(It's not the hanging that I mind, it's the being in the ground so long.)

I popped this into the end of the last open thread but thought it worth mentioning again since that one closed down not long after.

The Making Light indexing is going faster than I thought it would, so I've taken the indices live over at Wyrdsmiths.

They're linked in the upper right-hand corner under Writers' Resources as "A Writer's Index to Making Light" and "Making Light General Index." At this point they're both running from the beginning of Making Light through to mid 2004, but I'll continue to update until I've got them current and at some point I will probably go back and add in Elctrolite as well.

Carrying over from #93... "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"

In the wake of the current firestorm, San Diego area fans have set up a couple of check-in sites.

Wiki: http://www.conrunner.net/wiki/
Yahoo! newsgroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sdfans2007fires/

(Zak and I are not in danger. I'd like to say we are in no danger, but that's an impossible statement to make given this weather.)

Quick, before it gets pulled - check out Robot Chicken's 300 parody.

"Nobody does it better."

Friday is October 26th, the full moon, the start of MileHiCon, and the Anniversary of the Creation of the World. Mark your calendars.

...paraphrased from John McPhee's Basin and Range:

According to conventional wisdom at the end of the eighteenth century the earth was between five thousand and six thousand years old. An Irish archbishop, James Ussher (Primate of the Anglican Church!), counting generations in his favorite book, figured this out in the century before. Ussher actually dated the earth, saying that it was created in 4004 B.C. Shortly after Ussher's publication of Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Vice-Chancellor Lightfoot of Cambridge University confirmed the year, and refined the calculations and determined that the Holy Trinity had created the earth on October 26th, at 9.am.

Geologists today will give parties on the twenty-sixth of October. Some of these parties begin on the twenty-fifth and end at nine in the morning.

Bluegrass needs more cellos!

Heck, the general case of that is also true: 'most everything needs more cellos.

Mary Dell @ 5... Is this better than Mel Gibson's tale of the Revolution?

Did you know that the Battle Hymn of the Republic has six verses?

(For some reason, even the hymnbooks that include it these days don't often have the sixth verse...)

Carrying over from the previous open thread ...

Steve C. @ 947

Damn right, "Damn Yankees"! I have a DVD that I take out every three years or so. Between Ray Walston and Gwen Verdon, I don't know which I prefer to watch*.

But that brings up another issue when talking about dancing. No question that Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly are two of the finest dancers who ever lived. But would anyone disagree with me that (and I'm just talking about males here, so I won't trip over too many things that are hard to compare) Bob Fosse deserves to be up there too?

* Actually, I do; Gwen Verdon moves much better, and besides, I'm het, what can I say?

Not only does most everything need more cellos, but most everything needs more banjo, too. Harmonica's missing from too much modern music, also, for that matter.

Was it just me, or were Celtic roots especially clear in that particular tune? I was beating out the rythym on my knee, and recognized it as *very* similar to a bagpiping rythym...

Skwid @ 12... most everything need more cellos

Personally, I think there's too much violin in modern movies.

Best use of cello in popular music: Nirvana's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" aka "In The Pines."

and too much sacks at the grocery store....

Skwid @ 12... most everything needs more banjo

Kirk couldn't agree more.

Serge @ 13 -- that's sax and violins.

Skwid @12, It's not just you. Some of the many roots of American folk / bluegrass music incorporate those hardy celts who wandered up into the Appalachians and have kept modally tuned instruments and harmonies alive a few more hundred years.

Cellos, yes! I have a particular fondness for a recent album, Fire & Grace, by Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, having gotten to hear them live in CA one year either just before or after the annual string-music workshop he runs just north of the Bay Area in the Valley of the Moon. She seriously fiddles! that cello, even standing up! Yum.
Other cello fiddlers of note, without recordings, alas, are Fred Nussbaum in the Portland, OR area, and a genial fellow whose name I don't know yet who has recently moved to the Berkeley area and showed up at open band night a couple of months ago at the local English Country Dance series, much to everyone's delight.
One cello-fiddler of note with recordings: there are a few splendid albums out by Mark O'Connor (fiddle), Edgar Myers (Bass) and Yo-Yo Ma (cello) exploring American Appalachian country and bluegrass rootways -- Appalachian Journey, Appalachian Spring, and there may be another I'm forgetting just now.

O, Joy: those bigger boxes are splendid fiddles, too.

Thanks for linking this tune, Patrick. Love it!

Knitting!
Speaking of completely other forms of fiddling with one's hands, how many readers of Making Light who also knit have found themselves over at Ravelry (yet) ? This couple went and had an idea that turns out to be much like a LibraryThing for fiber arts, and did a slow rolling beta-opening this summer to (wisely) keep from breaking things as it scales up. They opened to beta testers, think they'd get maybe a hundred volunteers or so and immediately had a line packed with tens of thousands of folks! They're building a very nice database structure using Ruby on Rails, have their core structure in place, excellent beta-testy whacking goodness going on, secured some funding and purchased servers, and are rolling out the invites very quickly. There are already hundreds of affinity groups, in the way of such things, and -- well! -- come on in, the water's fine. http://ravelry.com is where to start. The wait's tremendously worthwhile (and gettin' shorter daily).

An off-topic question for the military types: when you deploy to other countries as part of a military operation, do you need passports and if so, do they get stamped with entry and exit stamps?

Obviously, an invading force wouldn't need them, but if you were deployed to a base in Europe, would you get stamped in and out?

Popular music? More cellos?

Be careful what you wish for.

I've been told that Apocalyptica is only the 2nd best cello group/Metallica cover band. Not sure who #1 might be.

dave @ #19, I dunno about now, but back in 1972 I was sent to Japan for 20 months; no passport required. I came back to the US for leave in January 1974; still no passport required when I went back to work.

Now, I flew into Yokota AFB both times, so the Status of Forces Agreement might have stated that service personnel didn't have to have passports if they were flying from one AFB in Hawai'i to another one in Japan.

Did you know that John Boorman originally wanted Deliverance to show dueling xylophones?

Jonathan Cohen @ 17... I can't believe I missed that one. I am so ashamed. Just don't harp ("Honk!") on it.

Bruce Cohen #11

I think Fosse was one of the all time great showmen, but I'm not that familiar with his own dancing - I'll have to see what I can find. Certainly as a choreographer, he was tops.

Comparing Kelly and Astaire is interesting. It seemed that Astaire was the more sophisticated and urbane, while Kelly displayed a more down-to-earth style. On the whole, I like Gene Kelly more, but they both moved with a physical grace that is bestowed on very few.

If I could have for just a few hours a show-business talent or two, I'd like to dance like Gene Kelly and sing like Sinatra in the 50's.

On the Battle Hymn of the Republic in #10:

Was the sixth verse shown in Wikipedia ever published widely in Howe's lifetime? The song's first publication, in the Feb. 1862 Atlantic, doesn't include it, and neither does the version at the start of Florence Hall Howe's 1916 book _The Story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic_.

Of course, it's not uncommon for there to be extra verses in manuscripts or in performances of songs. (Woody Guthrie created lots of verses, original and variant, for "This Land is Your Land" over his lifetime, for instance.)

Long-time lurker here. I know that here at Making Light there is a lot of discussion about publish-on-demand services and scams. In my hometown a bookstore that carries almost nothing but Author House books just opened. The manager said that they have a contract with Author House to carry their books. I've never heard of a physical bookstore carrying almost exclusively POD books... has anyone heard of this before?

I am of the opinion that everything needs more violas. More orsinos might be nice too.

#26: Never heard of such a thing.

#18, Ruth Temple: Teresa has been rhapsodizing about Ravelry for some months now. She just recently (finally) made it up the waiting list to get an actual account, but I don't think she's had time to do anything with it. She's described the site as "crack for knitters." It does sound brilliant.

On one of the Tor podcasts, Patrick is talking about recent & upcoming Tor releases, and he discusses one I hadn't heard of that sounds interesting to me: an alternate history / world walking book in which the alternate universe has a stagnant Soviet-dominated Europe; the teenage protags open a gaming shop in Rome. The cover has a Soviet Realist arm grasping a 10-sided die. Unfortunately my hearing isn't what it used to be, and I can't make out either the author or the title -- anyone recognize this?

There's always room for Cell-o.

I thought it was October 23. (At 9:00 in the morning. No word on whether that's Jerusalem time or GMT.) To quote Gaiman and Pratchett: "The Earth's a Libra."

Cello, cello.... Any Rasputina fans about? They're a rather peculiar cello trio with a bit of a steampunk aesthetic. Heretical of me, but I like their cover of "Wish You Were Here" even better than the original. (Don't get me wrong: Pink Floyd's managed a number of unmatchable songs. I simply thought that was one of them until I heard the Rasputina version in a cafe.)

#29: It's Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator. Edited by TNH. A fun read.

Didn't the credits theme from "Angel" feature a 'cello?

Dave @ 34, I am almost positive that it does, but I haven't seen the show in years. I used to just watch the intro and then change the channel.

AJ Luxton @ 32, I love Rasputina! The world needs more all-girl cello bands. If you like them you may want to check out Emilie Autumn; she's a violinist-singer-songwriter with a style she describes as "Victoriandustrial," and is sometimes accompanied by her corseted cellist Lady Joo Hee.

I know it's classical rather than modern, but my favorite cello part ever comes from the Brahms Concerto in A Minor for violin and cello. The Vivace non troppo, the third movement, is fantastic.

Apocalyptica is number 2? I can't imagine who number 1 is...unless they count S&M, which would be absurd.

Rasputina is *very* fun. Been a fan of theirs for a while, now. Also: Nigel Kennedy's Hendrix interpretations. I saw him perform "Hey Joe" at a Dallas Symphony Orchestra event accompanied only by a stand-up bass...blew the house away.

Ooh yes, Rasputina. Did you see this? Rasputina does Baby Got Back.

What the world needs is more banjolellies.

Fishtank Ensemble -- Turkish March

(And shaimsans (and punk accordions)).

Rasputina: Oh hell yeah. And speaking of their covers, I have a theory that if listening to their version of "Brand New Key" doesn't make you feel like doing something naughty, you might not actually be alive.

Zoe Keating, one of the former members, is now doing solo work using loops and improvisations; she's on one of the same looper mailing lists my brother is. It's deeply cool stuff.

Also, those of you who are banjo fans (as I have become in the last few years) ought to check out the catalogue at somedarkholler.com, making available some of the best underground/dark folk/wyrdfolk music around. It's run by Timothy Renner, himself a fine banjo player (formerly of Stone Breath and several other acts, now a founding member of Crow Tongue along with Shane Speal, the self-proclaimed King of the Cigar Box Guitar) and is probably one of the best mailorder labels on the web; they're reliably fast, the prices are more than reasonable, and they don't charge shipping.

(No commercial interest of my own in plugging this stuff, other than a deep desire to see it stick around for a while so I can keep getting my creepy folk music fix every so often.)

I'll see your Apocalyptica and Rasputina and raise you a Great Kat, who, apparently, is the dominatrix shredder of the classical world, which I for one am happy to know, as I wouldn't have been at all suspicious one even existed in the first place.

And then, of course, I'd call the bluff with Lorraine and Malena. Because, seriously, could Neil possibly be associated with people any cooler?

I just don't think so.

"Just Me & Eve" remains one of my favorite songs ever.

Patrick, thanks for the link to Crooked Still's vids. They accompanied my evening's work. I was sorry to see that Rushad is leaving the group--it's notable that they're replacing him with two musicians, a cellist and a violinist. No surprise that others heard Celtic sounds in there. O'Donovan's breathy delivery and the group's love of jazz-orchestral arrangements always reminded me of the New Age/Celtic groups like Clannad.

There was also a vid in the collection by Kerfuffle, an Irish group of prodigies. I hadn't heard of them, but I'll be seeking out more of their music. Don't get much Celtic accordion in these parts!

A.J. Luxton #32: Hooray, Rasputina! Their version of Barracuda (and Brand New Key, and You Don't Own Me, and Wish You Were Here, and All Tomorrow's Parties, and every single other cover they've done) verges on better than the original. Not to belittle their own orginals--The New Zero, f'rinstance, might be in my top 20 favorite songs ever. Three times now I've missed my chance to see them live, and it saddens me.

Bluegrass couldn't have less cello, after all, but yes..

Thank you, thank you Patrick - now I have to go out and buy Crooked Still CDs. I thought I'd been Bluegrassed out at Hardly-Strictly-Bluegrass a few weeks ago. I was wrong.

Pretty amazing pedigree for this band; I'd wager there aren't many professional bluegrass musicians (or non-bluegrass - yea, I know about Brian May) with Phd.s (from MIT, no less).

I saw (new fiddler) Brittany Haas playing with Dave Grisman at a Bay Area fundraiser while she was still in high school, I think - so I'm going to have to pay attention to when they play around here. Their tour dates seem to be mostly east coast, though.

Generally, everything could use more cellos. But the world could definitely use less Apocalyptica. I wonder what kind of pickups they use...?

Jeralyn Merritt digs up some Joan Didion writing about Santa Ana Winds.

Kevin Drum says he's lived in Southern California all his life and doesn't recognize the phenomenon Didion describes.

Whether Didion or Drum is correct, her prose is gorgeous.

Steve C. @ 24

Fosse could do all of the things he choreographed, and for a number of years his primary dance partner was Gwen Verdon, just so you know who he could keep up with.* For images of him dancing, start here

* The only thing he couldn't do with Verdon was stay married to her; but, married or not, they were great dancing partners.

Access to YouTube is, rather understandably, blocked from my workplace. Thus I can't tell whether the link at #46 is to a clip from this film. But Bob Fosse was one of the dancers in Kiss Me Kate, which I remember was mentioned recently in the discussion of musicals for, for instance, "Brush up your Shakespeare". I do remember noticing him in the "It's too darn hot" dancing.

I'm quite fond of Singin' in the Rain as a musical, apart from other reasons, due to something I share with Donald O'Connor. I don't remember it being mentioned in that discussion. I once watched it (while doing other things) with the sound off. It certainly gives you a different perspective. Interesting.

The Fosse clip, according to the YouTube poster, is:

"...from a 1955 movie called "My Sister Eileen," which starred Betty Garrett and Jack Lemmon. There are a few more numbers from this movie on youtube available from other users."

A friend of mine plays pop song on cello. Apparently he's doing original stuff now, but my favorite was when he did Johnny Cash covers in a country bar near Osaka.

Mez @ 47... My understanding is that, when O'Connor did his solo number (OK, not quite solo, since a dummy was involved), they basically let him loose, and what you see is what Inspiration had him think of as he improvised. I think. What? You callin' me a lyre?

Ruth Temple @18, Patrick @28 -- re Ravelry. I've been on for awhile, and "crack for knitters" and other fiber folks isn't an exaggeration. Remember how cool Windows once seemed? (C'mon, admit it.) And how MSDOS all of a sudden felt clunky and primitive? That's an analogy for comparing Ravelry to other tools used by internet-oriented knitters such as googling, bloglines, yahoo groups and wikis. Not only are the features great, the basic atmosphere there is welcoming and constructive.

I've been wondering if Ravelry will inspire similar sites for other hobbies, and if so, which ones. One attractive aspect of this format is the sheer scope of the enabling possibilities, but the potential for social cross-pollination makes it just as interesting.

Yeah, the last discussion I had about the different styles of Astaire and Kelly led to the conclusion that Donald O'Connor was a better dancer than either - it's worth watching Singing in the Rain again just to watch him instead of Kelly. I don't suppose he really improvised the 'Make 'em Laugh' routine, but I am pretty sure he designed it.

Michael Wood in America in the Movies has a nice (and light) discussion of the Kelly/Astaire question, where he concludes that Kelly's dancing shows more obvious effort - as if he were forcing himself to be in high spirits, where Astaire just moved like that naturally. It seemed an interesting reading. (I recommend the book, by the way - I'm afraid the link is only to purchase rather than to read it.)

Meanwhile, in 'My Stepmother is an Alien', Kim Basinger turns on a TV showing 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', and there is a quick clip of Jimmy Durante doing a routine (I think the song is 'Ever Had The Feeling That You Wanted To Go'). Has anyone seen the clip online - the Durante one, not the Basinger one - or will I have to rent the whole movie?

candle @ 52... Maybe that's what I remember hearing, about O'Connor, that he came up with the "Make 'em laugh" routine all by himself. (Apparently, Irving Berlin wasn't happy at first that its music was, more than a bit inspired by his "Be A Clown".)

Interesting, the comparison between Astaire and Kelly's styles. Kelly always went for the more athletic approach. I think he was from a working-class background. Must have been fun, growing up loving dancing and being 5'7 tall...

I'd take Astaire over Kelly and the Castles over either.

#18 #28

Yep, Ravelry is totally crack for knitters. I'm signed on there as "Miss Print" which is the name I blog under.

What I like best is the ability to drool over everyone else's finished projects, and dream about making them for myself some time...

Susan @ 54... I personally prefer Kelly, but the important thing is that theirs were different approaches to something they all loved in their own way (*). My understanding is that Astaire and Kelly respected what they each did. It was interesting watching Astaire in 1953's The Band Wagon, where he poked fun at his older movie persona, starting with an auction where nobody wants to buy his character's top hat. Later on, he and Cyd Charisse launch into a Mickey Spillane pastiche where he got to be more physical, like Kelly would have been, I think. Me, I can't dance to save my life. But I enjoy watching people who can.

(*) says Serge, hitting the obvious on the head with a jackhammer.

I thought it was October 23. (At 9:00 in the morning. No word on whether that's Jerusalem time or GMT.) To quote Gaiman and Pratchett: "The Earth's a Libra."

Barely... my birthday is also today, but I was born so late that the conversion to GMT pushes it into tomorrow morning, thus placing me smack on the cusp of Scorpio. (Yeah, I once did my "chart".)

Open thread.

From this morning's Washington Post, the lead paragraph of a review by Tom Shales of the CNN documentary "Planet in Peril":

Wasn't "Planet in Peril" one of the chapter titles from the original "Flash Gordon" serial? Thus another way to define the good old days, back when perils to the planet seemed almost entirely the stuff of science fiction.

Bob Fosse and Carol Haney in the specialty dance in Kiss Me Kate, and, of course, Carol Haney in "Steam Heat"... sigh I wanted to be Carol Haney as a dancer. I want to be Carol Haney as a singer -- who am I kidding?

But yes, Bob Fosse was an amazing dancer as well as choreographer.

I love Crooked Still -- "Shaken By a Low Sound" is brilliant. Thanks for posting the video!

For those that care, there's a new Tracy Grammer EP due out soon, with a couple of Dave Carter songs on it.

My current obsession is L.A. Guitar Quartet. Aaron Copeland's "Hoedown" sounds pretty damn cool on four guitars.

For cello fans out there, Rasputina, the hard rocking cellists have a spectacular new album.

It just sort of boggles the mind that this is happening: a Naruto/Star Trek cross-over convention.

The only thing I can imagine that the two fan groups have in common is that they both like to wear costumes. I'm just fascinated by what a potential train wreck this might be.

In the laurel, birds
Compete with leaves for space. They
Sing: "New day! New day!"

Language Hat pointed me to a cool vocabulary game named Free Rice, where correct answers accumulate microdonations to the United Nations against world hunger.

Thus another way to define the good old days, back when perils to the planet seemed almost entirely the stuff of science fiction.

WarMing the Merciless?

Catching up on this thread has resulted in a brainworm of the Cronos Quartet's version of "Purple Haze."

Worse things could happen.

#64 David, I tinkered with FreeRice for over an hour then realized it didn't matter what vocabularly level or how many words you had missed --- they were still going to donate rice. I spent entirely too much time stressing over my vocabularly prowess on that one... charity IS stressful.

David @ 64 This is fun.

One of the words I got was "rugose." Got it right, too. :-)

Faren @ 65... WarMing the Merciless?

"No! Not the Bore Worm!"

From today's Tomato Nation:

I don't know about you, but if I were in the fire zone in SoCal and I heard that Governor Schwarzenegger had called FEMA for aid, I'd be like, "You know what actually, we're good. No, it's fine, seriously. No, we'll just…dig a moat or something, really, don't get up. Please."

Ah, Crooked Still. Such a pity Rashad (the cellist) is leaving the band ... even though they are replacing him with a cello *and* a fiddle (which should tell you something right there), I fear Crooked Still is about to become Just Another Newgrass Band. Such a waste.

I loves me some Rasputina, too.

For those looking for something different in their cello-playing, might I recommend checking out Lindsay Mac. She straps on her cello like it's a guitar and strums away. She's truly something to watch (and hear).

Caught a few minutes of "Brigadoon" on TCM the other night--the "Almost Like Being in Love" number--and was struck by how balletic Kelly's dancing was. I used to characterize Kelly as more obviously athletic than Astaire, but now I'd add that Astaire looks more ballroom-and-tap, while to my untutored eye, Kelly took quite a few moves directly from classical dance. My wife's reaction was, "Wouldn't you love to see Bob Fosse doing this dance?" Actually, Kelly doing Fosse choreography would be really interesting. . . .

As for singing--Frank is terrific, but I'd give a lot to be able to sing like Astaire. (Try to do "Cheek to Cheek" sometime and make it sound easy.)

I love both Kelly and Astaire, but my favorite bit of dance from a film is Cyd Charisse dancing on the volcano in "Sombrero."

(The choreographer was Hermes Pan.)

That Free Rice game is fun. Infuriating, because it and I don't agree on some things, and its presentation isn't exactly what I would like, but fun. And I like any vocab game that knows more words than I do.

Lori Coulson @ 73... Wasn't "Sombrero" the short film where Cyd and Ann Miller danced with Ricardo Montalban?

re: banjos + cellos, no discussion could be complete without mention of Munly and the Lee Lewis Harlots. Mmm, southern gothalicious! (You can see crappy videos on youtube and they've got some tracks on myspace, neither of which I can get to from here, or I'd provide the links myself. Sorry.) And Dwight from Slim Cessna's Auto Club is the reason I couldn't listen to anything without banjos in it for an entire year. (It's still difficult, but I managed to wean myself off with mandolins and have safely recovered to standard guitar-tolerance.)

#72

Richard Schickel said about Fred Astaire that, ""He made us feel if we could sing at all and if we could have sung to a girl, we'd probably imagine that we would sing a little like Fred Astaire."

I love that.

JKRichard @#67: I spent entirely too much time stressing over my vocabulary prowess

Hey, even if you poke randomly, the rice still trickles in. The vocabulary level is just a nice touch, I guess they're trying not to bore or intimidate people.

Diatryma @#74: Infuriating, because it and I don't agree on some things

Yeah, the "meanings" aren't always exact matches (a vole is not a field mouse!) but I haven't yet seen anything that couldn't be waved away as a "fuzzy match".

It occurs to me that all the answers seem to be the same word-type (noun, verb, adjective) as the challenge -- the way they present words in isolation, they could easily make things even tougher by offering fake-out answers of different word-types.

Freerice:
I just did 500 grains of rice worth of vocabulary. I can thank the Modesty Blaise books for being able to recognize "ecdysis" and was amused to have to pick out the meaning of "grok".

If you poke randomly, the rice does flow in — but only about 25% as rapidly as if you choose the correct answer. Choosing a wrong answer returns the message "Sorry, not quite correct. Please try another word." Only a right answer gets "You have just donated 10 grains of rice."

"ecdysis"... I came across its derivative "ecdysiast" in the Hulk comic-book. You see, Rick Jones was about to tie the knot, so the superguys decided to give him a super bachelor's party and hired a stripper. Captain America actually blushed.

Serge #81:

Shows up in Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot", too.

For the record, I usually sit at 49. I may improve on this now I've figured out that if I have a hunch and then go pick another definition for logical reasons, the hunch is the correct one.

I hover between 44 and 46, with occasional bursts of 49. I'm good at words relating to science-- 'ecdysis' and 'flocculent'-- but go with hunches if I can't figure out the root. It's a much more interesting way to kill ten or fifteen minutes than Solitaire.

I I remember a PBS special where Donald O'Connor talked about Cagney's dance style and did it, then talked about Kelly's style and did it, then talked about Astaire's style and did it. Which proves the old line about Kelly having been the bravest dance arranger in film history, because who else would have risked being on the same stage as O'Connor?

joann @ 82... Shows up in Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot", too.

A classier source than the Hulk. Comic-books will rot my brain. ("Will?") Shush.

serge,

that's where i knew "ecdysiast" from, too. i'm not sure if that should reasssure you or not....

miriam beetle @ 86... i'm not sure if that should reasssure you or not....

Not sure that it does, but I feel slightly less alone in my rotten-brain state. Did I ever tell you where I learned to speak and write in English? Sure, there were mandatory classes in high-school, but I did most of my practice from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and reading comic-books. ("Why am I not surprised?") Behave, ethan.

Serge, "Sombrero" has three storylines, and Montalban is in one of them. I don't remember Ann Miller being in that one. Heck, I think I'll go look it up on IMDB...

My dad taught me ecdysiast. My dad is cool.

JESR @ 66

Gak! You started one up in my head, but it's not the Kronos Quartet, it's Bobby McFerrin, announcing in a plummy voice that he's going to do Bach, and then diving into Purple Haze. I saw him do that live a few years back with a full symphony behind him, and now it's on full video loop in my brain.

Red Cross donation link for Southern California Wildfire mess:

http://www.redcross.org/news/ds/profiles/disaster_profile_CAWildfires.html

Astaire was grace itself, Kelly was strength and courage and intensity, O'Connor was quite possibly one of the greatest dancers of all time, any style (I'd love to see him do something really modern, beyond the Kelly style; anybody ever seen that?).

But to my mind, there are two things that made Fosse the most interesting of them all to watch. First, he was a really fabulous choreographer, in a style that speaks to me even more than Kelly's or Astaire's, though I love to watch them.

Second, Fosse was a very atypical male dancer. Watch him in a pose, or a slow move. He had as much strength and control as most male dancers*, but he had far more flexibility, as much as many female ballet dancers. When he held a pose, his line was absolutely gorgeous. It's not exactly dancing, but you can see his flexibility in "The Little Prince" where he plays a snake.

* Granted he wasn't a leaper, but that's a specialized talent.

I love cellos. I have a thing for rich, dark, low tones; cellos fit that jones perfectly. When I started watching "Inspector Morse" I would always switch the channel well before it started because I didn't want to miss that lovely theme music. I found a CD of the composer, Barrington Pheloung, and worked hard at wearing it out. He's quite good, not a raving modern, but not a throwback to the 18th century either.

My friend's ex-marching band husband feels most bands are way under-tubaed. He feels a proportion of five to one's about right -- and he's a trumpet man.

Yes, Ravelry!

The Angel theme has cellos too (also windchimes! I had an mp3 of this on my computer for ages). I had a cellist boyfriend at the end of high school. He was stark staring mad, but the cello serenades were wonderful.

Not only does the Angel theme have cellos, but the Forever Knight theme included a fakey synthesized cello. Vampire = Cello.

I for one think there should be more uillean pipes and low whistles - in just about everything.

For either learning to read or for gaining vocabulary, there's the same three methods: Practice, practice, practice!

Comic books, sappy romances, whatever... one of my stepbrothers was borderline LD for reading, but AD&D gave him enough motivation to push through and gain proficiency (so he could read the rulebooks). Now he's a jet-setting executive....

Same deal for cartoons, soap operas, etc. and listening proficiency. Anything goes!

Somewhere in the category of very common words just not processing correctly on some days--

I've grown accustomed to all those symbols on the car in front of me, and sometimes it's fun to puzzle new ones out. Darwin fish, Jesus fish, FSM, etc., and an unfamiliar one caught my eye today. After studying it a moment, I groused to my husband, "What the hell is that, now? The Church of the Dowsing Snowman?"

"Er...no, that's a V8."

An open thread question for the fluorosphere (aka, please help me scratch this linguistic itch):

The phrase "big girl's blouse" - sometimes "useless as a big girl's blouse" - I've always understood from context to mean very useless indeed.

But why? Why is a big girl's blouse so useless? Why would it be more useless than the blouse of a small or medium sized girl?

Bonus question: "safe as houses", meaning very safe indeed. What? Why? Investment advice that escaped into the wild?

I think you may be parsing that wrong. At least, I've always taken it as big (girl's blouse), not (big girl's) blouse.

rams @ 94... You bring up music and Ravelry in the same post and I find myself thinking of Ravel's Bolero. Thanks. Truly.

Jen Roth @100:
Could be - but either way, why would girl's blouse be the equivalent of very useless?

Sharon, it's British idiom.

In #14 Robert Thornton writes:

Best use of cello in popular music: Nirvana's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" aka "In The Pines."

My brother John set out to collect every performance of that song he could find, on tape, LP, and CD. He liked the spookiness of it.

You inspired me to punch "In the Pines" into Youtube. Wow. Lots more covers John never collected. Plus a nine-minute clip that is claimed to be the only film ever shot of Leadbelly. (He's humming "ITP" under the credits, but, alas, it's not one of the three songs we see him perform.)

I just looked at the particle "Use lethal force before you're fully awake".

Words fail me. I thought they had laws, even in the USA, against crazy people owning firearms?

Serge #87: Hey, I have nothing but respect for comics and Bugs Bunny. Now, if you said that you learned English from Kevin Costner and a dragon with Sean Connery's voice, that'd be different.

Bill Higgins #104: Did your brother acquire the spooky Snakefarm version? That somehow managed to be the first version I ever heard, though these days I prefer the Leadbelly.

Dave @ #105, I'd like to think that was a spoof, but I doubt it.

Guns under the pillow are fine for 007, but for the average householder?

Nice music; too bad it was so poorly-mixed that the lyrics disappeared into the background. Reminded me of the way Howard Shore used wordless human voice as an instrument in the LOTR soundtrack.

Dave, #34: Yes, it did. And now I'll have it as an earworm for the next few days.

I played cello from 4th grade thru high school. My music teacher wanted to put me on the violin, but I heard someone playing the cello just once and was hooked. I tend to prefer low voices to high ones as well -- bass/baritone is more appealing than tenor, and alto/contralto more so than soprano. The tenors get all the glory on the opera stage, but give me Samuel Ramey any day!

Anybody else planning to be at MileHiCon? If you are, come look me up at the Pegasus Publishing booth!

The strangest story I ever heard about exercising the Second Amendment while caffeine-impaired concerned a man who woke up in the middle of the night and mistook his own erection for an intruder. Grabbing his pistol, he shot the intruder.

I'll let you google for this if you want to find the story.

Odd synchronicity -- I've had "Make 'Em Laugh" stuck in my head all night, alternating with The Decemberists' "Chimney Sweep" for maximum genre shear.

Fans of cellos *and* esoteric instruments might enjoy the French SF-horror film Delicatessan, which features an extended cello-musical saw duet.

The aforementioned Decemberists also have a penchant for using unusual instruments in modern-ish music. I went to a concert of theirs in Boston with a friend who plays Irish music, and after the first number the lead singer traded his guitar for another stringed instrument, and she nudged me and said, "That's a bazuki!"

I wish the Crooked Still site had more, longer samples of their songs... I like the sound, but there's no particular song or songs that really grabs me yet.

*tries to convince himself he doesn't need more CDs right now anyway*

I have nothing but respect for comics and Bugs Bunny. Now, if you said that you learned English from Kevin Costner and a dragon with Sean Connery's voice, that'd be different.

Not sure what that means, but I think the kid is again making fun of where I get my cinematic pleasures.

Meanwhile, last night Turner Classic Movies showed Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows. In French. With subtitles. As far as I could tell, Jeanne Moreau is in love with one of her hubby's employees. Moreau's boyfriend of course bumps off the hubby when the latter stays at the office late one Friday night. The boyfriend then gets stuck in the elevator all weekend while Moreau wonders where he is. And there's a subplot about a young couple stealing the boyfriend's car that was parked in front of the office. I think. The whole thing made me want to watch the "Fromage Grand" skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The latter was also in French with subtitles, but it had the virtue of being mercifully short. And it had Carol Cleaveland sitting in the middle of a dump with a head of lettuce in her lap.

I don't know the origin of "big girl's blouse" but I've always heard it used* to mean unmanly i.e. not willing to do very silly or dangerous things, rather than useless. In other words, if you fail to (for example) down your pint at the required time you're not a man, you're not a girl, you're just a girl's blouse** that's been grown to the size of a man.

* Including by me
** Because a girl can be manly, but girly clothes can't. That's my interpretation.

Linkmeister @ 107... Guns under the pillow are fine for 007, but for the average householder?

James Bond vs the Tooth Fairy in Golddenture?

Ethan #106 wrote Hey, I have nothing but respect for comics and Bugs Bunny. Now, if you said that you learned English from Kevin Costner and a dragon with Sean Connery's voice, that'd be different.

'There's no such thing as a drrrragon'. (Connery as James Bond in Dr No, accent slipping.)

Keith @61, awesome! I will go look that up. The only one I have is Thanks for the Ether (and doesn't it remind me of the weird and fun parts of high school?)

Bill Higgins @ 104, I once went to see a rockabilly band in Quogue. (It is an extremely long story why.) During the break, someone -- I think it was their drummer -- hopped up on stage, grabbed the huge bass, and accompanied himself solely on bass while singing that song. Later he and the band's lead singer delivered one of the most blistering renditions of "Jackson" I've ever heard. It was really fantastic.

I have recently woken up from a long dream in which there was something between a Making Light convention and Viable Paradise. Most of the dream was taken up by convention registration stuff -- people going around checking you off a list and handing you paperwork and nametags. One of the registration folk turned out to be a long-forgotten high school acquaintance, which was fun. There were going to be writing workshops, the first of which was a timed-writing on a prompt having to do with dragons, or perhaps aliens, invading.

The whole thing was being held outdoors, in a beautiful and apparently permanent sunset, but a rather desolate area. Possibly offplanet?

Finally, the registration was over and we all sat down ready to write about dragons (or perhaps aliens). And at that instant my alarm clock went off.

Bah. I want to know what you all would have written. I want to know what I would have written!

Re the Lethal Force particle:

Right at toddler level. **shudder**

Caroline @ 115... There were going to be writing workshops, the first of which was a timed-writing on a prompt having to do with dragons, or perhaps aliens, invading.

What, an ML con without panels about knitting? Or about poetry?

Hey everyone,

WAY off topic interruption looking for intelligence on the ground in SoCal. I'm supposed to travel to LA tomorrow morning to focus group a case. I believe we are staying at the airport, and the conference center we're using for the focus group is at the airport too.

My question is about air quality. I'm a severe asthmatic, well controlled with medication, but very sensitive to pollutants with particulate matter, like, for example, smoke. I'm trying to find out how bad the air is right now in LA near LAX.

I really just need to decide if I think it's safe for me to be there, because if I'm likely to end up in the ER I should probably duck out of this trip.

Thanks to anyone who knows.

Serge @ 117, I'm sure those were coming, if the *&!@#$ alarm hadn't gone off.

You see, I hadn't actually pulled out the schedule to look at it yet. It was in a folder.

I also had a "Making Light" dream, a few nights ago. I was looking through a catalog of crafts items (probably beading stuff), and all of a sudden there was a big section with luscious yarns, threads, etc. (Hmm, "yarns" and "threads" sound like what ML has even without knitting discussions.) I planned to tell everyone here about it, but then the alarm went off....

Aiiii! You're taking over our dreams! What next? Mind control?

Sidelight: "Might as well face it, you're addicted to Civ"

Hello, my name is Greg, and it's been six weeks since I've played Civilization.

(together) Hi, Greg.

Low is usually better than high-- it's more forgiving, certainly. I was a first soprano in high school, properly shrieky (and too loud, but I have a bigger voice while singing than while speaking). I was a little sad, because in children's choir, I was an alto, like all the cool older girls.
There's a reason you don't hear a great deal about female a capella groups. Men just sound better. Or feel better, when the basses come in. You can feel soprano voices too, but that's in your teeth, not your ribcage.

Faren... Aiiii! You're taking over our dreams! What next? Mind control?

BWAHAHAHAH!!!!

#118--According to the folks at www.noaa.gov (go to their site, type "air quality Los Angeles" into the search box, and select the forecast link from the list you get--then, when you get to the forecast map, select the Air Quality tab--using the normal forecast link on the home page doesn't give air quality.), smoke levels are high, and ozone levels are elevated.
I understand from the news on CNN that they're advising people living in the area who have breathing issues to stay indoors with the windows closed.
According to the Weather Channel website, the air in unhealthy.
Perhaps a teleconference would be in order.

Caroline @ 119... I'm sure those were coming, if the *&!@#$ alarm hadn't gone off.

At least the alarm spared you the agony of sitting thru the puntest. Wait. That last was a pun, albeit a lame one. Are you sure you're awake, and that this is Reality?

Caroline #115: The only one I have is Thanks for the Ether

Get How We Quit the Forest. Right now. I find it exponentially better, if only because the production feels more sympathetic to their goals--but I also think the songs are better.

I also did not know there was new Rasputina. I must rush out and purchase.

Is there a band out there called "Ethan and the Ethers"?

The airport area (90046 or El Segundo or Marina del Rey) is usually not too bad for that sort of thing. The Santa Anas don't usually get there - the forecast is for ENE 0-5mph tomorrow, and the humidity is higher (like, going up to 50% in the afternoon). FWIW.

ethan @ 126, it has gone onto the list (though I need to pay things like utilities before buying music; bummer).

Serge @ 125, I've never been sure of that, now less so than other times.

Caroline @ 129... Enter the Dream Realm of Madame Teresa at your own peril. What is real? What is woven (or knitted) by the Mistress? None can tell - util it is too late. Hahahahah!!!

But I get to sing "Nessun Dorma" and the best bit of "Au profonde du temple sainte", and you don't, so there.

Dave Lucket... "Au profonde du temple sainte"? Is that the actual title? If not, the grammatically correct title should be "Au fond du temple saint" or "Au plus profond du temple saint".

Marilee @103: Thanks - I was hoping there was a why attached, but that's English for you.

Neil Willcox @112: It's a phrase I've mostly read, and I had been assuming useless rather than not-manly. I wonder what changes if I read it that way? Thanks!

The mouseover message for the narcopuppies particle is broken; it contains malnested quotation marks, thus: "Note: that "date rape drug" they refer to is Gamma Amino Butyric Acid." and my browser (correctly) interprets it as "Note: that " followed by some other stuff that obviously isn't important or it would be inside the quotation marks.

Wait, I thought GABA was the actual brain chemical and GHB was the "date rape drug."

I don't know if this is in wide currency yet, but it's new to me, and Google believes it hasn't been mentioned on ML yet:

Hang drum. (youtube)

more results

Invented only a few years ago, according to the notes, and not many musical instruments can say that.

(Cue riff on which instruments can talk.)

Dave @ 105

In this state, it was at one time a crime to have a loaded weapon in a child-accessible location. I'm not sure if it still is, but that would be accessible to a two year old.

I spent all of last night watching YouTube and it's all y'all's fault! BTW, I am still in love with Bobby McFerrin collaborating with Yo Yo MA.

Open thread rant: the Sac Bee this morning carried an article on projected health effects of global warming and quoted Inhofe, channeling Crichton, on how this was all politics and it would be more effective to bring back DDT to combat malaria. Inhofe is allowed to say that "DDT was banned worldwide thirty years ago because of its effect on wildlife."

I wrote a letter pointing out that this is untrue (all right, I called Inhofe a liar) and got this response from a party at the paper:

"Am I to take it that this Wikipedia entry about DDT is incorrect?

'DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial.' "

Anyone?

That's right, his source is Wiki-bloody-pedia. And no, the source does not say there is a "world wide ban" on all uses of DDT.

In #136, Andrew Plotkin writes:

Invented only a few years ago, according to the notes, and not many musical instruments can say that.

The Zeusaphone can.

In re the Belfast gangster and drag artist -- perhaps it ought to be an Onion story, but it's not. There was a much more straitlaced obit in the Telegraph.

dave: No, as a rule the Standard of Forces Agreements actually preclude a passport stamp. Visas tend to have limits, (most are for six months). If a deployment goes long, then the record-keeping gets strange (as too the question of jurisdiction for crimes).

If it’s less than the period of the visa, then one might elect to stay over; when you didn’t enter for purposes of tourism/business.

re the Santa Ana, Sometimes it's just as Didion explains it.
I try to get stamps when I visit, but at exit.

Linkmeister: Japan’s SOFA specifically prohibits someone from staying after. If I want to visit Japan after a mission/deployment, I have to set foot in the US. Leave/passes during deployment are different.

David Harmon: I just tested it, and wrong answers don’t earn rice.

punkrockhockeymom: Depends on where you are. Pasadena, no problem, in fact most of L.A. is pretty much alright. It smells a tad smokey, but it’s not like being next to to a fire. How long will you be in town?

Andrew Brown @ 140... The Belfast gangster and drag artist makes me think less of the Onion than it does of a Monty Python skit. There was one where the British govt, to be more appealing to the public, had ministers explain things as if they were strippers. Seeing Terry Jones wearing shiny briefs while twirling tassels glued to his nipples was rather memorable.

punkrockhockeymom: stay home. That would be my advice. Here's the air quality forecasts I can find. I'm only a mild asthmatic, and I am, admittedly, in San Diego where the smoke is probably far worse, and I've been spending the last three days running a HEPA filter and lying down and feeling like I have bronchitis. The winds are starting to turn around tonight, but the air won't be really clear until the weekend, I'm gussing.

Safe. Unevacuated. Go bag packed. Now. :-) You'd think I'd have paid more attention to those Making Light posts after the Cedar Fire.

Bruce @ 92: I still think the most breathtaking dance routine on film of the Astaire era that I've ever seen was by the Nicholas Brothers in the film 'Stormy Weather'. After seeing that for the first time I was never as impressed again by Astaire or Kelly.

FWIW: the forecast from the AQMD, the air quality people - it's the PM10 and PM2.5 that matter most:

AREA                    1-HR   8-HR    8-HR   24-HR  24-HR  24-HR   MAX

                        OZONE  OZONE   CO     PM10   PM2.5   NO2    AQI

                        PPM    PPM     PPM    UG/M3  UG/M3   PPM

-------------------------------------------------------------

Los Angeles County:  South Coast Air Basin

NW Coastal LA           .06    .05     1.8    145     40    .03     99

SW Coastal LA           .05    .04     1.7    145     40    .05     99

Re the Particle "Use lethal force before you're fully awake," I prefer to sleep with a spring-loaded scissor device that propels a derringer down the sleeve of my pajamas and into my hand.

Bill Higgins... Me, I want adamatium claws. Perfect when someone wakes you up in the middle of a bad dream...

Well, well. Come to find out, the guy who was semi-stalking my boyfriend has quite a history.

He's in big trouble now. Thank gods.

#24 - .....Comparing Kelly and Astaire is interesting. It seemed that Astaire was the more sophisticated and urbane, while Kelly displayed a more down-to-earth style.....

52 - ....Michael Wood in America in the Movies has a nice (and light) discussion of the Kelly/Astaire question, where he concludes that Kelly's dancing shows more obvious effort - as if he were forcing himself to be in high spirits, where Astaire just moved like that naturally.....

53 - ....Interesting, the comparison between Astaire and Kelly's styles. Kelly always went for the more athletic approach. I think he was from a working-class background. Must have been fun, growing up loving dancing and being 5'7 tall....

#72 - ... how balletic Kelly's dancing was. I used to characterize Kelly as more obviously athletic than Astaire, but now I'd add that Astaire looks more ballroom-and-tap, while to my untutored eye, Kelly took quite a few moves directly from classical dance.....

Somebody in this group IIRC suggested that Astaire danced as Astaire and Kelly danced in character - that is dancing as the role would dance in that place and time if moved to dance not as Astaire might dance a show-off set piece - something of the difference between an opera and recital. CF John Travolta dancing in character.

The 'next page' links in the story in Xopher's link at 148 didn't work for me, but some guesses about URL formats lead to pages 2, 3 and 4.

Assuming stalker-fellow is Mr. Newman, he doesn't sound like a fun fellow to have in your life, no.

Clark E Myers... I wouldn't know(*). But Kelly dancing with Leslie Caron was a different style than he usually went for, either when they first do it by the Seine, or by the stylized fountain in the dream sequence. Sexy doesn't begin to describe the latter.

(*) For one thing, those who do know these things might thump me on the head for thinking that I know.

Xopher @ 148... He's in big trouble now. Thank gods.

It's nice when one sees signs that there is Justice in the world.

Bill Higgins @ 146... I prefer to sleep with a spring-loaded scissor device that propels a derringer down the sleeve of my pajamas and into my hand.

You wouldn't happen to have an alter ego named Artemus Gordon, would you?

I have just got home from seeing Black Maria the ballet. I just couldn't see how they could stay true to the spirit of the book in such a different medium, but they did, and all the characters (that weren't absent) were spot-on. So I am very happy just now.

Todd 150: I hadn't figured that out. Now that I've read the other pages, I shudder to think what might have happened to my boy (who is quite young, but only the fact that he looks much younger than he is would put him in Newman's range).

In unrelated news, on Saturday I was at a party at the rectory of a church in Boonton (following the investiture of a new Rector). I went everywhere in that house except the garden; I stopped at the door to that mostly very attractive space, and turned back.

You see, there was a weeping angel out there. No WAY was I going near a weeping angel! LMAOAM

Xopher @ 155...No WAY was I going near a weeping angel!

Don't blink.

Serge 156: There were lots of other people watching. I backed away slowly, eyes wide open.

Serge: "Au fond du temple saint" it is. From the Pearl Fishers, by Bizet. I will not attempt the title in French, my French being as faulty as my Latin. Tenor-baritone duet, and a demonstration of why tenors rule.

Xopher #155: What's the problem with weeping angels?

#156 Oh MAN, that was scary!

Fragano...you need to see the Doctor Who episode "Blink" to understand. You will never again look at weeping angels the same way.

Xopher #161: I see. I think.

Dave Luckett... No problem. Meanwhile, your Latin is most likely far better than mine, which is now all but forgotten and probably on the same level as that of Bryan ("Romanes eunt domus") of Nazareth.

(Since we're still talking about singing and dancing, I thought I'd post this again, hoping it won't get lost in the shuffle.)

Not long ago my wife and I watched Bogart/Bacall's Dark Passage, where Bogie plays a man wrongfully imprisoned in San Quentin who then escapes. At some point, Bacall takes him to her place. Looking at her records, he observes that she seems to like Swing music a lot. She corrects him by saying that she prefers Legitimate Swing. I googled that expression, and found a reference to it in an article about Liberty Swing, but without explaining what Legitimate Swing is. Does anybody care to light my lantern?

Xopher: I recall that story.

We can only hope is is treated to some portion of what he deserves.

cmk, #138, All developed countries banned it, but that's not the world. And in 2006, WHO started advocating using it at home level carefully, because of the malaria. That's not the thrust of this article, but it's in there.

Fragano @ 162... "Blink" is a great time-travel story juvpu vaibyirf npghny cnenqbkrf, naq gur dhnaghz rssrpg bs na bofreire ohg ng gur znpebfpbcvp yriry. And that probably confused you even more. OK, here's the spoiler: Gur "natryf" ernyyl ner nyvraf gung ghea gb fgbar jura lbh ybbx ng gurz, ohg pbzr nyvir gur zbzrag lbh ybbx njnl, thus the title.

Reading further in the story with the links Todd L found @ #150, even assuming the LA Weekly has an iconoclastic attitude like most alternative papers, that's one heck of an indictment of the LA court system, too. They had to move the former prosecutor's civil trial to Orange County? Sheesh. I thought it was just the LA cops that were insular.

#109, Bruce, I'm so glad I don't have time to read this at work. I'm also glad for a flexi-keyboard, it can be washed off....

#138, DDT has proven to be very useful in malaria ridden areas, but when it's sprayed up into the niches and straw roofs, etc. where the mosquitos rest during the day. Surface spraying, not wholesale spray-it-all-over-everything. It doesn't get into the environment so much.

Dancing in general: I'm not a dancer. Astaire and Kelley are comparing apples and oranges as far as I'm concerned. They're both wonderful. So is Donald O'Connor.

fidelio @ 124, PJ @ 128 & 145, Terry @ 141 & Kathy at 143: THANKS. ML commenters ALWAYS come through.

Looks like I'm going. I'm going, however, with a back-up presenter and my boss's awareness that we might have to hole me up in the hotel and/or put me on the next plane back. We called the hotel and they said it's not too bad. The focus group folks said it's like a "bad smog day."

We pretty much have NO IDEA how I'll be. There's a long range of conditions for me between "fabulous" on one end and "dead" on the other. But just inside the fabulous marker is the "unable to do oral presentation" marker. Turns out you need pretty much normal oxygen and respiratory effort to control pitch and rhythm in speech. We can't test the themes of the case if I'm not eloquent. But I want to give it a shot since they've decided to let me present our client's case to the mock jury. Pretty exciting stuff.

Terry, I'm in town from tomorrow afternoon until Sunday morning. We are staying at the Hilton by LAX. I'll have access to email and such.

Car tomorrow at 7:15, though, so it is now time for me to get with the sleeping. I'm not QUITE packed yet.

Thank you!!!

punkrockhockeymom... My best wishes to you!

Clark E. Myers @ 149

where Astaire just moved like that naturally.....

Naturally plus a huge amount of rehearsal. Astaire was graceful, but not so graceful that he could dance like that without days of practice, and several takes to edit together. His genius was making it look easy.

punkrockhockeymom: If you have the time/energy, you can come up to Pasadena, where the air is pretty good. I am assuming you don't have days free, but if you do, I can offer you a tour of the grounds of the Huntington Gardens and Museum.

A pint, or a cuppa, is offered, regardless.

Just hit my blog and drop me a line, I'll get it.

Bruce Cohen @ 172... His genius was making it look easy.

That reminds me of how Cary Grant never won an Oscar. His problem is that he made things like comedy look so easy. Much as I loved Gregory Peck, he couldn't do comedy to save his life. I'd look at him in Stanley Donen's Arabesque and find myself thinking that his character knew he was in a comedy. Compare that to Cary Grant in Donen's Charade.

I almost succeeded in getting through the Wool Arts Tour without adding to the stash... almost. But, almost doesn't count. Instead I wound up with two more fleeces. One of these days I might actually get a spinning wheel....

Serge @ 174

His problem is that he made things like comedy look so easy.

You'd think the members of the Academy would know better. Comedy is hard, everybody in the biz or interested in it knows that. And Cary Grant was a wizard at making it look effortless.

That's why I'm always appreciative when some dramatic actor does well in a comic role; it's a whole other set of skills, and it takes a lot more care and experience to make a given level of talent look good.

Comedy is hard, everybody in the biz or interested in it knows that.

I don't think they do. We keep getting awful comedies whose very existence only makes sense if you assume that the people making them thought comedy was easy. And while the Oscars are ridiculous for a whole bunch of reasons, when was the last time a comedy won best picture?

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

This may have originated with George Bernard Shaw, but I first heard it attributed to Edmund Gwenn in 1985's Twilight Zone by an alien about to annihilate Earth. Besides, what do steenking aliens know?

ethan @ 177

I've always attributed that to the fact that the people who run things in Hollywood are bankers. What do they know about comedy? Or anything else that doesn't go ka-ching?

From the Grauniad America particle: "Which means what? Well, the paper was founded in 1821 "to promote the liberal interest" in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre. Now, I confess that I don't know what that was. But it sounds bad, and I've been around the block enough times to know that journals founded in response to events like massacres tend to be pretty reliable, from my point of view, more or less across the board."

Oh, I am laughing so hard. I can't for the life of me tell if that's even meant to be funny. Either way, awesome. (And confidence-inspiring.)

You have to go back 30 years for a comedy Best Picure - Annie Hall.

Heresiarch #180: 'Peterloo' was the sarcastic name applied to a massacre of protesters against the Corn Laws at St Peter's Fields in Manchester in 1819.

Wait, Braveheart wasn't meant to be funny?

"You can take our lives! But you'll never take us seriously!"

169, 138

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/

Tim Lambert at Deltoid is entirely on top of the DDT story, when and where it's allowed to be used, what the problems were, why it was stopped use (it wasn't Rachel Carson, it was widespread immunity).

There is some disinformation thinktank in Washington that keeps spreading lies about all this.

DDT doesn't break down in the environment, it is still killing birds in the Arctic, and politically it doesn't decay either, it seems, but retains its fundamental toxicity.

Yes Inhofe is a liar.

I thought the grand finale of Revenge of the Sith was supposed to he a comedy. Here you have Obi-wan duking it out with Annakin in the middle of a lake of fire.

"The Senator is evil!"
"He is not, from his point of view."

Not exactly he kind of wit that Errol Flynn would exchange with Basil Rathbone while they were trying to skewer each other.

#172 - yes of course, that's the point at issue - it's a movie after all.

Multiple takes and clever cuts for a perfect dancing performance that appears effortless - rehearsed endlessly - as opposed to the suggested Kelly notion that the character is doing the best the character can - an American athletic performance - hence the John Travolta reference to playing a character who is not so good a dancer as the best Travolta might do - or some of the folks who might have done their own singing but were covered by Marni Nixon instead. I wonder why there was a never a male cover artist at the same level - imagine Clint Eastwood bursting into Howard Keel talking to the trees.

Clark E. Myers @ 186... imagine Clint Eastwood bursting into Howard Keel talking to the trees.

"Do you feel lucky, trunk?"

Or Clint confronting Tony Shalhoub on his show?

"Do you feel yucky, Monk?"

re # 186: I don't think Jeremy Brett did his own singing in "My Fair Lady." God knows what got into the producers of "Paint Your Wagon," but there's something oddly charming about egregious non-singers Eastwood and Lee Marvin attempting those songs. (Oddly enough, according to IMDB, Jean Seberg's songs were dubbed.) I'm so used to actors being at least competent singers that it's a bit of a surprise to find any who can't or who haven't had enough training to at least get along. It's especially odd in Clint, who's a musician.

"Other People's Money" -- Only Cory could sell SF to Forbes, AND make me see exactly why they bought it.

re 186: I suspect that a large part of it is that it's quite a bit harder to match the men's voices, especially in the heyday of the musical when a lot of the men had very distinctive voices. The flip side is that musicals which have demanding singing by the male star were few and far between, Oklahoma! being a conspicuous exception. In a lot of them the lead can get away with not really singing at all (see under "Rex Harrison"). The real male singing (if any) can be farmed out to a supporting character who can be hired to be a good singer. However, female leads are always sopranos and always have good voices.

It also helped for Marni Nixon that her voice sounds rather like what the std. actress of the period would sound like if she could sing.

Paula Lieberman @ 175:

A drop spindle is cheaper and more portable, but it would take stamina to finish up an entire fleece on one. I've found some pretty good deals on spinning wheels on Craigslist.

What kind of fleece did you get? I've finally finished scouring the Corriedale I got back in February, but I can only comb it when the munchkin is out of the house, so it's still pretty slow going.

Footnote: In Mulan, is it Marni Nixon singing like June Foray, or June Foray talking like Marni Nixon?

Totally off any topic, but this is an Open Thread . . . .

Last night my 11-yo dd and I were watching Pushing Daisies. The three main characters entered an office to find a woman apparently dead at her desk. The guy-who-can-bring-people-back-from-the-dead poked her, but nothing happened. Not dead, eh? Further poking and slapping eventually woke her up. There was an exchange of dialog; in the middle of that, the woman fell asleep again.

Somewhere early in this scene, the kid turned to me and said, "Mom, that woman has narcolepsy."

I thought, "yet another cool thing my daughter learned from Teresa."

(I also thought, "that's not a very realistic portrayal of narcolepsy.")

Sorry I missed the musical/dance theme until today! I was raised on a steady diet of B'way musicals. When I was young, I preferred Astaire; now that I am old(er), I prefer Kelly. Not sure why that has happened. But I have always adored Fosse, who seems to exist in a separate universe.

When I was in my last year of high school, my mother would go to the tkts booth in Times Square one or two Wednesdays a month. I got out of school at noon on Wednesdays and went over to meet her. We saw every musical on Broadway and most of the comedies as well (and I went to the dramas with classmates). To give you an idea of when this was, we saw the original Chorus Line in previews.

My parents met in college while doing Arms and the Man.

This year, my daughter's 6th grade class will be working in partnership with the Encores program at City Center. Encores is doing three shows this year: Applause, Juno, and No, No, Nanette. Given the timing of the musical program at school, I think dd will be working on Juno or Nanette. It should be very interesting, whichever show it is. I'm kind of pulling for Nanette because Walter Bobbie is directing, even though Rosie O'Donnell is one of the stars.

(betcha didn't know I was a theater geek)

Melissa Singer is a drama geek, particularly about musicals. Nominative determinism strikes again.

abi: I can't sing . . . or dance . . . .

But I have been known to buckle my swash.

Melissa Singer... I wonder what the real Gene Kelly was like, besides his being a Democrat. After all, if I remember correctly, he reallyreallyreally wanted to make a movie out of Bradbury's Dark Carnival, with himself as Mister Dark. That didn't work out, but out of that was born Something Wicked This Way Comes. I could see him play characters like that. Take a look at Inherit The Wind.

abi @ 196

How very ... nominal ... of her.

Melissa Singer @ 197... I have been known to buckle my swash

Melissa, Girl Pirate, Scourge of the Seven Seas?

Northern hemifluorospherans should take a look at Perseus tonight, an insignificant little comet called 17P Holmes (2007) has flared up into a naked eye object. I just looked, and it's clearly not a star in my 10x50s.

Serge:

In more ways than one.

Actually, right now, this very minute, I have a cage-hilt rapier sitting on my desk, repossessed from a non-profit theater company I lent it to a few years back that is now going under (alas, alack). Luckily the prop mistress is an old friend of mine and is making sure all the weapons go back to their original owners.

Many moons ago, when Madeleine Robins and Lucie Chin and I and many of our friends studied theatrical fencing and fightcraft together, we would, each May First, put on a free show in Central Park. Over the years I played many parts, pretty much all non-speaking because with an audience of hundreds and a large, open playing area, dumbshow works better than dialog.

I was never a pirate, though I have been sailing on a lovely, old (National Historic Landmark--the first mobile landmark, lol), two-masted schooner and raised sail and hauled anchor and all that. The year we did a pirate show, I was a virginal (*cough*) maiden, but I still got to skewer people (virtually).

Melissa Singer @ 202... I still got to skewer people (virtually)

Goodness, New York editors are a really tough bunch to please.

In case you might be interested, the Girl Genius site has some computer wallpapers for those who drop coinage into their Paypal tin cup. I especially like the "Coffee" one.

Incidentally, in the original sense of the word, swashbucklers don't buckle their swashes; they swash their bucklers (i.e. beat on their shields with their swords). It's an exocentric compound, like "pickpocket" or "chupacabras".

[in passing--drowned under work.]

ENR reports:

"Similar to the mixed company often found on a construction site, tension is mounting between federal officials and the industry’s forensic engineers looking into Minneapolis’ deadly bridge collapse. While engineers probing the Aug. 1 disaster are anxious to reveal their findings to colleagues maintaining the nation’s aging bridges, federal officials are just as eager to keep them quiet until the government releases an official report."

+more at ENR's Bridge Collapse Update Center

Tim May @ 205... they swash their bucklers (i.e. beat on their shields with their swords)

I think there was such a scene in Alfred the Great, with the Norsemen (led my Michael York) loudly yelling and rythmically beating on their shields to unnerve the Saxons before charging.

David @ 64

Yup, Free Rice is fun, even though I hover around 49 & 50 (& wonder if that's on a 100 scale). It's also fun to speculate on the people who chose the words & assigned the difficulty level to them. (I'm betting that at least several of those people are long-time SCAers and one either a marine biologist or a zoologist.)

There are fifty Free Rice levels (I hit fifty today! Finally! Rejoice!) and the words apparently shift between them-- if no one can get a word, it moves up, or something along those lines. I think the very high-level words tend to be more sciency because they take specialized knowledge, but have synonyms-- I can't imagine 'synecdoche' or even 'metaphor' fitting in there. But for all I know, they're there already, and are moving around some.

Don Fitch: It peaks at 50, the difficulty is not exactly assigned. When launched it was, but as people get (or fail to) the words, they are moved up, or down.

me, carrying over (re bags): I libeled CVS; they shifted to #2 some time ago. (You still won't find multiple grades in a single chain AFAIK, but sometimes a chain will shift.)

I wonder whether the differences between Astaire and Kelly are what led to their casting, or vice versa? Astaire had a long line of upper-class parts with ballroom-dancing type scenes, which I don't recall Kelly ever doing and which would put a premium on smoothness rather than athleticism or expression.

Heinlein also had an ecdysiast (in this case professional rather than accidental) in "Gulf". Damfino which of the two I learned the word from.

Eleanor@154: You lucky !@#$%^&*!!. I heard about that just a few days ago, and have enough of a Jones jones that I'd consider flying there if I weren't so piled up. Did you also get to see The Wolves in the Walls: a Musical Pandemonium when it was in town? We drove to NYC for it; I was sitting there gaping in awe most of the time.

Bruce@186: cf Rex Harrison's autobiography, A Damned Serious Business, titled from one of the first things an acting teacher told him about comedy.

Russell@189: but there's something oddly charming about egregious non-singers Eastwood and Lee Marvin attempting those songs. I remember the billboards for this but never saw it; was it better than the spectacle of Marlon Brando trying to method-act his way through "Luck Be a Lady"?

Melissa@195: My parents met in college while doing Arms and the Man. Cool! I sneak-read that in English class due to the teacher spending IMO \way/ too much time on Yeats (considering it was a survey course from Chaucer to (at least) T. S. Eliot), persuaded the school's theater managers to do it, and played Major Petkoff. (I \think/ they were conning me when they said I should try for Bluntschli; the kid they cast later went to Juilliard, and I was already good at pompous older roles.) No carryings-on, but Raina's mother did mention Shaw had blown off her autograph request -- I hadn't looked up his dates to realize how long he lived or how early that play was. Just imagine what he'd said about Shrub if he were around now....

Heard on tonight's episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
"Their clientele is all anorexic models and Eurotrash named Serge."

CHip at 211: I just sat in front of my monitor screen griiiiinnnning like a banshee, imagining what GBS might have said about GWB, and then imagining what Chesterton might have said about GWB, and then imagining what Oscar Wilde would surely have said about GWB.... Unfortunately, the sound was off so I couldn't hear the words. But the expressions on their faces was priceless.

Xopher at 190:
-- Only Cory could sell SF to Forbes,

Well, I say that most stock market articles are speculative fiction.

Erik Nelson @ 214

Most of them sound like fantasy to me. And not the heroic kind, either.

Serge @ #212, And if you model for Polo Ralph Lauren you can be both!

I seem to remember there are a bunch of fans of the great Paranoia RPG here. You should definitely check out the Valve first-person puzzle game Portal if you can; no direct rip offs from Paranoia, but the whole tone of the game is riffing on it, in my opinion. Bonus: insanely cute little closing song written by Jonathon Coulton (Code Monkey). It's a short game, but a whole lot of fun.

Serge @ 204: I sprang for the Bangladesh Dupree one not long ago. Phil does do pulchritude.

I have been sailing on a lovely, old (National Historic Landmark--the first mobile landmark, lol), two-masted schooner

"Watermark", surely?

Serge #207: Your Michael York?

Fragano @ 220... Curses! Typoed again! Not that my wife would mind if I looked like him in his glory days.

Joe McMahon @ 218... Phil does do pulchritude

He does indeed. Which makes them a tad inappropriate for an office environment. Meanwhile I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow and will be working the whole week with my teammates instead of being 1000 miles away, and I contemplated bringing my Despair.com "Mistake" mug. Then I decided that my manager might get the wrong idea.

Linkmeister @ 216... if you model for Polo Ralph Lauren you can be both!

I'm not that skinny. Meanwhile, the last time a movie character had my name was with the crazy French scientist in The Core. Before that, it was Bronson Pinchot as a hairdresser in Beverly Hills Cop... I really want to play a corse in Criminal Intent because I'd then get to meet Leslie Hendrix.

Serge #221: Not like Robert Redford?

I have long harbored a desire to play, in a Law and Order episode, The Guy Who Finds The Body In The Teaser.

You're not onscreen long, you don't have to be particularly beautiful, yet it's an opportunity to create a character millions will see.

Serge, as someone involved in the production of reference works for use in quite important situations, and which stand as historical documents, I find a postcard-sized copy of despair.com's Mediocrity placed prominently in my section of our cubicle is a subtle correction to people planning to urge the cutting of corners.

They have a wide range of other good thoughts too; so many it's far too hard to choose.

MC Pye @ 226... I have that calendar too. I'm sure my manager would love Achievement with, below the photo of a Pyramid. the caption "You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor."

Bill Higgins @ 225... I'd also like to be in Eureka. Ah, to be handcuffed by Deputy Jo (maybe for illegal parking of my rocket backpack) just before the latest scientific mishap disintegrates me...

Erik 214: Well, I say that most stock market articles are speculative fiction.

Not at all. They're speculative lies.

Tim @205: The backward phrasing is a fencing joke, at least in my old crowd (and also a pretty funny Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon I have tacked up on my fridge).

Bill @225: It is a mark of how literal my mind can sometimes be that when I read, "I have long harbored a desire to play, in a Law and Order episode, The Guy Who Finds The Body In The Teaser," I spent a moment trying to figure out what sort of kitchen appliance a Teaser might be (having mind-read "teaser" as "freezer", apparently).

re 220: Somebody else's Michael York.

Xopher @ 229... Not at all. They're speculative lies.

That reminds me of the scene near the end of The Rocketeer, when Jennifer Connelly realizes that Timothy Dalton's Errol Flynn-like character was really a Nazi spy.

"You lied to me!"
"I didn't lie. I was... acting."

Melissa Singer at 230-- I read 'teaser' as 'toaster' and was surprised at the specificity, but not the implied scenario.

#217, Clifton Royston:
Ooh, Portal. I haven't tried playing it (that style of character motion in a game tends to make me nauseated, and then add in portal motion? Yikes) but my husband loved it and it was really amusing to watch over his shoulder. The computer is a really fun character.

I find this sufficiently inspirational (in a twisted way)to have it on my desk at work. And now, I will go back to grading!

More from despair.com, this one about delusions...

"There is no greater joy than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality. "

The shorter despair.coms are my favorites-- "The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends really, really badly" may be the best.

Serge @ 236

Trying to browse the various images on despair.com I needed to enable their javascript in the Noscript tool I use in Firefox, and found myself picking a menu option that said (in part) "temporarily allow despair". This seemed quite appropriate.

Xopher @ 229

One of the more onerous tasks I've had in my years of garnering experience points in the high tech industry was tracking what industry analysts had to say about the company I worked for, and the relevance of its technology to the industry as a whole. In years of reading analysts reports from places like Gartner, I have yet to read one which showed signs that the writer had more than 10 or 15% of a clue. Of course what they lacked in understanding, they more than made up for in wild flights of imagination, or, depending on the disposition of the author, large doses of grumpy dismissal. I'm sure many of them lied to further the aims of their cronies or their own investments, but even if they hadn't lied, they would not have been able to tell the truth.

In #230 Melissa Singer writes:

Bill @225: It is a mark of how literal my mind can sometimes be that when I read, "I have long harbored a desire to play, in a Law and Order episode, The Guy Who Finds The Body In The Teaser," I spent a moment trying to figure out what sort of kitchen appliance a Teaser might be (having mind-read "teaser" as "freezer", apparently).

The angel of my better nature urged me to write "The Guy Who Finds The Body," which of course would have sufficed. But I chose to go for the slightly grander phrase, aware that it might have been read ambiguously. Sorry.

Bill @240:

So not your fault! I have some Asperger's tendencies and literalness is one of them. I don't always get jokes either.

Also, I just saw the Pushing Daisies episode where the dead guy was, indeed, found in the freezer, so the image and rhythm of "freezer" was still floating around in my brain.

And, finally, my brain likes to play with words. The flash that gave me "freezer" also gave me "taser" as well as made me wonder if there was some new brand of automobile or furniture I'd missed hearing about.

It was kind of fun, actually.

Bruce 239: Still lies. For fiction to exist requires that both writer and reader agree openly that the piece is not intended to be factual.

Bill 240: Have you ever wondered if the show's writers actually write those bits? I don't mean there's a difference in quality, but if I were in charge of that show, I would just get some good improv actors and say "OK, you're going to find a body in such-and-such location; come up with a 30-second scene between you that leads you there."

Now THAT would be FUN.

Xopher #242

A Pythonesque take on a Law & Order or CSI show would be amusing.

"He's dead"

"No, he's not, he's just resting"

"Dead"

"Hibernating"

Bruce Cohen @238
found myself picking a menu option that said (in part) "temporarily allow despair"

What I want IRL is the menu option that lets me temporarily block despair.

Body in the Toaster, huh? How about Lamb to the Slaughter?

That aired nearly 40 years ago and we still remember the episode every time we have lamb.

Exploiting the open thread: This is an interesting link to a version of the spammer bingo discussion we had earlier, but applied to industry fighting to avoid some regulation. As with the spammer bingo, probably all the cards are often correct and reasonable in the right context, but they get used a lot to try to bypass or silence debate.

Denialist Deck of Cards

Albatross, is that a Roald Dahl story originally? I know I've read it before, though not quite as elaborate. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you, though, so it might just be a common murder trope, like stabbing someone with an icicle.

Xopher @ 242... I'd like to see an episode of Criminal Intent where the Body is discovered by a mime.

Diatryma #247: I'm not albatross, but yeah, it's a Roald Dahl story.

eurotrash serge,

Meanwhile, the last time a movie character had my name was with the crazy French scientist in The Core.

i can't remember specific examples, but people with my name in movies are usually 60-70 year old nice jewish ladies.

nevertheless i convinced myself, watching raiders of the lost ark (one of my favourite movies ever-so-coincidentally) for the first time, that the female lead was named miriam. & i don't want to hear otherwise.

miriam 250: And Miriam Zimmer Bradley would have agreed with you.

miriam #250: If it helps at all, you have a hospital named after you here in Providence.

No? It doesn't help? Sorry.

Hey, at least you don't have to deal with Tom Cruise having your name in the Mission Impossible movies.

AJ Luxton @32 and various others above who have raved about Rasputina -- my goodness, thank you. I just got, and am listening to for the first time, their "The Lost & Found", which includes their cover of "Wish You Were Here". Do I just get everything else they've done next, or is there a particular order I should go in?

Todd Larason #253: My humble is that How We Quit the Forest is their most essential album, Cabin Fever their least, and Thanks for the Ether and Frustration Plantation in the middle (far closer to the essential end of the spectrum, mind you--Cabin Fever is their only album I would call anywhere close to bad, though even it has two or three songs I wouldn't want to live without), though in very different ways. The live album is worth it just for the cover of "Barracuda," and the way they introduce it, and I just bought their new one but haven't listened to it yet. Dunno if that helps (or if it's worth it trying to sort out my tangled sentences*), but that's how I feel about it.

And yeah, isn't The Lost & Found awesome? I like their "Bad Moon Rising" faaaaaar more than the original. As I said before, I don't want to belittle their original songs, but they really are among the very best song interpreters out there. I eagerly await the day they release a full-length album of covers.

*Maybe I should take a page from abi's book and start using nesting footnotes rather than nesting parentheticals and asides.

The only film or TV character with my name I've seen for many years was a different gender to me. Luckily for my morale there are several prominent people in the entertainment industry with the same phonetic name (spelling varies) who share my gender.

Thanks, Ethan. Forest, Ether, Plantation and the live album have been ordered. Being the obsessive completist I am, I'll probably end up with Cabin Fever before too long as well, mind.

The allmusic review/summary of their newest album sounds spectacular too, but this is enough for the moment I think.

Xopher, #251, either I don't get the joke or you've misnamed Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I don't think there's ever been a movie with a character with my name.

I don't work anymore, so I don't think the despair.com stuff is quite right. However, from my bed, I can see a stand-up card of Mary Engelbreit's Snap Out of It and that's very useful.

I'm mildly annoyed that the two most famous characters with my name are a psychic who kills her entire class and a woman who spent so much on shoes she could have bought a Manhattan apartment with the money.

Marilee, I don't know whether I have good news or bad for you. Searching with that spelling on imdb gives nearly 20 character entries from TV & films, ranging from 1939 to 2006. You might find some admirable, if you work your way through.

The same search for my name gives hundreds of results. It can be either a personal or a family name, multiplying things even more. OTOH, so many things can be used as a first/Christian/personal name in English, frex Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is named Fitzwilliam Darcy, and when I worked in medical research I knew a Macdonald Christie who's now reached professorship in rather interesting subjects.

Carrie, maybe it's my avoidance of 'celebrity culture' but when I think of shoe-based extravagance, it's always Imelda Marcos. Is there another? (BTW, The film of Stephen King's book is on TV late tonight in Sydney.)

Variations on my name are rampant. I like to claim Tania the spy in From Russia With Love.

I thought this might give folks a good chuckle, I saw the link on Jezebel:

From the BBC - Why heroines die in classic fiction.

Back a few years ago one of my friends developed scurvy*, another one pleurisy, and I had TB (latent). I used to joke that all we needed was a few other people to develop brain fever, angina, and megrims and we'd have all the major diseases from 19th century novels covered. My doctor was amused by my repeatedly calling the disease consumption, though he thought my Camille references were a bit over the top.

*She's not a picky eater, she was in Yakutsk during the end of the Soviet era and there was no produce to be had. She was eating raw garlic at one point, because it was a green and greens had not been seen for weeks.

Ethan, thanks from me too for the Rasputina album recommendations; they seem to be right up my alley, and I'm wondering how I missed ever hearing about them.

I'm sorry. I totally got stuck at post #37. And not because of Rasputina's cover of Baby Got Back, no, but because of that terribly addictive way YouTube has of playing hypertext free association, and, anyway, what I'm trying to say is,

Jonathan Coulton likes big butts too.

Well, this looks like an interesting outbreak of discussion about Wiki-article-deletion politics:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/25/wikiwatch-stirring-the-pot/

It's linking to a bit of an organized movement, too; for those around here who care about such things, it might be useful to join forces.

Marilee @ #257:

In deference to miriam's request, I am unable to explain to you that the heroine of Raiders of the Lost Ark was likewise really named Marion.

I smell Christian Dominionist/theocrat disinformation campaign at work....

There's another one of the astroturfish things in circulation, "Dear Military Wife." Someone who I think is a military wife posted it in a newsgroup I'm in and I got ticked.... As a female military veteran, and daughter of niece of four women who served in the US military in WWII, I get pissed whenever I see one of these pieces of partisan shit that look like commercial paid schilling from that harpy Elaine Donnelly....

Warning, a lot of those things are pure unadulterated bombastic, politically motivated JINGOISM and SMARM, playing on people's emotions.
I'm a veteran, who spent 11 months at a remote site known as Thule, Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle.
I tend to get rather ANNOYED when seeing "women" depicted as all -civilian- and military as all -male-. This is NOT 1950, this is NOT 1973 when I got the litany from that jerk from Lousiana State University who was majoring in physical education and thought he was going to become an Air Force pilot, saying, "Women. They're women. Women shouldn't be pilots."

One of the people at my college dorm reunion was a Army colonel's husband, accompanying his wife who was an alumn of the dormfloor... The Colonel (that's colonel as in bird colonel, not lieutenant colonel...) said that there were two male cadets who literally quit in tears back when she was a cadet, because the two cadets had been instigators, engaged in belittling the women and the male non-white cadets in the summer training program they were all in, wound up being rated at the -bottom- of the unit, a minority cadet from the Caribbean got first, and the female cadet who today is a colonel, got rated second. (The point there, is that there is STILL a lot of prejudice around... when she went to senior officer training, there was some ill-feeling towards her ("-why is a woman taking up a position that some man should be in going through this-") until a "mustang" (officer with prior enlisted experience) with combat experience pointed out something like, "She's going to be commanding the people who develop the equipment you're going to be using out in the field. Don't you want her to know what it's like to use that equipment? And don't you want the equipment you use and that protects you, to -work-?-"

Anyway, I've seen the thing before, it was circulating around a few years ago that I recall, and it was noxious gender-biased smarm then--again, there are HUSBANDS who have wives who are out in Iraq and Afghanistan... why don't they get the same sympathy for being left minding the homefront and the kids?!

----- Original Message -----

>
> Dear Military Wife,
>
> I am an American woman that has no idea what is going on in the military
> other than what I hear on the news.

Get a CLUE then, try READING!!! There is no excuse for such IGNORANCE!
>
> I have never had to let go of someone so that they could go fight for people
> that they didn't know, people that sometimes do not appreciate or understand c
> what they are fighting for.

Once upon a time, there was a fellow living on my college dormfloor who was in Navy ROTC. His best friend in the universe, so he said, was living with a woman. The Navy cadet asked her to marry him, and she agreed, KNOWING that being a Navy wife meant things like long separations from a husband on sea duty who would be out on the ocean for months at a time.... It is a rather tacky thing, for someone to ask someone who's living with someone else to marry them, but.... Anyway, I have no idea if the marriage lasted, I suspect it did, actually. She had a quite level head on her shoulders... the person she had been living with, was a rather wild sort--not dangerous or anything, but definitely not fully civilized.

> I have never had a sleepless night of worry because of a report that another
> bomb has exploded and I still haven't heard from my husband.
>
> I have never had to wait for months on end to hold the one that I loved so.

Aaarrrggghhhh, bathos!

> I have never had to tell my children that daddy wasn't coming home tonight
> because he was so far away fighting for something that they aren't yet old
> enough to understand.

And what about Mommy being out stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan, getting sexually harassed by recivist males (see the LiveJournal of can't-think-of-her-name-now, she was in the blogging from Iraq a year or two or three ago, and got stuck in a firefight she thought she wasn't going to make it out of, as a Reservist I think on active duty in the Army....
>
> I have never had to hold my head high and suppress the tears as I hear that
> it will be at least another six months of separation before my loved one
> gets to come home.

Shrug. The military's been all volunteer for a generation now, anyone in it signed up. I think that the treatment of the people in the service stinks these days regarding too few people on active duty and abuse of the Guard and Reserve getting sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, but then I think the whole shebang that got ANYONE sent to Iraq in the first place mades a cesspool smell sweet in comparison....

> I have never had to deal with a holiday away from the one that I thought I
> would share every day of my life with.

There are lots of jobs that send people far away for weeks or months at a time. I spent a year in Greenland. Don't look for my sympathy... if you want someone at home, marry a plumber or electrician or person who works in the local area, not someone in the military or a traveling sales person....

> And I have never had to feel the panic rising in my heart at the sound of a
> ringing phone or knock at the door for fear that it is the news that
> everyone is terrified of getting.

More people get killed by drunk drivers in the USA every years than US service people have been killed in Iraq. For that matter, people die on the flight decks of aircraft carriers from mostly unavoidable accidents. Four members of the Thunderbirds died years ago when the lead plane in the formation of four jets, had a control failure. There wasn't enough time and there wasn't enough altitude between the formation and the ground, for the other pilots to survive--there was no time and no margin to eject, must less leave the formation and avoid smashing into/being smashed into the other planes.

But those are the risks involved in flying military jets. Sometimes things go wrong, and people die. Or sometimes people get STUPID, such as JFK jr, who wasn't even IN the military, got stupid, and died taking his wife and sister-in-law down into the ocean with him.... flying at night over water in clear weather's killed even highly experienced pilots with thousands of hours of flight time and commercial-instrument ratings. Kennedy did NOT have an instrument rating, and the weather was not good, and he had a broken foot. "There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, there are no old bold pilots." Sometimes stupidity is fatal, and it was fatal in his case--and he wasn't even a military pilot, flying something faster and with more things to go wrong, than a slower much lower performance private civil aircraft,that doesn't have the lag time that jet engines have between the pilot pushing the throttle in, and the plane reacting....
>
> For the reasons listed above, I can not tell you that I understand how you
> feel.

Then why bother saying the line above?

> I can not tell you that you must be strong.

Then don't.....

> I can not say that you shouldn't be angry, because you "knew what you were
> getting into when you married a military man".

What about the men who marry military women?!!! Or give up their careers to be the homebody, as the colonel's husband did?! She spent time stationed Iraq, while HE stayed in the USA minding the homefront...

> I can not say these things because I have never had to walk in your shoes.

The purported [fake, I think] author of this missive has never walked in MY shoes... I was, again, -in- the military, and among other reasons, as a FEMALE veteran am offended by this thing....

> What I can say for certain is that because of your unselfish acts of bravery

Bravery? BRAVERY?!!!

> and your husbands willingness to stand up for those who see him as "just
> another soldier" - -

What, again, about the WOMEN in the military.
I'm a veteran.
My uncle's wife is a veteran.
My mother was a veteran.
Two of her sisters were veterans.
I have NOTHING polite to say about bogus letters which seem to go far out of their way to avoid acknowledging that women are veterans. If my aunt Miryon were still alive she'd be out campaigning over it... she use to have a large button she wore that said, "Women Are Veterans Too!"

> I will never have to walk in your shoes.

Why didn't this person go into the military herself then? Oh, right, it's a piece of political propaganda, and it's a FAKE!
>
> I do understand that as a military wife you are expected to uphold a certain
> amount of control, but I never understood how you could do it, until now.

What about military husbands?! I remember how isolated some of them were, because while there were groups for military members' -wives-, often the wives' groups banned military members' husbands from joining....

> I have figured out that you are not like other women.

And what about women IN the military and female veterans, we don't exist?! [expletive deleted]

This sounds like rotgut that Elaine Donnelly peddles... she who sucks up taxpayer money to calumnify women who are in the military with reports that are full of lies and smears and bogus research....

> You are of a special breed.

.............
>
> You have a strength within you that holds life together in the darkest of
> hours, a strength of which I will never possess.

......

> The faith you have is what makes you stand out in a crowd; it makes you glow
> with emotion and swell with pride at the mention of The United States of
> America.

The faith... uh-oh, it's THEOCRACY time....
>
> You are a special lady, a wonderful partner and a glorious American.

What about the husbands of women on active duty, what, they don't exist?!

> I have more respect for your husband than I could ever tell you, but until
> recently I never thought much about those that the soldier leaves at home
> during deployment.

What about the women in the military? I don't respect anyone who writes tripe like this, I'm a veteran, and those who ignore my mother, my three blood aunts and one aunt by marriage, and the women I served with... has no respect from me.

> Until this moment I could never put into words exactly what
> America meant to me.

Bombast, bombast, bombast, for a war founded on utter LIES, full of corruption and greed, more than a tenth of the population of Iraq fled to other countries, and more than 100,000 Iraqs dead of what I can only call aggression.... I am ASHAMED to be an American, and ANGRY, angry at the waste of lives, of resources, of trust.... dead Iraqis, dead Americans, dead British, dead from all the other countries who participated in this vicious, noxious, greedy FARCE of an invasion and occupation on the basis once again, of LIES!
>
> Until this moment, I had no real reason to.... Until I heard of you.

Huh?!

> Your husband and his military family hold this nation close, safe from those
> who wish to hurt us...but you and those like you are the backbone of the
> American family.

WOMEN ARE SERVICEPEOPLE TOO!!!!
>
> You keep the wheels in motion and the hearts alive while most would just
> break completely down.

Pfeh. There wasn't anyone at home waiting for me the year I spent in Greenland.... for THAT matter, two of the people I was serving with up there, went on leave for two weeks and came back emotionally destroyed. One of them had been married for ten years, and his wife said that it had never been a real marriage... he almost drove over a cliff in his anguish. Another fellow went back on leave and came back to Greenland determined to try to get child custody of his two young daughters, away from his philandering spouse whom divorce proceeding were in progress with.....

> Military families make this nation what it is today.

Uh, the basis of the USA is the citizen, NOT a professional fulltime military. Was it Washington who pointed out that someone does NOT cease being a citizen when putting on a military uniform.... I am sitting in a house in a town from which the town militia marched in April 1775 to Concord, to fight the British Army, in the battle that was the start of the US War for Independence. They were NOT professional soldiers, they were civilian farmers and civilians of other careers, who took up arms to break free of British rule. The US military can't exist without an economy and the civilians who pay the taxes that fund the military...
>
> You give us all hope and you emit a warming light at the end of a long dark
> tunnel.

I don't agree.... military spouses have, to use a particular term, "challenges," but then so does everyone else. The spouses of the Guard and Reserve are getting particularly abused, along with their Guard and Reserve marriage partners, who got called to active duty for extended periods disrupting their civilians lives and livelihood.. the regular military don't have their lives disrupted the same way, being -in- the military and not having to deal with income crash from a civilian job to military pay, and the sudden removal from the -civilian- world into the active duty overseas world... military spouses have the support systems of continuity that Reservists and Guard members' families don't have...

> Because of you and your family...I am able to be me.

I Served My Time, I resent the whole attitude of the purported author of what looks, again, to me to be pure jingoism, that there are no WOMEN who served, and no women who are veterans....
>
> I am able to have my family.
in
I've never been married, and don;t have that validation, and get ticked off having this jingoistic junk shoved in my face. I am NOT drinking this Kool-Aid. I got enough crap of "I'm not married, I'm TDY!" [and some of them didn't even have THAT excuse.... they chased anything female when their wives weren';t around....] trying to grab my tail in my six years in the military, to have a jaundiced eye regarding the fidelity of people in the military (there were a few choice stories about women, too.... philandering isn't gender-dependent other than culturally and socially promoted as such.... that there seem to be more philandering husbands than wives for the most part is artifact of conditioning and cultural attitudes, values, and unequal treatment of philandering spouses... and it VARIES from place to place....
>
> I am able to walk free in this great land.

That's becoming more and more of a joke, tell it to the victims of "rendition"...

> Because of you and your family, I can look ahead to the future with the
> knowledge that life is going to be okay.

What, the abrogtion of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and no senior officer having had the guts to stand up in public and state that illegal orders regarding such things as torture of prisoners and contravening of the Geneva Convention have been on-going for YEARS?!!!

> Because of you and your family, I can awake to a new day, everyday.

See above.

> I realize that you are a stronger person than I will ever be because of
> these things and I just wanted to take the time today to say thank you to
> you and your family for allowing me that freedom.

I'm not. I want to know why the top military officers have not upheld their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC...

> I will never be able to repay this debt to you, as it is unmatchable.
....

> However, I hope that you know that no matter where you are...
>
> what you are doing...
>
> what has happened today...
>
> or what will happen tomorrow...
>
> Your husband will NEVER be "just another soldier" to me....

What about the WOMEN in the military? I have NO respect for this letter, and am ticked an anyone who redistributes it as other than bigoted jingoism.

> And you, dear sweet lady, will never be forgotten.

I am not a military spouse. I AM A MILITARY VETERAN!
>
> You are all in my prayer's everyday and I pray that God will bring you back
> together with your loved one safely.

Religion card...

> May God Bless You
>
Religion card.
>
> If you are a Military Spouse or know one, repost this and say THANK YOU.
> They too make daily sacrifices while their spouse serve our country.
> GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS

I wonder what the colonel's husband thinks of this....

Sarah # 12

They're both Romney fleeces, the bag in the livingroom from "Petunia reg. Romney" is 6 1/2 pounds of raw wool.... I think somewhere I have a black merino fleece which is a first shearing (from a different animal, of course! Black merinos might only transform into Romneys in fantasy stories or dreams!)

Paula?

Not a pinball wizard (Real Audio)

Marilee 257: either I don't get the joke or you've misnamed Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Paul A is unable to correctly explain at 264.

Carrie 258: Well, the class did deserve it. I remember wishing I could kill people that easily. (In retrospect I'm glad I couldn't, because I absolutely would have.) Think of her as Her Who Must Not Be Messed With.

The other one's a flaming twit, I agree.

Paula Lieberman @ 265

Just so you feel like you're not the only person, or a member of the only class being insulted by that piece of astroturf, consider that the wives and husbands of fire fighters and police officers also sit by the telephone knowing that "that" phone call can come at any time. Fact is, though, their partners usually come out of it better than combat soldiers if they're only wounded. Something about their employers making good on their promises of care and medical treatment and disability retirement.

265 - Was it Washington who pointed out that someone does NOT cease being a citizen when putting on a military uniform

Yes, Washington, one of David Hackworth's favorite sayings - it was at the top of his organization's web page for a long time: When we became soldiers, we did not cease to be citizens

The report on the Thunderbirds Diamond Crash that I saw in the end attributed the failure to FOD - object blocking the control - I did hear someone qualified to express an opinion

(T38 instructor pilot whose joy it was to take every single individual airplane and make sure that individual airplane would recover from anything he could do to it the day before a student used the vary same airplane to train for recovery)

say it was pilot error - good enough to fly in the formation but not goood enough to lead - and changed per Creech to avoid other issues.

There is typical fly talk discussion at:
rec.aviation.military Subject: Re: diamond crash

Anybody know?

Speaking of #265 - I'd like to think everybody who looks in here is continuing to follow GinMar's travail?

Xopher #268: Most of 'em deserved it, but the poor teacher lady didn't!

ethan 271: Collateral damage. Gotta expect that sort of thing in a war! (Yes, I'm kidding.)

Open thread gushing:

I just had my first two bookbinding students today! We spent the afternoon in my bindery, working through a technique that produces a light, airy book (but recognizably a book) in one sitting.

It took longer than I expected it to - at least twice as long, but it was a very pleasant time. It helped that I knew one of them (he hired me at my current job) and liked the other from her emails before we met today (the first student's girlfriend).

The whole thing was like acting, in a way - horrendous stage fright beforehand, exhaustion after, but in the middle, a real pleasure. The hours flew by.

Fantastic.

abi #273: All teaching is like acting. At its best it is as you describe (except that you get over the stage-fright after a while).

abi #273, gragano #274:

When I first started lecturing (as compared to leading discussion sections) I found that the quick way to deal with stage fright was to hum an opera overture on the way in to class. (I'd been in opera chorus for four seasons.) Traviata worked like a charm.

joann #275: That wouldn't work for me. I have the singing voice of a bird -- a crow.

I've found, when lecturing or presenting a paper or giving a talk (unless it's one I've given so many times I could do it in my sleep), having a complete set of speaking notes is a great comfort. That way if I do freeze up I can read from the notes until my brain starts working again. I rarely need them, but the couple of times I could have done with them and didn't have them was enough to teach me it's better to have the security blanket with me!

abi @273

Forgot to say - congratulations on the lesson/students! - And yes, exhilarating when it goes well.

horrendous stage fright beforehand, exhaustion after, but in the middle, a real pleasure.

congratulations on the class.

Carrie, maybe it's my avoidance of 'celebrity culture' but when I think of shoe-based extravagance, it's always Imelda Marcos. Is there another?

The main character of Sex and the City is named Carrie Underwood. (I think Underwood; I'm sure of the Carrie.)

Xopher, yeah; if I'd had the King character's powers a number of my classmates would not have survived high school. Though I'd have been more subtle about it. Practice with tiny little things and then no one will be able to figure out how so many kids had undetected weaknesses in their brain's blood vessels...

Carrie @ #280, Carrie Bradshaw. Carrie Underwood is a former American Idol singer who's having a halfway decent career in country music. She sang the Star Spangled Banner before tonight's World Series game in Denver (and, unlike many others, she sang it straight and didn't muck it up).

Come to think of it, Underwood was introduced as a two-time Grammy winner before tonight's game, so I suppose she's having a little better career than "halfway decent" would imply.

Thank you Carrie, a fast search shows that the character's name is Carrie Bradshaw. It may be relevant that the writer of the columns and then book on which it was based is named Candace Bushnell. I do remember hearing that exotic & expensive shoes were associated with the show.

Wasn't 'Bradshaw' a famous railway timetable in the UK? Don't know how that might relate to Underwood; maybe it's the Underworld typewriter discussion earlier.

It occurs to me that the people who are depicted with dangerous superpowers are always a bit dumb about how they use them. OK, so Superman isn't subtle, but he's one of the good guys. He doesn't gain anything from not being noticed.

I mean, if you can commit a crime without having to be anywhere near the scene, you maybe miss a chance to gloat, but not even CSI can find evidence that doesn't exist.

In the previous Open Thread, we were discussing hippotherapy.

I see the Beeb has finally caught up with Making Light.

Checking in...

We left a day early. We worked all day, every day, well into the night, except when we had some fairly exquisite food and drink. And then some more drink.

I started feeling a bit, well, gunky after the first 15 hours. Still gunky now, but with lots of hydration it's clearing out. It was definitely not too bad, though--just a slow creep of a lung build-up,. The worst of it is my skin; it's still feeling very, very icky, even after a ton of TLC. Smoke ick. Greasy.

Serge at 171: Thanks!!!

Terry at 173: I wish I'd had time! If we would have been able to stay the extra day despite not needing to, I definitely would have. Couldn't put another night on the client, though. But I did get to see Puppy's hockey game today instead, which was also fabulous!

Epacris, #259, the only one of those I've probably seen is Law & Order. I had no idea there were that many, though!

I don't get stage fright. Put me in a place to present, and I'll be fine.

I saw "Michael Clayton" this afternoon. Starts out looking like a legal drama, turns into a thriller. A real hoot, and highly recommended.

One of the Google ads on the main page at ML right now reads, "I Was Scammed 37 Times
These Programs Are Absolute Scams I Will Show You The Ones That Work "

And my thought was, "Dude, if you got scammed 37 times why in the world would I even consider taking any advice from you? You've made a career out of getting scammed."

But I clicked on the link anyway. I came to a place in what I call "I'm a scammer" format (you can recognize a scam site from across the room just from the template they use). The guy says that all the other Get Rich Quick schemes are scams, but ones he's recommending are, no kidding, not scams!

Wow. I can just see the next dude to advertise. His sell-line will be "I was scammed 38 times."

James D. Macdonald at #289 writes:

> One of the Google ads on the main page at ML right now reads, "I Was Scammed 37 Times
These Programs Are Absolute Scams I Will Show You The Ones That Work "

Reminds me of a radio program I once heard: an interview with a woman who used to work on those nasty psychic telephone hot lines, in which she detailed all of the nasty little tricks they use to trick people and screw money out of them. It was detailed and horrifically interesting, and an all round wonderful show until the very closing seconds of the interview, where she said that all of these evil scammer just made things harder for the *genuine* psychics - like her.

*sigh*

Artist Silversaff has created a Dragaeran Cycle of Houses poster (via skzb).

Very cool.

(Hmm, why does preview automatically insert rel="nofollow"?)

On Rasputina, I've been listening to their new album over the past few days, and while it hasn't really cohered yet (that usually takes quite a while for me), I can definitely say it's Quite Good Indeed. The first song, "1816, The Year Without a Summer," is incredible.

mcz @ 391

That's very nice, thanks for the link. I'm late to the Brust party, having just started reading the cycle a couple of weeks ago, annd in love with it. So far I've devoured Jhereg and Yendi, and I'm in the middle of Teckla, which IMHO is the best of the three so far. It helps that I swear he's been listening in to Eva and me talk about our marriage. And argue about it.

And another rave: Torchwood just gets better and better. I just saw last night's episode, DVR'ed for viewing after spending the morning painting the new bathrooms. It's about gur grnz erfheerpgvat Fhmvr, gur rk-grnz-zrzore jub gevrq gb xvyy Wnpx, naq qvq xvyy urefrys, va gur svefg rcvfbqr. Frrzf gung qrngu qbrfa'g nterr jvgu ure. Oh, and we get to find out that Wnpx unq n oblsevraq, juvpu ol zl gnyyl znxrf uvz bzavib.

I'm fairly new to Brust's work too, having waited over a year to actually pick up one of his books. And that book led to another, and another, and...

I really have to get those Torchwood DVDs out and watch them all the way through. Jack had a bf (or maybe a casual partner) in his first-ever appearance in the Doctor Who two-parter The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances; in that show it was suggested that he would "dance" with any race that was remotely compatible, IIRC. So that makes him omni-something. Or maybe pan-something.

By the way, did you once mention VR.5 on Making Light?

Eliza Carthy's Lal Waterson tribute concert is available for streaming from the BBC until November 4.

This is just a lament.

Two of Brust's books are physically missing and presumed lost from my library (statewide!). The Vlad books don't seem to turn up at used bookstores, while the others do.

Linkmeister @ 296

I'm reading a collection of 3 novels, Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla in a trade paperback I found at Powell's. Seemed like the cheapest entry into the series; even new that's $5 US per novel, with mass market editions of indidual novels running at $8 or $9 each. There were a lot of other copies of novels from the series on the shelf, both new and used. Check powells.com and see what's available online; if you can find used copies of the books you want, the shipping charges may not be too painful.

mcz @ 294

Yes, I did mention VR5. I watched it when it was first broadcast, and generally liked it quite well, though it was rough in spots and could have used a little more thought on the philosophical aspects.* Unforunately it was brosdcast here in Portland by the low-end UHF station, low-power transmission, and not enough money to rent access to the local high-tower antenna farm. So our tapes look bad most of the time, and really awful whenever a plane went overhead, or a large car went by the house. Basically unviewable after 15 years of accumulated age and oxide particle rot. And our current remodeling spree has us on bread and water for awhile, so we're being incredibly selective about buying music and video.

* One of my favorite, quite serious, titles for a technical book in the 1990s was "The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality".

My favorite sighting on Saturday while waiting for our plane to show up and take us to the Bay Area... A 4-year-old girl vrrroooming around with a toy version of a passenger plane. Yay!

re #289 "I was scammed..." ad: What keyword might have attracted it? Right now the Google keywordomatic thinks this thread is about cellos.

mcz (291):

(Hmm, why does preview automatically insert rel="nofollow"?)
By editorial decree, all links in comments are forced to be nofollow in order to make comment spam less useful to the spammer since it won't help their googlerank.
Close tags for unmatched tags get added at the end of the message, as well.

It's one of those "the spammers have won" kind of things, as legitimate links suffer from the stinginess of ML's googlejuice dole.

Earl 302: I'm pretty sure the front page posters' links (on the front page, not when they comment) don't have the nofollow. So the googlejuice counts only when the people who run this website want to juice something.

That seems entirely proper to me. Especially since the legit links that we put in here get promoted to Particles and Sidelights whenever Our Hosts think they're sufficiently worthwhile.

Xopher #303: And then we go "Squeeeeeeeee!"

Or at least I did when it happened to me.

ethan @ 304... et tu, ethan?

ethan 304: As will I, if ever it happens to me.

And btw, Earl, THAT is how ML encourages the posting of useful and/or amusing links in comment threads. The "squee" factor is considerable.

Linkmeister @ 296

Sorry I didn't think of this before; more caffeine needed. Which books are you looking for? I can buy used books at Powell's and send them to you when I've finished reading them.

Bruce C @ #307, That's a generous offer, sir. I'll have to see where I left off, what's missing from the library system, and what I can still get. Will advise.

I've had my wants listed on my wishlist at BookMooch, but so far no luck there either.

Bruce C, to update my #308, Both Orca and Yendi are lost/missing from shelf in my library system, so those are the two I haven't access to.

John Houghton & Earl Cooley III: thanks.

Bruce Cohen @ #298: I actually stumbled upon it in 2005, and as I watched the series I realized that I'd actually seen the last five minutes of an episode nearly ten years previous. It's fairly unusual for an inconsequential thing like that to hang around in my head that long, so I dug around for more information.

I do know that thirteen episodes were produced but only ten broadcast in its original run, and that when the official VHS tapes were released, one of the episodes was not included and another turned up twice. A DVD release was announced and then cancelled, so legit versions are currently unavailable, which is most unfortunate.

The fandom was very nearly successful in its campaign for the production of a final TV special to close off the storyline. I understand that a draft script was actually written but the project was eventually stopped by Fox.

One of the things the series glossed over was ethics/morality of rooting around in/manipulating someone's subconscious without their knowledge or informed consent. Perhaps, given enough time, the writers would have eventually gotten around to it.

Does anyone here know any Scots Gaelic?

There is a phrase in a sound file which I think means "closed", which I heard as "Dun kitty".

Some Googling around confirms that "dùinte"; "dùin" does mean "closed, shut" - would they both be pronounced something like "dun"? If "sláinte" is pronounced "slan-tchuh", I'd sort of think that "dùinte" might be pronounced "dun-tchuh".

But my Gaelic is verging on hopeless.

And what might the word that sounds like "kitty" mean (and how ought it be more properly spelled)?

Speaking of old series being released on DVD... I know what I want my wife to give me for Xmas - the whole "Jason King" series. Ah, the vestimentary and capillary fashions of the early 1970s...

Hey, Serge, as a fellow Cliff Simak fan, have you ever read Way Station? I just found it the other day. What a wonderful story!

Paula @ 266:

Ooh, sounds wonderful! I fell in love with a dark merino fleece at Oregon Flock & Fiber, but I can't bring anything more home; I'm out of room.

It occurred to me after I posted that you probably have a drop spindle, rather than just stockpiling fleeces to throw at the ravaging zombie hordes (although I like to think that if I were a zombie, I'd still have the good sense to stop for fleece).

Linkmeister @ 309:

I have both of those; If Bruce isn't able to find them, let me know and I can send mine off - just promise you'll send them back some day. I won't be re-reading them in a hurry.

Linkmeister @ 313... I've probably read all of Simak's novels, going all the way back to Cosmic Engineer, but Way Station is my favorite. I read it back in 1975 and I've never stopped thinking that, if I had LOTS of money, I would hire someone talented to make a movie out of it.

Serge @ #315, I dunno that you'd need lots of money. One or two sets, a forest, and lots of papier-maché widgets in the station itself. Three or four actors and a bunch of extras.

The story itself would be easy to market, I'd think.

Linkmeister: Screenwriter. Cameras. People to operate the cameras. Lights.

Maybe you're overestimating what Serge means by "LOTS of money." To me, anything with six figures is a LOT of money. I'm not sure what Serge means by it.

Linkmeister, Xopher... Even a low 6-figure amount is a lot more money than I'm ever going to have access to. If I did, I'd be living in the Bay Area. Anyway, yes, Way Station definitely is a Simak movie I'd love to see. The Big Frontyard is another one, along with The Goblin Reservation. And Time and again. And... You get the idea I liked Simak?

Well, yeah, I was extrapolating Serge's requirement into the $20-$30 million range. I'd guess, with no insider knowledge of the film business, that it could be done for around $5-$10 maximum. It's as much a psychological story as anything.

The Goblin Reservation would cost more, since there would be a lot more costume design involved. (Hey! We could get one of those Cavemen guys to play Oop!)

Linkmeister... Do you know where Oop got his name? It's French. Truly.

TV episode memory request. If this weren't an open thread, it would be off topic, and although I'm pretty sure it was a broadcast TV show within the past few months and therefore by definition not indecent, it was a somewhat sexual scene, so I'm rot-13ing the description to avoid accidental offense.

Vg'f n znyr punenpgre'f oveguqnl; sbe fbzr ernfba, ur'f abg rkcrpgvat n oveguqnl pnxr (gur crefba jub abeznyyl znxrf gurz erpragyl yrsg, znlor?). Ur'f erpragyl zrg n jbzna jub'f vagrerfgrq va uvz, nygubhtu V qba'g guvax ur ernyvmrf guvf; ur'f gbyq ure nobhg gur oveguqnl pnxrf ur yvxrf. Fur fubjf hc nf uvf eha-qbja ubhfr (genvyre?) jvgu n pnxr (gjb?). Ur'f nyernql unccl, ohg gura fur chgf bar bs gurz qbja ba gur pbssrr gnoyr, ovyybjf ure fxveg bhg oruvaq ure, naq ybjref urefrys qbja ba gur pnxr.

It's feeling like it might be My Name is Earl, but I can't figure out what episode or who either of the characters are, if so. Anyone, pretty please?

Serge @ #320, I kinda sorta remembered that, but I checked Wikipedia to be sure.

Linkmeister @ 322.. Allez hop!

@321

Actually I think that was on an episode of Dirt, back in March.

Oooh oohooh, that would fit -- and the male character would be the photographer, and the female the waitress he was seeing for a while. Thank you!

Serge, time to cue the Twilight Zone music. Super Spouse is also a Simak fan, and would rate Way Station in his top 10 stories.

Serge,

I've thought a few times about making an animation of "City". It would be a lot more effective than live action for the Jupiter scenes and the later Earth scenes with the animals and the ants. And if you didn't insist on Pixar-level computer animation or Henry Selick-level stop-motion, it wouldn't be terribly expensive, at least by Hollywood standards.

Then again, what about "Time is the Simplest Thing"? A lot of that could be filmed on location with Ontario standing in for Wisconsin.

Tania... Speaking of the Twilight Zone, or rather speaking of the Outer limits... As far as I know, the latter is the one and only time that a Simak story ever was filmed. Remember "Good Night, Mr. James"? It's about a man who's hunting an alien lifeform that escaped on Earth after he illegally brought it here. Then the man realizes that he is a copy of the original character, and...

Bruce Cohen... The problem with a movie version of City is that most of the public would find it way too depressing. Bad enough that most humans have left to live, transformed, on Jupiter, But you have ants taking over the Earth. Speaking of which... In the early 1980s, there was an anthology that published stories set in some famous series. Simak's was about the the Webster House and the surrounding land being the only area of the Earth that wasn't covered by the ants's colonies. And Jenkins the robot is still there, still keeping the House in order, but so very alone. Until some humans come down from the stars...

The only Simak book I've read is The Visitors, which I found incredibly beautiful. I haven't read any more because there are too goddamn many books in the world and I haven't gotten back to him yet.

ethan @ 330... Well, should you ever find yourself with a big chunk of free time and should you simultaneously find yourself prose-less, I strongly recommend the above-mentionned books by Simak. Goodness, maybe I should re-read them.

Time is the Simplest Thing is the other Simak book I picked up last week, along with Way Station. Time seemed like a forerunner of many other books and even some movies (Logan's Run¹,², for example).

¹ Should I duck now?
² Whatever happened to Jenny Agutter, anyway? Ah.

Who's got a chart for HTML sequences for daggers, double daggers, etc.? I know abi uses them here, for one.

&dagger is created by appending dagger to an ampersand
&Dagger is created by appending Dagger to an ampersand

I like &loz, created by adding loz after the &

Here's a handy reference table

Linkmeister @332

I use the daggers and such a lot, but I don't use HTML entity sequences for most of that stuff, since browsers these days are all capable of handling most of the common Unicode symbols. If you have a Mac, there's a wonderful utility called the Character Palette that allows you to insert all kinds of neat characters, including full fonts for Cyrillic, several of the Japanese character sets, traditional Chinese, even Cherokee. And all the hexagrams of the i Ching. I don't think Windows has anything quite so fancy, but there is a special characters gizmo of some sort in there.

Failing that, here's Wikipedia's entity list. I don't think any of their admins have tried to delete it recently.

Tania, thank you. The table I've had forever didn't include special characters. &dagger &spades &hearts

Bruce, I've been using Alt+ keys for accents, and I've got an old table in Notepad, but it didn't have any of the typographic symbols I wanted. Hence using superscript for my Logan's Run footnotes.

Oh, poo. I just threw out another loaf of bread from the breadmaker machine. Last one came out about as dense as a pencil eraser. Stupid me, I ended up changing two variables at once, got garbage, and now I don't know which one caused it.

First of all, when I do the basic wheat bread, 500 g wheat flour, 175 grams milk, 175 grams water, 9 grams salt, 9 grams dry activated yeast, I get a pretty dense loaf of bread. I don't mind, but my wife won't eat it. So, what's the thing to change in the recipe to make it less dense? I tried doubling the yeast, but that was an extra dollar of ingredients and didn't work (may have been operator error, though, still haven't gotten the hang of all the nuances of putting things in, my digital scale is a little wonky (if I take something off the scale, and then put it back on, the scale seems to zero itself out sometimes, which means if there is flour in a measuring cup on the scale, it might zero out and I add too much flour), and I still haven't found the operating manual for my breadmaker.)

So, how to take the basic recipe and make it less dense? Put in less flour? Add more water or milk? If I double the yeast, do I have to increase anything else? If I decrease the flour, do I have to change anything else?

Secondly, is oat flour and barley flour and other flours not usable for bread? This last loaf was a two-pipe problem, (1) an attempt to try and make the bread less dense and (2) an attempt to mix in other flours with the wheat for a multi grain effect. The result was the loaf I mentioned above that was hard as a pencil eraser. I'm surprised I didn't burn out the mixing moter in the bread maker.

Anyway, I've been defeated by a simple bread recipe, and I'm tired of wasting ingredients and getting inedible results. Although I could do the Dr. Seuss thing and figure out all the ways to not make bread so that whatever is left is a way to make bread, it seems like a rather expensive and maddeningly frustrating approach.

I may have to get a book on bread. (I did order the science of cooking book. did everyone know it was out of print? ordered a used copy. still waiting for it to get here.)

In the meantime, any answers would be greatly appreciated. less dense? oat flour?

Greg:

You need to get a book on breadmaking before you can do intelligent substitutions. (Or you can do it all by trial and error and make a lot of hockey-pucks in the process. BTDT.)

The short version of the key point is that you need lots of gluten to make a loaf with a nice light grain, and no other flour has as much as white bread flour. Whole wheat flour has some, but less; oat and barley have almost none. If you want to make a 100% whole wheat loaf and not have it be dense, you need to add extra concentrated gluten directly. Alternatively you can cut it with bread flour (bread flour = high gluten.) If you use flours from other grains, you need to counterbalance by using more white bread flour. You can also buy fancy gourmet high-gluten whole-wheat flour, I've never gone that route.

One more P.S. You said you spent about $1 on yeast, which means you're buying those little packets in the grocery store. At Costco, buy one restaurant-sized package of yeast for about $5.00, and you will have enough for hundreds of loaves at pennies each. (Stick half in a jar in the fridge, the other half in the freezer to take out when the jar is empty.)

Correspondence from The Lancet:

"These novels draw attention to the romantic possibilities of primary care settings and the apparent inevitability of uncontrolled passions in the context of emergency medicine, especially as practised on airplanes. These novels suggest that there is an urgent need to include instruction in the arts of romance in training programmes for doctors and nurses who intend working in these settings."

Clifton@338: You need to get a book on breadmaking

Yeah, I underestimated how complicated it is. "Flour, water, milk, salt, yeast" sort of lulled me into a false sense of security. I was thinking, "How difficult can five ingredients be". Apparently, pretty difficult.

you need lots of gluten to make a loaf with a nice light grain ... Whole wheat flour has some, but less; oat and barley have almost none

Ah. So adding extra yeast isn't enough if there's no gluten to begin with. Thanks for explaining that. I was starting to pull my hair out.

which means you're buying those little packets in the grocery store

Yeah, I've been looking for the large containers of yeast, but haven't figured out where my stores hide them. Apparently, I need to find out where I can buy "concentrated gluten in a box" too.

So, any good beginner-experimenter-bread-making books out there?

So adding extra yeast isn't enough if there's no gluten to begin with.

Yeah--there has to be gluten to make bubbles out of the gasses from the yeast. Otherwise the..what is it, CO2?...just escapes and does nothing to make the loaf light.

Did you proof your yeast, BTW? (That is, take a bit of the water and a bit of the sugar/flour, mix 'em with the yeast, wait to make sure it starts producing bubbles.) I guess that's not as useful if you're using a bread machine, but I always do it when making bread by hand.

I learned a new word today...

Cucurbitophobia apparently is the fear of pumpkins.

Serge #343:

Carved or uncarved?

joann... Not sure. I understand that the fear includes not just to the Great Pumpkin, but other members of the cucurbit family.

"Die, squash, die!"

Correction, joann... The line should be:

"Pie, squash, pie!!!"

Serge @343 Looking to confirm this, I found this link to Halloween related phobias

and @346 snarf!

PtterB @ 347... Samhainophobia?

I don't have a Halloween phobia; what I've got is more an indifference to Halloween. I can get excited about Thanksgiving, get all caught up in Christmas, celebrate New Year's Eve with the best of them (and the best of champagne), and even get delighted with the Easter Bunny, but Halloween leaves me cold. The growing emphasis on it as a holiday always catches me by surprise; a visit to the doctor yesterday brought the sight of mylar spiderwebs with shiny giant spiders attached, and all I could think (besides "Eck, purple") was "why do adults think this is fun?"

I'm not objecting on religious grounds, just that it always seemed to be a kids' holiday and it somehow kind of ... morphed. So what am I missing, or is there no way for me to regain that childlike sense of fun?

joann... is there no way for me to regain that childlike sense of fun?

Yam at a loss. Maybe some pun'kin pie might help.

Greg London@337- the recipe you're using doesn't seem to have any sugar except for what might be in the flour. Maybe a little extra sugar might help the yeast to work better. (I usually halve the salt quantity for the sugar amount.)

I'm certainly with you on preferring a fluffier loaf.

More recipe help: I just received a quart baggie full of what I am told are serrano peppers, from a co-worker of my husband's whose peppers seemingly underwent a zucchini event this year. WhatInHeck should I be doing with them?

Context: Most if not all of our TexMex experiments are conducted outside the home. Although I believe strongly in the existence of "hot" as the fifth basic food group, I mostly don't seek out products designed to burn off all my interior linings. Further, I'd already just bought some (rather mild) habanero jelly, so jam-making is probably out--and I'm not a great preserve-maker in any case. (Worse, the source of these peppers had already provided us with some pickled peppers. No, his name was *not* Peter Piper.)

Help?

joann @349

Halloween has been co-opted by adults as a holiday of release*, leaving very little for the kids except cheap animations on TV and admonitions about not eating the stuff they collect until it's been X-rayed. There's very little childlike fun left.

* Release from social restraints, release from the restraints of class and caste**, and release from sexual restraints.

** Yes, we have those restraints in America. You think there aren't any classes? Make a list of the restaurants in your city you would be reluctant to go into, either because you would feel insufficiently sophisticated for the ambiance, or vaguely threatened by the other patrons. /rant

Greg: I don't know whether this is possible in a bread machine, but multiple proofings of the dough (ie. where you let it rise, punch it down, and let it rise again) give a fluffier loaf.

Have you looked at the no-knead bread recipe that was making the rounds earlier this year? It's a different approach to a bread machine, but might well be of interest.

Here's the No-Knead Bread recipe from the NY Times.

This link had better work. Grr. If it doesn't, search on 'bittman no knead bread nytimes.com' and the 8 Nov 2006 article is the one you're looking for.

I've been trying to get my act together to make this bread for a year, and I still haven't. Someday...

The "Day in Pictures" section of SFGate has a fine photo of a "cannibal pumpkin". I'm not sure how to do a direct link, but this should get you to the front page. Then look to the right and click on the section with the thumbnail photo.

Greg, I don't do machine bread, but in general, when using high concentrations of whole wheat flour, you get a better result if you add liquid to the flour and let it rest for an hour or longer before adding leavening and other ingredients. Also, importantly: some companies use low-gluten wheat to make whole wheat flour, so you may need to experiment with that.

Bruce C #353:

More like a holiday of transgression, at least round here. Not that that isn't the same thing :-)

Maybe I worked the entire costume thing out of my system doing opera. And if I'm going to commit a sin, I don't need a legalized occasion for it; that's the whole point about it being a sin.

(As to your rant, excluding biker bars, I can't think of anywhere at either end of that scale that I'd be reluctant to go into for the reasons stated. I tend to pick restaurants based on whether I like the food, and don't go to one of the top restaurants in town not because of the prices or the ambiance, but because it is/was a favorite haunt of the Current Pretender--which, I'll admit it, makes it a bit downscale for me. Perhaps the Secret Service would make it seem a bit threatening.)

Bruce @353
The sense of release was what was most fun for me as a kid. My transgressions were extremely mild, but there was certainly no other time of year that my friends and I (probably in the age 10-12 range) were allowed to run around the neighborhood together after dark making lots of noise.

But this, as many things, has been less innocent for my kids than it was for me.

Greg:

Bob's Red Mill sells wheat gluten flour. You could mix in some to your wheat. On the other hand, I've never been able to pull off a 100% whole wheat loaf that I liked. You might start with something easier.

One that works for me is a white wheat honey wheat bread. (It's king arthur White Wheat, a 100% whole wheat out of a lighter grain). I do it about 75% wheat, 25% white bread flour.

5-5.5 c flour, 2.25 c water, 1/3 c oil, 1/3c milk powder, 1/3c honey, 1tsp yeast, 2tsp salt.

I do this with a long slow rise overnight, and mix and add ingredients slowly, so the proportions of flour and water vary by when the dough looks right. (i.e. ymmv with a bread machine)

I need to write this up well, since google isn't finding this on my site right now, and I'm getting a very reproducable product out of it.

Bruce @3543:

I'd debate you on the lack of childlike fun, at least in the kids I know. We're in a semi-urban setting, of course, so it's somewhat different in that our kids don't really have a lot of opportunities to egg cars or tp people's homes (which some people seem to think is the main point of Halloween, for reasons that escape me).

But in our neighborhood, there's quite a bit of fun to be had, and the kids get pretty excited about it.

All the local elementary schools have parties. This year, our school's party included a hayride (in the schoolyard), a fortuneteller, and a haunted house (of the traditional pasta/eggs/homemade-slime/uncooked hot dog variety, with a number of 6th graders hiding in corners to jump out and scare their fellow students). The last had long lines pretty much all night through as kids went through again and again and again.

On Halloween itself, two of the area shopping strips become Trick-or-Treat strips, with kids in costume spending an hour or more popping in and out of various shops and collecting goodies. This year my daughter is old enough to do this round without a parent and is much looking forward to it.

One end of the neighborhood is private homes; many of them decorate for Halloween and trick-or-treating there in the evening is a blast. There are a couple of people who do the "fake out the kids by pretending to be a display" thing and the shrieks can be heard for blocks.

At my end of the neighborhood, it's all apartment buildings. My building is huge, about 200 apartments. Every year we have a sign-up sheet for Halloween and several mobs of kids go trooping through the various wings on Halloween night, visiting the apartments on the list. This year we have a lot of 3 and 4 year olds who will be trick-or-treating for the first time and I can't wait to see what they look like. This year I get to stay home and hand out candy, since the kid will be going around without me.

My daughter, meanwhile, who is 11, has 3 Halloween costumes this year (usually she has 2, one for the school party and one for trick-or-treating, though last year she only had one because she was so in love with the mummy outfit I made for her). She sees Halloween as an opportunity to exercise her imagination and we have often done home-made costumes. This year she will be doing a little juggling along with her trick-or-treating: performance in exchange for candy.

I agree that Halloween has become very sexualized (it was hard to find a costume for dd that wasn't revealing or stereotyped in some way) and commercialized (you can always tell the big movies of the year by what the kids show up wearing), but I see plenty of children having plenty of fun.

FOOLS! I WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Ask me how!

(I'm thinking that it would be a good idea to have a long list of Mad Science responses in case people do ask.)

{I will set the atmosphere on FIRE!!!! |
Loathsome diseases spread by FLYING MONKEYS!!! |
I'll cut out all your hearts with a spoon — it will HURT more!!!!! |
I will create a mutant slime mold that tastes delicious!!! Everyone will eat it, but once it is inside them, it will eat them!!!! All will become slime!!!!! |
etc }
BWAHAHAHAHA! (of course)

OK, there's a particle there for "I'd hit that." It's a t-shirt with a donkey piñata on it, and the quoted text.

Anybody else think that's an anti-Democratic Party t-shirt? Otherwise, why a donkey? Am I crazy, or is this duhh, or something in between?

If it's duhh, I'm not sure why Teresa posted it. I guess I just don't get it, period.

OK, there's a particle there for "I'd hit that." It's a t-shirt with a donkey piñata on it, and the quoted text.

Anybody else think that's an anti-Democratic Party t-shirt? Otherwise, why a donkey? Am I crazy, or is this duhh, or something in between?

If it's duhh, I'm not sure why Teresa posted it. I guess I just don't get it, period.

Arrggh. Sorry.

As for breadmaking: it's not an exact science. The humidity of the room you're making it in makes a huge difference. Bread machines try to eliminate that as a factor; I don't know if they succeed.

I've never used a bread machine. I've baked by hand a lot, though, and the best rule I've found for a nicely textured and flavored bread is "Brown Bowl, White Board." In other words, while the bread is still a batter, add only whole wheat flour; when you turn it onto the board, it should be onto white flour, and you should add only white flour from that point on. This makes a bread rich enough for whole wheat lovers, and light enough for...non-whole wheat lovers. It hangs together well, and can be used to sculpt a man with horns for your Lúnasa ritual.

Um, er. Never mind that last bit. (But the three symbolic herbs we put in for that ritual—dill, for the sweetness of youth; thyme, for length of days; and sage, for the wisdom of age—also make a very tasty bread.)

Since handmade bread varies greatly based on conditions, I never measure flour. I have no idea how this would translate into bread-machine bread.

I second others' recommendations to follow recipes at first. I'd think this was doubly true if you're using a bread machine, where you can't correct anything in the middle if the dough feels wrong.

Mmm. Now I'm going to have to bake bread for Thanksgiving. How I'll fit this in, I don't know.

Joann @ #349
I don't have a Halloween phobia; what I've got is more an indifference to Halloween. I can get excited about Thanksgiving, get all caught up in Christmas, celebrate New Year's Eve with the best of them (and the best of champagne), and even get delighted with the Easter Bunny, but Halloween leaves me cold.

Halloween for me is a busman's holiday - oh, boy, dress up in a costume, just like I do every couple of weeks! But I'm equally down on most holidays, unless they involve either chocolate or explosions.

New Year's - Romantic holiday with drinking; sort of useless to single person who doesn't generally drink.

Valentine's Day - Another useless one for single person.

Easter - Okay, I like chocolate bunnies. Really cheap ones from the supermarket. Bite their little ears off!

Fourth of July - I can has fireworks!

Thanksgiving - Eat to the point of illness while not doing any actual thanking except to mom for cooking since no one in the immediate family musters any higher than "vaguely agnostic" on the religiosity scale. Many, many dishes to wash. Have successfully reoriented this day into the Final Fall Lawnwork Holiday, on which I rake many, many leaves and then read a good book.

Christmas - Got broken when my family went post-nuclear. Home alone depressed or visiting maternal family to try to graft on holiday cheer. Last time mom visited we watched Titus Andronicus by way of fun family film viewing.

is there no way for me to regain that childlike sense of fun?

My suggestion would be to borrow a child. The sense of fun is contagious and when it becomes annoying you can return it.

Susan @ 367... Thanksgiving - Eat to the point of illness (...) Christmas - Last time mom visited we watched Titus Andronicus by way of fun family film viewing.

Food. Titus. I like that juxtaposition.

Susan 367: When you're alone on Christmas, watch The Lion in Winter (ignore the costumes). A family even more messed up than yours (or mine), assuming your father hasn't got your mother locked up in prison, and assuming she doesn't keep trying to get your brothers to kill him.

It's my favorite Christmas movie.

In the bad old days, I'd watch it while eating tortellini al pesto to excess, and drinking an entire bottle of beaujolais nouveau. (In these happier times, I still overeat, but no longer drink the NooBoo, or myself into a stupor.) One year, I watched The Reflecting Skin, which is a great movie to watch when you're depressed, provided you really WANT to be pushed over the edge into suicide. TLIW is at least not depressing.

And of course, let us not forget the Dogs in Elk pumpkin.

A perfetc Christmas movie... The MST3K version of Santa Claus conquers the Martians. Also recommended is their version of the Mexican movie where Santa fights one of Lucifer's sulphurous aides.

Xopher, it doesn't seem anti-Democratic party to me — in the mercados around here, the burro seems to be the single most common shape of piñata available. There are also Dora the Explorer and similar character piñatas, but the burros are everywhere.

This is based on my experience shopping in the stores along International Blvd and in Oakland's Fruitvale district.

Susan #367:

Borrowing a child doesn't seem to be an option; friends' children are all too old now (like seniors in high school) or too young, or in the case of one kid on my street, not even due to appear for another couple of months.

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there's a weird component of seasonal disappointment in Halloween. Winter gets Christmas, spring gets Easter, and summer gets a bunch of secular holidays, marking the beginning, middle and end. Fall gets something designed to scare everyone to death, with a candy lottery on the side. Mind you, the notion of masks and disguises is fine with me: I'm a big fan of Carnavale, the farewell to the flesh that precedes Lent. But Halloween's linking it all up with a holiday that seems most connected with things dying and then coming back to haunt you, is kind of odd.

OK, I know that the pagan calendar--and even the Christian one--celebrates the annual appearance of the liminal interface between the worlds of the living and of the not-living. I assume that the costume play, the disguises, the mischief, are a form of taking dares--if I get dressed up as somebody else, the soul-eater can't recognize me on the one night he's allowed out, and old Mr Grundy won't recognize me either when I soap his windows. It is perhaps the case that, unless you're in a state of childlike innocence, or of strong religious belief, this will somehow seem less likely or less necessary. Certainly less compelling.

Perhaps part of the problem is that, except for pagans, this is the subversive night, not the one that maintains religious tradition. One does not go to the equivalent of Christmas Eve mass then. When I was doing my research semester in Venice (one not involving Carnevale), I noticed that it was All Souls' that was taken seriously. And it seemed like an important, solemn occasion, one I could appreciate. You wanted fun and misrule, you waited another couple of weeks for St Martin's Day. The only observance of Halloween I saw was a jack-o-lantern in the window of a bar catering to Americans.

Hmm -- sounds like I'm not the only one who has certain DVDs for particular holidays. Some of my choices may seem a little dull...

Christmas Eve - The Nutcracker (ABT version)
Christmas Day - White Christmas
Beltane - The Wicker Man
July 4th - 1776
Halloween - The Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow

Lori Coulson... To my list of Christmas viewing, I'd add the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. And, for a whiff of silliness, Rowan Atkinson's version. Never seen it? It has Steven Fry, Robbie Coltrane and Jim Broadbent. Not only that, but Queen Victoria finds herself verbally abused.

The only holiday movie tradition I have is that me and one of my oldest friends (in terms of how long I've known him--he's not my geriatrickest friend or anything) watch The Trouble With Girls and one other, rotating, Elvis movie every Fourth of July.

Oh, and every day is Gothika's Probably On Somewhere day.

Serge @375 -- Thanks for the recommendation -- they sound both interesting and fun -- I'll check the stores for them. My favorite "Christmas Carol" is Mr. Magoo's...

...and razzleberry dressing...

Lori Coulson... Rowan Atkinson's Scrooge is, to say the least, very irreverent, beginning with Ebenezer Blackadder who is known as the nicest man in London, which means that everybody takes advantage of him. Then he meets the Ghost of Christmas and it's downhill from there. You even get to see Atkinson in a jockstrap and leather boots. Not for the faint of heart.

One other Christmas show I watch every year is Mark Morris's The Hard Nut. Tchaikovsky's music, but with mutant rats, a nutcracker with an Elvis hairdo, and more.

joann@373

Re: seasonal disappointment- this is why you guys need something like Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes' Night. Halloween can be a bit spooky, but this time of year you really need to fight off the darkness by making, um, light.

(Of course, Brits need it especially because we don't, obviously, celebrate 4th of July. And everyone needs fireworks-safely operated!- some time!)

Lori 374: I like to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on Halloween (if I'm not in ritual).

But what to watch on Groundhog Day? Let's think...

Serge #375:

Alastair Sim heartily seconded. That usually gets saved for Christmas Eve.

Lori 374: I usually watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on Halloween, unless I'm in ritual.

But I'm not sure what I should watch on Groundhog Day. Any suggestions?

Lori 374: It's my habit to watchThe Nightmare Before Christmas on Halloween, or shortly thereafter if I'm in Samhain ritual on the day.

For a long time I didn't have a good holiday movie for Groundhog Day, but now I do.

Whoa, Xophers from three almost-identical parallel universes!

Greg London @341: So, any good beginner-experimenter-bread-making books out there?

I can recommend "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking". Processes and ingredients are clearly and thoroughly explained. I have the old edition from 1985, but there's a much newer one which has an expanded section on bread machines.

ethan 384: Do you really not get the joke? Va gur zbivr Tebhaqubt Qnl, Ovyy Zheenl'f punenpgre qbrf nyzbfg gur fnzr guvat rirel qnl ng svefg...hagvy ur svanyyl svtherf bhg jung ur'f fhccbfrq gb qb.

Am I the only one who actually types <v> when I'm going to ROT13 something?

We had a Halloween party for the boys and various friends (seventeen children altogether!) and it was a blast. Halloween isn't really celebrated here, but all the kids know it from tv and movies, and many kids want to trick or treat, but as it isn't really celebrated here...it's easier just to have a fun evening for them.

The husband is Canadian, and I like spooky stuff, and it's a fun creative challenge. It's nice to celebrate something that doesn't involve heroic drinking, present obligations, or spending time with people you loathe, it's just fun. And spooky!

I think the kids best loved the chance to race around outside at night, with torches, scaring their friends. And the alien autopsy. Oh, how we laughed.

ethan @ 384... But which Xopher is the evil one? Remember Star Trek's What of Lazarus? with two versions of the same time traveller, and the one who seems to be the good guy turns out to be the bad guy, and vice versa.

One of the cable channels, maybe Fox Family, has an annual run-up-to-Christmas where they run tons of holiday stuff. Some of it is cartoons, which vary greatly in quality.

Then there is the bottomless pit of awful, tedious TV movies about Christmas released over the decades. If you want to drive the Holiday Spirit out of your heart for the year, or maybe forever, just watch a few of these. They're the video entertainment equivalent of chewing on tinfoil and smelling burned hair and listening to someone scratch a chalkboard; they won't actually kill you, but they'll make you feel really bad.

In fact, watching a few will make you feel an awful lot like the lead character in these films, who almost always has lost the Christmas spirit and gotten terrible cynical about life in general.

#371: "the Mexican movie where Santa fights one of Lucifer's sulphurous aides"

That movie ran in theaters in the States for at least a couple of Christmas seasons when I was a kid. It was heavily advertise. I remember really, really, wanting to see it.

I finally got around to it a couple of years ago, when Walgreen's was selling copies for a dollar.

Oh, Man.

In the first few minutes, we learn that Santa lives at the South Pole, and instead of elves his toys are made by happy singing children in ethnic clothing. So, Santa Land is kind of like one of those island possessions where they run sweat shops full of imported labor.

ho, Ho, HO!

In the corny Xmas dept... I have a certain fondness for A Star in the Night, a short film from the 1940s that Turner Classic Movies airs during the Holidays. It's sappy, it's corny, but it's about the better side of humanity.

For at least four or five years, a movie called (I think) Children in the Crossfire aired on commercial tv here on Christmas eve. It's a movie about tensions in Northern Ireland, of course, what's more festive than that?

Xopher, I got the joke, and I'm still snickering. (And I'm glad I read all three posts before earnestly replying to the first one with an actual suggestion: a lesson in why to read the whole thread before responding!)

My girlfriend just told me that really hot baths are unhealthy because the heat effects the veins in some way. Anyone ever hear about this?
sounds like an italian superstition to me.

bryan, #393, really hot baths decrease your blood pressure and it would be a good idea to let the temperature moderate before you stand up.

I'm looking forward to handing out candy tomorrow. Our development only has 15-20 kids so I bought a box with a variety of Hershey full-size candy bars. I'm happy to make the neigbhbor kids happy, I like to admire their costumes and see them smile. A few years ago, we had two maxivans from another neighborhood come and we grownups had a very brief discussion and I went out and explained that trick-or-treating was a neighborhood thing and we would only give candy to kids from our neighborhood. They had about 20 kids -- they could have gone between their houses or just had a party.

Tebhaqubt Qnl,

Klingon for "You're doing it wrong!".

Baker by trade, here, clearing up a slight misconception in an earlier post: the gluten doesn't "help the yeast make bubbles," it creates a matrix of protein strands to contain the bubbles.

Heartily second the advice of Bob's Red Mill for wheat gluten -- have you got a Whole Foods or Wild Oats near you? Or even a natural-foods section in your mainstream grocery (what my vegetarian housemate cheerfully calls "the hippie ghetto")? You ought to be able to find it there.

The Laurel's Kitchen bread book is good. I'm not a bread machine user, so I can't speak to books directly for that.

Truly, one of my favorite bread books is a 1970s paperback called "Breads of the World," and it's at least half quick breads rather than yeasted, and I've gotten accustomed to tweaking bread doughs on the fly anyway, since I'm often sizing up home recipes for bakery production... I just like it for the variety of yummy things in it.

But I am not surprised that the multi-grain loaf turned into a brick. Gluten is the answer.

Hm. Egg white is also high in protein. If you want to try it again before acquiring wheat gluten, and you don't mind risking another failure -- try throwing in an egg. And let me know what happens.

I remembering seeing The Nightmare Before Christmas in its original release, on a day which turned out to be (in the Pittsburgh area) that rarity, a white Halloween. Perfectly suited to the movie.

I was going to go grocery shopping tonight, but I just got back from seeing Across the Universe and I'm so stunned I can't possibly do anything so mundane. Probably can't even write about it coherently, but I'll give it a shot.

This is another Julie Taymor film, and I'm a Taymor fan from way back when. It uses Beatles songs to take a story through the end of the the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s - sort of like what Twyla Tharp did with Billy Joel in "Movin' Out" on Broadway but, um, a lot better. Predictably (for Taymor), there's surrealism and puppetry - which work nicely with all the drugs - mixed in with the underlying love story of Jude and Lucy, and it hits all the late 60s cultural points like a history lesson come to life as they and their friends get swept up in the music and drugs scene in the Village, the draft, the war, the protests, and so on.

I'm young enough that I don't have my own memories of this, but aware enough for the movie to create a sense of recognition - riots in Detroit, Bono as a Merry Prankster in a psychedelic school bus, the assassination of Martin Luther King, students occupying buildings at Columbia, helicopters and ambushes in the marshy jungles (I think they digitally enhanced the whites of one soldier-character's eyes the better to radiate terror), shootings at Kent State, the "SDR" which is obviously the SDS - and to feel like a series of punches to the emotional gut. I saw it with my mother, who is old enough to have missed that whole scene (already married and raising me) but who was practically jumping out of her seat every time Taymor threw another memory-punch.

I'm not sure whether to recommend this to Beatles fans or not - either you'll admire how Taymor knit the songs and story together or you'll hate it. I suspect I will never be able to think of "Strawberry Fields" any other way again. And it would probably carry even more punch for someone more familiar with some of the music; I knew the obvious ones but quite a few were completely unfamiliar. Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite? Fabulous surrealistic drug-trip-giant-puppet-circus-hallucination scene, but the song rang no bells for me.

And, of course, as we were walking out of the theater my mother and I turned to each other and said "it's like Iraq!" except that the protesting hasn't reached the same fever pitch (was that only inspired by the draft?) I was crying at several points, partly because of the familiar anger and frustration of the students as they kept protesting and protesting and the war still went on and on.

More people should go see this movie.

The Dirt Cheap Book Sale has been extended through November 7!

Apropos of go bags, since that thread was shut down...

Just had a moderate earthquake in the SF Bay Area, significant shaking for about 20-30 seconds, probably a nearby mag 5

In my place, some minor items fell off bookcases, but that's it. But I've been lax in my disaster preparedness. If anything, this earthquake had better get me off my lazy ass to get a go bag and some stockpiles ready.

Hope everyone else in the Bay Area is OK.

Melissa @361: I agree that Halloween has become very sexualized (it was hard to find a costume for dd that wasn't revealing or stereotyped in some way)

Sexualized for girls, anyway. I'm really glad my daughter's too young for this garbage. Newsweek ran an article on costumes for girls, in which they pointed out that a lot of them are just scaled-down versions of adult sexual-fantasy wear.

Boys, on the other hand, can be fully-dressed doctors, astronauts, etc. (And anything violent you can think of, of course -- it's not a total win for boys either.)

My phrase of the day is "architectural endoscopy".

Oh, and the 300-American Revolution mashup is back.

USGS is reporting it as a 5.6; nothing fell off anything here, but there was certainly extended shimmying and crackling while the cats scurried around looking frantic.

I need to assemble a go-bag too :b though my flashlight will probably be a little PhotonLight LED of some color or other-- I have a red one attached to my keys (preserves night vision) and a borderline UV/violet one attached to my purse zipper (helps verify uranium glass while shopping).

I'm thinking time to open up that go bag thread again-- quite certain that it'll stay much more on the topic of go bags.

I was in San Jose- the quake started with a bang, and felt very jagged and sharp (vs rolling).

Usually quakes in the 4-5 range start off ambiguous: "What's that noise- is someone walking on the roof?" or "Odd, I'm swaying- am I dizzy?... Oh, must be a quake." Nothing ambiguous about this one.

Up here in Oakland/Lake Merritt, the 5.6 was pretty fun. I got enough time to look around and see which of my bookcases were tapping against the walls, and picture in my head the post-big-one landscape of my room (mostly ok, probably ought to move the fire extinguisher away from the shelf that will collapse). Only sad bit is that it wasn't the Hayward fault... I'm always rooting for that one to blow off a little bit of steam, instead of just exploding. Interesting bit was that I had just read the last Macdonald comment on the gobag thread when the quake started.

Kathryn and Madeline - glad to hear you're ok. If anything will bring the thread back on topic, a wee quake will do the job.

Jen @401 and Melissa @361,

Last month I blogged a visit to a Halloween store. Can you spot the difference between women's costumes and men's (or plus-sized women's*) costumes? The cultural assumptions of that store were squicky**.

If I can find some hexagonal corrugated cardboard then my partner and I will go as Colony Collapse Disorder, because that's scary.

---------
* Not that the physical store had plus-sized costumes.

** and as I blogged, the squick wasn't about visible skin per se. I'd just gotten back from burning man- everything and anything, and therefore nothing, is a costume. But those store costumes? ick.

As far as I can tell, the earthquake hit right after I got onto a bus, so I missed it entirely. (My dad was in a car on the freeway and didn't notice Loma Prieta when it hit.)

Owlmirror @362: here, of course, is where I first saw that T-shirt.

Kathryn @ 404... I was at a Mexican restaurant in Berkeley with a friend when the quake quaked. For some reason, I never felt it, but my friend did, and she told me she thought it was me shaking the table until she noticed that other people were also reacting to something unusual. (No, I don't make it a habit of hitting table legs, and no esprit frappeur hangs out with me. Not even a poultrygeist.)

I work mostly with political theorists and economists. This means that almost every single person I know who will get the joke of my latest craft project is here, at Making Light.

And it's been making me giggle madly while my colleagues stare blankly, so I feel compelled to share.

The Metonymy Bag

Sarah S #411: As a sometime political theorist (or, at any rate, a teacher of political theory), I have to say that I snickered.

Fragano #412

I am entirely unsurprised that political theorists who hang out *here* would get the joke! *grin*

Sarah S @ 411

*chortle*

As a onetime professional ontological engineer, I love it. And there are so very many follow-on lines.

That which contains me does not let me sag.
Professor's got a brand new bag.
Does this bag contain itself, Professor Russel?
Well-contained you are - Yoda

Oh, Xopher, I'm an idiot.

Susan @ 398

Thanks for the recommendation of "Across the Universe". I had high hopes of it based on Taymor's name and one bit of a trailer I saw, but then I started hearing negative comments that troubled me no matter how hard I ignored them. It's nice to know someone who sees things in somewhat the same way I do* thought well of it.

With luck I'll get to see it in the next week, though preparations for my son's wedding seem to be taking over everything just now.

* I can tell by the way you describe the movie and the fact that you know and like Taymor's work. And of course there are puppets!

Across The Universe

I had been thinking of seeing it, and posted about it here a few weeks ago, not being sure if Ishould take a look. I guess I'll go see it unless it's already disappeared, to be replaced by the latest Adam Sandler opus.

About the reaction to its music... I was too much of a square teenager in the 1960s to appreciate the music of the era when the era was actually going on, but I went to college in 1973, and eventually caught up with the music. It helped that my first-ever friend was a drummer, who introduced me to the likes of Gentle Giant and King Crimson. (Hearing "In the Court of the Crimson King" early in the movie Children of Men resonated very strongly for me.)

I was disappointed in some aspects of Across the Universe, but many of them were probably effects of the Invisible Hand of studio interference. The "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" sequence was incredible.

Sarah S:

It's a perfectly lovely Container for the Thing Contained! (Do you perchance also have a Thing Contained for the Container?)

If I may ask a technical question from LiveJournal users...

There's something strange going on with one of my picture galleries. The thumbnail version of one photo shows a blank spot. If I click on that blank spot though, I am correctly taken to the full-sized photo. Do you know how to fix this? Another photo had the same problem and I wound up deleting it before reloading the whole thing, but I'm curious to know if there's another way, especially since the deleting/reloading takes the photo away from its current position within a gallery. There may be a way to set the order in which photos are displayed, but I haven't figured it out.

Faren @356 Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater - with luck this link will work later for those wishing to experience Tom Stromme's Bismarkian cucurbit devouring its young.
(At the moment the top pic from the front page is a glorious image of Alicia Alonso, "Cuba's prima ballerina assoluta".)

Sarah S. #413: :)

Bruce, what the heck does an ontological engineer do?

Sarah, I really like it. I'm afraid my first inclination might have been a too-cutesy "Oh, Bag It!"

#419
Clifton Royston

Not labelled as such, but now that you mention it, I feel I must acquire one and label it forthwith!

Obviously, the inside of the Container for the Thing Contained should be labeled as the Thing Contained by the Container. For does not the Container always Contain Itself?

Something I've recently seen: "I'm skeptical of skeptics of skepticism, but only because, as another strange loop, I'm fond of the infinite regress." (posted by one Ken Cope)

Re the earthquake last night: I felt a tiny, barely perceptible jolt in my house in San Pablo. Since I live more or less on top of the Hayward Fault, I stood up, waited for the rest of it which did not happen, said, "Okay, not the Hayward Fault" to my dog, and returned to reading space opera. (Komarr, if you must know. Popcorn. Tasty popcorn.)

Lizzy 426: Komarr is lovely. (Don't you wish we could give THEM our greenhouse gas? Imagine living on Komarr and having it be your patriotic duty to emit as much carbon as possible. "If you haven't eaten cabbage or beans in the last seven days, you're just not doing your part!")

Seriously, I'm glad it wasn't the Hayward Fault.

Susan, #367: At the time I started my annual Chocolate Decadence party, I wasn't single, but I was really tired of Valentine's Day being nothing but hearts-and-flowers. So I created an alternative party based around the joy of chocolate, open to anyone.* Twenty years later it's still going strong, although schedule problems have pushed it into late March or early April -- February tends to be Hell Month for us, and will only be more so if I'm ever flush enough to start attending the Tucson gem show!

* In deference to people who don't like or can't eat chocolate, we also have fruit goodies, plus an assortment of salty snacks to cleanse the palate between bouts of chocolate.

Xopher, #369: My favorite Christmas movie is Lord of the Rings. Thank you Peter Jackson, for giving me something I associate with the holiday season that doesn't make me want to hurl!

Jen, #401: I had occasion to go into the local Halloween Superstore recently, and (having heard variations on your plaint several times) I spent some time while I was there looking at the girls' and women's costumes. I am pleased to report that there was quite a wide range of selections for both, not all of which were of the sexual-fantasy type. In some cases there were multiple versions of a character, one sexualized, the other not. But if I'd been looking for a costume for myself, or my partner's daughter, and not wanting one that made the wearer look like a hooker, I'd have had at least as many different options as the other kind.

Xopher @ 427... I'm glad it wasn't the Hayward Fault.

Hayward: "It's not my fault!"

Or as Lex Luthor said in 1978's Superman before dropping a nuclear bomb on California and after giving Our Hero a kryptonite necklace: "We all have our faults. Mine is in California."

Serge @410,

Your friend's experience has been my experience of most small to moderate quakes- you know something is wrong, but you can't immediately tell what. My internal dialog is something like: "Huh? Odd. Hmmm. Oh. quake."

Last night: "Quake! F**k!" The combination of being close to it (10 miles) and on mud not bedrock makes it worse.

It was a good quake, all considering- large and jagged enough to scare folks into updating their earthquake kits. I've spent part of the morning helping my family with kit and go-bag design.

If you play with the ABAG hypothetical earthquake shake map, a 6.8 quake on Calaveras causes only moderate shaking in most of Berkeley, with stronger shaking only right by the Bay (flat and (ancient and dried) mud). In contrast, a 6.9 on the Hayward would cause violent shaking throughout Berkeley.

I think another reason I like Halloween is that it is one of the few holidays I celebrate that feels (well, is) part of mainstream American culture.

For once, I get to be part of the majority. And when you seem to spend your whole life swimming upstream, it's nice to fit in once in a while.

In contrast, a 6.9 on the Hayward would cause violent shaking throughout Berkeley.

And my house would fall down. Probably.

Thanks, Xopher.

Linkmeister @ 423

An ontological engineer designs ontologies of software objects. The object of the exercise* is to design an ontology which is complete, consistent, and useful for the application the software is to implement. An ontology can be used as a framework or high-level design with which to implement a software program.

Software objects are modular pieces of software that have attributes and actions that can be performed on them. Objects can be related by inheriting attributes and/or actions from each other, or by other relations like containment, association, ownership, etc. Often an ontology will be designed as a general solution, that can be implemented for specific requirements by specializing some of the objects, i.e., creating new objects that inherit from the old ones and change the attributes or actions to match the requirements.

Software ontologies often model real-world systems of objects. For instance, if I'm building a set of programs to automate processes in a business, part of the job of designing an ontology is finding a useful mapping between the parts of the process and the objects. I might need to model the roles of the people who take part in the process ("Responsible Manager", "Analyst", "Dispatcher"), the documents that are created and transferred as part of the process, and the state a document may be in ("Drafted", "Approved", "Pending Input").

Have I made it clear?

* Decartes made me do it.

Kathryn @ 430... Remember the quake in July? Was that one stronger? I did feel it, but it was very early in the Bay's suburbia, with only the sound of my keyboard, not in the evening in a Berkeley restaurant.

Xopher @386:
Am I the only one who actually types <v> when I'm going to ROT13 something?

Yep. The rest of us type <rz>.

Bruce Cohen @ 433...

Ontologies? Haven't Our Hosts published a few of those?
"(Ontologies. Not anthologies.")
Humph. Personally I think ontologies would be an excellent subject for an anthology.

Lizzy @432,

We recently had our 1914 Edwardian retrofitted (one with a 'soft story' ground floor- the type that most needs a retrofit).

If applicable, I'd be happy to talk / email about our experiences in getting that done for a reasonable cost.

And anyways, houses are very unlikely to fall down. Get badly damaged? Possibly. If you have a place to Drop, Cover, and Hold On, so that you're protected from flying objects (and you don't try to walk, even to an internal doorway- that's outdated), then you've eliminated the single largest cause of earthquake injuries.

(Also, if you read anything or get a much-fwd'd email about a 'triangle of life'? That's a crock of dangerous and flat-out wrong advice. Even the theory behind it is inapplicable to countries with earthquake codes, and in practice his claims are just wrong.)

Lee @428: I'm glad to hear that. I admit, I've only been looking online (and all the online shops seem to have the exact same costumes) and not in person.

Serge #434:

Are you trying to say that every time you go to the Bay Area, there's a quake?

BTW, if I may have a proud parent moment, here's my little girl in her very nice costume.

Bruce @ #433, that's going to take a little while to digest. Thanks.

Jen @ #440, she's already got that "no, no, don't take a picture of me now" look down pat.

joann @ 439... I was wondering how long it'd take before someone noticed that. It's even worse. Remember the Big One of 1989? The only reason I wasn't in SF when that day is that I had spent the whole night at the office working on a Big Project. With the same friend I was having dinner with last night.

She gets that look from her mommy.

Actually it looks more like "What is that crazy grownup doing to me now?"

She's cute as a bug, Jen.

Greg re bread: Get a book. The non-wheat flours are gluten deficient. Get some “bread flour” (King Arthur is widely available), as it has more protein than “all-purpose”, which varies by region of the country).

More yeast isn’t going to do it and buy it in bulk (Red Star is quite good). Get a small jar, and put it in the fridge, put the rest in a sealed container in the freezer. Pure Gluten is easy to find, I add about a tbsp to a loaf.

On food and cooking, 2nd edition is out of print? Yikes. I’m glad I bought it when I did, but that’s amazing (given how long the 1st edition was in print).

Try Cookwise (it has lots of other useful stuff), it’s a troubleshooting manual on lots of food issues.

For bread basics, I’d recommend The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Joann: Dry them. Easy way, in a low oven for a couple of hours. Other way, tie them up with string, and leave them in a shaded nook of the kitchen (for serrano, the former is the more reliable). Then grind them as need. Otherwise, soak them in vinegar.

rikibeth: Any tips (other than the steam bath I fake with a dedicated piece of cast iron, and the high start heat) for getting better crust on my loaves in my home oven?

Re Earthquakes: I was watching something on TV the other day, about differences in geology and apparent effect of earthquakes, as well as cultural response. Apparently a 3.0 is a big deal in New York but (said in a German accent, as the seismologist was german), “In Los Angeles they just say, Oh, an earthqvake, and go back to drinking their coffee.”

Terry at 445, unless you're right on top of it, you rarely feel a 3 point quake. 5 point, you notice. (Of course, maybe that's just me...)

OK, earthquake stories:

We were a little bit more than five miles SW of the epicenter of the Nisqually quake, but it took my son and I a bit of time to recognize what was happening, because there had been concrete pumping going on across the road for weeks beforehand. There was a pause before I said "Oh, it's an earthquake" and then a longer pause before I said, "It's a big (6.8) earthquake."

The stupidest reaction I've witnessed to an earthquake of any size was in 1981, when the Goat Rocks quake rolled through at 5.1 or so and my upstairs neighbors ran out onto a slippery steel fire-escape over a thirty foot drop.

I sort of like 5.0-5.7 quakes in my neighborhood, they're rarely dangerous and yet big enough to make you feel you've been through something (if I lived on wet clay, I'd probably have a different opinion). My husband is less comfortable with the idea, but he was in the Silmar quake in '71, and hadn't been living in LA long enough to aclimate.

Terry @ 445

Richter 3: You mean people notice it here? It's pretty much below my threshold.

On Food and Cooking: Amazon has it in stock. (Having just had a potluck lunch, I've had more than enough food for today ....)

Apropos of nothing, I seem to be in picking over the past mode. I just went back to my old community and stumbled on a debate about their future. As an ex-member, I thought I had a few useful comments, so I made them.

I was also hugely amused to discover that one of my pieces has become the de-facto standard of behavior in the community. Wish they'd taken to it earlier; I might have stayed.

But hanging out there, thinking about the way I felt when I left (best expressed by Philip Larkin in No Road), I felt a sonnet coming.

Since we declared the road betwen us closed
And let the gates be covered by the vine
That grows between the trees, and seems to twine
Around the very sunbeams, I supposed
You went on very well without me here.
I'd come through once before, and found the place
So little changed, the well-remembered space
As painful as before, and still as dear.
Today, the vines are withered in the frost,
The wall-stones slick and chilly on my hands
As, pausing at the top, I see it stands
Unchanged outside, but all its comfort lost.
And then I slide back down, for now I know
The road remains, but there's nowhere to go.

#440 - What a beautiful baby, and a sweet costume!
#449 - Beautiful, abi, as usual.

Jen Roth @ 440

Really a cute kid. I want my grandkids to look like that (it's far too late for my kids).

abi @ 449

Lovely, abi.

abi 449: That's heartbreakingly beautiful.

Terry #445: (re my serranos) Dry them.

Thanks.

Everybody: I'm thinking of using some to make corn muffins, which would probably go great w/ pork chops later this week. Anybody suggest a good light, fluffy, sweet-ish recipe? (I've got original NYT, new NYT, Heritage NYT, Beard American, Fannie Farmer, and a 1975 JOC, but no clue as to how to sight-read the recipes for fluffy and sweet.)

I don't know about sweetish, but I love these cheese muffins so much I made them for my guests on my wedding day. The recipe doesn't make many (12 pretty small ones) so I usually double it and I always increase the cheese to nearly a cup (even if I don't double the recipe). They are very soft and light and delicious, and I've considered adding corn to them myself, so maybe they would work for you?

Abi @ 449... Thanks. And welcome back.

A few years ago someone came up with the Evil Genius level idea of getting users to fill in 'captchas' (i.e. - those boxes where you have to read the scrambled letters next to them and type them in to prove you're human) in return for access to porn sites, online crossword puzzles, or whatever it takes to get their attention. The twist was that the captchas being presented to the user were to have been taken from another site - perhaps the signup site for a GMail account - and the user was being used as the character recognition of a spamming program, or other piece of malicious software.

This idea - presented intially as a hypothetical quickly mutated (via BoingBoing I think) into stories that it was really happening, but as far as I know, it was just a hypothetical at that stage.

Now, it seems, it has become a reality. See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/31/captcha-busting_trojan/

ema #455:

Those look really great! Printed out. I'll use them, all right, but not this week, as macaroni and cheese is on the menu tonight.

By "corn muffins," we US types don't generally mean "we've added corn kernels to this," but rather corn flour or meal. Cornbread in a muffin format.

For some reason, probably having to do with my mother being a rotten cook at that time (she's better now) we never made our own cornbread/muffins when I was a kid, except for a mix, so I've not got a family recipe.

Joann at #458

Ahhh! Sorry to be less helpful than I meant to be, but at least you'll have some nice cheese muffins.

I often want to try cornbread things, but am never sure what to use. Is the cornmeal sold for making polenta the same stuff used in cornbreads?

Greg @337:

Your poor little yeasts are starving. They need some sugar. (You *can* make bread without it, but it's harder.) Try about the same volume as the salt. Also, make sure the liquid ingredients are in an acceptable temperature range (from room temperature to a little over body temperature; too cold and the yeast will be dormant, too warm and you'll kill them).

I will add to the admiration for Across the Universe. A very stellar work that resonates with many contemporary issues.

I saw it last week as an escapist treat after I was informed that I was being "impacted" by my company's latest round of layoffs. Worked pretty well, at least for a while!

[Job search leads and contacts in the Portland OR area appreciated.]

Lizzy, P.J.: I was quoting someone else. Me, I notice a 3, sort of. I sleep through 4s. I recall a time when everyone in the house (including my girlfriend) got up to talk about the 4.something.

They teased me in the morning for not noticing (we had a waterbed, I was more amused that I noticed neither her arising, nor coming back to bed).

When there was a 3.6 in Watsonville (I was in Monterey) I found out about it in the afternoon. My reaction, "there was an earthquake?" Everyone else (it was a barracks, and most people were from the mid-west) was, "WHAT! Didn't you feel it?!?!!!".

Me: A 3.6, in the middle of night, miles away? Are you nuts?

abi #449: That blew me away.

oliviacw @461

What kind of work are you looking for, and what areas are you willing to commute to?

Bruce

Jen, #440, cute baby!

abi, #449, wonderful visuals

I've been in two quakes -- one when we were first transferred to the Seattle area (1963, JESR) and so I was trying school again and our class was in a portable. The teacher had us get out of the portable which was good because it fell off its supports. The second one was very tiny and here, where I live two blocks from our train yard and assumed it was bad train mating until I saw the news.

We usually have 15-20 trick-or-treaters here so I bought a variety box of full-size bars. We only had 12 tonight, and not one I was expecting, so I have 18 bars left. I don't know what to do with most of them. I'm not that fond of chocolate.

Terry

It was the seismologist's thought that anyone in LA would even notice a 3!

Well, the saga of the bread continues.

The previous, rubber pencil eraser loaf was:

(following numbers in grams)
300 whole wheat flour
100 oat flour
100 barley flour
175 water
175 whole milk
9 salt
9 dry yeast

Tonight, I added 50 grams of pure gluten.

The loaf came out like the dense-but-edible loafs I had gotten with just pure whole wheat flour, but the top of the crust, about half an inch, was the think pencil eraser stuff.

It smelled way too good, so I et it. Tasted pretty good. Will see how good it is in the morning when it's smell isn't wafting through the house.

I think I'm close. a couple of people recommended sugar. same amount as the yeast it sounds. So, I'll add 9 grams of sugar on the next loaf and see how that goes.

(depending on if tonights loaf is edible in the morning, the next loaf may be tomorrow night, or in several days.)

Also, when I add the milk, it's right out of the fridge, so maybe that's too cold? If so, I seriously underestimated bread.

I can't seem to get the big air bubbles sort of bread, though. I might just have to buy some white bread flour and see how that cooks up.

And I bought the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. It was the cheapest of the books recommended. will have to see what it says about whole grain bread recipes.

Steve@457: A few years ago someone came up with the Evil Genius level idea ...

That's the "man in the middle" attack.

Bruce Schneier explained it in his "Applied Cryptography" book many years ago. His example was with credit cards, but same concept.

Greg -- big bubbles, well distributed, is a delicate balance. You need a well developed gluten structure to contain the active fermentation, a soft enough dough to be flexible enough to rise a lot, and careful handling to get it into a hot oven and steamed to get a good oven rise. It's hard with freeform loaves (what I do) but may be easier with a bread machine due to the containment.

My suggestions/Info dump:

Oat and barley are low in gluten, and are working against you at this point.

Sugar does help wheat breads, for flavor at least. There's a reason that honey wheat is a common version.

Bread flours are normally in the 13% protein range, AP in the 12, and Whole wheat probably around 11% or so. So your 300g of flour is probably going to have on the order of 33-39 grams of gluten -- your 50 may be a bit high. You may also want to make sure that the gluten is well hydrated before you add it to the mixture, since the kneading operation that happens before it's hydrated really doesn't help much. Also, salt tightens up the gluten, making kneading less effective.

I'd try this:

Mix 1/2 the flour, extra gluten, all the liquid + yeast and sugar enough to make a glopy mess. It's more batter than dough at this point. This should be doable by hand in the bread machine. Let this sit for 20 minutes. That should hydrate the protein in that portion of the flour, and give the yeast a chance to start on the starches in the four. Add the rest of the flour and start the bread machine cycle. If you can add salt near the end of the kneading cycle, do that, if not, add it with the second half of the flour.

One major piece of damage from yesterday's San Jose earthquake wasn't known until today. Two hundred thousand books fell down (warning- sad pictures of scattered books on floors) from the shelves in the downtown library. The top stories got some good sway going during the quake, like "a palm tree swaying in a tropical breeze." (This fairly new 8-story library combines San Jose State University's library with the main branch of the City of San Jose's library.)

I'm now thinking of running strips of grip-liner (a 1mm thick shelf-liner) along the front edges of my bookshelves. I've used it to keep kitchen items from slipping on RV shelves- if it can keep plates and glasses in place at 65mph, it ought to help keep a few more books shelved in case of quake. Or would the uneven surface cause damage to a book's edge?

metacomment: I tried posting here 2 hours ago, right at the time when ML commenting seemed to have a freeze.

That comment took about an hour to appear on the "Recent comments" sidebar and in my "View all by," but not here in OT94 itself. That one should be #470, and this metacomment #471.

Kathryn @ 470... Wouldn't the strips make the shelves look like prison cells? True, finding oneself thinking "Book 'em!" sure beats the damage the books would suffer from being tossed on the ground.

In late 1999, my then-boyfriend and I went to San Diego to look for an apartment for our move to the area. We stayed two nights in a hotel. The first morning when we went down to the comp breakfast, everyone was talking about having been woken by the largish quake (7.1) that had hit out in Joshua Tree (~50 miles from SD) in the wee smalls. We'd slept right through it.

That's the only large quake I know happened while I lived in southern California, though I'm sure there were any number of small ones; I was there for a year and a half, after all.

433: and if Bruce were concerned with researching older ontologies, in order to make new software compatible with them, he'd be a palaeontologist.

Following a long illness, swordmaster extraordinaire Hank Reinhardt passed away on October 30th at about 11:15am. A recent photo of Hank with his wife, Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf Reinhardt, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/27b2zy
Longer obits and more information floating around.

Epacris (#421): Thanks for finding a direct link to the "cannibal pumpkin" photo.

And I'll join in the praise for Jen's photo and abi's sonnet! (Jen, I expect that your adorable kid will be mortified when faced with that photo in 10 or 12 years, but quite proud of it eventually.)

Serge, do you think your friend could be to blame for the seismic action? My uncle from the South Bay told me he was *very* glad he'd decided to move some bottles of wine off a marble table top not long before the quake hit.

Bungee cords an inch or so above shelf level, along the front edge of the shelf?

I've used metal shelving, with the shelves installed upside down. (This is an old technique for storing canned foods: the jars will stay on the shelf.)

Faren... My friend can't be blamed, because she lives in the Bay Aea and noticeable quakes aren't a daily event although our being together may have been too much. As joann pointed out, bad things seem to happen when I set foot in California. For example, remember the nearly non-stop rain that went on for the first few months of 2006? That began the very morning after I crossed the border into California, just before Christmas of 2005. As far as I know, I don't have the power to affect Reality.

Serge (478):
You most certainly do have the ability to affect reality.

Just not anywhere close to that degree.

John Houghton... How would I know?

"What did you tell me to dream?"
"I told you to dream the aliens off the Moon."
"They're off the Moon all right. They're here."

ema #459: I often want to try cornbread things, but am never sure what to use. Is the cornmeal sold for making polenta the same stuff used in cornbreads?

Yes. The polenta stuff is coarse grind; other recipes can use that or something a bit finer. I've never been able to find the right stuff for making zaletti, which are Venetian cookies/cakes, sort of torpedo-shaped. I love them, my husband hates them, and the local Italian bakery doesn't make them right (IMO).

Greg: Warm the milk.

Thanks, btw, for sharing. One forgets how much one has internalised things. Bread seems much simpler, to me, than it is, and I think nothing of dashing off, a loaf, forgetting how many subtle things I am doing, unawares.

Kathryn #470:

About grip-liner: it's useful, but there are times it can be too sticky. We have it on an upper kitchen shelf that I can just reach stuff in, and I blame it for the demise of a champagne glass. On an ordinary shelf, touching a glass at the bottom with another glass will cause it to scoot slightly; on a lined shelf, the same glass will overbalance and fall down.

It's compressible; as long as you've not got collector's editions for which totally pristine condition is the whole game, it's probably not a problem for the edges of the books.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to just tack up strips of moulding.

When we lived in Palo Alto, we had a number of bookshelves, all of which were affixed to the walls at the top by means of L-brackets. We missed Loma Prieta by just about a year, so heaven knows what would have happened under extreme conditions, but no books went astray during several years involving the odd 6.4 (admittedly some distance away) and less.

I seem to remember that the sourdough whole-wheat bread I made a lot called for either 1/3 or 1/2 cup of molasses and 1/4 or 1/3 cup of butter/margarine (in other words, about 1/3 more sweetener than shortening), but being molasses, it would also mean that less other liquid (milk or water) would be added. (It's usually molasses or brown sugar with whole-grain breads.)

Terry #462:

The main criterion for being woken up by a night quake was, for me, did the windows rattle? You probably had to be in a old house for this to happen, but it was fairly effective. It was also hard to miss all the car alarms going off, or all the people out in bathrobes turning them off. (5.something in Livermore, about 30-35 miles away)

I can recommend a bathtub full of water as being a fairly delicate quake detector; it was good for sensing a 4.7 150 miles away when I was in a 4th-floor apartment in Venice. The water suddenly went slosh-slosh, several inches high, when I'd been lying perfectly still. It didn't seem quite like the usual morning episode where my downstairs neighbor ran her wash; for one thing, there was no accompanying noise. Later that day, people started sending me news reports of a quake. (I must say, when you're in the tub 4 floors up in a 500-year-old-building, your first thought is "but I *can't* get outside!")

Greg London, it's also possible that your milk had sufficient live bacteria to kill the yeast. I grew up using raw milk (from a cow I milked myself, how quaint) and so my breadmaking technique includes scalding any milk I use- this means to heat over medium until a "skin" starts to form and then cooling to no hotter than 120F before adding to the flour.

The thick hard crust can also be due to insufficient kneading, which comes back to bread machine problems. Gluten develops- polymerizes- through proper kneading, and can either not happen if the dough isn't worked enough or, strangely enough, if it's worked too much especially in the presence of fats. Which, again, not a bread machine person, but I'm guessing that the kneading cycle of your machine is not long enough for the gluten to be fully extracted from the whole wheat flower and stretched into the nice elastic network of tangled protein chains that makes bread light.

I am foolishly charmed at getting email from my Senator/Presidential candidate Chris Dodd that starts out with "Hey," and is signed "Chris". I don't quite picture Senator Dodd as either a guy I'm on a first-name basis with or a guy who'd say "hey". Makes me wonder if he has a 22-year-old staffer writing these things for him!

I will write him another defend-the-Constitution fan letter and maybe send money this time.

Susan... Is there any chance that Joe Lieberman will be kicked out by the state's voters next time around?

Serge: I'd say yes, but that's five years away.

Greg: I'd not worry about the milk, unless you are buying raw milk.