel of the Space Monsters (UK)
Frankenstein Meets the Space Men
Mars Attacks Puerto Rico
Mars Invades Puerto Rico
Operation San Juan

Jeez.. What does Mars have against Puerto Rico?

Serge #259: It has something to do with rum, radio telescopy, and tree frogs.

Fragano @ 260, ah, the dreaded coqui frog! Scourge of the Island of Hawai'i! Target of State agencies! Recipient of caffeine spray!

Oh, sorry. Those noisy critters are an invasive species out here. They're not admired.

Linkmeister #261: I didn't know that. In Puerto Rico the coquí is a national symbol.

Fragano @ #261, believe me, we know that. The moment eradication was suggested the state started hearing from local Puerto Rican immigrants (there aren't many, but some). Then they passed the word along to P.R. and impassioned pleas started arriving from politicians there.

I'm not sure what the latest word is on this, but they're a serious problem for people who live on the Big Island. Google "Hawaii + coqui frog" and you'll probably find a bunch of links.

Linkmeister@90: Unfortunately, maps have since become a debatable badge in fantasy -- too many authors spend more time on the map than on the story, or bend the story to fit the map.

Greg @ 220, no, you weren't responsible for me watching a bad movie. Hasbro Corporation was, along with a casually tossed off "Sure, I'll take you to see the Transformers movie when it comes out! Spielberg's the executive producer, how bad could it be?"

I managed to impress my youngest son by identifying Optimus Prime before it identified itself. And it could have been much worse: Yugi-Oh!:The Movie and Pokemon 2000 were both pretty atrocious. (The original Pokemon movie was not that bad.)

marilee: You beat me to it.

So I'm thinking about buying Buffy on DVD, starting with Season 1 and continuing... Amazon.com has New and Used sets available. Has anyone on ML ever bought a set of used DVDs from Amazon? If so, comments as to quality, reliability, etc. would be gratefully accepted.

my guess is that the Coqui frogs spread so well is the article that said Hawi'i 'has no native frogs.'

OOps for the introduction. That can be a very bad thing for the ecosystem.

Terry, I kept meaning to put it in earlier. I've been following the waiting for the baby. and now he's finallly here!

Bill Higgins #248: There are DVD editions of Moon Zero Two in the wild, including the MST3K episode where it was featured, but they all appear to be pirated, as far as I can tell.

http://www.thecinemalaser.com/hammer-warner.htm

Regarding Cory Doctorow, xkcd, and the cape/goggles, can anyone enlighten me as to whether the comic came first or the actual wearing of the costume came first? I saw the comic first, and then pictures of him wearing the cape (both several months ago), but I couldn't tell which had happened first. Just trying to get my recursives right...

Nenya @ 271, looking at the comments here, it seems to be the comic was first.

Lizzy L @ 267, the fluorospheric Buffy discussion spurred me into renting the series. (Available for $2/week/disc on Bargain Thursdays at my local place.) At a rate of a half-season every 2-3 weeks, I'm up to the first half of the third season out of seven. Looking at the non-declining & substantial price of the DVDs, there's no way I'll buy them new, and am not sure I'll even want to have them to keep second-hand, though much of it is quite enjoyable so far. My two Quatermass sets, tho', are keepers!

Lizzy L #267: I had been going to suggest going whole-hog and buying The Chosen Collection, which I did when it came time for me to own Buffy, but a quick look at the prices on Amazon makes it look like it's no longer cheaper that way.

As for used things on Amazon, I've never had a problem, but you are buying from individuals, not the company, so there's probably less recourse if there is one. I'd do it, if that means anything.

Nenya@271, the comic came first.

If you go here, you'll see the xkcd archive. If you hover your mouse over the entry that says "Blagofaire", you'll see a little popup text that shows the date of the comic to be "2007-03-23". (The individual comics do not seem to be dated, this seems to be the only way to figure out when an xkcd comic came out.)

Cory dressed up at the 2007 EFF Pioneer Awards, which according to this, took place on 2007-03-27.

So, it looks like the comic came out, and then a few days later, Cory dressed in a cape and goggles.

From the library, yesterday:
Some years ago I was told that audio books are the best way to experience the verse classics, not by reading them as text. True.

When I spotted Homer's Odyssey, it had been long enough that it was worth checking out (so to speak) but it was an off brand company.

I'm leery of them as the "actors" often are dull or histrionic.

This one is read by Derek Jacobi, translation by Allen Mandelbaum. I all but ran to the check out with it.

Epacris @ 272... My two Quatermass sets, tho', are keepers!

Which interpretation of Quatermass do you prefer? I'm familiar only with Brian Donlevy's and with Andrew Keir, as I've never been exposed to any of the TV versions. I definitely prefer Keir, whose Quatermass is a more compassionate scientist than Donlevy's.

Quality Control?
Bullshit...
This spammer earns special demerit, claiming to be a quality control agent.... my annoyed email response...

To "John C. Lindsay II"

Subject: Re: Introducing Dimensional Layout Services, Inc.

I have a very jaundiced, as in negatively prejudicial, view of any organization claiming positive expertise and excellence in "quality control" which seems to have failed at some of the most basic QC/QA concepts.

That is,
1. What don't you understand about "unsolicited commercial email," aka spam, and the abhorrence of it?
2. Your spam--and it is spam--is spam because:
a. You fail to identify the reason WHY the recipient is getting this email, that is a VALID reason to send email, as opposed to lowest common denominator ads for pharmaceuticals, scams, unwanted financial services, sleaze, etc., in either or both the subject line and the From address
b. You fail to provide any valid plain text or even formatted human-readable in Web browser email reading, information about your company and why anyone should think you have ANY competence for anything except annoying people,
3. You do NOT comprehend WHY people from especially places like MIT, DESPISE html etc. email and find it completely obnoxious.
4. You didn't even send the email from a corporate domain address--how credible is any "Quality Control" organization which uses {handle}@comcast.net for promotional purposes? and which MAIL BOMBS them? These are characteristics of an organization totally UNCONCERNED with customer needs, interests, and quality concerns!
5. You are a bandwidth hog and email box bomber-- 784 kilobytes of unsolicited email can and DOES bomb out end user systems from people on slow connections with older computer systems.
6. Why should I believe that someone who fails Technical Cognizant End User Marketing Concepts 101 (starting with, Do Not Tick Off Potential Customers by spamming them with mailbombs and failing to identify who you are and why the annoyed recipient is getting this--actually I suspect that people who have Bayesian spam filters your email goes directly to the bit bucket with!) has ANY credibility whatsoever and is anyone I would want to do business with?!
7. Your mastery of written English is poor, which lacks quality control.

And if you are a front for "work done in Bangalore, Roumania, Uzbekistan, Kiev, Vladivostock, Slovenia, the Phillippines, etc.," I've been entirely too polite here....

----- Original Message Follows -----
> This is a text part of the message.
> It is shown for the users of old-style e-mail clients
>
>

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inspection service, we perform 100 percent layouts, Capability studies, Gage R
& R's, Gage verifications, Digitizing, Scanning, Surfacing, and Reverse
Engineering. D.L.S.I. became accredited source to ISO/IEC 17025 1999 to
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> [Attachment: A2LA2.jpg]

'Dimensional Layout Services'? That sounds like something from Eureka.

217 & 232: I'm afraid I couldn't say what the root is. I found them while looking for a synonym for Dowd to use with an April Fools day piece.

Owlmirror, I was in fact amused to find that two writers with so much in common 'shared' a name as well. That they're writers who are professionally, to say the least, un-rigorous gave it a nice note of irony.

Is that the catty reaction you were referring to?

Mary Dell & Tania, 244/245:

Thank you both; I think that will be a much better way to frame the questions in my head. It makes sense that they would test whether you can recognize the feel of Chaucer or Wordsworth; I don't know why I got so hung up on "well, I use that word, so..."

Sometimes I worry that, even if I do get accepted anywhere, I will have used up my entire brain on this exam. Sigh. Really, I just want to read Jewish diasporan literature and have a nice discussion about it.

julia@#279:

Huh. I thought that the use of the words was based on the people whose names they are, but now that I have checked the OED, I see that the primary definition for "malkin" is indeed a "lower-class, untidy, or sluttish woman". Although the British meaning of malkin seems to overlap with the American meaning of slut; Chaucer says: "It wol nat come agayn..Namoore than wol Malkyns maydenhede, Whan she hath lost it in hir wantownesse."

But "dowd" is not synonymous with malkin, is it? Although way down the page, there is the cant phrase "malkin-trash": "a person dressed in dark gloomy clothes." Which I suppose is close enough to "dowd".

I see that another definition for "malkin" is a Scottish term for the female genitals, but I am not sure that that is quite applicable, since the Scottish word is pronounced "maukin".

For those here who don't keep up with Fragano's livejournal, he is celebrating August 1 in verse.

Interlocking rings of Evil Empires? (Not clear that Microsoft is an actively participating conspirator of the fascist regime, SharePoint and collaborative computing instead of email amongst Schmuck's junta may have been used BUT IT IS STILL ILLEGAL!

E

Linkmeister #263: Wow! I definitely did not know that.

Yesterday's episode of Eureka was quite nice, especially when we find why Jack sees town people disappear one after the other and nobody else remembers that the missing ones ever existed. Very nice. Next week promises to be scary. Wouldn't you be nervous going to the science fair held by the kids of Eureka?

Nancy C. Mittens@240-I'd also be interested-i"ve not read it yet either, and would be overjoyed to do so with a group with which to discuss it.

Nancy C. Mittens@240-I'd also be interested-i"ve not read it yet either, and would be overjoyed to do so with a group with which to discuss it.

Nancy Mittens @ 240... Unfortunately, I haven't read His Dark Materials yet. I'm saving that for after seeing the Golden Compass at Christmas.

Epacris 272, Greg London 274, thank you. The comic makes sense with or without it being a reference to a pre-existing event, but it's quite funny if he wore the costume afterward. Indeed, xkcd changes the world. :D

They're invoking executive privelege for Rove: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/01/attorney.firings/index.html

The HP thread is still intact. The Spider-man minithread is gone, and there's an undertow of Hermione as Mary Sue.

Recipe alert on the 'Thoroughly spoiled Harry Potter' thread — There's a Pumpkin cookie recipe from rm at comment #625, with thanks to Madame Rosemerta (aka mr?). Don't forget the ginger :)

Fragano @ 186:
Clifton Royston #129: I gather that as a physicist Hoyle was a good writer of sf (at any rate, I enjoyed The Black Cloud when I read it back in 1968). Thanks for that clarification.

To be fair, Hoyle was actually a brilliant physicist -- probably one of the most important astrophysicists of the 20th Century, particularly for his work on the nucleosynthesis of chemical elements in stars. Some people suggest he ought to have received received the Nobel prize for his work in that area (as his collaborator William Fowler did).

But Clifton Royston is quite correct, in that Hoyle refused to give up on the Steady State theory long after the evidence had ruled it out, adding increasingly elaborate and unlikely features to try to reconcile it with the evidence.

I remember an interview with Hoyle in the New Scientist some years back in which he said it was very unlikely that he would be able to make a big contribution in the mainstream ever again, since big breakthroughs these days come with big teams, huge telescopes, and large budgets. The only way he could imagine making a big contribution to science was by backing some way-out notion which no-one in the mainstream would back, and having it turn out to be correct. Obviously most such notions will turn out to be incorrect, and Hoyle knew that perfectly well.

So he wasn't just losing his marbles as he got older, he was deliberately championing wacky, unlikely causes like germs from space, Steady State theories and Archaeopteryx frauds.

Anyone remembers Hoyle's novel where some people there's a weird radio signal being sent from the Sun to Out There then people realize that some aliens had basically been scanning Earth's History for a long time? Next thing you know, various eras of History are made to co-exist.

Sarah @#280: Really, I just want to read Jewish diasporan literature and have a nice discussion about it.

Make sure the program you choose has a strong focus on the study of primary texts. Seriously. I went to IU, which was great for undergrad, but at the grad level was trying to compete with Duke and, I dunno, U-Nanterre-France for hugest amount of intratextual wankery. We read about 500 pages of philosophy and lit crit a week, and maybe 50 pages a week of primary text. Feh.

Serge @ 295

That sounds like "October the First is Too Late". An interesting book, which I took to be a response to the mildly social Darwinist and species expansionist bent of people like Heinlein. The "we must go to the stars because it is our Destiny, and anything we suffer to do it is worth it" philosophy.

Unfortunately, not his best book, IMHO; IIRC (I read it more than 40 years ago), it falls apart towards the end; the revelation of the mystery behind the jumbling of time leaves everything else pretty much an anticlimax.

Bruce Cohen @ 297... That's the book. I wasn't sure if the French title was anything like its original. I read it a long time ago, in 1970, after all. That's also why I don't remember how good or bad the book was, besides this being the days when I was discovering real SF and so everything looked great.

Peter Erwin #293: Thanks for that clarification. So Hoyle was a brilliant physicist who, when the paradigm of astrophysics shifted didn't follow to the new normal science. What about the diffusionist theory of life?

Serge #298:

I enjoyed the book, particularly for the tone and atmosphere. It's been some years since I read it, but I still have it.

Fragano @ 299:
I'm not sure I'd put it in "paradigm-shift" terms, really. It's more a case of there being two rival theories in the 40s and 50s: his theory and the Big Bang theory[*]. I think Hoyle basically invested too much of his time, effort, and intellectual prestige defending the Steady State theory to just give it up, even when everyone else could see it had failed. I keep his story in the back of my mind as a cautionary tale about getting too attached to one's own theories...

His "panspermia" idea was, I think, actually tied in to the Steady-State theory. He had argued that it would take an insanely long amount of time for random molecular collisions to produce a living cell[**], so there was no way for life to have started on the Earth in just a few billion years -- or anywhere in the Universe, if it was only 10 or 20 billion years old, as the Big Bang theory suggested. But if the whole Universe was infinitely old, as the Steady State theory asserted, then life could still get going somewhere during the past infinity of time, and then [somehow] waft through space, infecting newborn worlds.

(There were some interesting/amusing papers in the early 1980s from him and a collaborator, Chandra Wickramasingh, claiming that certain mysterious features seen in newly acquired infrared spectra of interstellar gas and dust clouds were due to dessicated bacteria....)

[*] As you may know, he's responsible for labeling the rival theory with the name "Big Bang"; this was the dismissive nickname he gave it during a British radio program about cosmology.

[**] He famously compared it to a tornado going through a junkyard and spontaneously assembling a Boeing 747. I believe his calculation was technically correct -- except that it completely ignored how chemistry actually works.

Peter Erwin #301: I'm surprised he isn't quoted a lot by the Creationist crowd.

Fragano @ 302:
Peter Erwin #301: I'm surprised he isn't quoted a lot by the Creationist crowd.

Alas, it turns out that he is some of the time. (See the discussion here, which mentions a creationist site flogging Hoyle's statistical argument.)

(Though they mostly ignore the fact that he and his collaborator Wickramasinghe would hardly have agreed with the "Earth is 10,000 years old" crowd!)

Speaking of tornadoes, I recently heard a rather chilling description on a cable weather show of 2004's Category Four Hurricane Charley as basically a ten-mile wide F2 tornado. (shudder)

Tim Kyger, #178: "Patrick, your comment about Ellen Tauscher shows how ignorant you are of how Washington works. *TAUSHER* didn't write that letter; some 19 or 20-year-old intern did (etc)"

Right. Powerful, influential United States Representative Ellen Tauscher doesn't exercise any control over her staff; they don't have regular meetings in which they get their story straight. The entire practice of "message discipline," as practiced by a million and a half tech startups and entertainment-industry marketing operations, is wholly alien to her, so we can't possibly hold her to the words she allows to go out over her name.

Also, the reason windows fog up when it's cold is because of all the fish in the atmosphere.

You are one of my oldest friends, but I keep getting the sense that I'm supposed to clutch my heart and cry out to God when you point to my dread ignorance of "how Washington works." Instead, I keep saying, yes, that's extremely hypocritical and undemocratic; remind me again why I'm supposed to have any respect for it?

I'd be more impressed if you ever weighed in to call me naive for failing to understand something good about how Washington gets business done. So far, though, not.

Serge/Bruce/joann et al: I'm very fond of October the First is Too Late; as Serge said, it's inherently tied up for me with falling in love with SF and what it could do. I don't remember how old I was when I first read it - 10? 12? - but I know it held up reasonably well when I reread it much older, and recognized some of the narrator's more adult interactions. I talked about this a little over on Charlie Stross's blog earlier this year, because his Missile Gap novella plays with some of its ideas rather differently, with an explicit nod-of-the-head to it by title.

Odd piece of my brain: the Beatles' song It's All Too Much is synaesthetically tied up with that novel. I always get a little flash of it when I listen to the song.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden @ 305

I want to expand on something you said, but I think it belongs in the "We're not led, we're kept" thread*, so I'm going over there.

* I'd like us to keep one thread clear of politics, so there's someplace to go where I don't have to feel depressed. My personal reaction, I know, but I'm not dealing well with the knowledge of our new fascist overlords just now.

I put up a first/organizing post in my lj here for anyone who was interested in His Dark Materials.

Peter Erwin #303: Creationists, being True Believers®, make highly selective use of sources, so that's not really surprising.

Mary Dell @ 296:

That's a good point, thanks. I'm meeting with an old professor* next week to talk about programs I should look at; I'll make a note to bring that up with him. I've been out of school for long enough now that I feel totally ignorant of the current academic memes.

*That'd be a professor I had as an undergrad, way back when. Not, y'know, an old professor. Probably not that much older than me, really.

Cþulhuvida

I wonder how Our Woman in Amsterdam is doing now that the whole family has moved. That disturbance I feel in the Force is probably Abi tearing her hair out.

Clifton @ 306... How are the Beatles tied in with Hoyle's novel? I know that some of them liked SF, as the presence of H.G.Wells on the cover of Sgt.Pepper suggests.

Is that what it is? I knew something wasn't the same on Making Light. Hm, her last post was July 31. I do hope she is alright.

alright...

all right...

damn. I can never get those two right.

from the "Another way to game wikipedia" particle:

the text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text

They are going to calculate "trust" via a computer algorithm. The explanation is that "trust" is based on how long someone's text lasts on wikipedia. But unless they take into account the level of user activity on an individual article, contributing absolute crap to a seldom visited article would still give you a great "trust" score. Even contributing sentence rewrites about topics you know nothing about in seldom visited pages would up your "trust" score.

Oh my head.

Greg London @ 314... If I remember correctly, Abi's last day in Scotland was July 31. I'm sure she's ok, if a bit harried. But you know how resourceful those International Women of Mystery are...

Here's a question for PNH: do you plan to post your recent Nippon 2007 Press Release parody to ML? I think it deserves a wider audience than the SMOFS elist.

The HP thread is still just HP. Kip is being hilarious and Greg London has been told to cut it out.

wrt the "atrocious knitted garments": egad. But at least the underlying yarn seems inoffensive, which is not true of a certain knitting book that scarred my eyeballs recently. Don't miss the "More Photos" link, although that doesn't have as many pix as the "more" link from Google Books' copy. (The object on the second page of the table of contents looks like some hideous tartan of Muppet pelts.)

I want to say right here and right now that Greg London is a valued member of this crowd, at least as far as people named Nielsen Hayden are concerned, and we'd be sad if he went away.

He's an awkward pain in the ass sometimes. He also has some bad qualities.

I've been staying away from the HP thread, so I don't know what Greg may or may not have said. I hope this doesn't sound too presumptuous of me, but I think it doesn't matter what he said. He may be a pain in the ass, but he's by Ghu our pain in the ass, and I, for one, want him to stay.

Greg's decidedly one of the good guys, and yes. What Bruce said. He's one of ours.

Bruce... Mac... About Greg, that all goes without saying. But let's say it anyway.

I was at the grocery store a few nights ago, and the cashier at the checkout had a name badge that read:

"KY"

And my immediate thought was:

"Ohmighod, she's been disemvoweled!"

Most of you have probably seen it by now, so I won't go back to find the link, but the new Mars explorer that was sent off today bears a copy of the disc with SF involving Mars that didn't make it there in a previous Russian attempt that failed. An exact copy, so the format is already out-of-date. (Typical)

re Greg: "cut it out" = / "go away"

I too value Greg as a regular poster. (God knows *I've* never posted anything here that anyone found annoying!)

re gaming Wikipedia: "If you don't measure what you value, you end up valuing what you measure."

Faren @ 326... I don't know if Sojournet is still putt-putting around on Mars, but it's my understanding that it contains a disk listing all members of the Planetary Society. Yours truly is on that list. I say dibs on Mount Olympus.

Allow me to add my own "hear, hear" to the pro-Greg sentiments being expressed here. And of course "cut it out" does not mean "go away"!

Yes, Greg can be a PITA—and boy is that helpful sometimes! He's truly one of the Good Guys.

Lila @ 327

"If you don't measure what you value, you end up valuing what you measure."

That neatly sums up the entire discussion of the acquisition of power on the "We're not led, we're kept" thread. Where is that quote from?

Serge @ 324

We should never go without saying good things about people who are close to us.

I appreciate everyone's kind words.

Thanks.

Bruce @ 330: "If you don't measure what you value, you end up valuing what you measure." Where is that quote from?

Well, it was used in a 2004 blog entry by Rob Styles, but it sounds more like something The Sphinx would say from the movie "Mystery Men". heh.

Statistical analysis of red-shirt deaths on Star Trek

Mary Dell @ 333... I think it was Timothy Zahn who once suggested that the Enterprise's security people should wear a insigna showing a bull's eye in front of which a duck is sitting.

"Goddamit doctor, I am not paranoid. I'm wearing a red shirt!"

"Goddamit doctor, I am not paranoid. I'm wearing a red shirt!"

I'd just like to appreciatively quote Patrick's "He's an awkward pain in the ass sometimes. He also has some bad qualities."

Sometimes we need that. (We=people, not just we=this blog.)

[making the most of Open Threadness]

I saw this sign today, in downtown Boston, which I imagine would amuse/dismay most of the architects that I know.

I'm thinking they should have gone with 'Marc Truant and Associates.'

Just an fyi from a lurker: the newspaper layout Sidelight is a scan from my local paper - the Victoria (BC) Times-Colonist. I didn't notice the irony at the time, but I recognize it from flipping through Wednesday or Thursday's edition because the whole page was bizarrely organized (article on top, then horizontal ad, then two articles at the bottom).

Julie L (#320): Yowch. Those yarns are indeed truly hideous. Although I guess if you are going to restrict yourself to garments that made only out of knitted squares, rectangles, and triangles, you have to try to make them interesting somehow. I think they might have benefited from a little more time to think of a theme for their knitting book.

debcha @#340: What, "ugly" isn't a good theme?

The Amazon reviews for that book indicate that not only is the yarn hideous (at least in this context; for all I know there *is* some way to knit a silk purse out of them sows' ears), but it's also expensive-- one person writes (probably about the Muppet tartan), "There is a blanket made of woven strips (more scarf knitting. How is this going beyond the scarf?)- how boring that would be to knit, and would cost over $400, if made in the recommended yarns."

OTOH, then there's the (five-star!) review that's titled, "Just jealous...they cant afford the fabulous", and then continues, "What a fabulous book - just because it says to use Trendsetter Yarns doesn't mean you would have to use them - I have been in plenty of yarn shops and seen comparable yarns that you could use with this book and have an identical item." (...thus presumably enabling more affordable fugly? O joy.)

Oh, drat, I just learned that Tommy Makem has died.

Here's Hares on the Mountain, one of my favorites. This is a duet with Liam Clancy...Tommy Makem is the second voice to come in.

Sigh.

Mild boggle of the day. We recorded the second show of a new series called "Saving Grace", starring Holly Hunter. I would watch her in almost anything after seeing her in A Life Less Ordinary. Saving Grace is much better than I feared it would be, given the religious theme of the movie; they've managed not to get too hung up on Christian mythology as opposed to other kinds.

But the boggle was the actor playing the guy who Holly Hunter's character was investigating. About half way through I finally realized that it was James Marsters. I knew he could change his voice that much (not just accent, but also pitch, cadence, timbre, and breath), but it didn't look that much like him. And the body language was very different from any other character I'd seen him play, most especially Spike. Very impressive.

We watched "Masters of Science Fiction" for the first time (this was the first episode, right?) tonight. Overall, I'd rate it better than the Outer Limits and all but a lot of the Twilight Zone. Good acting on the part of Judy Davis (of course) and Sam Waterston (though he should floss some of the scenery out of his teeth), but V gubhtug gur fgbel gevrq gb mvt naq mnt gbb bsgra sbe gur snpg gung nyy ohg gur svefg mvt jrer gryrtencurq frireny zvahgrf nurnq. Gb fbzr rkgrag, gung'f orpnhfr V'z snzvyvne jvgu gur gebcrf gurl hfrq, ohg bayl cnegyl. Rin tbg gurz nyy gbb, naq fur qbrfa'g ernq zhpu fpvrapr svpgvba. And they really need to get rid of that synthesized announcer's voice; it's highly annoying. I'll watch it again, but I'm not really excited about it, as I am about some non-genre shows like "State of Mind" with Lili Taylor, or "The Closer", and may get to be about "Saving Grace".

On the other hand, Torchwood is coming.

Bruce Cohen @ 344... Unfortunately, I found "Saving Grace" quite offensive in its depiction of atheists. The main character was bad enough in that respect (before an angel made her see the error of her ways), but having the first episode's villain be an atheist and a pedophile was a bit too much.

Re: 342

"for all I know there *is* some way to knit a silk purse out of them sows' ears."

Yes, apparently:

http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/purse/index.html

#345: The computerized voice is Stephen Hawking.

"Jerry Was A Man" airs August 18, and a Harlan Ellison script August 25.

Link here.

Mary Dell, #341: What, "ugly" isn't a good theme?

Based on the evidence presented on ML and elsewhere, I can only conclude that it's sadly overused.

Bruce @ #330, I first heard it on slacktivist, but was unable to track down an original source. I got so many Google results I concluded it was a common aphorism.

Bruce Cohen @ 345... Drat. I had forgotten to check for "Master of Science-Fiction". I knew it was coming, but I never expect new series to be aired on Saturday nights. (Except for Pretender and that was in the mid-1990s.) I remember that Ellison was very excited about it at LAcon, and how the network would air it the moment some other series failed. It doesn't sound like ABC was in a rush to show it though, since that was one year ago. Combine that with the slot they finally gave the show and one gets a sense they didn't have much faith in it.

Do you know if that first episode will be shown again?

Speaking of TV anthologies, does anybody remember Welcome to Paradox? It was aired some time around 1996, and didn't last long. Which is too bad because its episodes were all adapted from real SF stories, changed to fit the premise of this being set in the futuristic city of Paradox, but still real SF. There was stuff by Varley. And by Goulart, which meant a story about a robotic car that goes crazy because its passenger spilled some coffee on the dashboard.

ugly knitting: Who needs a book for that? I can do it for myself, thankyouverymuch. (The blue sort-of-striped shawl wasn't too bad in the picture.) Going back to the chair-pad I'm knitting, in decent wool ....

Melissa #347, thanks for the link to the wonderful page "On the Making of Silk Purses
from Sows' Ears"!

That thought from the report's conclusion should be remembered everywhere:

Things that everybody thinks he knows only because he has learned the words that say it, are poisons to progress. The only way to get ahead is to dig in, to study, to find out, to reason out theories, to test them...

Serge @ 276:

The definitive Quatermass is Andre Morell, from the original TV serial of Quatermass and the Pit. Well worth seeking out: one of the best pieces of TV SF ever made.

Jon Meltzer @ 348

It's the synthesized voice that Stephen Hawking uses, since his own voice doesn't work anymore, but it's still annoying. There have been better sounding voices for a long time now; if Hawking doesn't want to change because he considers it an identifying feature, that's fine, but for the show to use it is clearly an attempt to identify the show with him. And I personally would much rather thay didn't; the sound is very grating to me.

Serge @ 351

I just checked the guide on my recorder; it looks like they're only showing Masters of SF at 10 PM on Saturday. Now I wish I had recorded it, I could burn a DVD and ship it to you, thus becoming a member in good standing of the pirate class. Unfortunately, we watched it live because we were staying up late anyway.

Maybe someone else recorded it, and hasn't deleted it yet?

Serge @ 346

I honestly didn't see that emphasis on the atheism of the villain. I'm going to see if I can catch that again and look more closely; I would be disturbed if they meant to say that. My impression was that they were saying, for instance, that Holly Hunter's character was not an atheist, that she believed but her belief had been badly damaged by having to clean up in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing.*

* Graphic description of violence: Svfuvat gur obqvrf, be cnegf bs obqvrf, bs qrnq puvyqera bhg bs jerpxntr is very likely to disturb your belief in almost anything.

Iain Coleman @ 355... Thanks. I'll have to look it up. I'd be interested to compare the TV version of Quatermass and the Pit, with the Andrew Keir movie, which is probably one of my favorite SF movies.

Bruce Cohen @ 357... It's too early for Talk-like-a-pirate Day. I'll watch their other adaptations and, if I must, I'll beg someone for the temporary loan of their copy of the original episode.

PNH @ 108... Serge, 73: "Let's not forget that ML is sometimes referred to as the flourosphere." (...) Well, we were originally hosted on Panix.

"And give us our daily dread."

Re: #354: You're welcome!

Bruce Cohen @ 358... I honestly didn't see that emphasis on the atheism of the villain.

Maybe it's because I'm one - an atheist, not a villain - that I saw the emphasis. If his atheism was not a factor in his being a Bad Person, why was it brought up at all? If they truly wanted to use dramatic shorthand to indicate his being a misfit, they might as well have said that he reads comic-books, which is also one of my pecularities - but my lips don't move when I read. Honest.

Serge,

I believe you, about the lips for sure, and I'm willing to take your word that you saw a disrespect of atheism in the show. I just want to go back and see why I missed it. Being completely non-standard on religion (God refuses to tell me his plans; She'll talk to everybody else, why not me?), I tend to be sensitive about it.

Serge @ 346... But don't you know? Atheists are much more likely to be Evil than Religious Folk, because they don't have a God telling them what's Right and Wrong, so how are they going to have morals without that? Of course they'll end up getting it wrong!

;)

Bruce... Really, my lips don't move when I read comics. What? you don't believe me? It's clobbering time!

Jules... Of course this here atheist was raised as a Catholic and even did the altar-boy thing at the nearby nunnery so of course my criteria for what is right and wrong are based on that. I mean, on being a Catholic, not on having the nuns rap me on the knuckles with the rod. And, yes, the guilt complex still works big time.

Bruce Cohen, #345, that synthesized voice was Stephen Hawking. I guess they thought it made it more sci-fi. I agreed with you about the story. The trailers and ads for Saving Grace looked too stupid, so I haven't watched it.

The Harry Potter thread is at #705. Current topics include population sizes of various subgroups in the HP universe, a bit of quidditch trivia, links to some neat fan art, a bit of contention regarding "If you don't like it, don't read it", followed by "How do I know if I'll like it until after I've read it. And once I've read it, can't I critique it?", (this, as compared to the earlier "You haven't read all of it so you can't critique any of it" comments), and a very brief mention of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Other than the one Thomas the Tank Engine bit, it's all Harry Potter, all the time.

I should mention that the fan art is neat in the "go have a look" sense, not the "all the colors stayed within the lines" sense.

And now I'm stuck wondering why they call a train engine a "tank". Odd.

What is a tank engine?

Watching some movie previews yesterday, I realized that GEEKS HAVE TOTALLY FUCKING WON. The Dark is Rising! Stardust! The Golden Compass! I mean, cripes, even though one of them looked like cheesy crap that's a pretty solid mess of fantastic themed cinema.

Or maybe it's just that the entertainment industry has figured out that we're a good way to make money.

Yeah, that's it.

Stefan Jones #371: The movie industry would have to pay me to go see The Dark Is Rising, not the other way around. The other two, we'll see.

Serge @ 276 re preferred representations of Prof Quatermass. Apparently Nigel Kneale didn't like Donlevy's version. I had a look at this interesting blog about old UK TV programs, amongst other info, and find that he's been represented by seven different actors. The first three TV series from the 1950s were made with a different actor in each, with the three film versions using two actors. The fourth, much later — also set much later than the others — series (1979) was edited into a film for international distribution. Another actor was in a modern TV remake of the movie version of The Q Experiment (Q1). There's an audiobook of the Radio 'Q Memoirs' (downloadable), which gave Andrew Keir a second bite at the cherry in yet another medium. [List: Reginald Tate, (Q1 series) John Robinson (Q2 series), André Morell (Q3 series), John Mills (Q4 series & film); Brian Donlevy (Q1 & Q2 films), Andrew Keir (Q3 film & radio 'memoirs'); Jason Flemyng (Q1 remake).]

It's interesting that the recent (2005) live-to-TV movie was a remake of the first series. Perhaps because of its last episodes being missing, people "needed closure" :) I would have thought that some of the themes in the third (Q & the Pit/5M Miles to Earth) were more pertinent to contemporary issues. But perhaps that would have been too challenging. Because I was unprepared for the The Q Conclusion (Q4) when I saw it this year, it made a strong impact, so John Mills has stayed with me most so far, but this might change with time. My DVDs are of the 4 TV series, with scripts of the lost episodes, and I haven't seen the film versions to compare for a long time.

BTW, just looked at Wikipedia please, DON'T read the 'Character' section if you want to avoid some very nasty spoilers. Even the rest of it has some giveaways that I would prefer not to know if seeing a film or series for the first time.

The Knowing vs. showing thread last year had quite a good discussion of Quatermass & related subjects, including a nice contribution from Mike Ford.

ethan,

If they screw up Stardust they will deeply regret it. That's one of the finest fairy tales I've ever read. And you know, Disney to the contrary not withstanding, it can be done; fairy tales can be filmed. Have you ever seen Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast?

Ethan #372: Is that because of how badly they've messed up the story, or because you don't like the original? (I agree with you, for the first reason in my case.)

The Golden Compass looks like they've done a good job with it, though.

Bruce Adelsohn #375: Partly because of how they've messed up the story, though that's secondary to how crappy it looks. I mean, if they messed with the story but still produced a good movie, that would be one thing (Children of Men, anyone?), but it just looks like a shabby piece of nonsense through and through.

I like the books an awful lot, despite what I may or may not have said here about epic good v. evil struggles boring me.

Oh, oops, and Bruce Cohen STM #374: I have indeed seen Cocteau's Beauty & the Beast. The hands creep the living daylights out of me. Good movie.

I thought I had another good example of a filmed fairy tale working well, but it's slipped out of my mind. They're few and far between, to be sure.

Does Freeway count? That's a damn fine movie, though it's probably not in the spirit you were talking about.

Epacris @ 373... Thanks for the information about Quatermass.

Stefan Jones @ 371... The Golden Compass looks like cheesy crap? I must have seen a different coming-attraction because that one looked awesome to me.

Onwe of the problems with Hoyle's theories, such as the "Diseases from Space" thing, is that he asked good basic questions on the subject, and proceeded to ignore the established answers. He gave different answers, but failed to explain why his were better.

Which doesn't make wrong his calculations about whether a virus could survive aero-braking.

A lot of his later stuff is in that borderland between hard SF and hard science, but he decided not to include dragons in his panspermia theory.

That Redshirt Analysis leaves me wondering if Starfleet choses randy unmarried males as starship Captains so as to reduce the casualty rate, paternity suits being less expensive than training new crew and paying pensions to widows and other dependents.

Dave Bell #380: The absence of dragons is.... disturbing.

Greg, 368: "You haven't read all of it so you can't critique any of it"

No one has said that, Greg. Not even me.

Fragano @832: However, they were anticipated by Cordwainer Smith (The Game of Rat and Dragon).

Watching Star Trek TNG once, I imagined some class in the far future looking back at our time (as we look back at Columbus) and discussing that while our early spacefaring society expected black holes, cosmic strings, and space-time anomalies, we totally failed to anticipate the dragons.

Greg, #@368: "You haven't read all of it so you can't critique any of it"

Greg, leaving aside whether anyone actually said that, why are you trying to start that fight AGAIN over here?

Rob Rusick #384: Hoyle says nothing about cats, though.

Oh dear, I just realized that asking a question (#385) is way to perpetuate the conversation. Sorry. Instead just let me say: Greg, please, please drop it.

A lot of his later stuff is in that borderland between hard SF and hard science, but he decided not to include dragons in his panspermia theory.

Back where this started on Tipler's description of his work, I now know what it reminded me of - someone trying to explain the concept behind a Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter novel. (And similarily, if you ask "Is that real science?" about it, the answer is "Yes - if you include scientific speculation about what we may find out after we get the answers to what we're looking at at the moment, and then attempt to put half a dozen of these speculations into a semi-coherent whole".)

I confess I had much the same reaction to Saving Grace that Serge did; I wanted very much to like it, because, hey, Holly Hunter, but it kept offending me with relentless sanctimony and slut-shaming and twee preachiness. (I'm not an atheist myself, especially, but I am married to one, so the "You must have FAITH to be Good" thing irritates the hell out of me, npi.)

I'd be happy to hear it gets better as it goes along, especially if it winds up dealing with the issue of theodicy on a deeper than Hallmark-card level, though I find myself disinclined to put the effort into finding out for myself firsthand. (Well, okay, I confess that I'm torn now wondering if James Marsters would make it worthwhile. But based on the premier, well, Dogma it ain't.)

Bruce @375: I'm not Ethan, but based on what I've seen about Dark is Rising as a movie (mostly the production company and the director), it seems as though they're making into one of those 'Xtians all good, all the time; everybody else must bow down before our glory, etc'. Which, of course, completely misses the point of the series.

I didn't even know they were making the movie until I saw a "three from the circle, three from the track" icon on a hpknitting community. At which point I tried to figure out who (of the Ministry Six) were 'from the circle' and who were 'from the track'. Then my brain clicked in, and said "that's not HP, you silly".

After reading more about the movie, I think it's going to be one of those 'hey, that's a cool idea for a movie. But the hero needs to be older. and needs some family conflict. and scrap the Arthurian themes. and we need snakes.' type things. As far as I can tell, people who like the books will hate the movies, and vice versa.

Dan @ 389... well, Dogma it ain't

Let's hear it for Alannis Morrisette. Oh, wait. she's silent thru all of Dogma. By the way, it seems that every time that movie is on, I almost always catch it at the scene where Alan Rickman explains why angels aren't allowed to get drunk.

Hmmm...

You know what, Dan? I'm going to have to ask my wife for that DVD for my birthday.

Tomorrow night, on Erureka, sherriff Jack has to contend with the high-school science fair.

"It's Armaggedon with acne!"

...Um, Greg? Within the semi-recent past, you mentioned some health worries that'd been causing displacement truculence; this segued into a nutritional discussion that suggested the need for preventative followup. Without needing to get specific, are you okay over there?

Serge: If you're a DVD extras geek at all, make sure you ask for the special edition. Lots of good stuff on there.

Dan Layman-Kennedy @ 389

Sorry, Marsters just had a guest appearance in Saving Grace; no long-term benefit there.

I had a similar reaction going in; I'm not happy at all with the way religion is depicted in the mass media, but I'm used to being out of step with the world in general on religion. I thought that the characters were treated with enough respect (with the exception of the one played by Laura SanGiacomo, who really ought to be left off the leash for awhile, I think she would surprise the producers), that it was worth watching some more. And the second ep featured a wrestling match (greco-roman style) between Holly Hunter and the angel, which ended in a draw due to exhaustion. They both cheated.

The jury's still out on this one, I think, and I still have hopes. So maybe I'm just a foolish optimist.

#379: No, I thought the Golden Compass trailer looked top-notch. The Dark is Rising is the one that looked like cheesy crap.

(Mind you, today's Cheesy Crap would in almost every way be considered remarkable when I was growing up in the SF&F starved early 70s.)

Stefan Jones @ 396... today's Cheesy Crap would in almost every way be considered remarkable when I was growing up in the SF&F starved early 70s

Ah, the 1970s cheese... Ah, At the Earth's Core...

To totally change the subject...

Risks in Research

Note the following sentence toward the end of the article:

Whatever discussion led up to that approval is hidden from the public because of a federal rule change in 2000 that placed most such follow-on studies under confidential FDA review rather than a public NIH process.

I don't know for sure that this rule change happened under Bush's watch, but somehow it seems likely...

Lizzy 398: If it happened in 2000, it was under Clinton's watch. He was President until January 20, 2001.

Xopher, of course, you are right. I'm still pissed, but I guess I can't be pissed at Bushco about this.

From JennR @390

Bruce @375: I'm not Ethan, but based on what I've seen about Dark is Rising as a movie (mostly the production company and the director), it seems as though they're making into one of those 'Xtians all good, all the time; everybody else must bow down before our glory, etc'.

Looking at the Wikipedia page for the movie*, it seems that may not be the case. It looks absolutely unforgivably crappy, but at least I'm not seeing any Christian Supremacism. Call it an upside.

* Yeah, I know, but I don't have any film-specific sources bookmarked, nor time to go dig any up.

Abi and her family made it to Amsterdam. The reason for her silence in these parts is that her new home doesn't have an internet connection yet.

Abi and her family made it to Amsterdam.

Yay!

The reason for her silence in these parts is that her new home doesn't have an internet connection yet.

Glad to hear the issue is technical, not other.

Hooray for Abi and family! No internet connection, how shocking.

...Just turned up in my time.com RSS feed, about OCD:

When Worry Hijacks the Brain

Serge #402: Good news!

Serge, Stefan Jones

Even the '70s had high-budget cheesy crap. If you remember Towering Inferno, for instance, you have my sympathy.

Despite the lack of connectivity, abi has posted a description of the moving process on her blog.

Bruce Cohen @ 407... I never saw Towering Inferno until the late 1990s. That delayed TV viewing lent a certain weirdness to seeing OJ Simpson as a dedicated security guard who saves a kitty from the inferno.

Exploiting the openness of the thread:

Anyone have any insights into why the Democrats in congress caved in on the warrantless wiretaps? I'd like it if I could have the Repubs and Demos competing for which one could *win* my vote, not for which one could *lose* my vote.

Back in the Clipper-wars days, there was a common story about the NSA/FBI giving Congress the "If you knew what we know...." presentation (claiming all kinds of amazing evils that had been prevented by free use of wiretaps). The common joke was that the rest of that sentence was filled in as "If you knew what we know about what you and that 19 year old blonde chick were doing at the Motel Six...."

I wonder what the current version of that briefing looks like, with several years of massive warrantless wiretaps done on a "trust me" basis. That could genuinely be, say, stories of two or three really gut-wrenching attacks foiled by wiretaps, or it could be really nasty blackmail material collected on various important politicians.

JennR #390: Oddly enough, one of the things I've heard about the movie is that it's NOT very Christian-oriented; apparently gurer ner fvk QVSSRERAG Fvtaf bs gur Yvtug, abg fvzcyl gur pvepyrq pebff. V unira'g frra jung gurl ner, ohg V nz tvira gb haqrefgnaq gurl'er ABG nyy pebffrf be bgure Puevfgvna vpbabtencul.

I should also note that for years now, "three from the Circle, three from the track" is a major earworm for me. Fortunately, I have three versions of the song on my hard drive. Unfortunately, these days it's taking all three to get the song out of my head. (But on the gripping hand, I'm not so sure I want it out, right now :-)

Serge @ 409

But they never did show us what he did with that kitty afterwards ... or what revenge the cats took:

im in ur gloves killin yr wife and her friend to frame u.

Just goes to show about the best laid plans of cats.

albatross @ 410

You're not the only one wonderign about that. The current thought is that they were shown pages from their NSA files ....
(I'm also wondering what Shrub gives his guests that they don't know about, since they seem to come back with opinions that they didn't go in with.)

Re: #410, 413

I read the Dems concession on the recent surveillance bill as being basically a tactical decision to refight the issue in six months, in the belief that they'll be on stronger ground then.

The extent to which this was a good tactical decision is a separate question...

Michael 414:

But why give in at all? I can think of three reasons, but they're all pretty damning:

a. I can see this as insurance--some congressional Democrats think there may be an attack between now and the Presidential election, and don't want a vote against anything that might have prevented the attacks.

b. Perhaps some kind of agreement has been reached to make sure both Democrats and Republicans have access to the wiretapping power.

c. Perhaps Bush is acting on principle (the principle that the state ought to have near unlimited power, I guess) and the Democrats are anticipating a future in which they will have access to that wiretapping data, after winning the 2008 presidential election.

None of this suggests highly principled guys who are going to reverse the Bush administration's moves toward a police state. Instead, it looks like the Democrats are about as happy with a police state as the Republicans, and only differ on which people should be at the top.

"They're not people. They're Democrats."

- one of those afraid of Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still

Every single one of them needs to be voted out, as soon as possible.

ethan 417: While I agree, I'm not sure it will do any good. You'll still have humans in those positions.

What we need is some good ROBOT candidates. Three laws, no libido, honest as the day is long.

Meh, three laws.

It isn't quite enough to guarantee good robot behaviour. I proposed a few ammendments to the laws. (I think you have to scroll down a bit.)

Of course, this assumes that the notion of robot slavery is acceptable. If not, then the three laws need some work.

;)

I for one welcome our evil robot candidates.

No, no, that should be "I, for one, welcome our new positronic overlords!"

Greg 419: Or you could link to the permalink and they won't have to scroll down.

I'm against your amendments. I think if we're going to have robotic politicians they can't be owned by anyone (other than perhaps The People), or we're in the same situation we're in with our current lot. Or maybe slightly better, since the robots will stay bought.

I think a sufficiently sophisticated and influential robot politician would obey First Law, and the exclusions in the other two would make them virtually irrelevant.

permalink. Cool!

I posted the ammendments on somerightsreserved, but the site has been down and the guy who runs it hasn't fixed it in a while. One of these days I'll post it on my homepage.

I think the three laws could work with a robot overlord. I think the government, in general, should serve it's constituents. And the three laws are all about robot subjegation.

Of course, there's still the problem of finding a robot with a conscience.

Pleonastic redundancy of the day: "robot slavery". :D

Greg @#419 & Xopher @#422:

In order to govern, our robot overloards would have to break rule #1, constantly. There's no way to enforce rules without harming at least one human. Even positing a war-free world, how would you punish a murderer without harming him in some way? Depriving someone of freedom is harmful. Making him eat institutional food is, arguably, harmful. Merely giving him a good talking-to could, gosh, damage his self-esteem.

And as for the "through inaction" clause...for our own good, they'd have to outlaw fun in just about every form, from erotic comic books to Gnostic masses to recreational drugs.* Who'd want to live in a country like...oh, right, never mind.

*like cylert, if your recreation consists of staying awake and/or paying attention to things, you bad, bad hedonists

Xopher @ 421... I stand corrected. By the way, how many evil overlords have we welcomed so far? It's hard work, hating America, because we have to keep track of all those Evil Forces we'd happily make the Masters of America the Beautiful.

I, for one, welcome our new uncertain overlords.

No evil overladies?

To misquote Tracy Bonham: "Behind every bad woman lies a trail of men"

I prefer to think of myself as the puppetmaster behind the throne, manipulating events. You could call me an overlady if you want, but don't call me late to dinner.

Mary: In order to govern, our robot overloards would have to break rule #1, constantly.

I think it could be done, if you add the "ammendments" I had proposed, and then define "owners" to be the public as a whole.

If someone breaks the law, you can arrest them and put them in jail and that doesn't qualify as "causeing harm" in a strict interpretation of "harm" being "physical or emotional harm".

Incarceration could be implemented such that it isn't physical or emotionally harmful.

Then the issue is the law that says a robot has to do whatever a human tells it to do, as long as it doesn't violate #1. This is where you would have to define the robot's "owner" to be the population as a whole, and the only way to tell the robot a command is through voting or something. Otherwise the robot puts the bad guy in jail, the bad guy says "let me go", and the robot complies. Then the rest of the public says "put him back in" and the robot complies, repeat ad nauseum.

It still has the achilles heal of dealing with potential mob rule, but theoretically, it wouldn't have to be any worse than it is now. With the potential benefit, as Xopher pointed out, of no libido to satiate and no ego requiring chest pounding.

so it might be a net win.

How about the Zeroth law Asimov added later:

"A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm"

This allows for all kinds of nifty workarounds without putting the robot into a tailspin. Of course it helped that some of the robots were telepathic.

Mary 425: And as for the "through inaction" clause...for our own good, they'd have to outlaw fun in just about every form, from erotic comic books to Gnostic masses to recreational drugs.

I'm afraid we know how that comes out.

comes away reeling from the Evil Overlord's Tower particle

My eyes! My eyes!

I think that version is actually made of evil!!

Sarah S #433: It also proves that evil causes diabetes.

Sarah, Fragano:

I think that may be the vilest thing that I, as an art historian, have ever seen. What *do* you recommend as an antidote?

The Evil Overlord's tower combined with all the H.P. Lovecraft I've been reading (thanks, guys!) made me wish I could paint. I want to see Cthulhu overtake Kinkade's world.

ethan #436:

Just slimy monsters won't do it. You have to have an absolutely brutal style. I'm not sufficiently familiar with painters of that sort of thing, so can anyone else make a suggestion for the Cthulhu side?

I think that, if he'd come up with the Robot Bill of Rights, Asimov would probably not have written so many Robot stories. But I would have been fascinated to see what he got of them.

(To a certain extent, almost all the Robot stories by Asimov deal with edge cases, or, to put it another way, all the cases that would have gone to the Robot Supreme Court).

joann #437: Bathers at Asnières.

Oops, that should have been a reply to number 435.

Interesting riff on the three laws and behavioral safeguards on the last few installments of Freefall. (I don't follow the strip well enough to know why, but the bewigged wolf girl is legally classified as an AI.)

I want to see Cthulhu overtake Kinkade's world.

Though it's another kind of horror, ever saw that, by any means ?

My bet is on "yes", but still. ^_^"

Now I'm thinking photoshop, like putting together this and this somehow. Unfortunately, I don't have photoshop, and when I do have it available I spend all my time using that silly "Makes everything look like it's wrapped in plastic" tool rather than figuring out how to use the damned thing for anything interesting. Ah well.

Oh, shit.

On a different note, I have no idea how interested any of you would be in this, but Lee Hazlewood has died. People never take him seriously, but he's one of my favorite musicians of all time, and even though this has been coming for a while now, I'm not sure what to do with myself now.

Re: albatross@415

What I suspect happened is that enough Dems from conservative districts/states were worried about recessing without a vote that the leadership in both houses felt that they needed to allow a vote.

(I would not be at all surprised if an implicit promise to support a tougher line next February was part of the package.)

Keep in mind that the Democrats are a coalition party. While the leadership has actually done a fairly good job keeping things organized on most issues, they still have to mediate among the various factions. It isn't like the top-down GOP where the leadership can just issue orders and everyone obeys.

A bit of reassurance, perhaps in what Ed Kilgore said back on May 30:

"Such divisions are inevitably going to happen in a coalition party, and for all its sometimes maddening disadvantages, it's still better than a party whose unity and ideological rigor can sometimes lead it down the road to perdition, with no road back (viz., a Republican Party still chained to its conservative base and its domestic and international delusions."

Ethan @ 443 Fortunately I do have Photoshop and a fair amount of practice in its use. I can put those two together without too much difficulty but my next few days are so amazingly busy that you should probably distract yourself by browsing the Kinkade parodies at Something Awful here, here and here. I'm sure I remember a Cthulhoid horror in there somewhere.

Hey guys, I'm just popping by to say that I bought the Cool Nabataean coin that Teresa mentioned in the sidebar a few weeks ago, and it is indeed very cool, though much smaller than I thought it would be. I've been reading up on the Nabataean empire and it is absolutely fascinating. Even more interesting, for me any way, is that it had such an impact on the world, yet I never heard of it before. You know Rome, always stealing the other empires' thunder...

#425: "To serve and obey, and guard men from harm."

Now, where's that rhodomagnetic beam ...

Fruit Bats Discovered To Have Menstrual Cycles

Part of me wonders how they figured that out.

Part of me is imagining the top shelf in Walgreen's feminine hygiene aisle containing teeny weeny pastel-colored packages for the convenience of the occasional bat customer.

I had vaguely heard of the Nabateans previously, but was actually introduced to them via Last Act in Palmyra. In fact it's slightly embarrassing how much Roman history I learnt as a result of reading Lindsey Davis or Steven Saylor and then researching further. (You don't have to be embarrassed about learning things from Robert Graves any more do you?)

Ethan #436: I want to see Cthulhu overtake Kinkade's world.

Cthulhu is too busy with his day job as Those Annoying Post Brothers' cabana boy to be overtaking worlds at the moment.

To The PDX Fluorosphere:

TexAnne will be visiting Portland this weekend and next week, and we're trying to organize a get-together. The current (tentative) plan is to go see Stardust on Sunday afternoon, then go out to dinner (seafood, if that's a problem for anyone). Anyone who's interested in joining the fun, please email me and I'll put you on the list to get the final details.

Ethan @#443: Allow me. Thanks for the nifty idea, I giggled the whole time I was doing this.

The KinKade is called "Almost Heaven" so this version is, of course, "Almost Hell."

Mary Dell,

Nicely done. You beat me to it; I have some free time tomorrow morning and I was going to try that out, but you beat me to it. I might anyway; I'm strongly tempted to have Cthulhu bite that guy's head off :=)

#452: If my week isn't totally draining, that sounds cool.

Mary Dell #453: Bwah! Thanks!

Mary Dell, I can't tell you how much I needed to see that image, as my world, at the moment, is made entirely of annoyance and noise. (Chthlulu would be an improvement on my neighbors).

Mary Dell, may I ask permission to use that picture on my mumble mumble myspace page mumble I don't have a myspace page mumble and/or blog? With attribution, of course.

Oh my goodness. Mary Dell, that's priceless.

The "Perils of Stuff" particle remimds me of the scene in "Labyrinth" where the heroine meets a bag lady who convinces her (temporarily) that only by hauling around everything she's ever owned will she have any security. It's the face of the old lady (a puppet, of course) that sticks in my mind, and the clear implication that Jennifer Connelly will look like her before too long.

On the other hand, I'm typing this on a computer I bought a month ago, and I just bought some new software for it, so maybe I'm not taking the lesson seriously enough?

ethan @#458: Of course! It was your idea, I just executed the commission (and my flickr caption says so). More importantly, since I swiped the source images for the mashup, I'm not worried about attribution for myself, although credit to the original artists would be good. Unfortunately I can't find the name of the Cthulhu artist, but the page says it's from the Call of Cthuhlu game.

So, I'm fine with anyone grabbing and using this image, with the understanding that it's not really mine to give, which is why I didn't put a CC license on it.

Oh, and I'm glad everyone liked it. Bruce (and anyone else), I'd love to see your take on it...I kind of cheated and took his wings away so he's not as Dread as he could be.

#444--ethan, I'd suggest telling people just how cool he was, and giving them every chance to listen to his work.

I hears a recent cover of These Boots Are Made for Walking, and when the song got to the part about "You keeping playing when oughts not bet", I thought about Bush. Now, Hazlewood couldn't have had that in mind when he wrote that song, all those many years ago (I am old enough to remember seeing the proto-music video made for the song on The Smothers Brothers Show), and I doubt the band covering the song was thinking of that. But still, it came into my head...

Mary@453,

Wow. I'm always amazed when people do photoshop type stuff, get really cool results, and do it in a short amount of time.

And that picture is fricken hilarious.

Mary Dell... Hats off to you.

Admirers of Agatha Heterodyne.. The site's troubles with posting installments seem to be over. Huzzah!!!

abi is still off-line? How long does it take for an International Woman of Mystery to set up a Bureau for U.N.C.L.E.?

Car review to make you feel better about your day. (You can feel the snark coming off the hood. Also out from under it.)

From car review link: attempting to drive this car in a sporting manner feels like trying to run a 440-dash with a lawn tractor on your back.

I don't know why, but this just keeps making me chuckle.

P J @ 467... Cerberus Capital Management, the New York-based private equity firm that just bought Chrysler from DaimlerChrysler

Somehow, an outfit named after the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hell doesn't make me feel comfortable.

Down, Fido!

Mary Dell #461: Great, thanks! Wow, I don't think I've ever commissioned an artwork before. I'm not really in a position to be your patron, I hope you don't mind.

fidelio #462: Since you mention it, I did write something on my silly little blog that's mostly a collection of some of Lee Hazlewood's songs, by himself and with/for others. Not trying to blogopimp or anything, but it's there for anyone who wants to poke around and hear some of the beauty he made.

As far as the "You keep playin' when you oughta not bet" line, I doubt he was thinking anything like that when he wrote it, but I bet it occurred to him after. As he says in "Anthem," from his pre-humous (is there actually a word that's the opposite of posthumous?) album Cake or Death, "I always did what my mama told me/But I never did vote republican."

For anyone who's interested, I put up a quickie mashup tutorial on my blog.

Bwah! I just realized that Cthulhu + Kinkade = Cthulade. As in, "Drink the..."

::snort::
ethan, have I told you, lately, that I love your squirrelly self? Well, if not, consider yourself informed.

Think of the flavor name possibilities...

Dagon Punch
Yuggoth Berry Blast

I'm too tired to come up with anything actually clever.

Aw, thanks, Tania.

According to wikipedia's list of current flavors, quite a a few of them are already pretty chock full o' nameless dread. Eerie Orange and Scary Black Cherry, particularly.

The only thing close to clever I can come up with right now is "Mi-Go Mango."

Tania... Kadath Koffee?

Arkham Apple?

Greg London @#463: Actually, once you learn photoshop well it makes everything very fast, so this stuff isn't as hard as it looks for an experienced user, although having a good eye does count for something. It's a bit like touch typing or riding a bicycle--it seems impossible if you're new to it, but if you stick with it you reach a point where your momentum carries you and it's easy. Part of why photoshop is ubiquitous is that it's crazy fast once you get it customized for your workflow.

Oh and thanks, everyone, for the compliments.

Yuggoth Yogurt...

Squamous Strawberry? Eldritch Eldenberry?

Dunwich Donuts...

Linkmeister @#479: Squamous Strawberry?

I think you mean Squamous Squawberry.

Normally a spelling error dents my ability to enjoy a joke, but this one is just too nice:

http://tunteella.dy.fi/1607.jpg

Rugose Rhubarb...

ethan, #444, the WashPost has his obit.

#445 Michael I:

I'd like to believe that, but I don't. I expect to see the Democrats in the white house and in the majority in both houses of congress in 2008, and think the probability that they'll give up massive warrantless wiretaps is just a little better than the probability that I'll win the lottery.

I would really like to be wrong here. Please gloat at me in a couple years, if I turn out to be wrong. But what action on the part of the Democrats in congress in the last six years makes you optimistic here?

Marilee #484: Wow, it's nice that they were aware of the second and third Nancy & Lee albums. Most people aren't, even if they do know of the first one.

ethan @#472: Here's Cthulhaid Man.

Tentacles swiped from this cute wallpaper.

Oh Jeez! I looked for other people's images tagged "cthulhu" on Flickr and found this Family Circus parody

Mary Dell #487: My god, it would have been funny enough if it had just been a picture of him. But then you had to go put in that dialogue bubble...

YOMANK alert!

albatross @ 485

Every time I start thinking they'll do the right thing, I get squashed by them doing the wrong thing, so I'll take 'none of the above' for $0.02.

ethan @#487: well, the dialog bubble was already there, but Kool-aid Man was saying "oh yeaahh!" which wouldn't suit Cthulhaid Man. Also, where Kool-Aid Man bursts through walls, Cthulhaid Man should burst through the barriers between sanity and time and whatnot, but that's beyond my 'shop skills, I'm afraid.

Mary Dell @ 487-488... You are sick. Want some Ipswich ice cream?

Mary Dell where in Hell (and I don't just use that word for the rhyme) do you find these things? Do you have some kind of infernal search engine that ferrets out squamuousness on the Web?

Bruce Cohen @#493: Oh, I made Cthulhaid Man from a Kool-Aid man image, but if you want squamousness, a little google'l do ya.

Mary Dell,

To paraphrase Serge, "Mary Dell... Heads off to you".

There's a certain kind of perverse pride in knowing this is all my fault.

Serge: @#492: Ipswich ice cream

Scream, all! Dread Cthulhu demands that you scream for Ice Cream!

Bruce Cohen @#495:

That is AWESOME. *applause*, particularly for the flying blood.