You're right, they should have gone for "sexy librarian" instead of a blonde bimbo. Math is definitely hotter than IP addresses (cue indignant network engineer: "IP addresses ARE math!").

What really kills it is that you can't enter other IP addresses. Network geeks can't, therefore, waste hours entering IP ranges--you just get to hear the one address. Unless you go running around to all the machines in the lab. Which my colleages will do as soon as I tell them about this.

I see that you can go to the associated site HearMyIp.com to hear Stephen Hawking* reading your IP address, too. Eh.

*I know, I know

Oh Rule 34, what hast thou wrought? I weep for us all.

You mean like Kate Bush singing pi to the umpty-umpth digits on her latest album, Aerial?

It works for me at least.

Mary Dell, that's it exactly: sexy librarian or lab-coated babe.

That’s starting to sound like something out of xkcd.

As a Making Light thread grows longer, the probability of a link to an XKCD comic approaches one.

(Note: this is not a complaint.)

Well, now, where's the eye candy for the other half of the human race, the half that's more interested in sexy males than sexy females?

As a Making Light thread grows longer, the chance of someone perceptively calling out heteronormative assumptions approaches one.

(Note: this is not a complaint. Kudos to Bruce.)

As a Making Light thread grows longer, the chance of someone making an observation about Making Light behavior in the form of a mathematical law approaches one.

(As a Making Light thread grows longer, the chance of someone turning another commentator's off-hand comment into a pastiche/word game/poem approaches one.)

Bruce #7: If you've got the voice for it, that sounds like a strike while it's hot business opportunity.

Actually, so does recruiting various celebrity voices, like AOL did a while back for its various "you've got mail" sounds.

This is just to post

I have written
a comment
That links to
xkcd

and which
you will probably
find
perceptively challenging

Forgive me
it had to be done
(this is
not a complaint)

Geez, this thread didn't even have a chance to grow long before it grew longer and all those probabilities approached one.

Secretly, moanmyip.com is my new favorite website. I like the way she says "dot," it cracks me up every time.

Self-referentialism increases with length of discussion, save that it is most common at the very start of any discussion.

The likelihood of an unfalsifiable assertion being made approaches one as the thread grows.

Seriously -- how would one disprove Godwin's Law?

That is so unsexy. It just sounded like something painful was happening. And not the sexy kind of pain.

The likelihood of a William Carlos Williams riff, also. *applauds abi's*

Teresa @ 4... lab-coated babe

They blinded me with Science. Science!

I'm with EClair #14 on this. I've heard porn stars give better (fake) performances than the voiceover on that site.

What I want is a sexy woman who says my LiveJournal name. I wonder how much Claudia Black would charge. Maybe Ravi Nawat would do it. Or Gabrielle Anwar?

Max Kaehn #5 -- I did find that particular xkcd comic extremely sweet. Choked me up a little.

Bruce Cohen @#7: I googled "sexy man ip address" and found links for Matthew McConaughey (duh), James Gandolfini (huh?), and Pirate costumes, but no IP moaning so far.

Of course, if I want to hear men moaning IP addresses, I just need to go into the office and say I need to spin up a server...our server vlan is clean out of addresses. *rim shot*

Teresa #4 -- lab-coated babe voices:

As a grad student, I spent countless hours entering DNA sequences into a sequence analysis program called MacVector. To minimize errors, one could have the program read back the sequence as it was entered, either in a non-nonsense male voice or a breathy female voice.

The way she said "A" was straight out of the bedroom. Ahh, MacVector babe, where are you now?

I had the same reaction as John L and EClair on listening to that moan: yich. It's interesting that I had that reaction, while ethan likes to listen to it. I guess it's a lot easier to see something rather wretched as campy if there's not much chance it could push your buttons, even if it were better.

By a rather straightforward generalization, as a mathemstician might say, I'm reminded of a scene in a movie I saw many years ago (I think it was "The Osterman Weekend", but I won't swear to it) in which a plump and follicly-challenged middle-aged sugar daddy* is huffing and puffing away on top of his sweet young thing. She has her arms around him, her hands behind his back, and she's doing her nails while moaning most unconvincingly. Some people are completely satisfied by "I can't believe it's not axle grease!".

* We're going for Extreme Stereotype here.

Do we have any Air Force pilots here who have used the female cockpit voice* ? Does it really excite you, leave you cold, or set you to wondering how military organizations can be so good at screwing things up (even faux screwing)?

* Sorry, I can't remember the official nomenclature, and no one ever told me what the unofficial nickname is.

What I want to hear is a pleasant mezzo voice reciting Duverger's Law.......

They couldn't get Majel Barrett?

"Oh, baby, let xᴶ be the, uhhhh, coordinates of a , Yes!, vector x..."

Lacks rigor.

Bruce #22:

That reminds me of a friend's story she told my wife and I. She is a data retriever for her police force, specifically retrieving child porn and other items from people's computers.

One of her cases involved an underaged girl and her teenage boyfriend. Apparently he videotaped the encounter, but it was hardly complementary of his efforts; she was clearly looking at her watch over his shoulder during most of the act...

Bruce Cohen #23 : I belive the canonical name is 'Bitching Betty'. I'm told that the voice is pitched low and sultry because a) it gets fighter jocks' attention, and b) the frequency is more easily audible in a noisy jet environment. Both of these claims are to be taken with a pinch of salt. I also seem to remember that the voice actress is a grey-haired grandmother from a small town somewhere in the mid-west, but I can't remember whether this was from a serious source or not, curse my lossy brain.

#1: That network engineer will immediately be followed by a mathematician, who by this time is deeply frustrated, responding that
"Not all that contains numbers is maths! And not all maths is about numbers!"

I'm reminded of the driver CD for a PC motherboard I bought, about ten years ago now. It included an instructional video on how to put a PC together.

It being a Taiwanese product, the young lady who presented the video was of Chinese ancestry, and spoke English with a definite accent.

She was also wearing a minidress of some sort of metallised fabric. Pbviously, they take anti-static precautions really seriously.

I am suddenly unable to stop thinking of Lobachevsky.

"Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva bought the movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse."

--Tom Lehrer

Sarah S @ #31:

Ingrid Bergman. (That dates both me and Lehrer.)

theophylact @ #32

[pedantry] I think that the Brigitte Bardot/Ingrid Bergman thing is a canonical textual variant, originating with Lehrer in a later recording of the song. [/pedantry]

But regardless, for me it's all about the salacious qualities Lehrer manages to put into his pronunciation of "hypotenuse."

Bruce (26), your remark has been made a floating footnote in the main post.

Smut! Give me smut and nothing but!
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd!
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the wizard of Oz
There's a dirty old man.

(I actually used this song as a reading list, when I was a teenager.)

And Max (5), thank you for the XKCD.

#28: I seem to recall the "sultry recorded attention-getting voice belonging to a grandmother" meme showing up in the film version of The Andromeda Strain.

You know, if this were a jigsaw puzzle I'd be looking on the floor for the piece shaped like voyeuristic kite ariel photography right about now.

It was Doris Day as the Hypotenuse! (Is a male hypotenuse a hypoteneur?)

s Mkng Lght thrd gs lngr, th chnc f smn's pst gttng dsmvwlld pprchs n.

Heresiarch, #8: I'm not sure that "heteronormative" is the right word to use there. After all, there are also women (some of them straight, even) who like to look at pictures of women, as well as plenty of women who'd enjoy beefcake. I think the phenomenon that's really being addressed here is the "male gaze," which is a combination of heteronormism and sexism.

Jason, #37: I used to know one of those women in real life. She really was a grandmother, although she wasn't that much older than me; and she made a good living working for a telephone sex service. She was also one of the most physically unattractive women I've ever met, a walking ad for the "but she has such a lovely personality" stereotype. She told me that she couldn't get any other work that paid as well as the phone sex, even though she was a very competent office administrator; I'm sure visual prejudice was a factor in that.

See, I grew up with the Doris Day version, and so now all the real Tom Lehrer fans make fun of me. :(

Xopher @ 39... If Doris Day was the hypotenuse, what was Rock Hudson?

I had to kill the ap. That sounded so wrong. It was forced, fake, painful and pained.

It didn't even have th charm of a grade-school play. There affect was so strained the effect hurt my ears and mind.

Has this been tested for IPv6 compliance?

Serge, 43: I believe Rock Hudson was a tangent.

Howard Peirce @ 46... And what about Tony Randall?

Nancy C. Mittens (#35): As beautifully (and, um, thoroughly) demonstrated in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's magnum opus, Lost Girls.

The "Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer" CD (which in turn is supposed to be the merging of Reprise's releases of "Songs by Tom Lehrer" and "More by Tom Lehrer") has "Ingrid Bergman".

The "Tom Lehrer Revisited" CD has a live recording (1959, Kresge Auditorium, MIT) which has "Brigitte Bardot".

The "The Remains of Tom Lehrer" box set has both a studio version which has "Ingrid Bergman", and a live recording which has "Brigitte Bardot". Those are presumably the same recordings as above.

I no longer have the individual CD releases of Songs and More Songs to check, and never have had the pre-Reprise self-published Songs. Is that the recording that had "Doris Day"?

It’s not the easiest desire,
This lust for mind, for intellect
That rubs itself against my own
And rouses me like lustful hands.
It’s not like leather, rubber, rope.
It can’t be purchased and applied
To anyone, by anyone.
My predilection’s more precise.
Slide Shakespeare slowly on my skin,
And count my moans in multiples
Of primes. Bite iambs on my thighs,
Decline a noun as I recline
And map the angle of my back
Against the bed. Our alternate
Interiors are equal, yes,
But different. Check. I’ll wait for you.
I’ll lie here on my back and name
The stars, and tell you all their myths
In Attic Greek. Desire will rise
And we will slip the bonds of brain
But not just yet. Be clever just
A little longer, please. Seduce
me that way first; we’ll see what comes.

ses

Serge 47: Some people think Tony was acute guy; I think he was the opposite.*

*And now, not being a math guy, I have exhausted my high-school trigonometry vocabulary. So, I need to sine off from this area while I can still function.

#51 Oh, Howard, don't try to convince us that you're obtuse.

Maybe not, Sarah. But I am hopelessly square.

Howard @46: I believe Rock Hudson was a tangent.

I wonder how much time he had to spend out in the sun to become one.

You pull me from your shelves and lay me out:
My spine against the sun-warmed tabletop
My leather covers let to gently drop,
My coloured endsheets falling all about.
O straighten them, I beg of you, be quick!
Then spread my blank and creamy pages wide
And with an inky pen inscribe inside
Your formulae in lines both thin and thick.
The paper shivering as it receives
The graphs you draw on it. You fill my soul,
And still you write, until the proof is whole,
Then press your knowledge tight between my leaves.
You have your fleshy pleasures, but I find
I'd rather far be ravished by your mind.

todd,

I no longer have the individual CD releases of Songs and More Songs to check, and never have had the pre-Reprise self-published Songs. Is that the recording that had "Doris Day"?

doris day is on "an evening wasted with tom lehrer. possibly others, but that was the record i grew up with.

Oh, abi & Sarah S! Lovely, lovely, lovely!

Fifty-plus posts in and nobody has mentioned "Love and Tensor Algebra"?

(I hesitate to make that a link, since I'm sure none of the many versions online are there legally. Anyone who doesn't own The Cyberiad can find either the book or the poem fairly easily, at any rate.)

What warms the body still may freeze the soul,
what soothes the ear may be rough to the hand,
we aren't surprised to find the real thing bland
for showy leaves may hide a flimsy bole.
The point, it seems, is not to praise the whole
mass of those things we've come to understand;
instead we seek to excite that hottest gland,
the one that rules us all from head to sole.
Not what you think, the one that will respond
to clean cut body or to pleasing form
of well-made muscles or of round behind.
The organ is the one we have least conned
but which, well-comprehended sets the norm
less of the body and much more of the mind.

miriam beetle #56, hrm...

I have two different CD releases of "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer", and neither has "Lobachevsky" on it at all.

An Evening Wasted is more or less a concert version of More of Tom Lehrer, while Tom Lehrer Revisited is more or less a concert version of Songs by Tom Lehrer.

The old NeXT workstation, when you had the printer attached, would give you status reports by voice rather than by mysterious blinkenlights.

So you'd be sitting there, waiting for your print job to finish, and suddenly you'd hear a sultry English-accented female voice inform you that "paper is jammed in your printer."

Howard, that would be better than being perfectly circular, at any rate. At least logically.

#61 - On an old, old, Mac I had a pop-up talking moose that would interject random phrases, and iirc, also speak the error messages. (As in, circa 1986, MacOS 3?)

I think networked printers are an exception to the general rule that computers should be seen and not heard. An "out of paper" beeper or announcement ("Feed me!" in the Audrey 2 voice?) right at the printer would often be nice.

What's the chance of collecting abi's poetry before she dies?

I hope it's approaching one :)

Teresa:

What you need is a better photo of a sexy-looking woman, and a much better actress moaning, panting, whimpering, and throatily murmuring well-known mathematical equations.* That’d work. You could sell ads.

You're three years behind the times... If you think of the entire thing as an ad, that is.

And no one's mentioned that great Richard Thompson song The Hots for the Smarts

Even better than the lyrics, watch him sing the song, he does it so slyly.

As beautifully (and, um, thoroughly) demonstrated in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's magnum opus, Lost Girls.

Funny you should mention that--we just tried to read it in my house. Each of us got about halfway through Volume Two (of three) before deciding that, yes, even sex can get boring. Even lesbian sex. Even kinky lesbian sex. Liam lacks the typical (and in my mind, inexplicable) male "two chicks is hot" thing, and I'm about as straight as it's possible to get; by the time we stopped we were both kind of rolling our eyes and going, "OK, yeah, the weaving in of elements from the stories is cute and all, but for Ghu's sake we've all seen a penis, OK?!*"

We took it back to the library with a warning that perhaps they should consider not shelving it with the graphic novels the little kids were gonna be looking at--Lost Girls is in fact a graphic novel, but in, shall we say, more than one sense.

* ASCII really needs and interrobang.

You mean one of these‽

(The Wikipedia article you linked to tells you how to insert one; see the section entitled 'display')

Carrie S., #68 - Thanks for the description. I had been curious about that one, but it sounds like it might not be my cup of tea at all.

The expression on the library worker's face* when I asked where the graphic novels were kept was almost worth the disappointment when I discovered that all they had was Pokemon-type adventure manga** - any volume but #1.

*My understanding is that just because you work at the circulation desk, that doesn't make you a librarian, and I can't recall what the proper term for non-librarian library workers is. Apologies for the annoying workaround.

**Nothing in particular against that type of manga, but I was hoping for some of the more plotty ones, or else some good old American style comics. The assortment they had seemed pretty strongly aimed at ten-year old boys, and I don't know enough about the genre to be willing to wade through to find something I'd like.

carrie s.

Each of us got about halfway through Volume Two (of three) before deciding that, yes, even sex can get boring. Even lesbian sex. Even kinky lesbian sex.

YES. i was really disappointed in that book. i'm a big fan of alan moore's, & i waited a year to buy the book, cause it was just so big & expensive. i finally got it, a birthday present from my husband, this past san diego comicon.

& alan moore wrote some of the sexiest sex in comics that i've ever read (when the invisible man ravishes the girls' finishing scool? duuude.), so i really thought i'd like it. but i guess he set out to write 600 (?) pages of porn, which means 600 pages of "ooh, yeah, just like that."

there were about 20 pages of interesting, & the characters had to be shallow in the way that many porn "characters" are shallow, fungible really, just to get them into all the permutations of partner & position. yawn.

i guess the one thing the book was good for was making me realize, no, i don't think i like porn.

miriam beetle @ 71... I miss the Alan Moore of the early 1980s, the one that he seems to have come to consider too wordy. To me, without all those words to complement the art, the story where Abigail and the Swamp Thing first make love would have been nowhere near as sexy.

Carrie S. and miriam beetle -- I had a very different reaction to Lost Girls, and I'm usually the kind of person who is not into porn at all. I thought it had a lot of interesting things to say about the roles and meanings of sexuality as women are growing up. It was about sex in the big sense of the word "about." The sex itself wasn't all that interesting; it was the emotional context that I thought was great.

The third book gets very meta, with porn-within-porn and interesting discussions of fantasy vs. reality when it comes to erotica, and how the fantasy has its own role to play.

I very much liked it, and have been going around recommending it to people who were suspicious of it.

I certainly didn't find it wholly unproblematic. (For example, I have major problems with the "lbh'er bayl n yrfovna orpnhfr lbh'er nsenvq bs pbpx, naq vs lbh unq n tbbq shpxvat lbh'q ghea onpx gb zra" angle -- that rot13 is NSFW and contains sort of a spoiler.) But I found it worthwhile and have read it twice now.

I guess YMMV.

(I also didn't think the Invisible Man ravishing the girl's school was sexy. I guess we just have different tastes.)

serge,

maybe i'll like it better if i read it again. your rot-13ed point is very true.

& i'm not, you know, upset or surprised you didn't like the invisible man bit. i was kinda surprised that i did. it is problematic itself.

oh, wait. on rereading i see that i saw serge's name & read caroline's comment. so i was actually responding to caroline all the way through (i was surprised serge would use such strong language!). sorry, caroline.

*cough*

serge,

i actually haven't read swamp thing. is it collected?

miriam beetle, no no, I didn't mean to imply that you should be surprised/upset! I meant to say that people have personal and often idiosyncratic tastes in these things, so truly it's not all that surprising that you should find something sexy that I didn't, or vice versa.

By no means do you have to like it! I just wanted to register my opinion.

I'm sorry if I came off sounding tetchy. It's dinnertime and I haven't eaten yet, which is a situation in which I often sound shorter than I mean to.

caroline,

& here we are, apologizing all over ourselves. isn't that like a couple of women. :P

(it was an extreme case. i needed to use a smiley. sorry. i mean no! what? eep!)

miriam beetle @ 75... I don't know, about Swamp Thing. It's been 25 years, but there might be some out-of-print books, maybe in comicbook stores. If not, send me an email and I'll lend you the actual comics.

miriam beetle, heh. Having eaten now, I will point out that my inability to judge my own tone works both ways: I can either speak harshly while thinking I'm speaking reasonably, or speak reasonably and then be seized by fear that I've accidentally spoken harshly.

(And sometimes I just ramble incoherently. That's when I really know it's time to eat.)

Yay for low blood sugar. *waves tiny low blood sugar flag*

I'm pro-smiley in situations when they're needed to disambiguate tone.

Also, I believe Swamp Thing is collected. Friend of mine bought it in trades just a few years ago, so I suspect it's available in that form now. Actually I need to get it, and will now put it on my list of things to look out for at the local used book store.

Re:*
I believe there was at least one story in Phil Foglio's XXXenophile in which a woman had her libido linked to intellect, and was moaning scientific equations...

Funny comic.

R.M. Koske, #70, ours are called "volunteers."

Lis Riba... If I'm not mistaken, the cover of XXXenophile's first issue showed a guy and his ladyfriend about to have sex - with him dressed like Godzilla, and her adorned to look like Tokyo.

miriam beetle... Another 'wordy' Alan Moore comic-book I loved was Miracleman, where he took an old Captain Marvel ripoff and gave it a drastic update. Actually, 'drastic' is an understatement. Neil Gaiman eventually became its writer for the last issues then it just... stopped. I had heard that Gaiman wanted to bring it back, but that may have been a rumor.

Swampy has been collected, you can order it off of Amazon if your local shop doesn't have it. DC has been really good about getting collections to press.

I always associate a perfume with one of the early Alan Moore story arcs. The student in the dorm room next to where I was reading dropped a bottle, and it took me a bit to figure out that the aroma wasn't coming from my stack of back issues. Now, when I smell that perfume, I vividly picture Swampy.

#84: Miracleman stopped because the legal rights to the character are in a Bleak House-like mess.

#66: and then there's Danica McKellar ...

Jon Meltzer... When I read about Gaiman's wish to revive Miracleman, I think it was in an article about how the legal situation had been resolved. Maybe I remembered it wrong. It'd be interesting to see how well that comic-book would do today, considering the influence I think it had. It took the premise to its extreme logical conclusion, which was nightmarish in the way a Utopia can be. Other comics either ignored it and went their merry way as if their premises didn't have built-in problems. Others like AstroCity took the approach that, yes, there is a problem, but we're going to stick with the conventions and turn them on their heads. I know, I know, what I just said is probably full of (censored)

Serge #82: You are correct about the cover of issue #1. Back issues of that comic book are still for sale from studiofoglio.com (although they can't ship stuff in their "Not For Kids" section to Canada these days).

Earl Cooley @ 88... Has that rule always been in place? I presume it applies only to comics, which we all know are read only by kids. That would explain why naughty mags from the USA were available when I was living north of that border.

Tania @ 84...

"Happy birthday, dear. Here's a little something for you."
"What is it?"
"Why don't you open it and find out?"
(sound of ripped wrapping)
"Oh my God!"
"Do you like it?"
"Of course I do. All the other girls will be green with envy when they smell that eau de swamp!"

A bit of an Alan Moore tangent: his agreement with DC was that the rights to Watchmen and V for Vendetta would revert to Moore when they went out of print.

He's felt cheated, in that DC hasn't let them go out of print. The bastards...

This comment was stuck in my brain-queue from an earlier conversation about authors upset because their books were not in print.

Serge (89):
Canada's import restrictions on pornography and hate speech are applied (apparently in a very inconsistent fashion) to a wide variety of material shipped from the US. Seizures seem to be more prevalent on material coming from small presses, or shipped to "counter culture" bookstores. The Canadian Supreme Court (in Butler) bought into Catharine MacKinnon's thesis on what kinds of speech is intrinsically harmful to women. Canadian Customs seems to interpret very restrictively.

Re: Lost Girls - I think that the sex is deliberately relentless and transgressive to illustrate the themes that come to the fore in the final book, about the relationships between art, sex and society. And I think the flatness of the characters is also an authorial decision; it kind of reminds me of David Cronenberg movies like eXistenZ or Crash, in which the characters are deliberately affectless (as opposed to A History of Violence, in which the acting was much more naturalistic).

In a way, Lost Girls has many similarities to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, which is also relentlessly graphic to make a philosophical point. I'm not ashamed to say that I bailed on 120 Days - yes, Marquis, I understand the philosophy you're espousing (vice, power, blah blah blah, I get it) but no, you've done a good enough job of making the unthinkable banal that I don't feel the need to read the remainder of the book. Lost Girls, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot more readable and definitely makes more interesting philosophical points.

But much as I think Lost Girls is tremendously interesting as a work of art, it's not unproblematic. And I kind of think it is meant to be that way - it's meant to provoke different types of intellectual and emotional responses (to say nothing of physical ones) but I don't think it's meant to be a book that anyone is expected to uncomplicatedly adore.

Bruce/John -- prior art includes the moment in Klute in which Jane Fonda checks her watch in the midst of writhing, shouted ]endearments[, ....

Todd etc: I can't name the record (they're all long-vanished), but "Doris Day" is what I recall from one of the original LPs (bought no later than 1970, but probably a 1950's recording). A friend tells me TL did a \lot/ of re-recording in his prime -- IIRC mentioning an orchestrally-accompanied "Masochism Tango".

Jules: what browsers support your interrobang? My IE6 doesn't -- which surprised, as I recall it displaying CJK glyphs.

especially since it's been stripped of its parenthesis.

John Houghton #95: Bwa!

CHip @ 94: My guess is that it was the original Lehrer Records release of "Songs of Tom Lehrer". As I understand it, all the CD releases (which are all I've ever owned -- I'm 35 and didn't discover him until my late teens) of "Songs" are based on the Reprise re-release, which was a stereo re-recording.

I wonder what other differences there are? Now I need to get those LPs. And a record player.

There are orchestral versions of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", "The Masochism Tango", "The Hunting Song", and "We Will All Go Together When We Go" in the "The Remains of Tom Lehrer" box set. I'm not sure what they were originally recorded for; I remember hearing them on the Dr Demento show several years prior to the box set's release.

As far as I'm concerned, the best bits of the Lehrer box set are his five songs for The Electric Company.

# 95

You been getting off on Lisp porn?

It's not all about the parens, although nested hugs are nice; it's the, ummm, the recursion that excites.

By the way, here's some Lisp poetry.

As it happens, there was a documentary on the BBC on Saturday night, about horror movies and the drift into "exploitation".

And, at least from the British PoV, lesbian sex bypassed some awkward details of the law of the time. It was almost impossible to show a penis, and it's only a few years since the courts decided it was lawful to show an erect penis.

There's other potential awkwardnesses, such as the hint of gay cooties from the idea of a male viewer getting excited by a scene showing a male erection. More likely, it's as unsubtle as double the T&A from the money allocated to paying the cast.

Henry Troup (#63): The good old Talking Moose has been reimplemented for Mac OS X. It's even a universal binary.

Perhaps we should put together a Making Light phrase file for it....

R.M. Koske @ 70

The non-librarian titles, i.e., without an MLS or MLIS degree, vary greatly from system to system. As Marilee @ 81 points out, some of them are volunteers. In Minneapolis they are Aides. Years ago, when I worked in St Paul, they were called pages (if you just shelved books) or clerks. Some of them have titles like Library Assistant or Associate.

The official term is "Library Para-professional". It's often a sore point, since they do a lot of the heavy lifting, literally, and get paid less, sometimes much less, than the librarians. In some places, the aides or clerks or whatever they are called, can do almost everything, and have a lot of responsibility, but little or no authority.

This is what I have done most of my adult life. It keeps me near the supply for my major addiction.

Bruce Cohen (99):
(t)

John Houghton @#95: tee hee!

Heh. There's a big ad for Tom Lehrer ring tones on the side right now.

Mary Dell @ 105

Nice one!

I like more this one:

what is my ip and ip tracer

Magenta Griffith (103) and Marilee (81)

Now that my memory has been refreshed, I think the term I'd heard in the past was "clerk" or "associate." I don't think these were volunteers, though I'm not sure why I think that way. Possibly the size of the branch in question- it was a tiny one - though I'm not sure why that makes a volunteer less likely.

The whole thing has always struck me as a bit odd, since to the general public you're a librarian if you work in a library and aren't the sixteen-year old doing obvious scutwork shelving books. The low chances of ever getting the distinction to be made by anyone outside the field makes demanding the distinction seem silly. But then, I twitch every time a male sewist* gets referred to as a tailor on the basis of his gender. That's a skilled field, requiring years of specialized training. Just being a male who can sew doesn't earn you the respect of the title. When I consider it in that light, the librarian distinction makes a lot more sense.

*That's a new word I've seen recently and thought was very useful. Sewist = person who sews, gender not specified.

R. M. Koske @ 110

Have you ever worked with a really good research librarian? These are people who had google-fu before there was Google. I worked with one at the Intel corporate library a long time ago, and I was astounded at the information she could pull out of an unstructured database with a single, not particularly long, query. It's not just talent, of course, having spent the years to get a PhD in Library Science gets you knowledge and experience points towards that too. So, yes, I think it's worth recognizing the level of skill and knowledge required for that job with a special title.

What's the difference between a sewist and a tailor? Is it a labor vs. management thing?

R.M.Koske @ 110... Sewist = person who sews, gender not specified.

"mister Data, make it sew."

Serge, I'm warning you...

Darn it, Serge...

Just sew, Serge.

But do we really need more "Just-Sew" stories?

Guys, it seams to me that these neddle-ess puns are Kipling the discussion.

Must be awfully handy having Serge around when you need a hem on something. He just picks it up, and it's Serged!

What's the difference between a sewist and a tailor? Is it a labor vs. management thing?

I can sew--I can take a pattern, choose appropriate fabric, cut out the pieces, and end up with a functional (and usually even attractive) garment. I am not a tailor, because I can't make a pattern myself, nor make extensive alterations to one without screwing it up, nor work out on my own how to do the little beautiful details that make an item really, well, tailored. It's hard to explain.

Carrie S @ 119... Must be awfully handy having Serge around

Sew I've been told.

Yep, it's always seamed to me that a zippy little pun thread makes my day feel really snappy. I chalk it up to my being a bit of a ham.

Bruce Cohen, #111

No, I haven't. The few times I've felt the need to seek help, it wasn't that helpful for various reasons (not all the librarian's fault.) I'm sure if I had, I'd see the distinction clearly.

Recasting it in terms of tailor/sewist does make the difference in skill more clear, and I agree it is deserved. But I've never seen it personally, so it still feels artificial to me, respect I grant because I assume it is deserved, not instinctively. Obviously I need to go do more research to change my experience.

Earl Cooley III, #112

Not so much labor and management, though I think in really fine tailor shops it does somewhat shake out that way. It really comes closer to the distinction between a chef and a cook, I think.

(I'm not actually that knowledgeable, so take this all with a grain of salt.)

Tailoring is a specific skillset that a sewist may or may not have. Fitting a tailored jacket is unlike most other fitting, and the construction is also different from most other garments. So there's one set of differences. Just because you can sew, that doesn't mean you can tailor. (That paragraph I'm pretty certain of and stand behind.)

In addition, tailoring used to be (and I think still is) an apprentice-taught profession. I'm not at all sure how the system works. I suspect it is fairly loose, but I'd still be wary that I was claiming an education I didn't have if I hadn't been apprenticed but called myself a tailor. I wouldn't hesitate to say that I can do tailoring. But until I spend some time apprenticed to a professional tailor, I'd be leery of calling myself a tailor. (This is the bit I'm not at all sure of.)

If I recall correctly, this blog:

http://www.englishcut.com/

shows some of the distinctions and the strata of the tailor's shop. I stopped having time to read it, but I seem to recall the tailor drawing the suit pattern directly onto the fabric from the customer's measurements as an ordinary part of his job. I still boggle at the thought.

bratt, #109, now if I can just get Verizon to give me an IP address. Nine days now without DSL.

R.M.Koeke, #123, before I got sick, I could alter clothes and make custom pieces, including lined jackets. I'm not sure I'd call myself a tailor, though. I always thought the important part of sewing was good logistics skills.

Where does 'seamstress' fall into the hierarchy?

Not being up to the higher standard of what I'd call a seamstress, I used to be able to call myself a 'sewer', but I'd prefer not to have to write that down.

I think of the workrooms with highly-skilled — have I seen the word 'tailoress'? — who make the haut couture outfits, or the less-haut versions. Extraordinary what they can make real from a sketch or something draped and pinned, and the quality of their plainwork as well as their ability with fancywork. <sigh> Luckily for my clothes-addiction, I am a "sofa" by designer standards (aka normal Australian woman), as well as having medically-induced deformities, so unless & until I can afford to have clothes made-to-measure, I'm safe from their blandishments.

Mez, that's part of the problem, I think. As far as I know, "seamstress" is a woman who sews, with no particular skill level implied. The adoption of tailor as a term for a man who sews seemed logical because there wasn't a word for it, but "tailor" did include a particular skillset, and therefore gives a man credit for skills he might not have, just because he's male.

I'm very pleased by "sewist" because it gives me a viable alternative to sewer.

I don't think tailoress is common, at least not in the States. The woman who taught me tailoring called herself a tailor. Like chef, I think it used to be assumed to be masculine because tailors were mostly men. As the profession has equalized, the term has drifted to become gender-neutral.

This is where my knowledge trickles off, unfortunately. There could quite well be a heirarchy of professions in a couture house, but I don't know them.

Mez @#125

I think that many of the non-designers who work in constructing couture fashion are called "petits mains." This may specifically relate to those who do embroidery and other embellishments. I'm not sure.

R. M. Koske: Careful--if sewist catches on, sewistrix might not be far behind!

Why am I now imagining a female sewist in black leather?

"If you don't behave, I'll make you rip out these seams!"

I've always like semster/seamster, just because it's a word you don't see very often.

I'm an adequate quilting sewer, but for clothing alterations, I pay someone, because I've not spent the time to develop those skills as much as I'd like. The good thing is that because of the quilting and fabric art, I know who has super-duper clothing skills.

R.M.Koske @ 129... "If you don't behave, I'll make you rip out these seams!"

Oooooh... We're getting onto the seamy side of human interactions now.

#108 is a repost of part of a previous comment of mine, #60, with a spammy URL linked from the username.

Serge, this is becoming a pattern with you.

Well, as far as the sewing/tailoring distinction: my mother took classes in pattern-fitting and tailoring. Tailoring involves more skill that simple sewing, and you do have to know how to alter the pattern to fit properly. Men's tailoring involves some delicate fitting (as my mother's teacher said, 'Vive la difference!') that women's tailoring doesn't.

ethan @ 133... Serge, this is becoming a pattern with you.

Yes, it's a pattern that I've plaid again and again.

Serge, are you needling us? Will you try to pin the blame on us?

Nancy Mittens... are you needling us?

Wool this madness ever stop?

Maybe not. You see, I'm part-Vulcanized. Some of us go thru mating urges every 7 years, and it is called the pon far. Some of us instead feel the urge to become standup comedians, and when we gather it becomes the pun fair.

It's not pun fair. It's perfectly fair.

Don't be sheepish about it, Serge. Puns are part of the fabric of my life!

I don't know, abi. It may be beyond the pale.

#125 Mez--A seamstress is not quite the same as a dresmaker, usually; a dressmaker makes a wide range of women's clothing, which may include some tailoring, depending on the dressmaker. They certainly should be able to fit a commercial pattern, and in some cases can draft a pattern as well. Like 'tailor', 'dressmaker' is pretty much gender neutral these days. A seamstress is just a woman who sews, and may be highly skilled, or just so-so. (I owe this information to my grandmother, who made her living that way for a good many years after my grandfather died. bear in mind that usage here may be affected by the fact that Grandma was in the central US--Missouri Ozarks--and was born in 1890, so her usages might be old-fashioned today.) The old form is 'sempstress', IIRC, which would probably mean a male form 'sempster'. The'p' may be silent.

In the Parisian couture houses, 'petit main' is a term used for the people doing the construction work; 'premiere main' is the supervisor for that section, whether they're doing construction, decoration, or whatever. Another term used is 'midinette'; I don't know which gets preference currently. (This I owe to a Fench-English dictionary)

Nancy @140:

It may be beyond the pale.

I can has bukkit?

"Puns are the lowest form of humor - unless you think of it first."
- Seamus Zelazny Harper

(abi, what does that mean?)

pale => pail => => bucket => bukkit

In other words, I can has punz.

D'oh! Indeed you can, and do! (Did'ja get the fair/pale pun?)

Oh, I got it, all white.

abi, nancy... It's all going down hill, the goose said.

Tania and fidelio:

Part of the reason I brought up sewist is because it was new to me and I hadn't found another gender-neutral word for it. I sorta wanted to get opinions on it from a crowd of word-savvy people. I figured at the very least people would complain if it was awful.

I like seamster a lot, too, and it seems to have a bit of the weight of tradition behind it. Hm.

Anyone been withholding an opinion that wants to pipe up on the matter?

Coming soon to a contract negotiation near you: The International Union of Seamsters.

I'm just darting in quickly to note how hemmed in I feel by the puns overtaking this thread as it unspools its way down the page.

Not that I want to rip into any of you...

Sarah S... Hmm... I see that you are a glutton for punishment.

Some people are just constructing puns out of whole cloth. I'm darned if I know why.

Fidelio #141: The OED gives both 'seamster' and 'sempster'. It notes 'Originally a designation of a woman, but in OE. already applicable to a man. Now only applied to one of the male sex, seamstress being commonly used for a female sewer.'

The first citation dates to 995.

Fragano @153:
Some people are just constructing puns out of whole cloth. I'm darned if I know why.

Because weave nothing more relevant to say.

Woof.

Nancy @156
...a warped comment, if ever I saw one.

abi, if I have lost your regard, I will be be-weft.

I may even be sley-n.

Nancy,

Give in to no looming dreads in this context; I'll not be thought to have satin judgment on a fellow punster.

Worry not, nor be on jacquard. Twill be OK.

I don't cotton to all this punning, you know!

yarn ever going to forget this thread, fellow punsters and punsterettes.

Abi #155: Truly is it written, as ye sew so shall ye rip.

So -that- was what was going on with the flag at Ft Sempster?

Fragano @153

We're just trying to avoid a looming disaster...

Michael I #165: Then you should be worried if things unravel.

Reading some of the comments above, I can't help remembering the real function of the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Seamstresses.

I got all excited when I saw comment #3, because I thought it might be the source of this song. But alas, it does not seem to be. Does anybody know who does sing that song?

Fragano@166

Hopefully we can at least get some purls of wisdom out of the situation...

At least if we aren't too knitpicky...

Tiger Spot@168: Isn't that (portions of) Pi by Kate Bush?

David @170: If you can confirm it is reasonably close, that would be great. We listened to it, and to the first-30-seconds sample of Kate Bush's Pi that Amazon has up, and they sound like quite different songs. I suppose it's entirely possible that Kate Bush's version suddenly picks up a bass beat and the singing goes from lyrical to metronomic when she gets to the numbers (since those are well after the first 30 seconds), but with us just listening to the two and trying to decide if it sounded like the same singer and intrumentation or not, it didn't seem likely enough to bet the cost of a CD on.

Well, one obvious thing to do is compare the numbers in that video to the numbers in the lyrics of the song. A ways in, Kate Bush messes things up. (Google "kate bush pi" and you'll find commentary on it.) I'd do it myself, except I'm typing this from a hotel lobby in Cincinnati, and won't have access to the needed resources until after the Ha'Party, which means more than a week.

I listened to a short bit of that URL you posted, and that's definitely not from the Kate Bush song Pi. It's certainly not her voice; sounds like it might be a synthesized voice.

O dear. I just want to feed her prunes. this is not a good thing.

#174 looks like it was generated by a schizophrenia simulator.

Bruce, I don't think so. Unless that's someone cleverly assuming her ID, belledame's quite real; she just has an extraordinarily quirky sense of humor.

Dan 176: I almost made the same mistake you just did...note the time doesn't match. I think the schizospam was already deleted.

Oops! Wouldn't be the first time I missed some vital piece of the action while I was off writing poetry.

Never mind, then. Carry on.

#108 is a word-for-word repeat of an earlier comment.

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