To be followed in due course by Open Thread 98, Open Thread Me, Open Thread 2000, Open Thread XP, and Open Thread Vista.

95 Thebes of Greek activism?

Jen @ 1

'Open Thread Vista' will require new and expensive hardware in order to post comments.

I was using Win95 up until four years ago. The DOS machine is in the storage room - but it was running two years ago. (It has the 5" floppy drive.)

Or, Jen, Open Thread Jaguar v. whatever, followed by Open Thread Leopard.

underneath a blue mahoe tree
lay the red petals of a flower
the ridge above us did not tower
we walked uphill to view the sea

a solemn moment or an hour
to think and then to sip our tea
no auguries would then agree
we did not know we had the power

we thought ourselves happy and free
a simple joy to take a shower
ignoring then the old man's glower
we understood what we could see

in the high woods we made a bower
out of the light and in the lee
from paradise we sought to flee
with native sense for only dower

allow us each with aching heart
to name the place with proper art

Frangano?

"To each his Dulcinea, though she's only flame and air..."

So, I'll be in Minneapolis this weekend. Would anyone care to give a native Pacific Northwesterner used to temperate winters a crash course in What To Pack?

Also, is it utter foolishness to think that I could walk from The Radisson University Hotel (615 Washington Avenue SE) to the UMinn law school, which seems to be on the other side of the river? The map shows a bridge right between the two; does that have space for pedestrians?

Thanks for any help; I think I'm in travel denial right now.

I've been waiting for an open thread.

Question: What makes "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (which I enjoy immensely) a good book?

There is essentially no plot (Shukov ends the day where he started, no happier, no sadder, no wiser) and the entirety is worldbuilding, yet it is strangely compelling.

Is it simply the ultimate in "show me" (the repression of the Stalinist society) rather than "tell me" (Stalin was bad and his society sucked)?

Help me out, here. I reread it last weekend and, while I still enjoy it immensely, I don't understand why...

Never commented on Making Light before. Hope this works.

Can anyone recommend an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov? I figure it's about time I read it.

We shouldn't be using this thread until (at least) Service Pack 2 has been released.

Greg @ 9...

Weren't they the guys who used to entertain worldcons with the juggling of bowling balls?
("Pssst! I think those were the flying Brothers Karamazov.")
Oh.

Richard @ 8:

That's a good question. I'm not sure that I can properly articulate an answer. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of my favorite books; I first read it in high school for that year's Academic Decathlon, and have reread it a few times since.

Like you, I'm unsure why I like it so much or why it's so damn good. I think it's how smoothly we're dropped into that life, that day. It's profoundly satisfying (to me, at least) to have the experience of knowing someone, and from the perch that we're given in Ivan Denisovich, we do--that day, at least.

It's been at least a year since I last reread it, so I'd have to pick it up again before I could really begin to comment more seriously, but I did want to share your enthusiasm for the book.

Random comment, re PNH's particle on the Ars Technica review of the Sony PRS-505 ebook reader: I picked one up last month, and I really like it. Unlike its predecessors, it's sufficiently compatible with a Linux/OS/X gearhead's lifestyle to be usable, and open source software support is available here. It's a whole lot easier on the eyeball than any backlit LCD I've tried, and it's a third the weight of a hardback. Unless you absolutely insist on being able to buy DRM'd ebooks from Sony, or being able to read proprietary file formats for other readers without prior conversion, it's great.

(Okay, so I have a low saving throw vs. Shiny!, and I've been reading ebooks on PDAs since my Psion 3a, back in 1997, but this one's useful.)

A reminder... Tonight's episode of PBS's Nova is a 2-hour special about the Dover school district and the Independent Designers.

[ The received view is that the conservative christians have taken over the Republican Party. I think the reverse happened. The right wing of the Republican Party has taken over the church. ]

That certainly is what happened with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod in which I was brought up; as far as I can recall, it was already beginning in the mid-60's, considering what that newly ordained firecracker of new pastor in my home congregation was like. He even tried to force me to come back home and TESTIFY in front of the congregation that my mother was an adulteress -- because she was now divorced and re-married.

Nevermind that he was too much, then, even for that little congregation, that they let him go, and he had a nervous breakdown and was put into a church treatment center. Surely he was out again, not that long afterwards, and got himself another congregation.

The nation went crazy in more ways than one or two or three or four around 1965. And the loons took over a few decades later. Funny that those 'loons' turned out to be not the ones, say, that my grandfather, thought were the loons and who would destroy the nation (that was the anti-war people, in his opinion).

Love, C.

Sarah #7: Dress based on the temperature. It's likely to be chilly.

The Cedar Ave. Bridge has sidewalks (GIYF).

I am embarrassed* to realize that I didn't post a thank-you to the people who said nice things about my daughter's picture on the last Open Thread.

Thank you.

* Thank goodness for the spelling reference!

Serge @ 14 - thanks for the heads up on that.

Lori Coulson #6: I suppose so.

Sara @7: last time I was in Minneapolis/St. Paul was for the Winter Carnival. It can be cutting cold; the saving grace was the multitude of enclosed walkways.

Two words of advice: (1)tights, not hose. Especially if you must wear a suit. Tights under the suit's pants, if that is your preferred form of suit. (2)Layering; thin cotton cami, cotton shirt, blazer or cardigan, coat. Things may seem too light, but the effect is much warmer than heavy sweater/heavy coat that most winter novices use.

Seth @ 16:

It looks like the nights will drop below freezing; do you get enough rain that I need to worry about ice when I'm out walking?

I'm not familiar with GIYF; can you translate, please?

Google "GIYF" for one possible answer!

A world without writers.

Serge @ 11

No, I've already read their book, the memoirs from their Trapeze period, "For Good To Make Flying The Easy." I can't help but suspect it was, at best, a poor translation.

I was asking about the Dostoevsky.

(Oh. There really are Flying Karamazov Brothers. Well then.)

Fragano @ 5: Applause!!

Thanks, Emma @ 20. I'm accustomed to dressing for rain, which is a very different beast.

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

I think The Cluetrain Manifesto is going to give me nightmares.

Sarah @7,

If you're staying in the Radisson downtown, there's a bus that runs Very Often between downtown and the U of MN: the MTC 16 route -- http://www.metrotransit.org/serviceInfo/route016.asp -- take anything North on Hennepin Ave (out the hotel door to the west, heading to your right) to Washington Ave, where the 16 runs; get a transfer from the first bus driver. In general you can transfer up to 3 times, but not so as to make a round trip. The 16 bus runs about every 10 minutes.

If you'll be in the Radisson University Hotel, you can hop on the free inter-campus shuttle to the West Bank parts of the Law School (the library, unless they've moved it, is on the West Bank; though they have done some splendid building of things since my days at the U). These also run about every 7 to 15 minutes, depending on the time of day. There's an upper deck, complete with glass-enclosed portions to cut the wind, for pedestrians/cyclists on the Washington Avenue Bridge, which is what goes between the East and West Banks of the U over the Mississippi. You can avoid the collapsed I-35W and likely now overcrowded Cedar Ave / 10th Street Bridge (which does have a walkway separated from the roadway very well) by again taking the intercampus bus over towards Dinkytown, which is worth strolling through (bookstores, music, restaurants, etc.) but not likely on your main path for work/hotel.

Enjoy Minneapolis!

The transit website above also has all the info you need for finding your way around the Twin Cities by transit. If you're flying in, and will be between downtown and the school, don't bother to rent a car; take the light rail from the airport, it's around $1.50 (or $2 at rush hour) and the buses/train take dollar bills and any coins.

Emma's advice @20 about numerous light cotton and a windbreaker set of layers rather than the too-light blouse under a too-heavy sweater is absolutely right on; if it's chilly, also remember to drink extra water since the cold precipitates water vapor out to a very dry atmosphere. Do take a long scarf, wrap once tight for warmth and once loose for a breather-pocket that pre-warms your next inhale (a little).

@28 make that an endorsement of MULTIPLE layers of cottons, and your coat and hat good against wet / wind as well. Though the temperatures can get chilly, the biggest difference between a Seattle cold and a Minneapolis cold temperature is the lower humidity of the latter. Not necessarily the sort of detail a person can count on one's Friend Google to mention, Seth.

Greg #24: indeed there are Flying Karamazov Brothers, going strong since the late 1970s, working their way sideways from Ren Faires to stage show environments. "hup ho, they juggle!" - and warm up, or used to, by juggling in 5/4 time, and things like that. Nice folks. Glad to see they're taking the fun to Europe and China, I haven't looked at their website in years! Thank you.

Syd #25: Thanks.

Thank you, Ruth, that's all great to know. Cotton sweaters over wool, then? I mostly use wool out here, but it occurs to me that that particular regional preference is probably due to wool staying warm even in an endless drizzle.

Sarah@7: we seem to be having a long, warm, fall here. We just had our *first* frost the other night. Right now, it's 50.

Looks like it'll be marginally below freezing the next few nights, but that's the low, so it won't be reached until nearly morning.

Ice tends to be a problem later in the winter rather than sooner, it's mostly compacted old snow rather than newly frozen rain here. But sometimes the weather messes up, fall is unpredictable.

There's an open gathering (they're officially called meetings, but they're actually mostly social, with a 5-minute business meeting that's mostly announcements) of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society this Saturday (17-Nov), if you're into that sort of thing. Afternoon and evening both (details findable from that link). In St. Paul, near Macalester College it sounds like, easily busable.

Sarah @7 and 21

Agree with the rest of the posters on dressing in Minneapolis -- hat and gloves are also good for this time of year. The weather is really variable (it was in the 60s today), but it is forcast for highs in the 40s, lows around freezing over the weekend and snow showers on Monday. (kind of a Thanksgiving tradition in these parts.)

As a sort-of proud U of M grad, I can second using the free shuttles between the campuses. If you want to walk, the pedestrian bridge takes 15 to 30 minutes to cross, depending on speed (we had 15 minutes between classes -- it can be done, but that's certainly no fun).

I don't think it'll be cold enough for any of the rain to freeze, but it doesn't hurt to be careful in the morning.

Oh, and I hope you have time to have some fun in the Twin Cities. There's plenty to see right around the U and in Dinkytown, not to mention downtown.

OK, I'll get off my Chamber of Commerce Soap Box and go back to lurking.

Steve C @ 18... You're welcome. I got that from the ACLU's e-newsletter. (Do I need to use the 'e-' prefix in this day and age?)

Greg @ 24... I was asking about the Dostoevsky.

The Dancing Dostoevsky Dames?

Tania... I just got the DVDs. And the t-shirt. And the bear-eating-a-hiker fridge magnet. How much do I owe you for the last 2 items, as I assume that they, unlike the DVDs, aren't loaners?

(cont'd from #36) Forgot to thank you. I ought to be ashamed of myself. My parents raised me better than that. They also raised me to be 6 feet tall, but that's another story.

Julie L... I just got your copy of Mike Ford's How Much For Just The Planet? Thank you very much! Payment will be in the mail tomorrow. Hmm... A musical involving the Organians. Sounds very silly. Don't you people(*) be surprised if I ask for an explanation of some of the references.

(*) No, I'm not a troll.

I don't know if this is a good place to find women who use amphetamines regularly, to treat sleep or attention disorders, or anything else that means taking small doses every day. (But here seems more likely than anywhere else I could think of, so I was waiting for an open thread.) Does it disrupt the menstrual cycle? Or cause hair loss?

Neither of those seem to be written up as standard side effects. I'm not sure if they aren't side effects, or if they're just very unusual. A lot of the target market for this sort of drug seems to be children, so of course they wouldn't notice anything about menstruation. And probably not about hair loss, unless it was really drastic, because kids' hair grows so fast.

Ruth @29 has reminded me of my very fond memories of seeing the Flying K's. We have a signed poster from their appearance at our local university's theater. And my family spent many hours discussing the best possible thing to bring for the Challenge, in which (for those not clicking the link) a selected performer will attempt to juggle any three items selected by the audience. One time we saw them the items included a breadbox and a model of the Starship Enterprise (TNG version). Good stuff.

Alberto @ 12:

I'll take random gabbling at this point over proper articulation. :-)

Re: satisfying to have the experience to know someone: would it work as well if the person was completely fictional? That is, the reader knows (in general, I believe, it is somewhat drummed in from the back cover forward) that the gulag existed, that Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner there, etc.

Is it possible to bring the reader into a completely fictional world so thoroughly?

If yes, who has done it?

If no, why not?

Thanks for sharing your enthusiasm, though; one day, we'll understand it...

A question about winter coats: I'm looking for a good warm coat, something long involving wool. Everything I've found has a polyester lining. Will I regret this? I'm assuming it's the same kind of thing as my current winter coat, which feels very chilly against the skin. I've pretty much resigned myself to another winter of imperfect coat, but if I ask now, I'll probably remember in August, when coats are available.
Unless I've already asked and forgotton. Le sigh.

I have a question especially for the poets of the fluorosphere, but also for everyone else. I'm looking for poets - or prose writers, I suppose, but short prose, not novels - who deal well with grief and learning to accept it as part of your life. Not in a cheesy seven-stages sort of way; one writer who came to mind was Chris Clarke of Creek Running North, after Zeke died last year - now if I could find a *poet* with that kind of writing power, I'd be set. Do you have poems that come to mind on this theme, or writers who you think handle it particularly well?

It doesn't have to be poetry of any particular kind; it's for a song cycle, so one piece I'm already using is a Lorca poem, and anything else that seems immediately adaptable to music would be great, but even if it doesn't jump up and shout "lyrics" it could be good inspiration.

Diatryma @42: winter where? for Minnesota, these wouldn't work, but they're great for Portland, and a lot of them are really well-designed - and made locally, not by sweatshops, etc. etc. You of course end up paying for the privilege, but I've gotten them as presents for a few Very Special People and they were really well made.

Nau

I don't find wool warm enough, at least not up here in Canadia. Down coats rule.

Nomie @ 40: I once brought a breadbox to an FKB show myself (not as much of a coincidence as it might seem, since their rule is "no bigger than a breadbox"). Another time I brought jumper cables, and that time someone else brought a slab of liver. The champ made a valiant effort, but received the Gillette meringue.

Greg at #9:

Any translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is worth reading, according to the Russian speaking professor I had when I read the Brothers Karamazov. For myself, I can say that their translation was readable and enjoyable. Fortunately, it's also readily available since it's fashionable. It's the Vintage edition.

I spent a few (too many) hours in the emergency room recently. I overheard the following (half) conversation.

Doctor on phone: Yes, sir, I understand... I understand sir.... sir, I need to know... sir, would you tell me the details.... yes, I understand.... I understand.... yes, I understand....

This half conversation went on for quite some time. Doctor finally comes over to the desk, right outside my door, and relayed the details.

It seems that the gentleman on the other end of the call had had surgery at that particular hospital some eight months prior. The gentleman had come to the conclusion that he felt there was a 15% probability the surgeons had implanted a GPS device in him during surgery. Nothing specified as to what the gentleman wanted done about it, just that he *knew*.

---
*crogglement*

Even under the influence of morphine, I still suffered severe crogglement.

Eep, Varia, that does matter. I'm in Iowa City. It doesn't get very cold very often, but when it does, it does.

Actually, it appears that the Vintage edition I have is out of print, and you can now get that translation from FSG. Sorry.

Serge - Drat. I bet the note I meant to include with the package is still in my car. They are gifties, because I thought they might make you laugh. Hopefully you don't find them too tacky or odd. I love the bear magnet. I have one up on my fridge.

If anyone is interested, here's the fridge magnet and here's the shirt.

I wanted to send this one for Sue, but my local source was sold out.

I'm going to second Bill's vote on down coats. Jackets are cute and stylish, but if you want to stay warm, get a coat that covers, at the very least, your rear. A cold bottom is a real bummer.

Diatryma, wool coats generally have polyester or nylon linings because they are made to slide easily over a wool sweater. Or a light fleece jacket. Or something like that. Something designed to be worn over a cotton shirt is likely to be made for less serious cold, even if it feels warmer to the touch.

I am out of here for the evening, but I just have to say...

Charles Darwin drives an Evolvo! ::snort::

And that's why I had to send Serge the shirt. I'm sure you all understand.

Adrian @39,

An adult woman here (regular poster, but not the usual name for this answer)...

I've been taking them for over a decade. I haven't ever had either of those as side effects, nor have I read of them in any medical articles, and I haven't heard of it from other people in chadd (support group- adults and kids w/ ad(h)d). I try to keep up with research on any medicine that I take (although I admit it would take quite a lot of negative results to get me to stop... I like having my full brain available to me).

For any question on neuro/psych related medicines I'd recommend the forums at the website Dr-bob.org. It's run by a psychiatrist at the U of Chicago, and the forums there are filled with helpful and thoughtful people who like to geek out on these sorts of questions. If there is a link you're most likely to run into someone who's had the same symptoms there (vs. other places on the net).

I do know how AD(H)D meds have an appetite suppressing side-effect (the "Dex" of the 1970's version of Dexatrim). If one went too low in weight that'd affect one's cycle and/or hair.

As both of those symptoms are important I'd talk to your doctor about them. I know a woman who had those symptoms- iirc, they were caused by a problem with her thyroid- that's not an uncommon problem.

You can do online searches as well, although they can get a bit overwhelming. Here's a search for hair loss plus irregularities at the wrong diagnosis website: it lists 11 possible causes. If you're prone to getting weirded out by websites like that, have a partner or friend who knows your symptoms read through them for you.

Thanks, Adrian; I'd thought it might be a friction issue, but I am new to coat-shopping. By this time next year, I expect I'll have made up my mind.

Pamela @ 47

Thanks much. That's the edition I keep coming across, but it's nice to have a first-hand (second-hand? Does the internet count as a hand?) recommendation.

My 'winter' coat is down-and-feathers. Toasty at 32F, still comfortable at 0F (though not toasty). I rarely need it in SoCal (althgouth there was the morning I was standing on the station platform in 35F and 35mph, which is definitely windchill country).

My thermals (short sleeved tops, short pants) are cotton waffle-knit, warm when it's cold out and reasonably comfortable indoors.

Tania @ 51... Thanks. I loved the shirt and the magnet.

Serge @38: Looks like Xmas came early for you today :)

IIRC there was someone around here who recently offered to identify the original musical numbers... Lee @907 back in the "Wanker Wind" thread, I think? Dunno whether that offer is still open, but it sounds like it would be an appreciably useful thing.

private cat in the sun, Wrong Diagnosis missed renal failure. At least my hair fell out and my metabolism mostly stopped during both of them.

I really enjoyed the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Karamazov; it seemed to capture some of the flavor of the Russian syntax (I could sort of imagine everyone speaking their dialogue in Russian accents) while not being overly literal or stilted.

Lin @ 48 - somewhere, some surgeon is saying, "Where the heck could I have set my GPS unit down? I had it yesterday!"

Diatryma,

Should you run into the money for it; If you go custom tailor you can get silk for lining a wool coat for the friction factor and feel warmer to the touch than synthetics. If you need it to breathe then a nice linen. Last time I sewed a wool overcoat I lined with a light wool crepe polished side to body. Just don't line with cotton. A well made wool coat can last decades.

Adrian (39), I use amphetamine regularly to treat a sleep disorder.

Does it disrupt the menstrual cycle? Or cause hair loss?

After a while, amphetamine stopped having those effects. Even after I'd gone cold turkey for some time and then started on them again, I never again had those reactions.

Drink lots and lots of water, take your vitamins, eat citrus, and treat any remaining problems symptomatically.

Over in the last few comments (996,998) of Open Thread #94, Carrie S pointed to a write-up suggesting that Neandertal women had hunted alongside of the men. I was seized with a sudden curiosity about who said so, and why. I searched for, and found, the article by Kuhn & Stiner (2006) in Current Anthropology, and I am suspicious of their assumptions and conclusions.

However, my suspicion at this article was small compared to my extreme crogglement at another article in the same journal, whose abstract I shall post verbatim:

Theory in Furs
Masochist Anthropology
by Don Kulick

Was will die Anthropologie? Freud's analysis of masochism can serve as a lens with which to explore the long-standing anthropological interest in powerless or disenfranchised people. Recent anthropological work can be examined not only in the terms encouraged by its own diegesis as a relation between anthropologist and the powerless but also as elements in a constellation that includes anthropology as a discipline and capitalism. Exploration of the libidinal structure within which our discipline has taken shape—that is to say, the structure that gives not just possibility and meaning but also pleasure to the practice of anthropology—can shed light on the nature of the pleasure that anthropologists derive from identification with the powerless.

I made a post on Open Thread 94 earlier today, shortly before this new OT opened and everyone came over here. Since it had a number of links to Weird Stuff On The Internet, I'm going to be slightly crass and repost it here:

- - -

A link at Irene Gallo's Art Department led me, eventually, to ConceptArt.org, where, in one of the forum threads, I found some, uhh, interesting stuff:

The second photo in this post is a disturbing explanation of Why "Fanboys" Get No Respect.

And this piece of art is, I think, Not Safe For Anywhere, even though there's not an explicit drop of ink anywhere in it. Trust me, you will want the Brain Bleach standing by for this: Star Trek/Sailor Moon mashup

And, as a special treat for Patrick:

Strange Japanese Doritos packaging (Does eating Japanese Doritos make you want to give someone a kick in the groin, or to receive one?)

Plus: Rap Snacks

Diatryma, I haven't noticed that the polyester lining of my coat has made it feel any less warm - but, as Adrian notes, I'm usually wearing it over a sweater or long sleeves. But then, I tend to feel cold more in my extremities, so I worry more about warm socks and gloves and a good wooly hat.

Tim Walters @ 46, I think what they did with the breadbox at our show was to take out an interior shelf and use that. And I've heard stories of challenge objects such as a condom filled with baked beans and a length of pantyhose filled with eggs. The general idea seems to be an unpredictable flight path. Nobody knows what the wiggling beans will do.

...and there's a sentence you don't see every day!

If this was posted elsewhere earlier, sorry.

John Scalzi finally made it to the Creation Museum, and his report is here. Do not, repeat not, skip the photos out of a sense that your time might be better spent doing something else. His captions and the comments to each photo are hilarious.

Challenge Items: Condom string filled with jello. A toy dump-truck. That one was a hum-dinger, the hinge made it unbalanced and every attempt they made only made it more unbalanced (for those who don't know, the challenge is three objects, and three attempts. Before each attempt the juggler is allowed to make one adjustment).

There was a time one could, at the SoCal RenFaire, see them three times a day. One could also, in the same venue see, Firesign Theater three times a day.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company got their start there. I was in a group which failed to get a show, The Abbreviated Bible Company.

Good times.

Xopher: I'm not sure I thanked you properly for your support of me in the Yes Judge thread. That's OK, sort of, because I can now point you at someone who thought well of what you said, so, what he said

One of the times I've seen the Flying Karamazov's* my in-laws got tickets, ostensibly for the whole family, but actually so they could treat their grandkids. We saw them in an old theater down on 2nd Avenue in downtown Portland, since demolished, whose stage was about five feet above the auditorium floor. This was significant, as we were in the first row. In order to see anything, we had to all slump back and look up. And the most of what we saw was juggled objects headed in our direction, usually caught before they got to us.

Even cowering beneath a potential shower of fish and kitchen knives, it was a lot of fun.

* They're local, and a friend of mine has done technical work for them**, so I've seen them a bunch, but not in the last few years.
** He's the one who made it possible for them to juggle planets.

Fragano Ledgister @ 5

Very good!

48: It seems that the gentleman on the other end of the call had had surgery at that particular hospital some eight months prior. The gentleman had come to the conclusion that he felt there was a 15% probability the surgeons had implanted a GPS device in him during surgery. Nothing specified as to what the gentleman wanted done about it, just that he *knew*.

Just got a letter complaining that the writer had had eight memory chips implanted in her spine by Merrill Lynch.

COLLEAGUE: Merrill Lynch??

ME: Yes, I know. I mean, Goldman Sachs would be far more likely to do something like that.

Thanks, private cat and Teresa. The doctor warned me about the possibility of weight loss, but I seem to be seeing something peculiar alongside weight gain. (Fairly slight but very uncomfortable because of the category changes.) It's hard to talk about with doctors, after years of pushing hard to get the medical profession to look past me being fat and treat other problems.

Even now that not everyone automatically sees me as "fat," it's a concern. When I started taking my antiseizure medication, 6 years ago, I lost a lot of weight and a lot of hair. There were lasting bad effects on my depression, blood pressure, energy levels, and ability to think (bad enough to be problematic despite the weight loss and reduced pain, though reduced pain on that scale will make me put up with a lot.) Every doctor I talked to about it thought I must be getting healthier--not because I was having fewer migraines or seizures, but because I was getting thinner.

Exploiting the open thread:

Freezing hiker sits
warming blistered frostbit hands
burnt by friendly fire

Adrian #74:

Two of my coworkers independently found a local (apparently crazy) doctor, who told them they were infected with nanites spread from the contrails of airplanes. I don't think either one stuck around long enough to find out what his proposed treatment was, though....

Serge #38:

Are you troll or ent?
hard to tell in darkened woods
close to Isengard

Sort of surprised this hasn't shown up in the Particles or Sidelights yet:
88 Lines About 44 Fangirls

A doctor once told my wife that she might be having an allergic reaction to something produced by our stove. Our gas stove.

The wife, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, found another doctor.

Adrian (#74): My neurologist tells me there are many kinds of seizure medicine that work well. After some previous blood tests, he wondered whether what I've been taking affected my platelet count, but the latest test showed no problem so I'll stay on it. No apparent weight loss or hair loss side effects, and it completely eliminates the seizures. You might ask your neurologist about alternatives to what *you* have been taking, and see if something else might be better.

There's an interesting chart in the current Discover magazine about "connecting complex diseases". It turns out that allergies and seizures are quite close to each other, while other major diseases seem to have no major relationships to those two.

Julie L @ 60... Looks like Xmas came early for you today

Does this mean I can start setting up the Christmas Tree now? Sue usually objects to my doing it even one minute earlier than Turkey Day. Bah humbug.

As for Mike's novel... Yes, someone did offer to elucidate some of the references. Well, I still have to finish that Peabody mystery, then a few issues of Science News. Then Mike's book.

Thanks again.

albatross @ 77... Are you troll or ent?

I ent either.
We are Devo!

Malthus @ 78... Heheheh... Thanks for the link.

By the way, one upcoming of numb3rs is going to be set at a comic-book convention. My understanding is that it won't make fun of the fans, although it may poke gentle fun. Whatever that means.

Diatryma re: coat linings

Yes, they must be slippery. The old cheap option was acetate, the more expensive one was heavy rayon (Bemberg). Acetate doesn't survive cleaning well, particularly if subjected to body oils - not so much a problem with a coat.

Bemberg or a substantial silk* would be great if your pockets are deep enough (not so long they hang out of the bottom of the coat, though).

You can also have a professional reline a new coat, but you're as well off to have them make the whole thing.

*I'm not sure silk is so much better that it's worth the extra cost when commissioning a garment. I'd put it in a coat for myself.

The Flying K's would stay with us when they were taking their bus ("Caution: Weird Load") cross-country and we lived in south central Nebraska. The neighbors were croggled.

They were there one summer when the year's batch of 17-year locusts were hatching. We stayed up all night with lights and tripods and significantly expensive cameras documenting it.

Anything in the house could become airborne at any time.

Does anybody have a link to a photo of Jessica Lange as Hera in the movie Titus, preferably a closeup? That headdress made of knives is neat.

Don't forget Garrison Keillor's wonderful 95 Theses 95, which probably originates in his monologues, but which I first came across as a multipage footnote in Lake Wobegon Days.

So I missed the PBS thing about ID...anyone catch it? Is it good? Good enough to track down?

Re: the GPS device implanted during surgery, the oddest part to me is that the guy thought there was a 15% chance that it had been done. I thought in general either you thought you had a GPS implanted, or you didn't.

ethan @ 88... I taped the Nova special about Dover and ID, but haven't watched it yet. If you want, I'll give you the tape when I'm done.

#86 Serge: I haven't seen that movie(?), but is this the picture?

Jessica Lange

Varia at #43, I'd recommend Kipling for that - his later work follows that theme quite strongly, after he lost his son in the Great War. The short story collections Life's Handicap, Debits and Credits, and Limits and Renewals are all worth looking through - the first at least is available from Gutenberg.

Owlmirror at #66 - that abstract actually sounds quite a reasonable theory to me, at least if my translation into English is accurate. It also reminds me of this song.

Bioware is hiring writers.

I saw this story and immediately thought that the Fluorosphere might contain some folks interested in this kind of opportunity...

DaveL @ 90... Alas, it isn't. There is a scene where she pretends to be Hera, but her headdress, instead of being made of the traditional(?) peacock feathers, consists of long and narrow knife blades.

My favorite memory of the FKBs was seeing them do A Comedy of Errors at Lincoln Center. They didn't do the Challenges, because they were doing a play. Favorite moment: "This mole on my shoulder!" (Pulling, you see, a stuffed mole of the animal variety from his shirt.)

Terry 70: Wow. That's nice. But...well, I was saying what I really believe, not trying to compliment you or even support you as such. You never need to thank me for telling the simple truth. A fine distinction, perhaps...but also, I owe you much more than you owe me. Indescribably more. From early days, when you gave me what was for me a fresh perspective on military service (since confirmed by conversations with many other military friends), to today, when quoting you has helped me persuade many people away from the 24 view of torture. Thanks for all that, pale as they are.

Comment 95 already?

Oh, no... Girl Genius's site is advertising t-shirts that say
"Fools! I will destroy you all! (Ask me how.)"

Adrian, I've been shuttling back and forth between amphetamines and Ritalin for more than 15 years, for ADHD; the worst I can say about Amphetamines is that, eventually, after a couple of years, they begin to have a sedative effect. Ritalin/Methylphenidate is hard for me to manage, or was until I started using Concerta- otherwise I rollercoastered through the day, with rapid onset of effect and crashing rebound.

The worst problem I ever had with regular Dexidrine (as the triangular orange 5mg pills) was when I was prescribed them as appetite control back in the late sixties and was taking about 3X what ended up being my effective ADHD dose- I stayed up all night and ate carbs, which I'm pretty sure wasn't the intended result. Rapid disasterous weight gain, and a side order of sleep=deprivation hallucinations.

I am currently trying to find a balance between treating my ADHD so that I don't space out and walk in front of a bus and getting my BP numbers to a point where my doc will shut up about it; the battle between beta-blockers and stimulants is even less fun than the adolescent dexidrine over-medication was.

Kung Fu Monkey considers the reasons to support the Robot Overlords.

Coats: {sigh}

I have a wool coat my mother made for me in 1979, from a Yves St. Lauren Vogue Designer pattern; It's been relined once, with silk, and now needs the wool parts replaced, rather in the manner of "this hammer's been in the family for five generations, we've replaced the handle four times and the head twice."

The wonder of living in Western Washington and being a user of public transportation is that one needs many coats; the best all-around one I've found lately is a mens' false-shearling 3/4 length jacket I got from Costco a year ago; it's wind-proof and has many pockets, stays warm when damp, is lighter than a wool coat of comparable R-value and not slippery like many down ones, which are problematic on most bus seats.

Polyester linings are not as cold as nylon satin ones; there's a dandy specially made flannel-backed polyester satin lining in the best ready-made wool coats that is quite comfy (satin linings keep your business clothing from getting wrinkled and messed about when putting the coat on and off). The trick for a really warm wool coat is that it be fully inter-lined with something like waxed hair canvas or one of the high-tech breathable garment membranes.

Also, blanket-cloth coats, which are made of heavy felted wool, are right up there with arctic-grade fleece for heat retention, and almost as wind-proof as Goretex.

Nothing, however, replaces layering (well, maybe sable, if the old movies where women come in out of the blizzard and take off giant fur coats revealing diaphanous silk evening gowns, are to be believed). Frozen 6F/-14.5C fog demanded those nice British lacey woolies over tights and bra, wool socks, insulated leather knee-high boots, corduroy jeans, long sleeved T-shirt, tight angora cowl knecked sweater, wool and cotton bigger cowl necked sweater, and WW2 Naval deck coat, with a basque beret.

Which explains why I didn't go back to Pullman for graduate work.

fidelio @ 98... You just reminded me that I should add "Colossus - The Forbin Project" to my Xmas wishlist.

Fire and shadow.
Love and darkness.
Glory bright against destruction.

What a wonderful place this world is. How did I ever deserve to get it?

fidelio @98 beats me to the punch.

Truly, any conversation that begins, Robot overlords. You are "pro-robot overlords," is one that should be stuck around for. Also, I want the bumper-sticker.

In the realm of really doing anything to avoid work....

Quicksort

A list of keys is handed to your hack
your job: return a sorted list at last
an empty list is sorted, send it back
a list with all one value, send back fast

else take the first key, call it "pivot," P
and split the list to two, the left and right
the left gets lesser half, P more than key
while larger keys than P go on the right

the keys that equal pivot go with P
and end up in the list that's on the right
then sort the lists, the rest is almost free
return the sorted left plus sorted right

Serge @ 86, 90:

Hmm. I'm surprised that such an image isn't more readily available. Although I haven't seen Titus since its theatrical release, I distinctly recall being sufficiently dazzled by the look(s) of the film to buy the relevant issue of American Cinematographer at the time. (Lots of tech info and a few nice stills. No knife-headdress, though.)

A cursory sweep through the usual image searches makes me suspect that relatively few images from Titus were released into the wild. Which seems odd for this film in particular, unless of course they were worried about undercutting The Illustrated Screenplay....

So I had a chance to see Beowulf in IMAX 3-D last night.

Oh. My. God.

I say it better in my review above, but please see this movie in 3-D if you can. Utterly amazing.

James Crowley @ 104... No knife-headdress. Drat. Thanks for the references though, especially the one to the illustrated screenplay. Christmas is getting close.

Skwid 105: I might, if the previews hadn't utterly convinced me that the sensibility of 300 had infected Beowulf as well. "I! AM! BEOWULF!" is altogether too much like "THIS! IS! SPARTA!" for my taste.

albatross @103
Nice. I like it.

Xopher... I felt the same way, then I noticed that Neil Gaiman was involved in the writing of the script. Still haven't seen it though.

If Beowulf turns out to be a big hit, I wonder how many otherwise idle screenwriters will be turning their hands to motion-capture treatments of Gilgamesh, Gawain, Roland, and El Cid.

bravo, albatross! Now, can we avoid O(n^2) behavior on already sorted lists without messing up the rhyme scheme or meter?

The Beowulf trailer left me with the impression that they're firmly in Uncanny Valley territory.

I think I'm developing a dislike for computer animation. There's so much attention put on getting it as detailed and accurate as possible, it seems — modeling hair more realistically, water that moves the way it should, that kind of thing — that there isn't enough attention being put on making the characters appealing or funny. (IMHO, YMMV, etc.) I'm having a brain-freeze and my googlefu is failing me; which animator was it who said "don't show me something realistic, show me something true"?

Lexica #112: That's exactly how I've felt for a while now. And Beowulf looks awful to me (by which I mean it looks awful; I don't have an opinion about its seeming quality otherwise).

This is why I appreciated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, flaws and all; it used extensive CGI to create an effect, a feel, rather than a "reality."

RichM @ 110

I picture Gilgamesh in the style of old silent movies, with the text screens* cutting in at the exciting bits to say "Six tablets are missing here."

* Strike Plate moment. Is there a name for those things?

I certainly hope that Zemeckis knows that having a larger-than-life character does not mean he has to speak with gritted teeth while spitting out every word. (How can you spit something out under those circumstances? Do I want to know?)

Sarah @114: Caption cards?

If somebody does that epic, I hope they manage to work in one natural piece of product placement. Shouldn't there be a distiller out there promoting a Heorot Mead right now?

I get to see the Beowulf for free tonight if I wear my tunics because the marketing people asked local SCA to be around for entertainment during the lineup phase.
To me this looks to be like it's going to be TSR D20 Companion Beowulf more than anything.

RichM:

Caption cards it is! I knew the "card" part in the back of my head, I just couldn't come up with the other bit.

I blame Kafka; I've been pummeling my brain with him all morning when I ought to be focusing on work.

Sarah @114: They're also called 'intertitles'.

I thought they were called intertitles.

Jinx!

Re: Beowulf

Are there uncanny valley moments, yes, certainly (Wealthow, particularly, for some reason). But far more often there just are no issues. Amazing lip-synching and expressiveness. Flawless textures and lighting, beautiful imagery.

This is not 300, Xopher. This is Beowulf the braggart hero, Beowulf the glory-seeker. Beowulf is mighty, and he is weak. He is clever, and he is clearly mad. It's very Gaiman, really.

RichM @ 116... Shouldn't there be a distiller out there promoting a Heorot Mead right now?

Ale drink to that.

Perhaps an official, branded pukku & mikku set would make a good Gilgamesh tie-in?

119 & 120: Intertitles

I love this word, and I want to use it all the time. Thanks for the reference.

Serge @ 123 -
Ale drink to that.

Oh, but that's beerly acceptable as a pun. You've mead much better than that.

Scott @126
I'm sure he ne-ferment it to be his last word on the subject.

@126: Do you mind if I refer to you as Dregs Scott?

Maybe not, Abi. I'll have to beer the shame of it.

Oh, for heaven's Sake, Serge! Stop wining.

re 113: Sky Captain would have been pretty good if Law and Paltrow had decided to act for a change.

Xopher, yeastill picking on me?

Serge, I'm fermenting rebellion against you and your kind. We barley touch you, and you start having a maltdown, casking about for another pun.

Serge @ 83 - Wil Wheaton is going to be in that episode - he blogged a few times about it.

JESR #97: I am currently trying to find a balance between treating my ADHD so that I don't space out and walk in front of a bus and getting my BP numbers to a point where my doc will shut up about it; the battle between beta-blockers and stimulants is even less fun than the adolescent dexidrine over-medication was.

Are there conflicts between ACE inhibitors and the stimulants, or you haven't tried that, or what?

I hadn't realized you were doing a balancing act. I took beta blockers for several years at a fairly low dosage, then something blew up and pushed my BP higher, and my doctor doubled the dose. Moribundity ensued: I couldn't even climb the stairs in the house without stopping on the landing and then sitting/lying on the bed for a few minutes. Not to mention the "I have no energy and I can barely breathe" syndrome that set in every time I got out of a car and tried to walk across a parking lot. My husband reports that he was really worried about me losing my memory and all interest in just about anything.

I managed to get enough of my act together to charge (slowly) into the doctor's office this summer with a long list of things I didn't like about my current situation, most of which had cropped up since I started taking the higher dose. Result, she put me on an ACE inhibitor, and the effect was like having the switch turned back on inside my brain; I started being able to climb stairs with no problem *immediately*, and got my mental stack pointer (and the round tuit that went with it) back almost as fast. I'm able to do enough exercise that I've lost twelve pounds. I now regard beta-blockers as Teh Evil.

Xopher... casking about for another pun

Ale-ey Hops!

Dawno @ 134... Thanks for the reminder, about Wil Wheaton.

This byplay shot down any hops I might have had of escaping unscathed.

Appealing to the collective knowledge of the group mind: I'm trying to remember the name of a children's book. Three kids, two boys and a girl. One boy's name is Pete. Their babysitter/handyman is an old man with a pet dodo and a flying truck. In one chapter, he "fixes" their pipes and they start running with various flavors of soda--grape, orange, root beer.... In another, they pull their reflections out of the mirror to have as playmates, then have to trick them back in.

Anyone recognize this?

Any idea when it was published?

(Sorry, I lost the date in revision.) I first read it sometime in the early to mid 1970s, but it may not have been new then. Skinny little paperback, probably from Scholastic.

Wow. I've never heard of that book, to my knowledge, but I feel like I've read it already! Especially the boy being named "Pete". That's perfect!

Also, Serge and Xopher, you're both total pils.

A real coupla weizen-heimers.

"Ruth Christoffer Carlsen, Mr. Pudgins. 1951, Scholastic. This is a book about three children and their magical babysitter. The chapter about the grape pop coming out of the faucets is "Mr. Pudgins Turns Plumber". Other chapters involve a flying bathtub, magic birds, a dodo, and a black bear. "

Via the "Stump the Bookseller" Solved Mysteries page.

Jen Roth (144): Thank you! That was amazingly fast.

Ethan @ 88: I saw it. If the dramatization of the court room scene where Behe is asked about the evolution of the human immune system is accurate, I don't know why the man doesn't slink away to one of those mountain-top monasteries that you must reach by mule, rappelling rope, and finger-in-the-rock cracks... It is utterly devastating.

What is also utterly devastating is a scene at the end where the board member who set the conflagration of discusses the judge's decision, and... well, you will have to see for yourself the kind of conscious deliberate ignorance we are up against.

"Stump the Bookseller" is a national treasure. Except that it's international, but that doesn't have the same ring to it.

Given Mary Aileen's fast success, I was working on writing up my own request, but gave Google one last shot, and think I found it -- Sid Fleischman's "McBroom" books, but apparently in an illustrated edition that's not currently available now.

So, if anyone else is looking for tall tales set on a farm with giant vegetables, maybe that's it. And even if not, maybe I'll be able to find it here when I forget again...

Emma @ #146, a scene at the end where the board member who set the conflagration of discusses the judge's decision

Right. That's the guy in the blue knit shirt with the Sansabelt pants sitting in an overstuffed armchair, right? He looked like a caricature.

Jen Roth: How about, "Stump the Bookseller is a delight and a wonder, truly a world treasure,"?

Terry: Yes! It is all of those things.

Emma: Behe was interviewed on Point of Inquiry last week. He believes that his testimony went very well. The interviewer brought up the moment with the immunology books, and Behe's squirming was kind of embarrassing to listen to, frankly.

I need to TiVo the rerun of that documentary.

I know I'm a lager on this thread, but I feel like I should ask Serge to bock down. I worry that in a pun frenzy he might foam at the mouth or get a swollen head.

Then again, Xopher's so good, I can't really get a wort in edgewise.

Tania @ 152... Hmph. You hurt my feelings. I think I'll go brewd.

Xopher @ 130
Oh, for heaven's Sake, Serge! Stop wining.

You know (he said ryely*) I actually left that one out of my posting, for fear of not leaving any puns for anyone else. I should have remembered that this crew is made of stout stuff, and just carried on beyond the pale.

*which is altogether different from R'lyehly

Y'all are barmy, addlepated hop-heads, looking to tap into a keg o' troubles; willing to go doppel or nothing, suffused with the stoutness of your convictions, asking the rest of us to stand aside, where we must hope to be in the lees of your draughty verbiage.

In setting up a pot roast in a slow cooker (no, it isn't exactly healthy, but I've been experimenting with actually making meals, rather than just defrosting boxes, and was yearning for some comfort food of my childhood, anyways) and decided to put in an onion. An entire onion. And I figured I'd cut it into chunks to let the oniony goodness get all around, cause, hey, I don't know what I'm doing, and it's all one big experiement...

Holy crap.

I spent about a minute staggering around the kitchen blind as a bat, with a sharp knife in my hand, no less, until I manage to figure out I should put the knife down, and then I grope my way over to the sink and stick my head under the faucet and run water over my eyes.

I'm sure everyone else already knows that cutting onions makes your eyes burn, but, damn this was just one step below getting teargassed. The only thing missing was the snot rolling down my face.

Sometimes I think I'm either going to learn how to cook something or die in some horrible kitchen accident. I just always imagined it would involve a major appliance, not a fricken root vegatable.

Adrian, #74, you need a doctor like my primary. When I told him yesterday that I'd lost about three pounds a month this year and I wasn't doing anything to cause it, he ordered up a thyroid test for me to get with my standing orders next week.

Terry Karney @ 155... we must hope to be in the lees of your draughty verbiage

One can hop.

joanne, I'm also taking Lisinopril, which is an ACE; my doc is a great believer in the fruit-salad approach to health. The line about internists never meeting a pill they didn't like is a cliche for a reason.

I started on this merry-go-round even before I was diagnosed and treated for ADHD. Propanolol for hypertension totally destroyed my coping mechanisms for ADHD, which were mostly along the lines of obsessive self checking and living in a constant state of near-terror that bad impulses would screw up everything. Before I was put on stimulants, the Propanolol dosage had to be adjusted upwards every six months or so, since the habit of anxiety is hard to break. For years, my BP was fine with stimulants and Clonidine, but over the past few years assorted bad luck and other health problems have caused that to no longer be sufficient, and I've ended up on a passle of drugs for hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.

Atenolol isn't the worst of them, since it only makes me spacy and prone to missing stairs and otherwise damaging myself, and aphasic as hell, with increasing bad effect over time. It replaced Nifedipine, to which I reacted very badly, ending up with periodontal disease and mobility problems related to peripheral edema in existing traumatic joint injuries (apparently a known hazard, especially for Type 2 diabetics).

I can't tell you how much I loathe all of this nonsense. I'm a natural Christian Scientist: I expect myself to be healthy, active, and useful, and instead I'm constantly having to run to the doctor. Of course, in truth, I've had all sorts of medical problems all my life, and would have been diagnosable with Type 2 diabetes in my teens, except for people not doing that back then.

GAH! Venting, sorry. I have to go to the Orthopedic clinic on Friday to see about my right knee, the one I messed up, originally, by walking on it with a dislocated/broken knee-cap. I know I'll get the weight-loss lecture, which is just fine, as these things go, except for the fact that I'm running on 1200 calories a day and fantasies for dessert, and Atenolol and Glyburide are both known to cause weight gain.

(Research Medicine may be a science, but the transactions in the examining room are not).

Emma #146: So you're saying it's worth watching, is that it?

Greg London @ 156,... Sometimes I think I'm either going to learn how to cook something or die in some horrible kitchen accident.

Hopefully the former, and not both.
"It's made with people!"

I'm reading backwards in the thread, and wanted to address this line in Adrian's post at 74:

Every doctor I talked to about it thought I must be getting healthier--not because I was having fewer migraines or seizures, but because I was getting thinner.

Except, in a way, I can't.

So much that is wrong with the transactions of the examining room is contained in that sentence.

Linkmeister @148: Indeed. I have never before really understood the full import of that infamous expression "What the fuck?!!!" until I listened to that man.

Jen @157: Maybe that's how they do it!!! They create their own reality and carry it with them... for the rest of us, Behe got his ass handed to him in the most embarrassing manner possible. He displayed complete ignorance of a field he supposedly studies. Not just bad information, not I haven't-kept-up-with-it-for-a-few-months, flat out ignorance.

Ethan, of yes, it's worth it.

Greg: Some of them are like that. Some tips.

Put the onion in the fridge.

Decide how you want to cut it up, then peel it (there are several ways to do that)

For Quarters, cut the root off, put the cut face on the board (a dedicated board for lillies is good idea) and make two cuts.

For various finer cuts, don't cut the root end. Slice off the top. Make a set of cuts, vertically, at right angles to each other (making a grid in the onion). The finer the dice, the smaller the gaps.

Slice off one side of the onion, place the cut face on the board.

Cut across the grain of the grid you made.

Work fast.

Rumor has it that a wooden kitchen match, or two, will reduce the effect (the theory is the sulphur compounds in the head will attract the compounds which cause the burn; which is caused by volatiles in the onion converting themselves to sulfuric acid in your eyes). I think this is bunk, but chomping down on them when the burn starts helps some.

Or, just get some swimming goggles.

Malthus @ #78: That's utterly brilliant - reading it I could hear it to the tune of the original. (Now I need to go hunt for the original song somewhere because it's probably been 15 years since I heard it. *) Dang.

[*] Now bought, paid for, downloaded and about to listen to. I am finding Amazon MP3 a very very dangerous place.

I was taught the best no-sting way to chop onions was to chop them with the cutting board in the sink, under running water. But this doesn't work well if you're dicing, only for largish chunks. Swimming goggles may be the best solution.

Greg:

Some onions are, almost at random, extremely powerful. I've usually found it's white onions that have sat around for a while but I don't know if there's any real rhyme or reason to it.

What to do: IMO ignore the bit about kitchen matches; when you get an extra-powerful onion like that in future, at once simply run water over it, your hands, the cutting board, and the knife, under the kitchen faucet. This cuts the fumes by a factor of 10 or so.

Once your hands are rinsed, grab a soaking wet washcloth and hold it to your eyes and you'll get very rapid relief. The fumes are highly water-soluble, which is why they end up in your eyes. It's very much like tear gas; fortunately water will clear it away rapidly.

(Yes, I was once tear-gassed, at Kent State in the late '70s.)

Clifton Royston: The matches aren't something one grabs after the burning starts, it's what one does before.

I tend to just work them with speed. A sharp knife and a fast hand is the best cure; the cold onions are less volatile, but I don't have the space to keep lbs of them in the fridge, and rarely think to pop one in for a couple of hours.

As for tear gas... I don't think them much alike. tear gas is more punguent, and gets the lungs; persisting more than onions (and rinsing with hot water is the only way to get it out, which isn't what I'm going to do with my eyes).

But maybe the doses I get every year are denser than those you were subjected to.

Greg, #156: Wow -- that sounds as though your reaction to onion fumes is much stronger than many people's. I certainly don't get that much of a problem cutting them! I'm sorry you had to go thru that.

My partner normally puts onions thru the food processor, but this wouldn't solve your problem because (1) it minces the onion, and you wanted larger pieces, and (2) you still have to cut the onion into chunks small enough to load into the bowl. However, the underwater trick should work well enough.

Also, try Vidalia or Texas Sweet onions if you can find them; I believe they have less of the tear-gassy compound than white or yellow onions.

Maui onions are very sweet, and not nearly as potent.

I usually keep no more than two onions on hand at a time anyway, so I have room in the veggie crisper compartment of the fridge. I can't recall the last time I had the trouble Greg describes, but it has happened to me. Rinsing them before use helps. Flushing the eyes afterwards is the only cure I know of.

Sigh; merge ye with the mash, O porters. Have stout hearts.

Do not drown in the bitter. Do not go gentle into that bad lite.

Oooh, nicely done, Owlmirror. Very high-brau. Your verse kept me from krausen right along to one of the other threads!

Let the worts tripel gently from the tun. Study well, so that when you have a white head, you will also have a wise one.

I was wondering if there were some people here who haven't heard, and might be interesting in hearing, about Steve Brust's latest troubles, and the reaction of his fans and LJ friends to them. (His comments here.) Perhaps there's a post in embryo, still quickening, here? I don't know the background of how it all developed, and haven't yet found in trawling back any earlier entries that might elucidate, but it sounds like the sort of thing that we Aussies use to scare our kiddies "Be good, or next time you get sick, I'll send you to America!"

Two entries, with their comments, on Steve Brust's LJ, A Bland and Deadly Courtesy.

Personally, I'm heading off to get new from local shops a couple of his books that I was hoping to get second hand for Christmas. If I spend the same amount of money even if I only get half or a third of the books I want, at least he'll be getting some of the funds, and the sales might enthuse the stores to order more.

I was wondering if there were some people here who haven't heard, and might be interesting in hearing, about Steve Brust's latest troubles, and the reaction of his fans and LJ friends to them. (His comments here.) Perhaps there's a post in embryo, still quickening, here? I don't know the background of how it all developed, and haven't yet found in trawling back any earlier entries that might elucidate, but it sounds like the sort of thing that we Aussies use to scare our kiddies "Be good, or next time you get sick, I'll send you to America!"

Two entries, with their comments, on Steve Brust's LJ, A Bland and Deadly Courtesy.

Personally, I'm heading off to get new from local shops a couple of his books that I was hoping to get second hand for Christmas. If I spend the same amount of money even if I only get half or a third of the books I want, at least he'll be getting some of the funds, and the sales might enthuse the stores to order more.

Bother. Sorry about the double post.

New job on Monday!

Code monkey go back to coal face.

The technique for cutting onions that I learned from a cooking textbook is easier to describe with photographs than with words, but I will try:

(1) Peel the onion and cut it from the root to, umm, the pointy end opposite the root. Each half-onion should have one half-root and one half-pointy-end. Place them with the cut faces down.

(2) Define a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system on one half-onion where the z-axis goes from the root to the pointy end and the xz plane is the surface that you just cut.

(3) While holding the onion in place, make one or two cuts parallel to the xz plane, but do not cut all the way through; leave the onion together at the root end.

(4) Make another series of cuts parallel to the yz plane, but again, do not cut all the way through.

(5) Finally, make a series of cuts parallel to the xy plane, and this time, do cut all the way through. You now have a diced half-onion.

(6) Repeat steps (2)-(5) for the other half-onion.

The advantage of this technique is that until step (5), very little of the onion's fume-exhaling surface is actually exposed to the air.

#178 Seth: Don't forget to open the pod bay doors to vent the fumes to pitiless vacuum when you're through.

JESR #159:

Gaaah! Words fail me. All I have is the blood pressure, a treatable cholesterol problem, and no thyroid. And I feel that those pills are too many. Clearly time to recalibrate.

Cutting onions safely (my way, anyway) - first, make sure your knife is sharp. Very sharp. The idea is that it should make a clean cut through the onion without resistance, and without dragging pieces along with it and exposing cut surfaces to the air. If you wet the knife first, that will coat the cut surfaces in a thin film of water and absorb some more of the vapours.

Slice off the top and bottom and peel off the skin - you can profitably peel it under the cold tap if you want. For that matter, this is a good time to rinse it in any case. Then put it down on your chopping board (resting on one of the cut surfaces) and cut it in half vertically. Put both halves cut-side-down, hold one of them firmly, and slice into strips. You should now, if your knife is sharp enough, have a cohesive half-onion which just happens to have vertical slices running through it, so turn it through ninety degrees and repeat the procedure.

Then, of course, you do the same with the other half.

I'm told that holding a slice of bread between your teeth will also absorb the vapours, but I've never tried it.

Sam #181: I'm told that holding a slice of bread between your teeth will also absorb the vapours, but I've never tried it.

I tried it once, just in the spirit of research (tearing is not really a big problem for me) and the effect was way worse than the tearing: it triggered my gag reflex.

Use sweet onions where possible, yellow or red ones where not.

Greg: See what I mean about systems to cut onions?

For them as care, I peel them by scoring the dried layers, at the top/tip/non-root end, at right angles, rolling down the side, a bit.

Then I pull the "petals" back to the root, and twist them all off at once.

I'll have to try Seth's trick of wetting the knife.

I wish I could match the punning ability of this grand cru.

I was originally introduced to this idea by an episode of Veronica Mars, and I tried it and it works well on regularly strong onions, and not so well on ones I've had lying about for weeks.
You put a spoon in your mouth (and feel stupid because you have a spoon in your mouth.) I tried to figure out why it works at all, even if only partially, and only found out that there are different versions of this technique. I had copied the TV show, and used a metal spoon with the bowl in my mouth, but I have seen more references on the internet to holding it by the handle and/or using a wet wooden spoon. I still don't know why/how it works, but it is my preferred method when I can't find my lab goggles.

albatros @103, todd larason @111:

A Patch

-Quicksort
+Quicksort (v2)
===
a list with all one value, send back fast

-else take the first key, call it "pivot," P
+else take the midpoint's key, named "pivot," P
and split the list to two, the left and right
the left gets lesser half, P more than key

(a more ambitious patch would be to minimize the risk of worst-case performance by using the median of the first, midpoint and last key, but I fear this would require an entire new verse... or of course to use mergesort, which would mean an entirely new poem.)

joann @180, what really makes me furious about this situation is not so much the pill thing- at least since I've managed to clear the period from 9am to 7am of the need to pack my pillbox around- as it is the obsession with numbers in preference to what I'm saying about how I feel. It is more important to my doctor that my blood pressure stays twenty points below (both upper and lower numbers) where it's been at any time in my life than it is that I have the attention to do my necessary tasks, the clarity to write well, or the energy to get up and do, to steal a line, what needs to be done. Not to mention the ability to get the exercise which, history has taught me, is the only way I ever keep my weight and HGA1-c under control.

I accept that my MD and I have the same objective- that I live out my allotted years in health- but her definition of that term excludes a whole lot of what I mean by "healthy," including, apparently, the ability to get down the hill to the bus stop and go off and run errands, and includes a willingness to subject me to drug interactions and side effects in the name of good numbers. And I suspect that her attitude is the prevailing one in medical practice at this time and in this place.

I keep my onions in the refrigerator. I cut them with minimal tearing. If I want them finely chopped, I eighth them and put them in my chopper (sort of a hand-cranked food processor). I've used the dicing technique described by Seth in 178 (though I certainly wouldn't have described it that way) when I'm not at home and can't use the chopper. I don't tear any more that way.

When I cut thin slices, I'm generally cutting white or "red" (purple) onions, which have less of this problem.

I carmelized onions on Monday (they're an ingredient in my tofu paté), and everything in my house still smells of them. Anybody have any pointers on getting rid of that smell? I don't want it pervading my chocolates, or even skewing my olfaction while I'm making centers.

Is anyone else irritated by the fact that yellow onions are red, and red onions are purple?

Xopher @189:
Is anyone else irritated by the fact that yellow onions are red, and red onions are purple?

Yellow onions in the UK and the Netherlands are only red if I've been exceptionally clumsy with my knife. (Crossthreads! Cannibalism!). The yellow onions I remember from California were always yellow (or brown, on the papery outside).

Must be an East Coast thing.

abi, the papery outside is a color I call red (brick-red, if I'm being specific). They're yellow enough inside. But send a naïve person to the grocery store for "red onions" and they'll come back with yellow ones.

Or anyway, that's what happened to me.

Nitpicky comment:

My vowels were apparently returned to the wrong post in the now-closed Ron Paul->brtn thread. Drn, ht whn tht hppns.

re 148: If it involves "WillJillHesterChester...andlittleClarinda!" and a running gag about watermelons, McBroom's the one. There's an omnibus which has that one and the sequel; when I get home I can see if I can get the data for you.

Achtung, different topic -- While at my local Megamart this afternoon, I browsed in their bin of motley paperbacks. One literally never knows what will be in there. Today a name jumped out at me -- Juliet E. McKenna. "Hmm, that name sounds familiar..." It was a German edition of her book _The Gambler's Fortune_. The translation is called _Livaks Spiel_ (Livak's Game).

Small world, yes? (And of course the book followed me home.)

re #192: GOtta watch out for those emvowelisms.

Xopher, #189: The yellow onions around here range from pale yellow to golden brown, depending on how much of the paper skin is left on them. Once you get into the onion itself, they're white. And yes, red onions would more properly be described as red-violet.

So naive person at grocery store can't read the signage either? IME, the various types of onion are all generally clearly marked.

(OTOH, I know someone who used to laugh at me because I always specified "Lea & Perrins worcestershire"... until she sent her husband to buy "worcestershire sauce" and he came home with some off brand that didn't taste right. Apparently she had never even noticed that there were other brands on the shelf.)

Lee 196: But you don't need to read the signage if you see a bunch of red things that are clearly onions, and know you're supposed to get red onions, now do you?

And I don't know about your grocery store, but in mine the signage is clear, but which thing it's pointing to often is not.

Xopher #197:

"There was a sign for white grapes, but all they had left were these pale green ones."

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions of what to bring/how to dress/how to get around in Minneapolis! I think I'm all packed up and ready to go now. If anyone else is going to be at the Fantasy Matters conference, send me an email - we'll get a cup of coffee or something.

Lee @ 196... he came home with some off brand that didn't taste right. Apparently she had never even noticed that there were other brands on the shelf.

And this is why I don't like doing the grocery by myself.

Xopher: No help now, but next time try caramelizing them over a very low heat, in a covered pan. That will make the sweetness more noticable (IMO) and contain the smell.

Terry 201: It took an hour to carmelize them over high heat in an open pan, stirring absolutely constantly. Over low heat in a covered pan...won't that take much longer?

I think I must misunderstand the chemistry of this process somewhat. Isn't dehydrating them part of what causes the sugars to carmelize?

Xopher @ 202... It took an hour to carmelize

Nun too soon!

A happy followup report on the UC Press sale.

2-4 weeks for shipping? 2+4 days more like, not including the weekend. All books were packed nicely in the box- not a bend or a fold in any cover or dust jacket that I can see. All the hardcovers came with dust jackets, too (they warned that some might not).

'Encarnacion's Kitchen: Mexican recipes from nineteenth-century California': other than the candied fruit of the barrel cactus, I know I can find the ingredients she uses.

Serge 203: Now I'm picturing an onion in full habit...sort of an onion suit.

Xopher @ 205... In the friar?

The Nova thing about ID is online at the PBS website here. I will be watching it in the near future.

Xopher: re onions

I did a post on the subject a little while back. (He said Produce). Don Fitch gave his method of doing the same (more akin, I suspect, to yours).

For my method, it takes 1 1/2 - 3 hours (dependingin the amount of onion).

You don't want them in a pressure cooker, the steam will escape. You don't want them to dessicate, and burn. Covering them will increase the sugared liquids, which will reduce to syrup, and then coat the remaining solids.

At least that's what seems to happen. The actual physics... I don't know.

gack!

I trust the meaning of the ill structured mess was clear?

A cover isn't a pressure cooker, steam will escape, liquids will concentrate.

Amusment. I tend to keep the threads I'm following in open tabs. I'll draft a comment, and then forget about it; in preview. I did that in two threads (Maia's computer is acting up, and she needed mine to write a paper) I got told I was publishing too much, too fast, and had to wait.

Dang . . . NYC's Consolidated Edison electric company still had a DC electric service in operation until yesterday

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison/

There were still a few buildings that used Edison-flavored juice for elevators and other equipment.

Well, actually they still use DC, but now that have transformers.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before the New Amsterdam Academy of Elevator Operation stops issuing licenses, and who knows how much longer Amalgamated Chelsea Whale Oil & Coal Delivery can hold out?

Thanks Terry! I started with about 3 pounds of onions. Since I made the dulce de leche at the same time, I could have carmelized onions at the same time.

Terry@168: As for tear gas... I don't think them much alike. tear gas is more punguent

Yeah. I've been hit with teargas a number of times. (thinks back to younger days. reconsiders.) It wasn't as bad as that. But it was quite a flashback.

When Cook's Illustrated tested onion-fume-reduction methods, the one they liked best (after swim goggles) was having an open flame in the vicinity of the onion-chopping to burn off the gases.

If you have a gas stove, just having a pot of water on to boil or pre-heating your cast-iron skillet should do the trick.

If you have an electric stove (my situation since I moved this summer, and one of the things I miss most), try having a lit candle nearby.

It works pretty well for me.

Stefan @ #210, I'm still sad from the loss of the Medusa Cement Company.

(Mez, thanks for the heads-up on Steven Brust's situation.)

Ooooooo... Guess what's going to show up in theaters on December 14. Will Smith in I Am Legend. Guess where I'n not going to be.

I think of Wil Smith as a likable enough actor that I'm willing to give just about anything he does a chance. I even liked him in I, Robot in spite of the grotesquely heretical and ubiquitous divergences from Asimov's story. About the only movie I wouldn't care to see him in would be a porno remake of The Wiz in the role of Michael Jackson's Scarecrow. I just don't know if Smith can sing or not....

Stefan Jones @210:I suppose it's only a matter of time before the New Amsterdam Academy of Elevator Operation stops issuing licenses, and who knows how much longer Amalgamated Chelsea Whale Oil & Coal Delivery can hold out?

The next level of technology should be self-licensing; i.e, the elevator/automobile/airplane will assess your competence and print out the certificate if necessary.

By coincidence, today I cut up a bunch of yellow onions and caramelized them. They were unusually pungent, so I had a basin in the sink with cold water and dumped them in there after the initial in-half cut (when the onion's internal pressure forces out the biggest blurt of juice/vapor). Leaving the root end on greatly expedites slicing or dicing.

As they got to the right size/shape, they went into a big stainless bowl with some veggie oil and were stirred to coat, adding more oil as necessary but keeping it to a minimum. This also helped with the fumes. Then the bowl went into a 350 degree oven for the rest of the afternoon. I'd wander in and stir it every twenty minutes or so. They colored just as deeply and evenly as standing and stirring, and at less than a minute per stir. Forty-five minutes?! I did it that way ONCE.

Holding a match/bread/a spoon in your mouth - because it encourages you to breathe through your mouth and puffs the nasty vapors away better? The cold water on the face/eyes is the best remedy I know. If you have a vent hood, cover burners as necessary and do your work there with the thing sucking full (anti?-) blast.

The trailer for I AM LEGEND makes it look more like a remake of THE OMEGA MAN than an adaptation of Matheson's book.

(I'm not dissing THE OMEGA MAN, by the way. Great comic-book-on-film, and Anthony Zerbe was his usual wonderful bad guy. But the relationship to the original book was peripheral.)

For those who don't want to read the long Steve Brust threads to find the donation place, here it is.

I never have problems with cutting onions. Not that I'm offering to cut all of y'all's.

Carol Kimball: I have my mouth shut when I'm holding matches, so any change in air-flow patterns doesn't apply.

I also don't think that matters much, because the aresolising is going to be enough that falling droplets will hit the eyes; and it's the eyes, not the nose, which are the culprits.

Wait, what... a lit match?!

Earl @ 222

Yes, it has to be lit. The flame apparently burns, or perhaps evaporates, the aerosol from the onions. I've tried it, it does work. Somewhat more convenient is to light a candle or two on the counter near where you are cutting.

Terry Karney @ 209

That's my usual technique for keeping up with Making Light. My RSS reader won't keep the posts in numerical order, so it gets difficult trying to keep the order straight.

My problem with posting is a little more noxious - it happened today and really annoyed me. I sometimes read a few comments at work during lunch; for some reason the nanny filter is very random about which threads it will let me bring up; sometimes it lets me refresh a thread several times before it decides to block it. Altogether too often it will block the preview or the post, so I have to wait six or seven hours to get home, have dinner, and then open the computer and remember to refresh and post. That's especially annoying when the post is just a flip remark, a bit of snark, or a pun; the wait makes it seem very labored.

Xopher @202:

I think I must misunderstand the chemistry of this process somewhat. Isn't dehydrating them part of what causes the sugars to carmelize?

Dehydration of sugars is necessary for caramelization. However, I don't think the process that occurs in onions and is normally called caramelization is actually caramelization, but I suspect it is a Maillard reaction instead.

So I ran across this Blog Readability Test, and not having a blog of my own, decided to run Making Light. Go ahead, try it. I'll wait.

*snrk* Methinks someone needs to rework their algorithm.

Earl Cooley @ 222... Wait, what... a lit match?!

Is that where people try to one-up each other about their knowledge of literature?

So now backing away from the cops with your hands up is "active resistance". Sweet.

(Canadian police taser victim dies.)

Lila @ 228

The way the cops look at it, dying is active resistance. Of course, as with any rationalization, justification for the cop's actiona is valid post facto.

Not only is The hard Nut FINALLY being released on DVD, but the show will be at UC Berkeley during the Holidays. Yay!

Holding a lit match in one's mouth whilst chopping onions sounds to me like a great way to singe yer mustache, scorch the onions (which would, of course, burst into flames as they had been marinated in vodka), and become a hit on YouTube and America's Funniest Videos. It sounds like the kind of cruel joke that a disgruntled employee of General Mills ghostwriting as Betty Crocker might make. heh.

I even liked him in I, Robot in spite of the grotesquely heretical and ubiquitous divergences from Asimov's story.

So here's the thing: I, Robot bore little resemblance to the plot of the Asimov story of the same name. But I thought it did a fabulous job of getting many of Asimov's themes in. Plus, though it's not an Asimov story, at one point my boyfriend and I looked at each other and when I said, "With Folded Hands!" he just nodded.

Putting aside the action-movie bits they included, I thought I, Robot was surprisingly good sci-fi, all things considered.

I have yet to forgive Will Smith for The Wild Wild West movie.

Carol Kimball @ 218 -- I always caramelize onions in the Crock-Pot. Takes time, but a lot less effort. Pretty much the same as your method.

Apropos of very little, I would like to register a request for another turkey fryer fire safety post before Thanksgiving. (Mostly I just want any new folks to get to see the turkey fryer fire videos.)

I have yet to forgive Will Smith for The Wild Wild West movie

Will Smith did not produce, direct, or write Wild Wild West, so I think that's a bit unfair.

Now, if you said that you had yet to forgive Francis Lawrence for Constantine, or Akiva Goldsman for Batman & Robin or Lost in Space, well, that might be a bit more understandable.

As I remember the eGullet thread on onion confit, when caramelizing onions the texture of the cooked onions will be nicer if you've sliced the onions longitudinally, not latitudinally. It has something to do with the membrane on each layer, I think — it's not quite the same as the difference in slicing meat across the grain vs. with the grain, but it's something along those lines.

Heresiarch #226: Wow, and mine's college-level. Something's definitely wrong here.

Owlmirror @ 235... You're right. I may be unfair to Will Smith for The Wild Wild West. That though depends on who decided that he'd play James West the way he did. The movie could have gone the color-blind route, like Brisco County did with Lord Bowler. It didn't though, and so we had to deal with the absurdity of a black man of the 1860s who could have functionned as an agent of the Secret Service isntead of his being barred from going even to a bar. I remember talking about that with an American-Indian woman and she thought that was a bit more believable than if one of her ancestors had been in that position.

That being said... I thought the giant mechanical spider was neat. And I loved Kevin Kline as Artemus Gordon, master of the mechanical stuff. And of cross-dressing.

Look at this CNN article on familiarity with driving rules, and be not the least surprised that the bottom four "states" are Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, and New York . (Why the heck is Maryland in 25th place? I'd expect it to be rounding out the bottom five or so.)

Lila, in the UK they'll taser you for being unconscious. Twice.

#239 C Wingate:

I figure in Maryland, the drivers know they're violating the rules, they just don't care. I had lived in Montgomery County for quite awhile before I understood that it was the same people who were kind and pleasant in person, and homicidal maniacs behind the wheel.

Seeking the new New World
By John Johnson Jr.
Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, the world's leading planet finder, tells of the fierce competition to find the first Earth-like planet.

It's an interview, and pretty good.

Hmmm....

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/383/t/4089/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=822

Send Bush an early holiday gift, courtesy of CCR.
The President needs to be reminded that he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States-his administration has been systematically destroying the Constitution since he took office./i>

With your help, CCR will flood the Oval Office with copies of the Constitution this holiday season.....

re: #239: I am shocked that Alaska is #2, as my fellow drivers seem to have a trouble with the concept of merge* lanes. Then again, if you need someone to help you out of the ditch, we are the place to be.

*Merge means to join traffic, not drive to the end of the lane and stop, wondering what you're going to do. It's not like we have nasty traffic up here.

Carol 218: Salvatrix! I will use the oven method next time. How long was "the rest of the afternoon," btw? Four hours or so? And covered or uncovered?

Also, did they reduce in size the same way they do on the stovetop? (I measured once: about six cups of chopped raw onion yields about ONE cup of carmelized.)

Jules 225: AHA! I have at least heard of Maillard browning. Can you explain it briefly?

Also...as I mentioned I made dulce de leche at the same time, boiling four unopened cans of sweetened condensed milk in water for four hours. Dehydration seems impossible under those circumstances. Is that a Maillard reaction too?

Lexica 236: it's not quite the same as the difference in slicing meat across the grain vs. with the grain, but it's something along those lines.

Serge? You have a new rival.

Earl Cooley III: Not lit, though I like the way you think.

Xopher: re Maillard reactions--

They are a non-enymatic browing caused by interactions of carbohydrates and reducing sugars. Carmelisaton is, in fact, a form of Maillard reaction. (there's a lot of literature in brewing about this, because it's a little more complex than that).

Once the sugar loses a water molecule (creating a ketosamine), and begins the caramelisation process there are three paths it can go down.

It can just lose more water (and thus continue in the Amadori phase) which is simply more caremelising.

The second reaction is to produce some short chain hydrolytic products by breaking up the amino acids some more. Those create off-flavors in beer.

The next step is where things start to get interesting (in both beer, and onions) Strecker degradations cause the compounds formed in the second phase to change some more. Amino acids become aldehydes and aldols. Some of those can be off-flavors, and intial conditions affect the outcome, which takes place as the reactions continue.

In the third phase the ph, available amino acids and sugars continue to brown, recombine and create things like dextrose.

For a chart, showing the reactions, are here

Xopher @ 245... Serge? You have a new rival.

Better a Maillard reaction than a Maalox one, I guess.

Darn. Didn't realize I had used my wife's ID here.

#245 ::: Xopher

...I will use the oven method next time. How long was "the rest of the afternoon," btw? Four hours or so? And covered or uncovered?

Also, did they reduce in size the same way they do on the stovetop? (I measured once: about six cups of chopped raw onion yields about ONE cup of carmelized.)

Yeah, maybe three and a half to four hours, uncovered, though the oven itself is an enclosed space*. Several of us here are working the same technique - Terry's covered pot, the oven, Caroline's crock pot...an advantage of the oven is that you've got heat all around the container rather than just at the bottom. I may try the crock pot next time.

I always assumed the "match in the mouth" was unlit. I had to go lie down for a bit at the thought of deliberately holding fire that close. Never tried it either way.

Yes, the yield of finished product is a scant fraction of what you start with. For those wondering if that much effort is worth it: yes.

*waffling here: "a closed space"? "an enclosed space"?

Thanks, Carol. I'm tempted to try it tomorrow, but I don't have time.

I think 'an enclosed space' sounds right.

Paula Lieberman @243:
I tried that. Not so much as a thank you note.

Maybe mony a mickle will a muckle mak', but the true benefit is in the sending rather than the effect on the recipient, I suspect.

Soon to be a major motion picture:
Warner Bros. presents "Loony-Dune"

A new retelling of the Frank Herbert classic "Dune" with an all-star cast of Warner Bros. cartoon characters.
Directed by Chuck Jones
Cast:

    Paul Usul Muad'Dib Atreides 	Bugs Bunny

        He stood against the hunters of a galaxy! 

    Duke Leto Atreides			Porky Pig

        "Tha-tha-tha-that's all, Duke!"

    Lady Jessica,			Petunia Pig

        She wanted more from her Duke than she was supposed to!

    Thufir Hawat			Elmer Fudd

        The steely-eyed Mentat master of assassins .

    Gurney Halleck			Daffy Duck

        "Thhhuuufir Hawatttt, eh? I can drink him under the table withhh one hand behind my back!"

    Duncan Idaho			Sylvester

        He would have been a better hero if he weren't off chasing birds.

    Dr. Wellington Yueh			Pepe' Le Pew

        Something about this loyal follower stank!

    Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV		Wile Coyote

        Somehow his interstellar schemes always backfired.

    Princess Irulan			Miss Prissy

        She was far too well-bred for the role she had to play.

    Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam	Granny

        There's a gom jabbar in the old girl yet.

    Baron Vladimir Harkonnen		Foghorn Leghorn

        Evil, a shrewd politician, and a chicken hawk.

    Piter De Vries			Marvin Martian

        Alien to all, his warped views led him to destruction!

    Feyd-Rautha				Henery Hawk

        If he knew what his uncle really was, he'd eat him alive!

    "Beast" Rabban			Tasmanian Devil

        His appetites almost brought down a dynasty!

    Stilgar				Sam Sheepdog

        He followed his master, but did not understand him.

    Chani				Tweetie Pie

        This early bird got the Worm.

    Liet-Kynes				Yosemite Sam

        His knowledge of the desert couldn't save him from the dangers of the town.

    Guild Navigator			The Roadrunner

        "Meep meep!"

Bruce Cohen @ 252... coughgagsplutter

Eh, what's up Muad'Dib?

What's up, doc Huey?

#226 - Blog Readability - mine comes in at College (PostGrad), which is a bit odd as I thought I was pointing my friends at youtube videos, webcomics, recipes and jokes. On the other hand, this week I've documented two brand new words*.

I, Robot was almost exactly what I expected for an Asimov story run through the Hollywood system - I did have one quibble which was that 1. Susan Calvin was far too smart to end up in a position where she had to fire an automatic rifle; 2. Obviously if she did she'd hit what she was aiming at, but with her eyes open.

* Scalzi's "dioramageddon", and my friend Julia's "geschplonken".

Trollery with extreme prejudice:

News article here about a teenage girl who committed suicide after the friend she'd made on MySpace turned against her and began posting nasty remarks about her.

Turned out the "friend"... never existed. He was a false identity created by a family down the street; the mother there originally wanted to see what the girl was saying about her own daughter.

One kinda expects this sort of unthinking cruelty from teenagers, but that an adult mother was involved and took part in it, rather than stopping her daughter and the unnamed "other person" from this sort of thing... man, that is something really, really ugly.

Bruce Cohen... You varmint! You couldn't find a role for my sweetheart, Granny?

Bruce Arthurs... Crap.

Sandworm Shai-Hulud - Speedy Gonzales

A force of nature to strike fear in any heart, particularly the politically correct ones.

Bruce Cohen @252, thank you for restoring hope for a better day.

Also, *giggles hysterically*

And Bruce Arthurs, you remind me what, besides the inate sadism of orthopedics practitioners, had done initial damage to my carefully husbanded flicker of hope. I chased links on that article yesterday, when it showed up in a post on my friends list, and came to a statement by the harassing mother where she cites an earlier suicide attempt by the girl in mitigation of her own responsibility. Because, you know, the kindness I owe a neighbor's child is excused if she is already depressed and known to be suicidal.

** delurking **

Might I impose on the kindness of this group to ask for reading recommendations for a fourth grader who likes Barbara Hambly's Ishmael?

A 10 year old relative of mine has been reading Ishmael, and enjoying it immensely. He says he likes the parallel story lines where the characters don't know what the other is up to, and the fact that Spock doesn't understand people. (To clarify, he's otherwise unfamiliar with Trek, and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"; he's also not a "Here Come the Brides" fan.)

The kid's not a huge reader, so the fact that he likes this book is a fairly big deal. What else might he like? Are there any other Spock-centric TOS novels that would be good for him? A kid's book set in the Pacific Northwest logging industry?

Thanks.

Ronit... Susan Shwartz has written novels about the Vulcan culture, I think, but they're not St-TOS. Hopefully others who are more knowledgeable will be able to help you better.

Commenters have repeatedly revealed the troll family's name and address in a Jezebel thread.

Jezebel also links to this St Charles Journal article which contains an absolute gem of a quote from the police report:

(She) felt this incident contributed to Megan's suicide, but she did not feel 'as guilty' because at the funeral she found out 'Megan had tried to commit suicide before.'

["She"=Mrs. Troll.]

#252: I'd cast Tweety as Alia. Small, cute, creepy ...

Yosemite Sam @ 258

Hey, man, I gave her a gem: Reverend Mother Mohiam. What, she wants to be cast against type as Jessica? Well, have her agent call me and we'll talk.

Baring a bit of the writer's process: the idea of Looney Dune came to me yesterday morning as I was driving to work. Out of the blue, I clearly heard the voice of Daffy Duck saying, in that way he has of spraying the first five rows of the audience: "Thhhuuufir Hawatttt". Good thing traffic was light, or I'd probably be posting on one of Jim Macdonald's threads instead of this one.

Bruce Cohen @ 268... Yeah, please do be careful. We loved the results of your inspiration, but don't let it lead to your expiration.

Well, it says the btch whr's actions don't appear to fit any law, but I've heard there are federal laws for this sort of thing.

And I figure if we post the names and addresses and caseworker names of people who just comment here and are obnoxious, why not these loathsome excrescences' information?

Their home:

Curt D. & Jori J. Drew
269 Waterford Crystal Drive
Dardenne Prairie, MO 63368
(636) 272-2670

Drew Advantage
2977 Highway K Ste 200, O Fallon, MO 63368-7862
Phone: (636) 272-2670

Bruce #257 and later comments on the same subthread:

I think one lesson of the net, broadly, is that when you're communicating online with none of the usual cues, social constraints, etc., which you normally have, you don't act the same as you do in person.

It's the fundamental attribution error bias again. You see people acting a certain way, and it's natural to imagine that's something inherent in what kind of person they are, but often, it's more about their surroundings.

If you change the environment, you change the behavior. And in an environment that supports cattiness and teenaged-girl-cruelty, I'm not surprised that this woman fell into exactly that behavior.

I don't know anything about this case besides what I've seen here, but most of us have probably had the experience of getting into a new situation or environment, and acting badly before we understood what we were doing. Perhaps she did the same? Under normal circumstances, cattiness and teenaged-girl cruelty doesn't lead to someone killing herself, and I can't imagine she thought she was doing anything more than being personally nasty to someone she didn't like.

Neil Willcox #256: I went through all of Scalzi's Creation Museum documentation, and the bit about the diorama was my favorite bit, so how did I miss a genius word like dioramageddon?

Ronit, I in mind have two books by the same author which might work for the PNW part of your request, but her name has fallen into a black hole; I will relentlessly not think about it and post when the information shows up.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #72: Thanks!

Ronit, Diane Duane has some very good Star Trek novels focusing on Vulcan backstory. They stand alone reasonably well for people who are not obsessive Trek fans. (I'm not sure how suitable they are for fourth graders. That includes a wide range of reading abilities and sophistication. I read them in my late teens.) Your relative might also like Duane's _So You Want To Be A Wizard_ and _Deep Wizardry_, though they don't mention Spock or the Pacific Northwest.

Faren, thanks for the suggestion in #80. I had tried several anti-seizure medications previously, with catastrophic side effects and no reduction in seizures. (Sometimes with side effects having second order effects making seizures worse.) Because I don't have convulsive seizures, only absence and partial, it's sometimes tempting to not bother with seizure control at all and just try to prevent migraines. Well, it would be, if migraine prevention meds other than the anti-seizure type did not tend to lower the seizure threshold as a side effect...

I am still looking for alternatives, because I'm not very happy with it. But it's scary and frustrating because it feels like I've already tried so many of the potential alternatives and had them be worse than nothing.

albatross 271: I don't know anything about this case besides what I've seen here

Clearly not. Go read some of the links, and you will see that this woman was not behaving normally even by the standards of social-networking sites.

Ronit, I came up with the author name (Patricia Beatty) but apparently the books I'm thinking of have disappeared into the mists of time. Guess that's what happens to the childhood favorites of those of us born in 1952. :/

Albatross, #271: At some point, you have to grow up and take responsibility for your own actions. Various members of the Administration aren't being given passes for failing to do that (at least, not here); why should this woman be any different?

Adrian, #275: Psst... it might be useful for you to provide titles! I assume you're talking about Spock's World and The Romulan Way?

JESR, #278: Have you tried searching for them on abebooks.com? That's often a fruitful place for finding out-of-print stuff.

JESR & Ronit - This search on Patricia Beatty on the USA abebooks site gives roughly a dozen titles. It looks like the most popular is Charley Skedaddle. There's even a teachers' book about it.

Any of them what you're thinking of?

My lost Australian unknown classic is completely beyond my memory for name of book and author, tho' I can see the cover reasonably clearly from 40+ years ago. A girl gets lost in Jenolan Caves and discovers it's full of strange magical creatures, with illustrations. About the same vintage as Snugglepot & Cuddlepie or The Magic Pudding, but quite forgotten. One day I hope it will turn up in the boxes my parents' possessions are packed into.

Ronit @ #263: re kids' books involving logging industry (but not PNW)-- how about Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles?

Mez, I think one of my kids may have read Charlie Skedadle in school, but the ones I'm looking for would have much earlier dates of publication; the only two on that list which fit are Ballad of Calamity Creek which is, I have a dim memory, a California gold rush story, and Bonanza Girl which is set in Idaho during the silver rush, and has a female heroine. The one's I'm thinking of are set closer to Patricia Beatty's home town of Quilleute, and have male protaganists.

Anyone who has a daughter (or a son who doesn't get icked by female protaganists) with a taste for historical tales should look for Bonanza Girl, O the Red Rose Tree, and The Nickel Plated Beauty.

Xopher, #270: They apparently have had the brass balls to press charges against Megan's father for destroying their fucking FOOSBALL table!

... which Megan's family was storing in their basement as a favor to the other family, who were temporarily short of space. Does this sound to anyone else remarkably like the canonical definition of chutzpah?

Ronit... ST-TOS novels focusing on Spock? I noticed one at he bookstore last night. DC Fontana's Vulcan's Glory, one of the original ST novels that was recently re-released. I've never read it, but the backcover says it's about Spock's early Starfleet days under the command of Captain Pike. That sounds like what the kid would like.

Hey, daughter:foosball table. Parity?

As the mother of a teenager who was the target of relentless bullying and harrassment from 2nd through 6th grade, I am so enraged by this story I can't see straight.

I think "feeling LESS guilty when you find that the child you hounded to her death had a history of suicidal tendencies" may be a reasonable working definition of sociopathy.

The first time I saw the FKB fail the Challenge involved a Yellow Pages (not inventive, but it was what I could grab), a small watermelon, and a double-chocolate cake that had "Try juggling this!" frosted on the top. What a wonderful mess.... And the one trick I haven't seen repeated (although I'm sure some other theater has supported it) was at Trinity Rep's half-round (Providence RI); in "Jazz", the downstage feeder ran down the side ramp, partway around the lobby, back in the near aisle, and simultaneously caught his pass and was hit by a spotlight.

Greg vs the onion: cold running water is the best helper I've found; you can section onions (which should be as much as necessary for crockpotting) under it, or rinse after each cut if dicing.
Vidalia reportedly have the same amount of onion-y compounds; the flavor comes from having a higher percentage of sugar than Coca-Cola does. I haven't tried other varieties, but I'm not sure they'd be useful in many dishes -- better to use fewer real onions and be done quickly.

Stefan@210: according to a contemporary story, A Chorus Line (opened 1975) was the first Broadway musical to use computerized dimmers; they couldn't do what they wanted to with the old piano boards, which everyone else had used because Broadway was 100% DC.

Bruce@252: (from a 1984 Usenet post): "Can we tawk? You wanna tawk? Here, stick your hand in this box."

Ronit@263: if he likes parallel lines, try him on How Much for Just the Planet?; he'll miss half of it, but that just makes for good re-reading later. Note that in this one Spock is the only one who \does/ Get It, for similarly inhuman reasons; we see this even though Paramount insisted on cutting the scene Ford wrote to show it.

When the composer of a movie's score has also written an overture, Turner Classic Movies will play that overture before starting the movie. (Well, there is a reason why it's called an overture.) They have done so with Spartacus, and with South Pacific, among others. Just now, I caught them doing that for... The Black Hole

Mind you, I like that score. And the movie is like a very guilty pleasure for me.("Why am I not surprised?" Tania and ethan say simultaneously.)

No comment.

Ethan, how did you miss dioramageddon? One of the commentors notes that Live Search asks if you mean "Dior Armageddon"; slightly less amusingly Google asks if you mean "goremageddon", which appears to be the name of an album by a Belgian death metal band.

It's been a "good" month for new words as I coined "spaghnostic" yesterday on the FSM thread.

ethan @ 288... Humph.

The USPS has issued their Christmas stamps for 2007, and their theme for the non-Madonna-&-Child set is:

Holiday Knits!

(My god, the power Teresa has....)

(Is anyone still pushing the idea of a "Science Fiction Authors" set of stamps? I think I first heard of the idea about 25 years ago, when someone was trying to gather signatures in support. And who would be on such a set -- probably 8 or 10 individuals -- nowadays?)

Bruce Arthurs @ 291... My god, the power Teresa has

Luckily for us, she knows that with great power comes great responsibility.

As for F/SF stamps... Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein? Tolkien?

Wow, **thanks** to the hivemind here. (And to our gracious hosts, for one of the few salons on the planet that could address this issue so thoroughly.)

Serge, thank you. I've actually been reading Vulcan's Glory this weekend, in between enjoying my cold. It's a fun read, particularly for those familiar with Trek but - eh. I don't know if it has quite enough of Spock being puzzled by humans for the kid.

Adrian @274, you're right, the Diane Duane Romulan books are marvelous but not quite what I had in mind for the kid. _So You Want To Be A Wizard_ and _Deep Wizardry_ will go on the list.

JESR and Mez : thanks to you both. Looking at this link, JESR, is the book you're thinking of Indian Canoemaker?
If it turns out that the kid was hooked by historical fiction, Beatty's books are going to be great for him.

Lila@281, Freckles is on the list. Thank you!

CHip @286. I'd forgotten about the parallel lines in How Much for Just the Planet? That would be worth a try. (Paramount made Ford cut a scene from the novel ?!?! What? Why? Is it somewhere I can I read it? )

Thank you all so very much.

That is, "somewhere I can read it?"

Arrgh.

Totally sweet photo set:

Dreams of Flying.

Stefan, those are absolutely beautiful. Thanks!

Ronit... By the way, what was that about Hambly's Ishmaël and Here Come The Brides? I do remember that the show's main character appeared twice in the original ST, and so did his nemesis, played by Mark Lenard.

Clifton @167: Would that have been the summer of '77? If so, if we ever meet, let's reminisce.

With regard to The Case for Hilary Clinton over there in the sidelights, was anyone else struck by the total lack of any attempt to give any reason why anyone should actually vote for her?

In the better bad news department, the blog readability test say I'm junior high level!

Serge, without getting too specific or spoilery, Hambly's Ishmael owes about as much to "Here Come the Brides" as it does to Trek.

Ronit, Indian Canoemaker is definitly one of the books I remember reading.

When I was young, Mom often took my sister and me to the Washington State Library. The Washington Room had a copy of every book with a Washington State author, and there were a lot of obscure historic juveniles of mixed quality, as well as Beatty's early stuff. The library is no longer open to the public, a terrible shame, and Timberland Regional Library system has lost or deassessioned (a word I loathe, and which I'm pretty sure I've misspelled) most of her titles.

Borrowing genes from bacteria, coral and jellyfish, scientists have set mice brains aglow in a bold panoply of colors, revealing the intricate highways and byways of neuronal connections.
The technique, dubbed "Brainbow" by its Harvard University inventors, is detailed in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/071031-brainbow.html

By combining fluorescent proteins, researchers create compelling images

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/11.01/01-brainbow.html

Also, while the full text of "Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system" is behind Nature's paywall, you can see the images alone, and the supplementary info, for free:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7166/fig_tab/nature06293_ft.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7166/suppinfo/nature06293.html

Off topic squee: my link is in a sidelight!!! And my name in the hover text and everything. Eeeeeee! Now I feel like I've made it. (And I've probably spoiled my chances of ever being taken seriously again with this comment.)

Ronit @ 299... Hmm... I guess I'll have to find a copy of that book then. By the way, did you know that Bruce Lee was in one episode of "Here Come The Brides"?

Ronit @ 299... Hmm... I guess I'll have to find a copy of that book then. By the way, did you know that Bruce Lee was in one episode of "Here Come The Brides"?

Adrian (#276): Glad to be of some help, and I hope you can find a medicine that suits you. I have short "absence" seizures myself, not the big, convulsive type, and Dilantin (phenytoin sodium) takes care of everything without extreme side effects. (Medical pros here: please don't write to tell me why those meds could be killing me! I've got enough problems on my mind these days.) Of course I don't know how they'd interact with migraine medicine, since I manage to cope with my sinus headaches with acetomenaphins plus mild, over-the-counter allergy pills -- a combo both my doctors say is OK, in moderation.

As for the problems: Mom's in the nursing home recovering from hip surgery, and someone is "mislaying"/stealing her clothes. Three pairs of trousers have now vanished, and I'm boiling over with fury.

Faren... Did you know that Farley's Phil Frank had died two months ago?

I just received a group of four or five virus/trojan E-mail messages, with the apparent sending addresses pretty clearly linked by this blog. One was "from" www.nielsenhayden.com@[something-or-other]. I simply deleted them, though in retrospect I should have waded through the new botched Hotmail interface to try to get the headers.

Aaron Swartz is doing a good job on his NaNoWriMo project.

JESR (300): deassessioned (a word I loathe, and which I'm pretty sure I've misspelled)

'deaccessioned' :)

Do you prefer 'weeded', 'discarded', or 'withdrawn'?

Mary Aileen #310:

I suspect she prefers none of the above; books shouldn't disappear from libraries.

Joann @ 311: books disappear from libraries all the time; either theft, damage, or simply old age... In some cases, replacing a book that has been out of print for decades could involve more money than a small library -- or even a big one --can or should invest. Which is why Interlibrary Loan is your friend...

Books that are deaccessioned may end up in someone's personal library - I have one of those. (It was one I'd been trying to find for years. The promised reprint kept being delayed.)

A couple Christmases ago, I got my father a large-print post-library copy of Three Men in a Boat because we'd both liked To Say Nothing of the Dog and he was approaching blindness at that point. He really thinks it's cool that it's post-library-- I'm just glad he was able to read it. It's pretty near the top of the list of Presents I Am Most Proud Of, even if his next detached retina did make it a moot point.

Mary Aileen, what I prefer is some attention given to the role of libraries in conserving history and knowledge.

I've been through several discussions about withdrawing books from circulation for one reason or another (including the archiving of the contents of the Washington Room) but I'm yet to be convinced that letting old titles disappear from all public access is a good thing.

I also have sort of old fashioned views about card catalogues.

In case anyone here is interested, there's a BBC World Service Radio Drama of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys available online until Saturday. It's been cut to an hour, so the ending wraps up a lot quicker (and less neatly) and most of the quirkier bits have gone, but it's pretty good if you liked the book. Or want something to listen to.

Amazon.com is selling a device called a kindle to compete with sony's ebook.

It uses the same e-ink display technology.

6" diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 4-level gray scale

Cost $400.

JESR (315): Ah. It's not just the particular word* you object to, but the practice. Fair enough.

I work in a small(ish) public library, and there's no possible way we could keep everything, but I agree that someone should. And a state library seems like a likely place (although they, too, have space limitations).

*'Deaccession' is a rather clunky word, and a little too euphemistic for my tastes. We call it 'weeding'.

Re the particle: "Moore, Spiegelman, Clowes, Simpsons"

It is most decidedly not a youtube commercial for a legal firm.

Why I was expecting that, I don't know...

Mary Aileen, what causes me most concern about "weeding" library collections is that there doesn't seem to be any attempt to make sure that a small library somewhere doesn't get rid of the last publically accessible copy of a book anywhere. I've come smack up against the loss of information more than once- trying to find a copy of a book by Mary Bard (Betty MacDonald's sister) for my daughter to read when she wondered what Eastlake in Seattle was like before the freeway was built, looking for Nancy Mitford's Wigs on the Green after reading Unity Mitford and the Banality of Evil, worst of all, trying to reconstruct the fire history of the Nisqually Valley and finding that several small-press histories I'd read in high school were not in collections anywhere.

I can accept that not every book should be kept in every library; I'm fine with the idea that the book I need is in Amanda Park and will be sent to Lacey by next week; what I fear is finding that the last copy of a book containing information available nowhere else has been pulped.

#319:

That's a hilarious sequence.

Lisa Simpson strikes me as future Neil Gaiman fangirl.

Mary Aileen at #318: I find 'weeding' rather a worrisome term for it, because it seems to imply that some books are actively unwanted rather than being unneeded or taking up more space than they're worth. 'Deaccessioned', however, is a horrendous changeling of a word.

I have quite a lot of ex-library books on my shelves - enough for me to reach out and grab one to check the stamps inside for the terminology. The first says "Withdrawn from Essex Libraries" and the second says "Sold by Essex County Council Libraries", so I've always thought of it as "withdrawing x from stock". Not sure what the process of looking through the stock to see what's got to go would be called, since I've never had to do it (thank goodness!).

Individ-ewe-al @ #303: I totally understand. I'd sent Serge something that he put on his LJ and PNH linked to it, attributing Serge. Which I thought was uber-awesome. I emailed a friend of mine who occasionally browses ML, squeeing "I helped with that, I helped with that! Isn't that just great?" and she was very patient with me.

That was the same week I sent Scalzi a bacon cookbook. I figure I've now had my 15 megabytes of fame. And I need to remember to not shop online late at night when I'm feeling rather whimsical.

Indiv_ewe-al @ 303... I've probably spoiled my chances of ever being taken seriously again

Heck, I squeed too when I saw that Particle that Tania mentions @ 323. Mind you, it was a silent squee, but a squee nonetheless.

Faren, #306, an interesting study shows differences in the brains of people with migraines. Also, I had a dear elderly friend who went into a nursing home and everything I brought her "disappeared." I told the director that I was going to start charging them for every disappeared item and it got much better.

A very interesting rant / argument about how to approach Global Warming:

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See. (The title is a come-on.)

. . . and a follow-up, after the author listened to arguments and objections:

How It All Ends

Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale?

While volunteering at my local library over the summer, I was handed a list of books that hadn't been checked out for a year or more, for the purpose of pulling them off the shelves to be purged from the stacks. One of them was Deities and Demigods.

Yes, the edition with Cthulhu and Elric.

I casually asked them if I could keep it; they looked utterly boggled that anyone would want such a thing, and said I could carry off any and every cull I wanted. Unfortunately, I'd walked there that day, it was fairly hot, and I did not relish the prospect of hauling an entire box of books 2 miles home over hilly terrain.

(And anyway, since it had been shelved among games/sports books, I wasn't particularly interested in acquiring football biographies or Playstation strategy guides. Alas, since the last time I'd checked, at least one copy of the Dune Encyclopedia had also been weeded from the county system.)

The cutesy little "one laptop per child" laptop is available for purchase; you buy one at $399, and a kid in a third world country gets one free.

http://www.laptopgiving.org

I'm very tempted. Anyone have a chance to play with one?

Here's a new one: It's not plagiarizing if there's no grade.

Now I did not know that.

JESR: I have an old fashioned view of card catalogues too. I found them to excellent research tools, and one which the computer systems don't match.

I never used title cards, but author and subject sets were great for associational searching.

Xopher #330: I blench. What chance have kids got, confronted with teaching like that?

xopher,

i cannot be arsed to search for a link, but a vancouver sun cutesy-relationship columnist* was fired a couple years ago when it was discovered many of her columns were plagiarized.

she didn't think it should have been such a big deal, as "i never claimed to be a journalist."

aaaaaauuuuughhhhh.

*think sex & the city without, of course, the sex, family newspaper don't you know.

Serge (#307): Yes, I read about Phil Frank's illness and death (plus tributes to him) on SFGate, and a relative who takes the Chron later sent the articles so my mom could read them too.

Rest home report: *one* pair of pants found, anyway. I'll have to ask them to pony up for what's still missing from Mom's closet. (Thanks for the tip, Marilee.)

Faren @ 334... I'm sad, and not just because I'll never again see Velma Melmac scare people at Yosemite Park.

Greg @317: it also wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines, and your daily newspaper. Using Verizon's cell phone network. And the fee is built into the price of the book or magazine...book prices are way lower than sony, $9.99 for NYT bestsellers.

It doesn't appear to read PDFs, and I dont know if you can sync it with your PC at all. It may be a closed system: buy from amazon, read on the Kindle, period. But since I haven't invested in ebooks yet, that may not be a problem for me...I'm thinking I may get one of these. Waiting for a bit to see how the reviews pan out - right now it only has 2.5 stars on its amazon page, out of 280 reviews, but I haven't started actually reading them.

Greg @ 317: Early reviews suggest it's competition to see who can send more customers to Sony. It's more expensive and you have to pay to put (some types) of your own data on it. It's also extraordinarily ugly for something designed in the last 10 years.

Julie L. (328): Were they automatically discarding everything that hadn't circulated in a year? A number of libraries do that, but it's not good practice. Circulation history is one thing to consider, but there are others. Also, a year isn't nearly long enough.

JESR (320): There would need to be some kind of central clearinghouse/depository for those last copies. The state library would seem to be the obvious place, but obviously the Washington State Library isn't interested.

Sam Kelly (322): We call the process 'weeding', but the books are stamped 'For Sale: Discarded'.

Terry Karney (331)/JESR (315): Card catalogues are great for some things, but they're very labor-intensive to keep up-to-date, and they don't contain nearly as much information as an online catalog. I sometimes miss the card catalog, but I'd never go back.

You can subscribe to read blogs on Amazon's new ebook thingie--for one or two dollars per blog per month.

I hereby downgrade my opinion of the device from "meh" to "ick".

Is it called "kindle" because it is an anagram of "ink LED", or indeed "ink-led"?

Terry Karney @ 331, YES! The ability to start at the broadest subject card, or at the subject card for a known title, and quickly search through the adjacent cards for further reading just doesn't exist in the computer library catalogues I've used, and the searches devised to replace it have not got the same flexibility and efficiency.

Mary Eileen, the Washington State Library isn't the problem: the Washington State Legislature is. Even though maintenence of the Washington Room is a constitutional requirement, it has not been funded as a currated circulating collection for decades, and the gorgeous but badly constructed WSL building is currently in use as offices and storage.

I spent many long days filing LCS cards in golden oak card files while working as a library tech. I found it an effective meditative activity, but then I was comparing it to using an addressograph to update library cards. Over my lifetime I have probably spent a year or more doing searches in similar files, and mostly come away relaxed and enlightened. In the past two decades I have dealt with each iteration of the online catalogue often enough to get familiar with its quirks, only to have what expertise I'd scraped together washed away by yet another /d/u/m/b/i/n/g/d/o/w/n upgrade. (Apparently these systems are being designed by people who hated using card files, just as new math curricula are made by people who hated drill and memorization and English composition books by those who think diagramming sentences was pointless and boring).

So many problems I see with using libraries these days come down to the matter of money and storage. I am not unsympathetic, nor do I think that it should be possible to run libraries for free, like forests, especially in the face of fools who expect them to be empty by, well, twenty years ago. I live in an area where the biggest problem is finding parking for the people who want to use the library, building new libraries as fast as they are needed.

But I really wish there was a way for me to use my developed research skills instead of having to ask the reference librarian (who is all too often as frustrated with the system as I am).

The UK Government has just mislaid details of some 25 million people.

They tell us they want us to have a biometric ID card.

It's enough to know that the people referred to in this little ditty are British politicians. (Flash animation)

It is sometimes difficult for a librarian to discuss things like weeding and card catalogues with bibliophiles -- which probably included 225% of the readers of this blog. BUT...

Online catalogs can, in fact, replicate the proximity search. For example, I just did one in our opac. I started with an author's name; when the book record came up, there was a link to other books of the same subject built right into the record. It also told me that we had an online version of it in addition to the print copy. It also suggested other subjects I hadn't realized could be connected. If your library is part of a consortia, your catalog will also tell you who has a copy of it if yours doesn't. Best of all, I can do this from my house, in my undies, drinking tea (or is this the wrong thread for clothing discussion? :-)).

Card catalogs are expensive and time-consuming to maintain, and most libraries no longer have the financial ability to pay two or three people whose only job is to file cards, and do quality control on the catalog.

As far as weeding is concerned, research going back several decades show that 80% of the items in a library fall into the "seldom/never used" categories. Sometimes libraries faced with a space crunch and no money to relieve it weed out the these items.

Question: Julie @328, were they mostly fiction? Those tend to go under the axe much faster as in a public library that is the subject with the biggest title turnover. Although I agree with Mary Eileen, one year seems rather precipitate.

And DON'T GET ME STARTED on the management types that suggest we weed out everything because "everything can be found in the Internet, anyway!"

Emma, that's wonderful, but I have to tell you: the online catalogue for the Timberland Regional Library Service is not that good. In addition the last two /d/u/m/b/i/n/g/d/o/w/n/s/ upgrades have more or less removed what little flexibility it had to begin with.

Just because yours works for you doesn't mean mine works for me (nor for the reference librarians who I go to for help, now, when I never had to before).

Emma, Mary Aileen: I used to be one of those people who did maintainence on card catalogues. I know, and appreciate how hard it is, and what a drain on the resources it it.

But I've never found a proximity search function which works as well. I also dislike having to figure out the work arounds for each library I go to. I have five library groups in easy reach of my house (Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, Glendale, Los Angeles). Each of them has a different system. When I was in college there were nine campuses, each with a different system (and an out of date, but not yet useless, card catalogue).

I have spent hours of my life searching fruitlessly for books I know the library had, but not being able to figure out the search string for that system.

I might not mind having to learn a new system, if I only had to learn one. I might not mind having to learn a new system if I didn't have to do it, every couple of years, at each library.

It's gotten to the point that I only use it to find specific books, and sometimes authors (e.g. John Mcphee, who ends up in different sections of the library).

Charlie Stross, I blame YOU!!!

You made me late to work today. This is, of course, entirely your fault and not due to any weakness or lack of self-control on my part resulting in my inability to put down Singularity Sky. No indeed.

In fact, to show how strong I am, I demand a rematch against each of your other books in turn. My steely will will not be defeated again.

Or maybe it will. But it will be a lot of fun.

Open thread, any topic allowed right? I just ran across this piece of news and got filled with an urge to share.

When centrally held information goes bad.

There seems to have been a massive: "Eh.. Oops?" moment in the UK now.

The government has misplaced the personal detail of 25million people. This involves names, names of their children, bank details and national insurence numbers etc.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7091090,00.html

Sica, the story there, and the other I found online, which is almost identical, is slightly ambiguous. Do they mean there is no backup or other copies, so the information is unavailable now? That seems to be implied. Which seems nonsensical.

Or is the concern that the information could be misused?

I don't think they mean that the data is lost.

That's not the problem. The problem is the potential for massive identity theft and fraud if the disks get into the wrong hands.

This sort of data should not go missing.

JESR@345 and Terry @346: Both your public libraries use Dynix. Perfectly good system for public libraries...but I'm used to a RollsRoyce.

Let me see something (skitters off into the Web): Terry, the browsing in the Pasadena and Glendale library catalog has been pulled to the left of the screen next to the record instead of in it. Bit of a pain but not unavigable. I looked at "trilobites"; not much cop, only two books, but there are links on the left to the broader term "paleontology" which leads to a subject list.

JESR, same thing for you. I guess it must be the "new" look for Dynix. You do seem to suffer from records with limited subject access. Your best bet is the "power search" feature.

Terry I understand the frustration, but different catalogs types serve different functions. Mine (III) was originally built to mantain processing records of complex serial materials; the front end was added later and it pulled information from very complete records. Dynix was designed as a front end, easy-to-search-by-the-average citizen catalog.

All online catalogs are built on the card catalog; in fact, if you look at an online record, it is a transcribed card. The only thing I can offer as a sop is that catalogs are undergoing rapid change and the next generation promise to be da..rned different. Ask Abi. Abi, where are you?

BTW, for what it's worth, I'll give you the secret of the graduate level researcher: you can look at ANYBODY's catalog and derive a list of books. I use Harvard to verify holdings information for mine! Then head out to your local library with a list of titles...

JESR (341/345): There are certainly some horrible online catalogs out there. The one where my mother lives has now way to do a title search. Author, title, or keyword only. Stupid!

Terry Karney (346): Yes, the lack of easy proximity search in most online catalogs is their biggest drawback, with lack of standardization close behind.

Emma (344): You can tell which of the libraries in your consortium own an item. You can tell if it's checked out and if so until when. When an item is added to or withdrawn from the collection it updates instantly and automatically. YOu can check from home in the middle of the night. All wonderful things.

On the one hand, there is a good probability that my family's data is in there, including bank details. It depends if it was current, or included historic information, since we left the UK Child Benefit rolls in July.

On the other hand, we're not likely targets, being neither rich nor famous. We're just sand grains on a very large beach, leaves in the forest.

On the gripping hand, it's useful ammo against the idea of a national ID database.

Mary Aileen @338 & Emma @344: The cull list that I'd been handed was all nonfiction; it was also limited to a relatively small section of the library, but iirc it ended up reducing those particular stacks by ~15% and I know there were other lists covering the rest of the collection. IIRC the quiescent periods on my list were anywhere from one year to 8ish, averaging maybe 2-3.

Another strange feature of this exercise was that it was being surreptitiously carried out against the wishes of the branch supervisor, who shared the same view as both of you that one year was an excessively short cutoff, but apparently there was some further history behind it-- when the branch was renovated a few years ago, there'd been an earlier cull list to reduce the number of books to be kept in storage during construction, but the branch supervisor had successfully resisted that cull and now we were running low on shelf space for new acquisitions. It is a fairly small branch, but otoh the renovation was concurrent with the main library being replaced with a much larger building, which still has vast empty swaths of shelves. I guess they weren't thinking in terms of simply transferring some of the excess holdings over there.

myself @ 352: no way, even (not 'now way', whatever that means)

OK, I'll post. I don't want to seem too commercial, because this is my day job I'm talking about here. I'll keep it generic; if you want to know about my specific one or try it out, drop me a line and I'll send you a link.

Faceted search, to give it its proper name, is the New Wave in library searching. The goal is to take the base format that the library's catalog is in, be it a MARC variant (US) or one of the European formats like Vubissm@rt, and put a user-friendly front end on it. Nice to haves include full text newspaper articles where licensed, and multiple different databases in different formats all searchable together (we do this; some others don't).

At a minimum, these systems should allow you to search by title, author, keywords, series title, Library of Congress subject category, or just do a text search in the entire database for a word or phrase. My company was one of the early ones to add a visual element, with a word cloud based on what words turn up near the words you're looking for in records (co-ocurrences). A couple of other software providers are now adding tag clouds in to do much the same thing.

(Libraries need this because the general public includes a lot of visual thinkers as well as the text and keyword types. This stuff has to have many paths to the same information.)

Once you have all this searching, of course, you have a lot of results to take to the user. Pretty much everyone has a results ranking algorithm, trying to push the most relevant answers to the top.

Another piece of the puzzle is the ability to refine your search results, by subject area, format, periodical title, year of publication, whatever.

It's all about using the same catalog information libraries have always had (which is now, as Emma says, a collection of card catalog cards in electronic format) and trying to find ways of searching it and presenting it to the patron. The more thought that goes into the front end and the interaction with the user, the better. We do usability studies and reference a lot of search psychology.

(I also love feedback about what people love and hate in catalogs; I read threads like this with a notebook* to hand.)

-----
* hand-bound, naturally

Stefan @329,

I got to play with one last weekend, and previously I'd had a chance to talk with people on its design team.

Overall I'm about 51% on the side of getting one for myself, based solely on how I could use it. It couldn't be my only laptop, though, nor could it be a work laptop.

(As to the olpc program for education- I think it could be helpful, just based on the numbers I'd seen for average textbook cost and lifespan. That's a different discussion.)

Pluses:
Screen quality- I took it outside to test sunlight mode. Easily readable in a bright courtyard at noon.

Configurations- the screen can be rotated from a standard laptop mode to a book mode.

Weight and size- lightweight. Designed for ruggedness.

Power consumption- very low power. I don't know if the 2for1 special comes with the pull-power generator. (That alone was a nice bit of engineering)

Noise- no fan.

Neutrals (to me):
keyboard- I could use the keyboard, but other people there with wider fingers were finding it difficult. I don't know how it would work for extended writing.

UI: the UI wasn't good, but I'd expect new ones to be available soon enough

Negatives:
It could only be a partial replacement for a work laptop.

If I found that the keyboard does't allow for extended writing, then the keyboard would have to move from neutral to negative.

Unknowns:
wireless and connectivity: I didn't test this.

Julie @354: curioser and curioser. Nonfiction usually hangs around at least 5 years before being considered... In some subjects even more.

It sounds there were some nasty politics being played in your place.

Emma, no, my best bet, these days, is to avoid the library entirely, in favor of Amazon and Powell's (although Powell's search is as bad as anything out there). I'm not researching anything which needs library access, I'm not motivated to push my beta-blocker dulled brain to master a system which, experience suggests, will be subjected to a complete redesign in a year or two anyway, and I've got sufficient money to buy most things I need, in the print world.

So I'm no longer a libray user; if I need something I can't afford (the Timber Press book on magnolias and their allies, for instance) I have my husband check it out. After over fifty years, I've been deaccessioned as a library patron.

Not sure which thread is best in which to post this link:

Principle vs Money

JESR @359:
I'm really painfully saddened to hear that. Maybe in a little while when the interfaces have stabilized you can try again.

I, for one, am working really hard to make that sort of alienation from the library not happen.

JESR, I second Abi's feelings.
And if you ever need any research help, I'm a pretty good hand at surfing card catalogs of every stripe. Drop me a line.

JESR: And I third them.

One search system that irks me is IMDB.com... If I want to know more about, say, the bio of Katharine Hepburn, it will list all available entries for all the men whose names show up in relation to her, then we get around to the little women.

Thanks Kathryn!

I suppose I could, if I found the one I kept to be a doorstop, donate it to a local program.

There are plenty of schools in the U.S. for which these little slabs would be a vast upgrade in technology.

At some point the UMCP on-line catalog specifically had a "go back and forth sequentially through the cards" search method.

kandle, #340: I thought "kindle" was one of the collective nouns for cats. At any rate, that's the first image MY brain pops up.

Stefan @365,

On further reflection, I think that a good part of my hesitation is that I don't have much discretionary income for myself at the moment*.

If that wasn't an issue, I'd be very likely to consider it. Some part of that is based on wanting to be an early promoter of the technologies and pricing of an olpc**. (not necessarily to be an early adopter: I live in Silicon Valley... I can early-adopt vicariously.)

Being able to read and write on a device in bright sunshine- that's a big plus.

-------------
* darn you, UCPress sale. Although many of those are to be Xmas gifts.

** rugged, low-power, open-source, under $200. I generally like these.

"Never burn a bridge unless your foe is on it, captain."

(Found in http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071116)

Lee@367: I didn't know that meaning of "kindle", but you're quite right. What a nice word (well, use of). Not sure it's what the makers had in mind, though.

Perhaps they plan to make a start on the burning of books...?

A question for the Fluorospherianly massive brain.

I'm looking for SF stories I'm sure I've seen / read, but I don't have time to reread my collection of Asimov's magazines (most likely place I'd have seen them).

What near-future SF stories have covered inexpensive gene testing? These stories would cover issues and implications of you knowing many of your own significant SNPs*, good and bad.

This wouldn't include stories where full genetic engineering and repair is possible, or Gattica.

I'm looking for SF takes on today, where you now can get a probability map (however fuzzy) of certain genetically-linked health risks. Your test results may also apply to various family members.

I've read through the wonderful 'Biology in SF' blog and a few similar places- it doesn't list specific stories.

Other places I could look? People to ask? Do you remember stories like this?

--------
* that is, what you can buy for $1000-$2500, as of this month.

Beyond this horizon springs immediately to mind, incorrect chromosone count and all.

Terry @372,
I recall that story jumping from plain old selective breeding (original Howard family) to widespread longevity (from research on Earth).

I'm thinking more about stories that have the look and feel (poignancy) of Heinlein's Life-Line, when people are contemplating if they should gain certain knowledge of an unchangeable fact.

But instead of the envelope containing your death-date, the envelope contains probabilities- that you're more likely to get heart disease, or not get colon cancer, or to get Alzheimers, than average...

Too far advanced, Terry, for Kathyrn's purposes. "Melodies of the Heart" comes to mind, but I don't think that's what she's looking for either. I think there's a story in Greg Egan's Axiomatic that'd fit.

Beyond this horizon is the one with the genetic breeding, and "The control naturals" who are just randomly bred, instead of the parents going to a genetics counselor, and getting whatever improvements they can make fit.

It has the guy from the 20th century who shows up and is a freak.

It's not a future history story at all.

But there are versions of the Future History chart that have it. It's an oddity. I seem to recall asking James Gifford about this at the Centennial, and, dammit, don't recall what he told me, and the Reader's Companion is elsewhere. Both copies. Dammit.

(Okay, the hardbound copy is somewhere in one of our countless boxes of books. I must start unpacking them.)

Some days I need to wear a bicycle helmet while surfing the web.

crash.

Brian May, lead guitarist from rock band Queen who has just completed a doctorate in astrophysics, was on Monday named as the next chancellor to Liverpool John Moores University.

(checking calender, no, not April 1. hm.)

Another Shoe Drops

#378: Cripes, Cthulhu has a lot shoes!

I'm dropping this here because I simply can't keep up with all the Christianity discussion in all the places it's happening at the moment. So people will have to settle for two very generalized responses.

First, on Biblical literalism: Obviously it isn't really. What it really means is an interpretational tradition in a milieu where there isn't a hierarchy to transmit it. The thing is that they do have something of a point: there has to be some point at which non-literal readings have nonetheless to be constrained by the text.

Second: on a different thread there's been a lot of discussion of Christian plausibility that is dipping heavily into Christology. This is in fact an extremely well-trodden field, so the first thing one has to do is deal with the standard answers. At the very least one should admit that speculation about what was going on in Jesus' mind is untenable. Another error which should be pointed out is that better-read moderns are prone to thinking that Jesus is more or less like the avatars of Vishnu. That is definitely inaccurate (at least if you take scripture as a source-- and what other source is there?). The fusion of the divine and the human in Jesus is permanent; the risen Jesus is just as human as before.

Looney Dune Cast Photos

#52 - Mary Aileen

The one where my mother lives has no way to do a title search. Author, title, or keyword only.

Huh? What is "title only" if not a title search? Or do you mean "author, title, or keyword" to be one omnibus search? (That's so backward and bizarre it took me three readings of you post to even consider it. My sympathies if that's the situation!)

Bruce Cohen @ 381... Heheheh

BTW, anyone have a suggestion for an OTS (and free) catalog system for a home library? I don't have room on top of my bookshelves for busts of Roman emperors.

R. M. Koske (#382) I found that piece in Mary Aileen's post puzzling too.
My biggest beef with most database searches over the last decade or so, despite constant requests in specifications I've contributed to, is the lack of "not". Often if I'm searching for something where you can get a large number of hits, the best way is to search for X and not Y, where Y is the likeliest false hit. Google is good this way, tho' not always consistently correct.

R. M. Koske(382)/Mez (385): I meant "author, subject, or keyword only, not title. I obviously didn't proofread that post very well. Sorry for the confusion.

And, in fact, one can search that catalog by title keyword. But if you have an exact title--you can't search that way.

I found this in today's newsletter from the Annals of Improbable Research.

"Effects of Caffeine on Olfactory and Visual Learning in the Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera)," A. Si, and S.W. Zhang, et al, Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, vol. 82, no. 4, 2005, pp. 664-72. (Thanks to James Rodger for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain:

"Although caffeine is known to improve alertness and arousal in humans and other mammals, its impacts on specific behaviours, including complex cognitive processes, remain controversial.... Behavioural testing was performed with either tethered or free- flying adult honeybees. We show that caffeine has marked cognitive effects in this species."

Tethered bees?

Serge @ 387

ISTR they tether them by a thread carefully glued between the wings. Not a harness, if that's what you were thinking.

(If you're studying flying objects, it helps if they can actually fly while being studied (they have small wind tunnels for this, I believe).)

Popping in with a link I thought Jim might find interesting (since I don't see an easy email link for him as PNH & TNH have):

Bruce Schneier: More "War on the Unexpected"

A Canadian firetruck responding with lights and sirens to a weekend fire in Rouses Point, New York, was stopped at the U.S. border for about eight minutes, U.S. border officials said Tuesday.
[...]
The Canadian firefighters "were asked for IDs," Trombley said. "I believe they even ran the license plate on the truck to make sure it was legal."

P J @ 388... The idea of putting a harness on a bee hadn't occurred to me, but it makes the whole idea sound even sillier.

"Something wrong, honey?"
"I dunno."
"Have some coffee."
"I did. I just can't shake that dragged-down feeling."

#386 - Mary Aileen

Ah! Yes, I can see that being quite frustrating.

The idea of putting a harness on a bee hadn't occurred to me, but it makes the whole idea sound even sillier.

It's the only way to manage if, like Lord Mackay of Clashfren, you keep a bee.

(Reference to this episode of QI. Sorry.)

Clashfern. Damn. The time to proofread is before you press Post.

candle... Stephen Fry strikes again?

Serge: Tethered bees?

Well, if you want your pet bee running loose all around the neighborhood...hey, does that thing even have a license?

Ha ha ha, tee hee hee...

Serge -- I'll see your tethered caffeinated honeybees and raise you some shaved mice milk.

Xopher... Debbie... Twasped the night beefore Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse whose back had been shaved.

Kathryn @ 371: What near-future SF stories have covered inexpensive gene testing?

Nancy Kress' "The Mountain to Mohammed". But its concern is the effects of such testing on insurance and, thus, health care availability. It doesn't dwell on people choosing whether to know their expected lifespan (indeed, part of the premise is that you basically don't get a choice, if you've ever sought health care.) But people knowing it is one of the touching-off points for the story.

C. Wingate @ #384, it may or may not serve your needs, but you might want to look at Library Thing for home cataloging.

The stockings were tethered by the chimney with Nair, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would bee there with a new shaver for Mom.

The children were nestlé'd all snug in their beds, while visions of Honeycombs danced in their heads.

Kathryn #371:

I've seen a lot of factual discussion, but I can't think of any SF about this, off the top of my head. Though I'll have to go look for Nancy Kress' story, now.

The medical consequences are one side of this. I have a relative who carries the Huntington's gene, which is genuinely a nasty thing to know, and raises exactly the issues you're thinking of.

The health and life insurance stuff is genuinely hard to deal with. Suppose there's a set of tests that can give you a solid knowledge of the risks you face w.r.t. health problems. There seem two broad choices:

a. Insurance companies make you take the test, and then quote you rates; just like the physical or mouth swab (allegedly for HIV antibodies and residue from smoking, I think) you might take now. If you got the wrong roll of the dice in your genes, your insurance rates include the 15% chance you'll have breast cancer in the next decade.

b. Insurance companies don't or can't make you take the test. Many people take the test confidentially, and then go buy insurance based partly on the results. At least some levels of life and health insurance coverage likely become very expensive, because of adverse selection.

I could see this being one of the issues that drives us toward some kind of nationalized healthcare.

Similar concerns arise all over the place. Is it okay if we test accused criminals/juvenile delinquents/immigrants/everyone for crime-predisposition genes, assuming they exist and can be found? ("Sorry, Sir, but this test shows that you're at high risk of violent behavior, so we're not going to be able to let you rent an apartment here.")

Anyway, I'd be interested in seeing a post somewhere about what stories you find....

re 399: Hmmmm.... Looks very intersting. It's probably not fully what I need since one thing I need to know is where things are (we have a couple of thousand books spread out over around 20 bookcases) but it would certainly be useful for one subcollection.

albatross @ 401

Or testing for bipolar/unipolar conditions - they've demonstrated genetic connections (we aren't all surprised by that).

Or variations of genetic high cholesterol - would you get a better rate if you have the kind that results in gallstones rather than the kind that produces arterial blockage?

C. Wingate @ #402, Use the comment field for location. Many users do that.

C. Wingate @ #384: I second Linkmeister's suggestion - I love Library Thing. The cuecat bar code reader speeds up entry quite a bit, btw.

C Wingate: There is/has been/always will be a great deal of discussion on the nature of the incarnation. The non-canonic gospels don't help.

But they do point to the problems of canon. We have the scriptures we have because people made choices about what to believe/transmit. We accept them because a lot of people had a lot of arguments about them. Absent the belief in direct intervention to see to it we got the pukka gen (and the text doesn't support that) we don't know they are correct, we merely accept them as so.

For those who are interested, I commend "Misquoting Jesus" for it's explantions of how exigesis works.

As for the "avatar" aspects of well read moderns, it's not unique to us. Entire religious structures built on variations of the nature of Christ existed, and continue to exist.

Oh, dear.

"Director Ron Howard consults with scientists at the particle physics research center for a movie version of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.[...]

"Angels & Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican by using antimatter stolen from CERN."

Bill Higgins @ 407... You didn't make that up? It sounds like one of those SciFi Channel plots we sometimes cook up around here.

Holy Heavy Water!

Lee @ #367: I'd seen that term spelled "kendle", and I had it associated specifically with a litter of kittens fathered by more than one male. (The multiple-fathers-for-kittens-in-same-litter is well attested, but I can't find a source associating that with the word "kendle" so I may be confused.)

For me, naming an e-book reader "Kindle" brings on unfortunate images of book-burning.

Does anybody remember the complete lyrics from MST3K's Thanksgiving song? I googled for it, without luck. I think it went:

We're gathered together

To watch cheesy movies

On Mystery Science Theater 3000

I forgot the rest.

C. Wingate @384 - I have no personal experience with ABEBooks' free Homebase program, but some persons I trust recommend it. It may well be overkill for your needs, but it seems flexible and can accomodate details like location.

Since this is probably the last time I'll be near a computer until Sunday evening, I'm going to take this opportunity to wish everyone who goes in for this sort of thing a happy Thanksgiving, and everyone else a happy Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Same to you, ethan.

Bill Higgins -- Beam Jockey #407: Anti-matter from CERN? That's a plot point with more holes than a Swiss cheese.

ethan #412: And the same to you!!

Linkmeister had the nifty idea that there should be a Libary Thing group for Making Light denizens. So I took the liberty of creating it - it's called "Making Light Denizens." (I thought about calling it "Fluorospherians" or somesuch but people would have to know how to spell it, and putting "Making Light" in the title for search purposes seemed sensible.)

It has no discussion forum or anything like that (since that belongs over here), it's just a way for us to group our member names together so we can snoop through each other's libraries. Please join it if you're a thing-er, and if you're not a thing-er, please consider becoming one! I'm also sending invites via LT to the few people whose usernames I know over there. (My username there is marydell)

Fragano @ 414... When all seems lost, the Vatican is saved, not by the Swiss Guard, but by the Swiss Cheese Algorithm.

Mary Dell, I shudder to think how many books that group will have in the aggregate once more Fluorospherians find it over there.

(Of course I signed up!)

Have a happy Turkey Day, ethan, and everyone else as well.

Mary Dell @ 416, Linkmester @ 418:

I'm in. That's three of us (I'm "doubtfulpalace"), and we collectively have 5,310 books. I should finish cataloging my library so as not to let down the side.

I'm not convinced the "most shared" list is accurate, since it didn't change at all when I joined, and consists entirely of Rex Stout books.

C. Wingate: I use tags for location, prefaced by an at-sign, e.g. "@oversize_downstairs" or "@books_about_books."

Tim @420: It appears that Linkmeister and I are both Rex Stout addicts.

Tee hee, I just noticed on my profile page, under "members with your books" there's a member called "Rustermans"

I must catalog the last 200 books or so that aren't in my LT library so I can crack 1000 and not feel like such an egg compared to you folks.

I invited languagehat to join, btw. That's a library worth snooping.

I'm on my second collection of the Wolfe books. When we moved from Virginia to Guam in 1968 I gave them all to the Fairfax County Public Library. It wasn't till last year that I finally got the one missing volume (A Family Affair) to complete the collection.

Bruce Cohen @ 419.. Have a good time. My own Turkey Day plans include, after setting up the Xmas Tree, watching MST3K's The Day The Earth Froze and, time permitting, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Oh my goodness. Following Tim's link from his LT profile finds a whole page of music downloads ostensibly pertaining to Christmas.

Yes, I am nosy. Why?

Serge #417: That's not as cuckoo as an actual Dan Brown plot.

#s 416, 418, 420: I joined also. I note that my presence, while increasing the number of books in the 'library' did not change the dominance of Rex Stout (though I have none of his works).

Mary Dell @ 421: It appears that Linkmeister and I are both Rex Stout addicts.

There must be at least one book that all three of us have, though. Or am I misunderstanding what "most commonly shared" means?

By the way, Tim, I'm not sure whether that "most shared" list is immediately updated.

Also, the shared list is weighted. I'm not sure how. I think I once read Tim Spalding's explanation but have forgotten it.

LT thread on common books and weighting issues.

Linkmeister @ 424: Oh my goodness. Following Tim's link from his LT profile finds a whole page of music downloads ostensibly pertaining to Christmas.

And the deadline for this year's is Monday, and I haven't started it yet, or even had a good idea...

But 2003's entry is by far the most popular thing I've ever done, and seems like exactly the sort of thing that fluorospherians might like, and it's almost Thanksgiving, so... why wait?

Ah. If you look at the Group Zeitgeist page (top right link at the Group home page) you'll see different books as commonly shared. The weighting concept is one I don't understand yet.

Argh. All that coy blather and I broke the link. Here it is: Christmas Rhapsody (think Queen).

Linkmeister @ 432: Interesting. Perhaps there really are no books held by three or more of us.

Fragano @ 425... That's not as cuckoo as an actual Dan Brown plot.

His books are that bad?

The vet said the cats need more protein (Spirit, particularly, who only weighs 5 pounds 4 ounces), so I bought turkey drumsticks and a turkey breast this week. I just finished cooking the drumsticks in the microwave (waiting for them to sit a bit before we have a bit and then freezing the rest) and tomorrow the turkey breast goes in the microwave.

Serge @ #435, here's the best review of The Da Vinci Code I ever saw. And it is just as bad as the reviewer claims.

I reviewed it myself the day before that one appeared.

Re: LT I'm in, but so far the only books I have listed are the ones which happened to be on my desk here at work (ones recently loaned out and returned and not yet taken home) or semi-permanently on my bookshelves here. Maybe this will incentivise me to get my home library straightened out post-move.

Have a good Thanksgiving Day, Marilee. The kitties too.

It certainly would be an incentive to find the rest of my library, which is all out of Rex Stout - although my mother certainly had a number of them.

Cookbooks, on the other hand - those I have several of on the 'open' shelves.

I added myself to the group. I don't have many of my books listed there yet. Thanks, Mary Dell.

I'm in on the LT group, I'm tclucas. I have a couple thousand books that need cataloged, but that's why I've suggested that a CueCat might be a good gift idea.

Especially looking at other people's catalogs, I keep going "I have that book too", but I've not inventoried it.

Questions about LibraryThing, on which I have my available books as Mezza (I wasn't allowed just Mez), but not the thousands packed away in the Great Clearances, e.g. my childhood complete collections of Biggles and Agatha Christie books, as well as 1960s & 1970s SF.

LibraryThing allows you to automatically import your Amazon wishlists, but then just merges those entries into the list of your existing books, and doesn't, say, automatically add a tag like "wanted" or "wishlist" or "amazon". So it looks like I have a bunch of odd, exotic, expensive and exciting books which in fact I've just been hankering after for years.

Does anyone know of a way to easily distinguish those on import? Or do I just have to comb through the entire library searching them out and tagging them?

It'd be very useful to have some kind of 'category' or 'shelf' or 'bookcase' or 'file cabinet' thing as a choice *for display* along with everything by author, or everything by title, etc, so you could have different sets kept together and then sorted within each of those. So I could have the wishlist on one 'bookcase' screen with a title or label I could call Amazon Wishlist, 'parents' or something for everything I can remember that's packed away there, and so forth, and they'd move if I got something from the wishlist and changed its category to, say, 'homelibrary', or brought a box from my parents' over to home.

Does anyone know if there's some kind of way of doing this already that I haven't grasped?

Tania @#442, if you see a book in someone else's library that you also have, just click the plus sign and it'll add it to your catalog. That's one of the great things about LT. I have a CueCat, but for popular stuff like, say, Rex Stout, I just find a library that's already got it and dump the appropriate books into my own library.

Tim Walters @#434: four of us so far have 1984 - including you, me, and Linkmeister. If you click through the various names you can see how many books you have in common. The weighting thing is weird...you would think it would give more weight to a book owned by more people.

Fragano, you and I only have 14 books in common, but those books happen to be ones that I particularly love. So I shall have to go a-browsing in your library to see what else I should be reading.

Hey, I hadn't noticed the cool "also on" feature in our profiles before - it lets you link your LJ, DA, flickr, youtube, myspace, etc - up to 10 other online identities. I left my DA off of there (DeviantArt, that is) because some of my art is a bit boobalicious and I don't want my Dad or co-workers browsing through and being shocked. But it pains me to lose an opportunity to have a complete, octopus-like web 2.0 identity.

Re; Library Thing, Rex Stout, etc.. Don't forget the Nero Wolfe cookbook.

linkmeister @ 437... Thanks for the link. Many moons ago, I had considered reading the book as what it is, a work of fiction, but I was told it wasn't very well written, and kind of boring. So I passed. Good thing I did, eh?

I"m glad all that talk of animal crap has faded away; this was beginning to seem like the Thread at Poo Corner.

Mary Dell: But it pains me to lose an opportunity to have a complete, octopus-like web 2.0 identity.

I think the octopus got harpooned by the basic flaw in a "complete Web 2.0 identity" -- most people do want some boundaries as far as who sees what!

"Oh bother," said Pooh as his roll of paper ran out in the very middle of the Hundred-Acre Wood.

Mez, you might want to haunt the Site Talk group, or the Desirable Features group (I know that's not the right name, but there's something like it), because Tim and his team are constantly improving the system and they're pretty responsive if enough people ask. Somebody may have requested exactly what you're asking: a "tag while importing" feature.

Serge @ 408 -- oh yes, it's the real plot. Makes my brain hurt. The book contains the immortal line "So....CERN has a particle accelerator?"

(This once spawned an entire subthread here, arguing about whether or not that was a reasonable thing to say.)

In that book, CERN also has a super-jet.

re 406: Bart Ehrman helped edit the last version of the standard intro work on NT textual criticism, Text of the New Testament, but frankly you'd be better off sticking with the primary author, Bruce Metzger. If you'll look at any review of Misquoting Jesus from the scholarly community, you'll find that they all complain that he is exaggerating the issue to the point of severe distortion. He is book fits into a secular worldview that wants an unreliable gospel, but when it comes down to it there's not much reason to believe that gospels have been altered theologically over the years. It is abundantly clear that they haven't been altered so much as to produce a gnostic to Nicene transformation. Also, part of the problem with trying to compare the gnostic texts to the orthodox ones is that their notions about religion are so different. The gnostic texts don't have to be true in the context of gnosticism, but the orthodox texts do have to be true within their own context. To accuse the church fathers of picking and choosing among the text is to beg the question: one cannot reconcile the two sets of texts without picking and choosing.

Jeepers. While searching LT for "importing wishlists" I found this nifty hack for picking up all the "items you've told Amazon you own" and importing them:

1. While signed in to Amazon, click the center tab on the top ("your name's store")
2a. The top line should read "These recommendations are based on items you own and more." Click the "items you own" link.

2b hack the url part limiting the number of books listed
e.g. &minItem=1&maxItem=999
2c hit enter to get a complete list of books you've ordered

3. Select "view page source" (under the View menu, or simply command U on a Mac)
4. Select all and save as a text file
5. Import that text file into LibraryThing using the Universal Import

Now I wonder if the same could be done with a wishlist.

If not, this page says (on the right, in yellow) that there are instructions for importing from Amazon wishlists. And so there are. Since it forces you to do them one page at a time, in theory you could do a page, tag each item (which should be identifiable in your "add books" page as the most recently added books), and repeat.

I did it. Broke down and joined LT, started added the books in eye's reach.

I have one book which only one other member has. I also have one book (so far) which isn't findable in the data base, so I get to learn the advanced tools.

Go figure.

But most of my books are in storage.

#416 Mary

But what about the ExtremelyGuilty Pleasure books one doesn't want other people knowing one has?! (There are some such as Legend of Miaree which I have simply because I have a really bad case of book hoarding and back when I could find it, wasn't into deacquisitioning... were I deacquisitioning, which I ought to do and had things sorted and organized and accessible (ha, ha, ha, ha...) it would be one of a not inconsiderable number of books on the "books that I would only look at again for research purposes, their value as entertainment and information content for me is negligible." It's not something that I'm embarrassed to acknowledge having copy of--bought it long ago when I was buying rather omnivorously and widely. I have a number of books that other people regard highly that have no appeal to me--those, too, don't fall into the Embarrassment/continuing-lapse-of-taste category--that I bought back then, under the "if you wait to buy it until you're sure you really want it/think it worthwhile, it shall have gone out of been and become unavailable."

As for my want list, one of these years I intend to do something about getting a copy of Forgotten Queens of Islam, and the volumes of A Mediterranean Society I don't have, and perhaps a copy of The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. I probably never will do anything about getting a first printing of Nine Princes in AmberNine Princes in Amber

Paula, one of the features Tim's working on is a way to hide part of your public library. Your request isn't the first of its kind. OTOH, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen, as there are higher priority items in his and his team's mind.

That Möbius transformation particle is really gorgeous. If you're interested in following up the math involved I most highly recommend Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham. It's an informal book* understandable by someone with a good grasp of trigonometry and as much calculus as you'd get in high school AP class. It presents the subject in a strongly visual format; there's an average of more than one diagram, drawing, or computer plot on every page. There's also an emphasis on how to use computers to model and draw many of the mathematical objects. I enjoyed it a great deal, but then I'm a geometry freak from way back. If you are, you'll like it too.

* that is, not all lemmas are proved and many proofs are just sketched.

#455 Not to mention the smut that all us 40 year old perverts in our underwear presumably have. Unless we're all sock puppets.

Bruce Cohen @457: One of the blurbs said something to the effect, that if you could only buy one math book this year, you should buy this one. I could only, and I did.

Your link was 'malformed' (sorry). Fixed it for you: Visual Complex Analysis.

Wish I understood it better, but that's me. Since I started studying computer graphics (thirty years ago), I developed an odd fetish for math books. This one was especially appealing.

Linkmeister @456, et.al.

I've added myself to the Denizens. I've also got a cue-cat that's partially on its way to LT readiness.

However, in logging onto LT tonight it seems as if the UI has changed since the last time, and for the worse. Anyone else seeing that?

Previously I could select a book, select the appropriate cover and it- the right version- was part of my LT list. Now I'm seeing no options for "choose from this set of the most common versions." It's taking several clicks to get a book in.

Kathryn - I think they're doing upgrades or maintenance, because LT was acting normally, and right now it is wonky. Apparently we're supposed to be in bed at this time of day??

Albatross @401, Zed @398, J.A.A. and Terry:

Most of the time when I read about a new science development it'll remind me of a few SF stories. Remembering the author or title might be tough, but a bell, however faintly, is rung*.

Not with the 23AndMe / DeCODEMe news. A middle-class person pays 1-2 weeks wages in order to get an incomplete but still interesting database of genetic information? In a few years that $1000 will get them their complete genome? Nifty and Shiny. Why am I not remembering stories from 15 or 20 years ago that contain this?

Thanks for giving me the title of that Kress story. I remember reading it in Asimov's: it has quite a kick. (iirc- that's the one where a doctor is xvpxrq bhg nsgre ur urycf na havafherq crefba, cneg bs n ynetre cyna...?)

The Kress and the Flynn (Melodies...) both have hopeful endings- something is changed, or changing.

What I'm trying to remember- if I've ever read them- would be stories like the last paragraphs of LifeLine. You can choose to know an unchangeable fact about yourself, but that's it.

The closest (for the poignancy, not the specific science) I remember is a novella from 5+ years ago**. In that story the protagonist discovers he is one of the very few people who can't be helped by the common genetic treatment for aging. He had to come to terms with that.

23AndMe is only offering a faint and fuzzy probability map, but that's still profoundly different from what we've had before***.

-----------
* Bells? 'A Song for Lya' comes to mind, for example.

** Published in Asimov's, by Marusek, WJWilliams, Reed or Stableford, most likely. Contained a bit about "adults give children pets to help kids learn about death."

*** If you've got a LJ account I've got a F-locked essay on this, with more to come.

Mary Dell back @ 444: Thanks! That's exactly what I needed. Now I need to go read up on looking for duplicates -- ooh, look at that, it just identified my current upload as having 55 dupes. Hurrah for technology.

Just joined LibraryThing as SpeakerToManagers. It's way too late to start adding books; I was only up this late because our toaster oven just died, and I spent awhile finding a replacement at Amazon. It's true their search engine sucks, so I had to do a linear browse through all the DeLonghi products in their catalog to find the right one. Then, of course, the one I wanted had a 3-6 week delivery on it, so I found another one that I could get in a 4 days, but that took more browsing. Meh, I say, meh!

Kathryn #462 -- I don't think it's Marusek. As I understand it, all of his SF is included in either "Getting to Know You" or "Counting Heads" (or both); I've read both this year and that's not ringing bells for me.

I'm evilrooster on LT. Joined the group.

Just joined the group, but cataloging the collection again (we abandoned our delicious library catalog a year or so ago) is a big job.

Keep intending to finish cataloging the bookbinding books, with the intention of moving the book reviews from my increasingly stale bookbinding site.

Time, of course, permitting.

Sigh. Sick, not proofreading posts.

Rob Rusick @ 459

Thanks for fixing that link. That was a weird miscopy, I wonder how it got that way? Maybe I was trying too hard to not use the google link, which is rooted in www.google.com, and gives the posting routine on ML indigestion, causing posts with only one link to be held for inspection.

I was somewhat into math in high school and for awhile in college, but I ran into a block that made me drop it for years. But I've always been fascinated by geometry, and I love animated films so I gravitated to computer animation, and so I had to study geometry again, as well as basic linear algebra and curve and surface interpolation, and I found I really liked it.

The result is somewhat of a fetish for me as well. I have a lot of math and physics books, and some of them are really at or beyond my limit of comprehension, at least with the time I have to put into them. But I keep plugging away at them, and I'm occasionally rewarded by comprehending something really beautiful, like Group Theory, and its relation to the structure of geometry, or the basic idea of Clifford Algebras.*

* Clifford algebras, also called Geometric Algebras, create a general structure which describes all geometries, and in which a given algebra describes the geometry and all of the geometric objects of a given n-dimensional space. In 3-space, for instance, the Clifford Algebra consists of 1 one-dimensional object (a translation), 2 two-dimensional objects (oriented surface areas, and 1 three-dimensional object (a volume).

Kathryn from Sunnyvale: That potential Marusek is ringing a bell for me, I know I've read it too. Oddly enough, he's spending the winter where I grew up, instead of on the other side of town, or I could call him up and ask. My copy of Getting To Know You is on loan right now, or I'd browse through to check.

Todd @465, Tania @469,

You're right about Marusek, as that story isn't in either book. In my memory it feels slightly more like a Marusek than a Williams- but all four of those authors can do that poignancy I recall from the story*.

I'm now remembering that the protagonist is going to use his remaining years to compose a play. (He's an actor / was a famous actor?)

----------
It's related to, but not identical to Sensawunda. The greater the wonder, the potentially greater the sense of loss- but not every author can do loss.

SpeakerToManagers @ 468: Thanks for fixing that link. That was a weird miscopy, I wonder how it got that way?

If you don't put "http://" on the front of the link, it assumes you're linking to a page within Making Light and helpfully adds the "http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/" for you.

"Angels & Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican by using antimatter stolen from CERN."

We're going to use it to construct a replica Jesus. When the real Jesus returns, the two of them will collide and annihilate in a blaze of gamma radiation!

(Incidentally, I would like credit for not actually typing the implicit dreadful pun here. Serge - watch and learn, son.)

ajay @ 472... C'mon... You know you wanna.

Caroline @ 451... The book contains the immortal line "So....CERN has a particle accelerator?"

"My work is nearly complete."
"Don't! You will destroy the fabric of Reality!"
"Power up the accelerator to maximum!"
"No!"
"Inject the particles!"
"You are mad!"
"At last, as I shatter them, I will be the first to discover of what the Nielsen-Hayden particles are made of. Bwahahahahah!!!"

473: "You mean, an anti-Christ?"

ajay @472: There has been speculation that matter traveling backwards in time would be equivalent to anti-matter; apparently Feynmann diagrams of electrons colliding with positrons (releasing gamma ray photons) could be interpreted as an electron moving forward in time, releasing a photon and then recoiling back in time as a positron. It was even speculated that there might only be one electron in the universe, traveling forward and backwards in time.

When I first read The Man Who Walked Home, I thought this might account for the cataclysm caused by the backwards traveling astronaut (however, that much anti-matter might have cracked the earth's crust).

In the 50's, Dr. Teller provided some newspaper copy about the possibility of anti-matter explosions, dwarfing the H-bomb projects. It inspired this poem, originally printed in The New Yorker.

Somewhere in Heaven, people observe the end of the universe. Richard Feynman is among them.

"Well, that was cool. Let's watch it again. Backward!"

I just tried to join LT, discovered that I already am in there (chatworthy). I do own more than two books, really.

I just joined. My Library Thing ID is readinggeek451. I haven't input much in the way of books yet, so I'm bringing the average way down at the moment.

I have my complete bookbinding library in now, though all my reviews are still on my own site (I'd like to move my binding bookshelf to LT, or use an LT plugin for it, but that's a big site redesign job.)

I think we'll add the other books in when I get around to doing an import from our delicious library files. The books themselves are either a few hundred miles or a fortnight away, depending on how you look at things. It may be some time before it's all ported over.

LT is of professional interest to me as well, since we're about to start the beta release of user tagging to library books, and we've got agreement from them to import the LT tags into our DB. (And one of the LT team is a bookbinder named Abby, so they are clearly doing something right!)

Serge #435: It's certainly true of the DaVinci Code which is a mass of absurdities piled on each other.

abi, because of you I'm thinking about signing up for this class.

Tania @482:
Looks promising.

Langstitch und kettenstitch books can be really fun to make, and you can use a lot of interesting materials in them. They also have the advantage of requiring very little equipment, which means you can make more of them at home.

If you decide to do it, tell us how it goes!

Mary Dell #444: To have a lot of books in common with my library you'd have to have similar professional interests, so I'm not surprised the number's small. I hope you find some things worth reading in my small collection.

I looked up "Making Book" by Our Hostess in Library Thing's "UnSuggestions" - books least likely to share common library ownership with the title entered.

Dan Brown's works were high on the list.

(#1 was "Lolita")

Fragano @ 481:

The DaVinci Code is a mass of absurdities piled on each other.

Sounds like football to me.

Jon @485:

(#1 was "Lolita")

I'm not signing up for any system that's been infiltrated by kiddy-porn spammers.

Tania @ 482... Yoga while bookbinding?

Rob #576

Mike Ford did an unintentional Confuse Teresa and Patrick when alluding to that poem years ago at a party at a Boskone or a Lunacon. I got the reference, but TNH and PNH didn't. They looked at him with the "Huh?" reaction.

Joined LT. I only got one book in; the connection dropped (it was very cranky yesterday evening). I think I'll send them money for a CueCat, but I have books 'before ISBN' that I'll have to do some other way. LC number, maybe, if I can find one?

Paul A @ 471

That's it. I deleted the "http://" from the copied URL by accident. Never try to navigate the twisty little passages when you should be sleeping.

PJ, I had at least 500 books with no ISBN numbers when I entered my library into LT. Since I didn't care about which edition showed up (most of them were paperback fiction), I just typed in the title into the search box on the "add books" page and took whatever it gave me (Amazon actually had the bulk of them; if that didn't work I tried searching LC records).

If the specific edition is important, LC would be a better bet.

The comments thread at the Sidelight link about Robert Redford was wonderful to read. I can't help but wonder about this line from Redford's text "Forgive me while I dodge the rumble of the million footed throngs that have succumbed to the marketing ether for Christmas and its days."

How do you dodge a "rumble"? Unless he's talking about a gang fight a la West Side Story, of course.

The comment "Of course there is the possibility that his cheese has slid off the cracker." elicited a true LOL moment here.

Linkmeister, some of my books are so off-the-wall that the LC may be the only place I can find them catalogued. (The Ladies League of Leavenworth, The Kansas Home Cook Book is first to mind. 1886, or thereabouts.)

Fragano @ #481: Angels and Demons makes The DaVinci Code seem like a masterpiece of witty writing, clever plotting, and plausibility.

Clifton Royston #494: Having read the Templar/descendants of Jesus 'novel', I don't think I'll be reading anything else of Mr Brown's in this lifetime.

I am reading term papers and developing a death wish. This is why:

The Weimar Republic was present from 1919 to 1933 in Germany.

Once Nazi Germany came in to place, the hopes for all other forms of government were seemingly hopeless.

Many critics argued that Marx Communist Manifesto promoted individual freedom and wealth.

Lenin was the greatest theorist and practice of Marxism.

Trotsky was an international.

He was a consecutive fighter for interests of proletariat.

In those times USSR was so monolithic formation, the given event has passed absolutely without serious consequences and imperceptibly. Also easily and simply Ukraine could transfer not only Crime, but also, for example, Siberia or Kola Peninsula. Khrushchev firmly promised to construct in USSR communism by 1980, but as is spoken in one of jokes, Olympiad prevented.

The leader of the Varangians was the semilegendary warrior Rurik who led his people in 1862 to the city of Novgorod on the Volkhov River. The Communists under Vladimir Lenin seized power soon after and formed the USSR.

Khrushchev gradually gained strength within the party, and in 1964 he was ousted.

So far the European Union reserves the right to deny the Catalonian region the right to inter the European Union.

Also, the trade surplus was $27.95 billion in the month of October which grew 13.5 percent since 2000.

The reason why is because Putin has put policies into place that make it basically impossible for any piece of democracy to spring forward.

In February 2001, two editors of a Cherkessk newspaper were attacked with armed guns and badly beaten in their workplace.

The assailants were dressed in police uniforms and they not only broke their computers but they also broke the journalists’ bones as well.

The war has led to massive killings and coasted both countries thousands of dollars that should have been used to support internal issues such as starvation and droughts.

First off, the British imminently removed the color bar that prohibited Eritrean to be employed as civil workers.

There was speculated fraud in the elections and this was investigated and closely observed.

The 1917 victory of the Bolsheviks over the czarist government is the Russian Revolution gave them the wanted forefront of the socialist action.