OK...so I kinda think Tim Burton is slipping. I mean, Corpse Bride was OK, but compared to his previous work clearly sub-par. Of course, I have no idea what he's working on now...any rumors out there?

(What? Oh, I see...)

I figured baritones, or maybe the Matter of Britain.

Abrotine is a colorless alkaloid obtained from wood.

And suddenly I'm in love with Making Light all over again.

Didn't we already discuss Ben Britten's Requiem in the Remembrance post?

I've been enjoying the Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, complete with all the insane footnotes. It's highly scandalous and lascivious, (if you thought the Thousand and One Nights were stories for children, think again!) though I admit I have no idea how faithful a translation it is.

Unfortunately the spine is completely disintegrating; it's some kind of limited edition and evidently it was bound using some highly acidic cardboard behind the cloth. I have been entertaining wild fantasies about asking abi to rebind it - the pages seem to be just fine - but I doubt I could afford it.

Traveler, scholar, dirty old man - really, is there any other Burton worth discussing?

I'll start things off:

You're wrong, all of you!

Only a third of Indonesians have cell phones- I'm not sure if I was expecting that to be higher or lower. Still, lots of growth potential for both the object of discussion and its competitors. P/E and P/S don't look too bad, either.

Clara Barton? What about her?

A-Britain is really quite a bit like Britain, but not identical. For example, in Britain they may call them biscuits, but in A-Britain they might be called cookies or, more formally, any-and-every-other-possible-designation-apart-from-the-word-"biscuit"-and-perhaps-even-including-that-word-so-long-as-it-is-not-said-in-a-British-context. I prefer the former, as it makes for shorter recipe titles.

Anti-Britain is another story altogether. There, they tend to vomit up tea a few times a night, and are still coming into their own economically after the eclipse of their erstwhile colonial rulers from the subcontinent. Luckily, that's not the subject of this thread.

What do you have against Belgian radio and television?

Jhn S Brtn Vlkmnn & Schml LLP Attrnys At Lw: almost disemvoweled attorneys at law

3 telecommunications companies (US, UK, Indonesia), 2 mutual funds (Nebraska, Indonesia), 1 Australian cement company, 1 insurance company, 1 utility, and a trust for healthcare properties.

While I think the topic of stocks and investments can bring out the day-trading trolls, I suppose we haven't talked much about it here.

And while I'm overexposed in the telecom sector, if Ms. Teresa is saying to look there, I guess we should discuss it. (But I will say I think she shouldn't be as dismissive of mutual funds as her portfolio suggests.)

Baritone voices certainly have their place, after all, what would Don Giovanni have been like without them?

The German word "braten", encountered by Americans most often in the compound term sauerbraten, means roast, or roast meat. It's a fairly straight derivation from the Middle Germanic brāte, meaning edible meat. The association of "roasted" with "edible" reminds us that methods of food preservation were pretty lousy in the pre-electricity periods. I am reminded to be grateful for my refrigerator.

We really all need to stop beratin' one another so much.

Kathryn, I once had investments in three mutual funds from three different investment companies with three different goals (Growth, G&I, Sm. Co. Growth). Yet during one quarter in the 1980s all three had big holdings in Telefonos de Mexico.

Sheep, that's what mutual fund managers are.

Avram @ 2, Larry Brennan @ 14:

Ooooh, baritone voices. I'm told I'm in the minority of female classical music/opera lovers, in preferring them to tenors.

Linkmeister @17,

I quite possibly have some Indonesian telecom- one of my mutual funds focuses on SouthEast Asia. It's up 19% since I bought it a few months back.

This year it finally dawned on me that my Roth IRA* is where I should practice with risk and mutual funds. I decided to take some % of my Roth and practice. My online account has a mutual fund selection tool- I told it to give me ones with high 1, 3, and 5 year returns. And minimums /loads I could afford.

I'm quite happy at how they're doing. But it seems a little too easy.

----------
* rough summary... in the US, Roth IRAs-- a type of retirement account-- are filled with after-tax money, but one doesn't pay taxes on their gains.

Me, I'm a a bari-tenor. I prefer baritone, myself, as a voice to listen to..

I think the whole topic has gone for a burton.

The original or the remake?

Kathryn @ #8:
You might be interested in the work of Genevieve Bell. She is a cultural anthropologist at Intel who has studied the uses of technology in various Asian countries. Here's her take:

"In Indonesia, for instance, rather than individually owned cell phones, I met at least one family, where they share all their phones. You take whatever phone is charged and has money on it - individual numbers do not link to individuals but rather to whole households. The connection is between social networks rather than individuals."

Quoted from this interview.

It's a sad reflection on internet culture that all this circumlocution should be necessary. Why must every civilised discussion about Bruton descend into trollish sniggering? Okay, it's an unfortunate name for a school, but surely we're mature enough to see beyond that?

Aw, man. There was a Bartons store on 181st when I was growing up. I couldn't have been much older than four or five when it closed, but I can still remember it pretty well -- when one of my sisters would take me to the library, we'd stop there on the way back, and get one chocolate bar, which we'd split.

Good times.

Mutual funds can be selected using the Morningstar site tools; it seems simple enough to find the ones with no loads and the highest returns. (Yes, doing quite decently myself, thank you.)

Sweet potatoes--a word not in the "Spelling reference"--make excellent chips when oven-baked to crispness (cut, unpeeled, into medium-thick slices, roll in peanut oil, bake at 450 F for about 15 minutes, turn over, another 10 minutes--include spices as may seem appropriate, or go plain; add salt to taste). Do not, from remembrances of T'days, think that they'll be particularly sweet--it's the sweet slop added to them on T'days that makes the yuck factor.

Am I the only one here who prefers contraltos?

If you liked the Arabian Nights, try--I have not yet myself, this is by reputation--Count Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa.

And as to the subject starter, I can do no better than to quote from the closing thought at the delightful Grumpy Old Bookman blog:

'Reedin iz 4 geekz n sad ppl' -- Chantelle fan, May 2006.

This blog is respectfully dedicated to geekz n sad ppl everywhere.

Burton's _Nights_ is presented in full at Project Gutenburg.

According to Hussein Haddawy, Burton is a very bad translator and his source text was a late, much-amended copy of _The Nights._ Haddawy claims to have dug the original text out from later additions and interpolations (Sinbad's voyages, for one, were originally a separate book). His _Nights_ is a much better read--still bawdy, but the really revolting passages (men tricking toddlers into committing fellatio is funny haw haw) are not there. Also, Haddawy does not flog his thesaurus.

Burton does excel over Haddawy in the matter of food. I used both translations as sources when preparing to cook for an SCA event (West Meets East: A Crusader's Feast). If a meal was in Haddawy, it was period, but the details were glossed over because Haddawy was writing for casual readers. I went to Burton for exact names of the various dishes and copious footnotes. Then I used a translated and partially redacted 13th-century Moorish cookbook at Cariadoc's Miscellany to create the dishes.

You're accepting birthing stories at Making Light now? Cool :-).. but, uh, I'd rather not be first.

oh, and an embarrassing question: I'm guessing by the Indonesia, telecoms and mutual fund-related comments on here that there's at least one important interpretation of "brtn" I'm just not getting. Could somebody please enlighten me? (I'm not American so am possibly missing some important bit of local knowledge?)

I too enjoy the Tim Burton translation of the Arabian Nights. It definitely puts the lie to all those critics about his Corpse Bride work. Also, it may be lascivious but not anywhere near as perverse as the implied bestiality and romantic love of his Planet of the Apes.

Manifeste du surréalisme, his greatest work. Certainly the most important brtn to ever grace the Earth.

Regex Dictionary: ^[aeiou]*b[aeiou]*r[aeiou]*t[aeiou]*n[aeiou]*$ (case insensitive)

Chris, thanks very much for the Regex Dictionary. Isn't the Internet wonderful? All human life is there (and non-human too, of course).

Burton-on-Trent is rather a dull place to visit, but interesting in being the only substantial town I can think of that became important in the first instance entirely for its beer making industry, and still remains so to this day.

Clint Barton was quite right to refuse to become the new Captain America, though it is quite hard to guess what name he should take since Katie Bishop took over so effectively as Hawkeye. And her smackdown of Clint when she saw him in the blue suit was very impressive - just goes to show that sometimes a character gets added to comics continuity who instantly acquires the charisma some others lack after thirty years of story. Clint will probably die again some time soon, anyway...

Burton's Planet of the Apes left me cold, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was much more a success. I do look forward to his adaptation of Sweeney Todd.

Would a Burton movie version of The Road be too much to hope for?

As it happens, Barton is the electorate I find myself in for the current Australian federal election (named after Sir Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister of Australia).

Regrettably it's a safe seat, so my (mandatory) vote will make little difference either way. The senate, however, is another matter entirely...

I don't know; while this sort of conversation may be unusual elsewhere, it doesn't seem so much of an aberation here.

What? Oh. Yes, my spellchecker was on the fritz too; must be going around.

Isabel, Lady Burton, is indeed an interesting and controversial figure. I can see that some people might be upset that she not only disemvoweled but also disemconsonanted many of her husband Richard's manuscripts after his death. But she meant well, so I would hope that discussing her wouldn't upset people so much as to require being isolated in a special thread.

She did leave behind many of her own writings, as well as accounts of her life with Richard, which can make for some interesting compare-and-contrast exercises. For more by and about both Richard and Isabel, see http://burtoniana.org/ ; some additional Isabel material can be found via this link.

Every time I see a Burton product in the HP commercials, I weep for inanity.

Oh dear, what kind of to-do has Britney gotten herself into now?

The Barton Swing Aqueduct which takes the Bridgewater Canal over the Manchester Ship Canal is, indeed, one of the wonders of the waterway world and worth a discussion to itself.

nglsh s n smtc lngg. Rmmbr th rp f th Sbn vwls.

nd nbd sd, "f y dnt wnt t tlk bt t, s ths thrd nw."

C. Wingate: KTHXBY.

Teresa, you're not the only one adoring this place. My only regret is that I can add nothing.

#1: Tim Burton's movie adaption of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd, is opening around Christmas time. Johnny Depp plays the title role. This worries me because Sweeney is a part typically played by a trained baritone, and Johnny Depp is... not. I read one quote from him where he basically said that he decided not to go for voice training to prepare for the part.

(Maybe they got the ghost of Clara Barton to nurse his voice back to health after the shoot...)

Unlike England, a Scottish baron, that is, a holder of superiority over a territorial entity, is actually a laird, and since the title is attached to the land instead of the other way around, you can legitimately become a scottish baron by buying the land; the proper equivalent to the English "baron" is a Lord of Parliament.

Burton-on-Trent is also famed for its marmite.

Marmite is a kind of British soy sauce, it's made out of yeast extract and is therefore a by-product of the aforementioned Burton brewing industry. You use it in cooking to add some umami, especially in vegetarian cooking. Some people spread it on toast, but some people play the flute on stilts and others voted the upside-down kiss in a Spiderman film the greatest screen kiss of all time, which just goes to show.

The other thing marmite is famous for, was ending the Vnn Bnt weirdness on rasseff, when it was valiantly wielded by the intrepid John Richards.

While I do think the euphemism of bright for atheist is kind of amusing, you'd think such things would be old hat at Making Light.

jenny islander... Also, Haddawy does not flog his thesaurus

I certainly hope not. There are children here.

Burton, baritone from Britain, beratin' Barton on BRTN about *b*r*t**n.

I thought Burton was good in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Mind you, it must not have been that much of a stretch for him to play an alcoholic spy. I was amused when I first saw the movie to realize where the Deep Space Nine episode with Adrienne Barbeau (whoohoo!) as a Romulan had found its... ah... inspiration.

Speaking of Don Giovanni and favorite voices, I still remember when my opera teacher explained the meaning and use of basso nero voices in opera by playing that bit in D.G.

Chills up my spine.

Jo @46: heretic! Marmite is the one true toast topping!

(I buy it by the half-kilo catering tub. This causes some benighted individuals to look at me oddly.)

One could easily imagine an alternate universe in which brtn is an issue of the far left instead of the far right. The idea would be that radical vegans, who in our universe want to extend human rights to animals, also want to extend them back to embryos. It makes a lot of sense -- just look at who the domestic terrorists are now: brtn clnc bombers, and the ELF/SHAC/etc groups.

I hesitate to post this lest I be accused of making a political statement or equivalence. I am not. I'm purely speculating on hypothetical alternate universes. Really.

Hmmm... Thanks for making my brain itch. It's not an all-too-entirely enjoyable sensation.

Oh well. Now I know why cats and dogs shake their heads like that, I guess.

Chris Sullins @ 31: curses, I missed that one and I actually live in Brittany! Having said that, you hardly ever see the word "Breton" here: the locals prefer the autological "Breizh", although hardly any of them actually seem to speak it.

John Mark Ockerbloom @ 37: Mountains of the Moon certainly left me with a highly favourable impression of the lady in question (or possibly just of Fiona Shaw: it's always hard to tell, though I should stress that I have no similar regard for Harry Potter's Aunt Petunia).

By the way, if we need more topics, the national puzzlers league has a regular expression searcher with several very large dictionaries attached. As Chris Sullins posted, the search sting you need is
^[aeiou]*b[aeiou]*r[aeiou]*t[aeiou]*n[aeiou]*$

Sweeney Todd without... but... voices!
I'm another baritone partison, but this may be because I was once an alto (then a first soprano) and my mother can sing pretty darned low herself. There are a few whiny-guy bands I rather like because I can sing along without going too high or too low, but low voices are so much more fun to listen to. The best decision my college choir director made was to put the basses behind the sopranos so I could feel the rumbles.

Also, this is the second time in two days I've looked up the word 'bass' on Wikipedia. The one about fish was rather more informative.

Charles Stross speaks truth! I knew that there was a reason why I liked his books. In the 1970s, my parents were forced to travel around the world with heavy jars in their hand luggage so that I wouldn't starve. Thankfully it is now available in the U.S., but in tiny jars that probably cost more per gram than most street drugs.

I know one desperate geneticist who, when in a foreign lab sans marmite, attempted to make his own by the cooking the bacto yeast extract that is an ingredient in bacterial culture broths. Not a success.

Nick, that sounds incredibly nerdy. I wonder if he'd have had better luck with another culture mix? LB seems like it'd be... not tasty, but it, like cats, has a flavor. It smells like life to me.
A student here once had a party and advertised "Yeast Bucket", which I am told is a Peace Corps alcohol involving a bucket, sugar, and yeast. I am willing to do many things for science, but not that.

#53 : Is a "radical vegan" one who subsists exclusively on radishes, or on roots (Latin radix)?

It's been asserted - not least in the indispensable New Scientist - that everything you eat probably contains some atoms that were once part of a dinosaur.

"A vegetarian is someone who eats only vegetables.

"I, my friend, am a humanitarian ..."

Burton-on-Trent is rather a dull place to visit but it makes for some extremely disturbing gay sex.

I do wish all of you would stop dancing around the -real- issue Theresa raised here. She went out of her way to provide us with a safe space to discuss the topic, and I think we're doing a disservice to her in not discussing it.

Britney Murphy is an acting genius, even if she can't spell her name right.

There, I've said it, and I'm not taking it back.

re 47: Surely there must be another term for taking a neutral word and substituting a fluff word for it. "Euphemism" doesn't do it for me.

Vivaldi's choir at the Foundling Hospital in Venice seems to have been all-female, including tenors and basses singing at actual pitch, not an octave up as in some recordings. There's a modern choir, the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi, that tries to reproduce the sound. It's beautiful.

Diatryma,

As I recall, he attempted to caramelize it through excessive autoclaving. Perhaps if he had stirred it in a pan over a stove?

My favorite nerdy lab/alcohol story involves the the famous physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen who was a young researcher in Copenhagen during the war. According to his autobiography, he and his colleagues would use ethanol for a variety of extractions and precipitations. Then, they'd re-distill it and drink it.

Charles Stross: So, do you serve man baked or fried?

bryan @ 62... Burton-on-Trent (...) makes for some extremely disturbing gay sex.

Dan Burton on Trent Lott?

re #35: [Shudder] Tim Burton and Johnny Depp and Roald Dahl is too much highly concentrated weirdness. Give me Gene, thank you.

re 57: When I sang with a Slavic men's chorus there was one piece we sang that had 3 octaves and a fifth between the lowest and highest notes. We did a lot of insane arrangements like that: I discovered that one hymn we sang was pitched lower in the hymnal (for SATB) than it was for us ostensibly TTBB.

A couple of years back I had one of those parent rush experiences listening to my unchanged voice son getting a voice test, and hearing him go up over three octaves. As a soprano. (There was an amusing period when his voice was changing and he would show off at school chorus by singing all the parts.)

Baroque pieces tend to have great tenor and decent alto parts; shape note music has the worst alto parts ever. Victorian hymns have the worst tenor parts ever.

Emma #67, in the cartonical method of preparing H. sapiens (i.e. in all the cartoons) the missionary is boiled in a big pot.

Cliff Burton (the late) + Trent Reznor?

Burton-on-Trent sounds like an evening of Sir Richard expostulating on the Latin liturgy.

Another baritone fan here. In my case, my hearing is sketchy, so I have a harder time understanding words sung by high-pitched voices. Lower voices sound as if their diction is clearer whether it really is or not.

Oh my God, I love this place.

I had always heard that lab ethanol is unsafe to drink, but I have not run it through anything to check. Including my kidneys. I get enough of it through my lungs when I'm working under sterile conditions, anyway.

A friend of mine, not the lowest bass I've met but a pretty low one, took voice lessons in college with a man who was known for producing tenors. Not great tenors, but he'd stretch your range tenorward. Dan, formerly a soprano and then bass, reached a G above middle C; a mezzo soprano turned tenorish under the same teacher.
I used to get attention because when I was younger and chose to sing alto, I was able to sing higher than most of the sopranos-- it's a peril of making the soprano the melody in all kids' music. If you don't know what you're doing, they put you in the soprano section, where you stay until someone points out that you cannot actually reach those notes and why don't you move down a section?
I should poke around for a choir or something here. I still have a lot of choral-singing baggage, but I'd like to be able to take part in geeky music conversations.

albatross (#74): Ditto, and just when I'd expected to dislike a thread!

Have we said enough yet about the Matter of Britain? And what *is* the association with Indonesian cell phones? (Nobody has answered that question yet.)

Dieub ha par en o dellezegezh hag o gwirioù eo ganet an holl dud. Poell ha skiant zo dezho ha dleout a reont bevañ an eil gant egile en ur spered a genvreudeuriezh.

(as a mostly reader, rare commentor) I second albatross' motion on loving this place

John @70: Well, yes, if the eater is another human....

Chris @73: I have a similar problem, but not, for some reason, in music. I discovered when taking a chinese class and not being able to understand the teacher at all! I mean, I could not reproduce the sounds correctly no matter what I tried; then one day we had a substitute teacher with a low speaking voice and it all made sense.
The regular teacher had a very high voice and the sub was a nice contralto...

Q. Pheevr #77 : We hold these truths to be self-evident ...

Emma #79, you mean Charlie isn't another ... Oh. Mumble. Sorry.

I thought Richard Burton was married to Elizabeth Taylor. Was he married to this Isabel person before, after or in between Liz? Too bad he and Liz didn't do an Arabian Nights film after Cleopatra.

#75 Diatryma: I self-identify as baritone and my comfortable range is F below low C to F above middle C. High F# is pushing it, and that high G is sometimes there on a good day, sometimes not. Anything above that is a thin falsetto useless for anything but singing in the car with the windows rolled up.

The basses in my church choir range down to the low E-flat, where I dare not tread.

I'm totally not in the baritone camp. My favorite solo opera pieces are almost invariably soprano. In fact I generally prefer female voices to male in just about any musical genre.

Though I suspect this has something to do with me being able to sing along...

(I miss choral singing. Haven't done it since college. I'm sure I've lost range by now, but back in the day I sang first soprano - at least until I figured out that first soprano is the boringest part, and the mezzos got all the cool harmonies.)

Technically I'm a baritone. In practice (and not all at the same time-- my larynx refuses to adjust that far all at once) I can go from double-low C to high C. Not all of that is full voice, though on a really good day I can produce a high B-flat.

Glinda @ 18: If you are, so am I. Give me a bari or a good solid bass.

When I'm in practice and warmed up, I have a three and a half octave range. Today as a test...I'm about an octave down and it sounds like the crud I've currently got in my throat. I love my cats, but *man* my allergies are doing a number. I've shifted lower about 3 steps since we brought them home 2 months ago.

Dia@ 75 That's what happened to me. I sang SS for so many years even though it surrounds my break point because I could carry that harmonic line, even though my best range is either First Sop. or Sec. Alto.

I'm going to just keep watching the conversations and remembering choir.

C Wingate--do you mean "shaped-note music has the most BORING alto parts ever?"

If you do, you've been tricked. The majority of shaped-note music doesn't have an original alto (it was 3-part, all mixed), and whoever added alto was very boring. The stuff that DOES have an original alto is gorgeous.

ROFLMAO ... my cubie asked what I was reading!

Jenny @ 27
I have a copy of Adventures of Amir Hamza on order, and I got Medieval Cuisine in the Islamic World (recommend for the essay in front as well as the recipes) from the Dirt Cheap Book Sale. Mix the two and get ... something.

John @81: Oh my Ghod...you mean he wrote the cookbook?!!!

I love singing, especially "sacred music." I even enjoy singing those really uninspired modern hymns. I don't do it especially well, my voice is completely untrained, and I'm terrible at staying with the harmony; I tend to leap over to melody wherever it is. Bad, bad. I've often thought that it might be fun to take some singing lessons, just so I could learn how not to do that, and maybe get a little better at, you know, making a joyful noise.

C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters makes a point of having his demon say that there is no music in hell. I absolutely believe him.

By the way, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in or near Berkeley, you might be interested in this:

Berkeley's Chora Nova, directed by Paul Flight, is presenting a concert of works dedicated to St. Nicolas. They're singing Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai and Britten's St. Nicolas Cantata. The children of the Piedmont Choirs, four soloists, and a small orchestra join them. Date and time: Saturday, November 17, 2007 8:00 pm. Place: First Congregational Church of Berkeley, at Dana & Durant. Tickets are $18, $15 senior, $10 student. Parking sucks so get there early.

I also wish to express my delight in and appreciation for this community's knowledge, humor, and kindness.

That's it, I've decided that heathens are really just warm fuzzies.

And I have a four volume translation from 1914 of Arabian Nights with naughty pictures. But it wasn't bound very well either.

I'm a true tenor, though since I haven't been singing high stuff for a couple of years, my high notes are weak.

I wish I'd gotten in here earlier. Damn. All the ones I can think of have been used.

I AM thinking of a large group of double-reed wind instruments, all in a row, sounding a sixth chord as they ride the rails through the night. But that's not a word (or wasn't until now).

Rats. I transposed the 't' and 'r'. Frell me dead. Giving up now.

Roz @ #34: Another Young Avengers fan here, really amazed at how they manage to stand out in a world already awash in snarky heroes of one kind or another.

I regret never having read any of Pierre Berton's books, even though I lived in Canada for six years. (I'm told The Last Spike is terrific.)

Then there's Berton Roueche. Interesting stuff.

I am fond of Tuvan throat singing, however, especially with German lyrics...

Lizzy L @ 90... C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters makes a point of having his demon say that there is no music in hell. I absolutely believe him.

On the other hand, according to Gary Larson's Far Side, there is music in Hell, but, as a symphonic orchestra's maestro soon finds out, the only instrument is the banjo.

Charlie Stross @#52: Marmite is an abomination! Some people (horrible, horrible people) not only spread it on toast, they give it to helpless children. To eat.

re #87: You go ahead and tell me how great the first alto phrase of Kittery is then.

I have this theory that you can tell what parts the composer and his wife sang by his part writing. (I don't have a large enough sample of women to go the other way.) I would guess, for instance, RVW was a bass and that his wife (Ursula, IIRC) was an alto. His tenor parts tend to be ehh-- not bad, but not sparkling. His soprano parts are very often appalling, as for example in the motet version of "At the Name of Jesus", which has multiple punishingly high decant parts. And Benjamin Britten.... um, let us not go there.

BTW, since we're promoting: my church (St. Mark's Highland) is having a dedication concert for the new organ tomorrow night. (Free. 7:30. Drive west out MD 216 until you see the church on the left.)

Soprano in school chorus but with a wacky range, the National Anthem fit comfortably inside it (still does), and I used to fight the tenors for their solos.

I miss chorus...

John @81: Charlie became post-human some time ago, so technically it's not, y'know, cnnblsm. Though I don't know whether he eats them with marmite; that would clearly be beyond the pale.

theophylact @ 94: My favourite Berton book is the Secret Land of Og, although I haven't re-read it in about 15 years. It's very bizarre. My favourite bit was one of the boys covering himself in green paint so as to look like one of the Og people. I always thought that'd be a great, albeit obscure, Hallowe'en costume.

Charlie @#52: Heretic! Marmite is, as any fule know, best put on roast potatoes before they roast, to give them that nice brown crunchy coating. (They're not really roast unless you do that.)

Serge 97: Did you know that there is actually such a thing as classical banjo? And that a person who plays the banjo in this fashion is called a banjoist? (The technique is different, in part because the little finger is pressed at (almost) all times against the skin of the banjo, giving the whole instrument a sharper decay; I've heard this and the effect is almost like a harp stop on a harpsichord, though not quite as pronounced.)

A person who plays bluegrass banjo, I was told by Tom Hanway (also the source for the above information about classical banjo), is called a picker.

Jeez, I almost forgot! The Smithsonian Chamber Music Society put on a wonderful concert this past Sunday, of five of Haydn's trios for baryton (he wrote 126 for Count Esterhazy, who was a devoted player of the instrument). Even the fact that someone hit our car on the way home from the concert didn't wholly take the glow off the evening.

Arg. Better link for Tom Hanway.

I keep getting 'marmite' and 'ipecac' confused. They have such similar uses.

I've eaten and enjoyed marmite as an admixture to a vegetarian stew. But Dilute! Dilute! OK!

Pumeza @ #29, I'm guessing, but I think Kathryn took all those consonants Teresa put in the original post and looked up the stock market symbols for each one.

Y, for instance, is the symbol for Alleghany, a large insurance company.

Xopher @ 104... No, I didn't know about the classical banjo. Then again there are MANY of things I know very little about, unlike most of the people who hang around ML.

Nix #103: really? I'm going to have to try that. Yummy!

Mary Dell #98: And some of those children like it. I was one. Choose between giving up Marmite and Chocolate? Hard choice ...

Speaking of Don Giovanni, the star of Lemonade Joe (Limonadovy Joe), Karel Fiala, shows up in at least one version of Amadeus as Don Giovanni onstage. It's now possible to find LJ over here, at least on VHS (I've seen a DVD for sale online, but I'm not sure what region it's for). Back in Czechoslovakia, it's popular enough that there's a political parody of it in YouTube, and it looks like someone's named a band after it over there as well. (There's also a mix that uses the main title theme, which starts about a minute in.)

I guess this isn't so much about Don Giovanni after all.

#90: C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters makes a point of having his demon say that there is no music in hell. I absolutely believe him.

But... but... but...

'We'll win, of course,' he said.
'You don't want that,' said the demon.
'Why not, pray?'
'Listen,' said Crowley desperately. 'How many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean.'
Aziraphale looked taken aback.
'Well, I should think-'
'Two,' said Crowley. 'Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?'
Aziraphale shut his eyes. 'All too easily,' he groaned.

I think the thing about Marmite is that you have to get the taste when very young - the same may be true for human flesh, of course. The roast potato idea is fascinating - I shall try it some time very soon.

Personally, I prefer to spread a layer of Hellman's Mayo over my marmite toast but I know most even of those who eat Marmite consider this a heathenish sophistication...

I am actually less worried about Johnny Depp in the Burton Sweeney Todd than I am by La Bonham-Carter as Mrs. Lovett.

In case anyone's wondering about single-letter NYSE symbols:

More than a hundred years ago, the NYSE assigned its biggest and most liquid companies single-letter symbols in order to save time on ticker-tape machines. From then on, the symbols became important distinguishing characteristics for public companies.

The NYSE has about ten single-letter tickers available for trading, but a spokesman says those symbols won't be issued to just any company. "These are for industry leaders," says the spokesman, referring to a one-letter symbol as a "marketing tool" and a "Wall Street status symbol."

T = AT&T, F = Ford. M is unassigned; speculation is that's an outstanding bribe for Microsoft to list at the NYSE rather than remain on NASDAQ.

Perhaps we're discussing
this place?

Best I could come up with.

My 11-year old daughter thinks you're "a poser" because, "dude, you can't write AIM talk." She claims that her set write out more words -- unless you "have something against vowels or something."

(I asked her to translate "brtn" -- she translated it "I don't know -- whatever.")

She tells me it should be: if u want 2 talk bout brtn, do it hr.

So sez her. :)

Wow KristianB 113, another reason to be annoyed by C.S. Lewis. I thought I knew them all. I mean, Elgar? OK, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. But he wrote a lot of other stuff that's far from hellish.

Wait...which one is which? You know Liszt took religious orders late in life, right? Are they saying all those people except Elgar and Liszt went to Hell? (As you may be able to tell, I've avoided Lewis' propaganda, even when it's funny.)

Xopher (118): That's not C. S. Lewis, that's from Good Omens.

I made sincere effort to read The Screwtape Letters a few years back, and I just couldn't do it. I was irritated every time I set the book down. Eventually, it fell between my bed and the wall, and for all I know, it's still there. I took it as a divine sign that I was allowed to give up on it.

I did enjoy (that's not quite the right word - appreciate? over-identify with?) A Grief Observed, but that one was given to me at a time when I was predisposed to feel some kinship. It was pretty much just what I needed right then, and I'll always be grateful, both to Lewis and to the timely giver.

I haven't touched Narnia since I started to recognize the allegory; I'm trying desperately to retain the sense of wonder it had for me as a child.

His SF trilogy is still on the shelf, waiting for its turn to be read.

Abortion.

I talked about that topic a few months ago, and I'm still exhausted. But yes, Fred Thompson is being endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee, and The Catholic Voting guide is out and Cardinal O'Malley is urging Democrats to support anti-abortion candidates.

Oy vey.

Marmite really is powerfully polarising stuff. I don't know I'd go this far* but I'm definitely with Mary Dell on the subject, despite having been exposed to the stuff as a child. Family Marmite anecdote: we once had a French exchange student, Jean, who mistook the stuff for chocolate spread and made himself a good thick tartine of the stuff, despite my mother's earnest attempts to warn him. In retrospect I think his self control was admirable - bordering on the superhuman, even - but he did not take a second bite.

As for ways of cooking people, I seem to remember C. S. Lewis mentioning baking them into pies, though I don't think he ever gave the specifics of the recipe.

* WARNING: link probably** SFW but not at all suitable as mealtime viewing.
** For cultures that don't have problems with breastfeeding, at any rate.

"Jen @ 89: It doesn't have to be the beliefs of one specific religion, nor does it have to be a belief that is specific only to religion, to qualify as a religious belief.

If it is held by enough people for religious reasons, and prevents someone else from following the beliefs of their own religion, then it still runs counter to religious freedom."

The only problem with this formulation is that, taken to its logical conclusion, it would make it impossible to legislate against any of the following: animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, various forms of child abuse (ranging from witholding of medical care or proper nutrition to actual beatings and worse), ritual mutilation (from female circumcision to the emasculation required to be a priest of Cybele), or any number of other things currently considered crimes yet supported by various extant religious groups. These are all things that are forbidden by many religions, but required by a few. There does seem to be a point at which religious freedom can no longer trump the common law, however religiously based the original sources of that law might be.

However, I don't believe that abortion is such a case, since there is so much variation in what people believe about the status of a fetus on secular as well as religious bases. Given the lack of agreement, I firmly believe that it comes down to the individual woman's choice, whetehr religiously based or not.

There's not nearly as much disagreement on whether it is permissible for a practitioner of Asatru to perform the blood eagle on somebody, for example. However, something like murder can be outlawed for all without it infringing on anybody's religious freedom. However, I would tend to think that the religious use of peyote should be allowed on the basis of equal protection, by analogy to the use of wine in Communion. A similar argument could be made for allowing animal sacrifice by practitioners of Voudoun or Santeria, by analogy to kosher slaughter techniques.

Sometimes I think that there are no people in the world who had the same reaction to Lewis as I did.

When I first started reading Narnia was also around when I got a big fat comic-book version of the bible, which I read and re-read until it fell to pieces. I had been attending service/sunday school at a UCC church since I was 3.

I never thought of Narnia as Christian allegory. Rather I thought of Narnia and the bible as two different stories in the same genre... the same genre that some of the world myths I was reading at the time came from, and a lot of other fantasy stories. I didn't think that Narnia was the story of Jesus, and was trying to tell me things about him. Rather I thought it was another story that used the same classic and pervasive theme: something strong and great out there loves us (now that I think of that, Narnia and Aslan might be what led me to eventually become a pantheist).

I actually found the religious metaphor in Tolkien more jarring and objectionable, which is funny because a lot of the atheists I know love Tolkien and absolutely cannot stand Lewis. I still have trouble reading him because he seems to have this thing about good and evil as concepts and character attributes that really sticks in my craw.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with Lewis? Or am I completely batty again?

CosmicDog @ 121

Well, the cardinal will never know how many official followers of his church ignore the guidelines.

re 122: Screwtape is one long discussion on the cutlivation of soul food. Really.

re 120: Try Til We Have Faces.

I did eventually ask to be a second soprano, because being a screechy first was really piling on my choral baggage. The parts didn't get any more interesting. I didn't have a very good college choir director-- there was one song where the first alto part consisted of one note, sung in a repeating two-measure rhythm. And nothing else until the very end, where they sustained the single note.
If I could find a local choir that made me feel as good as my high school choir did, I'd be sold.

Leah, I'm going to try to think of Lewis like that. Narnia is still stories for me, raised effectively atheist. But I haven't reread them in quite some time; the message may have soured since.

Wht f w'r nt dn tlkng bt nn Ncl Smth?

As a kid, when reading books where people were fed mass produced yeast cakes/yeast fillets/yeast gobbets I always wondered what they'd taste like.

Then I tried Marmite and Vegemite. Now I know, and it's a future I do not want!

Which is more polarizing: marmite or abortion?

(I'm not sure I want to know, but I had to ask ...)

Leah, I'm with you. I was raised Jewish, so the allegory wasn't all that obvious - it was just another fantasy story to me. I am quite fond of Lawhead's Arthurian fantasies as well, despite the rather heavy-handed religious themes - I mean, what's the difference between that and, say, Eddings' Belgariad? Both have gods and religious themes that are integral to the story and character development. Why would one bother me, and not the other?

Well, I guess that Dmitri isn't exactly the best baritone today but he's pretty damn hot.

Interesting. Another French word has acquired a different (or more specialized) meaning in English. The French 'marmite' is the English 'cooking pot'. (Say... If a vegemite is a vegetarian marmite, what is a catamite?)

Ncl Smth was a nun? Who knew?

#77 -- Geseundheit!

Emma, #89: I've seen a number of different editions of To Serve Man, one of which I own. It lives on the same shelf with the other cookbooks, which occasionally produces interesting reactions at parties.

Brynna, #102: Around fannish circles, he'd be taken for a green Orion slave boy!

Count me in with the people who prefer lower voices, in both genders. IMO, tenors are terribly overrated -- give me Samuel Ramey any day! And yes, altos/contraltos in preference to sopranos as well.

I used to have a range of two and a half octaves, from around low C to G over high C. Lack of use has trimmed it back on both ends, although I can still sing Jethro Tull's "Velvet Green" in the same octave for about the first hour after I get up in the morning. :-) In my college choir, I sang first tenor for 3 years; my senior year, we got a new director who didn't believe in letting women sing tenor, and he moved me up to the altos.

One of my acquaintances is a classically-trained bass, and he sings a cute little piece called "Profundo's Delight". I went looking for it on YouTube with no success; if anyone could point me at a video or mp3 of it, I'd be most appreciative.

Which is more polarizing: marmite or abortion?

Probably marmite.

It is not unheard of for someone to protest at the front of a clinic one day, and sneak in through the back for an abortion the next, or for someone who supports legal abortion to also support things like access to birth control and good health care which would reduce the number of abortions.

But I don't know anyone who is anti-marmite who sneaks a marmite snack now and then.

Mary Aileen 119: OH. How embarrassing. I read that book. Why don't I remember this bit?

Scott 123: A lot of people seem unaware that kosher butchering is a form of animal sacrifice—not an official offering, because those can only be made at the Temple, which doesn't currently exist, but Jews are forbidden to eat blood not because the blood is unclean, but because it belongs to God.

Even more are unaware that the animal sacrificed in Santería rituals is generally cooked and eaten by the congregation afterwards, the Orishas having taken their portion.

WRT singing, there's something I've been wondering about the cast album of Spamalot-- toward the climax of "You Won't Succeed on Broadway", it sounds to me as if some sort of odd reverberant technique is being used so that the singer is (semi?-)simultaneously producing two tones about an octave apart. Based on the context, I was guessing at first that it might have something to do with traditional cantors, but I can't find anything along those lines. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and if so, could you explain it to me?

Since we got a couple East Asian pirated midi karaoke microphones in the local crowd, I've had to admit that I can not, in fact, sing along with Johnny Cash in his own octave. Or Radiohead, either. But I still might be a baritone! ...I dunno