ooo, I get to be the first poster on Abi's first thread!

Congratulations on making the front page, Abi!

For me, the iconic reading of ninety-six, is the Third World Band's 'Ninety-six degrees in the shade (real hot)'.

First post for abi's first post!

Cursors. Foiled again. You damn kids.

Congratulations, Abi!

96 is the low end of normal pre-ovulatory basal body temperature.

a little touch of horror in the night
it passes and the sunlight remains weak
the past's not pleasant and the future's bleak

we wait for monsters at the edge of sight
we wait since only fools would go to seek
a little touch of horror in the night

nothing will ever sapience requite
the largest bird has blood upon its beak
and no one intervenes to save the meek
a little touch of horror in the night

No love for "96 Tears"?

Bill Rodgers, 96, became Scotland's oldest bridegroom when he married long-term girlfriend Liz, 72, Perth last weekend.

I meant `near Perth.' Sorry.

Yay, abi!

[Or are we supposed to make sure there's some content in these messages? If so - how about Ninety Six?]

There's the 'Ninety-Six' district in one of the Carolinas (South, I think).

Welcome, Abi Sutherland, to the Making Light control room. (Directly beneath the massive Dirigible Mooring Tower atop the Flatiron Building in New York.)

Yeah, they let me into the special room where all the secrets are kept. It's intricate and peculiar, and all the chairs are very comfortable.

Did you know Teresa has the microfiche backup of the Library of Alexandria in there? If you peer closely you can see the grain of the papyrus, pared so thin it's translucent, on which tiny slaves copied all the texts. I could spend a year or two poring over the archives. More, unless my Greek improves.

And the DISEMVOWELLER. My god. It's just so...um. Words fail me. Just, um.

I won't describe the first aid kit in the corner. I'm a little afraid of it, despite the extremely detailed instructions posted inside the lid. Or maybe because of them. I didn't know bodies did that.

Wikipedia says the Book of Revelation was supposed to have been written in the year 96.

Well, "96 Tears" was taken. You go with what you got. Congrats on the post, Abi. I was in danger of being within ten thousand comments of catching up.

I hope I can post first in Open Thread 98.6. I got a good one.

Jeff Duntemann is looking for fanfiction and fan art to continue the didactic tales of soldering and antenna-mounting in the Carl and Jerry series.

Could this be the 96 you refer to? Just another nice drive in the country.

I like 96 because that's the year (if you add 1900) Bill Clinton became President again, and this without cheating or starting a war.

'96 was the year I met my wife. We have our tenth anniversary in May.

's a good number.

Congratulations Abi! Be careful around the disemvoweller, or you might to use the first aid kit.

I offer up M96.

Number 96 was a groundbreaking soap in Australia in the 1970s -- naked bottoms seemed to be the main thrilling innovation.

arrgh. And I even looked in the preview. Abi might need to use the first aid kit.

Serge, the package arrived today. Thanks! I'll be checking it out this weekend.

#8: I hate that song. It creeps me out.

And now it's stuck in my head. Curse you! *shakes tiny fist*

re: the Richter Scales' "Here Comes Another Bubble" Particle, I'd like to recommend their "You've Got Mail" and "Stockholm Syndrome", available on their website.

Tania @ 22... Glad to hear it. I hope you enjoy the videotape of The Hard Nut as much as we have. We'll be seeing the whole thing live on Dec 20, when Sue and I drive to the Bay Area. Yay!

Rene Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in Touraine, France. When he visited Pascal in 1647, he said "the only way to do good work in mathematics ...is to never allow anyone to make me get up in the morning before I feel inclined to do so"

Yay 1596

Congrats, abi!

That description of the highway feels like the introduction to a text adventure game. Maybe it's the second-person narrative style. Maybe it's because of its resemblance to the introduction of the first adventure game. (Maybe it's because I should be working on mine for class tomorrow instead of reading Making Light, sigh.)

Manon @ 23: And now it's stuck in my head. Curse you!

*pumps fist and bellows "SONGMASTER" in deepest voice*

You're right, though--it is creepy.

Fortunately, I'm still in denial about "Walk Away, Renee."

Abi @ 14... And the DISEMVOWELLER. My god. It's just so...um. Words fail me. Just, um.

I always thought it looked like something from Girl Genius, but crazier.

... And here's another M96

(One should always have a test motorway)

Congratulations and fruitcake, Abi.

Did you know Teresa has the microfiche backup of the Library of Alexandria in there?

Tim @ #28, Ah, but which version of Walk Away Renée? The Left Banke's or the one by Linda Ronstadt/Ann Savoy on their album Adieu False Heart?

In an episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati," gonzo-disk jockey Johnny Fever remarks:

"Ninety six? How do you do that?"

Context? I don't remember. But you don't forget a line like that.

Hi there, Abi!

And, um, happy holidays, yarn people. I've told myself I should do this for a few months now.

Three or so years ago, I went to Peru for a Spanish class. Disappointing class (partly my own fault) but we did spend time in, you know, Peru. Where alpacas are kind of common, and edible as well. I got the bright idea that for Christmas, I'd get some alpaca yarn, which had to be cheaper, and make Mom a scarf.
So I went to market, asked around, failed to be market-savvy and intelligent, desired strongly not to haggle (almost every time a shopkeeper approached me to ask what I was looking for, I wanted to run away and hide), found out that either what I was buying or what I had bought the day before may contain synthetics, and ended up with a cone of pretty fuzzy grey three-ply alpaca yarn.

I cannot work with it to save my life.

So. Yarn people. I have yarn. I'm probably never going to use it because I can't figure out *how*. This yarn deserves to be made into something interesting. I don't know exactly what went into it, besides, presumably, alpaca. I don't know what's in the four or so balls I bought at an earlier market (never tried working with them because there wasn't enough for a scarf). I don't know how to treat it, how it has been treated, anything.

And I sort of figure knitters and crocheters here might. So, um. Email me, username at gmail, if you can give some yarn a home.

(oh god I'm opening floodgates aren't I this is going to end badly with people offended what if it's not even alpaca I have no more idea what I'm doing now than when I bought it)

I think that 96 in bed is just as intimate. It means that two people have been together for a long time and they don't need to see each other. Just touching is enough, provided you don't have 3 dogs sharing the bed with you.

Linkmeister @ 32: Never heard (or heard of) the Ronstadt/Savoy (although I'd certainly be interested to), but I do know that I prefer the Left Banke's version to the Four Tops'. The latter is good, of course, but doesn't quite capture the perfect melancholy of the original.

Tim, if you want melancholy, listen to the Ronstadt/Savoy version. It's even slower, and the two voices meld amazingly well. I'm reasonably sure it's on iTunes, but if not Amazon has it. There used to be a video clip at Amazon of the two of them singing it live on Bill Maher's show, but that was a promo while the album was new (six or seven months ago).

Note: I am a hard-core Ronstadt fan with about 16 of her albums in my possession, so I may not be entirely unbiased.

Stefan Jones @33
You can find every script for WKRP at the link if you want to find the episode.

'96 was My Year in New York City - not exactly my favorite year, but one rich in stories and characters and, ahem, *growth experiences.*

Funny you should mention Dillon Bustin. He got his start in folk music and folklore studies here in Bloomington, IN and I was vaguely acquainted with him way back when. Bought his one album, The Dillon Bustin Almanac. The song you quote was on it. Also a beautiful a cappella madrigal about gardening, a swinging little piece about the delights of good wood in a good wood stove, and other songs about real people and real things.

Dillon's great gift to Bloomington was his discovery and promotion of the home-grown working-man musician, Lotus Dickey, who composed his own songs, a vast library of complex ditties full of wordplay, affection, reverence and ragtime rhythms. After Lotus' death, a folk music festival grew into a vibrant world music festival bearing his name: Lotus.

Thank you, Dillon Bustin, for writing good songs and finding good songs.

Hurray for Abi!

(I'm still not really back. Maybe after finals.)

An American/Scottish/Nederlandsche cheer for abi!

And my brother lives in (or outside of) Happy Camp, CA (dredging the river for gold in the summer). Has to drive for a bit to get a cell signal so he can call us.

I threw a party in 1996. On a Tuesday night, I believe. February 29, 1996. A Leap Day party, because it was the last leap day of the 20th century. Or of the 1900s, depending where you draw those centurial/millennial lines. Someone said, "But it's a Tuesday night. Can't you move the party to the weekend?" Alas, no. It's on leap day or not at all.

Stefan Jones (33):

"Ninety six? How do you do that?"

It requires another couple.

TexAnne @ 40... Yeah, about time you came back. I was beginning to think that fear of my bad jokes was keeping you away.

whoot! abi.

In response to the poem.

Old apple cart

I took it while I was at Ft. Lewis. I want to say it was Nov. 2003, but it might have been October. There was a huge pumpkin field on the other side of the road.

I need to rescan it, as that one doesn't truly capture the numinous quality of the original.

The version of 'Walk away, Renee' that Billy Bragg created drives me nuts. That may have been his intention.

Congratulations on being abi, FPP!

Serge 35: Just touching is enough, provided you don't have 3 dogs sharing the bed with you.

Especially at night. Because Jeremiah was a bullfrog.

Xopher @ 47... Huh?

I got it, Xopher. The wonders of googling. Yeah, every night is a Three Dog Night around here.

Ahh, thank you Abi.

Had another soul-sucking day at work and your short, pretty piece of prose made me a little weepy.

Blessings full of warmth, sunlight and flowers flowing your way. it made me feel better. Thank you.

Xopher: Because Jeremiah was a bullfrog.

...until the three dogs et him in the night. Now he is an ex-bullfrog.

(It was a curious incident.)

69 is a Tai Chi disk, the yin and the yang chasing each other eternally around the central point counterclockwise, or widdershins as you will; so a mote it be, locked in place even as it moves.

96 is a bit of Celtic knotwork, the line swirling up, circling left and down and right, then ducking under the paper a moment, to come up circling right and down and left, then continue swirling up and away; we catch but this moment of its Gypsy-free wanderings.

Coming in late with worst flooding since 1996.

Has anyone else noticed the URL of this thread?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009690.html

John Houghton @43
Stefan Jones (33):

"Ninety six? How do you do that?"

It requires another couple.

Actually, I believe it requires just a smidge less than 40% of another couple. Maybe our host with the medical experience can tell us how you accomplish that. I have no idea.

Pyre @54: Open thread 94 got similar treatment.

Speaking of roads, I find myself with an uncomfortable need to drive a car in the forseeable future. I'm capable of getting lost anywhere, but getting lost inside my own apartment is pretty low risk. I have a drivers license and a street-legal car, though I am too timid to make much use of them beyond proof of ID. (Having the car identifies me as an independent adult from Metro Detroit.) Thus far, I have managed to commute to work without a car by judicious choice of jobs and apartments, but my need to take a temporary job in an inconvenient place may defeat that strategy.

My mother, who loves me and worries that my sense of direction may be weak enough to be problematic, wants to buy me a GPS to put in the car. I want something I can use in the car to guide me between home and a contract job, and around traffic jams as needed. I also want to be able to take it out of the car, in case I need to not get lost on foot when I am walking 3 miles between new apartments, commuter rail stations, workplaces, etc. Can anyone recommend a device that would be good for both applications? I'm more interested in ease of use and reliability than in having a lot of features to play with.

Nathan @ 55:

Actually, I believe it requires just a smidge less than 40% of another couple. Maybe our host with the medical experience can tell us how you accomplish that. I have no idea.

So Pyre @ 55 (if you are who you say you are),

96 is not to be trusted?

P.S. It takes a warped mind to have come up with that. I like that.

Nathan @ 59:

Well, at least it tells you why they're lying back to back staring outward.

No doubt trying to spot the hidden cameras...

1996 was a memorable year for me. I turned 50. My father died.

X-rays were discovered in 1896. In 1796 the French Revolution was still happening. Catherine the Great died. In 1696 there was an undertakers' revolt in Amsterdam. Yes, really. No, I haven't a clue.

I have absolutely nothing to add here except for another big happy w00t for abi. W00t, abi!

So, I just bought two copies of "My Book House" on Ebay. It's a 12-volume storybook set that we grew up with in my family. I have the family copy, and it's MINE, damnit! In order to stave off other claimants, I volunteered to help get copies of the thing for my brothers who have young children.

First copy, all 12 volumes, plus two extra "parent guide" type volumes: $66. Second copy, all 12 volumes, plus one of the extras: $155. The difference is that the seller on the second one mentioned "Sambo" in the listing.

No real point, I just thought it was interesting.

JESR, that whole thing resurrects my feelings during our 1993 floods here in middle America. I've always lived on high ground, usually without a thought. In my current home we'd have to have a biblical flood to affect us seriously, we're over 100 feet above the Missouri River flood plain on the bluffs to the south of the river (we're not far up the hill and south from Crown Center, where the Heinlein event was held last summer)

i think it would be unbearable to live on an actual flood plain.

It may a subconscious urge, the house I grew up in was in a surburban neighborhood but in mid-slope of a creek drainage. Because of the way the developer had NOT dealt with the lay of the land, when it rained hard we had a river into our basement windows....Dad had to reshape the yard (he basically put a berm to keep the water running downhill but not toward our basement).

Plus Kitchen Impossible just did an event in Biloxi, which culminanted in the chef (Robert) presenting the keys to her refurbished home to one of the people who cooked for him. It seems cruel, at least Biloxi won't give a certificate of occupacy for a perfectly remodeled house unless you also have a minimum requirement of furniture (dining room, living room, bedroom set, who knows what else). Kitchen Impossible bought the furniture for her.

Congratulations, Abi. Awesome post!

96... hmmm. I think some of my relatives came to the U.S. in 1896.

(And yes, I mean relatives, though I think I had ancestors that came then too. But IIRC, that is the year that my great-uncle arrived here.)

Congratulations, Abi. None better.

Returning to politics for a moment: did anyone else hear the tapes of today's SCOTUS session? Topic was an attempt to get them to overrule an intermediate court's decision that everything is legal at Guantanamo, nobody has anything allowable to say about it, move along.... Summaries are always doubtworthy (and I swear I heard the announcer say "Scalito" at one point), but it sounds as if three of the justices were intent on proving their ignorance of any law or precedent that disagreed with their political convictions. One of the ali's even asked whether counsel for the appellant could point to \any/ case where a ]battlefield capture[ had had so many rights as had already been granted, and got a list right back.

#68: There's one thing I'm glad came up at today's session. The administration position seems to be that to give POWs these rights is unprecedented. But how come after all these years of insisting that they aren't POWs, the administration is now talking about them as if they were? Are they POWs or aren't they? The administration seems to change its position on this based on whichever will give them the result they want.

Xopher, #47: Liar! ;-)

In 1996 I was turning 40. I'd been planning for some time to celebrate my 40th birthday by throwing BirthdayCon; I had a hotel picked out, and was going to invite everyone in my various circles of friends.* And then my life fell apart, and I couldn't afford to do it. I still rather mourn the lost opportunity.

* By the time you included everyone I knew from SF fandom, running Musicon, SCA, and contradancing, that would have been some 500 people scattered across 7 or 8 states. I was figuring I'd probably get a 1-or-2-in-10 attendance ratio.

Welcome, Abi!

Have they mentioned that, as least-senior poster, it's now your job to clean out the vowel bins on the Disemvoweler?

Gracious, abi, how very cool.

Diatryma, I feel as if I'm adversely affecting my karma by trying to talk a yarn person out of deaccessioning yarn they'd made up their mind to release, but I've found I can work really difficult yarns with the new baseball-bat-sized crochet hooks, and there're some neat patterns for large-hook knitting in the Interweave Crochet pattern books.

I imagine it'd felt beautifully.

Thanks for the idea, Julia; I'll try a gigantor hook if no one wants it, but I'm not terribly good at that kind of weird proportion crocheting. Knitting seems to take to it a little better, but I cannot learn knitting from the internet.
It's not the worst yarn I've ever played with (Lion Brand Homespun) but it's also not something I want to wreck learning how to work with it.

ZOMG, abi is teh frontpagiest! Yay!

(I suppose we ought to thank Rachel for putting this idea into our hosts' heads? Or was that merely serendipitous?)

Tania @ 20: "Be careful around the disemvoweller, or you might to use the first aid kit."

I've heard stories...you know, rms and lgs lying everywhere, the walls spattered with bld... Be careful!

(I have this mental image of a patient lying in a hospital bed with little houses attached to their shoulders, and tree trunks coming out of their hips. Nearby, a doctor is saying, "We did the best we could! Reconstruction after disemvowelment is always a little hit and miss!")

Domitian was assassinated in the year 96.

Chip @ 68: I get most of my SCOTUS coverage from NPR. I wouldn't be surprised to hear Nina Totenberg let "Scalito" slip. Once I heard her say "What do you mean we, white man?" while recounting the day's court activity.

Avram @ 71: Have you been sending the vowels to Bosnia? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Tania, that's hilarious. I'm a regular listener to CarTalk, and I don't recall that at all. Guess I should check the website occasionally.

Tania #76, I think Asus is using a fairly large bulk order. They started with EEE (Eee?), perhaps because it's the commonest in English and, I assume, cheapest, but they'll probably work through the others for different models.

abi! Congratulations!

Linkmeister, #37, when I decided to alphabetize my CDs, I was surprised to find out that I have as many Emmylou Harris CDs as I do Linda Ronstadt CDs. After that, it drops off sharply.

Diatryma, #73, I crochet with Lion Brand Homespun rather frequently -- why don't you like it?

Marilee @ #79, then you probably have Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions, the album of duets with LR and EH. That's spectacular.

I didn't care a lot for either Trio album, mostly because there was too much Dolly Parton for my taste on each.

Diatryma @ 73

Gotta go with Marilee here - I crocheted the kid a robe out of homespun with a really big hook, and it's a wonder of coziness. It made up pretty quickly, too.

Also, whatever the color is called that's navy, violet and teal is just gorgeous.

puny /mp3disk/my-cds% find . -name data\.dump | cut -f 2 -d / | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
75 Depeche Mode
36 Soundtracks
35 Various Artists
31 The Cure
23 Firesign Theatre
21 Lords of Acid
19 Bob Dylan
17 Violent Femmes
17 Leonard Cohen
17 Jeff Buckley

Looking at all the reviews of the Kindle, it's becoming very apparent that Amazon are a mail-order company rather than a tech company. They're a company that makes money by applying tech to the paperwork problem of a mail order business.

The Kindle is a tech product. But they're not Apple.

I think it's also likely that the two halves of the business that the Kindle has to sell to--readers and publishers--are less tech savvy than we might like to think. I don't think books will suffer the same sort of tech-related market crash that music has, but the Kindle isn't something to exploit the possible markets; it's something to stop them being different.

Alter and I have been watching old Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with our 1.5-year-old.

(I will never say a bad word about political correctness again. But I digress.)

At last three or four times, a character has said "You are now in the hands of the dear old Maestro," or something similar. This is clearly a reference to something, but I have no idea what.

Google isn't talking.

Help?

Mr. Google thinks it's probably a reference to big band leader Ben Bernie.

Justice Scalito -- yes, that's right. Also Justices Stouter, Ginnedy, and Bremas. What's the matter, don't you recognize all these names?

Not to leave out Chief Justice D. P. Roberts.

Naomi #84: Google isn't talking.

...yet.

I love ML numerology. But am in terse mode, because Fu Xing is trying to nurse on my left hand. That is the orphaned kitten, who has made it to the naming stage. "Lucky Star."

I'm already sick of the Christmas music that's being overplayed in the stores. Who's got some interesting recommendations for stuff that hasn't been done to death? A few of my personal favorites:

1) We Three Kings by the Roches. A nice mix of sacred and secular pieces in an amazing range of styles -- classical, jazz/rock, meditative, silly/fun.

2) Winter's Dance by Golden Bough. Seasonal songs with a pagan and Dickensian feel, some pretty instrumentals, and a guest appearance by Leif Sorbye of Tempest.

3) Christmas Renaissance by Richard Searles and Gilbert Yslas. All-instrumental, guitar and harpsichord, with other period instruments here and there. Searles also has an album called Winter Air which isn't quite as Christmasy, but feels seasonal.

'96 was the year that Katie (whom some of you have met) and I first got together as more than friends.

My cousin's daughter was born on Leap Day in 1996, and she's turning into one smart cookie. This summer we were at a theme park that had guess-your-age-or-weight booths, and she won a prize because she's "really" only two. And it was all her idea.

Re: bubble,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
        layoffs, starving hysterical in black teeshirts,
dragging themselves back to their parents' couches
        looking for the next tech job,
Java-headed hackers burning for the new electronic
        connection to the economic dynamo in the World-Wide Web...

(Think not that I mock. This was the fate of many real friends.)

96 is my husband's lucky number, since he was six.... he always liked multiples of three & the way sixes & nines mirror each other, & around that time he started racing quarter-midget cars. his first choice for his car number was 69, but his parents said no (& wouldn't say why). 96 was "his" number ever since.

i think i was around here for when my lucky number, 64, came up as an open thread. but i don't remember it.

1996 was a pretty good year for me, or at least five weeks of it were so blazingly good that they outweigh anything else that may have happened. i went on an israel program, fell in love for the first time, & met two of my favourite artists while we were all teenagers.

abi sutherland
posting her first open thread
but where be dragons?

Here are 96 Dragons.

Avram @71:
Have they mentioned that, as least-senior poster, it's now your job to clean out the vowel bins on the Disemvoweler?

I can't get the vowel bin open. Jim said to ask you for the left-handed screwdriver...?

Abi... There's no sonic screwdriver lying around?

Naomi Libicki @ 84... Mi>"You are now in the hands of the dear old Maestro"

Leopold Stokowski, maybe?
There was one cartoon where Bugs Bunny pretended being he.

Oh, and my wife gave ME a DVD set of those cartoons last Christmas. I have no idea why she thought that was an appropriate present for someone over 50. Really.

hey LibraryThing-ers, I didn't know this but LT has a deal to get free early review copies of a bunch of books. I don't have time to do reviews (I'm a medium-slow reader) but some of y'all will probably be interested.

Serge #99: As I mentioned in my #85, I think the "Old Maestro" is Ben Bernie, who had a popular radio show during the time period of the cartoons involved. He's probably also the reason that some cartoon characters repeat his signature catchphrase "yowsa, yowsa, yowsa" [spellings vary]. See also cartoon character Ben Birdie.

A week ago I saw a band called "69 Eyes". They were awful.

Lee at 90, I thought my family was the only one that played the Roches Christmas CD. It's on heavy rotation with Canadian Brass, the Chipmunks, and one or two Tuba Christmases. The tubas are the best, because they're low and can be ignored fairly easily, but are still recognizable and fun.

I have a scarf of Homespun, made for me rather than by me, and I like it a lot. I think it's just that I'm pretty tense when I crochet and I never found a way to see the stitches using that yarn. I did a scarf in bright yellow eyelashy yarn-- the kind of yarn you get if you shave Big Bird and spin it-- and that was the same situation, but I was able to do the first couple rows by feel and after that, it was mostly sticking the hook in at appropriate intervals and adjusting when it stopped being rectangular. It is not the world's most precise scarf, but it came out okay.
My brother decided to learn to crochet a couple years ago. He didn't have money for a big gift for his girlfriend, so about a week before Christmas, Mom showed him chain and double crochet, then took him to buy yarn. Because he is a Krahe, he picked a dark boucle. Like me, he had trouble seeing the stitches; unlike me, he ran with it, figured out a way to mirror the tentacle on one side of the scarf, and his girlfriend liked it.

The alpaca is now claimed and is more likely to grow up to be something gorgeous.

Earl @ 101... Oops.

Serge @98:
There's no sonic screwdriver lying around?

I gave the sonic screwdriver away at Easter. Besides, it doesn't fit that last screw, the one next to the kneuter valve.

Abi @ 108...

Lecturer: Okay, so what you want to do is this: You want to attack at the most vulnerable spot. Come at it from this angle and locate the automatic flip-flop override device here, which in turn will defuse the antigyroscopic preinterface thruster chamber, and the pneumatic centripetal antigravity shield deflectors, then you simply deactivate the axial gyro-presubinertia-photomegatronic oscillator that you see here.
Fluke Starbucker: Huh?
Lecturer: You pull the plug!

Rt. 96 is the road I'll be taking to my new home in a little under two months. Not the 96 in California, though.

A piece of depressing news. One of the guys here was scammed by PA. Not badly (he didn’t buy any of the “discount” runs, refused the “agent” and the like. But he did sign the seven year contract.

Worse, he then went and fell for “Rose bud”(?) to print a children’s book. They bilked him for $1,400, and aren’t returning his calls. I have no idea if the books are salable (the one is a “life in the army” novel, which I suspect suffers from being treated as a novel, instead of being cast as a memoir.

He tried, but after a couple of dozen rejection letters got snagged. On the upside, he knows he was scammed and isn’t too bitter. Downside, he bought a lot of the PA crap about the market being about whom one knows and new talent doesn’t have a chance.

He didn’t know how an agent works, and was surprised when I told him they don’t charge fees, but rather take a cut of royalties.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that his kid’s book has some merit, anyone have any idea of who he might pitch it too?

The worst of it, as expected, he’s a little put off the whole idea of trying to pitch the book anymore. Some of it is that he’s not really (so far as I can tell) willing to consider editing/reworking the book (he didn’t like what the one “editor” was telling him about how much he needed to use the word, “fuck” which, “I use like commas” not completely untrue to the subject, but not, perhaps the best sort of writing style), but more of it is that, having gotten rejected, and then fleeced, he’s just about given up.

One more reason to loathe PA.

Highway 96 in Tennessee is road the bridge called the Natchez Trace Parkway Arches crosses over; it's the first segmentally constructed concrete arch bridge in the United States. The picture at the Wikipedia article is nice, but doesn't convey the full effect of being on 96 and looking up to see the bridge up ahead of you. Another picture of the bridge by the same photographer.

I was just about to post this, when the wonders of flickr found a full-on picture of the bridge in another photographer's stream.

Go, abi!

I don't exactly miss -- really, I'm just nostalgic for -- the old disemvoweller from our pre-computer days, with its clunky viewscope, and its re-inking assembly that always got clogged.

Congrats abi!

I was hoping for a new open thread, 'cause I'd like to borrow the collective expertise here on a couple of questions. The last person offering useful advice on this topic abruptly stopped speaking to me, and I am wandering around cluelessly in the technological wilderness. I figure the accumulated know-how here is probably significant. Any help and advice would be appreciated.

(1) if one were going to register a domain name, what company is the best combination of cheap and adequately supplied with support for idiots? Any registrars to avoid?

(2) if one were going to blog, what blogging, um, entity(?) is the best? I'd be curious to hear from anyone with a blog about experiences with LJ, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogspot, etc. I assume it's difficult to transfer stuff over once started, so I'd like to make an intelligent choice.

(3) I don't read many blogs and wandered in here originally because I've met the NHs several times via fandom. I don't think this applies to ML because the community aspect here is the strongest I've ever seen, but any idea what attracts people in general to read blogs by total strangers? I have a friend who has several hundred regular readers on her LJ apparently just because she lives in NYC and has a pulse. I love her but I find this mystifying. Why do people do this? Am I just a martian in finding this extraordinarily weird?

(Why, yes, it appears that I plan to commit bloggage, and since talking to myself bores me I hope other people will come talk to me there. I'm planning on divesting myself of some body mass the hard way over the holidays (the surgical solution to holiday depression - sort of an extreme version of cutting and self-mutilation!) and - assuming I survive the process - will need something distracting to do that doesn't involve gauze and leaking body fluids while penned in bed/house for a couple of weeks. I don't think O'Brian will last me a full two weeks. Pondering the mysteries of Regency drawers and poussettes just might, but I expect I'll also manage to set up a blog. I also fantasize about being visited by a Segway, which strikes me as the perfect solution to the combination of too easily fatigued to walk around and too medicated/mobility-impaired to drive.)

Teresa @ 110... I found a photo of Abi with the NEW disewvoweller.

Susan @ 111... I'd recommend LJ. It's very cheap. And very easy to get started and you have a choice of layouts and colors. (I'm still miffed that people didn't like my LJ's original bright-green background.)

if one were going to blog, what blogging, um, entity(?) is the best? I'd be curious to hear from anyone with a blog about experiences with LJ, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogspot, etc. I assume it's difficult to transfer stuff over once started, so I'd like to make an intelligent choice.

I have something of a fondness for Blog City, though I know it's not one of the popular choices. Their page-layout editor is horrifically clunky, and I'm not nuts about the fact that the edit-HTML option just runs everything together as soon as you close that window, but they have hands-down the best stats-tracking I've seen in any of the free blogging platforms and a very nice WYSIWYG entry editor. I prefer them to Blogger and LiveJournal (especially because LJ is blocked by many sites as a "chat" URL).

I should clarify that it does not have to be a free blog platform (thank you, Carrie, for the word I needed!) I am willing to pay a reasonable amount. I also do not have my own server, so it has to be, um, stored(?) on {platforms}'s machines and be friendly to a non-programmer.

#111 Susan
LJ is pretty much designed for the barely computer literate (I know this because that's me). The main attraction for it otherwise (AFAIK) is the ease of connecting with people, given that their format is designed mainly for that sort of thing. Also, you get a fairly good service for free, if, like me, you don't want to spend any money you don't have to so that you can spend it somewhere else. I have no idea if the new ownership will be as inclined to get panicky about trivial idiocies as the old one was.

I can't speak to other services' virtues or failings, not having used them.

Oh, I should add: Blog City has paid options as well if you want more storage space or more bandwidth, but their default is like 2 gigs a month and I've never come within shouting distance of exceeding it. Also you don't have to use the page-layout editor if you don't want to, because they have a fine selection of default appearances for most any taste.

I like Lj, it has some swell social features, but I might hold off for a bit, because the new purchase by СУП has some interesting implications.

Me, I'm invested, so it will take some effort for my intertia to overcome the loss of features I like (and the ease of audience I've gained).

TK

Right, fidelio. The basic is free, but the inexpensive yearly payment allows you room for lots of pictures. And for more icons. ("How do I feel today? Scared that my my boss will fire me? Then maybe Wile E. Coyote with the 'Help!' sign might be indicated.")

Abi! Yay! That's so cool!

More about the purchase.

It looks as if some of the present tools being added (to flag, accounts, and thus make it harder for people to see) are related to СУП being a Russian company, and Lj being the blog engine of choice in Russia.

Blogs were a large part of the Orange Revolution (which was a setback for Putin). СУП is tied to Putin, and the Kremlin, so there is an incentive to be able to break up lines of easy communication, should there be a populist/progressive backlash to the present goings on.

СУП says they will remain incorporated in California, but....

Okay, I'm doing this all wrong! Let me spell out the things I neglected to mention in my earlier post.

(1) In large part, I am doing this to talk about Dance History Things which are filling up my brain and spilling out my ears (and, unfortunately, my mouth in front of people who are bored senseless by my geekery). This means it will be something of a professional blog for me and should be able to accommodate things like a store and a calendar widget and music and video files.

(2) LJ's various, um, quirks about what they allow have kind of turned me off, and I find the whole "friends" thing and the associated high-school-type social dramas I have observed around it more than slightly nauseating. It would have to be a pretty spiffy platform to outweigh these issues.

(3) I am not a programmer, but I can find my way around HTML reasonably well.

(4) As anyone who knows me in person can testify, "dipping a toe in the water" is not actually an aspect of my personality. More like "swan dive off the high board" (and hope there isn't concrete below.) I've spent several months thinking about this intensely and whether I could do something interesting and worthwhile and informative. Of course, I may end up {splat} on the concrete, but if I'm going to do this, I will make a serious attempt to create a real resource for dance history geeks and anyone who needs information on the topic.

Underlying my thoughts on this whole blog thing is the whole pixel-stained technopeasant issue and how that applies to being a dance historian in the 21st century. I've been thinking hard about the bit about the enemy of an SF writer being obscurity, not piracy and how this relates to my natural tendency to hover protectively around my research and mutter "mine mine mine!" Giving away fiction appears to do good things for a writer's sales; I'm in a different position in that I don't really have actual works to peddle (someday there will be Books, but not yet), so what I am peddling is being hired to teach or lecture. Obscurity is definitely a problem. Does giving research away for free help with that? Gonna find out!

Also, I miss dance-geeking with my teacher. No one person can replace him but maybe a small horde would come close.

Susan, given what I've seen of some of the more dig-deeper-hole aspects of their handling of various issues, I can understand your reaction to LJ's management (we all remember the Terror of the Nipples, right?), and as Terry notes, we have no idea of what the New Order will bring us. I haven't been directly affected by any of this, but I've noticed it, along with a lot of other people.

As for teh drama, well, there are people who are going to have to have teh drama where ever they go and whatever they do when get there. There are countless people on LJ who manage to blog and comment on others' blogs like sensible people. There are also idiots aplenty out there, as you've noticed already.

But yay! Susan blogging about dance stuff! Woo-hoo! Susan with a dance website! More woo-hoo!

I think Happy Camp is somewhere in the general (CA Gold Rush) vicinity of Port Wine, where my maternal grandmother was born in a union of the Caya and Farren families. The only trace of Port Wine now is an obscure plaque -- no buildings left at all.

quoth fidelio
But yay! Susan blogging about dance stuff! Woo-hoo! Susan with a dance website! More woo-hoo!

Thankee. But, um, could you please explain why you're so excited? I'm back to the mystified thing again. I know why the topic excites me and a few other folks here who are also dance history types, but, um, are you another one? Have you felt a hole in your life where knowledge of historical dance forms ought to be? Are you a writer who wants to not be held up to ridicule 'cause you display rampaging ignorance in dance scenes? Or are you just abstractly excited by in-depth geekery about anything? Inquiring minds want to know!

Faren @ 125

I know where Weitchpec is, and it's in Humboldt county (we made a trip with part between Redding and Eureka, about the time I /e/s/c/a/p/e/d/ graduated from high school). So I'm guessing that Happy Camp is, too. Not that there wasn't more than one of them ....

Here's some excellent Christmas music by Praetorius--this cassette is on the rare side (I have the record), but I expect that Praetorius' other Christmas music is worth catching up with.

In regards to the mall murder/suicide, terrorism, and various other things: I've been thinking for a while that the desire to make a difference is a very strong motivation, and some people will settle for making a negative difference if they can't make a positive one. I don't know if there are people who prefer making a negative difference.

I don't have a feeling for what proportion of people are content with making some difference to the people they know or a smallish group, and what proportion feels that it takes a much larger than average difference to count for anything.

In any case, it seems to me that conventional education is set up on the assumption that most people shouldn't expect to make a difference.

What would a society look like where the desire to make a difference was taken seriously?

#111 - 122: store may be the major consideration. Taking things as a business (including adjunct to a major interest regardless of making money on the net) and not a friends and family operation nor yet an effort to sway the next election then:
I suggest separating the 3 elements of:
(1) Registration
(2) Hosting
(3) Help

(1)I'd register with a top lever vendor not a lower level reseller. There is a little savings possible with a reseller but more long term assurance with a top level vendor - especially when registration and hosting are separated.

I'd register a number of related names, variant spellings and all the domains com/net/org/eu et. al..

(2) I'd consider hosting with the top level registration vendor - e.g. but not necessarily Network Solutions - and also look locally for a host with the possibility of face to face problem resolution when the store goes down in a seasonal rush.

(3) I'd find help locally whether it be a wiseass teenager or a volunteer at a Senior Center as available.

I'm excited by geeks being geeks. I read knit blogs but crochet, I read a coffee blog and can't stand the taste, I read sewing blogs while forbidding myself any sewing projects, so a dance blog is just fine.

Well, I'm always excited by in-depth geekery about things, and I'm also excited whenever said in-depth geekery has a chance to escape into the world and spread like (insert fast-spreading thing of your choice).

Also, while I'm not a big dancer, I think's a fun, cool thing, and the thought of having another place to aim dance-inquiring minds among the various re-enactors I know makes me chortle.

Also, having the site will get you more kudos (and possibly more work) and how can that be bad?

Susan: I'm for Wordpress. It's very flexible and can incorporate most anything that you'd like to do.

Cliopatria's History Blogroll (ground central for the historoblogosphere) doesn't seem to list any dance history blogs, so there's a gaping hole in the internet's knowledge of dance history. And of course, in-depth geekery on most any subject should be supported.

Susan, I wouldn't worry too much about the action of Snacky's Law on an LJ friend's list. I put mine together as a reading list in Buffy fandom, and innocently included both sides of a few of the most lethal feuds in that notoriously fractious fandom; I'm on good terms with nearly all of them still. The secret is to be unwanky yourself, and to remember that f-lock is your friend when you are tempted to vent.

This has not stopped me from being banned on a couple of other journals, most memorably for objecting, loudly and specifically, to a verbose essay contending that Spike was not ADHD. The author expanded on a list of that character's qualities which were, from the point of view of a person with an actual ADHD diagnosis, pretty much a checklist of ADDult behaviors. Her amazing skills at tl;dr made a point by point refutation more than my bad wiring was up to, and the frustration of the attempt led me to intemperate (although perfectly accurate) snark.

Compared to the noticeboards on which I got my earliest online schooling Live Journal is incredibly civil if also terribly passive-aggressive.

Yay Susan!!!111

Q:(1) register a domain name?
A: They are all worthy of avoidance.
I use godaddy, because they are convenient and cheap. (7$/yr) They also incorporate a whois anonymizing service for an extra 10$/yr. They sell a ton of other crap services on their site, which has an execrable interface. Look for coupon codes, btw, you'll save some money. You'll need a calculator to get the best deal - it's stupid stuff comparing like 5$ off 7 domain names or 30% off 1.

Make sure you sign up for somebody's anonymizing service, otherwise your billing address, phone number, and email will be visible to the whole internet and assorted stalkers.

Q:(2) if one were going to blog, what blogging, um, entity(?) is the best?
A: Wordpress. Scalzi uses it, and hasn't been able to break it, unlike Moveable Type. It's free, unlike Moveable Type. You can get it with almost any hosting company. It's extensible: putting in new plugins is as simple as dropping a textfile in the right directory and picking it with the (pretty good) graphical user interface. It has plugins for everything, including spam filtration. I use it, though not rigorously. It's alterable: you can download new themes that rearrange what things are presented, and how they are styled, easily. You can learn to make your own relatively easily, it's just bits of html and css style sheets, with a dash of learning that this bit of code does this operation.

You haven't asked about web hosting: if you did not know, hosting is renting a server, and is a distinct service from renting a domain name. You don't need (and don't want) your webhost and your registrar being the same company. (Connecting the two means copying a line of text from your webhost into a textbox on your registrar's site. Very easy.)

Q: (3) any idea what attracts people in general to read blogs by total strangers?
A: Expertise. Network effects (i.e. all of us.) Don't worry, you'll be fine.

Susan, I'm an enthusiastic, barely adequate dancer. However...

I read historical novels and history tomes like other people consume mind altering substances. So, reading a blog on history of dance, development and progression of dance, how dance affects social interaction, etc. would, to use a phrase that I rarely use, rock my socks.

I can't believe I just used that phrase. ::face palms::

The good thing is, I'm fairly ignorant on the subject of dance, so you could tell me anything you wanted and I'm believe it! Oh, the power you could wield for good or evil. Bwahahahaha!!

The plethora of exclamation points I am using just shows how excited I am at the prospect of you having a blog.

It occurred to me the other day that I'd been listening to Teresa's theme song for over a year without even realizing it!

Susan, I'm excited because I like seeing people geek out, dance is interesting, and I have always been interested in the bits that you've posted here.

And maybe, just maybe, I can convince my SO that we need to make period costume and to go dancing.

Also, my LibraryThing fascination has been superceded by a Ravlery fascination. (redrose on both) I'll be back to LT as soon as I finish inputting the last pile of projects into my queue, and maybe my stash.

(And the spellchecker doesn't know supercede.)

NancyC @ 137

Possibly the spellchecker wants to be superseded.

Dang it! I looked it up at dictionary.com, and thought it was ok.

Susan, #111: Registering a domain name and finding a domain host are two different things. For the former, I strongly recommend godaddy.com, despite the silly-sounding name. For the latter, you'll need to do a bit more research; it may be that there's someone relatively local to you who'd be better than the Big Names.

If all you want is a blog rather than a website, that's a third thing altogether, and I second (third, fourth?) the recommendation for LiveJournal. It's relatively easy to use and provides several features that a lot of the other majors don't, such as comment threading.

Re "friends", that's kind of a misnomer now, but it's a holdover from LJ's starting place as a way for people who were RL friends to keep in touch online. And the way to avoid drama is to hang around the more drama-free areas (which is mostly where us Old Pharts hang out).

There are LJ layouts which allow you to link to various websites of interest, one of which could definitely be a store -- a lot of jewelry makers do that, and writers link to their own websites, etc.

If you do choose LJ, I guarantee that you'll go on my reading list, and I'll also point several dance-enthusiast pals in your direction!

FROM MERRIAM WEBSTER

supercede
One entry found.

supercede

Main Entry:
su·per·cede

variant of supersede

usage Supercede has occurred as a spelling variant of supersede since the 17th century, and it is common in current published writing. It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error.

Mez @46:

I said 'I'm the most illegible bachelor in town'
And she said 'Yea, that's why I can never
understand any of those silly
letters you send me'"

Brilliant.

Can anyone recommend devices or techniques to make medium-distance driving safer, easier, and more comfortable for an inexperienced driver? It's been years since I've driven more than an hour at a time, and I usually try to avoid trips over 20 minutes, but I'll be driving at least an hour each way to work for the next few months. At least one way will be in the dark.

I vaguely remember hearing a traffic hymn a long time ago, suitable for both drivers and pedestrians.
Please don't hit us random persons
Please do not squash us like bugs
Please try hard to drive around us
Even though you're taking drugs
Does anyone know where it came from? And is there more where it came from?

Our genial hosts wrote the Hymn Before Setting Out On A Journey. I do not recall all the words, though I've heard it many times, and even hummed along.

I expect they'll be along in a moment with it.

Christmas music -- I really like Rockapella's "Rockapella Christmas." Especially wonderful is their version of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." I have not heard their "Comfort and Joy," and it's got the newer band line-up and reviews are mixed.

Adrian -- The best advice is study your maps beforehand. I wound up getting majorly lost recently on a road I drive about twice a year, just because it was dark out and I didn't review my maps the night before. Know where you are headed; have an idea of an alternate route or bail-out point just in case; have a collection of print-outs with your route highlighted AND real area maps and city maps. Print them out large enough that you can glance quickly at them without having to refocus your eyes down to teeny-tiny print. AAA is your friend -- to me, the membership fee is worth it for maps, guidebooks, and especially TripTiks.

Pace yourself -- know if you're the type who can drive for three hours straight or just one, and mark the rest stops clearly on your map. Carry drinks and snacks where you can get them -- sometime you just need a soda to get you that next 30 miles to a good stopping point. Planning to drive that route again? Note down the good gas stations and confusing intersections.

I'm low tech and like paper maps myself, though I did just get a phone with GPS. Haven't tried it for driving directions, though.

Adrian @143 -- I find the music or audio is very important. It needs to be something upbeat and engaging enough to keep the driver awake, but not something energetic, forceful and tempo-increasing enough to encourage ever-increasing speeds. Patti Smith's "Horses" is a poor choice for the latter reason.

Lately I've been mostly enjoying the Escape Pod sf-story podcast for my ~45 minute commute.

Adrian, according to everything I've read, the single most important thing you can do to make you a safer long-distance driver is the simplest to advise and the hardest to accomplish: get sufficient sleep every night. Don't short yourself during the week and try to make it up on the weekend.

Adrian: until you get the route completely down, don't start with music or anything to take away your attention. At least the first couple times, you should be driving and nothing else. If it turns out you need something to listen to, add it, but start with quiet.
Make sure your seat and mirrors are adjusted right. Again, this is something for the first few trips.
Know your route, keep a map or two handy, and look at the route just before you go. It's not foolproof, but it helps a great deal.

Things to keep in the car that are not for emergencies but might make that specific hour easier: flashlight, a few dollars in change, suitable music setup (mine is kind of haphazard, but not the worst I've experienced), something easily eaten that doesn't go bad very quickly.

Recent Garmin GPS TV adverts filk the Carol of the Bells pretty effectively.

Adrian, 143,
Can anyone recommend devices or techniques to make medium-distance driving safer, easier, and more comfortable for an inexperienced driver?

Safer:
Number one is precisely what JESR says: sufficient sleep. Your body will unilaterally obtain enough REM sleep, should you deprive it. (Sometimes only for a few seconds at a time, but...)
Also: prescription sunglasses. Expensive,* but worth it. The most dangerous driving you'll do (on a regular basis) is near dusk and near dawn, when the sun is low in the sky. You lose a lot of detail in the shadows when your iris is trying to block out a bright light. A bonus is that it eliminates most trivial surface reflections, and makes some tinted windows transparent, making it fractionally easier to predict the behavior of other drivers.

*if you only keep them in the car, the chances of you ever losing them/sitting on them/etc are pretty small. They can last much longer than regular glasses that way.

Adrian, I'll second what Midori said. When the sun is low and the streets are wet, the glare can be very dangerous. Continuing the line of thought, keeping your windows clean and clear, inside and out, is also helpful.

Adrian... If driving where it might snow, get a scraper for the ice that might accumulate on the front windshield.

Adrian

In addition to what everyone else has said, I think the main thing is confidence and you won't gain confidence in anything you don't do repeatedly. Take a practice drive (or two) on the route you'll be following; both ways in daylight. Give yourself some landmarks that are really easy to pick out so you know when turns are coming up. Try to get to the point where the route is second nature and you can concentrate on the driving itself.

and another snow tip (and I believe this one's a law in most places.)

When you clear the snow off your car, clear the roof too. You create a hazard when the snow on your roof starts blowing off at the cars behind you, and it also suck big-time when you hit the brakes and the whole roof-full-o-snow slides down your windshield and blinds you.

(My favorite Christmas song.)

Christmas time is here
Happiness and cheer
Fun for all that children call
Their favorite time of the year

Snowflakes in the air
Carols everywhere
Olden times and ancient rhymes
Of love and dreams to share

Sleigh bells in the air
Beauty everywhere
Yuletide by the fireside
And joyful memories there

Christmas time is here
We'll be drawing near
Oh, that we could always see
Such spirit through the year
Oh, that we could always see
Such spirit through the year...

On the subject of interesting Christmas music, how about some Death Metal to spread a little fëstive chëer?

#102- TIm Hall- I saw them last week as well, at the Barrowlands in Glasgow, as the support act for "Within temptation". I didn't like them much, but at least they seemed to be trying.

As for medium distance driving, I find a radio with preset stations very useful. I can switch between talking people on radio 4 to music of various kinds, without taking my attention off the road, and the change in noise helps stimulate me. (Especially when some mendacious politician comes on and I have to concentrate to avoid crashing the car in annoyance)

Driving:

I used to bring a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew on long car trips. The caffeine kept me awake, and the diuretic effects kept me going. As in, I had to pull over into rest stops and pee. This is a good thing; it makes rest stops mandatory.

Becoming obsessive-compulsive about windshield cleanliness is another good thing. It ensures good visibility, and it makes you pull over to wipe crap off your windows.

Bring a camera.

I find that the windshield wiper fluid with the RainX in it is a wonderful thing. The water beads up and flows off the window, and the ice is easier to clean off.

If you are able (There are temperature limits on the application), RainX-ing and FogX-ing your windows is a good idea.

*Polaroid* sunglasses, if you're sensitive to reflection glare. They cut out the glare without cutting down the rest of the light too badly -- and glare can be an issue even on a cloudy day.

Adrian,
I should mention that if you are talking about drives of 60 to 85 minutes, to not let all of our well meaning advice turn this into something intimidating. Experience itself should turn this commute into something innocuous soon enough.

Because it's an open thread:

A bookstore built inside a former Dominican church, in Maastricht.

And for extra biblio-aesthetic whiplash, there's the competition-winning design for an extension to the Czech National Library in Prague: a giant alien amoeba.

(Apologies if this has been posted or discussed before...)

Xopher @972 in the previous thread: (re: Tin Man, which I've now finished watching) why MS instead of DG? Mary Sue, or is there some other reference I'm missing?

V jbhyq unir orra unccvre vs Qbebgul Tnyr unqa'g orra fubja; jvgu ure, V'z abj fghpx gelvat gb fubrubea guvf vagb gur Jvmneq puebabybtl, naq vg whfg qbrfa'g svg. Jvgubhg ure, vg jnf fbzr nygreangr ernyvgl / qvssrerag ernyvmngvba bs gur nepurglcr glcr guvat, juvpu V jnf bxnl jvgu. Rkprcg sbe gur raqvat; vg jnf gbb arng naq gvql naq _rnfl_.

Oh, I just found a wonderful bit of writing on the...well, I won't spoil it, but it's very much in the vein of what Jim MacDonald wrote on November 14, 2007, (Of Fire, Fire, Fire I Sing… ), it's regarding a historical anniversary for those who hail from Canada, and it's short.

Please take a look.

Hey, here's something heartwarming from LiveJournal. This guy's college (Berklee) is giving an honorary degree to Chris Guest! "An honorary degree in music," writes Oakenguy.

And they did it by holding a huge concert. With a video contribution from Elvis Costello. A huge concert that ended with Guest on guitar, the college president on drums, and 50 bassists parading down the aisles playing 'Big Bottom'.

What is this strange, alien sensation in my chest? C-could it actually be...school pride?

A. J. @ 93 - I have been corrupted. I kept reading your most excellent Howl pastiche to the tune of TMBG's "I Should Be Allowed To Think." For fairly obvious reasons.

I am past Xmas Carol Saturation Point and slowly approaching the Infuration Horizon. This annual process has been jump-started by a co-worker getting fairly snide at me when I mentioned my chagrin at a radio station playing nothing but Christmas music from Thanksgiving until New Year. "Yes, isn't it great?!" he said, in that ya wanna make something of it? tone of voice. I made glad-you-like-it-not-my-style kind of noises, and he said something pitying along the lines of "Yes, it must be hard for you with that kind of attitude." Like, y'know, I'm missing a vital moral component because I don't like having the stuff shoved down my throat in every public space for six weeks straight. And this from someone that I had thought was incapable of uttering a mean word to anyone. It really stung.

Why is Christmas music so privileged that someone who, like me, doesn't care for the stuff much after a day or so, gets accused of having an attitude problem? Even by people who know I'm not Christian! And therefore it's just another damn genre to me! I don't insult him for not liking to listen to nothing but Tori Amos straight for a month, or A-Ha's East of the Sun, West of the Moon (the latter of which I did for the entirety of NaNoWriMo for reasons I'm still not entirely cognizent of). It's not like Christmas, or Christianity, has a monopoly on celebrating the spirit of giving or lighting lights against the darkest night of the year. But if I don't like the music, I must be a "Scrooge." As though Dickens had nothing deeper or more nuanced in mind with that character than "archetypal Christmas hater."

I know, I know why this is. Rhetorical question. Every so often I am compelled to moan about it.

On the topic of Christmas music we don't get sick of, I heard Jim Croce's "It Doesn't Have To Be That Way" in the grocery store yesterday, and it wasn't until the next song came on that I realized it was part of a Christmas set list:

Crowded stores, the corner Santa Claus
Tinseled afternoons
And the sidewalk bands who play their songs
Slightly out of tune

On the windy winter afternoons
There walks a lonely man
And if I told you who he is
I think you'd understand

I like that one a lot.

Is the Open Thread a good place to point out the fascinating position by the British Crown Prosecution about collecting "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"?

Samina Malik's story here - and a bit of a caution to those of use who collect information in general, and the (smaller but growing group of the) ones who are particularly fascinated with security theater, real security, and the tantalizing gap between them where ancient dances can be projected?

Todd 162: I meant Mary Sue. And I agree with what you said in the ROT13 section.

Todd @162, I concur with Xopher on the rot-13 part.

Past a certain age, a once-a-year Christmas is just too often. At this point in my life, the season seems to come about every three months or so.

So if I were king of da forest, I'd rule that Christmas would come yearly for children under the age of 15, every two years for people 15 - 30, every three years from 31-50, and every four years after that.

Just got Garth Ennis's revamped Dan Dare. I never read the original, but I found this story engaging, in a very sad kind of way.

Xopher @ 167: And here I thought you might have meant Matilda Stanton (or Staunton), riffing off L. Frank Baum's family history.

Stanton was his mother's maiden name -- and the reason that one of his pen names was "Schuyler Staunton".

Freethinker and rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage was his beloved mother-in-law.

The character Dorothy Gale was named afer MJG's granddaughter (Baum's niece) Dorothy Louise Gage, who died in infancy.

Christmas music is like patriotic music for me-- I love the good stuff, but there is such a lot of bad stuff to get through.

I just wish some talented songwriters would come up with some new Christmas music, rather than simply new arrangements of the same material I've been hearing since I could recognize individual songs.

Nicole

The runway (well, taxiway) light colors: the answer is actually 'yes'. One airport has very blue lights along the taxiway, the other has a green close to the same color as the beacon.

OK, open thread and all...

On the local news tonight, they ran a story about how since the Whopper is turning 50, they had Madame Tousaud's recreate the Burger King character, (the creepy one from the commercials) in the museum. Then they had the guy in the costume unveiling the damned thing.

I just find it a little strange that they'd make a wax figure of something that's already basically a puppet.

You may now return to your posts. That is all.

Diatryma @ #103: ...the kind of yarn you get if you shave Big Bird and spin it...

<boggle>... LOL!

The danger of new Christmas songs is the same as with new patriotic songs (sorry, the comparison came to me and it is far too perfect for me to let go). You want something that feels like "Silver Bells" and end up with "Christmas Shoes". I'd be happy to find more new-to-me Christmas music, written whenever.

Those who were participating in the "Container Architecture" thread may find this interesting.

Nicole, if I were in your position I'd bring in a heavy rotation of pagan-oriented music and play it until your cow-orker complained. Then I'd look at him pityingly and say, "It must be hard for you with that kind of an attitude."

David, #176: That particular kind of yarn has been called "muppet-hide" by my knitting friends for years, because that's what it looks like once you've knit it up.

Just a heads-up; I noticed from my anti-spam/AV report for yesterday that it had deleted some bounced virus emails supposedly from "me" (sent from the address I post from here) to Charlie Stross's and Linkmeister's email addresses. (No, they weren't actually from me unless that virus can infect Mutt on a Unix shell account.)

I suspect that means some regular reader of this blog is infected with the latest Windows virus nastiness and spreading it around. For the next little while, be slightly cautious opening email from fellow ML readers, and whoever you are out there, get that thing treated damnit!

Nathan @ 175... the Whopper is turning 50

I'm older than the Whopper.
Thanks.
I think I'll go have a drink.

The fun thing about the shaved yellow scarf is that it has a pocket on one end (the end that wasn't very rectangular at all) and a big fat bobble on the other. The friend I gave it to reported that her Italian greyhound goes nuts trying to kill the bobble, and now he just wants to catch the entire scarf. It must smell like Big Bird still.
Furry and eyelash yarn isn't always appropriate, no matter what yarn manufacturers think. But in some cases it's the only thing that will do.

Susan: Drama? Happens everywhere. The tricks, as said is to avoid drama-laden people/places.

There are some very nice aspects to Lj. Part of my intertia is (despite the low esteem in which is is, largely, held in the "world o' blogging" it has some solid features.

I don't have to worry about comment spam.

I have a blog roll which only takes one tab. I can put together lots of such blogrolls.

For 20 bucks a year, I have a gig of photo-hosting, newer features make it possible to just dump a photo to my Lj, without having to do things elsewhere (like mess with flickr)

My concerns about our new russian overlords are political (and since I write about politics, that may become important).

I am with fidelio, squeeing. Why? Because I like people. I like people who know things, and share the knowledge. If you were on Lj, I'd add you in a heartbeat, because I like the subjects on which you plan to write (30 years tripping the light fantastic in Regency, and not enough in Baltic and Elizabethan. I'm bent).

More, I think blogging is fun, and the thought of someone else who likes words having fun I can share... as they say, "priceless".

On Christmas. It's really nice being in Germany. When we go to town things are much more subtle, and the PX isn't all carols all the time.

I like the Roches, love that Croce song and have none of the other things I like handy (the Cheiftans Bells of Dublin has some wonderful stufff on it).

But I like Christmas carols, and practice them (when Maia can't hear me) year round

Linkmeister, #80, er, no, I hadn't heard of that one, but it's on my wishlist now. As to Dolly Parton, I not only have both Trios, but three of her solo albums. When I went through the CDs before the renovations, I ended up with mostly country, R&B, and folk.

Julia, #81, I've used a lot of the yarn you gave me -- most of it into scarves and hats and mittens to give to the shelter.

Lee, #90, The only CD I have of winter holiday music is A Winter's Night: Christmas in the Great Hall -- all instrumentals by Ensemble Galilei.

Susan, #126, I just like knowing stuff, and you know a lot of stuff about dance history. It's interesting reading people who really know what they're writing.

Adrian, #143, is there any way you can take an experienced driver with you the first few times?

18 years ago today, 14 women were killed in the name of feminism at the Ecole Polytechnique.

Marilee @ 183, I think "in the name of anti-feminism" might be truer.

My favorite carol is "Good King Wenceslas", preferably sung in a sprightly manner rather than as a dirge.

I was an undergraduate in an engineering program in 1989, and still remember the horror of the news.

Susan @ #185, I always liked that one for selfish reasons: it has my saint's name in its second line.

I'm partial to "Silver Bells" because it paints images better than most.

Susan - ooh, yes. I love it when you get people to sing parts in "Good King Wenceslas", a nice baritone for the king and a sweet young tenor for the page, and the rest of us singing the other parts. Jolly and festive.

Adrian @143
If you're interested in other music with a 'surviving traffic' theme, you may be interested in "Grandpa’s Advice" by Adie Grey and Dave MacKenzie

Sample:

When you’re out here on your own
Just assume that everybody else is half-asleep or stoned
They’re all jerks,
And not a one knows how to drive
So you gotta pay attention to make it home alive
I’ll give you my philosophy, I guarantee it works
Repeat it after me, kid,
They’re all jerks.

You may also be interested in Cartalk's vast list of car-related songs they've played on the show. Sadly it doesn't include lyrics, but many of them are worth looking up.

In #173 Linkmeister writes:

I just wish some talented songwriters would come up with some new Christmas music, rather than simply new arrangements of the same material I've been hearing since I could recognize individual songs.

I believe that songwriters, talented or no, come up with new Christmas music all the time. But the canon of Christmas songs froze sometime in the mid-Sixties, and new songs are almost never assimilated into it.

While we're on the subject, here's something I often recommend this time of year: Tris McCall's Christmas Abstract, a splendid commentary on a whole bunch of holiday songs.

Another thumbs up for Wenceslas. A bright a happy tune, and there's a line in it I dig:

Heat was in the very soil which the saint had printed.

There's something interestingly pagan-ish about a guy so kindly his footprints sizzle.

midori @ 163

That was really beautiful; I was crying by the time I finished reading it. It has a special resonance for me; as I think I've mentioned here before, I watched from ten miles away as a town in California was destroyed by about 500 tons of Navy bombs in a train that caught fire. In that case we were very lucky, because a) no one was killed or even seriously injured and b) that train was scheduled to go by about 15 feet from my kitchen window a few hours later. So I have some idea what that looked and felt like. I admire Vince Coleman immensely for what he did.

Susan, #185: GKW is my favorite traditional carol, both because it tells a story and because it makes an important point (and one which much modern-day Christianity seems to have forgotten). One of the reasons I like the Roches' album so much is a subtle change they make in the lyrics of that song; instead of singing, "Therefore Christian men be sure / wealth or rank possessing," they sing it, "Therefore everyone be sure". I don't sing it any other way now.

So, open thread... I just got around to replacing the batteries in my smoke detectors. Now I have a couple 9 volt batteries sitting at my left hand that probably still have plenty of juice in them. Seems a shame to throw them out, but the flashlight I thought took 9V actually takes C...

What cool stuff do you guys have that uses 9V batteries? Or AAAA batteries, since I can take the 9V's apart to get 6 AAAA's.

Apparently there are teeeeny little 2-LED flashlights that are just caps on 9V batteries, but they're all sold with a battery included, so that kindof defeats the purpose... And all the emergency cell phone chargers I'm seeing use AAs...

#57 Adrian: I'm sorry no one has GPS suggestions, because one of my LJ friends just asked for the exact same thing. For driving, I find it useful to have the radio on, because otherwise my brain has enough space to start considering things and then I get wrapped up in thinking. Better to whistle along while watching the road.

#128 Nancy Lebovitz: I have a theory that people want to be heard. The ones who feel like no one's listening to them are more likely to do something huge and crazy that they think can't be ignored. I'm not sure if most people actually want to change things as much as they want to have people giving some consideration to what they say.

Also, yay abi!
A voice of peace
In a jingly season
Largesse indeed

I also love Good King Wenceslas. "Those of you who bless the poor, shall in turn be ble-ees-sed..." Also, since I'm watching all the Clone Wars animated stuff now... I mean, I'm seeing Jedi all over, but the holy man/apprentice thing is fun in a sweet way.

#57 Adrian: (Oh, though why not connect the dots in case he gets suggestions on his post?)

#164 Kip W: Yay! I love Christopher Guest. Everything I've seen him in, his character is all about love and the strange ways it manifests. And Eee! the Boston Globe article linked off the Berklee article mentions that Guest used to perform with Arlo Guthrie!!

I know some people like Christmas music, but does anyone like Christmas muzak? I really think that in the era of consumer demographics (which the kitten has helped me type three times as 'convsumer', 'consuvmer', and 'conjnsumerv') someone should have been able to figure out by now that we are all sick of it.

Today I went to the mall in Yangzhou and found that, though the city is largely not celebrating Christmas, the mall is -- by playing umpteen Chinese renditions of Jingle Bells (or "Ding Ding Dong") back to back continuously, and dressing up the mall workers as Santa's elves. I found it very surreal, but tiresome, except for the one version that had someone rapping (in Mandarin of course) for a bridge. I did not hear a song that wasn't Jingle Bells, and I was in there for about twenty-five minutes.

Nicole J. L-L., @ 165: If I had a personal coat of arms, "I don't want the world, I just want your half" would be the motto.

Hey, does anyone else here suffer from a Making Light *addiction?* I'm serious. By which I mean, I wanted to work on my play about an evil talking laundry room last night. By "wanted" I mean "needed." And I sat down at the computer, and had to read the whole rest of the thread on the SFWA. All of it. For 45 minutes.
Seriously, I need the equivalent of a Nicorette patch. This & liberal political blogs. Freakin' soft addiction.
And now I'm going to have to read all of *this* thread… sigh…

Abi, if the power goes out, and you need to manually generate power for the disemvoweller, you may be able to do so here.

#74 ::: Heresiarch ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2007, 12:27 AM:
Heresiarch, you win an internets. It's in the mail.

Christmas music not played enough:
1) Anything from "The Nightmare Before Christmas"
2) The theme from the British animated film "The Snowman" (usually airs on PBS Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, also available on DVD)
3) "The Night Santa Went Crazy" and "Christmas At Ground Zero," Weird Al.
(Nicole@165, you will particularly like these two.)
4) Benjamin Britten's cycle of carols

I have waves of heavy usage. Lately it's been really heavy, and here in Germany it's a strange (well, that's not the right word, but...) sort of way to touch base with home.

Oaouh shieiut!

eIeai jououste drouppeiede aiea fuiulle beieine oaouf espaieire vouweiles! Theiay'reie eieveirywhaieire!

Muouste cleaiene theaime ououp beiafouure aeineyioune coumeies.

Does no one read the Making Light Secret Email List? Abi has been smart, interesting, interested, kind and witty since I first started reading here; she contributes fascinating bookbinding information, exquisite poetry and adds insight to almost everything she involves herself with.

Clearly she is a Sock-Troll* who intends to destroy Making Light**.

__
*Related to the underpant gnomes:

1. Create Sock Puppets
2. ?
3. WORLD DOMINATION!

** Reference to the latest Wikipedia kerfuffle.

The thing I can't stand about seasonal music is when it's polluted with chipmunk or other animal transformations.

Earl @ 202... And there I was, about to mention that one of my favarote Christmas TV specials is Olive, the Other Reindeer... Oh well. It did end with UltraMan and the big Tokyo-destroying monster dancing together. And with the Pope getting a baseball cap.

Julie L suggested that I should post about this... I'll be in the Bay Area the week before Christmas, provided that the long drive from New Mexico doesn't involve the minivan going off the road and down a mountainside if it snows at the Tehachapi Pass. Julie and I and a couple of other fluorosphericals are hoping to meet in the evening, on December 18. Care to join us? Where? We don't know yet. That'd depend on who'd be there, and who needs transportation.

Looking at wikipedia's list of Christmas hits, I'd say all of the following have been added to the canon of Christmas music here in Ireland since the 60s:

"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", John Lennon, 1971
"Merry Xmas Everybody", Slade, 1973
"Lonely This Christmas", Mud, 1974
"In Dulci Jubilo", Mike Oldfield, 1975
"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day", Wizzard, 1973
"Wonderful Christmastime", Paul McCartney, 1979
"Stop the Cavalry", Jona Lewie, 1980
"Another Rock and ROll Christmas", Gary Glitter, 1984
"Last Christmas", Wham, 1984
"Do They Know It's Christmas?", Band Aid, 1984
"Merry CHristmas Everyone", Shakin Stevens, 1985
"Fairytale of New York", The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl, 1987
"Driving Home for Christmas", Chris Rea, 1988
"Mistletoe and Wine", Cliff Richard, 1988
"All I Want for Christmas is You", Mariah Cary, 1994

Serge: Argghhh. Maybe Maia and I can find a reason to be north that early (we plan to be at Dickens' Faire the weekend of the 21st).

If so, yes, I think we would love to lower our various SDS numbers of various Flourosphereians

For Susan, at 111 and further:

If you're looking for somebody to register your domain name and host a website and provide blogging software, may I recommend powweb.com?

It's the one I use, you get one free domain name of your choice with your subscription and it's eight dollars a month for iirc 200 gigs of bandwith and 20 gigs of disc space. They also provide one button installation of a great many popular blogging platforms, including wordpress, plus free e-commerce software and such.

My favourite Xmas carols haven't been mentioned yet: The Holly and the Ivy, and In the Bleak Midwinter.

My favourite patriotic music: An die Freude, of course.

Serge #203, What I object to is along the lines of Jingle Bells done with dog barks, and the annoying high-pitched audio transform that makes the Chipmunks possible. Just try to think of a musical Chipmunks version of Citizen Kane without cringing....

Bruce @ 192

Ah, *that* train. The report I found online said (in effect) it was a good thing it was too long for its siding: they had to split it to park it there.

My favorite Christmas carol story is Mark Evanier's encounter with Mel Torme.

"Good King Wenceslas" used to confuse me; since I learned it from the Roches' version, and they are not terribly clear singers for lyrics, I thought for years that someone actually died. And it doesn't seem to be so. Sigh. There's also "Chiron Beta Prime" from Jonathan Coulton, which is fun.

re 190: A lot of the reason is that the Christmas music market is simply saturated. New sacred stuff does come out-- I highly recommend "Maria Walks Amid the Thorn", for one-- but there's so much already out there that the music publishers have to be really impressed before they'll take on new stuff. And then it has to become well enough known. A great deal of this stuff is not suitable for the mall, though some of it could go on the specialty shop's CD player when they get tired of Maggie Sansone. There's some wonderful colonial New England stuff wandering around out there which is underrecorded and could work on the Muzak (e.g. Sherburne and the two settings of "Methinks I hear a heavenly host").

As far as Christmas standards are concerned, I think we've become too styliscally fragmented and too cynical.

BTW, "Good King Wenceslas" isn't that old: it's a Victorian construct with words by John Mason Neale and a spring carol tune from Piae Cantiones. And while I'm at it, the "Ukrainian Carol of the Bells" isn't old either, and (at least in Ukrainian) isn't about bells anyway. The original song is about a bird; the English lyrics came along later and are in fact still under copyright.

I'm discovering that it is very, very hard to add Christmas music to your own canon.

My parents had a reel-to-reel tape player, and sometime very early in their marriage, possibly before I was born, my father put four Christmas albums on one reel. A Boston Pops Christmas album that begins with the lovely, booming "A Christmas Festival", a choral album by the Norman Luboff choir, a Chet Atkins Christmas album, and a Jim Reeves Christmas album.* Start the player going and you had four hours of nonstop Christmas music. We loved it.

That's what Christmas has to sound like, and adding anything new has been quite hard. I've managed to shoehorn a few Mannheim Steamroller songs in (I know, I know, but their Veni, Veni is quite nice). Other than that, not much sticks.

I think part of it is that it has gotten harder for me to get excited about Christmas as I get older. So the ancient stuff has the association of my childhood excitement, while the new stuff is just more Christmas music.

*Everything but the Pops sounds a bit dated but still acceptable, I think. Jim Reeves includes one unfortunate but catchy song about a poor Mexican asking Santa to give him a peso to buy a ring so he can marry his girlfriend. I love it, but I'm worried that it is even more offensive than I think it is, so I try not to play it in public.

Oh, rowrbazzle. I'm amazed that I'm the first to mention Deck Us All With Boston Charlie, Walt Kelly's ode to the Green Line.

#156 Guthrie:

I saw 69 Eyes at Manchester Academy, also supporting Within Temptation. 69 Eyes came over as having put too much effort into their image, and not enough into the music. And programmed keyboards - ugh!

Do you think "The missing link between Enya and Rammstein" even remotely describes Within Temptation? Thought they were good, but not quite in the same league as Marillion the following night. I've reviewed both on my blog.

Santa is a ninja!

Hey, Serge--I like your bad jokes. Except when you beat me to the ones I wanted to make.

Susan--oooooh, yes, please start a blog!

My favorite Christmas CD is Sanctus (Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore). Anonymous 4's On Yoolis Night is OK, if you like all women, all the time. I do, but not as a steady diet. William Christie did a CD of Charpentier's Christmas stuff. Gothic Voices' The Service of Venus and Mars has two Christmas songs on it--"Lullay, lullay" and "Ther is no rose of swych vertu"--and the rest of the stuff is also really good, including a riproaring "Agincourt Carol." (Oh, and Messiah, part the first, of course! But you have to be careful which version you get. Some of them are terrible.)

Hm, I seem to be back now. Temporarily, anyway.

Adrian@57 I want something I can use in the car to guide me between home and a contract job, and around traffic jams as needed. I also want to be able to take it out of the car, in case I need to not get lost on foot when I am walking 3 miles between new apartments, commuter rail stations, workplaces, etc. Can anyone recommend a device that would be good for both applications? I'm more interested in ease of use and reliability than in having a lot of features to play with.

Sorry if this is too late. I have a Garmin 76CS Plus. It's a handheld unit that is designed to be usable by hikers, but it also can load hi-res maps and compute turn-by-turn directions for your car, including recalculating in case you miss a turn or whatever.

If you get the GPS, you have to get the "detailed maps" (called something like that) to do turn-by-turn navigation. The map software loads on your PC, and covers like all of North America (and they have other continents too that you can buy). You then have to hook the unit up to your PC with a USB cable, and select which sections to download into the GPS non-volatile memory.

The memory isnt' big enough to fit the whole US, so you have to pick what is important to you. But it's got enough memory that you can get all the maps for probably 10 states around you. Which means you should be covered for most trips.

I don't know if Garmin has a newer version of this Model. but I'd recommmend it or whatever newer version of it is available. Also, get the external antenna and cigarette lighter adapter. I use NiMH rechargable batteries and a separate recharger. the unit doesn't charge the batteries in it, so you'll want some kind of charger from Radio Shack. It uses 2AA batteries, so I got 4 rechargable batteries. a pair is always in the unit. and a pair is always in the charger.

Tim # 216- I am not a music critic, but I think there is a bit of Enya in there, certainly. But Rammstein? naw, except insofar as lots of people have been doing metal with strings added kind of stuff. Also Within temptations songs make a bit more sense than Rammsteins do, at least to me, but then I don't speak german.
Plus your spot on about whatshernames voice, without it the band would be sort of middling.

I admit to never having heard Marillion before, so have no idea if they are better than within temptation.
Also, I have little concert going experience, and to be honest find that CD's sound better. Ok, at the concert you get the crowd effects and sound so loud it gives you a massage, but somehow I just don't find them better than the CD.

Which is sort of the opposite of classical stuff, interestingly enough. Classical concerts come across to me as being far deeper and more interesting than the CD's, whereas metal etc is better on CD than in person.
But I have no doubt that both sound better when you are playing in the band or orchestra.

I've been playing with the Web 2.0 name generator.

So far, my favorites are "Myopia" and "Skynte". I think I may actually register "Skynte"; it's great!

Cool, Garmin now has a upgraded model (76CSx) that will let you plug in memory cards so you can have as much memory as they make in a card, and you can put different maps on different cards, so you don't need a PC to change maps in the memory. Nice improvement.

It's shown here.

Am I the only one who can't get to Kip W's link at #164? Livejournal is absolutely insistent that I must log in, which I won't do at work. It keeps looping me to a login page. Is this new behavior because of the new policies? I've never seen it do this before. Usually stuff that is friends-locked just says you don't have permission.

Earl Cooley III @ 209... The Chipmunks? Gag. Maybe they're what Hiro was having nightmares about.

Lee @178: I'd try that with Chanukah music, except that it's mostly worse.

TexAnne @ 218... Flattery, eh?

"Serge, how do you manage to say so many stupid things in one day?"
"Easy. I get up early."

R.M.Koske @ 219... I'm discovering that it is very, very hard to add Christmas music to your own canon.

"Mister Hornblower! Fire all canons!"

One of Tom Holt's novels has a grim, cheerless world where the Greco-Roman gods are still worshipped, and carols include

Bad King Atreus looked out
On the slopes of Pindus;
Lightning came and rubbed him out,
Burning him to cinders;
Atreus, the silly sod,
Came to Jove's attention;
People who offend a god
Don't collect their pe-en-sion.

Terry (in Germany) @ 206... I don't know if the evening of December 22 would be feasible. You know, there's nothing to prevent you and other fluorosphericals from meeting if I couldn't make it. Let's see how that goes.

R.M. Koske (#223): It's not just you; I am logged in, and get a 403 Forbidden on that page. I'm guessing that it's "friends"-locked, and Kip can see it but most of the rest of us can't.

Serge #227: Surely that should be, 'Mr Pachelbel, fire your canon!'

Serge: If it can't work, it can't work.

But, if I have my geography aright, tehachapi isn't too far from home. Maia is on break, and we might be able to either meet somewhere on the way, or just head up to SF a few days early and find people to visit.

"There is no rose" is one of those things that gets re-set a lot; besides my own, Britten's, and the original, I know of two other versions.

re 214: My parents had that Norman Luboff album. It actually has a couple of uncommon goodies on it (Billings's Shiloh for one). I'm surprised nobody has brought up the Ray Conniff album that scarred by childhood and haunts the halls of commerce to this day.

We also had such a tape, except it was a cassette and it was recorded off WLIF (old "beautiful music" station in No. Va.) without benefit of electrical connection between the radio and the tape deck.

re 208: Holst or Harold Darke? (For me, it's the Holst, but I am made to sing the other nearly every year at church.)

Another great holly carol is the Sans Day Carol.

What genre is Rammstein? Really what I want to know is what genre is Kompressor, but I'm not sure if they're well known or not. They sound similar to what little Rammstein I've heard. I'm not into the style at all, but I found a recording of "Girl from Ipanema" by Kompressor that I adore.

"Tall and tan and young and lovely,
the girl from Ipanema goes walking
and when she passes,
everyone she passes says,

AAAAAAARRGGH!" (Imagine the most agonized, horrified cry you can, held for several beats.)

I can listen to that bit over and over, and laugh myself silly every time. I'm not sure how one is supposed to interpret the song without assuming it is a joke.

#233 - C. Wingate -I'm not sure we're talking about the same Norman Luboff album. My parents had "Christmas with the Norman Luboff Choir," and Shiloh isn't in the track listing on Amazon.

Fans of crocheting and knitting might want to check out the Pieter Hugo photo on p.22 of the 12/10 New Yorker: a rather piratical looking African guy with his pet hyena, whose muzzle seems to be made from crocheted cord or rope. (Folks in NYC can see the original at the Milo gallery.)

PS to PJ Evans (#127): I Googled La Porte, the nearest extant town to Port Wine, and it turns out to be in Plumas County, not Humboldt. Same kind of "lonesome road" feeling, though.

On one of my two trips to Phoenix, probably the first, I was taken to Mountain Shadows with a group of fen.

Today WFMU has posted mp3s of an LP by Dick and Libby Halleman, recorded at the place itself. I don't think this is the group I saw -- there was a polka band playing when I was there. Still, this band has Lawrence Welk's approval, so maybe it was them.

Anyway, one more set of mp3s to download. For me, at least. Pass the word to all the Scottsdale crowd, please. Bruce, you getting this?

Serge, if you're reading, I need to know if "C'est un infamie!" is something a Frenchman might say, if he were seriously ticked off by being falsely arrested. Would he, perhaps, use an emphasiser, or a different word order. or different words? The general sense in English would be "This is a disgrace!", said with strong indignation.

Coo! If I'd realized Patricia was on there, I'd have downloaded it, no matter who it was by. I wonder if YouTube has Perez Prado playing it... (Ah! The answer is "sí"!)

further advice for Susan
Domain names: Psychic Whois is a fun tool. Great cat-vacuummer that one. It autocompletes/autopredicts domain names and lets you know which ones are already taken. Handy for identifying some one-character typo sites.

Clark E. Myers, in 129, mentioned taking common typos for a domain name as well as the .net, .org, etcs. I'm more of the school of thought that you only really need the .com. (Unless you really are an "organization", in which case you really need the .com and the .org, because everyone uses .com even when they know better. The python programming language site is .org, but sadly the .com equivalent is porn, so, well, you can fill in the blanks.

Typos are much less significant than they used to be, since "less experienced" internet users often just type the domain name into google. That's how most people who aren't directly linked to you will find you anyway.

Hosting/blogging platforms:
I forgot to mention the distinction between wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org. The dot-com offers free (and paid) blogs using Wordpress software. Robert Scoble uses the free dot-com version - it's robust enough. The main downside to the freely hosted version is the lack of customization. I'd pick free wordpress over Google's Blogger anyday, if for no other reason than the default templates for Blogger make it hard for users to click back to the beginning of the blog and read from there.

The dot-org Wordpress site is where you can get support, themes, plugins, etc for the free, open source Wordpress software. You can also download it there, but really, any webhost worth its salt has a one-click installer for your account.

I mentioned Moveable Type in my other post; I didn't mention that I think it has a cooler name, and that our hosts use it.

Oh, and why am I so excited? Well, because I'm a geek for all kinds of knowledge, the more rare and obscure the better. The idea of having someone I know, however peripherally, write intelligently about something technical that they love, is awesome!

Terry (in Germany) @ 232... By the time we get to Tehachapi and then to Bakersfield (where we'll stay for the night>), it'll be late so that wouldn't work. As for your coming to the Bay Area a few days early, I don't think I'd be worth it, but a meeting of a few ML people would, and not just for your 6 degrees of separation. (I have multiple ways of getting a Two to the Disemvoweller, by the way.) Well, we still have almost 2 weeks to figure something out.

C. Wingate @213: "Maria walks among the thorn" (Maria durch ein' Dornwald ging) is wonderfully mysterious, but it's not new. 16th or 17th century, possibly older. However, it does lend itself to modern arrangement. I like to improvise on it in my endless Christmas set, just before a slowed down "Personent Hodie"

I'm amused at the slow proliferation of the Scottish song "Gloomy Winter" [sic] as Christmas music. I recorded it back in the early 90s. The lyrics start out "Gloomy winter's noo awa'...", as in "it's spring, now let's go out into nature and do something natural."

A piece of new(ish) Christmas music I'm surprised I don't hear more often -- mawkish though it may be -- is Somewhere in my Memory from the Home Alone movies. Pleasant harmonies, no cringably high notes, and no religious content, all factors that make it perfect for school choirs and bands. (Pairing it with a Harry Potter tribute in this video is weird, but it works on several levels.) Just don't pay too much attention to the lyrics or you'll need an insulin shot.

re 234: Hmmmm.... We definitely had that one, so I must be remembering Shiloh from a different album.

.....

Ah, here it is, on this Robert Shaw Chorale album. (It's listed as "Shepherd's Carol"; the clip of that track is playing the last verse of it.) This one also has "I Wonder as I Wander". the great Southern contribution to the genre.

231:

Serge Says:

"New From General Products -
Feed your Priest
on
Canon Fodder!"

More "new" Christmas music:

Combining the sublime and the ridiculous, "The Carol of the Field Mice" from The Wind in the Willows set to Daquin's Noel No. 10.

And in another setting, to Joseph Sobol's tune on Kiltartan Road's recording. (This is a full length sample - enjoy.) I just love this one!

Sounds traditional, but Three Kings, here recrded by local faves the Solstice Sisters, was written by Robbie O'Connell.
The Sisters are great -- buy their CD. (Not distributed nationally, so I hope it's okay to put in a plug here.)

ajay @ 244... Or on cownon udder?

My wife is severely allergic to Xmas music - I think its ubiquity comes across as a reminder that "You're Jewish? You don't count." The only Xmas music we tolerate this time of year is The Bobs' Too Many Santas, which is utterly delightful. I love '50 Kilowatt Tree'

While I have limited affection for Christmas music, Loreena McKennitt's "To Drive the Cold Winter Away", the Irish Descendant's "The Gift" (despite including "The Little Drummer Boy") and the Barra McNeil's "Christmas Album" (there's a second one, now, but that I haven't heard) can all, in my view, stand listening to more than once.

Good King Wenceslas: I also like the story aspect and the fact that he's actually going out and DOING something good. When I was young, I was fascinated by the sentence "Hither page and stand by me, if thou knowst it telling, yonder peasant who is he; where and what his dwelling?" The Yoda-like reordering of subjects and objects just enthralled me.

My biggest frustration is that it's hard to find a recording that is (1) the complete song and (2) sprightly!

Since I'm not Christian, I also change "Christian men" when I sing it - I use "goodly men" or whatever comes to mind. But I don't sing it in public, since my singing voice is right up there with the average tone-deaf frog.

I was never particularly fond of "fluorosphere", but "fluorospherical" is just horrendous. Now I have visions of everyone I know on the ML blown up to Violet Beauregarde-like proportions. Yick!

Everyone who thinks I ought to start a blog and states or implies that they will come enjoy it:

You are all crazy, but I'm grateful for it. Watch this space (or whatever open thread is current) for an announcement around the new year.

I think maybe my lack of general blog-reading (even on topics that interest me) has as much to do with time as anything else. I barely manage to read ML and Kos, and I tend to vanish for long periods when life gets hectic. Maybe I just have poor time-management skills.

#220 guthrie "I am not a music critic, but I think there is a bit of Enya in there, certainly. But Rammstein? naw, except insofar as lots of people have been doing metal with strings added kind of stuff".

Vocally there's no parallel at all (Opera diva vs, Darth Vader in German?). But I could hear a lot of similarities in the instumentation, with heavy use of big synthesiser chords, and an absence of guitar solos. The symphonic influence in Within Temptation is a lot more overt, though.

"Plus your spot on about whatshernames voice, without it the band would be sort of middling".

I know that a couple of other band members write quite a bit of the music, but live they definitely came over as Sharon den Adel and a somewhat anonymous backing band.

"Also, I have little concert going experience, and to be honest find that CD's sound better. Ok, at the concert you get the crowd effects and sound so loud it gives you a massage, but somehow I just don't find them better than the CD"

I find the sound quality varies a lot from venue to venue. Some just sound like a loud poor-quality CD. But the best live bands add an energy and atmosphere that you can't experience sitting at home listening to the stereo.

#234 R. M. Koske "What genre is Rammstein?"

Generally classed as 'Industrial Metal'.

And combining the rock concerts theme with the traditional Christmas music theme, anyone from England or Benelux going to see any dates on Mostly Autumn's December tour? Their Xmas shows usually see them play a couple of hours of their own music (everything from hard rock and atmospheric Celtic/prog epics to folk-rock jigs) with up to half an hour of Christmas standards. Last year they played "Silent Night" in a five-part harmony, along with a version of Greg Lake's "I Believe in Father Christmas" which is an order of magnitude less cheesy than the original. And their original material is great as well.

Favorite overall Christmas CD:
Carols for Dancing by Renaissonics. Lively music, delightfully free of lyrics. As a bonus, you can dance to it. Originally from a WGBH (Boston) broadcast.

Susan...

You're right, 'fluorospherical' does have some ghastly girth-related connotations to it. (Says this Bolger-like MLer.)

As or your blog/site... Me, I can't dance my way out of a dunce cap, but it makes me happy when someone gets to do and talk about what they enjoy.

Bill Higgins, #190: Re Tris McCall -- boy, did she get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning or what? What a cranky little brat.

Niall, #205: The only one of those that I recognize at all is the Lennon piece; I don't think any of the others have made it into the American rotation. And technically speaking, "In Dulci Jubilo" doesn't count as a new song added to the canon, only a new arrangement. Same goes for the Mannheim Steamroller pieces that have achieved mall-ubiquity here. I think some of the TSO non-traditional bits may have snuck in, but it's a little too early to be sure.

Fragano, #208: The Holly and the Ivy is another one for which the version I like best is not the standard. The Golden Bough album I mentioned above fixes the horrible scansion problem in the chorus*, and now I flatly refuse to sing it any other way.

In the Bleak Midwinter, I'm afraid, is one of the ones I just can't stand. It's a dirge and puts me to sleep. Lo How A Rose E'er Blooming does the same thing.

R.M. Koske, #214: I have the opposite of your situation. Most of the songs my parents loved, and which I associate with childhood Christmases, now grate on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. (Their standard Christmas music was the Firestone Christmas Album series, if that makes it any clearer.) I've had to develop my own personal Christmas canon, with the added difficulty of no longer being Christian myself. My tastes now run to early-music carols, songs from other cultures, and instrumental arrangements (which give me the music that sounds "right" without the cognitive dissonance of the words).

ajay, #228: That's hilarious! Is there any more of it?

* The traditional chorus scansion, with beats marked by | symbols:
"The | playing | of | the | merry | or- | gan, sweet | singing | in | the | choir."
Golden Bough's version:
"The | playing | of the | merry | or- | gan, | sweet | singing | in | the | choir."
The first time I heard it, it was like a thunderbolt; that forced scansion had always bugged the hell out of me, and someone had finally FIXED it!

I apparently did a good deed yesterday. The office building's fire alarm went off, which meant I had to put on that stupid red cap, make sure everybody from my corner was leaving their cubicle and going down the stairs, then follow them out. Except that, when I caught up with 'my' people down the stairwell, one of my cubicle neighbors, a 71-year-old woman, was in a lot of pain because of one of her knees. I told her to step aside and I stayed with her near the stairwell's man trap until an expert came who said she could go back upstairs on the elevator because (surprise) this was a drill. I went outside by myself, waited in the parking lot, until we were told we could go back inside. When I stepped onto our floor, there was that woman trying to limp back. So I just scooped her up and brought her to her office. I should be happy for having helped her, except that someone said that, since I had gone thru the fire-drill training, I should have known that the man trap was a safe place even in a real emergency. My cubicle neighbor is home since yesterday. Braces, crutches and torn ligaments. With good deeds like that...

Tris McCall -- boy, did she get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning or what? What a cranky little brat.

Tris McCall is male (I'd guess that "Tris" is short for Tristram), and I for one find his crankiness highly enjoyable and thought-provoking, even in cases like this where I disagree with him a lot. I may be biased because I'm a big fan of his songwriting, though.

My favorite Christmas albums:

Vince Guaraldi, A Charlie Brown Christmas
King's College Choir, Christmas Favorites
Last Train Home, Holiday Limited (contains a first-rate original song, "Home For Christmas", and a pretty good New Year's Eve song as well)
John Fahey, The New Possibility
The Roches, We Three Kings
The Watersons, Frost And Fire (actually a year-round song cycle, but hey)
A video of Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band taped off the BBC
My friend Steve's annual compilation
My workplace's annual holiday CD

And, not to make this disagree-with-Lee day, but "In The Bleak Midwinter" and "Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen" are probably my two favorite carols, with stiff competition from "Down In The Forest" and "Coventry Carol." But I'm a dirge-y guy.

"Jingle Bells" is far from being a good composition, but it has a protean quality that makes lots of entertaining weird versions possible.

#256, Serge -

"Man trap"? What is that? (Other than a Trek episode?)

I'm really enjoying singing Britten's Ceremony of Carols this year, as I've mentioned elsewhere.

I actually like The Little Drummer Boy, sappy and historically absurd though it is, because it's the only carol where people will let me drum! (Not that some of the more dirgy ones couldn't use picking up with a little creative membranophonics, but people who like to sit around singing Christmas carols seldom appreciate this.)

#252, Tim Hall - Thank you!

#255, Lee - Yes, I could see that you'd have trouble enjoying your childhood songs under those circumstances. I'm having the best success adding the same kind of music you are, which makes me wonder if there isn't something about that kind of thing that makes it easier to print as "Christmas." Probably the fact that many familiar carols are themselves early music, so early music sounds Christmassy?

Tonight when I get home I think I'm going to use the suggestions here to seed a Pandora station. Ought to be interesting. (Which thread was it that had the cello discussion? I want to use that to seed a station, too, but I can't recall which it was.)

Hmm, it appears that Tris McCall is, not to put too fine a point on it, a flaming asshole and bigot. "[W]e ought to be beyond nature worship by now," indeed. G fck yrslf wth splntry wdn crcfx, Trs.

That was his comment on "Deck the Halls," which is certainly Pagan, but I must say I personally resent people who think nature worship is somehow primitive and unsophisticated.

Yep, the woods are full of 'em. And they're all flaming assholes.

R.M.Koske @ 260... "Man trap"? What is that? (Other than a Trek episode?)

It's the short corridor between the stairwell's door and the door that leads to the rest of the floor. Yeah... That sounds silly. And it was indeed not the best Star Trek episode.

Tim Walters @258 -- thanks for mentioning the King's College Choir album. I've got an older album on cassette (which I can't seem to find at the moment, drat), which has a version of "Away in a Manger" I'd never heard before. The familiar tune (in the US, anyway) is so cloying I've always seriously disliked it; the alternate is much nicer.

Lee (255), Tim Walters (259): I have to agree with Tim* that Lo How a Rose is terrific. It's one of my very favorite Christmas carols. It does help to sing it in a sprightly manner, which is how I've always** heard it. When I sing it myself, I have a tendancy to smooth out the rhythm, but that's just me.

One of my favorite Christmas albums is Schooner Fare's Home for the Holidays. Familiar carols mixed with more obscure pieces, including Lo How a Rose--the main reason I bought it.

*I keep typing that as 'Time'.
**As far as I can remember.

Xopher (261): I also like Little Drummer Boy. I bought Emmylou Harris's Light of the Stable for that song (and because I like her anyway); the rest of it is good, too.

I must confess that my husband has been playing Christmas music since two days after Thanksgiving, and I think the only reason it started that late was that we were on the road before that.

Christmas faves not mentioned:

"Christmas from Clare", cond. John Rutter

Joan Baez, "Noel" (includes some great Peter Schickele arrangements, particularly "What Child is This?"

Bach Magnificat

I agree totally w/ TexAnne on the William Christie Charpentier CD.

My own favorite carols are "Coventry Carol" and "Es ist ein Rose Entsprungen", along with the Britten carols, and something called "Personent Hodie" that I learned at thriteen for a carol service and have since lost track of. When I was a wee mite of eight, I couldn't get enough of "We Three Kings", just because the music was so mysterious.

I've got a couple of bits of music that I always associate with Christmas even though they aren't necessarily Christmas music, because I discovered them in the runup to the holidays when I was fifteen: Prokofiev's "Lt. Kije Suite", and the "Glory of Gabrieli" album with E. Power Biggs and various others in San Marco.

And I'd like to put in a plug for something written instead of sung, that is incredibly evocative: the "Dulce Domum" chapter from _The Wind in the Willows_.

Faren and PJ:

Happy Camp is in Siskyou County, which lies northeast of Humboldt. However, it is on the same river as Weitchpec (the Klamath). County lines are administrative demarcations. Watersheds are reality.*

I find the countryside up that way a little too dry, and the species mix is wrong as a result. Too many pine trees make the baby Bigfoot cry.

-----
* the map is not the territory**
** or so I am informed

Lee #255: If I had to guess, I'd say you probably know "Last Christmas" and "Fairytale of New York" whether you think you do or not. Or at least, they're incredibly huge here (Rhode Island) every Christmas, and I'd imagine they are other places. "Fairytale of New York" is one of my favorite songs, period; I don't particularly think of it as Christmasy, even though it is. To me it's just another fantastic Kirsty MacColl song.

As for "In the Bleak Midwinter," if you can find the version by The Pipettes, it's worth it (er...at least, if you like that kind of thing, which I do). Not a dirge any longer.

#264, Serge -

Huh. I don't think I've ever been in a building that has one of those. Our stairwells open directly on the hallways. But it makes sense that it would be a good place to wait for rescue if you needed to. One blogger I read* spotted a sign at Yale that called those kinds of places "areas of refuge." Good name for it, I think.

*Gretchen Ruben.

Yet another music thread making me wish for other people's collections. Le sigh.

Abi, your bit about watersheds made me laugh when I very much needed it-- almost done with one problem of a Water Quality assignment. I know so much more about water quality now than I did four months ago. It's always Iowa's fault, for one, or at least the things involving nutrients in the Mississippi. Invasive species are bad, but I knew that already. A big drainage area means poor water quality (because it probably involves Iowa).

#173 Linkmeister and others:

Christmas songs played in public are intended to maximize the warm glow of buying stuff, so I don't think they're wanting new, interesting, explicitly religious new songs, anything thought provoking, etc.

As Brad Delong would lament: Why oh why can't we have a decent Christmas songwriting corps?

abi @ 269

You prefer the area farther west, I take it? More fog, bigger trees?

O magnum* mysterium**, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, jacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum. Alleluia.

O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in a manger! Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Christ the Lord. Alleluia!

The do it yourselves versions.

*Morten Lauridsen
**Tomas Luis de Victoria

Mary Aileen @ 266: I keep typing that as 'Time'.

I do the same thing, oddly enough. Maybe I should just change my name.

It's one of my very favorite Christmas carols. It does help to sing it in a sprightly manner

You might like my version, although it's beyond "sprightly" and well into "maniacally perky."

Tracie 275: I've sung the Victoria, and I love it. I've been trying to get my three friends (a soprano, an alto, and a bass) to go caroling with it, but they think I'm crazy.

R.M.Koske @ 271... No matter what they're called, I am rather dubious about those areas really being safe.

My favorite Christmas song is probably "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer".... ;-)

PJ Evans @274:
You prefer the area farther west, I take it? More fog, bigger trees?

No, I like to be one rain shadow in from the coast, which means no fog to speak of and relatively small trees. Redwoods are pretty, but they're not home.

What I love is a mixed woodland, primarily Douglas fir, tan oak, madrone and bay laurel*, with touches of live or valley oak. Undergrowth should be sparse, with patches of blackberry** and huckleberry†. Bracken is welcome in strict moderation; gooseberry and thimbleberry are encouraged. Rosa Californica or nutcana should appear, and poison oak is tolerated like the drunkard uncle you have to invite to the wedding.

A copy of Jepson is essential, but does not occur naturally.‡

-----
* my favorite tree of all trees in the world: fast growing, graceful, fragrant, good in soups, good for climbing
** yes, yes, I know
† I was the only one of the family to like huckleberries, which meant I had an entire forest's worth to myself
‡ yes, my father was an amateur botanist. Why do you ask?

Xopher @ 277... they think I'm crazy.

To quote that Crawford/Davis movie:
"But you are, my dear, you are."
It's meant in a good way, of course.

The latest Lj kerfuffle appears to be a particularly hamfisted attempt to censor interests searching.

FYI, on LJ, you can add your interests to your userprofile. These may be used to search e.g. for other LJ users with similar interests. But now, searches for e.g. "child pornography" & "spic" no longer return any results.

No warning was given that this was going to be implemented. Worse, the blocking mechanism is so FUBARed that any other search term that has a blocked term as a stem, is also blocked. So with the above examples, "anti child pornography" would likewise return no hits. Ditto, "spicy food" or "Spice Girls".

Tris McCall spends a lot of time complaining that Christmas carols tend to focus on Jesus as a baby. But that's what the holiday is about. He shouldn't blame the songs for being about the holiday they were written for.

One thing I did like about that piece was the distinction he draws between Christmas carols and Christmas music. Exactly. I like most of the former and very little of the latter. It's entirely understandable why radio stations would tend to stick to the more secular songs, particularly in this area with its large non-Christian population, but that doesn't make me any happier about it. I'd probably get pretty sick of many carols, too, if I heard them nonstop since before Thanksgiving, but at least I could enjoy them the first fifty times each.

Todd #82: Marry me?

David Harmon @ 279: Don't forget the B side "Percy the Puny Poinsettia."

I've always been fond of Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella, probably because we sang it in choir, and it has a role-playing element with the singing.

Avram, I don't know if you've found what you want for the curried cashews, but the WashPost has a similar recipe for Prohibition Peanuts that gives the mechanics.

abi

Munz, here. More portable, anyway. (I get a kick out of showing people pictures of elephant-heads.)

Of that list I wrote earlier, the only one I really like is "Fairytale of New York".

Fred Clark has a thread about Christmas music going too. There are more nouveau selections, from a brief glance.

Xopher, 277: If we're ever in the same town for Christmas, I'll go with you. (Alto here. Oh, you'd noticed?)

In December '06 NPR came out with a list of "The Best, Worst and Weirdest" of 2006 Christmas album releases.

It includes Sufjan Stevens, Sarah McLachlan, Brad Paisley and The Klezmatics.

Favorite Christmas music: not very much of it. The only full album I can stand to listen to is the Chieftains' "Bells of Dublin." Favorite carol: absolutely the Coventry Carol, Mixolydian mode just does me in. Alison Moyet recorded a very lovely version. I have a soft spot for Fairytale of New York, of course, and there are a couple of rock-radio standards I enjoy, like the Kinks' "Father Christmas" for cynical and Greg Lake's "I Believe in Father Christmas" for less so. If I hear "The Twelve Pains of Christmas" ONCE a year, it amuses me (You're so smart, YOU put up the lights!) but not more than that. I have an original fundraising 45 of the Band-Aid song, of course.

And I kind of like the video of Bert McCracken's cover of "Merry Christmas/War Is Over" but that has a lot to do with a crush on a certain drummer.

I have been known to wear earplugs or concealed earphones to avoid the Tin Pan Alley secular-Christmas standards. Yuck yuck yuck.

Christmas music you probably won’t hear in the supermarket:

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Chant Choir, Mid Earth Rejoices. Be sure to listen to “The Other Shore” – not Christmas music exactly, but in the spirit of the season as it is celebrated today.

Kansas City Chorale, Nativitas. Includes Kevin Oldham’s amazing resetting of “Silent Night.” --as far as I know, this is the only recording of it. You’d think it couldn’t be done, but Oldham wrote a new tune, and it works.

San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble (SAVAE) -- La Noche Buena; Native Angels; El Milagro de Guadalupe and Guadalupe, Virgen de los Indios. Renaissance and Baroque music from the Americas, combining European, African and Aztec early music performance practices.

joann @ #268:

Personent hodie and Gaudete are two of my favorites. A vague memory that they had both originated or been collected in Piae Cantiones led me to this CD.

I must have it. I must. :)

Tim Hall @216: "missing link between Enya and Rammstein"?? My brain just exploded.

guthrie @220: Check Rammstein lyrics sites; they often include English translations, although those often miss some things. They're actually quite thoughtful (and fond of puns, which sadly only work in German).

R. M. Koske @234: They describe themselves as "dance metal"; sounds reasonable to me.

... @221: I think modern building codes require them, as they've just retrofitted such areas into the old building where I work due to other changes; it's fairly recent though (last 10-15 years?).

Rikibeth @284 -- okay, it's a deal. Should I ask what makes me so irresistible? The obsessive completist streak? The obsessive organizational streak? The obsessive geekiness streak?

If it was solely the musical taste, perhaps this snippit from my 'borrowed' directory can increase my attractiveness further...

puny /mp3disk/borrowed% find . -name data\.dump | cut -f 2 -d / | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -5
64 Depeche Mode
26 KLF
19 New Order
16 The Cure
15 Leonard Cohen
Except for the KLF, those are mostly live concert recordings.

Christmas depression music.

On Christmas eve of my first Christmas away from home, I awoke to Stan Rogers' "First Christmas", and I couldn't even get out of bed to slit my wrists. One of the most depressing songs ever.

"If We Make it Through December". They won't.

The aforementioned "Fairytale of New York." Depressing and angry.

Loreena McKennitt's "Dickens Dublin". From the point of view of a homeless women dying on the streets of Dublin during the Famine, it is the very essence of Celtic music -- wrist-slittingly depressing and it's a sing-along! We used to do this one (without the child nattering about a tiger) at a big fundraiser for a womens' shelter, and the audience was guaranteed to weep into their checkbooks while singing along. And we warmed them up with "Christmas in the Trenches." Manipulative? You bet!

Avram - This month's issue of Fine Cooking* has a garam masala cashew recipe that might be analogous to what you are looking for. Recipe Zaar appears to have version of the recipe. I've used a similar technique to make spiced pecans for Thanksgiving food garnish. I have to hide them from John, or make extra, as he likes to snack.

*perused last night while in line at the Post Office

The aforementioned "Home For Christmas" is a bit of a downer:

I wish I hadn't called
It hurt to hear your voice
I got the timezones backward
The line was full of noise

And you promised to be home for Christmas
Life is short and talk is cheap
So don't make promises you can't keep
You promised to be home for Christmas
I'm not going to hold my breath
The breath you used to take away from me

Dickens' Dublin is the only one of McKennitt's songs I find unbearable -- because of the nattering kid.

These CDs are on my must-listen Christmas list:

The King's Singers: Christmas
The King's Singers: A Little Christmas Music
Loreena McKennitt: To Drive The Cold Winter Away
Blackmore's Night: Winter Carols
Christchurch Cathedral Choir: Remember Bethlehem

And this other version of Jake Thackray's Remember Bethelem on YouTube that I just discovered this morning.

What's your favorite (or least favorite) filmed adaptation of A Christmas Carol? I have two favorites: the Alastair Sim one, and the Rowan Atkinson one.

Tim, #259: Not to worry. If we all liked the same things, think what a haggis shortage there'd be!

Tracie, #275: Given my general distaste for dirges, you'd think I wouldn't like "O Magnum Mysterium". But I do... go figure. Somehow it comes across as majestic rather than draggy.

mcz, #294: I adore "Personent hodie," and "In Dulci Jubilo," and a lot of the other Latin ones; apparently being in a language I don't know is as good as being instrumental. I like "Gaudete" too, but I was spoiled by hearing the Steeleye Span version first, and now all the others sound wrong.

Speaking of Steeleye, Maddy Pryor and the Carnival Band have a New-Orleans-style version of "Angels from the Realms of Glory" that's an absolute hoot!

I just stumbled across a Christmas CD I made last year--it's goofy at times, but I likes it.

1. Le Sport, Last Christmas (Wham! cover)
2. Sally Shapiro, Anorak Christmas
3. Erasure, She Won't Be Home
4. El Vez, Feliz Navidad
5. Jona Lewie, Stop the Cavalry
6. The Raveonettes, The Christmas Song (not the chestnuts one)
7. Throwing Muses, Santa Claus
8. The Long Blondes, Christmas Is Canceled
9. Darlene Love, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
10. Yoko Ono, Listen, the Snow Is Falling
11. Suzanne Vega, Coventry Carol
12. Belle & Sebastian, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
13. The Ramones, Danny Says
14. The Pipettes, In the Bleak Midwinter
15. John & Yoko, Happy XMas (War Is Over)

(These are the French lyrics for Tannenbaum. Whether you asked for it or not.)

Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Que j’aime ta parure!
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Que j’aime ta parure!

Quand par l’hiver, bois et guérets
Sont dépouillés de leurs attraits.
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Tu gardes ta parure.

Toi que Noël planta chez nous
Au saint anniversaire,
Toi que Noël planta chez nous
Au saint anniversaire,
Joli sapin, comme ils sont doux
Et tes bonbons et tes joujoux.
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Que j’aime ta parure!

Mon beau sapin, tes verts sommets
Et leur fidèle ombrage.
Mon beau sapin, tes verts sommets
Et leur fidèle ombrage.
De la foi qui ne ment jamais,
De la constance et de la paix.
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Fidèle à ta parure!

Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Que j’aime ta parure!
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Que j’aime ta parure!

Quand par l’hiver, bois et guérets
Sont dépouillés de leurs attraits.
Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,
Tu gardes ta parure.

I am now trying to compose a Christmas wish list, for the ease and comfort of my relatives. This is not proving to be easy.

Things I really want and don't have:
- at least 27 hours a day; 30 would be preferable
- enough money to buy a really spacious house next year
- fluency in Dutch, right now
- good weather
- a promise that my bike will always be as wonderful as it is now
- clothes that fit me without alteration

(I'll list some goats and suchlike, but they're not goat-giving people.)

Most of the things that I want, I already have. Family, friends, interests, challenges, puzzles, a good job, health.

I hope everyone else is similarly troubled.

Abi @ 305... How about a rapière and a red cape to go with you new job in these parts?

Whoever did the last edit on the blogroll put "Lawyers, Guns and Money" into 'Friends', instead of 'Collectives', where it had been living.

Just saying.

abi, if I had a spare fluency in Dutch, I'd give it to you in a heartbeat.

Soon Lee, 282
re: LJ kerfuffle.
See also:
they've given users a tool that will easily identify minors without telling them they've been spotted. Minors can't join or be invited to "explicit" communities... so all someone has to do is send out invites to anyone they suspect is underage; if the invite comes back with "can't invite that person," they've got a target.

Abi @ 305...

Why do you want a flying Dutchman?
("Fluency in Dutch, Serge."
Oh. Nevermind.

Bruce Cohen, 192,
That was really beautiful; I was crying by the time I finished reading it. It has a special resonance for me; as I think I've mentioned here before, I watched from ten miles away as a town in California was destroyed by about 500 tons of Navy bombs in a train that caught fire. In that case we were very lucky, because a) no one was killed or even seriously injured and b) that train was scheduled to go by about 15 feet from my kitchen window a few hours later. So I have some idea what that looked and felt like. I admire Vince Coleman immensely for what he did.
Thanks Bruce.
Do you have a link to an account of that? I'm really quite curious.

I'm listening to Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band at the moment. The Albion Band's Christmas music is also very good, though I don't have a copy of their Mystery Play music CD at the moment.

I must also confess to a fondness for Christmas Elvis and Christmas Doris. In small doses.

Serge @301, I'm actually ridiculously fond of the Mr. Magoo version, because, mostly, of the horrid little group that sings "We're despicable" as they bundle up the bed linens.

Otherwise, I much prefer just reading the book.

JESR @ 313... I must confess never having read the book. As for the Magoo version, I never saw that one, or the Muppet version, or Patrick Stewart's. Reginald Owen's was OK. I liked some things about the George C. Scott version, but Tiny Tim was absolutely atrocious. Also, Scott being Scott, I never believed that his Scrooge would tremble in fear when Marley shows up. But that's just me.

I must also confess to a fondness for Christmas Elvis and Christmas Doris. In small doses.

Don't tell anybody, but I occasionally play Christmas Slim. And Christmas Phil, although that has a lot more cred.

The Albert Finney musical version of A Christmas Carol is overblown and overlong, but a) it dramatizes a few bits of the book I haven't seen elsewhere, and b) some of the songs are actually kind of catchy. And c) Best Ghost of Christmas Present Ever.

The Mr. Magoo version, when shown on TV, is chopped up and horribly faded. Yes, some of that music is great.

Dave Luckett @ 238:

I need to know if "C'est un infamie!" is something a Frenchman might say, if he were seriously ticked off by being falsely arrested. Would he, perhaps, use an emphasiser, or a different word order. or different words? The general sense in English would be "This is a disgrace!", said with strong indignation.

Susan @ 250:

I was never particularly fond of "fluorosphere", but "fluorospherical" is just horrendous.

(I assume "fluorospheric" and "fluorospherial" would be too close to the form you mention.)

Why not just "fluors?"

Lee #255: I see what you mean.

C. Wingate #233: The Holst, I believe.

Pyre... Fluorescents? Neons?

re 253: I have to wonder at the person who thought that "Remember O Thou Man" was dance music. Speaking of dirge-like...

re 301: I've always preferred the Geo. C. Scott version. The P. Stewart version has some good points (Joel Grey, the anachronistic singing of "Silent Night") but the last ghost is horrible, and Stewart just fails to convince as a Victorian.

re 294: Very tempting.

Apropos of many thoughts so far.

Abi, I'd help in a heartbeat if it was possible.

Good King Wenceslas is one of my favorite carols, because it actually shows someone acting on good deeds, not just bemoaning how sad poverty is.

Then there's this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU6iP0WLsU8

And I can't for the life of me figure out why our FM radio market (dominated by Entrecom and ClearChannel) has TWO All-Christmas stations THAT FARKING STARTED UP THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER. Grr. And no classical FM station. KXTR was reassigned to 1650 AM, but may be defunct now.

C Wingate @ 323.. I used to like Scott's Scrooge as much as Sim's, then one Christmas, we watched them back to back. I don't know what Dickens's Scrooge was like, but I thought that Sim had a gleeful meanness and theatricality that sounded right.

Stefan Jones @ 316... I can't remember what the Ghost of Christmas Present was like in Finney, but I rather liked the idea of him being played by the Equalizer in the Scott film. And Susannah York as the Ghost of Christmas Past was nice. Interesting how the Sim movie has the latter dressed like a druid.

Serge #304: I prefer it with these lyrics.

Is it wrong that the Speed Racer trailer makes me mwah-hah-hah like a little mad scientist?

(no, really. I mwah-ha-ha'd. I'm kinda scared...) :-D

Fragano @ 326... I'm not expecting that version to play on American stations any time soon.

The tune to "Remember O Thou Man" is good dance music if played at the right speed (and without the cautionary but depressing lyrics). Fast and sprightly and it's a galliard (per me). Slower, with some swing and it's a waltz (per Susan).

Tracie @ #321:
The tune to "Remember O Thou Man" is good dance music if played at the right speed (and without the cautionary but depressing lyrics). Fast and sprightly and it's a galliard (per me). Slower, with some swing and it's a waltz (per Susan).

Susan has no per on this (I've never heard of it), but wants to let you know she has the back-trick as strong as any man in Illyria and is not sure she wants to galliard to anything she can waltz to or vice-versa. Wouldn't there be an unpleasant wrongness of emphasis in one or the other?

Arrgh. 321=329.

#316
With razzleberry dressing!

It's actually fairly close to the as-written version, most of the time, given the framing device of it being a musical/stage play which Mr Magoo is in.

R.M. Koske @ 234, thanks for recommending the KOMPRESSOR cover of Girl from Ipanema. I found it conveniently on Youtube, and I'm definitely going to have to pass this on to some people.

Christmas music: one I can say I truly like without qualifying my answer is the Carol of the Bells. There's just something grand and a little frightening about it. Heck, anything complicatedly choral or in a minor key beats the usual suspects...

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society did a very nice version of their own, on the Very Scary Solstice album. I recommend it as an antidote. I still haven't heard "Even Scarier Solstice", the followup album they're touting, but everything they've done has wonderful production values.

My favorite track from the first V.S.S. would have to be 'Little Rare Book Room', which someone has kindly given the lyrics to, here: I'll never hear 'Little Drummer Boy' the same way again.

Serge #328: Nor I, frankly. Though it can be heard
here.

Fragano @ 334... Thanks. Say, is it my imagination or is the accent a tad thick?

I've been looking for something on YouTube. They have many clips from Space: Above and Beyond, but nothing from their Christmas episode, which opened with a montage of photos from the Great War while the seraglio movement from The NutCracker is playing. If someone has a link to that...

Sorry, Susan. While you were a prominent poster on the thread, and we did discuss dance, it was indeed someone else who suggested waltzing to "Remember O Thou Man."

My post wasn't intended to suggest that waltz music and galliard music (speed, accent or rhythm) were interchangeable, but that the same triple-time tune could be played to be danceable either way. But a waltz at galliard speed would be very scary. Maybe as scary as this. (Christmas content warning.)

Serge #335: Nope, that's a genuine Irish folk singer.

And now for something compleeeetly different:
Of Atlantis: The Video

She's not a quitter.

Serge & Fragano: Then there's this.

Oops. That choral thing wasn't really that scary. This is scary. No wonder they all look depressed.

I'm trying to do too many things at once with a crappy substitute monitor (mine is sick). I think I'll go drink some hot cocoa with peppermint schnapps.

Tracie @ 339... "I am half man, half Orion"... Huh?

I like "Remember O Thou Man," but it's probably more fun to sing than to listen to.

"And the Glory of the Lord" (from Messiah) is a menuet if done properly, by which I mean fast enough.

And the old classic "Southern Comfort Ye, My People." (Not my joke, alas, though a slug of bourbon before our Lessons and Carols got me through the service last week. I hate laryngitis season.)

I'm on dialup, so I'm not going near YouTube to look for it--but there's a great one called "Rejoice in the Lord alway." I want to say it's late Renaissance English, or anyway it's got that fabulous "all music is dance music!" bounce.

Oh, I forgot my childhood LPs. English Medieval Carols and Italian Dances, plus another one I've forgotten the name of. Very, very early recordings of early music, before Historically Informed Performance had ever been thought of...so part of me cringes at the Wagnerian sopranos, but the rest of me basks in the feeling of "it's Christmas now."

R.M. Koske, #223, it's Forbidden for me, too, which means it's a friends-locked post.

I had the idea that "infame" (with circumflex on the a) was the adjective, and "infamie" was the noun. My French-English Dictionary contains both.

Tracie, #337: That would be a very nice contradance waltz piece, neither too brisk nor too slow.

Tracie, #339: Hey, does anyone know what the music they used is from? I didn't see a music credit.

I've come to appreciate liturgical traditions that make a clear distinction between Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany music, so here are some of my favorites for each.

Advent

Sleepers, wake! A voice astounds us (sound), written by Philipp Nicolai in 1597. But it's hard for me to imagine it was written 410 years ago. Bach based a chorale on it. Various English translations; I'm familiar with the one by Carl Daw.

The Magnificat is of course an advent text which has been given many settings. One which moves me greatly is "Sing, my soul, the greatness of the Lord", by Buryl Red and Ragan Courtney, from a musical called Celebrate life.

Christmas

A recent addition to my favorites is a French/First Nations carol, 'Twas in the moon of wintertime.

Epiphany

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning (sound) is a traditional American hymn with various versions of the lyrics and several tunes. I like the version that begins "Hail the bless'd morn, see the great Mediator," to a tune called Star in the east..

Secular Christmas music

It's sentimental, but I'm partial to Merry Christmas, darling as sung by Karen Carpenter.

Winter music

Someone pointed out that Jingle bells is what the Beach Boys would have sung 150 years ago.

I need note that I haven't seen Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol for decades; I'm not sure I've ever seen it in color, even. But it's more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and we all need some absurdity with this season. With razzleberry dressing.

As for the other possibilities: Albert Finney's version is fine, but really, none of the movie reproductions can equal the best bits in my imagination; I prefer radio readings to any other non print version. I don't like Dickens at all but I love A Christmas Carol. It's quite possible that this is because I had it read aloud to me several times when I was of an age to be read to.

Dave: I'm pretty sure you can say `l'infâme'. Certainly Voltaire does, at any rate.

Why is Serge so conspicuously silent on this question of French? Is he perhaps embarrassed to speak on the issue of infamy and disgrace?

Greg M. @ 198: Thanks, I always wanted one of those!

aabieie @ 200: I think an anonymous donation to Snt Gdwn's Hsptl Fr Th rrdmbly Trllsh might be in order.

Earl Cooley III @ 209: "What I object to is along the lines of Jingle Bells done with dog barks, and the annoying high-pitched audio transform that makes the Chipmunks possible."

I have a soft spot for the Swedish (I think) Chipmunks cover of Gangsta's Paradise, but other than that, I'm with you.

Xopher @ 261: "I actually like The Little Drummer Boy, sappy and historically absurd though it is, because it's the only carol where people will let me drum!"

While I recognize that, objectively, The Little Drummer Boy is an atrocity against good taste, it still makes me all sniffly. I blame West Wing.

On a totally unrelated subject, I've been watching Angel season four, and Brqvchf Pbzcyrk much? ARGHHH. Though the episode "Awakening" vf ol sne gur orfg vgrengvba bs gur "Vg jnf nyy n qernz" fpugvpx RINE. That pretty much sums up my take on season four so far: occasional gems of episodes embedded in a thick strata of suck.

A short reflection on The Golden Compass: I have decided that the very stone of Oxford must be imbued with neo-platonism.

Well, it would explain a lot...

Serge@204: Count me in! I'm in the East Bay, convenient to buses and BART, but would need a lift if we're meeting somewhere away from where those go.

David Goldfarb @ 354... Good, good. A lift you shall get to wherever people want to go, and if someone else needs to be picked up...

So much for sleep.

Dave Luckett @ 345: In #317 I gave a link to Google's web-hits on the phrase "c'est un infâme".

Here is that web-hits link again.

Here is another link, to book-hits including dictionaries and well-known writers.

Please look at even the first screenfull of the first page of each of those lists.

You'll notice that in some cases "c'est un infâme" is followed by a noun, and in some cases it is not.

I'm very sorry that in the latter case the literal word-for-word translation "That's an infamous!" doesn't track English grammatical form precisely... but this is certainly not the only case where that's true.

"L'État, c'est moi" is word-for-word "The State, it's me"; but we translate the meaning by altering the sequence to "I am the State."

Such a translation-by-meaning of "C'est un infâme!" would be "That's infamous!", or (as more commonly phrased in English) "That's disgraceful!"

Well. Back to trying to sleep.

ethan @ 351... Why is Serge so conspicuously silent on this question of French? Is he perhaps embarrassed to speak on the issue of infamy and disgrace?

You've been talking to my boss, eh? That being said, infâmie indeed is the noun, and infâme is the adjective. As Keir pointed out, one can say l'infâme, which translates as the infamous one. Perfectly colloquial in French. Besides, who can argue with Voltaire, especially if he's played by Richard Kiel? (Or don't you remember that that was the name of Doctor Loveless's henchman in The Wild Wild West?)

I'm not Serge, but here goes. "Infâme" is an adjective. "L'infâme" is a noun, "the infamous person." "L'infâmie" is a noun, "the infamy." "This is infamous" = "c'est infâme!" but I think "c'est une infâmie" is closer to what's wanted, as the extra syllables nearly double the available outrage.

Ooh, or you can say "I have never seen such an infamy!" "J'ai jamais vu une infâmie pareille!" (or "une telle infâmie" if you don't like yods.)

Pyre @ 356... "C'est un infâme!" would be "That's infamous!"

Not quite. "C'est un infâme!" would be "That's an infamous one!"

As for sleep, aka le sommeil, who needs it, especially when one can have coffee, aka du café?

Oh, never mind....

aabieie @ 200: Perhaps you could sell them to the Welsh...?

Then again, just dropping them in the post to Polynesia, where they will be most useful might be in order.

TexAnne @ 358... I'm not Serge, but here goes

Darn sock-puppet thinks it can have a will of its own now? But yes, "c'est une infâmie" implies greater outrage than "c'est infâme!"

"Cherchez l'infâme."

But Serge, while I'm sometimes woolly-headed and I often make socks--in fact I'm making one right now--no one can accuse me of being your sockpuppet. For one thing, I'm provably real, having met many Fluorospheridians.

Thank you, Serge, TexAnne and Pyre. Of course I made the dreadful error of taking "infamie" as masculine, but I'm glad I got it, as we say in my country, within coo-ee.

TexAnne @ 364... I'm provably real, having met many Fluorospheridians

As if that proved anything, without a DNA sample of the yarn... By the way, do you think that Susan would find 'Fluorospheridian' to have less ghastly girth-related connotations than 'Fluorospherical'? On the other hand, 'Fluorospheridian' sounds like some silly alien race from Star Trek or from Doctor Who.

Dave Luckett @ 365... You're welcome. Tu es la bienvenue.

Did you know that yesterday would have Leigh Brackett's 92nd birthday?

To quote Julius Caesar:

"Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"

Well, that's the version from Carry On, Cleo.

More carrying on

Dave Bell @ 369... Soon to be released, Mel Brooks's Here Come The Ides...

In The Atlantic Hanna Rosin offers a critical survey, buttressed by interviews, of the problem of turning Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, first of the His Dark Materials trilogy, into a movie.

Also interesting: Jeff Duntemann's comments on the trilogy's theology.

Less interesting: Something I Wasn't Expecting to Find in a Blister Pack at the Drugstore.

Time for a Holly Jolly MythBusters Christmas, with rolling roasts, roving monkeys, wandering robots, bubbling mentos and, of course, some bang and spark.

My favorite part of December is snow on the distant San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff. (We might get a smattering in Prescott today as well.)

As to ubiquitous Xmas music, did anyone else notice that three of the first TV ads to use it this year were all set to the Carol of the Bells, or whatever it's called (prominent mention of bells, fast pace, and early on it keeps ascending the scale in a somewhat minor key, or so this non-musician hears it). That's actually one of my faves, no matter how the ad lyrics profane it -- one translates it entirely to "duh"s. Otherwise, I go for medieval/renaissance and Vince G.

And why do I keep seeing "hodie" as "hoodie"? I *do* know the Latin.

Madeline F @ #195: I love Christopher Guest. Everything I've seen him in, his character is all about love and the strange ways it manifests.

You haven't seen (or didn't recognise him in) 'The Princess Bride', I take it?

Three? In Los Angeles it seemed to be not less than five.

It's not really minor, it's folk modal (being a Ukrainian carol, as is; I think discussed above).

Huckabee is a certifiable nutbar. And am I the only one who thinks this kid was a paid plant?

Tracie #340: I prefer the White Cockade version to the Tannenbaum version, myself.

Hesiarch, Angel s4 (or, in lj fannish code AtS s4) was the first full-season Jossverse program I watched all the way through, in order, unspoiled- since Firefly was not aired in order. There are things to love about it: nyy gur qerpx vf pbhagrenpgrq ol Jrfyrl'f fprar jvgu Yvynu'f pbecfr, sbe vafgnapr, be gur bire-gur-gbc ubeebe zbivr fghss va "Unorhf Pbecfrf" ohg gur Pbaabe/Pbeqryvn fgbelyvar fgvyy vexf. And "Down Under" may be one of the best season-openers in any series, ever, as far as I'm concerned; it efficiently and concisely lays out the characters and relationships in media res, leaving very little unexplained (rkprcg sbe gur fgbel bs jul naq ubj Jrfyrl Jlaqnz-Celpr unf orpbzr hafghpx sebz gur erfg bs gur tebhc, juvpu vf abg fbzrguvat nzranoyr gb n fubeg rkcynangvba).

Allan Beatty (348): "'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime" is one of my favorites, too.

December 8 today. 27 years since John Lennon died.

Allan, #348: I'm sorry to say that "'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime" is one of those that I loved as a kid, and which now makes me cringe. I didn't realize when I heard it back then that the people of the First Nations actually had their own religion. Now it comes across as another cheesy Christian attempt to assimilate other religions and file off the serial numbers.

Heresiarch, #352: That's a pretty accurate summation of Angel S4. I won't spoiler the ending of the season for you, but I will say that I expect an even louder AAAARRRRRGH! when you get there. Even my partner's daughter, who's an absolute Angel fanatic, said that getting S4 on DVD would be a waste of money.

Serge, #370: *holds nose and runs screaming into the night* [1]

[1] This is actually a compliment of no mean order.

Xopher #376: No, you're not the only one.

Serge (@304) I didn't realise there was an alternative tune to the Tannenbaum one, see here for much detail. I wonder if the French (Christmassy) words could be sung to the 'White Cockade' tune?

and also at (@368), my first thought was: "Is that from Hinge and Bracket?", but that was the late Dame Hilda Bracket. Not to be confused with the Hinge & Brackett Construction Ltd company.

Faren @ #373, I've often thought one of the prettier drives in the country is north from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, with the San Francisco Peaks ahead of you.

I wonder if Bagdad, Arizona has any people left in it at all. My aunt and uncle used to live there long ago.

#204 Serge: Oo, I'm in the Bay Area (Oakland, near 19th Street BART) and it sounds like quite a lark to meet up with some ML folk... I could give one person a ride somewhere, too. I wonder if Kathryn from Sunnyvale is free that night? She seems neat. And I know there are a couple others whose nyms I forget...

#371 Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey: Thank you for the link to the Jeff Duntemann discussion of HDM! That's exactly the feeling I got from those books.

#374 Paul A.: "Get some rest. If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

Fragano (@377) Oops. I hadn't seen your post while I was composing mine. But I like the information at Helen Sheenan's pages as well as the music.

Start the day with a refreshing glass of Olbermann.

Now that the publisher A Common Reader is dead (they apparently went into bankruptcy), does anyone have one of their final catalogs? They always had the most interesting reprints--including all Betty McDonald's non-fiction books.

Xopher #376: Yee-ikes. So does Huckabee think that his god that allows evil because we need free will reached into a bunch of people's brains and forced them to support Huckabee? I don't get it. I guess it's ineffable?

Stefan #387: I think I might be a little bit in love with that guy.

Epacris #386: No problem. So do I.

Seen today, spray-painted on a wall in one of the poorest districts of Edinburgh*:

DANTE CALLED HER BEATRICE

There's a story in there somewhere.

-----
* I'm back for the weekend, clearing up loose ends and saying goodbye

Lee (381): I don't see it as assimilating other religions so much as a missionary using imagery that would be familiar to his converts. Seems rather laudable to me. YMobviouslyV.

Lee @381:

The people of the First Nations actually had their own religion.

So did the Europeans. But unlike the snarky Tris McCall linked above, I don't mind holly and trees in Christmas songs.

Lee @ 381... Thanks. I do my best to do my worst.

Count me in for the 18th. I'm in SF but could make it to the East Bay or Peninsula.

I don't know what the lyrics to "Carol of the Bells" are, but in my head it goes "ding fucking dong/all season long" repeatedly.

Madeline F @ 385... So far, that Dec 18 meeting has Kathryn, Julie L, Dawno and David Goldfarb. Terry (from Germany) apparently is considering it. I'll be staying at my in-laws in Concord and my minivan could have 3 passengers - or more, if some people are willing to sit on the floor way in the back. As for where we should meet, don't be surprised when you and others start getting emails about Brittney Spears and farm animals... er... titled 'mini ML meeting'.

I'm grading finals at the moment, and have come up with these, ahem, gems:

The gods love pious since it is morally right no matter who is involved. To them, there is a being greater than the next when piety is in play. IT goes hand and hand with the 10 commandments today. We obey them because they are worthy of being obeyed and God approves of them not; we obey the 10 commandments because God approves of them. The 10 commandments are based on morals and so is piety.

Growing up his parents felt his smartness should be explored, so they sent him to Rome to gain more knowledge.

He did not understand the concept that the only one true God had at that point of time so; he decided to write a book that goes in to detail of Gods purpose of this happening.

His family disagreed to new foundation he had built for himself so, his bothers took him captive back to his family castle and held him captive for over a year. They felt as if this would be very beneficiary and corrupt his way of thinking.

When going through their works one will find a number of different views of governing and creating a governing system, but even though the systems differ they still center around the idea of a predominate class, which in most cases consisted of white Europeans, and secondary and third classes, which could range from improvised persons and or slaves.

Mary Aileen, #392: I also can't help but imagine someone like Frank Sinatra crooning "Feliz Navidad" to an audience of Mexicans. Post-Catholicism, it's just patronizing; prior to that, it becomes downright icky.

Tim, #395: You just made both me and my Christmas-music-hating partner guffaw uproariously. Even though I like CotB, I can comprehend that reaction!

Serge @ 396: My e-mail address is "walters@" followed by the domain you get when you click on my name.

Tim Walters @ 399... Duly noted. See you soon!

Fragano @ 397... IT goes hand and hand with the 10 commandments today

If the Commandments have hands, does that mean they are sometimes found with their fingers in the pie-ty?

Serge #401: Only for those involved with IT, apparently.

Tim Walters #395: I don't know what the lyrics to "Carol of the Bells" are, but in my head it goes "ding fucking dong/all season long" repeatedly.

I've got two of those. There's "It's the most godawful time of the year," and there's "Silver bells, silver bells/It's Christmas time, ain't it shitty?"

If I were good at it, I'd try to come up with new lyrics for "Tannenbaum" and call it "Trapped In A Tomb", but neither Poe nor poet am I so I'll abstain.

Frickin' awesome!
PW says that Tor and Seven Seas (boutique U.S. manga publisher*) are teaming up! Bonus includes:

Not only will the new venture release a combination of original and licensed manga, but also YA prose fiction and “light novels,” a Japanese format featuring illustrated prose novels at small trim size that are generally based on popular manga series.

re 381: Considering that the only majority Episcopal places in the US are Indian reservations, I think it's a bit presumptuous for others to tell them whether or not they they should keep or abandon their old religions for a new one. That said, "'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime" makes me cringe too, but maybe for the wrong reasons.

Fragnao #397:

I really like the idea of improvised persons.

Er, Fragano, sorry about mistyping your name. Just back up from the fifth power failure since 1 am. No clue as to what's going on, but lots of stuff keeps going off.

Aj Luxton #333:

The local public radio guy had a fit one year of playing every "Carol of the Bells" he could lay his hands on, all in one go. We recorded about 2 hours worth, or however long the tape lasted, but there were *lots* more. Some were very scary indeed.

Lee @ #398: Even though I like CotB, I can comprehend that reaction!

I like it as well, actually, although it requires proper handling even more than most carols. One of my co-workers did a version in the style of Philip Glass, which is both funny and effective.

Texanne #343 Oh, I forgot my childhood LPs. English Medieval Carols and Italian Dances, plus another one I've forgotten the name of. Very, very early recordings of early music, before Historically Informed Performance had ever been thought of...so part of me cringes at the Wagnerian sopranos, but the rest of me basks in the feeling of "it's Christmas now."

Sounds like Noah Greenberg and the New York Musica Antiqua? They came in a boxed set from back in the 40s; I found them in the early 70s as a rerelease.

There's a Purcell "Rejoice in the Lord Alway"; are you thinking of that? I've got it in an Alfred Deller recording either just earlier than or contemporary to the Greenberg.

Make that power failure #6. Natives are starting to break out the pitchforks to go along with the torches.

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey @371: Also interesting: Jeff Duntemann's comments on the trilogy's theology.

Thanks for the links; this one in particular.

A few years ago my mom gave me the first couple of books in Pullman's trilogy to vet for my niece. She had enjoyed the Harry Potter stories, and my mom had noted the Pullman stories had been described as popular among young adults. However, fantasy and SF were not to her own tastes, so she thought I could evaluate them for her.

I liked the books enough that I hunted down the third book in the trilogy, and then passed along the whole set to my niece. I also took the opportunity to give her a brief description of gnostic theology, as it was one of the themes in the books.

All the talk about the atheism in Pullman's trilogy misses the mark entirely, IMO.

The lady in question is an intelligent and voracious reader (in her first year of college now); I recently gave her a copy of Flatland.

I forgot another favorite seasonal song, "The Christians and the Pagans" by Dar Williams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Xdk4PujOE

'cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning." my favorite line.

Lee (398): I'm not sure what you're getting at with this: Post-Catholicism, it's just patronizing; prior to that, it becomes downright icky. Could you unpack that a little?

It is my understanding that TitMoW was written by a missionary to the Huron Indians for his congregation to sing, so I don't quite see how their former religion comes into it. Unless you're objecting to the whole idea of missionaries, which I could certainly sympathize with.

joann #407/408: That's a grade point off for you!

I am impressed by the idea of 'improvised persons' as well. I'm not sure what on earth the young person who wrote that meant.

Fragano @416:

imprisoned persons, perhaps?

Speaking of which, I wonder what it's like to be imprisoned by bothers. I pictured a tower room whose doorway is protected by some sort of spell. As you cross the threshold, a soft Winnie the Pooh voice begins to speak in your ear.

The further away from your prison you venture, the louder the voice becomes. The inanity drags at your mind like hunny until you collapse into blessed unconsciousness. You awake in your room again, the voice silent until you venture forth again.

For the corruption of the ways of thinking, I'd recommend Piglet doing a fan-dance.

Paula 414: When the camp where we have a Pagan gathering was taken over (management and ownership) by a Christian group, and they were a little freaked out by us at first, one of our community's most talented singers sang that song at the feast. As far as I know there was no actual friction, and things got better once they realized that we actually IMPROVED the camp while we were there (grass seeding bare patches, etc.).

abi #417: It could also be 'impoverished'. I keep telling students that my job is not to guess at what they mean.

Now I have to get the image of Piglet doing a fan dance out of my mind!

joann: That'd be John Aielli? I never could forgive him for Tramp Day.

New York Musica Antiqua, could be. Or it could be the Primavera Singers. I don't think I saw the covers enough to know--my parents had a changer, and they'd just leave all the Christmas records on a stack, turning them over as needed.

I often think I'm an improvised person.

Hey, don't knock "Carol of the Bells" too much. It's the tune that taught me to beat three against two.

I was going to add "Mele Kalikimaka" to any list of slightly questionable xmas songs, but I looked up the lyrics and they're pretty harmless.

Let's see...

Congratulations to Abi, whose poeticalness has always impressed me!

The Alistair Sim Christmas Carol (or Scrooge, depending on where it was released), the George C. Scott and Mr. Magoo versions of same, and Patrick Stewart's solo stage performance (which is abolutely priceless in my opinion; a decent substitute is the audio CD version. His TNT production was, unfortunately, pedestrian in the extreme, to my way of thinking).

Favorite Christmas music: Carol of the Bells (instrumental, preferably, as most of the vocal versions I've heard strike me as rather shrill); The Christmas Song; Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; Run Run Rudolph; Grandma Got Run Over...; Blue Christmas; God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen; A Charlie Brown Christmas; A Consort of Choral Christmas Carols (P.D.Q. Bach); For Unto Us a Child is Born and Hallelujah! from Handel's Messiah; and Stan Freberg's Green Christmas. There are others, but these are what come to mind most often...

Suzanne @ #422, Mele Kalikimaka is just an attempt at translation. If you want satirical Hawaiian Christmas music, look no further than the local version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

I never knew the backstory that site tells, but I've heard the song for years and years. I do like a "mynah bird in one papaya tree," although all the mynahs around our place just cruise the grounds.

Mary Dell @ 6: 96° F is also my normal body temperature (well, actually I run a bit hotter than 96, but below 97). It made it really hard to convince the nurse that I was sick in elementary school, since 2 degrees of fever looked just like "normal".

I guess I'm permanently pre-ovulatory, so it sounds like I'm in range.

Lee @ 90: I like Sing We Noel, by the Boston Camerata. It's all carols that would be period for Colonial America (so, of course, a lot of them are much older than that), and the singing is lovely. And you get carols like Ad cantus leticie and Nova, nova; Aue fitt ex Eva.

For the store situation, knowing other words to the same tune (either filks or more traditional material) works wonders for me. I haven't yet burst into The People's Flag/Keep the Red Flag Flying in a mall, but I've been tempted.

Janet Croft @ 145 re the AAA recommendation: ...or Better World Club. Pretty much all the benefits of AAA, but with better carma (pun theirs). Plus they do roadside assistance for bikes, too!

Susan @ 185: ack! how can anyone sing Good King Sauerkraut ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Wenceslas in anything but a sprightly manner? I mean, a dirgelike We Three Kings is okay, but Good King Wenceslaus?

Earl Cooley III @ 202: do the "Oh woe is me/Oh woe is me/Oh once I had/A hamster tree" lyrics fall in that category?

Still grading, still groaning. Misery loves company:

Current leaders could be endowed with the idyllic of these theorists and use it as justification for how they correlate that top others.

Democracy is a form of the government by the form of the people.

South Africa environment is not the best in the country.

The citizens aren’t able to republish their water supply when ever they need to.

Surrounded by neighboring countries and natural borders, land is one thing that South Africa is unable to produce more of.

Fragano, "land is one thing that South Africa is unable to produce more of."

Can't remember. Does South Africa have volcanoes?

We used to have a 1/4-acre plot on the Big Island, and when it was overrun by Kilauea Dad said our land was accreting nicely.

The Huron Carol -- what is the precursor/ur-text of "Twas in the Moon of Wintertime" was written by Jesuits off to convert the Huron; the original lyrics are in Huron; the English lyrics are a twentieth century creation, and shouldn't be held against Jean de Brébeuf. (I believe they're also derived from the French translation, not the Huron.)

Considering what happened to those particular Jesuits, and their really comprehensive general educational efforts as well as missionary efforts, I don't think cultural appropriation is really the appropriate charge to level against them either.

The Huron version is absolutely haunting, even if one cannot (as I most certainly cannot!) understand a word of it.

Linkmeister #427: South Africa's volcanoes are, as far as I know, extinct.

ajay @ #228, that sounds like something out of Silverlock.

Tim @ #259, have you heard James Taylor sing "Jingle Bells" in blues style?

Fragano @ #397, have you ever made those kids read their papers out loud?

Re "Good King Wenceslas": the snotty footnote in the Oxford Book of Carols is so priceless that reading it aloud has become a tradition in my family:
"This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the delightful tune, which is that of a Spring carol, ‘Tempus adest floridum’, No. 99. Unfortunately Neale in 1853 substituted for the Spring carol this ‘Good King Wenceslas’, one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call ‘doggerel’, and Bullen condemns as ‘poor and commonplace to the last degree’. The time has not yet come for a comprehensive book to discard it; but we reprint the tune in its proper setting (‘Spring has now unwrapped the flowers’), not without hope that, with the present wealth of carols for Christmas, ‘Good King Wenceslas’ may gradually pass into disuse, and the tune be restored to spring-time. Neale did the same kind of thing to another Spring carol, ‘In vernali tempore’ (No. 98; cf. No. 102); but this was not popularized by Bramley & Stainer."

A bit of Googling reveals this equally snotty comment in the Penguin Book of Carols:
"Product of an unnatural marriage between Victorian whimsy and the thirteenth-century dance carol (Piae Cantiones) Tempus adest floridum. [...] The tune is in the quick-moving virile measure of the branle family of dance tunes that swept Europe, characterized by a stamp on the heavy minim beats - a typical hurdy-gurdy tune. A late medieval song of similar structure is printed in the New Oxford History of Music (vol. III, p. 357). The Tempus adest floridum tune should be sung in unison, at its approximate speed, not slower than half-note = 120, two strong beats to a bar, with clapping drum, and plucked instruments, and a drone for the realization of the travail Neale’s ponderous moral doggerel has imposed upon a light-hearted spring dance measure. If, treated as this carol should be treated, it sounds ridiculous to pseudo-religious words, this only shows how ridiculous they are in such a contest: ‘Ste-phen’, ‘cru-el’, etc., are bathos on the accented stamp-notes. In spirit, in feeling, as in fact, it is entirely pagan. Danced as ‘twist’, with modern rhythm accompaniment, this tune would be nearer to its authentic style. (This is bound to disappoint the people who enjoy wallowing in cumbrous, harmonized settings and Master and Page solos.) The sooner this carol is restored to spring and its rightful treatment, the better."

To both of these I give a resounding THBBBBPTTT!!

My favorite Christmas music ranges from Bach's Christmas Oratorio to A Charlie Brown Christmas to quite a lot of Robert Shaw's stuff (Angels on High is a great album) to Daniel Pinkham's Christmas Cantata to, yes, Mannheim Steamroller. I also like Rockapella Christmas (but not Comfort and Joy), James Taylor at Christmas, and even Toolbox Christmas. If I had to pick a favorite Christmas song it would probably be "I Wonder As I Wander", or perhaps one of Hall Johnson's or William Dawson's spirituals. Or "Riu, Riu" from Medieval Roots.

Lila, I think both of those are absolutely delightful! GKW has a great tune and abominable, theologically incorrect (so say my Christian friends) words.

Lila #430:

I doubt I'd be allowed to, since that might embarrass them. Also, quite a few of them wouldn't see what was wrong.

Lila 430,
Loreena McKennitt did a version of Wenceslas that has a guitar cord that feels very dance like or skipping. Mind you her God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen sounds like you can belly dance to it.
You can sample the sound here:
http://www.quinlanroad.com/explorethemusic/wintergarden.asp

Fragano, a friend of mine who worked at a college writing center for a few years tells me when he used to have people read papers like that out loud, they wouldn't read--they would say, in simple, understandable language, what they had meant to write. And they would always be startled when he pointed out to them that they weren't reading what was on the page.

Stephen Sample #425: No, I won't begrudge Clive Barker's right to lament his missing cuddly fruit; that would be beyond my normally curmudgeonly capacity for holiday season cruelty.

Saw "The Golden Compass," the movie, this afternoon.

Not as bad as some of the reviews suggest; nowhere near as good as it could have been.

As is often the case, I admire efforts like this for even trying. It's like the fourth Harry Potter movie; you're left flabbergasted at what they managed to do even as you're disappointed at what they left out, and at much of the execution.

What I like best: The Magisterium is clearly a religious authority. What the "little cut" that Mrs. Coulter wants for everybody else's kid is clearly intended to neuter soul and sexuality. The serial numbers may have been filed off, but they didn't do a good job. I admire that kind of ballsiness.

ethan #434: Hmm. That might work in a writing centre (ours was abolished by fiat from on high), but not in a classroom.

Students have told me 'I mean X' and haven't been happy when I've pointed out 'You didn't write that, and I can only go by what you write.'

Gack, no writing center? Yeesh. Stupid fiat. Sympathies.

midori @ 311

Here's a brief account from the US Navy safety office and here's a local account with more detail.

Ethan, that is one reason I always read my short stories out loud before I send them off. It seriously disturbs the cats (less so now because I have no 'talking cats' right now). But it jerks out problems in a way no other amount of viewing a story can.

A few tiimes I've found myself reading along and going "WTF, how does that make sense....?" And then edited severely.

Stefan Jones @#436: I agree about The Golden Compass...just saw it this afternoon. It was wonderful to see things brought to life so close to the way I imagined them. The ships and machines were all really cool.

I wondered, the whole time I was watching, how they would deal with gur obbx'f raqvat, juvpu vf fb fcrpgnphyneyl qvfvyyhfvbavat. V jnf nsenvq gurl'q punatr vg, ohg vafgrnq vg whfg jenccrq hc rneyl, jvgu gung bzvabhf abgr bs "V'z oevatvat zl sngure jung ur arrqf," jvgu Ylen abg xabjvat gung Ebtre vf jung fur'f oevatvat. Fgvyy, V unq orra ubcvat hc hagvy gung cbvag gung gurl zvtug npghnyyl unir gur areir gb fgvpx jvgu gur obbx'f raqvat.

Nicole Kidman was a perfect choice, and her daemon was just as I imagined him. Daniel Craig was good too, but as soon as there was a bit of action I suddenly thought of him as Bond again, so that was a bit annoying...it kicked me right out of the story.

All in all, It felt kind of like a glorious set of illustrations for the book, rather than a full alternate telling of the same story.

Madeline F@385: Hey, that's right where I am! I work at the Copymat a couple of blocks down the street...do you know it?

Ethan #403:

"Have yourself a surly little Christmas..."

I think "improvised persons" must be some kind of PC term for robots.

Mary Dell @#441, Stefan Jones @ #436 -

My wife and I saw The Golden Compass this afternoon, and my reaction was similar - an entertaining, if perhaps imperfect, visualization of the novel.

My wife hasn't read the book, so she came it to it pure, and loved it. I had finished the novel a few days before seeing it, and I was impressed with how the moviemakers had realized some of the imaginings in the book. The daemons were extremely well done, and Ian Mckellen was born to voice an Armored Bear. Kudos as well to Nicole Kidman for her icy-sweet performance as Mrs. Coulter, and Dakota Blue Richards (what a great name!) as Lyra.

Where the movie was lacking a bit was in the direction - Chris Weitz's effort lacked some awareness of where the emotional peaks should have been, and the movie felt a bit a hurried.

But all in all, I liked it.

One thing I was wondering...do people in Lyra's universe have pets?

hmm...

So, Simcon is going on its thirtieth year of existence, and I'm trying hard to think of primarily gaming conventions (other than Origins and Gencon) that have been running continuously for a longer period of time.

Anyone have any ideas? I know Making Light is more SF-con (and specifically SF-Litcon) in general - but I also know there's a passel of gamers and ex-gamers lurking around in the margins.

(I did find one - DunDraCon, which is two years older, according to their website and wikipedia. CanGames might be older - I'm not sure. I'm almost certain Cold Wars and Historicon are older - but they overlap only peripherally).

#441: There's a discussion about the choice of the movie's ending-point here. Lrnu, cbbe Ebtre. Ur trgf fnpevsvprq. Gung jvyy pbzr nf n fubpx. Gurl nyfb unq Ylen fhttrfg gur cbffvovyvgl bs erwbvavat xvqf jvgu gurve frirerq qnrzbaf; Ovyyl gur 'Tlcgvna cerfhznoyl fheivirq.

V xvaq bs qbhog gurer jvyy or frdhryf. Abg hayrff guvf vafgnyyzrag ernyyl qbrf nznmvatyl jryy.

#446: In the book, Mrs. Coulter tells Lyra that severed daemons would be the (paraphrasing) "best pets in the world." So the concept is there.

And I imagine there'd be cats that do mousing and dogs that herd sheep.

OwlCon has been going almost that long: their next convention is #28 in February, at Rice University in Houston, Tx.

Has anybody seen Charlie Stross recently? This seems like it might be rather up his alley...

Xeger @ 450 It's thought no data was taken by the robbers, however.

...right. Just like those laptops that were lost by the VA.

JKRichard @ 451 ...
Xeger @ 450 It's thought no data was taken by the robbers, however.
...right. Just like those laptops that were lost by the VA.

A Reg reader who works for an investment bank says it is suffering major network outages today as a result of the raid.

Actually, given the cost of networking gear[0], I'd be willing to believe that they lost no data, but did lose gear...

[0] Running easily into the millions for remarkably small items

Tim, #410: Now you've reminded me (tangentially) of my favorite CotB story. I was in the Concert Choir in college, and for a fund-raiser we did Singing Christmas Cards every year. One of the options was CotB, and of course that was the one everyone wanted. (After singing it 10 or 12 times a night for 3 nights running, I was more than a little burned out on it!)

One night one of our victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^H carolees had to be dragged out of the shower by his suitemates, and appeared at the door wearing only a towel. The next day, someone unfamiliar said hello to me in the bookstore, and turned out to be Towel Guy. And just once, I got the Blinding Flash of Inspiration at exactly the right time, and said, "Oh! I didn't recognize you with your clothes on!"

Mary Aileen, #415: Yeah, that was a bit obscure, wasn't it? Let me try again. The scenario in question is some white crooner singing "Feliz Navidad" to an audience consisting of Mexicans.

If we think of it occurring in the present, when Catholicism is the dominant religion in Mexico, then it feels (to me) like patronization, as if the singer is saying, "See, I can ape your cute little culture too." Yes, an alternate reading is, "I'm trying to perform something in the cultural reference of my audience," but that's not the first one that occurs to me.

If we think of it occurring in the past, as TitMoWT appears to have been done, then it runs up against my general opinion of missionaries, which is "con-men"* and therefore triggers the "icky" flag.

Stephen, #425: I occasionally find myself softly singing the filk lyrics to the Hallelujah Chorus in the mall. "I'm a soprano! I'm a tenor! She's not an alto! She's not an alto! Hallelujah!"

Xopher, #431: GKW also has a message which badly needs to be dusted off and restored to its previous prominence on the mantlepiece of modern Christianity: the responsibility of the well-off toward the poor. In a time when the Gospel of Prosperity rules the faith and poverty is seen as evidence of moral depravity, I keep wanting to pound soi-disant Christians like James Dobson, Rick Warren, and Joel Osteen** over the head with it until it SINKS IN.

Earl, #449: Yes, and for the first time since I moved here, neither my partner nor I will be attending. In an interesting shell game, he will be running tables at an anime-con in KC for Pegasus Publishing, and our friend from White Lightning Productions will be running our booth at OwlCon. Me... I'm going to be English dancing to Bare Necessities in OKC!

* Note that I don't have a problem with people who, out of their personal religious convictions, want to help those less fortunate than themselves improve their lives. The problem occurs when "not having the same religion I do" is seen as less fortunate and in need of improvement. Since an important part of missionary work involves exactly that -- fixing those poor unfortunates who believe in a different religion -- I consider it Not Done In Good Faith.***

** Joel Osteen's megachurch, which I drive past several times a week, used to be a basketball arena. Its exterior shows no cross nor any other Christian symbol, but only the names of Osteen and his wife. One supposes this to be meaningful; the message is no longer the Bible itself, but the Bible According to Osteen.

*** Yes, I mean that in multiple senses of the word.

I just realized that the alternate history of the Golden Compass might have been designed to upset both Catholic and Protestant authoritarians; va gung uvfgbel Wbua Pnyiva orpbzr cbcr. Chyyzna, V guvax, qvffrzoyrf, bu, whfg n ovg. Ohg gura, ur vairagrq Ylen.

xeger @450:
Has anybody seen Charlie Stross recently? This seems like it might be rather up his alley...

Charlie is at a book signing gig in London this weekend, to my very great disappointment. Since I'm in Edinburgh, I had been hoping to get together for a dram or so.

Lila @ 430: Tim @ #259, have you heard James Taylor sing "Jingle Bells" in blues style?

I have not. My first, perhaps unkind, thought is that James Taylor plus blues is already a fairly unlikely combination, but I'll keep an open mind.

Lee @ 255: Steeleye Span did "The Holly And The Ivy" to a completely different tune with an even worse scansion problem: the second syllable of "organ" was emphasized, so it sounded like "the playing of the merrier gun."

#339 - After watching that, I'm sure I've read that comic*. (But I can assure you it's neither of these)

Have to say I wasn't keen on Ian Mckellen as the voice of Iorek Byrnison; he sounded too educated to my ears.

* Archimede's declarations sound like a bad comicbook villian introducing himself in as few panels as possible so we can get to the fight. And that's not always a bad thing; perhaps Lanaia should think about writing a comic?

Lee @ 453: the SF club in college had a tradition of going Pumpkin Caroling at Halloween with filks of Christmas music.

Most of the filks were the usual goblin and Fake Witch fare, but one member of the group invented a Halloween version of the Hallelujah Chorus on the way to the house of one of the religion professors. It was great fun.

For you are/Going to give us/Candy.
Halloween! Halloween!/Halloween! Halloween!
Or we will/Never stop this/Singing.

This article in Wikipedia about some aspects of Discworld is prefaced by a truly sidesplitting editorial comment. The best response to it I could come up with while laughing that hard was "No, really?".

Ooh, fun for early-music fans...Victoria's Missa O Magnum Mysterium! Last night I found that if you know the motet, it's not that hard to sightread the mass.

Xopher @ 421... I often think I'm an improvised person.

Feeling half-baked today?
Kneading help?

Fragano @ 436... Current leaders could be endowed with the idyllic of these theorists and use it as justification for how they correlate that top others.

Sounds like an ad for male enhancement.

I saw Golden Compass. I've never read the book, but it did feel rushed in places during the first two thirds. Kind of like when I saw Serenity, which I think was put together from some of the show's unproduced scripts. The stitches showed. But I liked it and so did most of the audience I saw it with. I was bummed that Daniel Craig wasn't in it more, but the whole cast was great. And I loved Eva Green. And it was GREAT to see a girl as the story's very resourceful main character.

Some questions about Compass's daemons...

In the movie anyway, we are told that they are our souls. That says something interesting about Scoresbye's character since his jackrabbit daemon is female. And if humans have daemons because they have souls, what is the situation for other primates, or dolphins? Maybe that's covered in the original books.

Serge #464: Only humans have dæmons. This is part of the plot of the series [rot-13 encoded for those who want to avoid a possible spoiler] nf gur Cnafreowøear xvat qrfcrengryl jnagf n qæzba.

Serge #462: It could be. It had me flummoxed.

My understanding was that daemons are always or at least usually opposite gender (sex? I haven't read the books in that much detail looking into it).

I'm usually a lurker because of a book that's way late, but I had to comment on THE GOLDEN COMPASS.

Okay ... I loved it. The critics are panning it, and I honestly don't see why. There were bits in the beginning that could have used more fleshing out, and I would have given a great deal to see a lot more of Daniel Craig, but I was fascinated throughout. Having not as yet read the books, I wasn't doing any of that sort of comparison, and I thought the film stood beautifully on its own. Nor did I feel the message was in any way obscured.

I loved the talking animals. I loved the fantastic cityscapes. I loved the sheer visual imagination on display in every frame. It was like one of my childhood fantasies come true.

As a professional storyteller, I'm usually quick to find flaws in movies and am not easy to please. But this film certainly pleased me, and I look forward to seeing the "unchopped" cut on DVD.

And I forgot to add ... if I'd seen more of wonderful girl protagonists like Lyra, I might have grown up relating more to heroines than heroes when I read my SF and fantasy. (I disdained female heroes for most of my teens and throughout my 20's, because the men were SO much more interesting in much of the SF that was being written. (I still relate as easily to male characters as female, if not more.) Andre Norton didn't quite win me over.

Now, of course, kids have so many other options, and I'm thrilled to see a girl take front and center stage in a fantasy film.

Diatryma @ 467... So I've just been told elsewhere. The daemon that spoke the most was the girl's, and it sounded like her own voice, to my tin ear anyway. Few of the adult daemons got to say anything, and the most prominent one was Eeevil Mrs. Coulter's monkey, which never uttered a word. So, when Hester the jackrabbit spoke with Kathy Bates's voice, I made a foolish assumption.

Lee (453): Okay, that makes sense. Thank you.

I'm not overly fond of missionaries myself, despite family history. (My grandparents were missionaries in China for twenty years.)

Lee, #453: Osteen is following a tradition here, I think. Check out whose name is front and center on the facade of St. Peter's...

I am considering seeing Golden Compass, but I also have the trilogy at home waiting to be read. I'm not sure if I should read them first, which will perhaps lead to being disappointed in the movie, as is almost always the case, but might also make the experience richer, or whether to go to the movie cold and then read the books. Any thoughts from the folks familiar with both books and movie?

Continuing to grade finals. Here are some more samples:

Next there is Cicero who created lawyers.

The government of Kuwait is a Middle Eastern country whose head of government is based upon a hereditary heir to the throne.

In its Economy, China has just acquired the rights to a new type of extradition technology for use in extracting crude oil.

The French model has evolved from a revolution to a republic.

The core of Frances administrative and political system is known as the bureaucracy, which was created by the country itself.

France is a multiethnic country that has become complicated with the assimilation.

China is a country that is run by a Leninist party that gives the country to right to bare as many children as they please, however many families tend to only have one child.

Fragano @ 474... The government of Kuwait is a Middle Eastern country whose head of government is based upon a hereditary heir to the throne.

To the heads, where resides the porcelain throne?

I thought that they had been doing with Golden Compass what was done with Lord of the Rings, with everything being filmed so that the movies could be released one year apart. I was mistaken, it seems, and they're waiting to see how well this movie does before they film the second one. Unfortunately, I don't think that Golden Compass stands even less on its own any more than The Fellowship of the Ring did.

Serge #475: That's one possible interpretation, I suppose.

The fortune cookie I got from Herdthinners this morning:
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
-- Flannery O'Connor

Fragano #474:

Too bad about the extraditing oil. It would solve any number of problems, no?

Totally off topic on what anyone else is discussing... I was trying to find some info on a local artist named Krisha (a Polish derived name, AFAIK), and Google insists that I'm looking for Krishna. And I can't find an email addr to tell it otherwise. Any ideas?

Rob, local to where?

The Alastair Sim version ("Scrooge") is the One True "Christmas Carol"", in these parts. Enthusiastically watched every year.

We're also partial to the "Blue Carbuncle" episode of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, and the Christmas episode of season 2 of "All Creatures." Also fun, with a bit of a Christas theme, is the "Royal Ruby" episode of "Poirot".

TexAnne #420:

Yes, Aielli. What was Tramp Day? Or do I want to know?