1fg: Nov'f qbhoyr qnpgly
2aq: Puevf l'f ivyynaryyr
3eq: Rguna'f fbaarg
4gu: Qropun'f unvxh
5gu: Oehpr Pbura(FcrnxreGbZnantref)'f yvzrevpx

^^

(probably got something wrong somewhere and making fool of self, but eh)

Is this Open Thread 90?

Should I perhaps have put that in rot13, by the way? Fool of self made...

This is just to say
that I have shattered the logic puzzle
you put up on your blog.

I am sorry,
it was so Aristotelian
honest and cold.

I get the same answer as KristianB.

I would note that lines 7 through 10 of the puzzle are not required for the solution. Lines 1 through 6 are enough to solve it.

Derek.

Whoohoo! I may not be right, but I'm wrong in company.

I get the same solution, except that the facts aren't consistent: How can the haiku be a witty response to the villanelle when debcha had hoped to post first?

[not looking at other answers before posting]

1. nov cbfgrq gur qbhoyr qnpgly
2. puevf l cbfgrq gur ivyynaryyr
3. rguna cbfgrq gur fbaarg
4. qropun cbfgrq gur unvxh
5. Oehpr cbfgrq gur yvzrevpx

Higgledy Piggledy
Kristian Melvin* B
Posted the logical
Answer so fast!

Yet, inconceivably,
No Williams parody?
Suspension of disbelief
Gone here at last...

-----
* I needed a middle name. What can you do?

I don't care who wrote what or in which order; I want to read that thread.

aquaeri: Because although Debcha had hoped to post first, she didn't. She posted fourth. (See clue #9.)

Thanks! Solved.

elissa: But she was writing it in response, and a first post isn't a response, and a response isn't a first post. How could she have intended a response to be the first post?

Not all the clues were necessary to solving, but they helped me see I'd got it right, as they were in agreement with what I put down.

I think aquaeri's point is that "hoped to post first" carries an implicature that she hoped to post that poem first, which isn't possible if it was a response to an earlier one. But you often have to restrict yourself to entailment in logic puzzles, and it's not a very strong implicature to begin with.

I read it that Debcha wanted to post first, just to be first, but by the time she read the thread someone else had posted first. So she read the thread, and composed a response. If she'd gotten there early enough she would have composed a completely different post.

Derek #5: Really? I didn't need 7, 9, nor 11, but I did find 8 and 10 to be useful. Did you assume 4 meant "without gaps"?

First post denied me!
Like Chris, I think fair trade for
dactylic Abi.

Because it's not enough to have poetry and pastiches all over the place, we must also have talking about poetry and pastiches, and now speculation about the content of an imaginary poem posted in response to another imaginary poem. Debcha, I am sure mine is not as good a response as the one the imaginary (or real) you would have produced, but it is something.

I had no clue how to do these puzzles until about 10 years ago when they used them at the Junior high where I taught. (I learned how to do them in self defense, I can't have students knowing more than I do.) Our test scores improved. I'm not sure this was one of the reasons, but I suspect it had something to do with it.

Konrad #15: I'm not Derek, but I definitely made that assumption. It doesn't appear to be wrong.

Gigi Rose #17: Is there a particular technique that one should use to solve these things besides putting the position of each element on paper? I'm usually not good at logic puzzles; I'd love to know if there's some method I should be applying.

I told myself I wasn't going to sit down and work it out.

Of course I had to sit down and work it out.

(Got the same answers everyone else seems to have.)

Konrad @ 15:
#8 is definitely redundant, given #1.[*] I know that I made use of 7, 9, and 10, but there could be some redundancy elsewhere I didn't notice. (And, for what it's worth, I didn't assume that 4 meant "without gaps.")

[*] Unless it was intended that "particularly witty" should be a clue... but that's not how these puzzles work.

Jeff at 18, I was taught to draw a grid for simple ones-- name and poem only-- and then a more complex one for ones like this. It's three grids together in a corner-L shape. Across the top I have position and poem, running vertically I have name and poem, and I just fill in Xs and Os as I go through the clues. I'm not sure how I'd lay out a more complex one, like if we'd had to handle the subject of the poem as well.

abi 9: You needed a middle name?

Same answer here, too. (And I didn't look. Really. )

Bibbedy bobbedy
Dutch transplant abi
responds to the thread with some
pleading for plums.

Fluorosphereifically
Icebox is opened; "i'm
inside ur kitchen, and
pwnin ur crumbs."

*ducks*

Abi @9: You could have my middle name, I don't use it much, but it wouldn't fit.

Generally: Since this is an open thread, does anyone know anything about Maum Meditation? Specifically the organisation?

"Walter Carlos Williams" was, of course, later known as Wendy Carlos Williams, following metrical reassignment surgery.

Jim was probably thinking of someone else.

Lovely. Been a while since I've had to grid one of those out.

I once got away with writing a poem instead of an essay— for a poetry class, natch. The trick is to know that the professor will be impressed instead of annoyed, especially as a poem on the definition of poetry, improvised, is not likely to be much good.

I wish I had that poem. It would be good for a laugh.

Derek et al: I thought I'd needed #7 and 9, but I tried it again with just 1-6 and got the same solution.. I didn't assume that 4 meant without gaps.

PNH@26: "Walter Carlos Williams" was, of course, later known as Wendy Carlos Williams, following metrical reassignment surgery.

I prefer her solo poetry to the poetry she wrote with the Plasmatics.

Got it. I hate logic puzzles, but this one was too much fun to pass up.

Then, of course, there was Wendy Melvin Donaldson, who wrote about an alternate universe where Iraq planned 9/11.

KristianB solved
the logic puzzle
that he found
in your blog.

You were probably expecting
people to take longer
and argue
the validity of syllogism

Please forgive him
he solved it
so quickly
and properly.

Oh, I love these! I just got in, but I couldn't resist. ROT 13'd for any other latecomers...

Svefg: nov jvgu gur qbhoyr qnpgly.
Frpbaq: puevf l jvgu gur ivyynaryyr.
Guveq: rguna jvgu gur fbaarg.
Sbhegu: qropun jvgu gur unvxh.
Svsgu: Oehpr Pbura jvgu gur yvzrevpx.

1: Nov, jvgu gur Qbhoyr Qnpgly
2: Puevf, jvgu gur Ivyynaryyr
3: Rguna, jvgu gur Fbaarg
4: Qropun, jvgu gur Unvxh
5: Oehpr, jvgu gur Yvzrevpx

Patrick @ #26:

This is just to say
I have excised the plums
that were in my...

oh, never mind.

Oh! I have something to contribute to a Making Light thread!

Diatryma @ 21, your system extends neatly. Just tack the new category to the end horizontally, and tuck it in the middle vertically. My attempt at an ascii illustration was woeful, but I'm sure a nearby newsagent will sell Puzzle books with examples, which is where I learned it. Come to that, I'm sure Google can find examples. Alas I'm stuck at work, or I'd look them up.

I cannot help but link to this XKCD cartoon.

I thought Walter Carlos Williams wrote those Dread Empire's Plums books. I devoured the first two--they were really cool!

Diatryma @ 21 (and myrthe @ 36): Ah, like this.

Further poking about on the interwebs returns the Zebra Puzzle, a six-dimensional logic puzzle attributed variously to Einstein and Lewis Carroll. I'm scared to try it.

1. nov, gur qbhoyr qnpgly
2. puevf l, gur ivyynaryyr
3. rguna, gur fbaarg
4. qropun, gur unvxh
5. Oehpr Pbura (FcrnxreGbZnantref), gur yvzrevpx

Oh, dear. I should have rot-13ed that, shouldn't I?

William, and Walter, and Wendy have nothing to do with the case.
The creation of verse in the threads we traverse
helps keep Making Light our own place.
Pastiches will keep us amused,
and puzzles will sharpen our brains.
The words that we write on this blog day and night,
are as dear as the blood in our veins.

qbhoyr qnpgly - Nov
ivyynaryyr - Puevf
fbaarg - Rguna
unvxh - Qropun
yvzrevpx - Oehpr

A few of those clues didn't really take me anywhere, though, so I might be missing something.

I agree that the latter 4 clues were unnecessary. My method of just drawing up a list and slotting the poems and authors in when I was sure of them worked well enough here, but would probably break down (into the grid, if further structure can be called a break down) as more items were added to the initial puzzle.

(I apologize in advance if I guessed anyone's sex wrong.)

A Making Light poster named abi
Had a dactl that wasn't too shabby
Said she: "This is no trouble!
Why, I'll make it a double!"
Then posted it, quick as a tabby

Chris Y took a bit of a chance:
He composed in a form fancy-schmanced.
"Of this ball, I'll be belle,
With my fine villanelle!"
Said Chris Y, just before being pantsed.

Then ethan composed us a sonnet:
It was hard work, and he got right on it
Such extravaganzas
Of well-crafted stanzas!
We all wished that *we* could've done it.

Now Debcha felt slightly morose:
"I tried to be quick, not verbose,
For writing haikus
Takes a short-winded muse,
But still I'm in fourth! Well, 'twas close."

And finally there was Bruce Cohen
Whose limericks are widely-known
For hilarious rhyme
And for scansion sublime--
Shitloads better, I'd say, than my own.

Actually, I've sort of been hoping for an open thread to mention two things, so I'll pretend we're just treating this as such. The words are used in the original post, after all. With no gaps, either.

First, I tried Mimolette for the first time this week. They have a bunch at Gourmet Garage right now. It was great, except persistent thought of tiny red hexapods scurrying across my gums.

Second, I've been thinking of putting up a desert-themed display in the bookstore's F/SF section. Does anyone have any suggestions?
So far I may use:
Dune
Sandworms of Dune
Acacia
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (gothic fantasy of the highest order)
Soldier of Sidon
That cyberpunk novel that Tor reprinted a year or two ago, set in a future Norther Africa, if I can ever find it on my shelf and order a few copies.

A standing rule seems to be that I'm considering a desert to be a biome, the "bio-" root being the key point. Thus extraterrestrial deserts are no problem. Nor, clearly, are post-apocalyptic wastelands. All standard lunar deserts are. I've also decided to exclude all martian settings, whether full of flora or not. There are just too many of them, and I want these deserts to feel hot. Given all that, if anyone has a good book or two that I should be sure to include, I 'd love the help.

Woo-hoo, a logic puzzle! I love these. I used to play on a site called chatgames.com that had them weekly, but they don't any more.

I got the same answers as everyone else, and I concur that clues 7-10 are unnecessary. (And no, I didn't assume that #4 meant "in a row".)

Jeff Davis@39: Thanks for that link. I can tell that's going to waste a bunch of my time in the near future. :-)

That last post was missing a key preposition and article in there.

Apologies mistake y'all.

Evan @ 45

Thank you for the compliment.

Wow, I haven't done logic puzzles like these in simply ages. Got the same answers as everyone else, by means of making a column for names and one for poem-types, and slotting them in when sure. Surprised at how easy it was.

And I did assume that #4 meant "without anything inbetween". Now I see that I shouldn't have done (although I got the right answer).

Dang it, I missed out on the fun. I love puzzles, and I did take the time to figure it out before I read comments.

Gursky - books that have deserts* as a primary residence that come to mind:

Chaz Brenchley's Outremer
Melanie Rawn's Dragon series
CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun novels (Serge, am I remembering this correctly? I haven't read the Faded Sun books in a looong time. I associate them with deserts)
Alan Dean Foster's Pip & Flinx book Reunion

I've got a few others ideas rolling around in the back of my brain, but I am going to bed. I'll see if the unconscious/subconscious/not-tired brain floats the other titles to the surface.

*I initially read desserts and was wondering how Dune related to tasty snacks. Sandworm Surprise? Bene Gessarit Biscotti? Arrakis Cobbler? Then I came to my senses.

Bruce, of the Cohen clan,
(Speaker to Managers)
Writing a limerick,
said to his friends:

"Wouldn't the blog be more
illuminatory
if we wrote poetry?"
(Here the tale ends.)

Higgledy Piggledy
Abigail Sutherland:[*]
amateur poet (as
everyone knows).

We should encourage her
enthusiastically:
amateur nothing, she's
up with the prose!

[*] I know "Abigail" is all kinds of wrong, but the scansion! The scansion!

candle @53
I know "Abigail" is all kinds of wrong

Not in the slightest. I answer to both Abi and Abigail in RL*. Abi just takes less time to type, and after the curious incident in the Spanish class**, has become my nom de note et net.

but the scansion! The scansion!
The bells! The bells! (Agreed)

-----
* Except when the Dutch pronounce it. "ai" is not a diphthong in Dutch, so they pronounce it "Abigah-el", and I don't recognise it as my name. I'm almost tempted to change the spelling to "Abigeel" to get them to say it right‡, but I think I'll just go to Abi.

** OK, the incident wasn't really that curious, but you are now, aren't you?†

‡ Right for values of "makes me look up from my work", not in some Platonic abstract sense of rightness.

† And, sorry, you're going to have to stay that way. It's not worth explaining.

Lizzy L said @ 30:
Got it. I hate logic puzzles, but this one was too much fun to pass up.

That's kind of my feeling about them. I find it easier to solve logic puzzles if they deal with something intrinsically interesting[*]. In one sense, that goes against the point of logic puzzles -- ideally, one should reduce them to a set of purely abstract entities and relations -- but there are only so many times you can contemplate re-arranging entities A, B, C, D, E.

[*] I remember two logic puzzles in particular from when I took the GRE's: one dealt with arranging different kinds of power tools along a bench, the other with arranging different kinds of books along a bookshelf. The former was tedious; the latter was easy, since it was something I could imagine doing for fun....

Walter Carlos Williams was the poet's evil twin;
He wasn't a physician and he didn't just stay in.
No, Walter, he took passage on a ship bound for Belize,
And asked how he would live his life, he answered "As I please."

He thrilled to eating hardtack and the sound of native drums
And he didn't have an icebox and he didn't care for plums.
He never saw a barrow, whether black or white or red,
And he never saw New Jersey, and before long he was dead.

His life was all ideas, and it wasn't much in things:
But William stayed at home. I wonder why the caged bird sings?

abi @ 54... the curious incident in the Spanish class

Sounds like the title of a mystery novel. Hmm... Spanish... When I think of you and of Spain, I am reminded of the time you went for that drastic way not to have to shave your legs ever again.

Thanks for this! I used to love doing these as a child - they came in books with the grids laid out so you could keep crossing off the impossibles unlit, voila!, the correct answers are left. Ages since I did one though.For this one I just wrote the negatives down in a Notepad document until I got the order of poems, then of people. As other have noted, clues 1-6 were all that was needed.

Gursky @ 46 Re. desert-themed books, off the top of my head:
Hammerfall (C.J. Cherryh)
Sword-Dancer (Jennifer Roberson)
There's lots of Arabian-themed fantasy around which might fit the bill - particulars can be supplied if requred.

Gursky @46:

That cyberpunk novel that Tor reprinted a year or two ago, set in a future Norther Africa, if I can ever find it on my shelf and order a few copies.

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger? I shall have to get a new copy myself.

Gursky@46: Are you thinking of When Gravity Fails? There were a few more in the series, including one where the lead is dumped in the Rub' al-Khali (the Arabian peninsula's Empty Quarter), which is about as desert as it gets. IIRC, Liz Williams's City of Bones qualifies if you're allowing cities surrounded by desert and I haven't confused it with another of hers.
Also: Dry Water (Eric Nylund) and Child of a Rainless Year (Jane Lindskjold) -- the desert is perhaps not the main theme, but is a dominating presence in the towns where the stories happen. Nylund may be OOP (~9 years old), but the Lindskjold is recent and IMO her best yet. (Her two Athanor books are set in Santa Fe et al but IIRC aren't strongly desert-connected.)
Tania is correct about The Faded Sun, but I have no idea where you'd find it; Hammerfall is relatively recent, and the jacket says it's set on a desert world, but I haven't read it yet.

Abi #54: 'Abigeel;' dat is de geel Abi.......

More desert books: Mercedes Lackey's pink dragon books (Joust et al) are set in a semi-Egypt. Lindskold has The Buried Pyramid, set in the real one. The argument could be made that Left Hand of Darkness is a cold desert, but that may work better for a 'books that make you feel cold in August'.

Tania @ 51

Then I came to my senses.

Such a shame. I think you were on to something there. How about Death By Fedaykin? Maud' Dib Mousse? Corrino Crumble?

CHip, 60: The City of Bones you described is by Martha Wells (not to be confused with Cassandra Claire's YA book of the same name, which looks awful IMO). Liz Williams did Banner of Souls and Empire of Bones.

Gursky @46

A recent cheese discovery here is Taleggio. We've taken to calling it apple butter. It was Meant to be smeared on slices of tart apple.

Soo Soo Soufflé? Liet-Kynes Lite Kandy? Pre-Spice Parfait? Harkonnen Halvah?

Tania@51: I initially read desserts and was wondering how Dune related to tasty snacks.

Doon. Arruckus. Dessert Planet.

Elias Weiner's classic should be added to the desert books list. :)

abi @ 54

"* Except when the Dutch pronounce it. "ai" is not a diphthong in Dutch, so they pronounce it "Abigah-el", and I don't recognise it as my name. I'm almost tempted to change the spelling to "Abigeel" to get them to say it right‡, but I think I'll just go to Abi"

Odd. I've always said "Abigah-el" and the closest I've ever been to the Netherlands was 30K up. Any other PNWers do the same, or is this just another Margaret linguistic oddity?

A day and a half later (I hate being away from the computer!) I got the same answer. It took me a little longer than it should have*, I think because I was assuming that the sonnet couldn't possibly have been me, seeing as I'm pretty sure I couldn't write one if the 2008 election depended on it.

Oh, and speaking of Walter/Wendy Carlos, she's from Rhode Island, which is yet another reason that it's the Best Damn State in the countryworld.

Gursky #46: Great, now I can't shake the feeling of "tiny red hexapods scurrying across my gums." Yick.

*That's not where the day and a half came from. I swear. It didn't take that long.

I enjoy these kinds of logic puzzles.

No I didn't start out assuming that #4 meant no gaps. But, with the other clues, 1-3,5,6 - it leaves only one spot the Villanelle could be in.

Derek

Speaking of logic puzzles (and the newly-refurbished title of this post), the BBC is reporting on the "least believable on-screen romances" here.

Number one: Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen - Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones

Michael @ #67: That is perfect!! How on earth have I missed this classic parody?

Gursky - I thought of one more:

Emma Bull's Territory - takes place in Tombstone, AZ.

Looking for people knowledgeable about the ins & outs of mp3/ID3 headers.

I'm testing a new toy which is supposed to help me archive my EXTENSIVE cassette-tape collection to CD and MP3 formats. The problem I'm having is that Nero (which I'm using to create the CDs) doesn't play nicely with the .wav tracks I've created, and iTunes doesn't play nicely with the .mp3 extractions of them. In the latter case, tracks play in what appears to be a completely random order, even though the list appears in the order I want them to play.

I suspect that I need to follow a specific format when I name the tracks, but I can't find anything with Google that will tell me exactly what that format is. My partner suggests that it's a hyphen-delimited string along the lines of track#-artist-album-title-genre; does that sound right?

Gursky @46,

Robert's Salt fits the desert classification.
McHugh's Necropolis might- someone who's read it more recently...?

Abi @54 re Abi @OT89.809 on deserts and noise.

This is desert, filled with complex ecology and long history.

and this is the dry dead bed of a lake 20,000 years gone. Not that it isn't good for solitude, but name aside, it isn't at all like the various National Park deserts of the west and southwest here.

(But today, 120 hours away from heading out there, I'm near-incapable of thinking bad things about Burning Man*. I should stop writing about it.)

-----
* other than finding their "Green Man" theme for this year to be quite funny. Old NorthWest Europe mythology, fine. But 'green'? When one art project is going to burn 2.4 Gigawatts of energy in 1 minute? Even with the carbon credits, Oy.

Kathryn @74
I'm simply noise intolerant. That's just a part of my makeup. It's not a criticism of Burning Man.

When I say I don't regret not going because of the noise, that means that apart from noise I greatly regret the low probability that I will ever go.

Not criticism. Just sour grapes, Aesop style.

(And yes, the deserts I love are the California deserts; the high desert around Bridgeport - particularly Bodie - and the low desert of the Eureka Valley*. I tend to prefer BLM land to National Parks land, just because it's a little less managed.)

------
* Or, for the full on clothing optional hot springs in the desert experience, the neighbouring Saline Valley.

Grids appear to mess things up/make them harder for me. I end up drawing digraphs with blank spots, just the sort of thing I do when plotting, outlining, or doing anything else with a not-quite-yet fixed order. (Sort of state diagrams without loops.)

I hadn't had any kind of approach at all until I decided to take the LSAT, at which point the not-so-good results on that section in the GRE suggested I get a prep book and get myself around some sort of method. Then I found that the suggested thingy only worked about a third of the time, but my own thing worked quite well. I figured I wasn't being graded on how I solved the problems, only *if* I solved them, so ...

Diatryma #62: The argument could be made that Left Hand of Darkness is a cold desert, but that may work better for a 'books that make you feel cold in August'.

What I call "window into winter" books. (Like the "door into summer", only the reverse.)

Lee @ 73 -- I'm fairly obses^H^H^H^H^H knowledgeable on ID3 tags and use iTunes, but don't know Nero. I'm missing an important step in your process.

As I understand it, you're
1. somehow making WAV files from casettes
2. burning those as audio CDs, which play as you want
3. creating MP3s from ??? using ???
4. importing those MP3s into iTunes, which plays them out of order

Is that right? If so, can you fill in the question marks in step 3?

What you're reallying trying to set (assuming you're using ID3 v2.3 which is a reasonable assumption in the absence of good reason otherwise) is the TRCK tag (and, if it's a multi-tape/CD album, TPOS). The naming will only be important if whatever software you're using for setting the tags uses that to fill in the tags.

KfS @ Open Thread 89 #801:

That would be great, hope to see you there! There's some ongoing churn on the gig schedule--you might want to check that link again right before you go.

Abi @75:

With some obvious exceptions, such as walking next to a rave or a sculpture that went FOOM at intervals, I didn't find BM to be particularly loud. I brought earplugs for sleeping, as advised, but never used them. There was plenty of sound going on, but it was like distant fireworks--I could tell it was loud in an absolute sense, but it wasn't moving a lot of air where I was.

That said, I might have been lucky in my campsite (although it was fairly close to the center), or I might have a higher tolerance than you, and I'd certainly hate for you to go and not be able to stand it. But it's a data point for you.

By the way, I also love Bodie.

Lee @ 73: In the latter case, tracks play in what appears to be a completely random order, even though the list appears in the order I want them to play.

Are you sure you don't have shuffle play turned on for that list (the button with intertwined arrows)? That seems much more likely than an ID3 tag problem. You might get a bad ordering from the latter, but it would show up visually as well.

I'm a bit lazy (and getting into this conversation late) but *I believe* you can solve this with only clues #1, 3, 4, 5 & 9. I say this because I was too lazy to read all of the clues and I figured it out....

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 74

Wait, do you mean they're going to burn for 1 minute at a rate of 2.4 gigawatts (total energy 144 gigajoules) or they're going to burn 2.4 gigajoules in 1 minute (average power 40 megawatts)? Either way, that's one energy intensive art project. What are they doing, casting molten rock?

I've loved the New Mexico desert since I got a summer job assisting a surveying crew north of Albuquerque. This was in 1965, and the land was complete scrub, with a few rather stringy cattle on it. The land was being sold for $2 US per acre, and developers were starting to circle.

This is what it looks like from above now. Remember, not one of those buildings existed then, and the roads. what there were then, were just somewhat graded dirt. I sure hope they figured out what to do with that one 400 ft. wide arroyo that flooded every afternoon in summer when the rains came.

Abi @75, Tim @79.

You like Bodie? You'll like this Bodie (picture).

Bruce @82,
The latter: 2.4GW burned in one minute for the art project Crude Awakening. Includes the description "largest flame cannon in history." At a preview event the lead artist described another part of the project as the "single loudest noise generating device ever built by humans." That latter bit is on top of the 100 foot wooden oil derrick.

Most of the time Burning Man is about small subtle surprises. Sometimes not.

If this is an open thread, can someone who knows about roses help me?

I'm looking for a breed of rose that can best be described as "a rose proper": blood red, with 5-7 petals and yellow stamens. I don't much care what its growth habit is, as long as it can be sucessfully container-grown. Any suggestions?

Todd, #78: At the time I wrote that, I'd tried 2 different methods of creating .mp3 files: (1) using the software that came with the widget on the .wav tracks created in the previous step, and (2) taking the Nero-created CD and running it thru CDex, my normal CD-ripping program.

Tim, #80: *headdesk* You called it. I don't have a CLUE how Shuffle got turned on for that list (I've noticed that I can have it default to on or off in different playlists, but normally I keep it off on the main Music library list!), but it was.

After consultation with my local audio-software experts, I'm now trying a slightly different approach that makes use of iTunes instead of both Nero and CDex. (I'm a complete n00b about a lot of the advanced functions of iTunes, which is why I ask my local experts.) Watch this space for further reports!

A brainstorming help request (that almost belongs in the 'Internal Passports' thread.)

Imagine a performance art piece at a crowded festival where a hyper-patriot (all possible meanings) of a US type does the following:

1. zips up to people while looking extremely patriotic (very red white and blue*)

2. Asks them ??? to prove that they're patriotic- where the questions could be real**.

3. Hands them a copy of the Bill of Rights (laminated wallet type) and zips away.

1 and 3 I can take care of.

But I'm having trouble thinking of good questions. I know some folks last year who built a portable airport security gate and had fun acting like hyper TSA people and asking people to go through. I'm inspired by that, but my props can only be questions and then the Bill of Rights at the end.

Surprising, funny, pointed patriotism questions anyone? Thanks!

------------
* fine 4th of July wear. All made in China.

** Steven Colberty real.

Abi: Just pretend that Abigah-El is your Krypton name, and you now have superpowers because of the yellow Dutch sun.

-----

Fun fact: In his youth, Walter Carlos Williams briefly corresponded with Lester Maddox Ford.

In the last post I made about software development in the Bad Sources thread, I promised I'd take the discussion to the open thread, and this seems to be it now.

My take on software is highly personal, first because I'm not originally a student of computer science or software*, and second because for some years my job was to evaluate software technology and transfer it into the corporate software process at Tektronix. Because of where I've worked and who I've worked with, I've gotten to know many people who've been involved in writing about, consulting in, and selling software development techniques and methodologies. So some of my opinions are based on my opinions of the people involved as well as of the technologies they're involved with. I know that's not very scientific, but then the subject matter isn't very scientific either. Very little of the writing on the subject of software development is based on careful experimental design and analysis, and for all the talk of metrics, very little good data is available on how software is developed in real projects.

The other major reason why there's no science of software development is that any software project has to be involved, to a greater or lesser degree, with organizational politics. So there are often reasons why accurate measurement of the effectiveness of the processes in use is not desired, and even more often reasons why the actual progress is not reported or perhaps even known.

I look at the spectrum of development methodologies as running from the extreme of central control, highly structured project organization and planning embodied in the waterfall method to the other extreme of local decision-making, unstructured communication, and short-term planning of XP and agile programming. While it's true that the spectrum is usually considered to also run over the range of organization size and project complexity, where waterfall is suited primarily for large, complex projects, and XP for small, short-term projects, I believe that this is very much an over-simplification.

There is one principle that seems to hold true across the spectrum of development projects: the organization and architecture of software is determined by the structure of the organization which develops it. I wish I knew who first came up with this idea, I don't, but I certainly can't claim it for myself.

* I was a hardware technician who became a systems engineer, and then decided that since the work was mostly software, I might as well have the job title.

Bruce, I would be fascinated to hear your take on (sometime Making Light reader) Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code.

Howard (#88), IIRC, Lester Maddox Ford wrote occasionally under the name Ford Milo Chevrolet.

One thing that interested me about the agile/extreme programming movement was the idea of embedding technical writers in the programming team in a larger than normal ratio of tech writers to programmers, with the goal of matching emergent working software with equally emergent complete documentation. It seemed, though, that too many software organizations think of dedicated tech writers as an unwarranted luxury. Every bit of tech writing I've done while programming and doing tech support fell into my lap by default because I could usually spell moar betr than the other members of my team. heh.

#91: Howard (#88), IIRC, Lester Maddox Ford wrote occasionally under the name Ford Milo Chevrolet.

And would not a Ford by any other name get as much mileage?

I got to this thread late and have nothing to add at present except my wild appreciation for Evan's communication of the answers. That it was five limericks in a row would have been enough, but that each limerick encompassed much of the characterization of the clues (e.g. debcha wishing to be first) was pure icing.

For those who might be interested, I have now successfully converted 2 cassette tapes to archive CDs and .mp3 files in my iTunes library. Details (including all the dead ends) and a product review here. Summary: there was a bit of a learning curve involved, but overall the product works as advertised.

Bruce Cohen # 89: Conway's Law?

Stupid Zebra puzzle. Stupid almost practically OCD me. Stupid three in the morning.

Now that I've solved the bugger, may I be permitted to finally go to sleep?

Howard Peirce @ 88...

Who says she has to pretend? Didn't you notice that, when her family was still in Scotland and she'd fly from Amsterdam to see them on weekends, she didn't say how she flew there? Did she think we wouldn't catch that strange ommission? And when some of us met her in Berkeley, she was always careful to stay away from bicycles with a kryptonite lock on them.

nerdycellist & ethan... Re what was said in thread #89 re Across the Universe and the Beatles being overused... Even though I was born in 1955, which means that I was around when the radio would play new songs by the Beatles, I was such a square that I never paid much attention to what was going on in the 1960s. Then I went to college in 1973, getting a ride with someone who was the drummer in a band, and thus I was introduced to the Beatles after they'd each gone their way. Anyway, come to think of it, isn't their overuse in advertising a recent thing of the last 5 years? I somehow manage to tune most of that out. No matter what, I still enjoy them, especially George's "within you without you"...

Desert SF? Hmmm, Turtledove's "Down in the Bottomlands" (title?) works. There are a number of short stories set on Mercury; I think one or two of them have inspired "Year's Best Science Fiction" covers. The Gunslinger, with its wonderful first line (I think Drawing of the Three is also set in the desert, but I'm not certain).

A man looks at a portrait and says: "Sons and brothers, I have none, but this person's father is my father's son." At whose portrait is he looking?

Tania @ 51... CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun novels (Serge, am I remembering this correctly? I haven't read the Faded Sun books in a looong time. I associate them with deserts)

That is correct. Kesrith... Shon'jir... Kutath... I think that's the order of the books, but it's been a long time.

Serge @100: Uvf qnhtugre.

Jakob @ 95

That could be the original source. I'd guess I first heard it about 4th hand or so; it would take some digging to verify that there wasn't another, independent source.

Only recently, with the debate over making the Felix Chevrolet sign a designated landmark, have I finally realized fully why the writer/singer/bandleader of "Pico and Sepulveda" chose the pseudonym of Felix Figueroa. I already knew about Figueroa, and for all these years, I hadn't even wondered about "Felix."

Serge @100
It is an image of flaxen-haired Doreen Grey, whose timeless charms have captivated Society for so many seasons now.

Yet I doubt that her many bosom-bows would know her as she is shown, with her face marred and marked with all the cruelties, petty and great, that a beauty may commit on her helpless acquaintance.

Yvxr sngure, yvxr qnhtugre

Bruce Cohen #103: I'm not a software chap, but IIRC I first came across the idea in the jargon file, which referenced Conway.

Deserts figure prominently in several Terry Pratchett books; Pyramids is the first that comes to mind.

'Altissimo' is a superb blood-red just-more-than-single rose crowned with golden stamens. I don't know how successful it'd be in a container, since it's a short-growing (in my experience) climber. No scent, though.

Another desert novel: Courtship Rite aka Gaia, by Donald Kingsbury. The semi-eponymous planet is perhaps more scrub than sandy desert, but the dearth of edible native species makes it as hostile as the deepest Sahara.

Also, I remember a novel called Salt by author unknown, about which I recall almost nothing, except there being a rape in the middle of it. Seemed almost self-consciously literary when I read it, but I mention it in case someone else liked it.

108: "Salt" by Adam Roberts, perhaps? And, yes, I agree.

Regarding desert sf: Tim Pratt's Strange Adventures of Rangergirl takes place in an Old West desert (and Santa Cruz).

Kip W... abi... Correct. I first came across it exactly nine years ago, in some column by Marylin vos Savant. It had originally been cooked up by one Warren Buckland.

THE HUGE GOD ADDRESSES THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES

I am Her twin and Her son.
I was born when She gave birth
To Herself, and grew as She grew.
You say She abhors me,
But I am greater than all
Her other children; greater
Than all of them combined.
I surround Her and embrace Her,
Though I have no substance.
You, in your small bubble,
Can go nowhere else unless
You first pass me.
Touch me unprotected, and
I will draw the breath
From your body, the warmth
From your flesh. I am nothing,
But I encompass everything.

Who is speaking? (This isn't hard. Not much of a riddle, really, more of a poem.)

Carrie S. @85: What you're looking for is commonly known as an "old" rose.

Most likely candidates are R. gallica or R. damascena.

I'm pretty sure, since it violates the "money flows towards the author" rule, but Author House is a scam, right?

Lori, cmk, thanks, that gives me somewhere to start looking for roses. :)

Lori, cmk, thanks, that gives me somewhere to start looking for roses. :)

I'm pretty sure, since it violates the "money flows towards the author" rule, but Author House is a scam, right?

Serge (98)

I think all it would take is for me not to hear another Beatles song (no excerpt, no arrangement) for the next, say, five years - I think then I could actually listen and fully appreciate them. I feel the same way about Copland; overexposure makes me change the radio channel anytime Rodeo or Appalachian Spring makes an appearance. I'm not sure how many years those would have to go away before I could tolerate them again.

Pachelbel can just go away.

I agree, R. gallica was the first thing that came to my mind as well, until I looked again at "blood" red; it's usually described as "light" red, I think. I am nearly sure there are no strong reds among the Damasks, though.

What I did think of later was the modern Gallica hybrids such as 'Poinsettia' and 'James Mason.'

nerdycellist... Considering how long it took advertisers to stop using Carmina Burana after Excalibur came out, you might want to abandon all hopes of 5 years without the Beatles.

I could go a long time without hearing Stairway to Heaven again...

Xopher @#112: inphhz?

I guess inphhz as well.

(I venture either havirefr or angher for the "she" in the poem, mostly because I like the rot13ed names).

Mary, Neil: Inphhz is correct. Told you it wasn't hard.

As for "She"—the fourth line will let you know for sure whether it's Havirefr or Angher, if you really think there's a difference.

Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a Pound.

I thought Walter Carlos Williams wrote those Dread Empire's Plums books. I devoured the first two--they were really cool!

Isn't everyone actually thinking of Walter Juan Carlos Williams, author of speculative fiction, poet of the commonplace, and Spanish monarch?

"Shadows cast by the plasm light

under the Shield,

the head is tilted back,

the long shadow of burning legs

presumes a world taken for granted"

on which the dolphin trills."

--Walter Juan Carlos Williams, "Shadows" (from Pictures from Constantine)

re myself @87,

The "Flamer Bingo" thread is a near-canonical list of troll and flamer sign.

Has anyone here seen something similar for questioning patriotism? i.e. What do patriot-trolls say?

The bingo thread itself has a couple ("The president is doing God's work.."). I've seen short lists at Glen Greenwald and a few other places (in response to claims that Republicans have never questioned Democrat's patriotism, for example). But I haven't seen a longer list / don't know who might have one.

Any pointers here or by email much appreciated.

Kathryn: I get a fair amount of "What are you, French?" To which I reply, "Yeah, culturally, pretty much. How many languages do you speak?"

Gursky @ 46: The Gandalara series by Garrett and Heydron fits your criteria. The actual geographic identity of the desert is the main "mystery" of the series.

Ah, you folks are great. A thousand good suggestions and no-one cruel enough to point out that mites actually have eight legs.

The book on my shelf I was trying to remember, that I later found when callous morning came calling to wake my girlfriend and let me turn on the lights in our studio apartment, was indeed Effinger. Specifically, his A Fire in the Sun, which I rather liked.
I've put some of your suggestions on order at the bookstore. Usually my displays don't actually sell any books*, but I have fun choosing them regardless.

*Last month's for instance. Apparently anyone who cared about the Heinlein centennial already owns his books. Silly me, I thought Farnham's Freehold would fly off the shelf with sheer kitsch power alone.

I somehow thought "can you grok it?" was sheer placard gold, too, until I slowly realized that no, no of course they could not grok it. I was, in fact, trying to sell them the book that would allow them to grok it. Like advertising a Mandarin for Beginners course in Mandarin.

OK, Open Thread question: Can any of you Latin types tell me how to say "Behold, I am Justice manifested"? I need it for a story. Medieval Latin would be ideal (so I think there's an 'ego' in there, right?).

Kathryn: "What is habeas corpus?" "What citizens of the U.S. are barred from voting?"
IMO, knowledge is an important part of patriotism, but my imagination is blanking (mercifully) on the sort of question that could be answered "Ditto!" if you're looking to be sardonic.

Carla: Our "Mr Lincoln" (thanks to TNH for the identification) grows in a small compass -- not a windowsill-sized flowerpot but it might fit in a tub. Gorgeous smell and petal color, but I haven't noticed the stamen color and it might be more petals than you're looking for. (I'm not sure I've ever seen a rose with just 7 petals.)

Kathyrn, #124, I sometimes get asked why I don't have an American flag on anything. (I wrote and installed a software patch while on a submarine under fire. I don't need a flag to be patriotic.)

Marilee @130,

I used to not own 'patriotic gear.'

But when I saw the wide range of garish stuff on super deep discount at a Large National Store I had to grab some.

As said, every last piece was made in China*, thong shoes to headscarf. If I try a hyperpatriot act**, I'll have leave the tags on for the irony.

-------
* to be fair, the flag they sold was made in the US. But it wasn't on sale, and I didn't buy one.

** although I've got too many art projects already, and I'd need a shtick to go with the costume. It's like thinking about how many costumes to bring to a SF convention- easy to get carried away.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale as Lady Liberty, maybe?

Altissimo rose is not a delicate flower in California. It is a brute, often referred to as Attila The Rose.

You can find it growing up the walls at the Huntington Museum, Art Galleries and Botanical Garden's Tea Room. Sometimes, it gets really hungry and has a patron for lunch.

Here's a URL for the Huntington's Rose pages.

Gursky, were you there? I was stuck in the dealer/exhibit space the whole weekend....

Because just about every generaton of my men-folk have been in some branch of service as far as I know (I'm' certain about mine and earlier generations, I expect that male pretty-much-unknown-cause they're on my fahter's side have signed up for more current warfare, I think the whole yellow ribbon thing is stupid.

Someone whose blog I read regularly who was in the service got berated at a gas station for not having the magnetic stickers on their car. The woman who berated him got really defensive when he pointed out that the stickers don't send money to the troops and that he had been collecting and sending along goods to actually help the troops in the field (http://skippyslist.com/2007/08/21/warning-signs/)

I got talked out of joining the army by my dad (Air Force Major, at the time reservist) and my brother (Army Captain, active) in my early college years. After I got a little older and more experienced I realized they regarded the woman's service as little more than a lesbian recruiting system and they were scared of that for me (silly men!). (I realized it from the language they had been using, not any overt "this is what it is" kind of thing."

When I realized this I was amused but I did not go sign up.,..

Meta Logic Puzzle: Out of the 11 clues listed, what is the smallest number of clues that can be used to arrive at the correct answer? Which ones? How many different unique combinations can you come up with?

(I have it down to five, or four if you allow that "before" and "after" mean "directly before" or "directly after.")

Xopher@128:

"Behold, I am Justice manifested"? I need it for a story. Medieval Latin would be ideal (so I think there's an 'ego' in there, right?).

I think "Ecce, Iustitia repraesentata sum" would be more or less right. (Feminine ending for "repraesentata" to go with the first declension feminine noun.) You could substitute "aequitas" for "iustitia" and not change the rest. Unfortunately, medieval Latin's out of my depth, since I ignore anything after the fourth century CE; medievalists?

No Paula, I was just talking about the humble little display I put up in his honor at the bookstore where I work.

Would the Powers That Be consider posting a link to whatever the current Open Thread happens to be, near the top of the ML main page? For a while there, the open thread was deep, deep into the main page, about half-way down.

To whoever was asking about the meaning of the numeric labels on the cards near the end of the novel, The Prestige:

I just finished reading the book myself, and was briefly puzzled by them. I believe if you go back and read the part about the playbills near the beginning, in the main narrator's meeting with Kate, you will find the clue. If you want me to be more specific, fur fnlf gung gur qrgnvyf Natvre abgrf bofrffviryl ba gur onpxf bs gur cynlovyyf naq va uvf wbheany vapyhqr qnl naq gvzr bs cresbeznapr, zngvarr/riravat (Z naq R), nzbhag cnvq, naq nqqvgvbanyyl abg bayl n pbqr ahzore sbe rnpu onfvp gevpx ohg sbe rnpu inevnag va ubj ur cerfragf vg. Guhf V guvax gur 2359 jbhyq or inevnag 59 ba gevpx 23 (juvpu zhfg or VA N SYNFU), naq nf cbbe Avpxl jnf abg cerfragvat n gevpx uvf erznvaf jrer pbyqyl pngnybtrq nf 0000.

Can any of you Latin types tell me how to say "Behold, I am Justice manifested"?

First, grow a pencil mustache and put some pomade in your hair. Wear too-tight trousers, an ascot, and a smoking jacket. With a cigarette holder in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, stand with your hips slightly forward, look at your lover through half-closed eyes, and say, with a slight Castillian accent, "Behold, cara mia. I am Justice, how you say, . . . manifested!"

Or did you mean the other kind of Latin type?

Nomie 136: Thanks. I think I may just go with "Ecce, justicia sum," ('j' at the beginning of a word is, I believe, Med. Lat. practice, though it was still pronounced the same); 'representata' is accurate, I'm sure, but it sounds awkward.

Howard 140: Latin, yes, but not Medieval.

You're a bad man. I can picture Antonio Banderas saying it. Must bleach brain.

@Xopher #141: Antonio Banderas? I was thinking Raúl Juliá.

Paula Helm Murray (#134): I do have a couple of magnetic ribbons that did help the troops, because I bought them from my brother's unit's Family Readiness Group. However, they're on my minifridge at work, not on my nonexistent car/truck/SUV....

Paula @ #143:

I highly recommend The Asylum Street Spankers song "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on your S-U-V", which seemingly annoys both people who understand it and people who miss the point.

oops! I should mention the link is to youtube and may be considered NSFW, depending on where you work.

Clifton Royston @ 139 -- ahh, that makes sense, although I think it must be variant 2359, not just variant 59. Thanks!

WRT the latest Particle: Karl Rove wants to have his CGI modelled by Crispin Glover??

"Behold, cara mia. I am Justice, how you say, . . . manifested!"

So, the Continental will be heading up the New Avengers, then.

"What's this? I see... evildoers! through my... periscope! Quickly, the champagna bottle!"

whether it's Havirefr or Angher, if you really think there's a difference.

I have the idea that one is the action of the other; so one abhors while the other is surrounded and embraced; one acts, the other is. Or, as came into my head when I thought about it

Gur jnl V frr vg, angher npgf
Juvyr gur havirefr whfg vf;
rkcerffvat havirefny snpgf
vf ubj jr frr jung angher vf

(Which, although unpronounceable in rot13, would rhyme if it could be spoken)

Giants in Yorkshire!

Serge back at #132: Kathryn could be American Maid!

Time to go home read some Tick.

For all of us that love books for their nifty selves, not just the wonders they contain: Unusual Books and Book Sculptures.

Okay, this is weird. My last two posts to Making Light have vanished.

...But they still exist in my "view all by" page. Immediately after I post, I can see them in the comments. The previous comment is #152, and this will probably be #153. However, sometime between when I post them, and when I return (probably about 24 hours later), they have vanished off the page. What's going on?

Gah, never mind.

Ooh, somehow I just tore my gaze away from the posts long enough to find the Edited By NH list. It seems Patrick edited the new trade version I mentioned above (the one I couldn't see on my shelf through the late night computer screen gloaming) of A Fire in the Sun. Thanks man, it was good work.

Neil 149: Me likey! Natura sola sufficit.

OH MY GOD Kristen Bell is going to be on Heroes!

I just had to change my pants, like, nine times. Because of the peeing. From the excitement.

Michael, #142: So was I.

ethan, #157: That would be funnier if I didn't have a UTI right now. ;-p

Todd: V qba'g guvax ur pbhyq unir qbar gung zber guna 2360+ gvzrf, nf ur jbhyq unir gb unir gung znal havdhr inevnagf; V qba'g guvax ur pbhyq unir orra qbvat vg gung znal lrnef, be gung znal gvzrf n qnl. (Naq jbhyqa'g gur pnir or engure zber guna shyy?)

Lee #158: Oy. Ten thousand apologies, and my condolences.

Clifton: Tbbq cbvag; V unqa'g gubhtug gung guebhtu irel pnershyyl. Ohg va gung pnfr, gur "/23" vf whfg erqhaqnag juvpu fgvyy obguref zr n yvggyr.

Paula, #134, I tried to enlist in the Navy to anger my father at one point, but I'm too blind. But my father's family has been water military for many generations.

Ah, googling tells me that Kristin Bell was in Veronica Mars.

And I found that one of the ComicMix guys had the same opinion that I did about Flash Gordon.

Marilee @ 162... I saw only part of Flash Gordon's pilot, but I'm afraid I'll have to agree. (Sorry, Xopher.) I came into the story just as Our Heroes got zapped to Mongo, so I may have been spared some of the offense. Still... I actually didn't dislike Flash himself, especially when his tactics to cope with being taken captive on an alien planet was "Smile, everybody! Smile!" Gura V pnzr npebff Zvat gur Zrepvyrff naq ernyvmrq jvgu ubeebe gung gurl unq ghearq uvz vagb gur obevat PRB bs n ovt pbecbengvba. Naq uvf qnhtugre Nhen juvavat "Bj! Lbh'er uhegvat zr!" Ab Bearyyn Zhggv, fur.

Serge: transliterations like Zvat gur Zrepvyrff naq ernyvmrq look like they belong in the Pooh/Lovecraft thread -- just what I imagine the squamous types would say to each other as they slither along, looking to devour us.

Faren @ 164... Yeah, rot13.com often makes words sound like they were uttered by a human reduced to a gibbering state after being in the presence of Pooh.

What pisses me off most about the Flash Gordon series? That it got greenlit, and Dresden Files got axed.

Meh.

Skwid @ 166... I thought that Dresden was simply cooking up its next short season, like most of the Skiffy Channel's series.

Knitted food! The photos include knitted sushi and a knitted burger. I'm tempted to make a run over there some time, just to look at the pictures in the book.

PJ @ 168... We've been told that fiber-rich food is good for one's health, but isn't this pushing things too far?

Well, if you use silk or wool, it should count as protein.

Serge, so did most fans of the show, apparently. I never saw anything like an official announcement, just heard a rumor, went snooping, and found a SciFi Wire story that Paul Blackstone was accepting a part on some show about CEOs and (buried at the bottom) that the 2nd season of Dresden was cancelled.

I'm kind of baffled about it, really, because from what I was hearing it was getting good ratings for SciFi...

PJ, 170: And fiber!

Skwid @ 171... Go figure. TV producing is a strange world, eh? Meanwhile, I heard that Galactica's next season will be the last one. I hope they wrap it up tidily. And that Baltar falls into the Sun and burns to a crisp.

Following up on Serge and Skwid's comments on the Dresden Files:

I found a brief news report of the cancellation, with links for fans who wish to lobby for the show's renewal, here: http://www.tvscoop.tv/2007/08/the_dresden_fil_1.html.

Since the star has accepted a role on another show, I'm not sure how they could arrange to bring him back.

The folks on Jim Butcher's blog talk like it's dead beyond hope of resuscitation, and I trust they'd know.

That this will be Galactica's last run was known prior to the end of the third season. It's a good thing, IMO, as I think the story arc is flowing naturally towards a conclusion at this point. Coming in late November will be a new BSG TV movie, set largely on the Pegasus prior to its encountering Galactica, and then the fourth season proper starts in January. I can't wait!

Skwid... I agree that BSG is finally moving to a conclusion. I only hope they don't screw up.

Rozasharn... I am especially going to miss Dresden's Bob the Ghost.

Serge, I'll miss him too. Bob's appearance was one of the most dramatic differences from the books, and it added a lot to the humor and vibrance of the show.

I just discovered (via the blog theamericanscene.com ) a book http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SHLGRA.html which analyzes three models for the interaction of the government with the economy. Their models are called the invisible hand, the helping hand and the grabbing hand. This seems like something other people here would appreciate ...

179

They clearly forgot the goosing hand.

Back from trip, reports being made at my Lj (Better than salt money.

Some adeventures (some more normal, some of the Baggins variety) mostly good times. Horses did well, scenery was nice, didn't get far enough, and spent too long; though the urge to stay was strong as well.

Snagged some wireless on the road, and read the swatjester thread as we drove home. Was comforting to see homely things, like the (relatively) mild flamage that takes place here.

Coffee is in the cup, crap is still in the trailer, everyone else is still abed.

Too long on the trail
Horse's rider turns around
Leaves the trees for home

It seems that at the recent North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Quebec, the protesters couldn't be counted upon to be sufficiently disruptive that the police would have to act... so the police tried to surreptitiously help things along. Unfortunately, the protesters were too determinedly civil and refused to participate.

CBC story:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2007/08/22/ot-police-070822.html?ref=rss

My take:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Montebello%20police&w=13291357%40N00

Harry Potter and the Big Box Store: Harry and his friends battle Lord WaldeMart.

And here I was waiting for The Dresden Files to reach terrestrial TV in the UK so I could get someone to tape it for me (not having a TV), and now I find it's been cancelled (at least the books are still going)! I'm already suffering through the enjoyment/misery of watching Firefly knowing that when I reach the last episode that's it (having picked up the DVD set due to (a) enjoying Serenity and (b) good vibes picked up from this community) and now - it's deja vue all over again...

Terry @181:

Welcome back.

abi Thanks. The damned haiku is all your fault.

Leaving in about ten days for a trip I've always wanted to make (the Galapagos) which reminds me to remind you to think about the picture you want.

Terry @186
I'd much rather be blamed for a haiku than for what I'm currently blaming myself for.*

I'll email you about the photo. But Galapagos! Cool!**

-----
* My 3 year old daughter is at the emergency room with her dad right now, with either a broken or a dislocated finger. She slipped in the shower I made her take. Had I let her have a bath, as she wanted, it might not have happened.

** I mistyped that as "Cook!" and almost left it, though of course the correct exclamation would be "Darwin!"†

† But that's just nice-speak for Dam.

abi @ 187... Don't blame yourself about the Road Taken or Not Taken.

Abi: It happens. My "little" sister (the middle one, who is now... lessee 40-18=22, and has three kids) was going back to her chair (at the age of 1 1/2, or so, and tripped, right onto the hard wooden arm, at the cubical corner.

Took three stitches. Sooner or later they all break themselves. Some are more serious than others and there's nothing you did to make it happen.

Enough of the Polonial advice (having been in my late-teens/early twenties for the birth of two kids, while I was still living with my folks, and having spent time as an au pair I am probably as ready as any non-parent can be to deal with them).

You could also say "Melville" but he hated the "Enchanted Isles", so perhaps it's not the best of ejaculations when one thinks of them.

It is cool, and something of a surprise that we're going. It was added to a different trip (on which I am not going), and I wanted in on that (I was pickling with envy, until I got the gumption to say I wanted to go).

Frigate birds and tortises, sea-going iguanas and finches.

Blue-footed boobies.

Five days on a boat, and a couple of day trips (the timing of one-week boat trips doesn't work right). Maia is skipping two-weeks of school to make her trips, and I'm trusting the plants to others (again) so I can go.

It's tight, for money, but there are rumors the islands will be closed, and when else were we going to be in the area?

Marine iguanas! I don't remember what Darwin called them, but it was not complimentary.

Abi, my mom's mom once dislocated her daughter's arm by accident. My dad managed to take a layer or two of skin off my chin with industrial-strength gum-removing solvent. Do not feel guilty that you wanted your daughter to be clean.

Has anyone else caught "water me, when I tilt" as an earworm, to the tune of the first line of "Shock The Monkey"?

OK, how about now?

My dad sliced off the tip of my left hand index finger with a pair of nail clippers when I was a baby. I'm still missing a teeny bit of fingerprint on that finger, although it's not noticeable unless you're looking for it.

My brother broke his leg when he was three years old. It was on the outside, just above the ankle, which meant he could walk with it broken; it was the shocky silence that tipped off our parents.

abi, if nothing else you have provided her with a great story to tell when she's older (even if it's only a day or two older).

My mom zipped my chin into my coat when I was a kid. I live in the sub-arctic and have a fear of zipping my coat all the way up. Btw, it was a great bruise, looked just like a zipper.

So, how's she doing now?

abi, my father hit/punched/kicked/etc. me every day. That's his fault. Having your daughter take a shower is not your fault.

I managed to knock my little sister down hard enough to make her go in for stitches on her chin* when she was four or five. Both of us were out at the park with our very large dog and he ran past her on one side while I ran past on the other, and without meaning it at all we clotheslined her neatly with the leash right onto her face on the pavement.

I'm really not sure what my parents were thinking, in letting an eight-year-old run around with a very large and only moderately trained dog on a leash. Probably that the dog could use some exercise, and it would do me some good to get out of the house and go to the park with my little sister for a while.

* With a large blunt needle, because they were out of little ones. I could hear her shrieking from the waiting room. Being very young myself, I was mostly concerned about whether or not I would get in trouble for it.

Modesty Blaise fans: Do you find Sabre-Tooth kind of lacking? After reading the first one, I thought it was kind of a letdown. Is something wrong with me? Or with the book?

...Or both? Or, for that matter, neither?

i have a computery question that is making me want to break things. hey! here is an open thread. perhaps someone familiar with illustrator & acrobat writer (6.0.2 professional) can help me?

i have a pdf that i made in illustrator. it has three layers: a drawn image, some shadows, and more drawn images (handlettered text in speech balloons & captions). i need to put these pdfs together in acrobat to make one big pdf (comic pages in sequence).

acrobat just now started, sorry for the shouting, but inverting the top layer only, so all the speech balloons are black where they should be white, etc.

i open & open & open the files in illustrator & they're right, i open & open & open the files in acrobat & they're wrong. i printed out one page to see if it's just showing up wrong on the screen, & the printout's wrong, too.

i may have given acrobat ideas because i did have cause to invert some of the text-images, to white on a black background. but that was in photoshop, before it got to illustrator to get to acrobat, & also all the text-images were inverted, not just the ones that may have been inverted already.

am i making sense? does anyone have an idea what's happening?

They (the Hub and the girlie) got home at midnight our time. She'd been asleep on and off in the emergency room, and had behaved well apart from screaming in fright at the fist sight of the doctor for some reason.*

She came home with a cast on her arm, as solemn and as sweet and as strong as I have ever seen her, and went straight to bed.

I am proud of her. Within a few minutes she was looking for the upside. "At least I can wiggle the other fingers." "At least I can wiggle my other hand." "At least Alex [her brother] can wiggle his fingers." "At least the stars are pretty tonight." Classy kid.

I feel guilty - less so now, since it's clearly minor - because she wanted a bath and I insisted on it being a shower. And because I was in there with her, conditioning her hair, when she fell.

She's going to be very annoyed when she realises that she can't ride her bike today.

-----
* screaming when they straighten a broken finger counts as well behaved, though.

nerdycellist @ 192

What's with string players and knives? Nadia Solerno-Sonnenberg tells a blood-curdling story (she plays it for laughs, but ...) about cutting off most of one finger while chopping onions. Got it reattached and spend the next year doing rehab, but got lucky and got all the dexterity back, so she could still play professionally. Gah! Gives me the shivers just thinking about it. It's not the mutilation so much as the loss of the music. It would be to me as if I lost my sight and couldn't take pictures anymore.

A friend's father sliced his own thumb off at the knuckle, upon which he supposedly looked at it, said, "Huh," got the superglue, and glued it back on. I've seen the thumb, so I know it was pretty definitely severed and inexpertly reattached, but the rest is just hearsay.

Apparently the use of the thumb, including feeling in it, is just fine. This completely boggles my mind.

Patrick @ 90

Sorry this is so long after your post; my access to ML is limited to non-work hours these days, and the house remodeling is stealing a lot of the time that remains, so I have to skim, and sometimes miss things.

I haven't read Dreaming in Code, but I think I'm going to now that you've mentioned it. I'll get back to you when I can.

This comment isn't just an apology and a promise, though, because the title, Dreaming in Code, reminded me of some of the more, erm, fringe-oriented movements in software that I've tripped over in the last few years.

Aside from the stuff that since has become orthodox, like the open-source movement that's coalesced around Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, there are some less well-known and still avant-garde ideas floating around in the infosphere. One of them is the "Futurist Programming Movement", which is not as political as it's early 20th century namesake. I don't know a lot about the specifics of the movement, but I know of Paul Haeberli's work, and I'm moderately impressed with some of his ideas. Another is Richard Gabriel's Feyerabend Project. Richard is trying, among other things, to find an objective way to prescribe the mathematical quality of elegance, since elegant software is much more likely to both work well and be easier to maintain. Richard and I meet at conferences every once in awhile, and I attended one of his workshops on the subject. I think he's got something there, but I don't know what yet. He thinks there should be some way to make aesthetic qualities objectively useful; my experience of photography agrees with him*.

Hmm, it's getting late and this is starting to get long. I'll see if I can go into this subject more thoroughly in the next few days on my own blog. Thanks for the forum.

* The effects of composition, shape, and color palette on the viewer are at least partially the result of the way the human visual system works.

abi,

I'll join the chorus: accidents happen to kids, and there's not much you can do about it. Just try to get over those moments of terror, and go back to appreciating your child.

For about 8 or 10 years there our younger son Jeremy was really accident prone. To the point where we started to get funny looks from the emergency room doctors, clearly having dark thoughts about child abuse. The climax to that came one day when Jeremy was about 6 or 7 and he and I were rough-housing (not very roughly) and he grabbed my hand as he fell over and dislocated his elbow. We took him into the hospital immediately, and when the doctor started examining the arm, Jeremy started screaming in pain; the the doctor reset the arm and Jeremy suddenly stopped yelling, as if in great surprise, because it didn't hurt any more. The resident who examined him was rather suspicious of all this, so he talked to the attending physician, who took a look at the records, took one look at Jeremy, and said to us "Oh, he's accident prone, isn't he?" That, of course, didn't much relieve the sense of guilt I had for the next few days, but at least it removed an additional burden I might otherwise have had to deal with.

The thing about being a parent is that you just don't have time to feel bad about things until after it's all over; before that you're going to be too busy dealing with the situation. And afterwards you need to make sure that the kid doesn't get a bad feeling about it all from you. It sounds like your daughter isn't likely to do that; good work.

abi, I can't blame my parents for the one childhood accident whose scars I retain, but I can tell you it passes and becomes a conversation point.

I incurred a compound fracture of my ring finger when I was about 11. I ended up with a soft cast and boxing glove affair for about 3 months during a Los Angeles summer (when I got that thing off, my hand had an odor and appearance straight out of the worst B-movie you ever saw). I still have a double nail on that finger.

But. I got treated on the SS Hope, a hospital ship berthed in Long Beach. For an 11-year-old, that was the coolest thing ever.

My nephew Everett (age 1 1/2) recently managed to fracture his wrist at a playground. His arm is in a cast, and his parents are supposed to keep him from running and jumping. (This is very much against his natural inclinations.)

Well, they're also packing for a move. He got up onto a suitcase, about 4" off the ground. His mother said, "No jumping!" and took him off. Then his sister got up onto it and jumped. Well, after that there was no restraining him....from fracturing his other wrist. Whee.

Bruce and abi: amusing study shows sharp decline in pediatric emergency room visits on Harry Potter book release dates.

I don't have any cool childhood injuries, but as an adult I did manage to tear an anterior cruciate ligament in a shopping incident (turned a shopping cart loaded with gravel and concrete pavers over on my knee, about 30 seconds after a clerk asked if I needed help and I replied, "No, I got it.").

BTW, abi--what everyone else said. Don't beat yourself up. Random stuff happens.

P J Evans #193:
Yep, the fibula isn't a weight supporting bone. I know, I'm missing 20cm of the one on my left. I had an open Tib/Oblique Fib fracture (I did something stupid for a Bostonian, I crossed Mass Ave. -- in a cross walk, what was I thinking? So rod in Tibia, bolted both ends. Fib heals first, and ends up a bit longer than proper. They had to take a section of the Fib out so that there'd be enough pressure on the pieces of Tib for it to heal (they also took out the distal bolts which may have been part, or all, of the problem). Once the bones fragments got real close, the osteoblasts got busy). Original prediction: 6 weeks on crutches, actual 12 1/2 months (6 extra weeks due to my insisting that the rod come out). The gap in the bone is annoying when I wear boots, especially ski boots, otherwise no problem. The related soft tissue injuries in knee and ankle still bother me (14 years later).

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #203:
The standard instruction for applying traction to a broken femur is to increase tension until the patient's face relaxes (the ends of the bone aren't pressing painfully on anything anymore, etc). Similar thing for reducing dislocations (but there is also the tactile sensation of the bones slipping back into place, supposedly).

When I was little, we moved into a house that has cellar steps down from the outside. One day my mother was weeding along the edge of the stairwell and I came up behind her; she turned to tell me to be careful, bumped me, and pushed me off. 25+ years later, I still have the scar on my chin from hitting the gravel at the bottom.

Which is to say, these things happen and you should not feel guilty.

abi @ 199... Glad to hear the news. Your kids are indeed great kids. Then again, what else could they be?

I was noodling around with the latest version of Google Earth the other day* when I found a placemarker someone left a couple of years ago on the site of the base I spent a year at in Vietnam back in the Second Age. Weird; it used to be a small compound, about the size of two football fields, surrounded by rice paddies; the nearest hamlet was about half a klick down the road. Now the satellite photo barely shows where the perimeter fence was. It looks like parts of the battalion office and the comm center are still there, and the barracks buildings; because they were built on concrete pads they would have been worth keeping. But the entire area is buildings now, no trace of rice paddy. Not sure what I'm feeling right now; it's not exactly nostalgia, and it's not exactly remembered fear.

* Nice planetarium mode ... "I see stars inside!"

Carrie S. (208)

I seem to recall the most common scar is just under the chin. I have a variation of it, a small angled scar on my lower lip.

I got it falling down and catching my face on the wing nut which held the leg of the table I knocked over on the way down.

I still recall (vaguely, I was 3-4) the trips to the dentist to have the tooth rebuilt. It probably shaped my tastes, because the nature of the cap prevented me from certain types of sweets (lest it be pulled off).

Bruce Cohen (STM) Being a (lapsed) cellist, who cut almost the entire tip off his, bow-hand, pinky, [I was whittling, the kife was sharp. I set it down on the arm of the chair, it fell. I was removing my had from the area when the edge brushed my pinky. It didn't, quite, remove the whole tip. I stuck it in my mouth, and called my sister; that she might butterfly it. I have an interesting, if faint, scar] I think it might be that we do so much with our hands.

Further lots of that is delicate; with things in our hands, so we assume we have the same level of desterity with other things. Sometimes that's not the case.

Then again, I seem to have in mind that lots of athletes lop off fingers with power hedge-clippers. Those things scare me. I won't use one.

Seafood at Burning Man, by Violet Blue

210: that must be a pretty strange feeling. I visited the former Clark AFB a few years ago and found it an extremely odd, almost Ballardian place - two miles of desolate runway, surrounded by completely overgrown base housing and used only by courier planes and a few superannuated USAF pilots in light aircraft. And Pinatubo near enough to cover the whole area in feet of ash. But I never actually saw it as a working airbase.

You might want to read "Beaucourt Revisited" by AP Herbert: http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/52138-A-P-Herbert-Beaucourt-Revisited

When I was seven I was running down some stairs, tripped, and landed hard on stones. Broke my right arm. It happens.

The chin scar is really common. Baby Sister (who leaves for college today) fell while running at the pool. I think my brother has one, but the one on his forehead is more apparent-- two rounds of stitches because he tore it open pretty soon after getting it fixed the first time. Mom blamed me for some reason; I am still a bit resentful. He also has a dip in his tongue from where he bit it about halfway through, ridgey fingernails from scarlet fever, and some nice dog-bite marks on his arm. We could see the layers of tissue when he came in.
My own scars aren't as good. I have a thing people think is a mole which began as a cat-scratch-thing, dog bite on nose, dog bite on hand, dog bite on arm (that one had incisor marks for a few months), cat scratches on wrist, piranha bite on finger (my stupidity), barnacle scrapes on legs....
I love my body's recuperative abilities. I've not broken a bone yet, but if you want housepet-related injury, I'm there.

Abi, it could be worse. She could have broken *your* finger. Although then you'd get to guilt her for years.

And here's a photo of Abi's daughter Fiona. I like the mechanical hand.

As regards the Wired News item on "internet" -- it's interesting thinking about the tendency to capitalize or not capitalize, in English, important things of which only one exists. I wonder if the early capitalization has to do with the Internet having been a very particular realm in which we did not all coexist: usage similar to, say, 'the White House'. Whereas the internet is now common territory: more like 'the world'.

regarding the particle describing the most recent style update from those gneiuses at wired... i wonder if they're planning to stop capitalizing words like: congress, capitol, treasury, and my personal favorite, god. probably not.

p.s. from a practical standpoint, the decision to stop capitalizing 'internet' and 'web' makes sense, but only as a recognition that there is no such thing as the singular public internet or the worldwide web anymore. there are only locally available and privately provided views into the various internets and webs that used to be nominally public . oh, i'm sorry... were you using that notion of 'The Public Domain' before we destroyed it? sorry about that. better luck next time, suckers.

WikiPirates. "Do not meddle in the affairs of filkers..."

ethan, #201, superglue wouldn't exactly have connected all the blood vessels, so the end would have rotted and fallen off. I do have a friend whose husband had to have a piece of glass dug out of his knuckle (she owns a bead store and he works for her), and he didn't stop lifting and carrying and opened the stitches before the wound was healed and then wouldn't go to the doctor, so his knuckle looks like it was severed and reattached.

My brother has the chin scar. We were playing on a parking lot and he tripped and hit his chin on one of those concrete things they put at the front of parking spots.

Marilee #220: I had the same objection about the blood vessels, but the whole family swears up and down that it's true anyway. I think perhaps it's somehow partly true in a way that I can't figure out--maybe he didn't actually sever it and superglued a severe injury shut? Who can say.

Eric Johnson looks so good in a slave collar!!!

OK, "Flash Gordon" is suggestively erotic camp. It's funny, and they do both hot women and hot men. Fun for all.

Xopher... But what we've seen of Mongo so far looks anything but exotic. Another British Columbia-like alien planet as Richard Dean Anderson once pointed out in StarGate before saying "Eh?" Oh, but I do like Eric Johnson as Flash. Meanwhile, where are Barin and Vultan?

When I hear "Eric Johnson", I think of the guitar virtuoso.

Has Ming's daughter Aura been cast yet? It's going to be difficult to top Ornella Muti's iconic portrayal of that role.

Earl @ 224... Aura has been there since the first episode. Unfortunately. She's no Ornella Mutti. And their Ming is no Max von Sydow.

Ming the Merciless has been turned into Ming the Merely Grumpy.

And I figured out another reason why I don't like the new Flash Gordon series:

The color scheme is wrong. They use a lot of muted colors, browns especially, and a lot of dark shots.

Flash Gordon needs to be done in bright primary colors. It needs to have some... ummm... flash.

ethan @221:
but the whole family swears up and down that it's true anyway

Indeed. But I know a nation of folk who will swear blind that a haggis is a little fuzzy creature with one pair of legs shorter than the other (for the hills, you know) that runs through heather backward.

omnes:
Fiona is much better, and hasn't let the injury damage her cofidence or get her down in the least. She didn't throw a tantrum about the bike ban, though she did argue with surprising persuasivenes (for three) about the ways she could still ride.

And I'm much better now too. Thank you for the reassurance and support.

j h woodyatt @ 218
i wonder if they're planning to stop capitalizing words like: congress,

Lower-cased, congress means something slightly different (I was going to say completely different when I was reminded of what congresscritters think the pages are for). Also there's a certain irony in you, who do not* capitalize your nom d'net, grousing about others' quirks of capitalization.

* ack! Is that construction correct?

I prefer "electronym" over "nom d'net". Don Webb used electronym in the mid 90's to more elegantly refer to email addresses, but I like it better than "handle" (BBS handle, etc.)

p.s.: One of the reasons I'm posting to ML at this hour of the night is to avoid returning to playing BioShock until the sunlight makes it safe again....

Terry Karney @ 211: "I think it might be that we do so much with our hands. Further lots of that is delicate; with things in our hands, so we assume we have the same level of desterity with other things. Sometimes that's not the case."

That makes a strange sort of sense. I have some dancer friends who are amazingly graceful on the dance floor and yet somehow guaranteed to walk into every desk corner in a 50-mile radius. I theorize that dancing has got them in the habit of moving in such elegant ways that they are constantly trying to move like that, but without the benefit of choreography (or an empty stage). So they would always be thinking "If I take two steps, then pivot on the ball of my foot to the left, I should be able to slide past that person without bumping into...grrk! Desk-corner in the thigh!"

abi @ 228... she did argue with surprising persuasivenes (for three) about the ways she could still ride

Goodness. You did spawn a Girl Genius. Next, she'lll probably steal the egg beater, improve its performance and use it to motorize her bicycle.

Bruce Arthur @ 226.. Ming the Merciless has been turned into Ming the Merely Grumpy.

His employees probably call him Ming Rhymes-with-Boring.

Heresiarch, 231: I never made a living at dancing, but I had years and years of training. Dancing is just fancy walking--after a while you don't need to think "two steps and pivot," you just do it. When I run into a desk, it's because I'm thinking about something more interesting than where the furniture is.

Long interesting article here about the Portugese fantasist Jose Saramago. (Interesting both for Saramago himself, and for the background on 20th-century Portugese politics.)

Bruce 226: Ming the Merciless has been turned into Ming the Merely Grumpy.

It's the Banality of Evil. This Ming isn't as gaudily deranged (thanks PNH) as the older version—instead he's the kind of evil we see in our world every day: the corporation that takes political power and enforces a monopoly with draconian laws. He's more...well, OK, less unrealistic than the previous one.

ibid., 227: Same principle. The evil in our world is drab and conservative. FG is showing our world exaggerated, not some other world, and it's no longer a total comic book. (Reference is only to four-color printing, pace you comics fans.)

Bruce 229: ack! Is that construction correct?

Yes, it is, assuming you're talking about the verb form prior to the asterisk, and not the incorrect French contraction following it...the 'e' in 'de' can only be elided when the following word begins with a vowel. Nom de Net, please, though actually (ref. Earl 230) I like 'electronym' better.

TexAnne 234: Dancing is just fancy walking

West African proverb: "If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing." The latter is possibly aided by the fact that many West African languages are tone languages (Yoruba, Hausa, and Twi just to name a few), which means you actually need some pitch sense to speak them correctly, but the former applies everywhere.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is pretty damn cool.

#210/213: Seeing a formerly-remote area overrun by "civilization" isn't uncommon, given the way most cities in the U.S. sprawl. Googlemap 10835 South Glen Road, 20854; my parents built the multi-gabled house in 1951, and I can clearly remember that the 1/2 x 3/4 - mile lot across the road had cows on it. (Don't look too closely at that space now -- several people committed architecture there.) The more-compact house next door is a fake-Georgian put where it could make best use of the lot after it was subdivided, which our house hadn't been placed to make easy; they've also erased substantial berry and vegetable gardens and an orchard.
   Or look around 7101 Democracy Blvd 20817, noticing the winding stubs of Bells Mill Rd that were left after a 6-lane "boulevard" was rammed straight through the area to connect one of the US's first malls with the interstate. To the west, the area between Seven Locks Rd and what they now call Democracy Ln was a huge summer camp (almost all the way up to where Inverness Ridge Rd is now, and mostly woods); it was all townhice by ~1989. The pond is the only remaining trace, and they've probably kept it only because the nearby spring keeps that spot too wet to build in easily; even the multipurpose building (a community theater in 1989) is gone if I'm reading the pictures correctly. (Can't be certain as it was just over the edge of the we-can't-zoom-here zone on top of Seven Locks Rd.)

The U.S also has its strangely-abandoned areas, even close to cities. Try 7280 Macarthur Blvd 20818; the white-roofed buildings are still walled with sandstone cobbles from when this was a Chautauqua in the 1890's, but it was a thriving amusement park when I moved away in 1967. (It had been a trolley park, but an asset-stripper destroyed the trolley network a few years before that.) It looks like more of the park traces are gone now; when I visited in 1995 I noticed all of the concrete underlay of the minigolf course (the carpet was long-rotted) and 3 ~30-foot sycamores where the roller-coaster loading area had been. (I was there in December; the broken-down leftover bits (some since cleaned up) made it look like a set for Batman: The Killing Joke.) I haven't even been in working amusement park since 1992; omnia mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.
   Worse is 430 Commonwealth Rd 01778; the flat area left of the driveway end used to be the lab where I had my first professional job -- Dow pulled out and I suspect the town decided to cap the land just to be sure. So omnia mutantur, nihil interit is literally untrue. (Thanks to Fritz Leiber for the omnias -- The Big Time has a million of 'em.)

Any chin scar I have is from way-post-childhood skydiving clumsiness. (I'm not even sure it's there under the unshavenness.) What I specialized in was chipped teeth, at least 4 in my adult set. Somehow I didn't break the skin even when the chip was caused by my chin colliding with a fellow 3rd-grader's scalp. (At that age I was the tallest in class, and he was one of the shortest). And there's the 1" round on one knee due to trying to race a bicycle around a tight corner \and/ not cleaning the mess up afterward. (I don't think my mother realized how much crap had gotten into it until it turned gray-green.)

Xopher... About Ming... Sure, he's less unrealistic than the older one, but... Remember that this is Flash Gordon. It's not supposed to have the kind of villains that we have to put up with in the real world. These things are supposed to be larger than life. Still, I'd have put up with this new Ming if he'd been played by a better actor. Take Max von Sydow but without the silly makeup and the gaudy costume, and he could project menace. What's-his-name is just plain dull. So is this Mongo, come to think of it.

Terry Karney @ 211: "I think it might be that we do so much with our hands. Further lots of that is delicate; with things in our hands, so we assume we have the same level of de{s}terity with other things. Sometimes that's not the case."

Case in point

Twenty+ years since I first poked my way around a keyboard and I still can't find the right keys all the time.

20 years since I last handled a cello, and I can still find the notes (I just lack alacrity, tone and intepretation, but practice and I could get those back).

#240: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Charles Middleton's sixty year old corpse would make a better Ming than that guy they're using.

And where are the farging spaceships?

I'm gonna guy rustle up a DVD of the original serials. And a copy of Les Preludes.

Stefan Jones... And where are the Hawkmen?

Serge,

That's going to be the breaking point for me, if the Hawkmen don't show up. The originals were just effin' cool; but Brian Blessed was so ... sublime?, no, certainly not; ebullient, yes, but that's only part of it. Ah, I have it: much larger than life as we know it. To not even go there, not matter how hard it would be to equal Blessed's performance is just artistic cowardice.

Amazon has a three-DVD set of the Buster Crabbe adventures. The copy suggests that they are in serial form, which is the way I want to see 'em.

Aha! Free MP3 of Les Preludes

Y'know, WAY EARLY in the history of "Star Wars," George Lucas stated that it was his intention to recreate the glory days of the old serials. The corny lightning-bolt cuts used between some scenes are evidence of this. Damn shame he got all pretentious and Joseph Campbellish. Darth Vader was better as a pulp villain, not the star of a psychodrama.

To be fair, Flash Gordon doesn't have the budget it needs. Still, good actors aren't necessarily more expensive. Or good writers. Or good costume designers. Or... You get the idea. There may be someone out there who could have had the vision and the inventiveness to overcome TV's limitations.

Meanwhile, I still chuckle when I think of those episodes of Voyager where Paris used the holodeck to experience the adventures of Captain Proton, cousin to Flash.

I really like the guy who's playing Flash, I'm just not nuts about the direction the producers? writers? Powers that Be? decided to take. It feels Stargate-y to me - maybe Stargate with a side of X-files - and as mentioned above, just not gonzo enough. Sometimes I like subtle in my sci-fi; just not with Flash.

I'm pretty bummed about the Dresden cancellation, but not surprised. I caught a couple of episodes, enjoyed them and then figured I should immediately stop watching before I got involved, since it was sure to be cancelled. (also, I knew I needed to stop before I developed a crush on a character who was technically just a skull. Damn that Terrence Mann and his righteous speaking voice.)

About dexterity and music - I'm a passable cellist, and have made a few bucks here and there. I don't think my missing bit of fingertip, or the broken left hand (done in a fall onto icy concrete) would have made the difference between being a hobbyist and a professional. Not like, say, a great deal more talent might have. I don't think I'm more accident prone with my hand and fingers, but I'm constantly tripping and spraining things, bumping into stuff and generally being a klutz. I'm terrible at sports and hopeless at dancing, so I generally assume that's related to my awkwardness.

nerdycellist,

I mentioned that our younger son was accident-prone? He was a real klutz through much of his childhood, and we found out why at about the age of 8 when he as diagnosed as having in general rather loose ligaments in his hands, arms, and legs. This made him clumsy and uncoordinated. The treatment was to have him take keyboard lessons*, and get on a soccer team for a year.** The point being that sometimes there are physical reasons, not just general dorkiness, that cause clumsiness.

* He ended up with the organ rather than the piano, because of all the cool things you can make an electronic organ do.

** A social nightmare for us hippie parents who had rejected the whole suburban middle-class lifestyle.

Bruce, when I went to the college my parents insisted I go to, I comped out of everything except religion (but only because they didn't allow you to comp out of religion) and majored in music and drama. All voice majors were supposed to take piano, but they were short piano student slots, and since I already knew how to play organ, I got to take organ lessons that year. A real pipe organ!

Re the new Flash Gordon: Episode one was okay, but not very
distinctive. Episode two was okay, but not very distinctive. Episode
three, I found myself fast-forwarding through the wedding scenes;
I didn't even want to start with that crap.

Then they got to alien women self-righteously intoning "Marriage
implies consent to the patriarchal violence inherent in the system" --
or whatever the line was -- and I had the show safely deleted from my
recording schedule within six seconds, tops. Retread feminist debate
in the first three episodes of a SF show is *never* a good idea. (See:
that godawful first-season Stargate episode. And: that godawful
first-season ST:TNG episode.)

For what it's worth, Ming was fun at the beginning, when he was being
polite. That had some depth to it. Since then, he's been...
undistinctive.

This is not my show.

Marilee @ 249

Neat, I love pipe organs. Did I mention that I work for one of the very few companies left in the world that does nothing but build church and theatre organs? These days it's a subsidiary of a Japanese company that makes electronic instruments for rock musicians. We don't make pipe organs per se any more, all our organs are basically Linux computers with organ keyboards, tab and piston bars, and pedals. But for the traditionalists, we make a gadget that plugs into the organ to control a set of pipes.

I don't play the organ myself, but it's nice sometimes to be working away on the organ software and have someone fire up a console to test it by playing Bach.

Apropos of an open thread, I saw Stardust again today with a friend and his mother. Said friend had to deal with two weeping women at the resolution of the show, verklempt with the happenings.

It hit all the buttons for an enjoyable, complete story. I liked it a lot. It isn't great art but it's worth a look, and Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Di Nito have great excuses to chew up the scenery.

I know I'm gonna buy the DVD. And from my review of trailers/previews, it's going to be an expensive fall... lots o'.f movies I'm going 'oooh I want to SEE that on the big screen

Mom plays the piano and organ for church, and when there was a church-wide mandate to give all the buildings the same organ, she got dibs on the old one. It's just a console (? - not a pipe organ anyway) and it's now ensconced happily in the dining room (which has never been used as such) in their 1100 sqft ranch. A few years back she bought some fancy-ass digital piano that had a reasonable organ setting with a good touch so she could practice the hymns at home any time of the day or night with the headphones plugged in so as not to disturb my dad. Now even with only one speaker hooked up to the organ (two was just too much space for their house) she could probably be heard halfway down the block.

Until my brother picked it up, she had here original upright piano as well as the digital piano and organ in the house. I told her all she needed was a harpsichord and a virginal and she could have a whole set.

nerdycellist @ 253:

She would also need an Ondes Martenot (second link is YouTube, but worth it--especially to a cellist, as you will see).

OK, that's seriously cool. I need one. How sad that this instrument never became standard in the recording studio. I'm thinking specifically of tv shows that have been cheaply scored; the great swells of fake strings during dramatic moments are really jarring. The vibrato on that instrument could make quite the difference.

I did appreciate the piece of music at the end of the clip. Naturally.

Nina... It was good to see you and your hubby at Bubonicon last night. I hope you had a safe trip back to Phoenix today.

Miscellaneous thought: Remembering the Sixties' injunction " Turn on, tune in, drop out" (or whatever order those were in), I much prefer "Making Light"'s quote from John M. Ford: "Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate." That one can't be used as a mantra for dope-using slackers like the young George W. Bush.

From the Phoenix New Times website, a photo slideshow of "art bongs", super-deluxe and/or complex bongs and the glassblowers who make them.

Some of these things look like alien spaceships. Then there are the Homer Simpson and Nightmare Before Christmas inspired bongs, too.

Who is handling moderation duties for ML during the busy Worldcon travel season? I have an issue to present that probably shouldn't wait until after the convention is over.

I'll be here.

Earl @259:
As far as I am aware, only Patrick is going to Worldcon this year (Teresa is not listed as going on the nielsenhayden front page, and Jim doesn't list Worldcon in his upcoming conventions on his site. I don't know about Avram; his blog hasn't been updated lately*.)

If no one answers your call, try a direct email to Jim or Teresa?

-----
* Probably something to do with some other site he posts on. Dunno.

Beaten to the punch!

Earl... What is the issue? An overabundance of puns in recent threads?

Bruce C @ 251

Would you know if anyone builds digital keyboards with spinet-sized keys for us small-handed people? (I'd get one that does organ/harpsichord/piano ... if I could find one with smaller keys, and the full range of octaves.)

Serge #263: Wait, we can get moderation for that?

Teresa! Teresa!

ethan @265:

ajay is toast in that case.

ethan... Humph... I was tempted to respond that I've never been so offended, but the, the last time I said that, Abi was in the same room and shot back that I should wait, and that the evening was still young.

As for you, abi, before you try to make ajay sound like the worst of punsters, need I remind you that, but a few days ago, you were guilty o extremely atrocious puns?

P J Evans @ 264

Sorry, the only ones I know about are toys (literally, little 25-key things). There are probably some made for high-end digital pianos, but I don't know of any sold separately. Those made for lower-grade instruments aren't going to be performance-grade piano-style keys, i.e., weighted keys with variable action; I don't know how much that means to you.

Tomorrow at work I'll ask around among the heavy-duty instrumentalists.

Serge @267:
Thus do I sacrifice one of my sub-personae to save the core abi. So low do I stoop.

(d'you think it'll work?)

James D. Macdonald #260: Thanks, I found your email address, and in the process realized who you were back in the GEnie SFRT days. I feel better already, just knowing that. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to that point when I started participating in ML. heh.

Serge #263: No, it's nothing like that, and it's not something I feel comfortable discussing in explicit terms in a location where the Google indexing spider crawls. In any case, puns are not a problem with me, as people like Aaron Allston have relentlessly desensitized me to most of their ill effects over the years. I haven't felt like jumping from a moving automobile to avoid an oncoming pun in many years.

Tim 254: Coolest instrument EVAH. (Yes, it has supplanted the Theremin in my heart for that title.)

I want one. Damn. It's pretty hard to find any place to buy one...finally found a place that sells a kind of modern knock-off, but you really have to dig to find the price, and it's not clear they'll actually sell you one.

Thus do I sacrifice one of my sub-personae to save the core abi.

"Captain! The core can't take it anymore!"
"Scottie, I need those abilithium crystals!"

As for what happened after abi's acrifice, here it is.

There was one person in the 1980's Austin BBS scene who had somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 meticulously documented distinct online personae. He had enough argumentative diversity to sustain multiple sides of a major, highly entertaining flamewar all by himself.

question on the proper setting of a science fiction time: if the time that a science fiction story is being set in presupposes technical differences from the present so different that they are in the 'looks like magic' dept. should it be so far in the future that the characters and their reactions to the technology as being the way things are do not need to relate to how things are today; in other words so far in the future that all of us can be presupposed dead?

Note that this is not the same thing as asking if we will live in a future with technology that seems magical to us, we surely will, but from a story told now should with technology that would be magical to us now for the sake of suspension of disbelief should the time be far enough from now to get rid of the question of how people now would feel about this magical technology?

Pipe Organs....Ondes Martenot....then the particle on curiosities of bell ringing....

Time for a link.

For what we are, for all the debts we owe,
we pay the bills, and the payment comes slow.

A million memories on each heart batter,
the world we have is never once the same;
we live with meanings hidden in the chatter.

On certain days, the sycophants will flatter
but they won't ever want to take the blame;
a million memories on each heart batter.

Earth passes round the sun and we get fatter,
age gives us plain excuse for present shame;
we live with meanings hidden in the chatter.

The truths that we have learned will one day shatter,
and we shall be extinguished with the flame --
a million memories on each heart batter.

Tomorrow we will think of the mad hatter
and all he said to the young future dame:
we live with meanings hidden in the chatter.

We think that what we do will surely matter
that life's much more than a most subtle game.
A million memories on each heart batter,
we live with meanings hidden in the chatter.

Bruce, #251, no, I didn't know that was where you worked! I'd played church organs for years, so I was used to the stops and pedals and such (I always played best barefoot), but it was neat to play a real pipe organ. The teacher was thrilled to have someone who already had some knowledge. It belonged to the church associated with the college.

Turkey Get a Clue Department...

========================================
[and email to info@johnkerry.com BOUNCES...

From:
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 9:23 PM
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

info@johnkerry.com

======================
To:
Subject: Regarding "Leonardo DiCaprio --11th Hour"

I very nearly deleted the email with the subject like "11th Hour" from the sender "Leonardo DiCaprio" expecting that it was SPAM.

If your people want email to NOT get thrown into the electronic garbage can, please get a few clues about using COMMON SENSE for emailing (and please get RID of the SPYING that tries to stick PEEPHOLES on people's computers when visiting Sen Kerry's website! Talk about SPYING on people, do you REALLY need to put tags on visitor;s computers that stay until 2037?! How would you like it if you walked into a store and someone injected an RF ID tag into your butt the instant you walked in the door to TRACK you? That is in effect what a "cookie" does.. somehow I do NOT think that Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc., would approve or consider it anything but offensive and indecent and uncivil!):

1. Spammers and malicious emails often claim to be from celebrities... there are such noxiousnesses as "Britney Spear goes bra-less" on the "From" line... so anytime I get email purporting to be from a celebrity when I have not subscribed to any mailing list from that celebrity, I suspect it's spam...

2. The title "11th Hour" is the sort of thing that a spammer or malicous email generator would use for a subject line.

3. There is NOTHING in either the FROM line or the subject line to indicate that this apparent piece of SPAM or malicious email actually is from johnkerry.com for people who are subscribed to the johnkerry.com mailing list.

4. If it looks like spam or a malicious message, MOST people are going to delete it sight unseen and unread, assuming that it gets through their anti-spam filters in the first place.

5. Therefore, this message is NOT effective... and whoever presumable got PAID to generate it, is an incompent who should never have been hired to woek on any email campaign in the first place, the person does NOT have CLUE about email and NETIQUETTE. You would be FAR better off to contact e.g. Daniel Dern and Bobbie Fox, two constituents of Sen Kerry, Daniel is a long time computer trade journalist and author of articles and books about the Internet, Bobbi does website design and such, instead of whatever highly overpaid and overrated incompetents came up with the incredibly STUPID idea of using Leonardo DiCaprio's name on the FROM line and "11th Hour" as the subject line for any email you expected anyone to actually LOOK at, instead of identifying the email as being from johnkerry.com and a title that would make it clear that the email is neither spam NOT malicious!

#274 ::: bryan

question on the proper setting of a science fiction time: if the time that a science fiction story is being set in presupposes technical differences from the present so different that they are in the 'looks like magic' dept. should it be so far in the future that the characters and their reactions to the technology as being the way things are do not need to relate to how things are today; in other words so far in the future that all of us can be presupposed dead?

If possible, make it "transparent." That is, if it's ordinary to the characters, then try to avoid doing -technical- descriptions unless the viewpoint character deals with the tech guts and likes talking about it... instead, describe the effects. The classic was something like Heinlein writing that a door dilated. The more one tried to do detailed technical description of somethinng that doesn't exist and one doesn't have a technical clue about, the worse the results tend to be as far as contributing to the willing suspension of disbelief instead of exploding it....

Note that this is not the same thing as asking if we will live in a future with technology that seems magical to us, we surely will, but from a story told now should with technology that would be magical to us now for the sake of suspension of disbelief should the time be far enough from now to get rid of the question of how people now would feel about this magical technology?

Concentrate on the story. Conventions in SF include "assume that supraluminal travel exists." Note that e.g. C. J. Cherry doesn't go into detail about jump engines generally, only that they exist, and focuses on some of the effects of it on people and hani. Schmitz in The Witches of Karres described the Sheewash Drive as "something you have to do yourself" I think it was, said by one of the three girls, and Captain Pausert got a brief glimpse of something metal they were using.

One makes nonexistent technology in fiction or fact [government contract proposals....] by describing the effects and what can be done with it....

Holy Crap:

Government Training Clergy to "quell dissent."

'A KSLA-TV news report from Louisiana has confirmed the story that Clergy Response Teams are being trained by the federal government to "quell dissent" and pacify citizens to obey the government in the event of a declaration of martial law.

The report confirms the existence of a nationwide Homeland Security program which is training pastors and other religious representatives to teach their congregations to "obey the government" in preparation for a declaration of martial law.

A whistleblower who attended one of the training sessions reports that the feds were recruiting religious leaders to help implement government Homeland Security directives in anticipation of a terrorist attack or a nationally declared emergency.'

The first directive was for pastors to preach to their congregations Romans 13, the often taken out of context bible passage that was used by Hitler to hoodwink Christians into supporting him, in order to teach them to "obey the government" when martial law is declared.

It was stressed that the pastors needed to preach subservience to the authorities ahead of time in preparation for the round-ups and to make it clear to the congregation that "this is for their own good."

That subthread on software development whetted my apetite for the subject. So rather than just have it die off, I'm continuing it on my blog. The initial post of an occasional series is up here.

Were I as talented, or as persistent, as some of the other folks hereabouts, I might have been able to come up with something clever to say about "videogrames". I'm not, though, and I haven't.

The rest of you are free to have a go, if you want.

nerdycellist @ 255: How sad that this instrument never became standard in the recording studio. I'm thinking specifically of tv shows that have been cheaply scored; the great swells of fake strings during dramatic moments are really jarring.

I think of that sort of thing as "the Mighty Wurlitzer meets the Uncanny Valley."

While the keyboard-centric MIDI protocol has held back controller design to some extent, there are electronic instruments out there capable of expressive performance. I just bought a wind controller (new toy, oh-way-oh), and for a mere gazillion dollars you can snag a Haken Continuum and get your finger vibrato on.

Xopher @ 271: Coolest instrument EVAH.

They didn't even show one of my favorite things: the bizarre collection of custom speaker cabinets incorporating springs and gongs for additional timbral wackiness.

That said, they also didn't mention that they're fragile enough that you have to travel with two. In fact, I remember hearing that there was a Martenot breakdown during the SFS's Turangalîla (not on the night I was there, though). I highly recommend seeing that if your local orchestra ever puts it on; it's a ravishing piece (Boulez called it "whorehouse music," so you know it's got to be good), and it's much easier to hear the cool stuff the Martenot is doing live than on record. And in our case the Martenot player gave a great pre-concert demo.

finally found a place that sells a kind of modern knock-off, but you really have to dig to find the price, and it's not clear they'll actually sell you one.

I assume you mean this. I don't know anything about that unit, but the company is real and sells stuff.

About what bryan said at #274... Would a society where technology looks like magic to us be even easier to knock off its feet than ours is?

Stefan @#280, that is really disturbing if true. I would like more substantiation than I'm getting from Google News.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is resigning today.

I'm going to grill me a steak for dinner tonight!!

Lila #285: The KSLA-12 TV news report seems to confirm it, although who knows how many layers you'd have to dig through to get the truth: Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared

Lila--

The resignation appears to be true

nerdycellist,

Speaking of new instruments, the Media Lab at MIT has a group that investigates user interfaces to music, called the Hyperinstruments or Opera of the Future Group. You can't buy these things (unless you want to give the Lab a substantial endowment, I guess), but some of them are very cool. Here's the Hyperstrings page, which might appeal to a cello player.

Adrian @ #288: I was looking for confirmation of the "clergy response teams trained to keep people in line during martial law" story, not the Gonzales resignation. Gonzales is all over the wire; the clergy story seems only to have been carried by one Louisiana TV station and copied by other sources.

"Clergy Response Teams"

And how do non-CHRISTIAN clergy feel about this?... or for that matter, Christian clergy who believe in tolerance and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and religious freedom etc.?

The KHerISTIAN Fascist Coalition, turning the USA into a kleptotheocracy....

Well, at least now we know the results from the Faith-Based Initiative Program....

Last night my husband and I watched an interesting duo on cable TV (only missing 15 minutes of the second one when we switched stations after the first): 21,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Independence Day. Despite the obligatory Mad Scientist organ solo in League, James Mason/Nemo came across as a justly cynical former idealist and ultimate tragic martyr for the cause of peace, with Kirk Douglas as the irritating American yahoo (despite his interesting "odd couple" scenes with Peter Lorre, which should play well in the Castro). As for Independence Day, a mere 11 years old, a lot of it seems unintentionally poignant -- shots of the twin towers (before the squid aliens demolish NYC) and a faith in good old American know-how and massive bombing attacks to save the day (once the hunk hacker has done his job). The president there may look like San Francisco's current mayor, but I wonder if his exploits sent GWB into a wet dream that ended up with that flight deck "Mission Accomplished!" nonsense.

I was an infant when 20,000 Leagues first came out, so it took several viewings for me to realize how close Hiroshima was in memory back when it was made -- less than a decade. And despite the pet seal and Kirk's singing, it doesn't seem much like a typical Disney film.

Earl Cooley @ 292... Faith-Based Initiative Program

Cue in Ephrem Zimbalist announcing that the TV show they're about to watch is Effff... Bee... Eye

Lila--aw, geez. Please accept my apologies. :(

#278 ::: Paula Lieberman
[frustrated by spam]

Let's say I make money from companies hiring me to generate and send spam. I tell them that people will follow links in hopes of dating movie stars, or whatever. I don't care if you as spamee have a program that deletes it, or if you ever see it more than fleetingly as you hit the "Trash" button, as I've been paid. If some do follow, that's gravy.

Sadly, anyone you reach with attempts at feedback is not going to care.

Carol #296

I expect that the message really was endorsed by the Celebrity in the particular case, as opposed to spam that uses a celebrity name the way that the Weekly World News used Batboy and tabloids use Diana once Princess of Wales, Lindsay Lohan, Brad Pitt, etc.

Unlike tabloid covers, however, spam is NOT "opt out" in the sense of not having the tabloid shoved into the shopping bag you take home like it or not....

Having returned from Montana, sans the college sophomore, with the impression that more of the state is burned than left whole. With, also, a desire to spend very much more time in the hot pool at the Spa Motel in White Sulphur Springs.

I hereby declare myself irreparably behind on everything and thence more clueless than usual, even.

(The news of Gonzalez resignation has made the morning sweet).

Carol (#296) I thought Paula's problem there (#278) was a genuine, informative mass-mailing that made itself look like spam. I hope they spelt it OK, that's one of the big suspicion markers for me, along with weird grammar.

Awoken by blasted helicopter manouevres[sp?] happening over Central Sydney 'tonight' (it's 0345, people!). Ruddy APEC. Now will try to sleep again so I can function at work & beyond later today. *Grumble* I s'pose it could be a 'police operation', but we've had days of helicopters buzzing us and motorcade rehearsals blocking off streets, so that's a first reaction now.

#299 Mez
Carol (#296) I thought Paula's problem there (#278) was a genuine, informative mass-mailing that made itself look like spam.

That's it, exactly.

Today's Girl Genius begins with Kaja and Phil Foglio introducing an apocryphal adventure of Agatha Heterodyne, "Revenge of the Weasel Queen". I ferret's going to go downhill very fast.

more fun with Wikiscanner: Somebody from an IP address associated with the American Enterprise Institute last September added "f*** this turd" to the section of Mike Bloomberg's Wikipedia page discussing same-sex marriage.

Serge #301: Moderation! I demand moderation!

ethan @ 303... Your demand will be met with otter contempt.

Serge 304: I have no respect for the rights of otters, I admit.

Xopher... I will consider mongoose cooked only if Teresa says so. Then my fate will be sealed.

Serge, you're just trying to weasel out.

John Houghton @ 307... I walrus-pectfully ignore that comment.

T'ermine'ate the mustelid puns.

Serge, it's a good thing that Teresa isn't running an underground fur farm down in one of those really cold formerly sealed coal shaft-and-human-made-cave facilities in the Appalachins-- or you'dd be liable to being covered in her mine. And as for the sealed fate, if you take that faulty laptop when you visit some old sailing port with noisy sea mammals that has replica ships, beware of splinters from timber that wasn't completely planed of the outer layers and isn't smooth, with the splinters and all the noise, the bark is much worse than the byte....

Xopher @ 305, I hope Rivka can persuade or teach you better than that.

Great humming polecats!

Republican Senator joins B.J.'s Warehouse

"Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.

Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8."

Paula Lieberman @ 310... Teresa isn't running an underground fur farm

I thought that, like most editors, she did run such a farm, although in her basement if not in the Appalachians. The Basement of Doctor Teresa sounds pretty scary, like something out of Howard Waldrop's mind. Hmm... I suddenly feel (sea)cowed and shall refrain from punning.

Serge wrote

I thought that, like most editors, she did run such a farm, although in her basement if not in the Appalachians. The Basement of Doctor Teresa sounds pretty scary, like something out of Howard Waldrop's mind. Hmm... I suddenly feel (sea)cowed and shall refrain from punning.

Didn't you know that down in the basement, she's been thinking about starting up a new convention on a Mediterranen island, called Concrete?

Paula et. al.

Ah, I see. Sorry.

Stefan #312

http://www.ontheissues.org/Senate/Craig_Thomas.htm

What did the apparent hypocrite get caught presumably with his pants at least partly undone, doing, I wonder?

And will this get him out of the US Senate, I hope?, after a censure, or will he even get censured?

Paula #316: TPM Election Central has more details about the actual allegations. It sounds mostly plausibly deniable to me -- put his suitcase down in front of the stall door, tapped his foot, touched another guy's foot with his own, and flashed his hand below the stall wall. Of course, it's hard to keep up a pretense of being fully innocent after pleading guilty, not to mention apparently trying to pull rank to get out of trouble.

Can I have my underground fur-farm coat martinized?

Terry, # 318
Can I have my underground fur-farm coat martinized?

Don't do with the Pinesol, though.

===========
#317 Todd (thanks)

How about a Dating Service for outed Republicraps--match e.g. the senator with Ted Haggarty....

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) writes: "Also there's a certain irony in you, who do not* capitalize your nom d'net, grousing about others' quirks of capitalization."

It's an alias derived by abbreviating of my full legal name, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a useful distinction between the capitalized version and the all lower-case version. If there were, I'd be really annoyed about it.

There is (or at least, there has been) a useful distinction between the capitalized and non-capitalized version of Internet, i.e. between the Internet and the various other internets which are not the Internet.

I maintain that Wired, by making this change, is smudging that distinction. I'd offer a wild paranoid conspiracy theory to explain why Wired might do this, but it's so dumb that even I can't relate it with a straight face. I think Wired has just decided that what the capitalization has traditionally signaled isn't comprehensible to their audience, much less all that important, and they've tossed it, probably without thinking much about the consequences. That doesn't mean there won't be consequences if this construction takes hold.

For what it's worth, I saw this change coming a few years ago and started referring to the Internet as "the public Internet" in my technical correspondence. It tends to make the messages wordier than I would like, and it hasn't caught on yet, but it does eliminate the ambiguity. Perhaps, it will catch on if I stop capitalizing the 'I' like those sooperhipsters at Wired have chosen to do.

j h 320: I don't know of any other internets. Could you elucidate?

The private ones are usually called VPNs or intranets.

Or are you being sarky and I'm missing the joke?

Paula Lieberman @ 314... Didn't you know that down in the basement, she's been thinking about starting up a new convention on a Mediterranen island, called Concrete?

Plus or Minos Patrick? Without him, Delos is great and I should probably stop before I embarass myself and have people think I am from Crete.

Xopher #321, I'm not j h, but I'll take a shot at it anyway.

Back in the olden days (after the days of yore, but before yesteryear), before TCP/IP was ubiquitous, there were lots of different networking protocols. They differed in all sorts of ways, from the lowest physical levels (how many volts are on the wires) up to the highest levels (what word processor file format do you use?), and somewhat bizarrely to our current minds all those things were generally assumed to go together.

That is, you'd run a Banyan Vines network over Token Ring with Type 1 Connectors, using the Vines addressing system. Or you'd run a Network Novell network over Ethernet with 10-base-2 in a ring configuration. Or you'd run AppleTalk over twisted pair with a star/hub configuration. If you changed any of those things, you'd be expected to change all of them, and you'd have an entirely different network.

Any attempt to get two or more of these networks talking to one another was an internetworking project. The end result, if it was at all successful, was an internetwork, or just an internet.

Oh, and yes— for the record— I do regard Irony as one of the principle virtues.

ZOMG. How's this for a candidate for most ridiculous Wikipedia edit ever... on the page for Irony, you will currently find the following header:

This article appears to contradict itself. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Quick question: I have 3 Barbara Pym books in a binding: Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, and An Unsuitable Attachment. I can't seem to get that into the first. Is it worth reading any of them, or should I just consign the book to the to-be-given-away pile?

Nancy #326: I suspect if you can't get into Excellent Women you may as well stop there. I re-read Pym regularly and that's probably my favorite.

I mean [from memory, not checking for precise wording], "love must be like having a large white rabbit suddenly thrust into your arms"? Who can resist it?

Open thread complaint registry: I'm a late convert to Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, and I object. There's only one copy of Yendi listed as owned in the entire Hawaii State Library system, and it's been tagged as lost in the catalog.

This is not good. Once I'm involved in a series I don't like to miss one, yet apparently I'm going to have to.

Xopher @ 321 asks: "I don't know of any other internets. Could you elucidate? The private ones are usually called VPNs or intranets. Or are you being sarky and I'm missing the joke?"

I'm not being snarky, and it's not a joke. Todd Larason @ 323 explains the more archaic usage of "internets" in the plural form as a way of distinguishing IP-based internets from others, e.g. Appletalk, ISO, et cetera. I was thinking of a different distinction— admittedly a pretty technical one— that's relevant to people like me in the Internet engineering community, i.e. the distinction between the public Internet including the default-free zone and the transit networks operating as common carriers, and the various private internets that you often see referred to as "intranets" or "B2B networks" or what-have-you. It's important to us because we like to think we're documenting standards for the operation of the public Internet as opposed to the various internets that aren't public.

This more modern usage is basically the result of carrying forward the definition you find in RFC 1392 (written in January 1993 and quite dated now):

internet: While an internet is a network, the term "internet" is usually used to refer to a collection of networks interconnected with routers. See also: network.

Internet: (note the capital "I") The Internet is the largest internet in the world. Is a three level hierarchy composed of backbone networks (e.g., NSFNET, MILNET), mid-level networks, and stub networks. The Internet is a multiprotocol internet. See also: backbone, mid-level network, stub network, transit network, Internet Protocol, Corporation for Research and Educational Networks, National Science Foundation.

One of the interesting and arcane bits of controversy in the IETF these days sorta revolves around whether the idea of a "public" Internet makes any sense now. Some folks think it's time to recognize that the thing is all privately owned and operated from the top all the way down. Even the DNS root and the BGP default-free zone are just their own weird domains with unusual operating principles. Certainly, some people will never need them. Maybe, none of us do? That seems to be the thinking.

Or, do we? Perhaps, there is something to be said for having a single global root of the public DNS namespace, and a single global addressing and routing system. I would say so, but I don't think the nice folks at Wired magazine were thinking about that issue when they decided to "clean up" their orthographic conventions.

In any case, I'll soon have to be qualifying the word 'internet' with the adjective 'public' if I expect anybody to know that I'm really talking about the three-level hierarchy of backbone, transit and service provider networks that actually connect the Public together, as opposed to the internet qua internetworking system, embodied in the protocol specifications, the running code and the rough consensus about how nodes and routers are supposed to function together going forward.

side particle: Miss South Carolina answers a question.

My gawd, my head is spinning, spinning, faster, spinning, I think it's going to explode, make it stop, it's gonna blow,

IIEEEeeee-yaaarrggghh!!!!

Xopher @ 321 asks: "I don't know of any other internets. Could you elucidate? The private ones are usually called VPNs or intranets. Or are you being sarky and I'm missing the joke?"

I'm not being snarky, and it's not a joke. Todd Larason @ 323 explains the more archaic usage of "internets" in the plural form as a way of distinguishing IP-based internets from others, e.g. Appletalk, ISO, et cetera. I was thinking of a different distinction— admittedly a pretty technical one— that's relevant to people like me in the Internet engineering community, i.e. the distinction between the public Internet including the default-free zone and the transit networks operating as common carriers, and the various private internets that you often see referred to as "intranets" or "B2B networks" or what-have-you. It's important to us because we like to think we're documenting standards for the operation of the public Internet as opposed to the various internets that aren't public.

This more modern usage is basically the result of carrying forward the meaning described in RFC 1983 (written in 1993, updated in 1996, and now showing some age):

internet: While an internet is a network, the term "internet" is usually used to refer to a collection of networks interconnected with routers. See also: network.

Internet: (note the capital "I") The Internet is the largest internet in the world. Is a three level hierarchy composed of backbone networks (e.g. Ultranet), mid-level networks (e.g., NEARnet) and stub networks. The Internet is a multiprotocol internet. See also: backbone, mid-level network, stub network, transit network, Internet Protocol.

One of the interesting and arcane bits of controversy in the IETF these days sorta revolves around whether the idea of a "public" Internet makes any sense now. Some folks think it's time to recognize that the thing is all privately owned and operated from the top all the way down. Even the DNS root and the BGP default-free zone are just their own weird domains with unusual operating principles. Certainly, some people will never need them. Maybe, none of us do? That seems to be the thinking.

Or, do we? Perhaps, there is something to be said for having a single global root of the public DNS namespace, and a single global addressing and routing system. I would say so, but I don't think the nice folks at Wired magazine were thinking about that issue when they decided to "clean up" their orthographic conventions.

In any case, I'll soon have to be qualifying the word 'internet' with the adjective 'public' if I expect anybody to know that I'm really talking about the three-level hierarchy of backbone, transit and service provider networks that actually connect the Public together, as opposed to the internet qua internetworking system, embodied in the protocol specifications, the running code and the rough consensus about how nodes and routers are supposed to function together going forward.

I don't know how that happened, but #329 shouldn't have been posted. Read #331 instead.

Linkmeister, re Yendi: it's been put in an omnibus called _The Book of Jhereg_, which I'm pretty sure is still in print.

TexAnne, thanks. Alas, even under that name the library doesn't have it. Hmm. I guess I'll have to hit the used book shops.

bryan@274: depends on what you want in the story. IMO, Vernor Vinge characters are excessively blase' about their tech -- but there's a story in the Boucher anthology (hence >50 years old) in which the punchline is the editor complaining that the time traveler couldn't have found future people to be so blase'. Reactions are more appropriate for an abrupt dislocation -- you could make a story about that -- where the Ralph 124C41+ of everybody marveling at the quotidian doesn't fly in modern SF.

bryan @274: Not a direct response, but your question reminded me of an account by Edmund Carptenter in his book Oh, what a blow that phantom gave me!. He was an anthropologist, and a contemporary of Marshall McLuhan in Toronto (worked on constructing the Toronto subway during the 50's). He described an isolated island group that had been contacted (during the 30's?), and the initial contacts were filmed. 30 years later, these same people are shown the films of those early contacts. They have had 30 years of absorbing the wider world culture; they saw the images of themselves 30 years earlier and refused to believe they were the same people.

At least, that's how the story was told...

That should be 'Edmund Carpenter'...

j h: Thanks, that's exactly the information I didn't have. (But 'sarky' wasn't a typo for 'snarky'; it's (British?) short for 'sarcastic'.)

Argggh, and only after hitting Post did I realize I should have said it was nasty, British, and short.

Rob@336: They have had 30 years of absorbing the wider world culture; they saw the images of themselves 30 years earlier and refused to believe they were the same people.

I think that's a standard human development feature in most folks. We respond to the world through the filter of our personal worldview. We track and follow changes that occur as registered by that worldview.

We have little capacity for seeing our worldview itself, though, so we have little capacity to see it change.

Psychologists testing children for their capacity to understand the volume of water being held in different shaped glasses saw similar results in as little as one year. The experiment involved something like pouring a glass of water into tall/skinny container, and then pouring the same glass of water into a short/fat container, and then asking kids to identify which container held more water. Kids who failed generally said the tall glass held more water. They'd tape the experiment, kids would fail the test. A year later, they give the same kids the same test. Then they'd take the kids who passed and show them the tape from last year where they failed. The kids would generally make accusations that the tape was photoshopped or CGI or something. They could not believe it they had failed something that seemed so obvious to them now.

They had no experience, no memory, of their worldview changing, of their brain rewiring, so that it could suddenly register the concept of "volume" that could be independent of "height". As far as the kids were concerned, they hadn't changed in the previous 12 months.

But the tapes were clear that they had.

j h @320: It's an alias derived by abbreviating of my full legal name, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a useful distinction between the capitalized version and the all lower-case version. If there were, I'd be really annoyed about it.

According to a certain species of lunatic, a name in all capital letters does not refer to a person but to a government-created artificial person.

Yeah, I don't know either.

Greg London: Geez, I still can't judge volume independent of height. Ask me anything remotely spatial and I'll give you the wackiest wrong answer you never imagined possible.

To this day, for instance, I have no idea what room in my parents' house is underneath the bedroom I grew up in. If I think real hard, I might remember being told which one it is, but I could never figure it out on my own.

I still don't understand how the streets in my current neighborhood (of two years) meet up the way they do. I know they do, through practice, but it makes no sense to me.

Ethan, I'm the same way. I have mental maps of my town, but they don't connect at all. I'd never notice if a house had an extradimensional room added on; I have to think to connect 'window I look out of' with 'window on the side of the house as I walk by'.

I was once a test subject for a friend of the family's undergrad child-psych project. She had me, at seven, and a younger friend do the water thing. I remember realizing that wider glasses held more around that age-- I felt very smart-- and sort of remember not knowing that. But I had younger siblings, so what I knew was also defined by what they didn't know yet; it wasn't something everyone knew, so I might not have felt weird acknowledging that I didn't.
Or maybe I am creating a false memory of that. Memory is so much fun.

I remember, in first grade, thinking that my money -- a big pile of assorted coins -- was more in some indefinable way when spread out in a glittering heap then neatly and compactly piled into nickels, dimes and such. It seemed to me that the heap had to have more buying power . . .

I woodchuck all you punsters overboard if I didn't think it would make me look shrewish.

Strange how my response to the Miss South Carolina particle is so perfectly summed up by the particle two before it.

Greg, please tell me what the deal with the SC beauty is. Verizon hasn't talked to me in five days now and I still don't have an IP address. I'm on dial-up.

I'm behind with the WashPost, and I found a couple of interesting things:

In the process of a free speech suit, the ACLU managed to get the "Presidential Advance Manual" in which not only are volunteers at each speaking site supposed to keep protestors out of the sight of the president and the press, but they're supposed to have "rally squads" to out-shout protestors or maneuver them out of the way. The specificity is amazing.

The WashPost has a columnist named Dana Milbank who writes "Washington Sketch" most days. It's a political column and he adds some humor to it. This piece is a mash-up of Congress & the White House and Batman. Exceedingly funny. (A lot of people who write the Post think this column should be op-ed, but the humor is bipartisan.)

Jen Roth @341, I've heard of them. Aren't they related to the species of lunatic who believes that U.S. flags sporting gold fringe are some kind of false flag?

Gold fringe doesn't make a flag a false flag; that would just be insane. It's simply that any court with such a flag is showing itself to be an Admiralty Court and thus operating under civil law rather than common law and thus has no lawful constitutional jurisdiction. See how much more reasonable that is?

Astonishing: the Miss West Carolina video (the (also) in TNH's particle). I mean, the video itself is utter genius on many levels, but then I poked around at some of her others and for one thing, girl is British (amazing accent work on the "West Carolina" character!), and for another thing, she has a hilarious video called Becoming Miss West Carolina, where she claims to use "makeup wipes" to become "instantly more beautiful" and to "lighten hair." I'm deep in the throes of being totally impressed.

Tania @ 345...I woodchuck all you punsters overboard if I didn't think it would make me look shrewish.

Mouse this go on?

j h woodyatt @ #325:

This article appears to contradict itself. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

You didn't, I take it.

(See the discussion on the talk page, I mean. It seems entirely reasonable to me.)

Submission advice?

1. if the guidelines don't specify a font & size, what's a good default? I generally do TNR, but 10 points seems uncomfortably small and 12 points seems annoyingly large. 11 seems iconoclastic.*

2. if the guidelines don't specify a word count, should I include it anyway? I'm at the very short end of the magazine's acceptable range.

*I realize I have succumbed to authorial insanity at this point.

Hi to the fluorosphere from Burning Man. I wasn't planning to be much online this week, but since I'm awake at 5am.

The odd event that just happened here was the Man burned Monday (early Tuesday, technically). Signs point to arson, because it happened right as totality started in the eclipse. I was up for that, and didn't quite notice that the Man was on fire until it hit me "he's colored green this year, not orange."

In fandom terms, this would be like both the Hugo winner data being released days early and all the masquerade costumes lost in an odd accident.

Mary Dell, I'd go with 12-point, since it's easier to read, and put the word count on.

269: Just popping my head round the corner to say I ATEN'T DEAD.

Or, as Emma Goldman would have said, "if I can't pun, I don't want to be part of your fluorosphere".

ajay #356: You ATE the DEAD?!? Zombie thread redux...

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 354... In fandom terms, this would be like both the Hugo winner data being released days early and all the masquerade costumes lost in an odd accident.

Considering your campaigning for a worldcon combined with Burning Man, we could wind up with the Man burning prematurely plus the Hugo winner data being released days early and all the masquerade costumes lost in an odd accident.

Marilee @ 347:

During a pageant, Miss Teen South Carolina was asked why so many Americans couldn't locate the US on a map. Here's a transcript of her answer (swiped from metafilter):

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because...ah some...people out there in our nation don't have maps and...ah...I believe that eh-education such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should....our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or-or should help south Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our gen..."

She later said that she had misunderstood the question. She got into the finals anyway.

Serge @ 358

Or perhaps the Man, Burning, draped in all the costumes, and holding a Hugo.

Come to think of it, has anyone ever nicknamed the Burning Man Gully?

Bruce Cohen @ 360... Or maybe someone steals all the outfits that were going to be used in the Regency Dance, not knowing that this means incurring the Wrath of Susan.

You may recall that Peter Jackson was talking of a remake of "The Dambusters"

This YouTube video might really confuse him..

Hey, everybody, go look at the new BoingBoing, starring TNH as the Moderator!

We had a great view of totality here in Hawaii. (OK, clouds kept coming and going, but clear patches kept coming back around the moon.) I woke the boy up near midnight just before it went total, when there was still a crescent of light on one edge beside the glowing red face. He came outside, looked up at the moon, said "Huh", and trotted back in to bed. I was afraid he wouldn't remember it but he did.

On a completely different note, Boing-boing readers should check out the "New Boing-Boing" page today. If you read it all the way down, you'll see that they're bring back comments, with Teresa as moderator. WOOT!

TexAnne: Jinx!

Todd Larason #349: If you want a really weird world-view look up the League of Pace Amendment Advocates.

Whoa, cool, Teresa!

Congratulations, Teresa!

ethan@342: I still can't judge volume independent of height.

If I recall correctly, this was a rather basic test. Pour water from a pitcher into regular glass A until A is full. Then pour water from A into a tall skinny glass B. Then refill A till full, and pour into a short, fat glass C. The kids were then asked something like "Which glass currently has more water in it?"

I believe the point was to test whether the kids had the capacity to hold the sequence of events in their mind so that it was clear that B and C must have the same amount of water, regardless of shape.

If they don't have that capacity, then it becomes a purely visual test, looking at B and C without any knowledge that they both contain "A" amount of water.

The thing that makes it interesting is that a kid who failed the test would watch a kid who passed the test and it would seem like magic. The kid who passed the test would probably more often than not, be unable to explain it to the kid who failed so that the failing kid could pass a similar test. The point where the kid who failed suddenly can pass is almost a moment of satori, where the same koan is senseless before, but brilliance after.

The filter through which we view the world is to us like water to fish.

Marilee@347,

Sharon posted a transcript at 359. The thing is that the text doesn't quite transmit the same level of pain that the video does. It was pretty clear to me that she didn't understand the question, but as happens when people get on stage, their brain prioritizes "looking good" over "making waves". So, she started to answer before she understood, at which point she could not stop without making it more obvious that she started talking before she knew what she was talking about.

Nancy CM #326:

Consign. (To the briny deep would be my choice.) I had _Excellent Women_ sitting round taking up shelf space for nigh on ten years. I swear, I really swear, that I tried *three* times to get into it, and each time I got annoyed.

Clifton @ #364, I was outside at 11:20pm when the eclipse was about halfway across. As befits the incurable optimist in me, I had my Canon A-1 SLR (film camera) out and braced myself on the car and took a few shots. The automatic shutter speed was about 3 seconds. We'll see.

Kudos to the Advertiser for the series of pictures Jeff Widener made.

I thought Miss South Carolina did a pretty good job of answering immediately-- are they allowed to think for a moment?-- and spending a few words saying nothing. Looking intelligent while talking until you figure out what you want to say is a skill, just not one we like to know we need.

Congrats, Teresa.

Serge #329: That sort of thing can only lead to Chios.

Fragano @366 -- pointers for the Pace Amendment folks? All I can find in a few minutes Googling is that they were racists who wanted to repeal the 14th amendment, which is odious but not particularly weird.

Greg London #369: Oh. I think I could do that. But if you had tall-skinny glass A and short-fat glass B both full of water at the same time, I would probably start talking about maps of South Africa.

I join in the congratulations, Teresa.

They won't know what hit them until it's too late.

Todd Larason #376: It's the text of the 'amendment' that's weird. I can't find it online, but it specified what ancestries, and what share of ancestries, would be permitted to reside in the US (excluding, in the process, any Native Americans).

fidelio 378: On the contrary, I think they'll know exactly what hit them, and exactly why they were hit. Arbitrary and capricious Saint Teresa the Luminous is not.

Congratulations, Teresa!

Fragano @379: Ahh, interesting. The full text would be in James Pace's "Amending the Constitution" http://www.amazon.com/dp/0961526807 it seems, but I don't think I'm willing to spend even $.60 for it, and neither Amazon nor Google has it digitized.

A family member used to be on both Lyndon LaRouche and the John Birch Society's mailing lists. Those were fun days.

Todd Larason #381: I was sent a copy of the amendment years ago, when I was a wire service stringer, and was astonished.

I found the core text, btw: "No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non- Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or nonwhite blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwest Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States."

Linkmeister @372

I shot a few frames on the digital, and was getting pretty significant motion blur at 4 seconds on a 160mm effective focal length. (On a tripod). Then again, there was also some significant foggy haze that cut down the contrast here (Whidbey, WA), so even if I were to stop the moon in it's tracks, it wouldn't have had a lot of definition. (Such as I was seeing before the eclipse, where I was metering at ISO 100, F8, 1/100 sec.)

Ugh, Fragano. Although the court cases would be interesting for a while at least. Would a person of Hispanic descent (whatever that means) merely need to find one person of British descent (again, whatever that means) whom they superficially resemble? Or would it need to be all people of British and NW European descent? Or does 'indistinguishable' really mean that, and only identical cousins may apply?

Regarding the particle about Miss Teen South Carolina...

Some folks might want to read the rest of the story.

Upton was taking her flubbed answer - and the attention - in stride.

"Everything did come at me at once. I was overwhelmed and I made a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake. I'm human," she said Tuesday. "I seriously think I only heard about one or two words of the actual question."

Upton's former principal Creig Tyler remembered her as a well-rounded student.

"She took college-prep and honors courses and performed well," Tyler told The (Columbia) State newspaper.

Xopher@339: Brian Ameringen precedes you by many years. He's also been seen wearing another button saying "H. H. Munro is a wry swine", which has an extra twist in it.

Sharon M, #359, Gracious! Thanks!

Greg, #370, and thanks to you, too. I hope she wasn't really that stupid.

Congrats, Teresa! They're lucky to have you!

Fragano @ 379

Yet more proof that most of this country's problems stem from extremely lax immigration policies and enforcement on the part of Native Americans.

Stefan Jones @ 344: "I remember, in first grade, thinking that my money -- a big pile of assorted coins -- was more in some indefinable way when spread out in a glittering heap then neatly and compactly piled into nickels, dimes and such."

Any dragon in your family tree, perchance?

389: I hear you. One of the best things about travelling in Laos lo these many years ago was that the Lao kip converted at 65,000 to the pound, and the largest denomination note was 1,000 kip. Which meant that paying for anything at all meant hauling out an immense wad of notes with a rubber band around them and peeling them off one at a time in (inevitably) a Brooklyn accent.

CHip @ #386: "H. H. Munro is a wry swine"

I like that.

Remember the early 1950s movie The Day the Earth Stood Still? My wife asked me if I knew that it's being remade. I said yes, unfortunately. Did I know who they got to play Klaatu? With dread, I asked "Who?"

Keanu Reeve.

Serge #392: Woah.

Keanu Reeves is apparently terribly professional: he shows up on time knowing all his lines and everyone else's lines too. He'll do his lines all day without tantrums. The movie will not be held up by any prima donna nonsense from Reeves.

He's also a terrible actor, but as you know Bob, 90% of movies are going to be crap anyhow, so why not hire a "star" who won't break the budget or screw with the schedule?

I'm surprised Lucas didn't cast him as everyone in the Star Wars prequels.

I think The Day the Earth Stood Still is a great choice for a movie to remake right now. Unfortunately, the choice of Keanu Reeve tells me they're probably doing it for all the wrong reasons.

Then again, he was also in A Scanner Darkly, and that was about as well-intentioned as you can get without being actually any good.

Huh. According to imdb, the guy directing it directed the awful The Excorcism of Emily Rose and is attached to, no joke, an upcoming Paradise Lost project. I guess I know what aspects of the Day the Earth Stood Still story he's interested in...

Well, who knows? Maybe that remake will actually be enjoyable. Still, I'm not going to rush in, no matter who plays Klaatu.

One movie I'd like to see remade is Forbidden Planet. It's probably one of the most sophisticated SF movies ever made, as far as concepts are concerned. The direction though could have been improved. I think.

Another one for the misread thread titles department: Japan opens a can of gay bathroom sex. Seen while scrolling up the "previous 1000 comments" page quickly.

Embarrassingly, Serge, I haven't seen Forbidden Planet. It's always lingering towards the top of my netflix queueueueueueueue, and then at the last minute I'll be reminded of some other movie and it'll get replaced.

The Day the Earth Stood Still A fresh adaptation from the original story, "Farewell to the Master", might be worth watching and Reeves might be able to play Klaatu acceptably well. I suppose the giant robot would be a digital creation, so I suppose Andy Serkis is most qualified.

ethan... I'll lend you the movie if you want. Just email your real-world address to me. It may turn out not to be your cup of tea, but if you pay attention to all the concepts that they throw at you, you'll see what I mean. Travel thru hyperspace, the need for protection when jumping back into normal space, the navigational hazzards that that entails, why there's no way something living could withstand a disintegrator, for example... Oh, and the reason why we have laws and religion, in an exchange that probably was quite subversive for an early-1950s movie...

Serge, thanks so much for the offer, but if I have the movie in my hand, with no incentive to watch it soon and send it back to get another one, it'll just linger, unwatched, like all the DVDs I own and never watch.

I've moved it to #4 in the queueueueueueue, so hopefully this time I'll actually watch it. As for it not being my cup of tea, I sincerely doubt it.

I was leery of the prospect of another remake, this time "Halloween", but then I found out that Rob Zombie was doing it, and felt better about it.

Rob Zombie had this to say about John Carpenter in an interview with Variety: "The original 'Halloween' is hallowed ground to me, and I talked to him about it and he was very supportive of what I wanted to do," Zombie said. "He said, 'Go for it, Rob. Make it your own.' And that's exactly what I intend to do. Over 25 years and a lot of movies, a very scary character became something of a Halloween cliché, with Michael Myers dolls that play the Halloween music when you press their stomachs. By the end of the sequel cycle, there was little connection to the original. I take that film very seriously, and I want to make it terrifying again."

Keanu Reeves is a decent human being who doesn't happen to be very bright (by his own admission). He works out all right in movies that don't require a lot of acting chops (The Matrix, for example, where as a just-unplugged person his woodenness was entirely plausible).

I've seen The Day the Earth Stood Still several times, and I thought Michael Rainey was if anything too expressive, too culturally appropriate, too human. Maybe Keanu can improve on that.

Ahhh, they'll probably put in a bunch of raygun battles and car chases and spoil the whole thing. If the SFX budget is more than $1.29, it's gonna be a crummy movie.

I'm all messed up on my feelings about Halloween. The original version, when I finally saw it last year, bored me to tears (I don't think it's just a question of novelty, because I'm usually pretty good at putting myself in the place of the original audience, at least intellectually--I think I just didn't like it, and wouldn't have no matter what), so I don't have any vested emotions in the story itself. But then Rob Zombie--House of 1000 Corpses was the silliest, dullest piece of garbage, but The Devil's Rejects was far and away my favorite movie of 2005. So now the question is--is he a good director who got off to a shkay start? Was The Devil's Rejects a fluke? I desperately want it not to be a fluke, so now I'm all invested in Halloween being good...but then, the original was so boring!

And then the whole cycle starts over in my head.

Reeves is quite a good actor within his range; it's just that his range is not terribly wide. But Klaatu strikes me as falling dead within it. I expect him to be fine, assuming the script is decent.

Oh, I wasn't questionning Keanu's professionalism, or his being someone I might enjoy meeting. I just am not sure he can pull it off. Rennie was perfect, projecting intelligence and culture. And he was pretty much unknown to Americans, which made him believable as an alien. Speaking of actors who bring in baggage, Klaatu was originally going to be played by Spencer Tracy. A cranky Klaatu... Just what this Mission of Peace needed.

"Gort? Screw the barada nikto. Just incinerate everything."

Mary@353: Submission advice?

standard manuscript format is described here.

Use a fixed width font, such as courier.
size: 12 point
double spaced
1" margins
(with a ragged right margin)

plus some more tips.
Each point is explained in the link.

Ugh. I misspelled Michael Rennie's name. Ten lashes with a VHS copy (shredded and made into a whip) of the movie.

Xopher... Don't forget to put DVD shards at the end of the whip.

Serge #392: Is that a hitherto unknown relative of Christopher Reeve? *Ducking*

Ethan #397: Now that is an image!

Todd Larason #384: The court cases would be unending.* And persons who had more than 1/8 Native American blood would be expelled (to where?). On the Hispanic blood issue, that would definitely mean that a Chilean friend of mine with a very Iberian surname would be acceptable thanks to his blonde hair and blue eyes.

* Think of all the expert evidence on blood quanta there'd have to be.

Bruce Cohen #388: Indeed!

Fragano #410: I can't even figure out what image it creates...what does Japan look like opening a can, and what does a can of gay sex look like?

In other news, I'm reading Sixty Days and Counting right now, and I just got to the bit where there's an entry from the President's blog, and at the end it says there's something like five million comments. My first thought was to wonder how many of those comments said "FIRST!!!1!!" My second thought was to wonder who was moderating.

Ethan #413: I'd say about the same as a can of straight sex. (On the other hand, a can of gay Republican bathroom sex would contain two elephants and a chap with a VERY LARGE bucket and spade.)

Greg 406: Very useful link. But he seems to think he has the right to restrict people from linking to it without permission. Odd, for someone so otherwise sensible.

Niall McAuley @ 398

A remake that actually followed the idea behind the original story would be nice. In the story (which was quite short), it turns out that the robots were given complete control of the defense of galactic civilization, with the duty to destroy, on their own initiative, any planet which shows it's a threat by using nuclear weapons. Gort is left behind on Earth as judge, jury, and executioner, if necessary. Not quite as optimistic as the movie.

.

[posted from 82.128.18.226]

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam!

How about, instead of Keanu Reeves, they were to cast Adam Baldwin? He's much more physically imposing, and comes across as very intelligent. And he has a lot more range than Reeves, which might not be a bad thing.

Klaatu is dead for most of the story and any of the Baldwin boys could do that, but the producers would rather have Keanu, because he'd show up for filming every day and he'd know everyone else's lines, which is kind of intimidating.

Adam is no relation to Alec and the rest of the mob. He's the guy who played Jayne in Firefly and Serenity. He was also in Angel (playing a demonic nasty).

Niall McAuley, Adam Baldwin is not related to the Baldwin Boys. This is the person who played both the useful thug Jane in Firefly/Serenity and the ultimate corporate enforcer Marcus Hamilton on Angel. He's capable of a lot of actual acting.

Sorry, Bruce, I never saw Firefly or Angel, and fell asleep during Serenity. From the IMDb, I recognise his face from Stargate: Atlantis.

I'm not certain that he'd be better at playing a corpse than the more famous Baldwin boys who have more practice.

Serge #405: Michael Rennie associative link Jean Elizabeth Martin crossref ArmadilloCon, accessing...

I was admiring some of JEM's artwork at ArmadilloCon years ago, and asked her "Do you always put yourself in your paintings?" She did grin, and it was explained to me that the lady in her painting which included a pharaonically attired Michael Rennie was, in fact, Jane Seymour. It was probably the best accidental compliment I could possible have made under the circumstances.

Fragano @ 409... Actually, Keanu Reeve is the love child of George Reeves. Or was he Steve Reeve's?

Bruce Chen @ 416... My understanding from reading about Bates's Farewell to the Master in an early issue of Cinefantastique is that The Day The Earth Stood Still did use the story's central idea, which is that the robot, apparently a tool of Klaatu, really is the latter's master. That being said, it's a fine movie I never tire of watching and a remake is totally pointless (except to make some studio a bit richer). Heck, why not remake To Kill A Mockingbird, while we're at it?

Earl Cooley @ 424... Seymour never did it for me, but I can think of worse people to compare a woman to. Heheheh...

Serge@426: I remember the CFQ article, but I don't remember it making that false claim. ISTR mention of the original being referenced (mutated by political pressure?) as -"we have given them much independent authority"-, but Gort clearly was not the one in charge.

CHip @ 428... OK, not an exact use of the original idea, but, if I remember correctly, the movie's Klaatu did say that, once Gort and its likes have made a decision, they cannot be stopped. Maybe I should go get that crow's carcass out of the freezer.

Serge #425: Oh dear me. I'm now going to have my brain scrubbed.

Serge Re: 392: I suspect that Keanu Reeve will be able to convey an alien being convincingly. Xopher's comments at 402: [..] I thought Michael Rainey was if anything too expressive, too culturally appropriate, too human. Maybe Keanu can improve on that [..] are appropriate ... although how could we sympathize with true aliens? (it is their alieness that proves them evil — if we like them [ET], they must be good).

ethan @400: There's a lot to like about Forbidden Planet (for certain value of geek).

Electronic music. As an aside, the use of classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey was described as a case of frustrating expectations: Clarke described the audience's expectations as for electronic music as in Forbidden Planet.

Of course, the saucer in the Forbidden Planet ended up in at least one Twilight Zone story, and I think 'Robbie the Robot' ended up in more than one.

Much of the design was picked up for Lost in Space. Although not the same spaceship, a similar layout (with a central astronavigational console) was used. The same designer who created 'Robbie the Robot' for Forbidden Plantet created the robot used in LIS (eventually, the robots met and had a smackdown).

Leslie Nielsen plays a 'serious' role as Commander John J. Adams. The relationship between this character and Lt. 'Doc' Ostrow (Warren Stevens) has been described as anticipating the 'Kirk-Bones' relationship in ST-TOS.

The 'invisible monster' effect was used in an episode of LIS, and the 'monsters from the id'* was used in a Peter Davidson Doctor Who, 'Snakedance'.

*'Monsters from the id' is a bit of a spoiler, but you'll have to watch the Forbidden Planet to get the point.

Can I still edit? No? (for 'Plantet' read 'Planet').

Niall McAuley @ 423

Point taken. Although Alec Baldwin for damn sure couldn't hold still long enough to act dead.

Maybe it's because it's three fricken am, and my brain is fricken fried, but this was fricken funny.

Greg, it's not even 1 am here and that is really fricken funny! I wonder if you could call that "Surrealistic Polo"?

And this one is at least as funny.

[Adam Baldwin] was also in Angel (playing a demonic nasty).

"Can you pick out the one word in that sentence you probably shouldn't have said?"

Possibly my favorite quote from the entire run of Angel. Though a close runner-up is "I'm made of felt. And my nose comes off!"

And, of course, in Full Metal Jacket, as Animal Mother, the suspiciously Jayne-like M-60 gunner.
"Don't let that fool you. Under fire Animal Mother is one of the finest human beings alive. He just needs somebody to throw grenades at him for the rest of his natural life."

(standing round a dead marine)
"Better you than me."

xopher@415: Very useful link. But he seems to think he has the right to restrict people from linking to it without permission.

Good grief, I missed that. That sort of thing was in vogue in the early days of the internet when people were running their servers on 286's and bandwidth was measured in kbs. The article is copyright 1997, so maybe it's fallout from the ancient days.

ajay,

He just needs somebody to throw grenades at him for the rest of his natural life.

huh. is that a flannery o'connor reference? or a weird coincidence?

Michael Rennie was my very first movie actor crush object when I was a little kid. Keanu Reeves? Ugh.

I know I'm just about the only tennis fanatic on this site, but you should have seen Roger Federer's all-black outfit last night. Along with the way he was playing (mostly), it was so "dark angel" I could almost see the sooty wings!

PS: Yes, some details of that outfit were slightly ridiculous, but once he was in motion that became irrelevant.

Faren @ 442... I was wondering who I'd have wanted to see play Klaatu in a remake, and I couldn't come up with many names besides Christian Bale and Edward Norton.

Rob Rusick @ 432... Leslie Nielsen plays a 'serious' role as Commander John J. Adams. The relationship between this character and Lt. 'Doc' Ostrow (Warren Stevens) has been described as anticipating the 'Kirk-Bones' relationship in ST-TOS.

I wonder if that relationship was also inspired by Gunsmoke? Luckily, Forbidden Planet's influence upon Star Trek didn't include Earl Holliman's character.

a few years ago, I was watching some old (50's?) movie about some captain of an American naval ship operating in the Atlantic during WW2. The engineer had a thick Scottish accent.

I kept waiting for him to say "I kenna change the laws of phyics". It was like watching "The Searchers" just after watching a Star Wars marathon and going, "Holy crap".

Can't remember the name of the movie though.

441: It's a quote from the film, taken originally from one of the short stories by Gustav Hasford ("Body Count") that the script was based on. I've never read any Flannery O'Connor so don't know what you're talking about...

Greg @446: When The Mote in God's Eye was first out, the authors took some flak that their Scottish engineer was a 'Scotty' rip-off. In their defense, they claimed that the Scottish engineer was an established type even before 'Star Trek'.

Serge @445: Luckily, Forbidden Planet's influence upon Star Trek didn't include Earl Holliman's character.

Well, Scotty on occasion would comedically get into 'the stuff'.

Rob Rusick... Scotty on occasion would comedically get into 'the stuff'

Luckily though, Scottie never was seen wearing an outfit that belonged in a greasy-spoon joint.

Forgive me. The fourth
post haiku was wittier.
So wry and so apt.

I'm not sure how I managed to miss this Open Thread entirely, but I'm honoured at my inclusion as one of the poets (although I think the above might be my first effort for ML).

In other news: I taught my first class of the semester this morning - yay! Happy New Year to all the students and academics of the Fluorosphere!

debcha #450: Welcome back to the word mines.

Oust the Schmuck and his theocrat buddies:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083007A.shtml
(excerpt)

"Pentagon Chaplain Accused of Aiding Proselytizing
" By Jason Leopold
" t r u t h o u t | Report

" Thursday 30 August 2007

"... the Pentagon's top chaplain opened its doors yet again to another evangelical group whose leader recently spent two days at the facility proselytizing, passing out Christian literature, and "saving souls."

"....David Kistler, President of Hickory, North Carolina-based H.O.P.E. Ministries International, embarked on a "DC Crusade" along with dozens of members of the evangelical organization for two weeks that included two days inside the Pentagon proselytizing and preaching the "gospel" to government employees and "saving souls."
"....
"Weinstein said the lawsuit has been delayed only because of the "overwhelming, non-stop reports of out-of-control Christian fundamentalism his organization has been receiving" from soldiers who indicated to Weinstein's staff that rampant Christian fundamentalism has plagued the halls of the DOD and soldiers on the battlefield in Iraq are being forced by their superiors to accept Jesus Christ as their saviors. Weinstein, a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has called for Congressional hearings into the Pentagon's attempts to "Christianize" the military and the DOD."
"....
"Two weeks ago, following a story published by Max Blumenthal in The Nation, the Pentagon scrapped plans to send so-called "Freedom Packages" to soldiers in Iraq. The packages, put together by the fundamentalist Christian ministry called Operation Straight Up, contained among other things, Bibles and the apocalyptic computer game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," in which "soldiers for Christ" hunt down enemies of Christianity."

What is, this, the Russian Army pre-Revolution drafting Jews for thirty or forty years' service with non-stop proselytizing at them the entire time to the State Religion?

Note that other Christian denominations get witnessed at, too, and that the Southern Baptist Convention targets Roman Catholics and in eastern Europe Orthodox Christians, along with proselytizing non-Christians....

For Susan or other dance mavens:

I need some other word, if it exists, for a do-si-do. The word should be a movement/step from some dance that was highly respectable in New York/Boston high society circa 1907. Not knowing any such dances, I ask those who do.

(Context: describing what happens when two people are, say, in an art gallery, moving in opposite directions, and instead of colliding, they somehow, magically, switch places.)

Pass back to back.

The french term,, from whence the modern is Dos a dos (which is to say, back to back).

There might be an italian term as well, but I don't know it.

@454 Dos a dos

The new term being windows a windows...

Serge@445: I recall either an entire panel, or a panel that got hijacked early, on the topic of the action leader and the wise sidekick // the king and the counselor // .... IMO, Clement deliberately used it in Mission of Gravity (1953, so it predates both Gunsmoke and Forbidden Planet; but the tradition goes back at least to Arthur & Merlin.

The new term being windows a windows...

Sometimes also refered to as "cross-purposed forks", while done in a more modern free style.

Terry #454: Pass back to back

Which makes it obvious that I was asking for the wrong thing, drat it all.

What I'm looking for is a sideways exchange. One person goes behind the other, both facing the same direction (in this case, the wall of pictures). The front person takes one step (to the right, say), while the back person will probably need to take at least two steps in the opposite direction. The maneuver should be fairly familiar to us literate types as the old bookstore switcheroo.

Paula Lieberman: Your name just came up in the taxi from the Quito Airport to the Hostel Sta. Barbara (where we are now, before we head to lunch).

The cast of characters on this madcap adventure is:

Me
Maia
Pat (her mother)
Alan Frisbie, who was telling about a trip cross-country with you, himself, Bounder and someone I didn't place enough to recall now.

The catalyst was the complex, and moderately worrisome approach to Quito (several righ angle turns, in DC-9, at low-ish altitudes, while descending over ravines and below mountaintops... it seems to be geographicly driven). We got to talking about various other approaches and he said the mmost exicting take-off he'd done was in a civil aviation bird; from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, when weight/altitude/engine power made it impossible to load more than half a tank of fuel, if the bird wasn't to end up in pieces floating down the Colorado.

Sounds like it was fun.

Terry @ 451

Denver in '81. They rented a light plane and flew from Orange County to Denver and back. It was supposed to be a turbocharged plane but turned out not to be (last minute rental of oxygen tanks and masks).
Frisbie described the approach to Denver as ATC asking them if they could get some more altitude as they flew through canyons trying to keep within the plane's altitude limit.

Coming back, they had to spend some time at Grand Canyon waiting for the area to cool off so the plane had enough lift to get off the ground.

from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, when weight/altitude/engine power made it impossible to load more than half a tank of fuel, if the bird wasn't to end up in pieces floating down the Colorado.

You are a cruel flirt, sir. Now I need to get some air time, dammit.

I don't have much strong memory of the trip, it was a long time ago.

However, I don't remember it being a really big deal to me with the altitude--several years earlier I'd been in a Cessna 172 flying over Pike's Peak with two other people in the plane, the plane was up over 16,000 feet (Pike's Peak was something like 14,441 feet or so). Granted, back when I was living in Colorado Springs and working in Cheyenne Mountain, my body was much more adapted to altitude at the time than someone living at sealevel, where the atmospheric pressure is higher and there's more oxygen per unit volume....

The really horrible thing is, that I -did- have a current pilot's license and the time and must have been doing some of the flying, but I don't have any more real memory that a hazy looking out the cockpit of small plane at mountains recollection! "There I was at 10,000 feet" and I don't remember much about it! I do remember landing and taking off from an airport in Colorado at the top of a mountain, I remember some flying out in Colorado, I remember the haze over in the LA South Basin that restricted visibility, but....

Of Political Officer Appartchiks and Health...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083107D.shtml

"In Emails, Political Pressure on Ex-Surgeon General
"By Christopher Lee
"The Washington Post

"Friday 31 August 2007"

" "He needs to be the SG [Surgeon General] with specific speeches, on specific topics addressing the Secretary's and the president's agenda - which will become more political as the re-elect gets underway," Turenne wrote.

"In a Sept. 25, 2002, e-mail to Schofield, Turenne described Carmona as "wandering" and "not focused on the president's/secretary's agenda."

""These documents confirm that White House and HHS officials improperly sought to influence the activities of the Surgeon General to achieve political goals," Kennedy wrote yesterday in a letter to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt...."

Kennedy, chairman of the Senate health committee, obtained the e-mails as part of a probe into political interference in public health matters. In his letter, Kennedy noted that many of the White House e-mails were sent from Republican National Committee accounts held by White House officials, and he requested more documents.

#463: Some GOP flak was on NPR this morning, on the occasion of Rove's departure. Short version: "He was just a very effective campaigner and people resent that."

No, no he wasn't. He was a manipulative weasel who perverted public institutions for political gain. Never forget that. He needs to be hounded and harried and disgraced and jailed if they can find something that sticks.

I don't remember who it was that mentioned Girl Genius here (it was mentioned at least twice), but thank you. I hadn't heard of it, and now I'm sucking up the archive as fast as I can get away with without getting in trouble at work.

I want to buy some of the collections, and I'll be attending Dragon*Con this weekend. Finding a collection in the dealer's room is instant gratification, but if the writers/artists profit significantly more from website sales, I'll order from Studio Foglio's page and wait. Does anyone know? Also, is there a good way to find out if there will be anyone representing the comic at D*C so I can gush?

Exploiting the open thread here, I wanted to point out a link I followed from Gene Expression. Apparently, several big academic publishing houses have hired a famously nasty PR consultant to attack the whole open-access movement, in which peer-reviewed academic papers are put online and made available for free.

Nature Article

This relates vaguely to the DMCA discussion and the Wikipedia discussions we've had here, and more to the ongoing discussions of evil PR and astroturfing.

"President Bush will be viewed as a far-sighted leader who confronted the key test of the 21st century." -- Karl Rove

Wow. We're about 8% of the way into the 21st century and Bush has already figured out and confronted the key test!

I can imagine Rove's great-great-grandchild saying the same thing about Bush's great-great-grandchild after he signs a law banning cybersex between uplifted coyotes and plasma creatures living in the Sun's chromosphere.

So you know how Peter Jackson took The Lord of the Rings and changed a bunch of details but really, he got the feel right? And you know how most people were happy with the first X-Men film because the essential characters were all themselves, even if they were a little skewed from the comics?

Not everyone is that good, looks like.

I just watched a trailer for The Dark is Rising. I think I'm gonna cry. I love those books. I re-read TDiR every winter, and they're fscking murdering it. At least, if the trailer is any indication of what the movie's like.

We'll start with, Will Staunton has an American accent...

joann: it sounds like a do-si-do is not at all what you're looking for; IIRC that involves people ending up in the same place. This is called a whole gyp in morris dancing, where a net exchange of places is a half gyp. ("Net" because some morris styles involve large excursions.) Still not what you're looking for because people are facing each other before and after (which means they both turn net 180 degrees) but closer.

There are also many contra dances which net out to bookstore shuffles, but usually that's the result of several maneuvers with their own names. "casting" is a single maneuver like the shuffle, but involves one person doing a 360 (turn 270 while stepping outside the line, walk down while the neighbor sidles up, complete the turn).

Yes, Susan, I can hear you fuming from here. Feel free to be more precise than my 35-year-old memories....

R.M., they're not listed as dealers at Dragon*con, and there's no mention of con-going on Kaja's LJ or the Studio Foglio LJ. The current mini-episode starts with their going on vacation.

I don't know anything about their pricing arrangements; I bought all mine online.

Studio Foglio have said many times that they encourage people to buy their books from comics retailers, as this encourages the retailers to stock their stuff.

Did the issue of how tall Modesty Blaise is ever get settled? At the risk of repeating, here's what I've just found while reading The Night of the Morningstar

Her height, thought Ben Christie, was about five feet six or seven; not small, but seemingly so when compared with the legend surrounding her name.

(I don't think there's any unreliable-narrator-stuff going on, but Christie is lying down and recovering from being beaten and drugged at this point)

We did have a couple of people citing Modesty's height as five foot six, back in the heptalogies thread (from the first novel; from the first sequence of the comic strip). That detail seems to be pretty consistent.

The question of how tall Modesty is -- in the sense of whether five foot six is "tall", "about average", or what -- was not definitively settled.

The question of how tall Modesty is -- in the sense of whether five foot six is "tall", "about average", or what -- was not definitively settled.

Seems to me that when the books were written, 5'6" would have been on the tall end of average for a woman.

Hmph! I ask a Modesty Blaise question and no one answers. Neil asks a Modesty Blaise question and the next two comments answer him. I'm gonna go cry myself to bed. Even though it's two in the afternoon.

The courtiers like big bustles, and they can not lie.
http://squidflakes.livejournal.com/198545.html

I think it may be mixing periods a bit, but who cares.)

ethan #475:

Our abject apologies. That is, I started to write something, found that I needed to ponder it, and then got distracted by something or the other, no doubt to be found on Making Light.

To answer: it's certainly not as nutty as some of the later ones, but I've always thought it to be worthy.

(Dedicated readers will no doubt know exactly why I was wondering on first reading if O'Donnell had jumped the shark in The Impossible Virgin, even though it would be another 25 years or so until sharks were jumpable. If you see what I mean.)

Ethan - I'm pretty sure I read Sabre-Tooth some years ago, but my memory is hazy and I can't find my, or indeed, anyone elses copy. Which is a pretty useless answer.

My question was stupid, as if I'd searched properly I would have known the answer. Your question was interesting and hard to answer. Don't cry yourself to bed (unless you really want to, of course).

The good news is I've canonically established that Modesty is "not small".

A small datum-point. Within the last 5-10 years I have seen a survey of some physical characteristics of Australian women. The only one that's stuck is that their 'average height' was between 5'4" and 5'5" (around 1.64m).

I wouldn't call anyone above that "tall"; that would have to be a distinct chunk above average, like at least half a head.

BTW, I've used this figure many times while pointing out how awkwardly & badly designed things like our local bus shelter seats, and indeed seats in buses, are for women of average height like me — maybe even contributing to DVT, but certainly yet another reason discouraging people from using public transport, and helping to make people's lives more miserable.

Thanks Marilee. I looked at Kaja's LJ, but didn't know if there were other sources of info or not, and I wasn't sure what guests' names to look for in the D*C info.

And David, thanks for that info. That means I get to go for the instant gratification on them. I'll be hitting the dealer's room and asking about them tomorrow. (Maybe with hardcopies in hand I'll succeed at pimping them to my husband. I've been trying but he hasn't taken the bait yet.)

I just saw the third X-men movie. Damn that's depressing. So much death, and all for nothing.

I hope they don't make a fourth one. That would really be no fun at all.

I'm 5'8" most of the time, and that was tall until about 20 years ago.

I thought I'd do a Finally Get Around To Some Day project this long weekend: Digitizing my few remaining vinyl albums.

For some reason, my stack included records I never remembered listening too, much less owning: Three Judy Collins albums. Percy Faith and his Orchestra performing songs from The Sound of Music. The soundtrack to Gigi. A JFK Tribute album. How did I come to have these? Did they belong to a family member and accidentally got packed with my stuff when I moved west? I suppose, since know one has expressed grief or puzzlement about missing records at family get-togethers, that I can safely donate or toss them.

The stuff I know is mine is more troubling. Do I really WANT mp3s of the three Steve Martin and four Monty Python albums I haven't listened to in 20 years? Do those half-dozen Talking Heads discs have anything my Talking Heads CDs don't? And that literal-album of shellac 78s I bought for a quarter so I could show a co-worker where the name "album" came from . . . do I have any obligation to preserve it ("Piano Reflections by Joe Reichman") for posterity?

There's something creepy and deeply disheartening about this activity.

The right-hand sidebar ad for the National Book Festival features a striking piece of artwork.

The full image, by Mercer Mayer, can be seen here.

Stefan Jones #483: Three Judy Collins albums. Percy Faith and his Orchestra performing songs from The Sound of Music. The soundtrack to Gigi. A JFK Tribute album.

This is similar to what Gaiman & Pratchett tell us in Good Omens about any tape left in a car for more than a fortnight turning into The Best of Queen. Each of those albums you name is spontaneously generated in any batch of records left unattended for more than a month.

Re: Sabre-Tooth, I didn't dislike it enough to stop reading the series (though I am taking a break until I can get the stack of books I currently have out from the library to a more manageable size), but it just seemed kind of...diffuse, maybe?...compared to the first book. Vaguely unsatisfying for reasons I can't quite name.

On a completely unrelated, vague, and personal note, I find it amazing that, just as one reaches the verge of utter desperation, suddenly plans for making both the short and long term vastly more wonderful than one had thought possible suddenly materialize, out of nowhere. I almost don't want to say anything about it for fear that the bubble will burst, but things might be looking up for me for once. If I can make it through the next three weeks (a pretty big if), I think I can make it through the next few years on the inertia. In a good way.

My plan for a desperation-free wonderful future for myself is to win the lottery. It's the only practical way.

Michael Jackson is dead.

Xopher, that's sad news. Psmith will be devastated.

Carrie@468: So you know how Peter Jackson took The Lord of the Rings and changed a bunch of details but really, he got the feel right?

Well, except for Farimir's change of character. That was just wrong in so many ways.

Completely miscellaneous question:

Can anyone recommend to me another Bollywood movie that resembles Dil Chahta Hai? It's one of my favorite films of any kind, and so far my attempts to find more like it have failed.

On a related note, does anyone know of a source for legal Bollywood soundtrack CDs?

Earl Cooley III #486: That would work, too. If you come up with a good method for doing so reliably, let me know?

Carrie S:

Possibly my favorite quote from the entire run of Angel.

"Lie to me" in the last episode. Although I admit almost laughing myself into an early grave at the question "What is a Smurf?"

I just started watching Heroes on DVD (never having seen it before).

It's hella cool so far.