At last, a Current thread!

(Waits for thrown vegetables from the direction of Hoboken)

I thought currants were fruit rather than vegetables.

Never mind.

Ripe currants can be very tasty fresh.

*stretching, scratching, swings tail*

Ah, that's better! Thank you.

You keep it up, Abi, and I'll have to buy the DVD of Dragonheart.

Serge, step away from the cheese.

Walk out of the store. Do not purchase anything.

Jakob: No no no. 93 designates "Love is the Law, Love under Will"; and everyone knows that it takes more willpower to eat your vegetables than fruits. QED.

Has anyone pointed out lately that "Fragano Ledgister" scans fairly nicely to Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay? It would make a great campaign song were he to run for public office.

I must have too much time on my hands....

Does anyone here have any familiarity with the British Museum/Uni. Texas Press 'World of Myths/The Legendary Past' series? I've been looking at the collected hardbacks for a while, as I don't really have anything on the major myth collections, and was hoping these would be a good basic set.

Continued from end of previous Open Thread. In response to this poem, I told Abi I loved it but wanted to see it end with a final couplet that says something about the ongoing need to declutter my house. Or have my dragon-loving 15-year-old clean her room.

She offered:
But even we, when overwhelmed with stuff,
Must tidy up at times. Enough's enough!

That's going up on the refrigerator door this evening, with proper attribution, of course. Thanks much.

ethan @ 6... Humph... Your comment only makes me want to buy the DVD of Dragonslayer. Now THAT is cheese.

Earl Cooley III #8: I will run, for the border.

Earl #8: (apologies to Fragano)

There was a man, Fragano L
Who'd come comment on threads for a spell
He'd quote Locke in a comment
Write abi a sonnet
and end with a new villanelle

Agh. What do you call an earworm crossed with an intriguing name? Because Earl just set one off. Fascinating how a very well-worn neural track combined with a unique set of syllables starts consuming so many background cycles.

Serge #11: OK! OK! I take it back! For the love of God, I take it back!

Fragano #12: The border, you say?

(Cue big band)

South of the border
down where poets play
writing a rhyming line
and drinking wine
(or Appleton if he may)
But up here we wonder
why couldn't he stay?
Fragano Ledgister -
your poems display!

I missed Eureka's season finale last week. Did someone record it? Say you did. Please.

OtterB, thanks for asking Abi for the alternate ending, and Abi, many thanks for providing it. This will be on my fridge tonight, too.

Serge @ 17
If that was the two-parter ... I watched it Sunday afternoon. Things are left hanging (although Stark seems to be getting his personal life back together and becoming really human). I'd say more, but it requires Revealing Plot.

R.M.Koske @ 18... Abi, many thanks for providing it. This will be on my fridge tonight

Watch out for excessive accumulation of rime on the rhyme otherwise you'll have to thaw the whole thing out.

albatross & Jakob:

What have I done, that you should hurt me thus?
I did not think to injure one poor soul
and yet my words, as they swing past the pole,
seem to occasion merriment and fuss.
I'd not say anything (rather I'd cuss)
because in time I see my dearest goal
is to play here a better, purer role;
to every minus add a double plus.
But now, I have to turn from duller work
to thank you for your efforts at rhymed verse
and show I'm no foul spirit nor mooncalf.
A challenge of this sort I cannot shirk;
I'd write much better, but I fear I'm worse,
and smile discreetly when others might laugh.

ethan @ 15.. You caught me in time. I was about to buy the two Dungeon and Dragon movies.

Fragano #21: 'Doggerel' I'd have accepted, but words that 'hurt you thus'? Sir, 'twas not my intent.

P J Evans @ 19... That's the two-parter, yes. I did see the first part. You wouldn't happen to have Part Two, would you?

Stark becoming human? What a concept. Heck, we had tough-girl Jo dream of Fargo as Zorro protecting her virtue from Stark as the evil landowner. So, why not that?

Serge, I was watching over at a friend's house, where it was recorded on the cable-system thing. I have no idea how to save or transfer from there.

PJ @ 25... There may be a way to transfer a recording from a DVR to TiVO to a disk, but I don't have either device. Maybe someone reading this could tell us. Anyway, if it's to much of a hassle, I'll just have to keep an eye on the SciFi Channel's schedule in case they repeat it. Speaking of their schedule, did you know that this weekend they'll show something called Wraiths of Roanoke, starring... Adrian Paul.

Ta ra ra boom de ay
Fragano Legister
shows no wish to bang
the political gong.

But if he should enter a
gubernatorial
contest--he'd sure have
one hell of a song.

Reviewing the WW I discussion in the other thread prompts me to point out that von Trapp's WW I U-boat memoirs have finally been translated into English by one of his great*granddaughters. Odd factoid: his first wife was the granddaughter of the British inventor of the torpedo.

* not sure how many "great"s involved here

jakob #9:

Do you mean "looking at" in the sense of browsing them on someone's shelves, or in the sense of seeing it at Amazon?

'Cause if it's the latter:

I've got three of them in paperback, bought a couple of UT Press sales ago, on spec, as it were, in case I needed some nice myths (with pictures) for some future fantasy or other. (Serial-number filing being all the rage.)

They're 80 pp each, have b&w illustrations, are in a style that reminds me a bit of Bulfinch and other purveyors of Myth.

Greg L from previous thread:

Thanks for the whole time chart for Getting Stuff Cold.

Once again you guys have managed to floor me with the variety of things that it would never occur to me could be found on Wikipedia, but which are.

(How did I miss that mythbusters episode? Some of the others I've seen like three times.)

joann @ 30... How did I miss that mythbusters episode?

The concrete mixer's grand finale is now part of their show's opening credits. One of my favorites is the one where they built a rocket using technology available during the Civil War.

In #14 Joe McMahon writes:

Agh. What do you call an earworm crossed with an intriguing name? Because Earl just set one off. Fascinating how a very well-worn neural track combined with a unique set of syllables starts consuming so many background cycles.

The well-known example of paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde was first pointed out by Isaac Asimov.

(Tip o' the hat to Mike Van Pelt for the quote.)

Lurkers as dragons, then ?

Dragons, shamgons, eh?
silent readers lurk, backlit
fluorosperic green

Jakob #23: I needed something that would rhyme with 'plus'. It also provided the 'fake-wounded' note that I wanted. I wasn't truly hurt, I assure you.

Sarah S #27: If I ever seek public office, I'll think of you as my songwriter, but you'll have to improve your spelling!

Serge #31:

actually I was talking about the time-to-freeze one, not the concrete mixer.

But speaking of exploding concrete mixers, has anyone else been watching "Build It Bigger"? The last episode Mr Tivo grabbed for us involved an exploding concrete nozzle, which we got to watch replay in slo-mo while a rock as big as the Ritz tried (and failed) to come out the end. (It came out the side instead.)

Excuse me, in #36 I meant "time-to-chill". I've already proven that frozen cokes are Not Good.

#17: Try http://www.scifi.com/eureka/video/index.php to watch videos of recent episodes on your computer. Not the best way, but better than nothing.

Serge @ 22

No, no that's cheese whiz

Fragano #35

Oy gevalt!

I'm sorry!!! And, as is seemingly inevitable, I misspell your name within 24 hours of kvetching about people who can't spell mine!

Larry Lennhoff @ 35... I had forgotten about that possibility. Thanks for the reminder.

Joann @ 36.. I wonder if the MythBusters ever tried to blow up a frozen Coke. They did blow up a few lava lamps.

As for "build it bigger", that sounds interesting. Very much so.

I notice today's Snopes has a Mythbusters-style video clip on it. It doesn't have the same, er, visual panache, though.

Help!

Maia is having troubles with school, and my ability to help seems, at present, to be a tad less than ideal.

She needs online articles (preferably journal articles) which discuss "occupation based practice" (related to Occupational Therapy).

This is, of course, a term of art (it's an old use of occupation; what we might call today activity; not a job/employment).

If it is about work with horses that would be even better.

When I'm done/she's got something usable, I can explain some of the problems, but now I have to dive back into my searches.

Thanks.

Checking back...rereading Serge's #22...wait, what? There are two of those?!?

Yeesh.

Terry Karney #44 Try NARHA, the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association, here They have some resources including this pdf on research written by an OT that might give her some starting points

ethan @ 45... There was indeed a theatrical D&D movie, in 2001, I think. I never saw it even though it had Jeremy Irons in it. There was a later D&D movie that went straight to the SciFi Channel. Sans Jeremy, alas. At least the elf girl was cute, but the dragon had moth-eaten holes in its wings.

Terry, I haven't found anything on horses, but:

Price P, Miner S.
Occupation emerges in the process of therapy.
American Journal of Occup Ther. 2007 Jul-Aug;61(4):441-50.

Segal R, Hinojosa J.
The activity setting of homework: an analysis of three cases and implications for occupational therapy.
Am J Occup Ther. 2006 Jan-Feb;60(1):50-9.

Chan J, Spencer J.
Adaptation to hand injury: an evolving experience.
Am J Occup Ther. 2004 Mar-Apr;58(2):128-39.

Occupation by design: dimensions, therapeutic power, and creative process.
Am J Occup Ther. 2001 May-Jun;55(3):249-59.

those at least sound interesting. Pubmed is my friend.

joann @37: Excuse me, in #36 I meant "time-to-chill". I've already proven that frozen cokes are Not Good.

Actually, frozen cokes are Good, provided you make them without freezing them in the (about-to-be-)ex-can, thereby creating a gods-awful mess in the freezer.

(Admittedly, I'm thinking more "slushy" stage than "cokesicle" stage. But the shrapnel-and-coke-everywhere stage is Right Out.)

Oops, bad link to research pdf in #46, should be www.narha.org/PDFfiles/research.pdf

Not my field, Terry, but I did a search on MedLine and found several articles on "hippotherapy," for what it's worth. Also found these, which I include as examples:

Snider, L. "Horseback riding as therapy for children with cerebral palsy: is there evidence of its effectiveness?" Physical & Occupational Therapy In Pediatrics 27.2 (2007)5-23.

Meregillano G. "Hippotherapy." Physical medicine and rehabilitation clinics of North America 15.4 (2004): 843-54.

Apologies for the wonky formatting--I'm typing in a hurry. If you don't have access to MedLine or its EBSCO equivalent, let me know; I can probably email you a couple of fulltext articles.

Sarah S #40: It happens, what can I say?

Some place you folks have here. Just browsing through on a recommendation and love the civil tone.

(Here's hoping suralc doesn't look too closely at the other active threads...)

ethan - I'm new to blogs, so my experience is limited. But from what I've observed, there is a general level of respect , regardless of opposing views, shown by commenters.

I just finished reading "Great Political Blog Posts of Our Time " and the comments, and if ever there were a post ripe for flame, that was it.

Either the proprietors have gifted hands, or people here have decided that honest discourse is preferable to some of the, well, shite I have seen elsewhere. Or both.

And Bravo Ezra!

suralc: I think it's "both."

Welcome!

Mary Frances: I understand about the not your line. If you could send a full-text of the former (my.name at gmail.com) that might help.

Things are less hectic (for the moment). The problem is USC has a terrible search engine for journals (Ovid. It might be swell, but I suspect it takes lots of training, which they don't give; so far as I can tell it doesn't take boolean modifiers. Maia says you have to create a search and then use secondary limiters to reduce the returns. The limiters [so far as I am concerned] aren't counterintuitive, they are anti-intuitive. I've been able to reduce the 10533 returns to zero, but nothing in between).

But the competition for her time (today) is gone, so I can work at a, slightly, slower pace.

Back to the trenches.

suralc @55:
Either the proprietors have gifted hands, or people here have decided that honest discourse is preferable to some of the, well, shite I have seen elsewhere. Or both.

Both. You can't have it any other way; the absence of one will break the spirit of the other.

But it's a virtuous spiral, too. The community is self-sustaining when the principals are away, because we agree - to a large extent - with the values with which they shepherd the community. That's why we're here.

Welcome, by the way. You don't, by any chance, write poetry? Sonnets? Villanelles?* Pantoums? That sort of thing?

-----
* All the regulars are now rolling their eyes. There goes Abi, recruiting for the Making Light Company of Versifiers and Doggerel-Smiths again. But I like new poets!

Joann @ 29: Thanks! I'd just seen it through a bookshop window, and from the descriptions I found online I couldn't tell how academic the texts were.

Continuing the previous WWI threads: I assume that the argument that the US's entry prolonged the war assumes that the Central Powers would have won otherwise?

suralc: We have our flaws. There have been, not completely wrong, accusations of "groupthink"

I think (just me) it's a case of, mostly, likeminded people reacting to things they disagree with.

By itself that's not so bad; but this is a discontinous medium, so a lot of disagreement can happen at once.

If the recipient's back gets up, well it can get heated (cf. the post you praised).

But it's one of the more pleasant places to get into heated discussion on the web.

Abi... There goes Abi, recruiting for the Making Light Company of Versifiers and Doggerel-Smiths again.

Watch it, suralc. Abi is a rhyminal mastermind.

As a longtime lurker (who reads nearly everything, and doesn't add much), I'll submit a bit of doggerel, with a nod to yabonn @ 33, who gave me the thought.

We lurkers are dragons
(or so we are told),
So circle the wagons--
We're here for the gold.

But can they be taken,
these coins cast from thought?
Does wisdom awaken,
or can it be caught?

I don't know the answers,
but have high regards
for the grand versomancers:
the Making Light Bards.

I'd rather be a dragon with a flagon full of ale than a Hobbit with a habit of slurping beer from a pail.

alsafi #62: Nicely done!

I'd rather be a dragoon by a blue lagoon, or maybe a tycoon landing on the blue Moon.

Terry Karney@57: By now you've gotten the email with the full article citation but NOT the full text. Again, my apologies. Silly me: I thought if the citation was in "Medline FullText," that meant full text was available. And when I tried through the journal link or secondary databases, the "fulltext" function was down.

I'm sorry. I tried to help--I know how much fun (not) it is when you are struggling with a deadline and a recalcitrant (or impossible-to-use) search engine; Maia has my sympathy.

Terry - I have access to a lot of journals online. Sending you one article, but it would help if you could give me a better idea of the project. Leaving work (and journal access) soon but will wait a bit to see if you get back to me on this in time to be useful today.

I'd rather be dragging the ass that's dragging the wagon than be dragged by the ass behind the wagon, as was said by the wag that sat on the ass that was dragging the wagon.

Along came a dragon.

The End.

bryan @ #68, that sentence needs to be a podcast.

I'm thinking that suralc might write doggerel backwards.

Mary Frances: Got it. I think I'd found it, but I'm not sure (I've looked at a lot of paper titles in the past couple of hours).

I think the abstract is enough. I'll ask.

Susan: I got the thing you sent, and will forward.

I am not sure just what she needs. This is a place where her instructor failed the class; everyone thought the assignment was one thing but it wasn't.

So they now have to do the work, while keeping up with everything else.

Here is the assignment, as Maia explains it to me (the instructor didn't write it out, even after the misunderstanding)

She needs articles for which the end product will use evidence from an Ocuppational Science Journal, from which they will design a program. The present assignement is to find articles which describe practices which have already been designed around an occupation based practice model. Her group is working on designing a pediatric practice; she is looking for information on hippotherapy/therapeutic riding.

I think that hits the high points. If I got it, I will be better able to find things.

So abstracts are ok, because if they look good (IIUC) they can pull them through USC.

One way to consider the anthropomorphic concept of Death is as a friend, someone who welcomes you at the end of your life, and ushers you to the next stage of existence, whatever that may be. Neil Gaiman's Death from the Sandman stories and Terry Pratchett's Discworld Death can be considered as being that sort of thing, more or less: Death as psychopomp.

Another way to consider Death is as an enemy; the great thief who steals away loved ones, and steals away the world from everyone.

This film is for those who for whatever reason tend towards the latter concept.

How to Cope With Death, by Ignacio Ferreras (3:20)

TomB is perceptive. Thanks for the welcome. I'll be here often.

I am a knight, my bearings a dragon
proper (indeed) on barry wavy field,
a sign that land or sea I do not yield.
Still I'm happier with leather flagon
(not being the sort who'd go on the waggon),
that sort of weapon's easier to wield
but none would dare to limn it upon shield,
but truly all my fortune comes from lagan.
Now, tellers of romances all agree
that dragons far from eating ladies fair
are gentle creatures, always kind and sweet;
an awful state, this one that's come to be,
when dragons fly unhindered through the air,
and never knight and monster come to meet.

I'd like to thank you all for saving my sanity during an unexpected 6-hour layover in Denver. I quickly finished all the reading material I'd brought in carry-on, and the airport newsstand didn't offer much. (I didn't find the real bookstore in another concourse until the return trip.) There were approx 2 science fiction books to choose from. But the Making Light regulars all seem to think that this Charles Stross knows how to tell a good tale, and here was "Glasshouse" just out in paperback. So I bought a copy (and this is one of those cases where the tree carcass is definitely preferable to the evanescent electronic edition). All I can say is... WOW! And, now of course I have to read "Accelerando."

Terry, here's another:

"Effects of Hippotherapy on Postural Stability, in Persons with Multiple Sclerosis" by Debbie Silkwood-Sherer, PT, MS, and Heather Warmbier, MPT. Published in the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy, Vol. 31 No. 2 (June 2007)

Jakob @ #59:

As I understand the argument, the premise is that the Central Powers and the Allies were running out of manpower, tired of war, and having domestic problems. Without America to spur on a last push from the Central Powers, and to reinforce later Allied attacks, the theory is that the First World War would have ended in a tie.

That would have rather dramatic effects on the next few decades - no punitive treaty at Versailles, a more isolationist America, and a different kind of lesson about what happened when great powers threw down for real in the 20th century.

(One alternative outcome, where the Central Powers won after recruiting female soldiers for the Valkyrie Corps and instituted a post-war militant matriarchy, should at least be good for a SciFi movie of the week. As long as it has a role for Claudia Black.)

How interesting: Mr. Google assures me that Hippotherapy is not a typo.

FungiFromYuggoth @ 77... the Central Powers won after recruiting female soldiers for the Valkyrie Corps and instituted a post-war militant matriarchy, should at least be good for a SciFi movie of the week. As long as it has a role for Claudia Black.

I can't wait for the DVD.

joann@30: Once again you guys have managed to floor me with the variety of things that it would never occur to me could be found on Wikipedia

Well, I knew where to look. I certainly didn't google "rapid cooling drinks" and work my way there. I'd seen the episode, and started on the wikipedia mythbusters page. (actually, I started on the Mythbuster home page, but they didn't reveal much information other than that they attempted to cool beer in sand with fire.)

They tried to come up with various inventions to cool a drink even faster, but turned out that ice+water+salt was way easier and pretty effective compared to any contraption they came up with.

Reminded me of the episode about soda and Mentos. They isolated the compounds that caused the reaction (I forget what they were), and then they tried to come up with some other reaction that would be even bigger. But turned out they couldn't find anything that was nearly as easy to find as soda+mentos and as cool of a reaction.

Greg London @ 80... I can't remember which ingredient in the drink did the trick, but one contributing factor were the tiny hollows of the mentos themselves.

USB Drink Chiller & Warmer

Earl: Why did you think it a typo?

To one an all who provided links, titles, encouragement and warm thougts, my thanks, Maia's thanks and all good wishes that bread cast on the waters shall come back to you one hundred fold.

Someone said that surviving grad school is one of the toughest things a couple can do, and let me say, I agree.

Old thinkers circle their wagons
Second-rate minds set the tone
I have no map for my dragons
and so I must search on my own

Hacking out new code in Java
Sequencing genomes for fun
Chipping off pieces of lava
Pinholing pictures of sun

Children just playing with rockets
hacking with maple and math
Acorns and bugs in their pockets
buoyancy shown in their bath

Old men still mulling their data
Anomalies puzzling them still
can't put off thinking till later
Till death they shall not have their fill

This girl sees patients and wonders
if she could connect all those dots
That guy sees germs of a theory
in pages of rough-printed plots

Dragons are what we are seeking
and seek them we shall, till we're dead
God has the map; there's no peeking
though you dream it's there all in your head

in microscopes, telescopes, flagons
in isotope ratios in bone
I have no map for my dragons
and so I must search on my own

Some random musings on what makes an author a Great Author: At least part of the distinction is something like this...

Common authors can write tales that are appealing the first time you read them, because they're new -- like some pretty object that draws your attention for a while -- but when you reread them, they're not nearly as interesting the second and third times, because they depended so much on novelty.

In contrast, the Great Authors write stories that are more like something you'd put up on your wall, or keep on your desk just to look at, because they're special in their own right. Every time you read them they still affect you strongly, and distinctively. That is, they affect you similarly every time -- if your response to them changes, it's because you've changed.

This came to me as I had decided to take a break from my memorial reading of Wheel of Time, having (again) found Fires of Heaven to be difficult going, even more so than The Shadow Rising.

So, I picked up the first volume of the Sandman graphic novels for a break. (Those were among the last things to go on my bookshelves post-move -- but by the same token, I made sure they were up front and accessible!)

And I found myself crying over "The Sound Of Her Wings"... again. It's not like I cry so easily, especially over fiction. But, beginning with that story, Gaiman reaches something really basic, something that stretches back as far as the poem he quotes via Morpheus, and further. And every damn time I read that tale, I'm moved to tears.

Another hint is when the author's work just becomes part of people's semantic memories... as when reading Serge's joke in #20, I immediately flashed from "rime" to the "Rimer's Tree" from Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. And apparently I wasn't alone, as in the very next comment, we see a "mooncalf" poke its nose out from Fragano's verse....

Oops, I desiblified Tad Williams' name with a misplaced apostrophe....

On a lighter note, Aaron Neathery did a "mad" riff on self-cooling soda in his guest strips for Shaenon Garrity's Narbonic.

Serge - if you haven't watched the last episode of Eureka yet, it's available at iTunes for $1.99. (And you can, ahem, back up your iTunes purchases, so maybe you can watch it via your dvd player.)

I subscribed for Season 2, but I haven't watched any of it yet - I'm saving it for watching on the road in November. I hope this season of Eureka is as good as the first one!

(back to lurking, all dragon-like)

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age"

Jesus. What a gasbag of a movie. Damn shame, too. A lot of pretty stuff to look at, but christ what a waste of *so* much money.

Probably the most beautiful but most inept naval battles I've ever seen. You know you are an incompetent filmmaker when you totally eff up The Destruction of the Spanish Armada.

(If that's a spoiler for anyone, you deserve it.)

Sharon M @ 87... I hope this season of Eureka is as good as the first one!

It's even better.

Terry Karney #83: Why did you think it a typo?

I plead ignorance. My edumacation wasn't quite as eclectic as it was for many of the luminaries here. When I saw the word "hippotherapy" I thought in terms of what if there were a Mad TV comedy skit where a hippopotamus petting zoo goes horribly wrong.

Michael #88: You mean the Spanish don't invade England? Arghh! You've ruined the movie for me.

Actually, one of the more fun Harry Turtledove books concerns an alternate history in which the Armada succeeds, _Ruled Britania_. And the main two characters are both rather famous writers in OTL.

#90 Earl:

I was visualizing a really hardcore variant of that massage technique where the person walks on your back. ("The last back treatment you'll ever need.")

Though any book on hippotherapy ought to be written and illustrated by Sandra Boynton.

albatross #91

Pavanne is a dance
It's also a book.
Perhaps it is one
At which you should look

The English they lost
A battle at sea
The Spaniards did triumph,
Quite vigorously.

And Protestant England
It ceased then to be,
Stamped out by fanatic
Orthodoxy.

And centuries later
And late they arrived
Industrial trains
From somewhere on the side,

There came revolution
And iron to land,
Alternate histories,
See how they stand.

I'd like to see an alternate history novel where we lose the war with Grenada. The medical students on the island unleash a genetically altered virus that makes everyone really really nauseous.

"Du-u-u-u-de! Don't interrupt our education with your stupid invasions, okay?"

Jakob @ #59:

90 years ago, in 1917, Russia was defeated and Italy was almost knocked out of the war by the Battle of Caporetto. There were mutinies in the French Army. Although Turkey wasn't much better.

The defeat of Russia released large numbers of troops for operations in the West.

So, without the USA, there was a possibility for the Central Powers to be in a strong enough position for a negotiated settlement.

Unfortunately, as a consequence of Blockade and the manpower absorbed by the military, their economies were in a death-spiral. A bit of French stubbornness, and there might have been a genuinely undefeated German Army forced to an armistice by economic collapse.

In other words, the betrayal myth of OTL might have been closer to the reality.

Throw in the influenza, and you could end up with something pretty dark and grim for a post-war Europe--famine, disease, Empires seeing Bolshevists behind every ill.

Brad DeLong points to work on a lolcat version of the Bible. Just so everybody here knows.

"10. o, wait. wen teh perfict coemz, teh not perfict will diez, lolol.

11. wen i wuz a kitten, i speakded leik a kitten, thinkded liek a kittenz, reezined liek a kittenz. wen i wuz becomez a cat, i no haz kitten waiz ne moar."

Teh Gospel of John is pretty good, too.

A question:

How many novels, having won major awards, stay in print?

I know I've read some Hugo-winners in tatty editions picked up second-hand, printed around the time they won the award. Others get reprints, eventually.

But maybe being in print now isn't such a good measure? It's just easier to check.

albatross @ 84

Very nice!

Steve C.

My wife keeps threatening to design a virus that specifically targets assholes, with a mortality rate proportional to the amount of gape of a given subject. That's the sort of virus the med students of Grenada should have developed. Think of hte effect on the halls of power; Washington, DC, especially around K Street, would be completely depopulated.

Administrative Note #1
=============================================
The old e-mail associated with this alias is actually defunct, on account of moving two states further East from when I originally created the account. (Frakin' Comcast....) As a result, I am having to use a new e-mail. Not wanting to lose the thread-post chain forever (or risk being labeled as things I'd rather not be labeled as) I am posting this here, under the old e-mail, to be followed on by another post with the new e-mail.

Administrative Note #2
=============================================
I've argued with a heap of people over the last 6 years. Some self-identify as liberal, some as conservative, some as libertarian, and some as nothing in particular. Re-reading the LibHawk thread it occurs to me that not once, in that entire 6 years, did anyone ever really sway me from my original positions; nor did I have much success in swaying them from theirs. In point of fact, if I drift back in my mind through all the internet discussions that have been political in nature, and in which I participated to any degree, almost nobody said, "Whoa! I never thought of that before! You might be right!" People (myself included) tended to stick to their guns, and more often than not, things got angry, and then we all really had cotton in our ears.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I had something of a come to Jesus moment. A friend of mine, and with whom I have disagreed heatedly on many political issues over time, said to me, hey, you know what, I am sick of all the internet debating. And he didn't just mean between the two of us. He meant between himself and the whole cyberverse. He was exhausted. He felt like all that was being accomplished was a whole lot of people getting pissed off at each other, and for what? What good was it accomplishing or doing anyone in their lives? It was anger for the sake of anger, rancor for the sake of rancor.

I sat back and thought pretty hard about that, and had to conclude that he'd touched on an almost spiritual meme: when does dialogue cease to be dialogue, and instead become a corrosive on the soul?

By nature, I'm not a guy who enjoys being angry, nor staying angry. And when I think of all the internet debates I've been party to since 2001, I must conclude that I've wasted vast personal resources getting upset over all kinds of shit and at all kinds of people, and it never actually accomplished anything positive. Not a lick of good came out of any of it, either for me or for the people who participated.

So he and I made something akin to a pledge.

For the next 90 days I'm swearing off political cyber-debate. Cold turkey. Here. On the other forums I frequent. Gonna pull the needle out of my arm. I can't stop the rest of the world from enacting the final scenes of "Needful Things", but I can cease my participation in the soul-corrosion. Either as a giver or a taker of said corrosive.

Because in the end, what good is accomplished--personal, political, social, psychological, spiritual?

Not much.

Assuming the 90 days goes well, I might get out of the arguing racket for keeps. At least on political issues. I might not give up having an opinion, but I can eschew expressing it and harping on things through communication modes which lend themselves to corrosive, pointless results.

Anyway, just wanted to put it out for the group.

Administrative Note #3
=================================================
New e-mail. The bookmarks for old/new have been established, in case anyone in the future cares to track back through my posts.

Dave @ #85: I have often felt similarly about the television version of "The Maxx". While no condensed or televised adaptation of a comic or novel ever truly succeeds in being 100% true to the original material, I keep coming back to "The Maxx" as one of those startling and unexpected gems that one occasionallty finds amid the dross of cable 'entertainment' TV.

Along with "Liquid Television", I like to think that "The Maxx" (and "Daria") was one of those animation projects that MTV got right, in spite of there being every indication that they'd get it wrong. Chalk it up to writing, I guess? And strong source material?

Anyway, I just wish "The Maxx" could be had on DVD. We've got the three-DVD deluxe "Æon Flux", so when the hell are they gonna give us a DVD for "The Maxx"? If that never happens, I will be seriously, seriously upset.

Terry #83: Someone said that surviving grad school is one of the toughest things a couple can do, and let me say, I agree.

Any tips? The SO started her PhD a few weeks ago; for added fun, she's doing it part-time (although her supervisor has said he'll transfer her at the usual point if she produces a good enough report, which she should.)

CRV @100 & 101:
First off, good resolution. I go through periodic waves of resolving to hold as few opinions as possible*, and discuss them rarely.

And although internet discussions can change minds, they're rarely successful at it. I'm not sure the success rate is worth the effort.

Secondly, if I were you, I would repost the account move information in Comment 100 into a new comment under the new address, with a pointer to the old address in it. Just c&p the following text into your posting:

<a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/commentlist-oneauthor.php?author=CommunityRadioVet&email=roadwarrior1974@comcast.net"> my old View All By</a>

Then someone doing a View All By on the new you can click a link to trace back to the old you.

-----
* Which is still a fair number; I need to have opinions to function in society.

CRV @100 and All,

Today's NYTimes has a nifty article on email (mis)communications that's applicable to any online conversation.

In short: "e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone."

"the absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks...we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended...'When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome — you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle'..."

What this means is we must have more Fluorospheridae gatherings*.

-----------------
*I'm still planning to hold one at Denver's Worldcon.

#78: How interesting: Mr. Google assures me that Hippotherapy is not a typo.

I naturally assumed it involved travelling to some African country, there to wallow in glorious mud. Sounds rather nice.

ajay: Sounds like a transport of delight.

Hmm. I dropped by here to leave a link in the latest open thread, which now seems rather off-topic. Ah, well.

Here is what I was going to post: a singing Tesla coil which I have been assured plays the Tetris theme music.

I suppose this fits with the Mythbusters/things-go-splodey theme, tangentially at least.

Back to the hoarding of words--is being a blogdragon related to being a bookworm?

Jakob #107: It is, but then the gasman cometh.

Disentangle the Making Light posters to win no valuable prizes!

1. Solar Bats
2. Kind impala
3. Silken Mitre
4. Nth tor gnome
5. Bring lasagna
6. Weird plankton
7. Camel with hole
8. Oily ace oilier
9. Doggie transferal
10. Foggy Uniform Thug
11. Mom Dad jeans clad
12. Vindicate Rummy too
13. Thy cold horrid host
14. Alien hyperdance knits
15. Hygienic Kibble Logjams
16. Oceanographers rename buckets

#110: Main Ally Clue: Disentangle the Making Light posters to win no valuable prizes!

The only one I can't figure out is:

7. Camel with hole

alsafi #62, welcome, I enjoyed it. Perhaps welcome isn't right for someone who's been lurking regularly? Congratulations on your coming-out poem

albatross #84 *applause*

re, #92: I thought hippotherapy was an exotic veterinary specialty, though I agree that the manual should be illustrated by Boynton.

Nenya@108:

Maybe blogdragon is to bookwyrm. I'll certainly cop to having a hoard of papery treasures that take pride of place (ie, anywhere vaguely horizontal that is not a chair) in my dwelling...

albatross @ 84
*ow*

bravo.

I had been invited to a party by a kind impala. "Bring lasagna," she told me, "it's pot luck." So I said goodbye to my parents, both of whom were wearing Levis, and went to mount my camel, but fell off because the poor thing had a hole right through its hump.

"Fine," I thought, "I'll go by boat." But before I had gone very far I found my way blocked by some immovable masses of floating logs crowded together, which, strangely enough, were mixed in with a lot of very clean iron buckets of the sort one might use for hauling water out of wells. On the riverbank, a couple of oceanographers were playing cards and chatting. "We can't keep calling them hygienic kibble logjams," said one. "We should rename those buckets. When I pull mine out of the water, they're always full of weird plankton." "Really?" said the other one. "Show me thy cold horrid host." The first oceanographer complied, but warned, "Don't dip your cards in the bucket! You don't want to make your oily ace oilier." "It might make the game more exciting," opined the second. "It would vindicate Rummy, too."

At that point they heard me calling for help. At first they were inclined to ignore me. One said to the other, "We don't want to get involved with some foggy uniform thug." I was quite offended when I heard this, but looking down at myself I could see how they might have got this impression of me. I wished I had put on my brightly coloured alien hyperdance knits instead. Then I felt in my pocket, and lo and behold! I found my silken mitre. I put it on my head and it had an immediate and positive effect on the oceanographers. They helped me to shore and onto a sledge drawn by huskies, guided through the gloom by some solar bats which glowed as they flew before us.

This method of doggie transferal soon brought me to my destination. I was fashionably late; numerous editorial staff, many of them very short, had already arrived. After I had greeted N-1 of them, the Nth Tor gnome found a dish for my lasagna and gave me a glass of wine. It was certainly a memorable evening.

Dragons once walked these lands, long ago,
But in their place now are screws and rats;
Where once molten fire scoured the hills,
Mere mammals build homes, houses, and flats.
But immortal fire is a strange affair
For where the ancient light once burned,
Word-fires arise, their substance, smoke and fuel
Academic; the lesson was learned.
Beasts are destroyed, monsters abolished,
And dragon slayers now only bore,
But in a world where nothing is real,
Dragons show their claws once more.

Administrative Note #4
================================================
abi, excellent idea!

my old View All By

Fragano, #109...

But he can't pass heat from a cooler to a hotter.

Dave Bell #119: Unless, apparently, you use a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube!

Kathryn @#105:

The lack of intonation in text communication far predates the Web -- it's been a problem literally since the beginning of E-mail. Back when I got started in the mid-80's, there were omnipresent FAQs trumpeting the issue, but in this Eternal September, few places even bother to try and educate all the new users....

#120: No Science Villain should be without a Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube. In extremis, you can connect it to the gas dump valve of your zeppelin* - producing an instant jet of incandescent hydrogen!

*You have a zeppelin, right? You don't? Amateur.

David Harmon #121

It does seem like an endless task. At least Newsreaders have killfiles to filter out the obvious dreck - I haven't yet seen anything similar for blogs (but then I haven't looked very hard).

Not that it really applies here - the signal to noise ratio is much higher in Making Light than other places.

Dave Bell #119: For that you'd need twenty tons of tnt.

Jakob: Forbearance, lots of it, on both sides.

All I can look at is how it affects us. There's never enough time; always too much to do. Things which would have been minor nuisances explode.

Pick up more than your share of the load (dishes, laundry, shopping, what have you).

If you can, get involved in the subject (I know a lot more about OT now than I ever thought I would). If you can help with some of the scutwork of the program (like finding articles) things seem more a team effort than the one person having to fight all the battles, while you have all the fun.

If you can really get into it, you can act as reader; and pick up some of the load (that does, however, require that the person in the program knows how to use a reader).

I think the way to look at it is, perhaps, one's beloved is suffering a dread disease and needs all the suppport one can manage, with as little resentment of how it's dominating everything, as possible.

Oh yeah, and reminding yourselves it will pass. Often.

A couple of thoughts from one of the war threads: There was talk of being in the resistance if the US were conquered by Canada or the UN or whoever. I can understand the impulse, but historically, most people accept getting conquered. At what point is it reasonable/moral to just accept that you've got a new government?

If George Bush surrendered to a foreign power, would you feel bound by it? What if he didn't surrender and told Americans to keep fighting?

Should there be laws of resistance comparable to laws of war?

And in re Iraq and WWII: The defeat of the Axis worked out extraordinarily well. I can't think of anything else like it in history, but I could be missing something.

Maybe it would be a good argument to say that expecting a WWII outcome from conquest is like expecting to get rich by betting your life savings on the double zero. It's possible in principle, but really, you shouldn't.

Starting with Katherine's post on Obsidian Wings, I've been reading about Khaled el-Masri today. Because I can't find a way to formulate thoughts about this that won't get me the same treatment he got, I'll just say this: it no longer makes sense to talk about the United States being on the verge of fascism. We crossed that line a ways ago and we're not looking back.

Terry #125:

I think the hardest thing for me, when my wife was in grad school, was accepting that right then, her work was more important than mine. That if there was a push between her writing her thesis and me finishing something up for work, I needed to let her write her thesis while I took the baby. The second thing that was hard was realizing that I still had to set some limits and priorities for my own time and interests, or I'd be squashed flat.

And years later, there's still some residual resentment/stress about my job and outside commitments vs. hers, even though she finished up several years ago. It's like those pressures were so intense, they shaped us even though they're long gone now.

Terry #83: Someone said that surviving grad school is one of the toughest things a couple can do, and let me say, I agree.

Jakob #103: Any tips? The SO started her PhD a few weeks ago; for added fun, she's doing it part-time (although her supervisor has said he'll transfer her at the usual point if she produces a good enough report, which she should.)

In 1992, I got married and started a PhD program. My new spouse was 2 years into a PhD program in a different department at the same university. Of the relationship and 2 academic careers, only 1 academic career survived to 1997 (and that was as part of a 10-year PhD completion.) My advice is to beware of academic advisors that do not approve of students being married--either in general, or your particular marriage. When everyone in a lab group is divorced, if they have not married in the last 18 months, it's a danger sign. Also beware binge drinking.

My major tip for the spouses of those pursuing PhDs is NEVER to ask, as you both climb into bed, hoping to sink into comfortable slumber, "How's the dissertation writing going?"

I swear I didn't sleep for a year until my beloved learned that lesson.

126: At what point is it reasonable/moral to just accept that you've got a new government?

I'd say there are two tests: legitimacy and morality.

Assuming that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed (not from, for example, the Divine Right of Kings, or descent from George of Hanover, or whatever) - if a government, however erected, has that consent, then it's legitimate.

Note the difference, too, between consent and support. I may not support Gordon Brown as PM, but I am willing to consent to be governed by him, on the grounds that his rule is the result of a process of election which I support.

Similarly, if Britain annexes the US, but most Americans decide (rather like post-war Germans) that Britain was justified in doing so, and that they may as well accept the annexation - then its rule is legitimate, and trying to overthrow the British colonial government by force isn't legitimate.

Second point: moral. It's still not moral for Britain to do so - because it's waging aggressive war. Can resistance be justified because of this "original sin"? I would say not - it doesn't affect the legitimacy of the current regime (see above). But it can be justified by immorality during the occupation; if the widely-consented-to British government goes around torturing people, or disappearing people, or whatever, then it's governing immorally, and resistance (even against a legitimate government) is morally justified.

Another round of early morning fun; so many threads of whimsy.

CRV: I've changed a number of opinions from print/internet discussion (and tone of typer/lack of voice is a problem which has existed since the invention of writing. For years I didn't do letters because I was afraid I would give some permanent offense [because the noxious remark would be fresh at every reading] I've gotten over it, though it probably restrains some of my baser thoughts from being realised on the screen).

It wasn't, usually, something on which I had a really strong opinion; but one on which someone else did. I've come, as I get more practice, to the point that some of the one's I have great investment in I can walk away from (there's a person who posts to my blog; extolling the utility; even to virtue, of torture.

He's yet to figure out that I ignore him. It's best for my blood pressure/the integrity of my household goods.

But things which weren't so close to me have been changed (and some of them to the point of being dearly held). That's why I debate. Hope, that most pernicious of blessings, keeps rising that those at intellectual loggerheads with me will change their minds. I assume they feel the same (so long as I think them being honest).

So I'll not give up the struggles, mostly because I know there are those on the fence who watch.

I commend you the realisation that it's more grief for you than fun (I've taken breaks; weary in spirit and heavy of heart the fight wasn't in me).

And now I'm off to toss hay at the hippos.

Earl #82:

Cool device. It's rather overspecified, though, except in one particular: how *long* does it take to cool off a drink can?

Heh. Reading Spook Country by Joel GreyWilliam Gibson on my lunch break, just came across this exchange:

"[My mother] complains about my father...she thinks he's obsessed with American politics. She says it makes him too angry."

"If this were my country," Odile said, wrinkling her nose, "I would not be angry."

"No?" Hollis asked.

"I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything."

Sarah S #130:

I headed that one off at the pass by doing a deal with my husband: "It's finished when it's finished. These things happen at one second per second. If you don't ask me how it's going, sometimes I'll tell you." Which I would do once every week or two, when sufficiently emboldened by wine.

Fortunately, he is of the opinion that anything can be solved with a sufficient application of computer power and RTFM, or whatever the subject-specific equivalent might be. Not that any of this helped while I spent a whole semester in another country.

yabonn #33, albatross #34, etc. The conversation's wandered on, but I just got back to this.

The fluorosphere has dragons in the deeps
They lurk unseen, below the give and take
We argue, quip, and rhyme; the discourse sweeps
Across the forms unknown beneath the lake

Do not mistake for trolls their silent presence
No need to disemvowel, there's no pain
They stretch their wings and bask in the fluoresence
Neither flamed nor flaming, they remain

Sometimes we are privileged to witness
One breaching, leaping high into the light
To leave behind a verse or thought whose fitness
Makes us glad for glimpse of dragon flight

Sarah S. @130

IMO, it's best to never ask that question, ever.

I carry around a field hockey stick to use on askers of that and similar questions ("So, when will you be done?").

OtterB @136:
I like.

Terry @ #71 -

Did you get the other articles as well? Do you need more?

Ajay #131: I suspect there's also a practical aspect, that has to do with what you expect everyone else to do. If there's an invasion or coup, and you expect widespread resistance and outrage, you may join in spontaneously. If you expect everyone to stay home and silently accept it, then no matter how much you hate it, you may find yourself bowing to the inevitable.

Sarah S #130, Suzanne F. #137: That much I know.

One of my mates in college had a t-shirt made up for him when he was writing up. On the front was a cartoon of him wielding a 2x4 above the text: 'Ask me about my thesis and I will BREAK YOUR LEGS!!'

The intonation problem isn't just a fluorosphere/email thing. I transcribe most of the interviews in Locus, and it can be hard to suggest a light tone when something's not an obvious joke. I usually resort to using exclamation marks to convey a lighter tone. (And now you know how to decode a Locus interview!) Apologies to anyone who hates that device.

Ethan #127:

I'll admit, I haven't followed this story, for the same sort of outrage fatigue as some people on that thread reported. But was there any explanation anywhere about why we could try spies and terrorists in our court system, but we couldn't allow a court to find out details of what kind of torture we're using? I mean, the outline I've seen sounds like it doesn't make any sense. Is there some way to understand it that does?

Alternatively, is there an explanation of why the SC would make this decision?

alsafi @ 62, Fragano @ 74, and albatross @ 84: Wow! This is shaping up to be quite the poetic thread, isn't it? I hypothesize that planting an abi sonnet at the top works on a similiar principle to seeding clouds: it gives the poem something to coalesce about.

albatross #143: I mean, the outline I've seen sounds like it doesn't make any sense. Is there some way to understand it that does?

I'm thinking the answer is no. I admit, I'm coming late to the whole thing, too (I second the "outrage fatigue" emotion), but, poking around as I've done today, it seems to be lies and nonsense all the way down.

I think there's no word at all from the SC about why they chose not to hear the case, which is normal, but stupid. Although I think one of the commenters at Obsidian Wings was right when they said that, with the justices we have, maybe it's better that they don't rule on this.

(No dragons here, just math.)

Proof by induction
showing one case shows the next
and I show the first

Susan (et alia): The stuff she got was sufficient unto the day.

With luck (seemingly in short supply with this instructor) such chaos won't arise again.

If it does I will avail myself of those who have the advantage of being further from the center of the storm again.

Dragons and flagons of fresh wine in season
Maps showing monsters with both rhyme and reason
Fire-breathing lurker that shows up and sings
these are a few of my favorite things

Threads full of poetry, puns and some knitting
Disemvoweled spammers and astroturfer-twitting
Recipes, politics, morals and math
POD follies and Patricks hot wrath

When the Bush wins
when the nets clog
when I'm feeling sad.....
I simply remember my favorite blog
and then I don't feel so bad

I want to add to the poetry roundup, but I'm all out of inspiration (and possibly skill); all that comes to mind is a rendition of the Spam song, with the word "sock" in its place.

Note to self - swallow coffee before reading albatross postings.

Just in case.

CRV: If I agree with you about nothing else, I agree with you that the TV adaptation of The Maxx rocks. It's a classic in our household, one of the first things my husband shared with me from his trove of beloved media. (He showed me The Maxx, I introduced him to Tori Amos, we were both already Rush fans, and as for Sandman, we each insist the other introduced us to it.)

Ditto for Liquid Television, especially Aeon Flux. Thank you for reminding me that I need to order that DVD.

Now, I don't want to ruin a good post or seem unappreciative, but I still think I'm hearing something a little self-congratulatory in your Admin Note #2, along the lines of "Let the rest of the Internet (including all those people at ML who dogpiled me) engage in soul corruption; I shall virtuously abstain!" It may be that I've become over-sensitive to self-congratulatory elements in rhetoric, to the point of reading it in where it isn't. So I mention it here mainly to calibrate: am I just paranoid? Do you see that if you reread your post? Do others perceive it? Is it there, but I should just shut up about it rather rip shreds out of a truce flag?

Nicole @151:
I didn't read it that way. I read it as, "This pastime is not good for me, and is not doing what I want it to be doing (convincing anyone of anything). Therefore I'll stop."

There is perhaps a declaratory tone, but I do proclamations like that when I'm trying to break a habit. Makes me stick to it, knowing all those people heard me say it.

albatross @ 148

I like it, and I second the sentiment.

albatross @ #148, Oh my. Who's the 21st-century equivalent of Julie Andrews? That needs to be forwarded to her, stat.

re the "what if we were invaded" subthread:

In what has got to be one of the wierdest cases of synchronicity I've experienced in a long time, when I was Googling "Let's blow the whole thing up" in an attempt to find out where I heard it, I came across a terrific interview with Ronald Hutton wherein he analyzes the Gunpowder Plot. It's a great read if only because he interviews terrifically (at least on paper). But it's particularly relevant because he pays particular attention to the tensions among English Catholics and the political tensions between them and the government.

But I have to say I'd never expected to pull up a detailed analysis of Ehglish history while trying to find something I thought I saw on the Muppet Show.

Pardon me: is there an index of threads somewhere that I can't find? I'm just looking for Jim Macdonald's pancake recipe (which is really wonderful, thankyou) and the post where someone said how to tweak it if your ingredients are different. I am out of buttermilk. Should I acidulate the milk I have?, or add baking powder?

I wanted to fit this into the rollover for the Sidelight pointing to Holtzbrinck USA's name-change to Macmillan, but yar boo sucks technology fale us agane.

So, without further ado, "The Suicidal British Prime Ministers Song." (Attributed to Colin Fine.)

Sir Harold Macmillan spent a fortnight drillin'
Through his skull to let out "vapours".
The Earl of Bute took his brain right ute
And replaced it with newspapers.
The Duke of Portland had himself trepanned
With a couple of butchers' cleavers.
Lord Liverpool sawed round his skull
And prised it off with levers.

Sir Robert Walpole took a scalpel and set to with a will
Clement Attlee rather flatly used a Black and Decker drill --

Ted Heath, Ted Heath took the bit between his teeth
And drilled straight up with the brace underneath.
Sir Robert Peel with nerves of steel
Put a needle through his beadle with never a squeal.
Bonar Law, Bonar Law took a circular saw
And crept up on himself from behind
And Douglas-Home used a thing that went "Boom"
And really blew his mind.

Viscount Palmerston's the calmest an' the coolest of them all:
He sat and smashed his skull in with a solid silver ball.

Googling

"pancake recipe site:nielsenhayden.com"

gets me this as the first result.

What do I win?!

*slaps forehead*
You know, I'm always telling people to use Google, but I've only had one cup of tea so far so I'm not firing on all cylinders. Thankyou. Want a glow in the dark cross-stitch skull?

Question about Jo Walton's "Ha'Penny". I'm not quite through with it, and I don't think it's really a spoiler, but I'll be on the safe side anyway.

Bar bs Iv'f fvfgref vf zneevrq gb na ngbzvp fpvragvfg anzrq Jnygre. Nf sne nf V'ir abgvprq ng yrnfg, jr unira'g orra gbyq uvf ynfg anzr, ohg V trg gur srryvat V'z fhccbfrq gb xabj jub ur vf naljnl, naq V qba'g. Nalbar?

I would be quite glad of the pattern, ema! That would be a fun thing to stitch for next year's TLAP Day.

What's a TLAP?
I don't have a pattern, was going to *ahem* Google one, as I am currently in the grip of a glow in the dark embroidery cotton obsession. I'm doing a sugar skull embroidered tshirt for one of my sons, and a jack o'lantern door hangy whatsit for a swap, and am like the weasel in Foghorn Leghorn cartoons looking for a new glow in the dark project :)

TLAP day=Talk Like a Pirate day, September 19th.

I would guess tlap=Talk Like A Pirate.

Yes, Talk Like A Pirate Day, with Jolly Rogers and such...but of course a glow-in-the-dark skull would be even more appropriate for Dia De Los Muertos, which is actually coming up soon and is more likely to be why ema brings it up in the first place.

*smacksself*

It was the sugar skulls that finally clued my dimwitted self in.

Also, abi, thanks for the calibration check (and apologies to CRV). I shall endeavor to ratchet down a bit on my tendency to read things into things that aren't in fact the things I'm reading.

Todd #160:

Gur boivbhf pnaqvqngr jbhyq or Jnygre Mvaa, jub jnf gur bar jub npghnyyl gbbx gur pbageby ebq bhg bs gur Puvpntb ernpgbe gb fgneg gur punva ernpgvba, naq jnf jvgu gur Znaunggna Cebwrpg, ohg ur qvqa'g trg zneevrq hagvy gur 1960f, hayrff vg jnf n frpbaq zneevntr naq uvf fba qvqa'g zragvba gur svefg bar. Vf gur jvsr anzrq Znel? (V'z jnvgvat n ovg gb beqre vg fb V pna rafher orvat nebhaq gb pbyyrpg vg.)

re #158: ..... waiting here anxiously to find out whether Wilkins-Rogers has discontinued my preferred pancake mix.....

Never to be confused with "Talk like a parson" day.

#160 - Taking the sisters as inspired by the Mitford sisters with rather more filing than a roman a clef then consider Pamela Mitford's husband - Derek Ainslie Jackson:
Nancy Mitford, whose books include Noblesse Oblige, about the behaviour of the British aristocracy, also informed on her sister Pamela.

She {Pamela] and her husband Derek Jackson "had been heard to declare a) that all Jews in England should be killed and b) that the war should be stopped now 'before we lose any more money'", the files show. Nancy Mitford spied on sisters by Paul Reynolds BBC News Online world affairs correspondent Web

Jackson's first experimental success was the spectroscopic observation in 1924 of the hyperfine structure of the caesium atom. To estimate the nuclear moment.....Derek Ainslie Jackson (1906-1982): Some Recollections of a Great European Spectroscopist B. Bleaney Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 55, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 285-287 (available on the web)

Jackson was later a Scientific Officer at Fighter Command.

My own view - and disavowing immediately any thought that my view is or ought to be taken as the author's or need be adopted by anyone else - is that the characters are on the one hand

(1)entirely and completely Jo Walton's characters - and to be considered as such with no fan fic or slash or anything else based on a spurious claim that the character is really ........

(2)sufficiently like real people, including some real people we can all - or at least might be able to - name as to be entirely plausible.

For no particular reason I am reminded that AJ Budrys once told me that one of the characters in Rogue Moon was exactly a man he knew at International Harvester - and that he met the man only long after the book was in print.

In particular I would, speaking for myself, no more consider the Small Change trilogy a roman(s) a clef than I would consider Tolkien a writer of allegories.

OtterB #136: **APPLAUSE**

dangerous monster or strong kindly friend
dragons are both and fill our universe
though barred from normal vision by a curse
into the background they most subtly blend
still if by gentle force our authors rend
the veil that our illusions serves to nurse
the sight of dragons leaves us none the worse
but we our thanks to segoy ought to send
and dragons aren't the only beasts we seek
to populate our world with magic joys
there are so many beings we could name
to set alurk on distant mountain peak
to teach us that all creatures are not toys
and make the world more noble and less tame

abi: May I beg for the sonnet about the dragon collecting different kinds of fire? Or if you've written it and I missed it, a link thereto?

Xopher: If you're still in Houston and have any spare time, please call -- transportation isn't a problem! I sent you an e-mail with our phone #s.

Kathryn, #105: Well, yes and no. In a true online community such as this one, it's quite possible to get to know people well enough for your mind to "fill in" some of the non-verbal nuances, because they follow from the modes of expression that people routinely use. For example, I've had a number of people, after meeting me for the first time after knowing me online for a while, mention that I write exactly the way I talk, and that now they "hear" my posts in my RL voice.

None of which, of course, is to say that more Fluoropheric gatherings would not be a good thing!

albatross, #146: Very nice indeed! That could be a really useful mnemonic device.

On the recommendation of Randolph's SO during our visit this past weekend, I've just finished reading S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, and I have two things to say:

1) WOW.
2) How much of the description of Indian culture is reasonably accurate, modulo the usual alternate-history tweaking? I did catch the Bollywood reference. :-)

Joann 166: Ur zvtug svg, ohg onfrq ba uvf ynfg anzr V'z thrffvat ur jbhyqa'g or pbzsbegnoyr va gur Trezna Ervpu?

Clark 169: Ah, interesting; I'd read a little about the Mitford sisters, but hadn't noticed that about Pamela's husband. Based on the note in the acknowledgement about fictionalized speaking parts but real non-speaking parts (not to mention Pip's husband), it seemed plausible that Walter was a real person even if his wife was not.

#166 - The Tizard Mission was pre-Hess but the world changed with Hess
e.g. this from Wikipedia on Tube Alloys:
When there was no reaction from America to the reports of the MAUD Committee, Mark Oliphant crossed the Atlantic in an unheated bomber in August 1941. He found that Lyman Briggs had merely put the reports in a safe. Oliphant then contacted Ernest Lawrence, James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton and managed to increase the urgency of the Americans research programs. The MAUD Reports finally made a big impression. Overnight the Americans changed their minds about the feasibility of an atomic bomb and suggested a cooperative effort with Britain. Harold C. Urey and George Braxton Pegram were sent to the UK in November 1941, to confer but Britain did not take up the offer of collaboration. The offer lapsed without any action being taken. emphasis added and cascading changes taken to be self-evident.

I'll stand by my belief that too close an identification with a single individual falls off into something rather like a Baker Street Irregular reading of that canon or a finding that Nero Wolfe the greatest detective of the last century was descended from the greatest detective of the preceding century - good fun but far astray from the text. Kingston Ontario is a far cry from Oxbridge and the Met Lab is a far cry from the Mitford sisters

Mr. Myers @ #173: "a finding that Nero Wolfe the greatest detective of the last century was descended from the greatest detective of the preceding century"

He wasn't?

(Of course, I'd fight to the death anyone insinuating that Archie inherited any of Watson's character traits; AG was much cooler.)

#174 - Baring-Gould clearly establishes that Archie inherited coolness and spunk from his father's mother - no connection to Watson's wife be she first or second.
Likely Kipling had the whole family in mind when he wrote:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,

Still Watson and Archie did have it in common that they each tended to carry a gun at need - though Archie never needed reminding.

albatross @ #148 *grin*

Fragano Ledgister @ #170 "more noble and less tame" - I'm all for it.

Linkmeister: Esp. in that no small part of what made it work is that Archie was a crack detective in his own right.

Which, for all Watson's sterling traits, he wasn't.

Lee: yes, time will make up for some things (and I echo the statement that people who know me say I write as I speak).

Note to self re: abi's advice @#150: differentiate between coffee and gum. ;-)

Nicole @#158: You win a pancake recipe, of course!

Personally, how I'd react to America being conquered would depend a lot on who was doing the conquering. Our current gov is pretty bad, but as they say, things can always get worse.

On the other hand, if the conqueror was, say, Canada, I'd probably be cheering (after I quit giggling). ;-)

Terry @ #177, "Archie was a crack detective in his own right"

One of my favorite scenes when Wolfe reappears in "In the Best Families," is the one in which Archie tells Wolfe that during Wolfe's absence he (AG) has raked in twice as much as Wolfe had been paying him.

I know you guys are light-years ahead of people like me when it comes to dealing with comment trolls. Have you ever compiled a set of "troll management" advice in a single post, or anything like that? If so, could you post a link to it here in this thread? It would be greatly appreciated.

I think this is a post you want, though I won't use the definite article-- it's just the first I found.

I hope this works.

(edited from preview: it worked! Baby's First HTML!)

Christopher: I think it's a concentative effort. We tend to take them at face value; address their points and then, when they start calling out bingo numbers, we point and laugh.

Sock puppets are different.

At my blog, I don't get trolls much. The closest I get to a recurrent one, I just ignore. The rest of my commenters, mostly, do the same. Since he is someone I know in person, and those who respond to him also have a relationship with him, outside of the net, so that has something to do with it.

Patrick @ 157: Is that TTTO The Philosopher's Drinking Song?

Christopher @180,

You could start with Virtual Panel Participation- both the essay and the comment thread. But that's from 2005: our Hosts have become even more awesome in their moderation wisdom.

Their moderation knowledge shows up often. For example, yesterday's Sock Puppet post implies one important part of moderating-- check IP addresses. Well, two-- check for sockpuppets, note IP addresses...

One small point-resource for someone looking for earlier atomic scientists is this list of Manhattan Project personnel: www.nndb.com/group/738/000055573

Fragano #170: I also loved that last line. "More noble and less tame."

Lee #171: Thanks!

I also enjoyed the Pershawar Lancers. I really liked the world, but thought the Russians were too unabashedly evil and one-sided. I think he wrote at least one short story in that world, as well.

#122 - near a friend's cottage is a signpost reading "Schwartz-Bunnemann" (simply another cottage owner). But we decided that Schwartz-Bunnemann has just the right sound for a stfnal device:

"Activate the Schwartz-Bunnemann drive!"

"Captain, the Schwartz-Bunnemann effect makes that very dangerous."

"Signal detected on the Schwartz-Bunnemann, sir."

"We've burned out the Schwartz-Bunnemann compensators, and we're doomed."

etc...

I also enjoyed the Pershawar Lancers. I really liked the world, but thought the Russians were too unabashedly evil and one-sided. I think he wrote at least one short story in that world, as well.

"Shikari in Galveston", IIRC. I have never read it, however.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @151: [..] we were both already Rush fans [..].

You are talking about the band?

Myself, not especially, but when you consider the alternatives...

Fungi@71: what is your understanding of "tie"? Does it mean Germany pulls out of (a) France, (b) Belgium, (c) Alsace? I don't see a tie as requiring that -- which would make for a different set of lessons from your suggestion, i.e. it's still possible to readjust homeland borders.

Nenya@108: how is it possible for anything in an open thread to go off-topic?

albatross@148: Nice. For the other side, have you heard the original words sung to "Pirate Jenny"? (Bolcom&Morris did that a few years ago, from someone else's arrangement.) Surreal....

To everyone who responded: Thanks very much!

Nicole @ #151:

I'm a big fan of classic Rush. Stopped being into them after Presto. "Hold Your Fire" and "Power Windows" are two of the best, uncelebrated prog-rock albums of the 80's IMHO. My wife doesn't like Rush. Though ironically, Rush fandom is one of the things I have in common with her first husband.

Tori Amos was a KRCL-FM find for me; just like Curve and They Might Be Giants. My wife and I both got into Tori with "Under The Pink", not so much with "Boys For Pele". She's got wicked talent at the piano. And I am always supportive of female pop stars who tend to eschew pop tendencies; such as Bjork. But Bjork is a whole thread all by herself...

I introduced my wife to Sandman via the autographed graphic novel treasury I kept, from my comic book daze. That series always ranked as one of the most adult, if not the most adult, I ever collected. Very deep writing. Though I love the line from The Maxx when Sarah gripes, "Death isn't some cute chick!"

My wife and I co-discovered The Maxx. We rushed out and got the video after catching a re-re-re-run of the show on MTV in 1996. Expected something a little quirky and off the wall when we threw it in the VCR that first night. Never knew we'd be struck speechless by the end of the film, at once awed and bothered to an equal extent. Our stomachs hurt.

MTV needs to get off its corporate duff and do a full-DVD set of Liquid Television and The Maxx. My wife and I would buy both in a heartbeat!

One nice thing about the 3-disc Æon Flux is that it includes roughly one half hour of Liquid Television material from the first season. Unfortunately, I don't think first season Liquid Television is that good. I rather liked second season, with 'Dog Boy' and 'Winter Steele'. Though I still chuckle at 'The Art School Girls of Doom'. Funny, I never noticed, back in 1991, that they were guys in drag!

As for the self-congratulatory thing... Yeah, OK, re-reading my post, it does sound grandiose and self-back-patting. "I SHALL NOW RID MYSELF OF THE UNCLEANLINESS, WHICH UNFORTUNATELY YOU ALL STILL WADE THROUGH!" So I apologize for that. I wasn't aiming at this forum, so much as pop American political culture at al. Has there ever been a time in modern American history when more people spent more time and money arguing endlessly about things upon which nobody will ever reach a consensus? I suppose I feel like it just reached a too-toxic level, inside myself, and I had to step out of the tornado before I lost my mind.

Again, my apologies if I came off with a big head about it.

KRCL-FM, YEAH BABY!!! (screamed in Plankton-voice)

Sounds silly, but getting back to my community radio roots is one of the big plusses about coming back to Yewtaw.

Spent two hours down there tonight, helping answer phones for Fall 'Thon. Their new building (heh, new, they've been there 7 years now...) is a vast improvement over the semi-homeless-shelter they occupied in 1993.

Shared a few laughs with one or two of the guys who were actually there in 1992-1993. Found out what happened to a few other people. The pot-smoking hippy former program director is now in Texas, and his son is at the U of U being an ultra-right-wing conservative. Somehow, that fits, like Alex Keaton from Family Ties.

Anyway, such a gas to be at the station. Community radio, gotta luv it.

Now if I can just get my biodiesel guy I know here to sign up as a business underwriter....

Hmm, not sure why it reverted to the old e-mail...

Sign on a grad student's office door:

"You do not exist.

Neither does my thesis.

It has priority."

Patrick #157: Thank you. I have been trying to get the complete words for that ever since Colin sang it to me. The reason I couldn't remember them is because being utterly prostrate with laughter seems to destroy my memory, as well.

But of course you know of its counterpart, the one that concerns the, ah, venting activities of SF writers?

Captain, we are being swallowed by a rogue Schwartz-Bunnemann entity!

Sir, the Schwartz-Bunnemann wormhole should be appearing -- now!

Chewi, you've put us smack in the middle of the Schwartz-Bunnemann asteroid belt. Get us out of here!

Aaaargh!!

All this poesy on dragons, and prose about the works of the noble Ms. Walton, and none has yet pointed out the obvious crossover point:

Tooth and Claw

Forsooth, say I.

Shame on all of you for gluing my eyes to the computer screen and forcing me to miss my bedtime. Fie!

What I sat down to say was that earlier tonight I keyed in a seven-digit phone number, not even a #$%^*! area code, here in North Carolina, and seconds later I heard my husband's voice--in India.

I couldn't make this stuff up.

"rejocing"?

198: None of these, of course, should be confused with the Schartz-Metterklume Method.

The Peshawar Lancers was OK, but slightly too derivative of Flashy - though Count Nikolai Ignatieff really existed (in the 19th century) and had a very interesting life. And the technology didn't ever quite ring true... airships and calculating engines, but no motor cars or automatic rifles? Hmm.

Lee @171:
I hadn't written it, and when I sat down to do it, it turned out not to be a sonnet.

The forest fires burn hotter
But campfire coals are richer
Till quenched by sand and water
From fire-pail and pitcher.
The lust for human glimmer
Made all I had seem lightless.
My hoarded fires burned dimmer
In contrast to Man's brightness.

To feed my need for fires
I left my mountain fastness.
A gleam like flaming pyres
Entranced me through the vastness.
Beyond my wooded valley
I saw a light, bright-burning
I made a winging sally
Emboldened by my yearning.

The roads were rich with red lights
Like coals they shone. I craved them
Yet brighter glowed the headlights.
I burned to keep, to save them.
But other sparkles drew me
As bees are drawn to flowers.
For I could, as I flew, see
The neon-shining towers.

I found a roof and landed
Where shadows would surround me.
My hidden perch commanded
A view of all around me.
And what I saw amazed me
When peering through the windows.
What did men as they gazed see
In panels with their dim glows?

I stayed awhile and learned from
The humans with their bright things.
I heard of "cash", and earned some,
Enough to buy the right things.
For in the nights, while dreaming,
I knew that I must go back.
My hidden fires, still gleaming,
Without my care would go black.

Returning to my treasures
Within the mountains lightless
I rediscovered pleasures
Outwith electric brightness.
The embers glowed more redly
The fires had brighter spark
The lightning looked more deadly
Against a forest's dark.

But still I miss the cities
That glisten, gleam and shine
With countless coloured pretties
All crying to be mine.
But Wi-fi goes a long way,
And now my laptop's working.
I buy my lights on eBay,
And on this blog I'm lurking.

abi@203:

*speechless admiration*

Great Scott, abi. And you can read it as a tragic or a hopeful story. Very impressive.

By the powers! Is there no end to this woman's talents? (Personally I'm clinging to the hope that abi can't do HALO jumps, because if she can I'll feel inferior in every way.)

I can't speak of Indian (or Pakistani) culture in the subcontinent but the culture of The Peshawar Lancers rang true for Indians in Britain (celebrate Christmas AND Diwali*; British food with Indian touches combined with Indian food** - been a while since I read it so some of the details escape me, but I don't think I needed to look up any of the Hindi loanwords). I wasn't completely convinced by the technology either, especially as airships in an alternate history is traditional, and most of the choices fed back into the plot in one way or another; S M Stirling either chose his technology to serve the story or paid close attention to the limitations when devising the plot (or both).

Interestingly Stirling said "Maybe I can now convince the publishers that books with UK settings and/or lead characters are not necessarily market poison." a few days ago on Charlie Stross's diary. I wonder if one of the reasons for writing Lancers was a way of sneaking this idea onto them via an Anglo-Indian?

Too derivative of Flashy? Perhaps. I think it was also inspired by the things Flashman was a reaction-and-inverted-tribute to.

* The council in Leicester leaves the same lights up for both
** If I plan a menu without considering it I almost always leave off beef and pork; a reflex left over from my student days when I couldn't afford it anyway and one or more people randomly turning up wouldn't eat it.

#207 Neal:

It sure seemed to me that he was trying for steampunk, which required the calculating engines and airships kind of technology. Besides, he probably has some reason to like the name of the high efficiency external-combustion engines they used.

I wonder about how inevitable our technological progression is; if we could run back to 1900, would we end up with the internet in 2007 99% of the time, or 5%, or is it a one in a million, but there'd be some equally magic-looking technology to replace it?

I always find it fascinating to find natural experiments where technology evolved separately in two different places. Looking at the US and USSR space programs and military designs gives a flavor of that, though of course there was information going back and forth. And looking at technology between Europe and China in the middle ages gives another.

In some cases, the next step of some technological or scientific discovery seems inevitable; this leads to "races" between scientists or inventors to be first to do something. How does the saying go? When it's railroading time, railroads get built. For example, there were well-publicized races to get the first telephones, light bulbs, and commercial power services going. Public key cryptography was apparently invented three different times (Cocks in secret, Merkle in an obscure form that nobody seems to have understood, and Diffie and Hellman in public). There are a bunch of compression algorithms that were developed more-or-less in parallel (once you've seen LZ77 and LZ78, about a million variants suggest themselves, especially if you also get Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, etc.). Calculus was invented in parallel by Newton and Leibnitz. There are probably a million other examples.

And sometimes, someone comes up with a key insight, but the stars don't quite line up to get that insight out there in the world. Mendel knew something about genetics, but doesn't appear to have had much effect on anyone else. We can see in retrospect that he was onto somethign big, but nobody at the time seems to have noticed. (Darwin could really have used the idea of genetics.)

Other times, you get some big advance in either science or technology, that makes all kinds of other stuff possible. This is "railroading time" stuff--once you've got statistics and genetics and evolution, *someone* is going to put them together into the modern synthesis. Once you have the basics of electricity, someone's going to build a working light bulb and a decent electric motor.

One of the cool things is when you see technology that was possible long ago, but never discovered. I gather that mortars and stirrups and halters that don't choke horses are all examples of this, but there must be zillions more, some enormously important.

CRV @ 100: Often, when I find myself frustrated and angry over an internet debate, I realize that it happened because I came to instruct, not to learn. I was there to tell everyone my cool and interesting ideas and show how neat and shiny they were. More importantly, I wasn't there to hear how anyone disagreed with me, or had other ideas on the subject. When I do this, I'm setting myself up for disappointment: even if I convince everyone, or everyone already agrees with me, it's boring, which is in some ways worse than being dog-piled.

Debates where I came away happy and satisfied are the ones where, however things ended, I had come to learn. Maybe I was playing with an idea that I wasn't totally committed to, or maybe I was trying out someone else's ideas. Maybe I was just feeling egoless that day. The beauty of this approach is that I can always learn something from a debate: what weak points others see in my position that I hadn't, how my position can be altered and improved, the benefits of my position vis a vis others. Even if what I learn is that my argument is pretty lousy and unconvincing, well, that's progress. No matter what happens, I come out a winner, because I've learned.

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be an attack. If it feels like one, I apologize in advance: it's poor manners to pick a fight with someone who's sworn not to fight back. I have no idea if any of this is true for anyone other than me. Maybe it will help you, and maybe I'm totally off. FWIW, etc.

Lee @ 171: I often think that written English is my first language, and spoken my second; I suppose then that I ought to say I talk like I write.

Then you get parallel tracks like phages in the Soviet bloc vs. antibiotics in the West. (I'm reading Viruses vs. Superbugs right now; I'm not keen on the style--perhaps the fault of the translation--but it's an interesting story.)

Who was it who wrote that we'd have had space travel in the 1500's if the Libraries of Alexander hadn't burned?

Re: The Dentistry Particle...there's a nice discussion of dentistry licensing in Frank Norris's great, and grim novel McTeague, which if you haven't read, is a truly bizarre and grisly and wonderful book--much-neglected these days.

Earl @ #210: I can't speak to an SF author who wrote that, but I know Carl Sagan expressed a similar opinion in his COSMOS series. He was of the belief that if the scientific method that was just beginning to be toyed with by the Greeks had not been ultimately smooshed by Platonic mysticism, it's hypothetically possible that we'd have reached the atomic age 300 to 500 years earlier than we did, and that by the late 20th century A.D. we'd have had our first starship surveys returning from the nearest suns in our niche of the galaxy: Barnards, Tau Ceti, etc.

An endlessly fascinating mental experiment, if you ask me. What might have been, had we just....

Heresiarch,

No, actually that's an illuminating way to look at it. I'm constantly mulling ethical and philosophical issues all day long in my head, whether I really concentrate on them or not. Many times, if I come to any sort of debate about a given issue, I've already mentally staked out my territory. In my mind I'm not thinking, "I'm going to teach these people a lesson..." But it probably comes off that way.

Thanx for the alteranative viewpoint.

Abi #203:

"Say, what's going on at the top of that mountain? It looks like it has been covered in *christmas lights*."

As someone mentioned very recently around here somewhere*, some newly-discovered papers show that Aristotle came with an epsilon of developing differential calculus, which is the bedrock of mechanical and a lot of electrical engineering. We all owe that over-zealous Roman soldier a good roasting in Hell; if he hadn't been so eager to kill an old philosopher we might be importing asteroidal iron even now.

* so many threads, so little time

abi @ 203

Very impressive. Of course, if you are a dragon, it explains an awful lot of things, including why your poetry is so good.

Bruce (StM) #215: Or, if we feel like being gloomy, it might have moved humanity's* extinction up a few thousand years. I like the asteroid idea better, though.

*I am tired. I just tried to spell that humaniti'es.

Brenda @#200: Shame on all of you for gluing my eyes to the computer screen and forcing me to miss my bedtime. Fie!

Eh, they do that to me all the time.

I'm pretty dubious about technological determinism: IIRC, even the wheel was only developed in the one area where they happened to have decent draft animals and suitable terrain, and it spread with the draft animals. Other places, a wheel was just a toy, because it was just as easy to carry stuff or drag it.

A lot of tech is oriented toward solving particular problems, but those problems in turn depend heavily on prior developments in society, and contingencies of the moment. Not to mention all that stuff prompted by various wars....

One good effect of the The Dark Is Rising movie is that its existence inspired me to re-read the books for the first time since I was little. Thus far they hold up remarkably well against my memory of them.

Question, as I begin Greenwitch: Does anyone know why on earth Will's dogs would be named Raq and Ci?

albatross @ 207: There's a Gene Wolfe short story about an alternate history where hot air-balloons were invented in the middle-ages. In the preface to the collection, he mentions a fascination with the same subject you discuss, and relates a tale from the Greeks of a man who revolutionized hoplite warfare by cutting a semicircle out of one side of their shields (allowing the formation to pack tighter.) It was the biggest advance in warfare in three centuries, and could have happened at any time before then. Scientific progress is weird.

On the other hand, Newton and Liebnitz. That always gets to me. When must things be discovered, and when are they merely happy chance?

re. the dentistry particle -
Wow, Patrick channels Milton Friedman; who'd'a thunk it? I can't tell if the false information in the piece is because the writer is ignorant or because he's deliberately parroting right-wing arguments on this topic by way of satire, but it's always wise to inform oneself on a topic before spouting off.

True or false, boys and girls...?
(1) Foreign dentists cannot practice in the U.S.
(2) The U.S. government licenses dentists

(I could add in the medical version of this quiz, which starts with "You need an M.D. to practice medicine in the U.S.")

In #215 Bruce Cohen (writes:

some newly-discovered papers show that Aristotle came with an epsilon of developing differential calculus, which is the bedrock of mechanical and a lot of electrical engineering. We all owe that over-zealous Roman soldier a good roasting in Hell; if he hadn't been so eager to kill an old philosopher we might be importing asteroidal iron even now.

Archimedes, perhaps?

CRV @ 213: I'm glad it was useful.

I thought of another way of putting it: I have useful debates when I engage with other people's ideas. I have unuseful debates when I spend my time defending my own.

Albatross @ 148: Thanks for the earworm! And since I find the original lyrics cloying, I will have to memorize your version so I don't drive myself insane!

And since this is an open thread, may I write a fan note? Someone who knows me very well, gave me Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise, The Atrocity Archives, and Halting State for my birthday. Holy Moses. I've been high all week. Amazing.

Have I mentioned that going home after work and reading for eight hours straight does not allow for much sleep?

@222: Aristotle [sic] would have discovered calculus if not for that time traveler biographied by de Camp ...

Alas, to me all verse is blank.
Rhythm and rhyme, scansion, meter:
These are but babble to my ears.
I illustrate my lack of skill
With these scribbles, these random tracks
that with a feline lack of grace
criss-cross my keyboard, leaving... sense?

My medium is light, my muse –
I see she does not have a name,
Wiki though I might. Spirit of
the LCD, of CRT,
of CCD, of film, of light,
what is your name?

Nameless, you follow me across
the shining sea of sky. Click now!
You command me, and I do it.
A shrine, lizard most unholy,
A thousand paper birds entrapp'd,
A maid engarbed in maidly robes,
Another by sleep ensorcelled,
ghosts of young men, of empire dead.

And fen. A multitude of fen.
Fen in kilt, in fez, and cos,
play with idea, with sword, with pen.
A thousand new books lie unread;
words elude, dream to nightmare turn'd.
And worse yet, gallery of images
that, by order more urgent
than my muse's, recorded – not.

[missing verse]

Returning to the land of rain,
from flight to flu, my muse
at my shoulder commands – Share.
Let others see what they have missed.
Still more will my sibling Mneme
encounter as they wander past
your pictures that do grace her house.

So, day by day, pictures do I add.
Every worldly week that passes,
in the house of Mneme one day
does flickr by.

About the Greeks:

The elder offspring was in an Evergreen program a couple of years ago which bulled its way through the Western Canon in three quarters. One of the discussions we had, in regard to Plato, reached this consensus: Plato's influence over later thinkers is the Platonic ideal of never underestimate the power of a bad idea.

It was indeed Archimedes who came close to calculus, as reported on the Charlie Rimmer's Socks thread (??). Which is just as well for counterfactuals; any Aristotle alternate history story could hardly be more exciting or outlandish than the real story of Alexander.

I seem to remember a David Brin story in which a character says something like, if aliens have been trying to help us, couldn't they have shown us how to make glass lenses as we can figure out the rest for ourselves. The Romans had clear glass; what if they'd made lenses?

Albatross #186: Thanks.

ethan 219: No idea about Raq, but Ci (pronounced "ki", because the c in Welsh is always hard) is the Welsh for "dog".

Re "My Favorite Things" as earworm: What annoys me most is the way its (mostly) dumb lyrics ruin what is actually a gorgeous piece of music. "Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings" stands out, amidst drivel -- that's what it all should be like.

Cassandra Wilson may have done it as what it should be, a slow waltz, but for me it still bears a dreadful aura of nastily piping children.

Dave Luckett #229: Ah, thanks! I figured Ci might be Welsh or Scots or something, didn't expect it to be so straightforward. Raq, on the other hand, doesn't seem like it comes from the Isles.

No one here needs an online source for research materials for medieval Iberia, right? And no one here needs another new large online time sink, right? So there's really no point in my inserting a link here to LIBRO, the Library of Iberian Resouces Online, is there? Because there's no one here who'd take a second look at titles like Irrigation and Society
in Medieval Valencia, or a translation of the Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, or The Visigothic Code.

Please note that I am not making the pun about Visigothic code being the version that came before Morse code, and that none of you need to either.

CRV, #212: Hence the fascination with writing, and reading, alternate-history stories. It's always interesting to speculate about what might have happened if this or that turning point had gone differently.

abi #203: A most Elphin dragon that. Wonderful.

It seems to me, though I'm not the best player,
we treat the world of dragons as a game.
For their attacks and hungers we don't blame
but celebrate, as if we did not care,
for vanished village or for mountain bare
the beast that desolated with a flame
the marvellous places we had sought to tame.
We praise the dragon, curse the dragonslayer.
Of Perseus we seem to say the least
although we know that upon alien strand
his spear straight-pierced the monster's horrid gorge;
instead we sing of the great hungry beast,
and in our narrow, comfortable land,
do execrate the hated name of George.

fidelio #232:

Now if that had been "Irrigation and Society in Medieval Venice", I would have been beyond chuffed.

would this be the point to yet again bring up the fact that someone should really collect and publish Verses of the Fluorosphere: the poetry of Making Light?

Sisuile #237:

But it's an ongoing project. What do you want, a new volume every two weeks, maybe? (These guys are prolific.)

re #226: SNORK!

Ooh--OtterB @ 136, I like! And abi @ 203, and... wow.

(this one--meant for the "Great Political Blog Posts of Our Time" thread, though the point to post it there is long past--has been keeping me up at night.)

That "someone else is worse" does not excuse.
Murder makes of theft a lesser crime,
But it does not mean thieves do no time.
The world's goodwill's not all we lose
With these hateful tactics. When we choose
A lesser evil, it's an evil still.
The dead care not how humane the kill,
But we'll be called to 'count for every bruise.
Torture, secrets, and imposéd coups
Do not on others only take their tolls
But also leave their traces in our souls;
Evil deeds stain all with evil's hues.
Through blood we tiptoe where the worst have trod;
The marks are plain, for all we go unshod.

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey @ 222

Arggghhhhh! Of course it was Archimedes! *gnashing of teeth and dense smoke from the ears*

Getting up at 3:30 AM does not improve my memory a bit.

A propos de rien, I have an online friend in NY who is looking for a cheap/pro bono lawyer who can help her with a harassing landlord. Any ideas? If you have good contacts, either post here or drop me an e-note at t.s.whitmore at att dot net.

@230: "My Favorite Things" has lyrics?

[ /trane]

fidelio #232: We'll keep that last under seal.

Fragano @ 235, alsafi @ 240

Both well done; thanks for keeping the thread full of poesy. I'll be back in the rhyme mines in a day or so; things are hectic just now.

Fragano, special thanks for mentioning how pesky those georges are.

Fragano @235: Bravo!!!!

fidelio @ 232

Argh. I'm supposed to be doing a german film crit and you distract me with Iberia!!

Re the hamsters and cucumber particle:

Something in me wants to take that, recast it into black and white, and crank up the speed a little. Then add silent film dialogue, with ornate frames, all done in LOLcats.

I CAN HAS CUCUMBER?

OH NOES! THEY BE TAKIN MAH CUCUMBER!

etc...

I'm not going to, but then, I don't need to now, do I?

Add so

The Dentistry Particle...

As Jack Nicholson said to Tom Cruise:
"You can't handle the tooth!"

Abi @ 203... Of all the depictions of dragons in movies and such, have you ever come across one where you found yourself thinking "This is a dragon as I envision them" ?

Er, isn't that the same palimpset that got the public attention some months back and mentioned for it in Making Light back then? Or is it a different one?

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/november6/archimedes-116.html

#251

I think so. Apparently there's a book coming out on it. (Most peopel can't remember things that long, after all!)

Serge @250:
Of all the depictions of dragons in movies and such, have you ever come across one where you found yourself thinking "This is a dragon as I envision them" ?

Since I think dragons would have characters as varied as humans*, there are many dragons that work for me.

Smaug was my first real dragon, since my mother read us the Hobbit when I was four

Yevaud, Dragon of Pendor**, far smarter and far colder than Smaug, whom I first heard about at about eight

Oolong†, of course, whose greed was turned toward knowledge

Draco‡ is probably the best screen dragon I've met, for complexity of character. His motivations are a little too comprehensible, but that's film for you. And Sean Connory has the voice of a dragon‡‡

Mike Ford, perhaps, as well††

But to a certain extent, I also write the dragons I envision. So you can add a couple more to the list, based on the things you've seen here.

(Must get Tooth and Claw)
-----
* though their bell*** curves are on different axes than ours
** A Wizard of Earthsea
† Tea with the Black Dragon
‡ Dragonheart
‡‡ Which makes The Hunt for Red October an entirely strange film. A dragon comnmanding a submarine? How can this happen? How can this be?
†† What? No? Well, I bow to those who knew him
*** and the sound of the bells, if cast and rung, would drive men's thoughts to cold avarice

#250 Serge

I *have* come across what I believe to be the anti-dragon. In Baum's Tik Tok of Oz a dragon is used as a sort of mass transit system. Any dragon I could imagine wouldn't dream of...well...here:

"Perhaps the most singular thing about the dragon's appearance at this time was the fact that he had a row of seats attached to his back, one seat for each member of the party. These seats were double, with curved backs, so that two could sit in them, and there were twelve of these double seats, all strapped firmly around the dragon's thick body and placed one behind the other, in a row that extended from his shoulders nearly to his tail.

"Aha!" exclaimed Tubekins; "I see that Tititi-Hoochoo has transformed Quox into a carryall."

"I'm glad of that," said Betsy. "I hope, Mr. Dragon, you won't mind our riding on your back."

"Not a bit," replied Quox. "I'm in disgrace just now, you know, and the only way to redeem my good name is to obey the orders of the Jinjin. If he makes me a beast of burden, it is only a part of my punishment, and I must bear it like a dragon. I don't blame you people at all, and I hope you'll enjoy the ride. Hop on, please. All aboard for the other side of the world!"

i highly recommend tooth & claw.

never read any other of walton's books, although i imagine i will when i go visit my sister & brother-in-law again (they gave me tooth & were at both farthingparties).

fidelio @ 232:
Please note that I am not making the pun about Visigothic code being the version that came before Morse code, and that none of you need to either.

But you're not excluding puns about Seekrit Conspiracies involving famous Visigothic artists? (Or, perhaps more appropriately, famous Visigothic encylopedists?)

Raq is the devil/deceiver/Source of Evil in Fool on the Hill (Matt Ruff). I'm guessing that there's some sort of back story to that, since quite a lot of everything in that book has roots in something.

abi @ 253... Draco‡ is probably the best screen dragon I've met

I was thinking the same thing. Having a voice like Sean Connery's can't hurt either. In the bad-dragon dept... The one in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad wasn't too bad. There was one scene in Dragonslayer that was particularly effective, as Vermitrax is seen crawling in a tunnel like a giant bat. Mind you, that was the only worthwhile scene in the whole movie (aside from the one where we find that the cast's best actor turns out to be its best actress).

Why not a dragon in charge of a nuclear submarine? Few things can top the fires of a nuclear reactor, after all. There's probably a sonnet in there. Or a short story.

Sarah S @ 254.. Hmm... I seem to remember recently reading a Locus review of an alternate-History where magic works and dragons are use to power steam locomotives.

By the way, are fire-breathing dragons mostly a European thing? Chinese dragons were associated with Air, not Fire. I think.

eric #257: Oh, I'd forgotten that. I can't imagine that Will Stanton's dog would have the name of Evil, but it's interesting at least.

Open thread, so: limerick contest.

Re guinea pigs and cucumber:

I have a friend who, if I were to show him the link, would almost certainly react thus:

"The guinea pigs sound interesting, but I don't like cucumber... what, you mean it isn't a recipe?"

Jules... You never heard of cucumber and guinea-pig sandwiches? Yum!

Serge @ 259

I think that classically, Chinese dragons are associated with water (air isn't one of the five Chinese elements). The Dragon King of legend is a sea-god.

As to the fire-breathing, I have no idea.

Re cucumbers: several years ago I told my cucumber hating son that we would be having slugs and cucumbers for dinner, (after about eleventy million questions of "What's for dinner?", I think) and he replied "But I don't like cucumbers!" in an appalled tone.

alsafi @ 264... I stand corrected. Say, in Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the dragon flew around like a snake in water, but I can't remember if he was associated with any specific element. Of course, Japanese dragons may be different.

Different depictions of dragons... I rather liked the dragon in Boorman's Excalibur. And Pierre Pevel's Les enchantements d'Ambremer (think of Paris in 1900 but with Faerie creatures casually walking around) had dragons capable of assuming human shape, but with their main occupation being as librarians. (No, I don't know if that was influenced by Tea with the Black Dragon, which Abi mentionned above.)

My only Dutch pun is about cucmbers.

But by the time you explain a pun, it isn't worth it.

So I won't tell you it.

Huh. Haku did seem to be associated with air, though he'd been a river, and that was how he and Chihiro/Sen had first met--when she fell in him. But I think the mythic cosmos in China* mooshes the sky/water concepts together to some extent, which would account for it. Oooh, and now I have a new thing to research!

I'd write a lot more, if I didn't spend so much time looking things up.

-----
* IMO Spirited Away owes more to Chinese folklore (and Rackham-esque touches) than Japanese, despite being a Japanese film.

I'm copying this over from my LJ because I think it's such a good story.

I started the December Asimov's last night which opens with Connie Willis' novella All Seated On the Ground. This is a fabulous story. There's the SF part -- aliens arrive and pompous people try to talk to them, but our lowly protagonist and a choir director find the clue. The pomposities won't listen to them, but they continue to look for how to talk. This part is great, a real SF mystery. But in addition, there's little barbs at Bush and his adminstration, evangelicals, pompous academics, etc., plus a little light romance. Truly a great story and worth buying the Asimov's for.

*looks uneasily at the thread title*

Here's some news of the weird, only it's from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Horror novelist boils girlfriend's flesh

An aspiring Mexican horror novelist has been arrested after police discovered his girlfriend's torso in his closet, a leg in the refrigerator and bones in a cereal box.

Methinks he was a little too thorough in his research.

alsafi @ 268... I think the mythic cosmos in China* mooshes the sky/water concepts together to some extent, which would account for it. Oooh, and now I have a new thing to research!

What have I wrought?

It'd make sense to combine air and water because, well, rain falls from the air. As for Spirited Away, I figured that Myazaki probably took things from all over the place and combined them into his own story. (I've been wondering if showing that movie to my 6-year-old nephew would be a Bad Idea. Probably.)

Marilee @ 269... It's next on my list of to-read.

Daaamn. You can buy anything on ebay.

It's been a while, but IIRC, the Asian dragons (from a root before the divergence of their cultures) included representatives for most or all of their elements. Rather than being "monsters" as in the West, they were what we'd consider demigods and "spirits" -- in China at least, they were part of the Celestial Bureaucracy. Always sentient and deeply magical, never mere beasts!

They were also much more varied in appearance and personality than in the Western conception, ranging from the serpentine forms which got them translated as "dragons" to us Westerners, to turtle-like creatures to more exotic beings such as the ki-rin, and surely others I haven't heard of. (Not necessarily friendly to humans -- they had their own roles independent of humanity, and presumptuous mortals could seriously tick them off.)

A general dragon source:
Obviously, there are a zillion sites out there about dragons, but The Serene Dragon has been around a few years, has a huge collection of types, sources, and stories, and when I originally found it (by way of a search for peahens) the maintainer was quite nice.

On closer examination, that site hasn't been updated since 2003, but it's still got a huge collection....

I notice that the Turkish ambassador has returned to Turkey, as a result of the House Foreign Relations Committee allowing a resolution on the Armenian genocide to go to a vote of the full house. At any other time, I would applaud this vote. Right now, it puts our troops in Iraq at risk, and makes a Turkish invasion of Iraq more likely. Allow me to congratulate Nancy Pelosi for making the wingnuts into honest, er, whatever they ares.

Well, the obvious solution to that is to kick Turkey out of NATO if they're naughty and begin the Axis of Evil Regime Change Tango on their behalf, right? That would also solve the Cyprus problem, and give the Kurds more land (along with the northern third of Iraq) for their homeland. Whee!

When winter whites the mountain meads,
And wicked winds the summers slay,
And night and noon wear widow's weeds,
Dark dragons in the passes play.
Of dark the daughters, lost to light,
Children of chaos and old night.

Of all, the direst dragon had
The crags at Carrine as her home.
Her hoard was heavy - gold to glad
Her heart. She reckoned not to roam.
And yet, the yen to go was growing.
The wilds were wordless, nothing knowing.

Scales like shields, might none may measure,
Yet her wisdom was awaking.
Dragged from dragon dreams of treasure,
From her bed of bright gold, shaking
Shining jewels, she rose unheeding.
For no hoard could help her needing.

Paltry seemed her pearls, her prizes,
And the paladins, the plunder.
Words she wanted. So arises
She of Carrine Gate, and thunder
Rolled through all the snowy summits.
Poised like peregrine, she plummets.

Hence she came to human hearths
Where words are wrought of different dreaming.
Words, to walk the wizard's paths
And spells to shape another seeming.
So to learn, the Carrine Worm
Took upon her human form.

Made as maiden, mild as Maytime,
So she came to croft and crafter,
Helped in harvest and the hay-time,
Shared our striving, learnt our laughter.
Thus, by little laid on less,
So she came to humanness.

Not a grotto, golden-gleaming,
Now she needed, nor yet knightly
Knaves to gnaw on. So that seeming
She retained, and reasoned rightly
Dragon days were borne behind;
And henceforth home's with humankind.

So still she's with us. Who shall say
What law or lord she may be bound by?
Whose the house where last she lay
Or any mark she might be found by?
Only this that one would say:
Beware of wenches on the way.

When winter whites the mountain meads
And skies grow steely, grey as glass,
Then listen as her laughter leads
Across the crags to Carrine Pass,
And follow, if your fear be small,
Or fail to fare that way at all.

What do the blogger folk do
To help them escape when they're blue
Astroturfers, spammers, the clueless and the trolls
The poster who on lunch break has lost all the goals,
When there is work to be done,
We'd rather be here having fun,
With Patrick and Teresa and Avram and with JIm
Oh what do blogger folk do,
Sink or swim?

Often I am told
They stomp a noxious troll,
And watched Teresa filet all the words,
When the feat's complete,
All all the vowels are gone,
Amusing comments comes in larger herd,
And that's what blogger folk do, so they says.

They stomp trolls?
So they say.

Arise posters, arises posters,
The threads continue to grow posters,
See knitting, plants, and politics
And poetry fill up the screen
The words pour in with lots of vim,
And wow can some of be mean!

What else do the blogger folk do
They must have a real life or two,
The children some at home have,
The day job though it sucks,
The time off line gone shopping
Or feeding the ducks
When all the doldrums begin
What keeps the posters in their skins
They have some secret weapon
We haven't dug up yet,
Oh what do posters all do, posts to whet?

They sit around and post more
That's what we all here do,
And that's what blogger folks do...

Yes, Rush the band. Surely no one here thought I was fond of the talk show host?

I used to have a bunch of bumperstickers, made by an online acquaintance, that said, "RUSH IS A BAND, DAMMIT."

I think anyone who says "I was a fan of [Band] until [AlbumTitle]" really ought to at least take a listen to the very latest album, just in case the band's output has looped back around to intersect with their tastes once more. You never know.

(CRV: For Rush, that would be Snakes And Arrows at this time. Have you heard it yet? What do you think of it? I adore it. But then I also adored Presto, it was totally my gateway drug, but I understand many folks found it too tame and overprocessed.)

I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet: Knitted Flying Spaghetti Monster Hat

Nicole @280: There have been times I could have used an "O'Reilly is a publisher!" bumper sticker, myself.

Serge @ 258

That brings up a story request. It was very short no more than a couple of thousand words, maybe shorter. A metallurgy company is losing very expensive quantities of some highly radioactive alloy; they believe it's being stolen but no search, not matter how careful, has ever found any going out. It turns out that gurve puvrs sbhaqre* vf npghnyyl n xbobyq jub unf orra qevaxvat gur zbygra zrgny bhg bs gur pehpvoyr. Arther Porges, maybe from the early 60s?

* Ur jub ehaf gur sbhaqel.

Randolph@276: I notice that the Turkish ambassador has returned to Turkey, as a result of the House Foreign Relations Committee allowing a resolution on the Armenian genocide to go to a vote of the full house.

They're apparently willing to go to war over how we describe something that happened a century ago. The Hatfields and McCoys got nothing on these guys.

Rush? I always think of the classic old Aussie ABC TV Series Rush (imdb) set in the gold fields during our gold rush, with the incredibly catchy George Dreyfus theme music (MP3 excerpt) quoting folk tunes, and the incredibly swoonable-at brooding, mysterious Sgt McKellar (next step after Captain Scarlet). You can get DVDs not of the original series (curses), but of a more recent revoiced parody they called Olden Days, by the comedy group D-Generation, part of their The Late Show.

Greg, #284. It's a serious accusation, even now. The problem is, it's true. The other problem is, stating it plainly puts our troops at risk. And, of course, the very thought threatens their, er, honor (no, that's not your honor, your honor, that's your, er, nevermind).

Fragano at #234: Did you mean "elfin"? The fine people of Elphin have lots of stories about St. Patrick, and a pub called The Elf Inn, but nothing about dragons that I know of.

abi #267: 'kwamkwammers'? Come to think of it, I can't think of many other monolingually* Dutch puns†.

*English/Dutch ones, yes. (Cf. the infamous 'I fok dogs')

†'Voer eendjes, geen oorlog' springs to mind.

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

IPCC and Al Gore win Nobel Peace Prize.

Zarquon beat me to it. (If I hadn't been in the middle of cooking dinner, would have been rather faster off the mark.) Well, well, well …

Zarquon beat me, too. But I posted it over in the Doris Lessing thread -- vaguely relates, right?

Now if only the "Draft Gore" movement would get some traction with Gore.

David Harmon @ 274... Thanks for the reference.

Bruce Cohen @ 283... This sounds like something that Unknown would have come up with.

Dawno @ 281... Heheheh...

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers): Thanks. Some Georges are more annoying than others.

Randoplh Fritz @ 286... no, that's not your honor, your honor, that's your, er, nevermind

Not gill-cup!

The Guinea Pig movie good, especially that cinema verité moment where they slam into the camera, but I prefer Hamster Eats a Carrot.

Huzzah! Al Gore, along with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007.

Well deserved, sir; congraulations!

Heh. 'Swhat I get for being eager to post; still, it's good news worth repeating.

Mind you, Gore getting a Peace Prize, and that from a bunch of smelly furriners, probably disqualifies him as President of my country. Still, I really want him to run. Now, have you ladies & gents added your names to that draft-Gore petition?

Dave Luckett #278: **APPLAUSE**

Niall McAuley #287: I mean Elphin. That's because Abi was imitating "The War Song of Dinas Vawr".

Dave Luckett @278:
Fantastic!

Fragano @302:
I was indeed riffing on Dinas Vawr, though due to childhood influences he always comes to me through the intermediary of TH White.

Second the applause to Dave Luckett @278. Excellent.

I also enjoyed Paula Lieberman @279 ... is there a tune I should be able to put this to?

273 Greg: But you'll have to outbid Admiral Bob's National Defense.

Hooray, Al Gore and IPCC! Now if only the motherfracker would run...

abi #303: I read The Once and Future King after I had read both 'The War-Song of Dinas Vawr' and 'The Lament for the Makers'. I had an odd childhood.

Huzzah! Al Gore! Huzzah!

Voted for him last time he ran. I'd vote for him again.

re 167: Drat. But they did send me the recipe.

Greg London #308: The "Re-elect Gore" slogan kind of writes itself, doesn't it?

Ethan, maybe that would explain the pen floating above my desk this morning and the noticable chunk of missing paper.

;)

The man certainly demonstrates "In Service of his county" though.

Greg London @ 311 In Service of his county

Bloom County?

Is it just me but are the ad-servers here really interfering with pages loading? I'm on my MacBook, in Parallels Desktop for Mac, in W2K, using Firefox and the pages seem to load fine. But I generally prefer to be over there in OSX land, in Firefox there, and when I do that I often get a ton of stalled pages (with name of ad-server in the lower-left supposedly "transferring"). If I try to start scrolling anyway, either the page doesn't move at all, or I get these weird effects of part of the comment thread scrolling in, say, the lower 1/3 of the screen while the upper 2/3 remains frozen.

I dunno. Maybe it's my machine, but it doesn't happen all the time. When it does happen, shutting down Firefox (and wiping the cache), and restarting it doesn't seem to help.

I'm not complaining about the ads. I know they are necessary. I'm just saying, is all.

ethan @ 310... The "Re-elect Gore" slogan kind of writes itself, doesn't it?

Let me know if you come across that bumper sticker. I want one.

Serge #314: I'll be on the lookout.

Regarding Raq the dog: Romany, children's author and the host of a popular children's program on the BBC in the 40's, had a dog named Raq who appeared on the show and in his stories. In story, if I recall the chronology correctly, I think it would be reasonable for Will to have read/heard Romany

Out of story, I suspect that Romany and Cooper are both making a common allusion, perhaps to a second foriegn language. My first thought was to try Romani (aka gypsy), as Romany was Roma (thus explaining his choice of pseudonum). I couldn't find any good dictionaries online, however.

#313 Michael W. -

I don't get stalled pages I can blame on the adserver, but if I open multiple threads in multiple tabs, sometimes it locks up the screen refresh on Firefox (under OSX) so that no matter which tab the top bar claims I'm looking at, nothing changes. Sometimes the left third of the page will freeze much like you're describing, so that changing tabs changes the right 2/3 but not the left 1/3.

I've always blamed it on Firefox for OSX just not quite being up to snuff. I use Safari mostly, but it doesn't work for ML for some reason I can't recall at the moment.

The Onion on parents relating to their bisexual kids.

Someone PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE collect all the poetry in Making Light and put it somewhere where we can buy it -- please!

I have a horticultural request: if any denizens of ML live in an area where pomegranates grow, and has access to a plant, I would be delighted to pay to have a couple fruits shipped to me.

They aren't winter-hardy around here, but I want to have a go at growing a plant (vine? shrub?) in a tub. My attempts to sprout seeds from store-bought fruits have so far been unsuccessful, and I suspect the refrigeration they get in transport kills them.

Anyone who can help me out, drop me an email with your shipping cost and I'll send you a check and my address. Or I can do PayPal if you're set up to receive payments. :)

DavidS #316: Well, that's something I'd never heard of. The Susan Cooper books were written in the 70s, and I always imagined them to be taking place about when they were written (or, at any rate, in the eternal "present"), which would mean Will probably didn't watch the show, though his parents or twenty thousand older siblings or someone may have, and at any rate any of them might have liked the books. Sounds reasonable.

A bit of googling tells me that raq is Romani for "beloved dog," though in my utter ignorance of the language I'd be more willing to believe that such a simple, single word just means "dog." Either way: Will Stanton's dogs appear to be named, essentially, Dog and Dog. I like it.

Thanks, peoples!

Carrie S

Try here:
http://www.bayflora.com/pomegranates.html
They have one that's hardy to 10F.

They have one that's hardy to 10F.

I'd still have to cover it in the winter; though we don't get many days below 10F, we do get some, pretty much every winter.

I wonder if pomegranates are like apples and other fruit trees in not growing true from seed. If so I might have to go with a cutting or a started plant.

I've found a bunch of sites that sell the plants, but they all charge ridiculous amounts--generally, more than the cost of the plant itself--for shipping. I try not to buy anything that's going to end up costing me more for the shipping than the item.

Todd Larason at 282: You have my sympathies. I'm not sure a bumper sticker would help, though - I could totally see the O'Reilly Factor spinning off the publishing imprint responsible for putting Ann Coulter in my local Borders (which deserves some punishment, surely, for smacking its anti-theft adhesive bar right on top of the gorgeous illustrations in 1001 Nights of Snowfall, but having to hawk copies of Godless in Boulder, Colorado seems a little extreme).

Serge, #314, there's a ton of them on cafepress.com.

Carrie, I've got a 15-year-old pomegranate shrub at my parents' New Orleans-area home. I planted it from the seed of a storebought while I was in high school. It never got above three feet high, but that may have something to do with the pot it lives in. It has flowered several times but never fruited. I don't know whether that's due to the seed it grew from or the lack of other pomegranate bushes within cross-pollination reach.

They definitely seem to like the tropical and sub-tropical zones. Our across-the-street neighbor had also grown one, one season, and bonzai'd it. It actually fruited, too, a pomegranate the size of a lima bean. I also once saw one fruiting in front of an apartment building in Cozumel.

Randolph Fritz @ 325... Thanks!

Carrie S, I wish your timing was better; there are pomegranite starts at the Patricia Calvert Greenhouse at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle, and I could send one to you, but I won't be there when the greenhouse is open until the next Fall Bulb Sale.

I understand your desire; everything about the plant is lush and gorgeous. I don't know, though, if they are propagated from seed; if they are, the fruit probably has to ferment for the seeds to mature.

re 323: You might want to try the 'nana' variety, which you may be able to keep in a pot. It's hard to imagine it growing outside in Lewes, but there you go. It's a widely available variety.

Interesting response to the Al Gore/IPCC Nobel at worldchanging.com. The wingnutosphere is going to be buzzing like a stick-stirred nest of hornets.

OtterB @ 304: Paula's piece @279 fits very nicely to the tune of "What do the simple folk do?" [MIDI], from Camelot.

This page probably tells you more than you want to know about pomegranates, but it's very helpful. They should be hitting the markets in the next few weeks - they're just now showing up in my local farmers' markets.

PJ, that link gives me a Not Found haiku.

re #330: Of course, and a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Diatryma: Try this link.

It looks like something went flakey when I pasted it - Jakob's is the one I found. (Aren't computers wonderful?)

Re Tooth & Claw: I've read no Trollope and don't really have a thing for dragons. Would T&C be wasted on me?

A link to an interesting article on group dynamics on the web and elsewhere.Shirky Article

They should be hitting the markets in the next few weeks - they're just now showing up in my local farmers' markets.

My local groceries have them now, mostly teeny not-quite-ripe ones, but I've found a couple worth eating.

Pomegranate season is one of my favorite seasons. :)

Nicole and JESR: I've seen a few websites that claim they can be propogated from seed, but I haven't yet managed the trick despite trying every variant I can find. It's possible I've just been unlucky in my choice of seeds, of course.

Having a moment of duncery here...is there a word for the DRAMATIC bit at the end of a chapter if it isn't, per se, a cliffhanger?

ethan #340: You mean like 'climax' or 'dénouement'?

Hmm. PJ's "Everything you always wanted to know about pomegranates" page claims that they'll sprout spontaneously on pretty much any soil, which implies that the ones I've been getting are either stunted by their shipping conditions or somehow deliberately treated.

On the upside, it says that they're "uncertain" from seed but not as bad as apples et al, which means I'm likely to get at least edible fruit if I ever manage to get one to sprout, flower and fruit (self-fertile, but having more than one plant improves the fruit set).

Now I'm going to have to try a pomegranate. This could end very, very badly, and will certainly end very, very messily.

Intelligent questions about "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."

#339 and others:

Random vaguely relevant comment: I saw a Good Eats episode on pomegranates a few weeks ago on Food Network. I don't know if it's still around somewhere (they eventually seem to come out on DVD), or if you'd find it useful or interesting....

todd,

I've read no Trollope and don't really have a thing for dragons. Would T&C be wasted on me?

i've read no trollope & don't have a thing for dragons, & i loved it. but maybe it helped that i have a thing for austen.

Nick Anderson (Houston Chronicle) has a funny editorial cartoon on Gore's prize.

Cartoon

Diatryma: It's likely to be very messy indeed (and distinctly bad-tasting) if you try to treat it like most other fruits, and even experienced eaters have occasional seed explosion accidents.

Basically you have to get the seeds out/off of the pulp before you can eat them; the pulp has a mouth-puckering taste that's hard to describe but isn't pleasant. And if pomegranates have a default internal arrangement like apples or oranges do, I have been unable to detect it--that is, chunks of pulp studded with seeds and seperated by thin papery walls occur in all pomegranates, but I've never disovered a default number or arrangement of them.

Some people advocate removing the seeds while the main body of the fruit is submerged in water. This cuts down on the blast radius of seed explosions and washes away excess juice as it occurs, but can be hard to manipulate.

Susan @ 344... isn't that totally amazing fiddle feedback thing the Devil plays (which sounds like Hendrix gone bluegrass) a hundred times better than that high-school-band piece-of-crap tune Johnny plays?

Of course, this forced me to go watch MTS3K's short film "Mr B Natural"...

If you peel the pomegranate under water, the seeds sink and the waste floats. It's very helpful. Also, it keeps the juice from going all over (and the juice stains fabric). The easy procedure is to cut through the skin first, then break it - roughly- into sections. After that, into the water. There really are sections inside, but they aren't at all obvious from the outside. (For the botanically inclined, it's a berry, like a tomato.)

alsafi, #240: Very nice indeed. I have to wonder whether the mothers of the wingnuts accepted, "But he started it!" as an excuse.

Dave, #278: Oooh...

Because it's an open thread, The NIH format for professionally citing a blog post.

Many, many thanks, Carrie S. They should have a default internal arrangement, but it probably varies; apples have five seed chambers ('locule' is the word I know, but there may be a more precise definition), my porch bell peppers can have one to four, but just about everything has some internal structure. The pomegranate picture in the link looks like it has five locules, so if you were to take a cross section of the fruit, you'd see five seed chambers.
Of course, this is all based on a picture and knowledge of fruit and flower structer, not actual experience with a fruit. I think I'll stop by the co-op on my way home, see if I can buy a couple. One to eat as recommended, and one to dissect, then eat.

Fragano #341: Can it really be called either of those things if it's just the end of a chapter?

Yeah, there's always some number of locules (what a neat word) arranged radially, and usually one centrally at the stem end, but sometimes there's one at the flower end, too, and sometimes the radial ones seem to do an alternating higher-and-lower thing. Basically I've gotten to the point of just peeling the rind back and looking for the edge of the seed chamber thus uncovered.

ethan... Fragano... A dénouement applies to the grand finale. It means the untieing of the knots, which, in English, is where the loose ends are supposed to be tied. Go figure.

To be precise*, it's the arils one is trying to get at to eat, not the seeds. Dried pomegranate seeds are used in Indian cooking as a mild souring agent, but that's the only context I've come across where it really is the seeds that one wants.

The arils are the beautiful, ruby-red capsules that burst filling one's mouth (or splattering one's favorite white shirt) with tasty, juicy, stainy goodness. Yum!

*Note to self: when you find yourself wondering "would it be too nitpicky to bring up this correction?" remember which blog you're reading...

Carrie S @320:

Wouldn't your rather have the plants?

Pomegranates

Lexica's right; pomegranates are a lot like raspberries on a larger scale. The seed proper is hard and not especially tasty, but is surrounded by juicy red flesh/pulp (not the white pulp that provides structure) which is the good part.

Lori: I'd rather not have to pay more for the shipping than for the plant itself. Edible Landscaping is cool, but they charge the earth for shipping.

Ah, I see -- yes the shipping is expensive. I've used them for years and have gotten used to the cost...

You can also smush half a pomegranate in one of those hand-lever-operated orange squeezers, add crushed ice and 4 cl of gin, and enjoy.

The juice stains, as noted earlier in the thread, so don't drink so many that you start missing your mouth.

Here's a place in Georgia with pomegranates. The smallest size is $20, and they say shipping cost is 25% of the order total (so $5). The "Sweet" (the one under "dwarf") is listed as hardy to 0.

re 302:

"The mountain sheep are sweeter
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter."

All right, how many blogs would have a significant number of people who've read Thomas Love Peacock? The above quote is from memory, not from research.

Susan @344: I always thought the 'gotcha' was either Johnny's 'sin of pride' in thinking he could beat the Devil, or that Johnny would have become more prideful than he already was thinking that he had beat the Devil (and ripe to be plucked later).

Yeah, definitely dissecting a pomegranate this weekend. The arils vs seeds thing is cool-- I know strawberries are aggregate fruit, and each of the things we call seeds is actually a fruit in itself, but this is new to me. I don't remember what the fruitlets of raspberry are; I want to say they're drupes, like cherries, peaches, and coconuts.
Plant anatomy is great for Scrabble, too.

Jakob @288
'kwamkwammers'?

Yes*†‡.

'Voer eendjes, geen oorlog'

[*]

-----
* a cucumber in Dutch is komkommer
† kom means "I go", and the past tense ("I went") is kwam
‡ So what do you call a week-old cucumber?

Diatryma, you're right, they're drupes.

re #362: Looking at the gardening scuttlebutt sites, I would say to avoid "that nursery in Georgia", as one post put it. Mislabelled stock, crewed up orders, .... They don't even show up on Dave's Garden Site (which anyone planning to do nursery mail order should consult, btw), which is a pretty good sign that DGS had bad press for them and they threatened Legal Stuff.

I don't see another on-line source for it, so maybe you want to take your chances, but just so you've been warned.

Fragano @235
True, but...

Myth, that is intolerant
Of the coolly competent
And that treats with chill disdain
The practical mundane
Worships story and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives
Pardons arrogance and greed,
Calls heroic every deed.
Myth, that will no hero waste,
Pardons vampires and their taste,
And will pardon Happy Feet,
Pardons them, for being neat.

Fragano, that's nice to know. Being in CA, I'd not be buying from them anyway (too far for shipping something like that). My first choice is local, then I'll start looking for elsewhere in-state. Lori's looked interesting, though. (Ooh, American persimmons!)

"Is it just me but are the ad-servers here really interfering with pages loading?"

Oh yes, definitely. The ads have little Javascript bugs on them, and they really slow things down. I highly recommend the noscript Firefox extension.

Fragano @ 235... Not in Dragonheart. Nor in Gordon Dickson's The Dragon and the George.

Abi #369: I suspect that Auden is laughing in his grave. Lovely.

ethan #353: Chapters can climax, but not have all their knots undone.

Fragano @ 374... Chapters can climax, but not have all their knots undone.

Sounds like a naughty book.

P J Evans #370: I think you meant to thank C. Wingate, and not me.

Serge #372: I must confess to not having read either.

Serge #372: I must confess to not having read either.

That McSweeney's article is just perfect. I hate that song. What always bugged me the most about "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" was, in the face of what a gracious loser the Devil was, what an unsporting winner Johnny was. I mean, did he really have to call him a sunnuvabitch?

Fragano @ 376

Probably. (Dynamic RAM with a refresh problem. Not to mention trying to get work done.)

OTOH, I did notice that abi's poem upthread took flight from the back of a Peacock. (And Peacock's stuff is available at Project Gutenberg.)

And now I've been hit by the stereo monster. What can I do in recompense? Here goes:

voice of the dragon that so loudly calls
we hear it and we do not understand
what sort of creature comes upon the land

the king drinks deeply in his ancient halls
around him still carouse a noble band
voice of the dragon that so loudly calls

before next summer winter's horror falls
against the firedrake not a man will stand
for all his armour and his boastings grand
voice of the dragon that so loudly calls

the knight who would have ridden to the cave
answered the riddle and retrieved the gold
his bones are scattered on the mountain cold

and all of us from king right down to slave
know what the price has been for acting bold
the knight who would have ridden to the care

in such a time would any rise to save
the fearful land and in honour grow old
you know what tale has many times been told
the knight who would have ridden to the cave

the final hero is of humbler kind
the one who's chosen as the expert thief
in whose sharp eyes few seem to have belief

the keepers of the land are in a bind
they fear that there will not come swift relief
the final hero is of humbler kind

so many options but none come to mind
all might have ended with another grief
but fortune spoke and we have crowned a chief
the final hero is of humbler kind

others may tell the story in their way
gilding the truth and shining up the fact
reciting verse with heady action packed

just how the hero did the dragon slay
while hard with pains and horrors he was racked
others may tell the story in their way

the climax comes on just such a bright day
as when we saw the citadel attacked
but we are overcome with decent tact
others may tell the story in their way

As I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear, I've violated some rules somewhere by baking rock cakes for my own birthday. As a birthday gift* our ancient family recipe (from 1955 but I've updated it for 21st century tastes and labour saving devices) can be found here.

* Giving gifts on your birthday probably breaks some rules too. Tut.

Serge #375: Je ne dis rien.

If it's good enough for hobbits, then it's perfectly fine behaviour, in my opinion.

Randolph Fritz @ #371

I use prefbar, which allows me to toggle colours, javascript and popups off and on from the main screen. Many other functions are available, and the toolbar is customizable as well.

Fragano @ 383... Oh well. One could have referred to a book's binding in a totally different meaning.

Michael Weholt, #313, that happened to me when I was on dialup. Now the ads just take a couple more seconds.

R.M.Koske, #317, that happens to me with Firefox on Win XP and if I change to another program (usually Agent, which I keep up for mail), Firefox will change properly.

Carrie S, #348, I always just cut the first section carefully and then take the seeds out one by one as I eat them.

The WashPost had a list of Blackwater Fever symptoms.

Neil Willcox @ 382... I think that Abi's rule against baking your own birthday cakes applies only when chocolate is the prime material. Not sure though if it includes rocks.

Serge #386: One could have.......

PODdy Mouth - Daily Dirt on POD and Self-Publishing suspended

No, it's not the original Poddy Mouth. It's a new site with a similar name that's been filling a need for information for writers interested in either POD or self-publishing avenues. The URL at https://poddymouth.wordpress.com/ states that it's been suspended, but not why.

I have my suspicions as to why, but it's too soon to mention those since it wouldn't help matters if I'm wrong. However, I think it would be useful if the site could be resurrected on another site because it's opinionated in a good way. So, if anyone knows the operator of this particular suspended Poddy Mouth, could you contact that individual and ask her to contact P&E?

Say, is it that unusual for a 9-month-old kid to be walking around? It's going to be strange, meeting my youngest nephew at the end of the month now that he definitely has grown beyond the lump-of-flesh state. Hmm... He's probably still too young for me to succeed in corrupting his mind with comic-books.

And now PODdy Mouth seems to have been restored and is no longer suspended. Still, I'd like to contact the operator if anyone knows her.

Serge, it is not unknown for a nine-month-old to walk. And I'm so very sorry for the child's mother, for once the child is walking, he enters the stage of being perfectly mobile and having absolutely no sense of their own vulnerability, and there is no rest.

Why, yes, I had one of those.

JESR @ 393... once the child is walking, he enters the stage of being perfectly mobile and having absolutely no sense of their own vulnerability, and there is no rest

No kidding. My sister-in-law lives in the Oakland hills, in a house with lots of stairs.

According to the Yarn Market News, August 2007, June Hemmons Hiatt's book The Principles of Knitting is being rewritten and reorganized, with new material. Hemmons Hiatt signed a contract with Simon & Schuster, and the revised edition is slated for Fall 2009 publication. Hemmons Hiatt said "the revisions have been more extensive than expected. This is not a reprint; this is a new Principles of Knitting, and I hope knitters will find their patience has been rewarded. It isn't often authors get a chance to make something better, and I don't want to rush this." The YMN blurb also mentions that this book is frequently in the bookfinder.com annual Top 10 list of most wanted OOP books.

In a complete change of topic, I kept forgetting to post the follow-up to the "whop yo jaw" conversation with Linkmeister: based on what I've learned, it's a generational thing (late 1950's early 1960's), with some regional variation in the accompanying hand gesture. It means "I told you so," and likely that I heard it as a child and misunderstood it based on the context, for example, as Aunty M having told Aunty B that she made the cake with tomato soup and Aunty B saying no way, it doesn't taste like tomato, and Aunty M showing her the recipe.

Serge, by the time my daughter had been walking for two hours, she'd chipped an incisor by falling against the bath-tub; by the time she was eighteen months old, she tried to run away twice (and since she stalks me on the internet: yes, you did, once you tried to walk to grammies and ended up clear down by the road, where the corral is now, and once you tried to blend in with the crowd so you could go to Mrs. Peggy's class with your brother).

I hope your nephew at least sleeps at night; the very young non-sleeping toddler is a whole lot of work.

Marilee, #387 -

Switching to another program doesn't seem to help when it does it to me, unfortunately. The only thing for it is to close the window and try again.

I do wonder if it isn't some bit of a particular ad - shortly after I posted my complaint/comment, it started doing it every time I tried to load the "Weirdly Similar" thread, but not on any other threads. I switched to reading that thread on Safari* and after a few hours, tried it again, and it worked fine.

In spite of my rather detailed complaints, I don't mind it much. I only use OSX at work and the page runs fine for me at home under Win XP. I mostly mentioned it in case the extra info helped Michael get some resolution to his troubles.

*I recall now why I don't usually read ML using Safari - it doesn't understand the HTML magic that takes you straight to a specific comment. So if I'm on the front page or the "Previous 1000 comments" page and want to go to the oldest comment I haven't yet seen, I end up somewhere apparently random in the middle of the thread. Not an easy way to follow the conversation.

JESR @ 396... To put it mildly, your daughter was a handful? Kind of like the little girl in Adventures in Baby-sitting who had a crush on the god Thor, to the point that she carried a hammer everywhere...

As for my youngest nephew... I think he sleep a lot. He certainly enjoyed sleeping on my chest when we first met.

Re: Serge #398:

OK, everybody, all together now:

Awwwww.

ethan @ 399... Thanks. By the way, my littlest nephew was born on the same day as Rush Limbaugh. When I pointed that out to my sister-in-law, she exclaimed "Gross!"

Serge @ #391, my eldest walked at 9 months, and it was pretty stressful. They don't develop a fear of heights (and sudden dropoffs) until they're a bit older than that. (She didn't sleep much, either.)

RM #397 -- Safari does anchored links (the HTML magic you mention) just fine, normally. On Making Light it doesn't interact well with the 'larger type' or 'even larger type' option, unfortunately, so you could choose to switch back to 'small type' if that's a better trade-off for you.

Neil @ #382, I dunno. My cousin gave gifts on her 40th birthday, and it was super.

Lila @ 401... So it seems like an perambulating 9-month-old isn't that unusual. My wife says that she was walking around at that age and that she was fearless. Yes, she was a handful.

Marilee@387: The WashPost had a list of Blackwater Fever symptoms.

Heh. :)

In other news, the Vatican is self publishing 800 copies of the minutes of the trial of the Knights Templar. Apparently the Vatican decided that 700 years was long enough that they could declassify some information regarding the case.

Anyway, as far as book binding tasks go, they tried to replicate the stains on the original copies, leather bound, and they even tried to replicate the wax seal used by the 14th century inquisitors. They're asking for $8,000 dollars per copy.

Fragano #381: One of your best, which is saying something.

JESR #393, Serge #394:

My mother used to recount the time she looked out the back window and saw my eldest brother, at just that age, disappearing from view as he happily climbed a stepladder to the roof. Somehow, she recovered sufficiently to have three more children.

Serge, actually, my daughter got a hammer for her seventh birthday.

She's a wonderful human being, in fact, beloved by one and all, girl genius, et'c and so on, it's just that for a long time there I was pretty sure I'd never get any sleep again.

Leslie in CA, a cousin of mine managed to get on top of the refrigerator before she could walk. Babies are terrifying, no doubt about it.

And I forgot to say awwwww... at the picture link. There's just not any babies around here, and I'm jealous. Makes me forget my manners.

JESR #408, I must say that's impressive.

Serge, Theo is adorable.

I think I forgot to say that I find the Rock Cake recipe quick, easy and not too messy for when you want to make cakes in a hurry. They're supposed to look uneven, which plays straight into my cooking strengths. You can hardly taste the flints at all.

Forgetting to mention these is a lesson in why you shouldn't "just check" your email when you come in from the pub.

Neil @411: "You can hardly taste the flints at all"

You mean you don't take the rocks out at the end?

Todd Larason, #402 -

You're right, of course. I forgot about that. I do prefer the type larger, so staying with the default size doesn't work for me. Firefox seems to have no trouble with them even after I've changed the type size.

Am I the only one who finds that the smaller and smaller default text sizes are a problem? ML's default size isn't that small compared to some of what I've seen. What's causing this? For a long time I blamed it on the fact that I had a higher-resolution monitor than most web-designers were expecting. But now I think what I've got is about standard, and I'm not even running at the highest resolution my computer is capable of, because that makes everything too small. I could get used to the idea that I'm simply getting old, given a little time, but my slightly-older-than-me hubby keeps his computer at teenytiny unreadable and always has. Should I just accept that my vision stinks? (You'd think that wearing glasses since the fourth grade would have been an early clue.) But if that's the case, why is it only recently a problem on the web?

All this is only an issue at work, where I use OSX and can't install and extensions to Firefox. At home, I've got a FF extension that automatically resizes the text to whatever I resized it to the last time I visited a page. I do very little adjusting anymore. (The extension is called NoSquint, if anyone is interested.)

Leslie @ #407, JESR @ #408: I believe it. My nephew could climb the ladder to my parents' aboveground pool before he could walk. Through constant vigilance on all our parts, he has survived to a successful adulthood.

Leslie in CA @ 407... she recovered sufficiently to have three more children

Good thing too otherwise you wouldn't be with us. I'll mention your comments about Theo to his mom. Apparently, not only does he walk, but he is apparently very curious. Then again, maybe he already walks because of his curiosity.

JESR @ 408... my daughter got a hammer for her seventh birthday. She's a wonderful human being, in fact, beloved by one and all, girl genius

And you looked forgivingly as she turned the farm equipment into a coffeemaker. Until the day lightning came out of the barn and a little-girl voice could be heard saying "It's alive! Alive!!!". Then everything turned into a scene from The Iron Giant.

R.M. Koske @ 413 -

Change "OSX" to "Windows" and I could have written your last paragraph word-for-word. In my case, the Mac at home is the one with the useful extensions. On the PC at work (which doesn't like the combination of anchored links and larger text, either) what seems to work is to let the page load and the text resize, then click the "go to URL" button at the end of the address bar. The browser loads the anchored link, then resizes, after which you're no longer looking at the comment you were trying to see. Clicking "go to" makes it relocate the anchor.

Serge @415,

I can believe the curiosity; he's looking at you with such intense concentration in that photo.

And yes, I'm decidedly grateful for Mom's stout constitution.

Serge at #416, no, in fact, that would be my nephew, ten years my daughter's junior and a unique individual in his own right. The morning after his parents spent the night installing a new dishwasher, before they dragged their middle-aged carcases out of bed, he had gotten out the socket set and disassembled the whole thing all over the front lawn and was working on the schematics for a robot.

My daughter's nefarious plan is to make everyone fat with more and more elaborate desserts; this summer's garden party was topped off by a trifle of dark sweet cherries, muddled with sugar and the juice made into syrup, almond custard, and ganache (I forget the cake part, since merely being in the house with the thing had negative effects on my HgA1C and I stayed as far away as I could get while it was around).

JESR @ 419... It sounds like your nephew and your daughter both could apply for a job in Eureka. ("No, Bobby, you may not use your death ray to heat up my crême brûlée.")

Serge, they'd fit right in, although some one would have to be appointed dedicated safety officer.

I was corrected in email: it was her tenth birthday, and she also got a hacksaw and a "pretty, pretty dress." The Nephew will be ten next spring, and I think I may get him a soldering set and a book about making garden structures from copper pipe, since my sister doesn't think he's old enough to learn to weld, yet.

abi wrote: I am determined to resist [the inner itch to write a sonnet] for the mental image of a fire magpie, which picks up and collects different types of fire.

So I thought I'd write one instead. It took me longer, determined to complete it, than it took abi, determined to resist, to write her version (shoulda known!), but since it's done, here it is:

The common magpie loves all things that shine:
The sapphire and the sequin both the same.
Its nobler cousin's feelings are more fine:
The fire-magpie lines her nest with flame.
She wings unseen through ev'ry human land
To find, and then, when found, to swoop and snatch
A pretty flame from unsuspecting hand.
(You curse the wind, and strike another match.)
From match and candle, beacon, lantern, lamp,
The hotdog cooker wheeled from street to street,
The friendly blaze that guards the hunters' camp,
She takes her pick of little gems of heat.
For centuries, she gathers up the best;
Then phoenix, fire-cuckoo, steals the nest.

JESR @ 421... they'd fit right in, although some one would have to be appointed dedicated safety officer

I don't know. Fargo doesn't have a safety officer and he almost destroyed the whole town a few times.

That being said, there is no shortage of intelligence and of the will to use it in your family, eh?

Leslie in CA @ 418... he's looking at you with such intense concentration in that photo

Probably wondering what that hairy thing on my chin is.

Paul A @ 422... Thanks for the poem.

Dave Luckett #406: Thanks. I blush.

Oh, man, I get busy for a few days, and don't have much time to watch the poesy detectors, and people start coming out of the woodwork with beautiful things. Makes me feel like a magpie picking pretty bits out of the web (thank you, Paul and abi). I don't mean to leave anyone out, but there are just too many to mention here, you're all wonderful. But, I'm sure none of you will feel slighted if I do mention that Fragano's work at #381 was at another level altogether. Marvelous!

Serge @ 423

I think STNG could have used an executive chef instead of an engineering officer: "Captain, we're entering a patch of Pan Particles; they're dissolving all the ship's no-stick surfaces!" or "Another exit from warp drive like that last and I can't answer for the condition of tonight's dessert!"

JESR,

I don't know whether to just commiserate or feel less crazy about those years, knowing that others had those problems. Our oldest, at about four, was convinced he could fly, if only he could get high enough for a good launch. Luckily we lived in a ranch house at the time; a one story roof was quite enough height to get him down from.

And he was the one who took everything apart. Unfortunately he usually lost interest at that point; if he did put things back together it was usually in a hurry and in a slapdash manner. He never could keep a working alarm clock. And he didn't listen to me when I tried to explain audio grounding problems; he was seventeen, with his first beater car, and he was going to make the stereo system work. Well, it played, didn't it?

Oh, and Serge, that is one intensely cute kid. Awwwww, indeed.

Broce Cohen @ 428-429... There are lots of things that could have improved St-TNG. At least DS9's Promenade had a Klingon chef whose specialty looked like a salad bowl filled with worms, but he sort-of made up for it by serenading his customers with a Klingon violin.

As for my latest nephew... Thanks. I'm still bummed that, when I first held him, he fell asleep on my chest, soon followed by yours truly, and his mom never thought of taking a photo of that. Like I said earlier in this thread, last time, he was still at the eating-pooping-peeing lump-of-flesh stage. It's a totally different little guy I'll see when I fly to the Bay Area, two weeks from now.

Serge, there's a tendency to creativity coming from my brother-in-law, too: when he was in middle school he built a shop out in the woods and then spent the afternoons and weekends until his sixteenth birthday building himself a car.

It's really a good thing that he turned his skills to farming instead of crime, or the entertainment industry.

Bruce, I'm still looking for a railroad watch for my nephew to take apart and reassemble; the one I used to mess about with was in a jammed four-drawer file cabinet stolen shortly after I was married. Digital watches are just no good for the purpose.

My family is full of extreme cases: the first time I met one of my cousins he was twenty feet up a skinny paper birch. It was his little sister who did the refrigerator climb. Another cousin, as an adult, took a week of his vacation every year to go work the king crab fishery.

Of course, my son is at the opposite extreme; the day before he committed to walking, he practiced standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down the whole afternoon. He's now putting himself through college with a goal of having no debt and a salable degree at the end of his studies.

Paul A @422:
That's great! It takes what I first saw (which then got away from me) and brings it to a fruition I never anticipated. Of course the phoenix would steal the fire magpie's nest.

Bruce Cohen @427:
May the spirit of Mike Ford arise and shave my eyebrows off if I ever feel slighted by praise of another poet.

Particularly when you're right.

Paul A. @ 422:

Oooh. Very nice.

/me adds herself to the list of people requesting a collection of the ML poetry.

I think it'd have to be an annual thing; bound copies for the joy of having books, and e-files to be searchable.

Carrie S:

I was in my local Lowe's this morning, and they had, in the garden department, 5-gallon 'Utah Sweet' pomegranates for $21. In that size of container, they're about three feet tall. Just so you have a checkpoint for size and price.

Paul A #422: Nicely done.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #427: Thanks.

Lexica, #417 -

Ooh, I'll have to try that trick. Thanks!

JESR @ 431... there's a tendency to creativity coming from my brother-in-law

Sometimes I think about the family that spawned me and I wonder if I was adopted because I have almost nothing in common with them, when it comes to personality traits or abilities. Not quite. I think that I am what my father would have been if he had had access to more education than 7th Grade.

Nicole, #379: In redneck dialect, "sonovabitch" can be either a cussword or a term of affection, and sometimes partakes of both senses at once. Think of it as the white-trash equivalent of "nigga".

Paul, #422: That's lovely!

As far as millionaire-or-felon goes, I'm recently back from a family wedding. Stories included "I once shot my mom with a replica Civil War revolver", the lightning strike on the porch (Bob with an improvised bottle-cap rocket filled with gunpowder), the sodium, and this one kid who cleaned up the YMCA change machines with slug quarters, faked his way out of being a suspect for local fireworks trouble, and invented a rifle-style slingshot based on the Flintstones. It's that last that makes us wonder-- he's not in the family and we don't know him any more, so for all we know, he's in prison.

I don't want my children to have my childhood. I want my children to alternate between Pamela Dean characters' various childhoods and my father's.

about the radio-playing lawsuit - when I was in restaurant school a long, long time ago, our professor warned us that if we played records or the radio in a business, sooner or later we'd get a visit from a Musak salesman, and if we didn't sign up they'd report us to the relevant authorities to get sued.

I don't think this is new.

JESR #409, I was at the post office Monday and ours has a counter parallel to the one where the clerks work and you wait in line behind that. I was talking to a baby in a carrier on the floor by the clerks' counter and the lady next to me (much shorter than I am) looked at me like I was nuts. Then I realized she couldn't see the baby.

Serge, Theo looks like he's waiting for wisdom from his uncle.

Bruce Cohen, #429, we solved that problem in our house. I like taking things apart and my 17-month-younger brother likes putting them together. When necessary, I fix things and put them back together, but I'm mostly limited to things that will fit on my lap these days. I think my keyboard gets more cleaning than anybody else's.

Happy surprise in the mail day, especially appropriate the day after hearing that Gore got the Nobel Prize. Worldchanging is sharing the wealth from the better-than-expected sales of their big book. Got a check big enough to pay for the copies I bought as Christmas presents last year.

Marilee @ 442... Theo looks like he's waiting for wisdom from his uncle.

Coughgagsplutter...

Maybe it's just me, but my TV-viewing is rather sparse, now that the 'real' season has begun. I had more to watch during the summer season, with the closer, Eureka, Doctor Who, burn notice, the 4400, the dead zone and probably a few other things that I forget. The main season has numb3rs, House, cold case and criminal intent, and that's pretty much it. I am enjoying journeyman, not that its premise is extremely original, but I like the cast. Unfortunately, I wonder how long it'll be before it gets canceled.

Marilee, there are, sadly enough, people who don't realize that flirting with babies and smiling at small children when they're being well behaved is one of the most important duties and joys of adulthood.

I need to go to church more often; a little girl I met when she was two has a baby of her own, and when I went to meet him she took one look at me and gave me the smile she used as a preschooler, and her son amplified it, looking from her face to mine.

JESR @ 446... a little girl I met when she was two has a baby of her own

I can't hink of a more drastic realization that Time is passing. In 2004, I went back to my home town after a 9-year absence. What reminded me of Time wasn't the fancy shopping mall where fields and a drive-in used to be. It was to meet my friends's youngest daughter: less than one year old in 1995, she had now become a bookworm who casually and correctly used words such as 'lugubrious'.

Amen, Serge. I met a friend and her daughter about ten years ago in a reunion group at a bar; the daughter was about fifteen and a soon-to-be heartbreaker. The last time I'd seen her she was a gumdrop or something in a local production of The Nutcracker.

Serge @445 - About the new shows this fall, you might want to check out Pushing Daisies. I thought the premise sounded dreary, but a friend pushed me to watch it, and it's adorable! Sort of a Tim Burton/Dr Seuss/Douglas Adams mashup with loads of charm. It remains to be seen if they can keep it up for a season, but so far it's a treat.

The first episode of Reaper was also hilarious, but it's turning out to be rather formulaic, alas. We'll have to see if they can pep it up and really take advantage of Ray Wise as the devil.

Serge: I second oliviacw's emotion on Pushing Daisies. I thought it sounded abysmal, but it's pretty great. Charming as all get out, and the narrator is hilarious. I wanted to watch Journeyman, but I watched the first five minutes of the pilot, turned it off, and said "NEVER AGAIN!" Hated it. Thirty seconds in I said "I'm never going to care about these characters," and the others in the room said, "Uh-huh." Too bad, because the lead guy's kinda dreamy.

I was excited about Gossip Girl, which let me down. For some reason I haven't even tried Bionic Woman, though if it's online I'm going to try to catch up. I'm almost done with the third season of Desperate Housewives (got slowed down because the person I've been watching it with moved away just before the last disc, so I have to wait until I visit her to watch it), and once I'm done I'm going to try to catch up with the current season, because that show is damn good. Of course, I'm surgically attached to NBC on Mondays from nine to ten.

I don't have cable, so Doctor Who and Eureka (which I've never seen) and stuff are out of the question. Ah well.

I'll always have my Buffy DVDs. Unless someone steals them. Stay away! I've got a knife!

oliviacw... Pushing Daisies? Duly noted.

Ray Wise as the Devil? We should team him up with Christopher Walken as Gabriel? Comedy ensues.

ethan @ 450... Sorry to hear that Journeyman didn't click for you. Probably just as well since it's doing badly in the ratings.

Serge @ 445

There's Torchwood, but I think you said it's not available in Albuquerque. There are some non-sf, or barely-sf shows I like that are very YMMV: "Side Order of Life" and "Tell Me You Love Me", as well as "Californication" which only works because of David Duchovny and Evan Handler, who are two of the finest comic actors in Hollywood. I just wish that Tea Leoni was in it too. But other than the actors and some occasionally surgical dialog, it's mostly explicit sex (which can be funny, I'll admit) and bile against Southern California, which isn't as articulate bile as it should be.

Some other shows, sf and non-sf, in the current season I like and do recommend in general: "Friday Night Lights", "Blood Ties"*, "CSI"** , "My Name is Earl", "Mad Men"†, "Pushing Up Daisies"††, and "Dexter"‡.

And I've been watching reruns of "Brimstone" on Chiller and being reminded how good that show was and how criminal it was to take it off the air. John Glover's take on the Devil alone was worth not cancelling it.

* Slight cheat; I haven't seen it yet, but it's cued up on my DVR waiting for Eva to get back from Pittsburgh.
** The original, Las Vegas version, accept no substitutes.
† Possibly the best show on right now.
†† I pray they can keep this one going; the first two eps were wonderful, but it must be a king-hell strain to keep up this level of weird.
‡‡ I didn't like "Dexter" at first, but Eva kept on me and I find it occupying space in my head that might have gone to lesser work. The thing that makes it work is that it's not about serial killing, but about a serial killer. Thus it avoids the trap that "Criminal Minds" fell into: fetishizing the abberant mental symbology of psychopaths.

Bruce Cohen... No Torchwood here, alas. I'll probably wind up buying it when it comes out on DVD.

Ah, yes, John Glover as the Devil... I seem to remember the Foul Deceiver being so glad that humans had invented elevators becuase, before, he used to have to walk all the way up from Hell.

One show I miss that didn't last long, thanks to religious conservatives apparently, was The Book of Daniel.

And now, for something completely different... The opening credits from "Jason King". They just don't make TV shows like that anymore.

Fragano@381: Does that structure have a particular name, or did you invent it to get the right reflections for this poem? It \looks/ like the sort of thing people came up with many centuries ago (cf the ballade), but I've never seen anything like it before; it's very effective for the topic.

JESR at 446: yeah, unless the well-behaved child takes one look at this grinning stranger and starts screaming. Which happened to me yesterday evening at church. My hair's pretty short but I don't usually scare the children.

Ew, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin have gotten into a copyfight.

Serge @ 455

Oh, the moustache! Oh, the hair! Oh, the humanity!

Serge @ 454

No Torchwood here, alas. I'll probably wind up buying it when it comes out on DVD.

So far, given the shows I've seen, I'd recommend that. I like that they're playing Captain Jack differently, and a little deeper, I think, than they did originally on the Doctor.

My younger brother's hair once made a little girl cry. He had played in a concert with his five-inch spiked mohawk, and then come to sit with us in the audience for the rest. On our way out, the people in front of us, with two-year-old girl, said something like, "Yeah, she was a little freaked by the kid with the mohawk, but-- hey, there he is!"
The girl turned and screamed her head off. I guess a seventeen-year-old trombone player with spiky hair is scary when you're small.

#458, NelC: my two comments on the matter.

Lee, I'm familiar with the usage, but he didn't mean it as a term of affection. He wuz jest gloating. It doesn't make him look good.

Assuming that there is sufficient interest to make a ML poetry collection a reality, how would such a collection be organized? By posting order, author, theme or form? Should the poems stand on their own, or should there be a commentary to provide context?

Since I've finally, finally read Farthing, and since La Walton is often seen about these parts, this is for her:

Damn. Damn. Good job, writing that book. Damn.

abi #366:

'Voer eendjes, geen oorlog'
[*]

'Voer' being a colloquial form of 'voed', and 'oorlog voeren' meaning 'to make war', it translates as 'feed duckies, don't make war.'

Except punnier.

461:
-- River, why don't you come on out?
-- No! Can't! Too much hair!
-- Is that it?
-- Hell, yes, preacher. I didn't have stuff to get done, I'd be in there with her.

Bruce Cohen @ 460... I did sport a mustach like that in high-school. Even had a goatee. For a time. Then my face returned to its glabrous state. My current facial pilosity has been here since right after 1980's worldcon in Boston. A traumatic experience that was. Oh, and before you ask, I have been trimming my beard since then. I don't think the ZZ Top look would have seemd particularly attractive to my wife-to-be.

Bruce Cohen @ 461...I probably should indeed go the DVD route considering my recent realization that the SciFi Channel cuts stuff out of Doctor Who. Luckily, some people posted on YouTube some of the missing scenes, such as the Master's music video as he gloats over having taken the world.

Diatryma @ 461... What year was that?

OK... We've got 470 posts in this thread, not including this one. Is this the point where Faren's Computer starts acting like it's the Little Engine That Could, only it can't?

Jakob @466:
So not unlike the English "Make love, not war"? But with ducks*.

Thank you for the explanation.

-----
* Ducks. Why did it have to be ducks?

Abi... Why did it have to be ducks?

Who said that? Anatidae Jones in Quackers of the Lost Beak? Or Groucho Marx in You Bet Your Life?