I've been having a week of highly unsettling health problems, and have the beginnings of a scale for describing the literary complexity of one's health. But I need help filling in the gaps.

Level 0: Mickey Spillane. Your circumstances are very simple. You may actually be too healthy for your own good.

Level 1:

Level 2:

Level 3:

Level 4:

Level 5: Gene Wolfe, William Faulkner. Your situation is very complex. Important truths are hidden in multi-level allusions, and very little (if anything) is as it seems.

What should go in the intervening slots?

The Wreck of the Old 97.

Your bindery looks... ah... cozy, Abi.

Can a necktie bind a book? Maybe not as well as Abi does, but people often talk of the ties that bind.

The Living Embodiment of Wikipedia.

97 is the largest two-digit prime number.

If you go look at the livejournal linked in particles as "Two kinds of dead stubborn", you will find (rare) evidence of JMacD being WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Like so many others, I am a fanatic on one side or the other of this question.

Dawno @ 5... Eek.

#5: Well, there's a webcomic that won't have a Wikipedia entry much longer.

I was watching 1965's Charlie Brown's Christmas Special when I noticed how strange it was that some of the original characters are now gone. And some hadn't shown up yet. Like Woodstock. And Peppermint Pattie. I think she was my favorite, which is probably why I married her adult counterpart.

fidelio, 2,

The Wreck of the Old 97.
ObOffTopic:
I wonder how modern day casemodders and pimp-my-ride types would build steam engines, were they in use today?

BSD 7: Under what posting name?

I cannot type without putting two spaces after a period. I just hate the way it looks with only one. I even do it when I KNOW html is going to take out the extra.

See my comments elsewhere about learning to type on a manual typewriter. In a fixed-pitch font, no less. I am scarred for life.

When preparing a manuscript for submission, I just have to globally replace dot space space with dot space. I cannot type that way ab initio*, and I probably won't ever learn.

*abi nitio?

"Brian Dettmer carves into books ... " He cuts up books? Somewhere inside, I am bleeding. At least the people who cut prints out of library books don't destroy the prints when the steal them.

In re: Bruce Baugh @ #1:

Level 2: Hunter Thompson. You may or may not be healthy, but you're not feeling any pain.

When they decommissioned the card catalog at the San Francisco Public Library, they took 50,000 cards and had people write quotes from the corresponding books (or related books) on the cards, then they papered the walls of the new library with them.

It's pretty cool.

Manny @13:

So you're not going to like it when I do my binding of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, then. When I can find a clothbound* copy of Hamlet, I'm going to take it apart and use it as binding materials.

-----
* gotta be clothbound. I need to unravel the cloth for thread to sew the book.

The LA Central Library has some elevators wallpapered with former-catalog cards. And the elevators tell you the Dewey Decimal Numbers for the floors.

I'm still hanging on to an old card catalog at my place... This is giving me some very good ideas...

Speaking of end papers, here's some eye candy featuring a demonstration of Turkish marbling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgg0GIfbszg

And let's not forget the relevant Arcimboldo still life.

Xopher @12:
abi nitio?

There's no word nitio in Latin; I presume you meant niteo, which means "I shine, I sparkle", with a secondary meaning of "I am charming."

You also missed a comma.

So, rephrased,

abi, niteo?†

To which, Xopher, the answer is nites* You are shiny.

-----
* because there is no Latin word that means "yes", you restate the verb to agree with the question.
† we are entirely ignoring the Latin requirement for question words or suffixes, because it's not entertaining to add them in.

abi 20: Et nites. Way more than me.

So...would "Io, nitet!"* be a good Latin translation for "Ooo, shiny!"?

*fix ending if needed; trying for "that shines" or something.

Nitemus! I think. I'm extrapolating from Spanish.

Which leads to Nightmouse, and they can make mice fluoresce. I'm thinking a very nerdy brandname for a very nerdy pet.

Those autopsied books are beautiful. I totally want one these book purses, but I know my archivist roommate will evict me if I ever used a book violated in that manner as a handbag.

In other news, last night I saw a movie that I can say objectively was a great movie that I didn't like one bit. Very interesting experience.

So I've brought it up most everywhere else, but I figured the Fluorosphere might have its share of special insights.

My company announced to me a couple of weeks ago that, Surprise!, I get to look for a new job, as they no longer want my group around. So anyway, I get some severance as condolences for the lay-off, but I haven't looked for a job in almost 8 years. Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

Bruce Baugh @#1

Level 2: Jane Austen. Although there are some complications, by sticking with a reliable formula, everything will turn out as it should.

Level 3: Tolstoy, Henry James: You will eventually understand what's happening, because your ailment is fairly straightforward. Still, it will not end well for you.

Level 4: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco: You can't possibly understand what's happening to you, but it's meaningless and will have no perceptible effect, so don't worry about it.

I've been saying that my current parenting set-up is the worst of all possible worlds: my still-teenage daughter is away at college, and my fully adult son is living at home while he works (at a job that often has him driving when the bars close) and goes to school. All of the worry, none of the solitude.

I love them both without limit, they are remarkable people for their ages, but they are still people of their age, and I am a woman of my age and would prefer a bit more private time and a lot less cooking.

And for the next month, starting tonight, both of them will be home.

I too learned to type in a formal setting on manual typewriters; the last class of the day my junior year in high school. I always tried to get one of the Smith-Coronas; the Royals the school used didn't feel right.

I've always been glad I learned to touch-type back then; it kept me in beer money in college typing other people's term papers. Then I was ahead of most other recruits when in Navy Radioman school I didn't have to learn my way around the TTY keyboard.

Oh, and Xopher, I double-space after periods and colons too.

JESR, I don't know how my parents are going to handle our house for the holidays. This year, they've had just themselves, the big yellow dog, and the fiercely territorial cat (and a snake, but she's not important). Soon, my siblings Baby Sister and JM both come home, one of them bearing the entire contents of her dorm room (she's transferring to the community college) and one bearing his girlfriend's ferrets, Flower and Bubba. Then I come home, which puts us at something like nine cars fitting into the house and streets, and I'm bringing another cat. We will also have JM's friends and girlfriend over quite a lot.
And the house is all Christmassed up. This could get very interesting very fast.

JESR: Make them cook. Tell them that from X time to Y time you need to be left entirely alone unless the kitchen is on fire.

Give them specific cooking assignments. Don't have a backup meal.

Skwid, 25,
Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

Disagree. If I* meet you outside of a tech environment, and I'm interested in you, how do we exchange data? A one page advertisement for you that tells me what you do and how to get a hold of you is going to be way more useful than...pretty much anything I can fit into long term memory.

If I'm interviewing you, and I decide I want to hire you, but I have to convince the rest of the commitee, then having that sheet of paper I can photocopy and pass out at our next meeting is great. If you didn't bring that sheet of paper with you to your interview, then you have to count on me remembering to find it on the company's (buggy) HR webapp.

Arguably, if you can fit the essentials of what you know how to do, and where you did it, onto a single sheet of paper, that's awesome, because nobody is ever going to want to read more than that.

I'm thinking the question isn't "are resumes still useful" but "what are resumes actually used for?" As far as I can tell, all of the scenarios mentioned above, plus the data in them is useful for sorting out who not to call back. That step may or may not be taken over by crappy HR webapps.

*I = hypothetical hiring person

Diatryma, your parents obviously win, and would win on points for either the ferrets or total dorm-room dump, let alone both. I can only hope their house is much, much larger than mine.

And speaking of houses, let me pass on a piece of hard-earned life wisdom on the same scale as never create with a bulldozer a problem you will later have to solve with a shovel: If you are of the Christmas/Yule/Solstice tree persuasion, DO NOT SIGN THE MORTGAGE PAPERS ON ANY PERMANENT DWELLING UNLESS YOU KNOW PRECISELY WHERE A CHRISTMAS TREE WILL FIT.

Fourteen years here and we've yet to find a place that doesn't entail terrible inconvenience.

Xopher @21:
Gratias ago tibi.

& @22:
Less sure about the Io than the nitet, which is correct.

But I'm not up on my Latin exclamations.

Diatryma @23
Nitemus means "we are shiny", in both the visual and Firefly senses. Spanish is a good extrapolation here.

The people I work with want resumes, because that's how they decide who might be worth calling in for an actual interview. Notes get made on the paper copy, too.

(Also, it separates the people who are really clueless about work history and resumes from those who have some competence. I saw one once where the misspellings and inverted dates alone would have killed any possible interview, if the history of frequent job changes hadn't done it first.)

When I saw "autopsied books", I immediately thought of the books bound in William Burke's skin, some of which are on public display here in Edinburgh.

Xopher, in actual fact the "make them cook" stricture has been in force for a decade or so. The problem is that making the elder do more than he's doing now (which includes his own laundry, feeding cattle, 35 hours a week on the job and full-time college) offends my sense of fair play. The younger is six hundred miles away most of the time; she cooks when she's here, but that leaves a whole lot of dinners when she's not.

Privacy is a tricky thing; we've yet to negotiate a common definition.

If the book is a biography, will it be biopsied?

@22, #33--Ecce, nitet!

I really like the way you've got the workbench set up for natural lighting. I'm going to have to keep that in mind when I move into a house...

Bruce #1 and Mary #26, Is there room for:

Level 4.5: Umberto Eco, David Foster Wallace. The diagnosis is written in English, but you need to read it three times and consult two encyclopedias before you can begin to tease out the meaning.

We have a very large house. This is why all three kids are such terrible packrats: there's always room to put a box of post-bedroom possibly-trash. Since I'm living relatively on my own now, Baby Sister has taken over both my room and hers, as well as most of the front of the house. My parents walk through the front of the house to get to the front door, but otherwise live in the great room.
Besides, a lot of what Baby Sister is bringing home started out there, and it is dwarfed by what she left behind.

The first Christmas in the house, we put the Christmas tree in the big picture window in the music room. It was disappointing, not least because even then, the front of the house was for kids, and the back was for adults. The next year, we had to figure out a way to get a tree into the great room, which has a two-story ceiling and a perfect place for a tree, right next to the stairs going up to the second-story kitchen lofty thing.

Do you know how big a tree will fit in two stories?

Do you know how interesting it can be to get a fifteen- to twenty-foot tree into an interestingly-shaped house?

My company announced to me a couple of weeks ago that, Surprise!, I get to look for a new job, as they no longer want my group around. So anyway, I get some severance as condolences for the lay-off, but I haven't looked for a job in almost 8 years. Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

When I saw your question I assumed that the distinction was between one-page resumes and longer resumes, but I see others are making a different assumption.

I would say that yes, you need a resume, but it doesn't have to be a single page. Mine isn't. Of course, I've been employed for 14-22 years, depending on how you count it. If you have only been employed for a few years you can probably fit everything onto one page. If not, I would at least make sure that the most important information is on the first page - for example, don't lead off with your education, since unless you just got a degree that's not critical.

Diatryma @ 23... they can make mice fluoresce

A fluorescent hamster, now that would be a great mascot for this neighborhood.

Dan is correct, I was unclear. I don't think many people would question the need for a resume of some sort, the dilemma is whether one should bend over backwards summarizing so as to keep everything on one page. This was the advice I most often received a decade ago (countless horror stories about bored HR reps going through stacks of resume slush, throwing out anything of more than one page unexamined), but my sources these days are saying that one should be much more specific and spill over onto a second page. For now, I've still got my cramped one-pager, but I really think I should have an expanded version if it should be requested, at the least.

The worst resume requirement I saw for either grad school or a summer research program wanted my CV in four hundred characters. It was possible, but only barely.

Skwid, in my experience the usefulness of the one page résumé depends on who/what is hiring. At big bureaucracies/governmental organizations/universities we usually are not allowed to qualify someone for an interview unless we can prove it from the résumé. And arguing with HR is ... umm... well, there's a reason Catbert is the evil director of HR.

Private industry usually has more flexibility, and the one pager is usually more appropriate.

Résumés are like other things, where it's not size that matters, but demonstrable skills. ::grin::

Good luck!

According to my own experience reading resumes, the best practice is still to have a one-page resume and a cover letter which addresses your fit for a specific job; sending multi-page resumes to HR departments without seeking a specific job is a great way to end up in the round file.

Two pages is on the cusp. Better a two-page resume in readable format than a one pager in eight-point.

In the tech companies where I've been involved in hiring, there are three distinct hurdles to get past. (This is all talking about "individual contributor" tech positions -- I have no idea how or if the process differs for management or non-tech positions).

First, you have to get to the hiring manager. There's someone else, either a headhunting company or an internal recruitment staff, who's doing first-run triage on resumes. They generally don't really understand what the team is looking for, so more often than not this comes down to comparing the resume against some keywords the hiring manager has suggested. So for this, you need a resume, and you need to have guessed some of the right buzzwords.

Next, you have to look interesting enough to the hiring manager for it to be worth a technical person's time to talk to you. The resume's all this decision is based on too, so it still matters: obvious lying and a complete lack of communication skills are bad here, but other than that as far as I can tell it largely comes down to luck.

And finally, you talk to people. From here out, the resume is primarily just a starting point for conversations, and doesn't matter much. Do be careful that if you claim to be an expert on a subject that you can back that claim up, though.

Good luck! Where are you located?

Skwid, when I hire folks for my team, I tell our HR recruiter what we're looking for, both in terms of personality and specific tech skills. And I give her a job description that's got some key phrases in it like "unix admin experience a plus" or "SQL knowledge required." She goes on dice.com and some other industry looky-see places and does keyword searches, and she puts the word out to recruiters, using the same phrases, etc. Then she reads through all the resumes and gets me anything that seems to match.

When I get the resumes, I go through with a highlighter and mark off anything that matches up to what I'm looking for, and I also look for a pattern showing width/depth of knowledge, since different positions call for different things. For example, a help desk person needs a broad base of shallow knowledge; a db architect needs in-depth expertise on one thing. I also look to get an overall sense of the person's level so I can figure out if they're in our salary range.

So, from a manager's perspective, I think the best resumes are the ones that show a pattern of activity and experience, and are liberally peppered with specific accomplishments and technologies. If it's 3 pages long, no problem, since I'm just skimming anyway. Whereas if it's 1 page long and doesn't happen to list the one odd thing that will catch my eye, you could miss an opportunity.

Bruce Baugh #1 -

Level 4: Thomas Pynchon - even when you know you what you have, you have no idea where it came from.

Level 4.01: J.D. Salinger - whatever you got has been hanging around for 50 years.

Level 1.02: Michael Chrichton - even if you think you have it, you don't have it, particularly if you think you have a fever.

Skwid @ 25: I think Rands' take on this is very useful: your resume needs to make an impression in 30 seconds or less. His take on what he's interested in: your name (because he's about to Google you, or he knows you), who you worked for (know the company? good guess at what you do. don't? scans for keywords), job description and history (what have you been doing, how long, any inconsistencies), and finally other interests and extracurriculars (how is this resume different from the last 50 I saw?). And that's the 30 seconds.

Highly recommend reading the whole article.

Skwid @ 25: Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Also relatively young & techie, I've hunted jobs twice in the last 12 months. (Contract expired followed by dot-bomb collapse.) I found the following to be effective:

1. Post your resume on Computerjobs.com, Monster, and careerbuilder. MS-Word format is standard for recruiters, but some of the job sites want you to jump through a few site-specific hoops. Throw in as many buzzwords as you feel comfortable asserting competence in. Recruiters will begin phoning about 5m after you post.

2. For each of the above web sites, do an a.m. scan of the new postings. If something looks particularly choice: 1) send an email with attached resume 2) follow-up 1h later with a phone call.

3. Resumes should be as long as you need to communicate your skill set. My last one ran well over a page and no one blinked.

4. Based on my experience on the hiring side of the desk, the following translation table applies. You may wish to fluff your resume accordingly:

claim="1 year experience" --> actual="I've heard of it"
claim="2 year experience" --> actual="6 months. knows the basics."
claim="5 years experience" --> actual="either actually competent or a gifted bullshitter"
claim="competent" --> actual="very good indeed but still modest"
claim="expert" -->actual="incompetent AND arrogant"
claim="less than 1y" -->actual="hasn't sent out resumes in a while"

Oracle is still pretty happening. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding something. Happy hunting.

Skwid, let me recommend LinkedIn. I know a number of tech folks who have gotten interviews through LinkedIn - since you know someone who can vouch for you, you tend to get past the slush process and at least to the phone interview stage a lot faster.

For getting the resume down to one page, I suggest using the heading "Relevant Experience," which indicates that you have plenty of other experience, too, but you've been thoughtful enough to highlight just the bits your reader will care about.

Iain @35:
Out of curiosity, are you a geocacher? Not because I know you from gc - I don't hang out there any more - but because if you are one, are in Embra, and are interested in Burke & Hare, I have a recommendation*.

-----
* yes, blowing my own horn on this, but it's relevant.

I have a summary resumé for initial contacts and a longer one to take with me to interviews.

The "Relevant Experience" paragraph makes a lot of sense.

abi @16: Brilliant, I love it!

Manny @13: I still feel queasy hitting books with hammers, rounding and backing. It's getting better, but I think it will be a few more years before the horror has completely left.

Ralph Giles @56:
I'm still looking for a copy of Hamlet to tear down, of course, but I'm glad you like the idea.

If you find rounding and backing feels like beating up books, have you tried Jim Brockman's technique of concave rigid spines?

I have a thermal mug question. Here in the high country, I like to take a mug of tea with me if I'm going to be sitting outside in the cold somewhere for longer than an hour or so. I have a few thermoses and insulated mugs, but I prefer my tea with milk, and without exception, the tea tastes nasty from the plastic lined thermal device. I also like blackcurrant flavoured tea with some sugar, which tastes fine from the thermal things, but does anyone know of a thermal mug or flask that doesn't make tea with milk taste weird?

Speaking of bookbinding...

Abi @ 54:

I'm not a geocacher, but thanks for the recommendation. Sounds like a good wee walk for a dark winter's evening.

I'd like to make mulling spice sachets to give away for mini-presents this winter. I have cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice berries, and cardamom pods. I also have fresh ginger slices and fresh orange zest strips. What should I do to those last two things (or substitute for them) to ensure that the spice sachets have a decent shelf life?

Lee @59:
Oooh...nice.

But I note they used a pre-made headband. Should have sewn it by hand.

There are steel/aluminum-walled thermos-type objects, but I don't know whether they might give your milky tea a "metallic" taste. Generally I've had excellent experiences with the Nissan/Thermos brand.

If I downloaded OpenOffice onto a PC clone running (yes, I know, I know) Vista, could I read .xls files?

Eventually, I would like to take up the church newsletter again, which would also mean downloading OpenOffice because my new computer has nothing more complex than WordPad. I pride myself on creating elegant, readable pages. And I go into FROTHING RAGE when I download one of those cute little "fill-in-the-middle" frames or word bubbles or what have you and I can't actually PUT ANYTHING IN THE BLANK PART IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PICTURE. What good are they?

xopher @ #22, I think I'd go wth "Eia, nitet!"

nerdycellist @ #24, I've had that experience. With Osama, for example.

JESR #32: DO NOT SIGN THE MORTGAGE PAPERS ON ANY PERMANENT DWELLING UNLESS YOU KNOW PRECISELY WHERE A CHRISTMAS TREE WILL FIT.

Amen, sister. This is our fourth Christmas here, and I'm still not happy. We're of the "put the tree in or near the front window" persuasion, and we've got a doozy of a window, a huge bay. Unfortunately this is also the obvious/OneTrue place for the couch. So for three years we moved the couch, with a resultant furniture arrangement that turned out to discourage guests from even entering the living room. (It damn near discourages me!) My husband, swearing that he will never move the couch again (it has a queen-size bed inside and is more than just quite heavy) insisted last year that after Christmas the couch stay where it had been temporarily placed. The tree looks good, but that couch has been bugging me for a whole freaking year. And will continue to do so. (My personal theory is that the tree would look great in the equally-large upstairs bay window in the bedroom, where it wouldn't discourage anything bu maybe the cat, but carrying the tree up the stairs would be, umm, difficult in several senses of the word. Alas.)

Jenny @ #64, I don't know why Vista would make any difference. I just opened an .xls file using OO with no trouble whatsoever. The only caveat I can think of is retaining it as an .xls file after working on it. If you want to, be sure to save it as such, because OO defaults to its own spreadsheet format (.ods, I think).

Also, OO uses semicolons instead of commas to separate arguments in a function, and is incapable of using an entire column or row as a range. For example, Excel would say =COUNTIF(b:b,a2) and OO would say =COUNTIF(b2:b2000;a2). And if the text in A2 contains parentheses, that COUNTIF function will return 0 no matter how many matches there really are. ARGH.

Trying to use OO after spending more time than is technically healthy for me dinking around with Excel 2003 is infuriatingly not quite right.

Skwid@25 ...
When I'm hiring[0], I don't care if the resume is one page or 16 pages (academic resumes *sigh*). What I -do- care about is being able to figure out if you're interesting enough for me to want to read further after the first page.

What that means (for me, slightly incoherently, since it's been a long week):

(1) There should be something that tells me what sort of job you want to have ("UNIX administrator" is useless - do you want to build genome sequencing clusters, or would you prefer a highly predictable 9-5 job, where you're responsible for specific, well understood things).

(2) There should be something that tells me what you can do for me, vis-a-vis your previous work experience and skills. ("Normalized a database of ten billion entries, reducing end-of-month reporting time from 3 days to 3 hours" (spurious example, but hopefully clear enough) "Negotiated a 15% reduction in support contract costs", yada, yada).

(3) I don't have to work at figuring out what's on the page. That means no fancy fonts, no smushingeverythingtogether, so it's unreadable, no murky acronyms, IYKWIM.

It's (hopefully) obvious, but having your name and the page number on each page of your resume makes it obvious if a page has gotten lost, as well.

Unlike somebody further up the page, I'd never recommend padding your resume - the reason I suggest the "what you can do for me" section is that it highlights what you can do, which is completely separate from the years you've been doing it.

[0] Tech industry, everything from no experience through to senior level experts

nerdycellist@24:

It's possible that the artist used just the boards (aka covers), and the textblock/book itself* lives on in a less attractive but more durable library binding, although it's hard to tell whether that's the case** here or not.

I'm not sure whether or not that would mollify your roommate. I'm always a little ambivalent about these sorts of things, myself.

* -- I'm not entirely comfortable with calling this "the book itself". It's *most* of the book, but its original binding served as something more than just a container for its information, unlike this.

** -- unintentional bookbinding pun

joann, the best place for a tree in my house, from the traffic-flow and seating viewpoint, would be in the corner bay window in the kitchen. Kitchen? Who puts the tree in the kitchen? And anyway that's where the orchids live. In fourteen Christmases we've had it on the dining room table (which makes entertaining guests impossible), on the entry table (which makes entry a challenge), and jammed in the corner of the living room (which is now the location of a stack of boxes my sister insisted on getting out of her house, just because it was our stuff. Imagine!).

I'm stuck with this house; even if we wanted to swap it out (it's a double wide; we're real farmers, in that way) it would involve digging up and storing out of the way some giant irreplaceble landscape plants, and I'm not up to the job. I have yet to win the argument for a teeny tiny tree, and somehow no-one wants to talk about getting a fake one and hanging it from the dining-room ceiling.

Hey!

Where did all these fellow bookbinders come from? Cool! How long have you been binding? What kind of binding do you do?

I'll have been binding six years come January; I'm self-taught and bind mostly in leather. I do fine binding and some designer binding, mostly traditional structures. But really, I just do what interests me.

Not a sonnet, but stimulated in part by Avram's thread on childhood memories:

dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy
what worlds were dreamt in that forbidding place
with pleasures of the bloodless hunt and chase

it took such little things to bring true joy
as all unthinking we created grace
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

yet far too swiftly each discards the boy
too much to do though different in each case
and far too fast deep lines will groove the face
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

Skwid @25,

Having gone through Silicon Valley searches, I think the single most important thing is to have a really good cover letter. And cover letter system.

Your CL connects the dots between their reqs and your skills. It also lets gatekeepers know-- or at least leave them unable to vote against you-- that you are qualified, even if they don't understand the details (and they often don't). By gatekeeper I mean the HR or recruiter who'll send resumes on to the actual hiring manager.

I made sure that even 10 seconds of reading- or even glancing- on their part would let them know that I met their main reqs.

For example, If they needed 4 years of experience in XYZ, my resume might have those 4 years at 2 different companies in 2 different industries / languages / etc, so the reader couldn't automatically see it. The cover letter, in contrast, could have "4 years..." as the 1st bullet point. The resume is proof of your qualifications, but the CL is your claim.

More later, and I'll email an example.

fidelio 38: "Look, shiny!" Useful too (and will appear here before long), but not quite what I had in mind.

Lila 65: 'Eia'!!!! That's the word I was looking for. Thanks!

I meant to link to this page about types of Chinese bookbinding found in the Dunhuang caves on one of Abi's earlier bookbinding threads, but I don't think I ever did.

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

Skwid:

My advice, in a direction somewhat orthogonal to the general flavor of advice you're getting, would be that now is a good time to diversify. For your next job, hunt a job which uses some of your existing skills - so they'll hire you - but builds on them in a new different direction. If you've got experience with Crystal Reports and Office VBA automation, for example, hunt for a job where you're using that in a .Net programming context, and then leverage it into doing VB.Net and C# or J# programming. (MS .Net programmers will be in demand for quite a while, I think.) Or get a job which uses your Oracle reporting skills and find a way to take on DBA responsibilities and pick up DBA skills in that job. Etc. In the short term it's easier to get hired by having lots of years in one thing. However when the industry suddenly changes course, as it does from time to time, and nobody is using X/Y/Z any more, that can turn deadly to your career. Better to keep adding new skill areas from time to time.

I agree with the general flavor of the advice up thread, especially from Mary Dell and Katharine - use a couple pages if it takes that to comfortably fit in all your buzzwords, but be ready to summarize it in a less-than-one-page cover letter.

Advanced play: Classify the jobs you are going after into discrete niches, and have a custom version of the resume for each niche, emphasizing different skillsets as primary. You may even wish to tweak your resume a little for each job you're applying to.

Oh, also I found Dice.com to be the most useful site to post your resume to for relevant queries. YMMV.

And IMNSHO never ever pad your months/years of experience - that's just the kind of thing that will throw you right out the door of a job you might otherwise have had. One of the absolute worst things that can happen during the hiring process is if the interviewer suddenly finds a reason to suspect your moral character - they are likely to drop you like a hot potato and go for someone less qualified but who they think is more trustworthy. I have had to drop candidates like that myself, when our reference checks cast serious doubts on claims they'd made.

P.S. Kathryn, not Katharine. Excuse me! It was right there above my post, too!

Jenny: Yes, OpenOffice will do fine with .XLS files. However, the formula language is different as noted upthread and if you are experienced in writing Excel formulas, that will drive you insane; I can rant and rave at length about this. The word processor and presentation program (Word and Powerpoint clones) are pretty acceptable.

Clifton @ #77, "However when the industry suddenly changes course, as it does from time to time, and nobody is using X/Y/Z any more, that can turn deadly to your career."

(Flashing red lights, bells...)

Fat lot of good managing a mid-sized IBM S/34 and its data entry personnel for nine years has done me.

Lee @59: Pretty, and at least somewhat appropriate to the aesthetic of her other books. Do you know if she hand-wrote each copy, or are the others facsimiles?

abi @72: I started taking occasional classes about 4 years ago, but am only now trying to put together some of the larger tools so I can do things at home. I just bought myself some gold and hand tools. Still getting the hang of warming them on the kitchen stove...

Pictures of some of my books.

I've heard of the concave spines but never done one. About the instructions you linked: What does he mean about "the...top board may be cusioned"? And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well? I guess if it filled the square at the top of the foredge it would also help support the book block.

Thanks everyone for the various binding links!

Scott H #52 typed:
"Throw in as many buzzwords as you feel comfortable asserting competence in."

Be careful. Not sure of the laws where you are but we had a high profile case of that ended with a jail sentence.

Lee, #59, This is the official link, if people interested in bookbinding and self-publishing want to check out the Amazon page for their recently-purchased copy of one of a very limited edition. (Several rather large images.) Some other background and detail are in the newspaper story, with links, here (you can read this while you're waiting for the other page to load if your connection is slower).

Skwid, I'm job hunting too. Got laid off Wednesday, ave severance etc. sufficient for a bit.

Last time this happened, I had a new job before the severance ran out.

Unfortunately I'm just a power user, not a programmer. But that may not be a bad thing.

Clifton @79: Have you ever tried Gnumeric? It's supposed to be a closer clone, but the Windows build isn't nearly as well supported. Just curious, but I prefer it to the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet on Linux.

I want to take this open-thread opportunity to thank Serge for his comment a couple days ago in the inner-lives-of-rodents thread that linked to the Girl Genius webcomic. I have now read the whole thing, am utterly addicted, and have put the book collections atop my to-buy list. ( www.girlgeniusonline.com )

yay!

Linkmeister @ 80 ...
Fat lot of good managing a mid-sized IBM S/34 and its data entry personnel for nine years has done me.

Hmm... any idea how transferable your S/34 skills would be to the AS/400 ? I know the AS/400's theoretically the successor to the S/34, but that doesn't tell me much about how related the skillsets are.

@52: Recruiters will begin phoning about 5m after you post.

There are still recruiters? I thought all of them moved over to be real estate salesmen.

xeger, I dunno, and to be honest, I haven't done the managing systems thing in about 15 years. I should have used a different tense in my bad-tempered grouse above.

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

Linkmeister @ 89 ...
xeger, I dunno, and to be honest, I haven't done the managing systems thing in about 15 years. I should have used a different tense in my bad-tempered grouse above.

How about this sort of grouse? ;)

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

I understand - the largest concentration of organizations doing the type of work that I do/enjoy/like are assuredly not where I live, nor where I'd want to live. The advent of telecommuting as a viable option certainly hasn't hurt anything, however.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

Ahhh! I'd have said "Manager, Data Processing" - but that's far too much time spent dealing with organizations that make ASN.1 seem flexible and unconscious of hierarchy.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

Neat! Any chance you'd comment about how to do[0] freelance research?

[0] Get paid for...

Skwid @ 25: my husband went through that last year. He recommends playing up your experience with Crystal Reports and that if you have/can gain MS DBA certification you've got it made. The medical IT company where he works just hired someone with a Crystal/MSDBA mix of experience. He was very impressed with the applicant throughout the hiring process.

If you'd like a few recommendations of IT recruiting firms we'd work with again, contact me via e-mail.

The demise of the card catalog is *not* sad. The online catalog has many many many benefits for library user and librarian alike.

More than one person can search the same general area -- no waiting until the guy doing a bibliography of books about George Washington finishes with that drawer.

It can be quickly, easily, and cheaply updated to fix mistakes, add new materials, enhance searching.

And about that enhanced searching -- you can have as many entry points to an item as you and your catalogers have the time, energy, and storage for. And storage is waaaaay cheaper than more card catalog cabinets and drawers. Not to mention the cost of the cards themselves.

I can acess the online catalog remotely to determine if the library has the item I need, which branch it's in, and whether it's on the shelf before I leave home.

Terminals take up lots less space than bulky catalogs and can be anywhere in the library.

No looooong waits for filing to get done.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

MKK--former cataloger

abi@62

It kind of goes with the hollow back/case construction and the false raised bands, I think.

xeger @ #90, here's my self-marketing website, with explanations in the FAQ.

First you have to find clients, which means network with people who know people who might find your services useful. This is unquestionably the hardest part of the process. The second-hardest is getting paid on a timely basis, particularly if you work for startups. In the biotech/pharma business the startups are the ones who need this kind of service, but they're also the ones who have terrible cash flow.

It's an up-and-down business.

Linkmeister, #80: Sympathies. That's one of the reasons I'm now a jewelry designer -- 15 years on S/3, S/34, S/36, got laid off and couldn't get hired for AS/400 work because it was based on the S/38 OS, which was nothing at all like the S/36 and with which I had ZERO experience. I even tried going back to school for an AS/400 certification -- which turned out not to be about the machine, but about "Programming 101 on the AS/400", which was... less than helpful, and not what I needed, which was a crash course on the operating system.

xeger, #87: Not. See above; IBM made some major OS changes from the S/36 to the S/38, and the AS/400 is successor to the latter. The system architecture and command language are completely different.

skwid@25: I was last laid off 13 years ago; the placement agency my company hired said 1-pagers were uncommon. I've seen a handful of resumes (my company hasn't been hiring much for the last 6 years) and they've all been multi-page, even in the web age. Kathryn@74 makes a \good/ point on cover letters; if you have a lot of time you can tailor the resume itself, but the CL lets you match their bullets. And extending Dan@42, consider putting the whole thing in reverse-chronological, with the degree at the end; even if you don't have the mismatch I had (SWE with a degree in chemistry), it's not just history but theory -- it doesn't tell what you can \do/.

abi@33: my first reaction was it should be nitent, since the number is unclear; but I don't think I ever learned what Latin does in that case....

Xopher: agree on "ecce" (involves a 2nd party), but I thought "Eia" was noisier than "Ooo". (But not really sure, since I'm recalling it used in medieval Italian).

CHip @96: Latin doesn't have unspecified number any more than English does. In practice you'd want to use "nitent" if there were multiple shiny things. As far as the interjection goes, my Oxford Latin Dictionary says that (h)eia is for various attitudes, including astonishment. It even gives the quote "Heia ut elegans est!" from Terence's Self-Tormentor. So I think "Eia, nitet!" is pretty good.

Open Thread and all...

The NZ SPCA has a Christmas CD single designed for dogs - recorded at frequencies audible to dogs but not humans.

Abi, thank you for the marvelous links! The video of the nonsense-filled bindery made me laugh, but yours looks a very nice place to visit; I now lust after purses decorated in the same styles as the à la fanfare, Jacques Anthoine-Legrain, Pierre-Lucien Martin, and Henri Creuzevault examples; and I am both fascinated and slightly appalled by Brian Dettmer's art (mostly fascinated, but still...those are BOOKS!).

Thanks also to Debbie @ 19 for the video on marbling--I just wish I could have examples of the finished products!

Like Xopher, I'm a period-space-space typer. The "single space after the period" development irks the bejeebus out of me: there's not enough white space to nicely delineate the beginning of a new sentence.

JESR @ 71--As long as you have a sturdy but decorative hook screwed into the ceiling's equivalent of a stud (a joist? I dunno...), and a hook-and-four-straight-wires version of a hanger for plants in plastic pots, you can hang a small live tree from the ceiling. My mom and I did so for many years, as a means of thwarting the lummox dog (who nearly knocked down the tree to see out the corner window behind it) and the climb-the-trunk, bat-off-the-ornaments cats.

It worked well, not only in those capacities but to enable the stringing of lights and tinsel garland--just spin the tree one direction, then the other! (Slowly, of course.)

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

Bill Moyers is interviewing Keith Olbermann on his Friday-evening show.

Might be in some web archive or other.

Re the dog-only CD: does the CD audio format really support that, and if so, why? It's been a long time since I really knew this stuff, but if memory serves, if we ignore harmonics[1], accurate reproduction of frequency X requires sampling of 2X. CD audio is sampled at 44.1 kiloherz, allowing accurate reproduction up to 22.05 kiloherz. Humans vary, of course, but Wikipedia suggests that 20hz-20khz is a reasonable rule of thumb for what "humans can hear", with young people in particular able to hear somewhat above that range.[2]

That only leaves the range 20khz-22khz usable for doggie music. A full frequency doubling is required for an octave; I'm not sure how to figure out how much of an octive that gives, but it can't be much, maybe not even a full note.

So...am I missing something fundamental here, or are doggies not going to be getting much out of these CDs either?

[1] and that simplification may be where I go off the rails
[2] I used to be able to hear when a computer monitor was powered on but not getting a signal; I no longer can. Do new ones not make sound or is that another sign I'm getting old?

ink cannery girl @ 86: "One of US, One of US..."

As a fellow heterodynaholic, I send my sympathy (and, of course, sinister laughter).

I do a touch of bookbinding myself, ever since I took a class from this brilliant fellow at Evergreen. Coptic stitch and sewn-on-cord -- I haven't the patience or space to make many covered spines.

It may very well be addable to the list of 'things which people interested in Making Light are often also interested in.'

Yangzhou has a block printing museum which I'm going to be taking some students to see -- maybe next weekend, or in any event whenever I've got this kitten in good enough shape to rehome.

Todd @102: Sounds (hee) odd to me too. Mastering equipment can often record at 96 or 192 kHz these days, so It's certainly possible to record and playback (assuming appropriate mic and speakers) sounds well above human hearing. But people mostly do that to avoid artefacts in the harmonics when the sound is manipulated digitally. As you say, on a CD it's downsampled to 44.1 kHz.

Google (and dog whistles) suggest dogs can hear up to around 44 kHz, so above CD (and normal stereo amplifier) frequencies. Maybe dogs can just pay attention to noises above 14 kHz, which we mostly hear mostly as timbre anyway.

Pretty much all CRTs do whine in my experience, but it's much less common for the newer LCDs to do so. (The LCD itself is silent, but they usually have a florescent backlight that isn't.) Also, nowadays CRTs are often driven at higher resolution, which raises the frequency of the whine and makes it harder to hear, I think.

Todd Larason @102:: I can, in my early-mid 40s, still hear CRT flyback transformers. LCDs don't work the same way, but I can sometimes hear them if something's going wrong with the backlight (normally it's far outside human hearing range).

Also, older LCD monitors could behave "interestingly" with an out-of-range or absent/floating signal, but modern ones (mostly) detect that early and put the display into low-power mode or substitute an internally generated signal.

Lee @ #95, I knew there were other people in my shoes!

The last DP job I had was at a major Waikiki hotel. I left it in 1993, when they were still running two S/36s, one for front-office and one for back.

Todd Larason @ 102: That only leaves the range 20khz-22khz usable for doggie music.

Not even that, really, since you only get all the way up to Nyquist if you have infinitely steep filters, which we don't. (That's why DVD-A, running at 96kHz or 192kHz, sounds better* than CD--not because people can hear frequencies up to 96k, but because the designers can use better-sounding filters.)

My guess is that the CDs have tones in the upper half-octave at a fairly low level, which is going to be hard for humans to hear (maybe impossible in a noisy environment, or if the humans went to too many punk shows in their youth the way I did), but easy for the dogs.

I sure hope they come with warnings not to play them too loud...

*In principle. Implementation counts.

Syd, #99 (and several others): I seem to be alone among my age-group in strongly preferring the single-space style. But then, I never had typing in school; back then (early 70s), it was being strongly suggested that women who wanted careers NOT learn how to type, because that would condemn you to the secretarial pool no matter what your other qualifications might be. I do recall being told, at some point or other, to put two spaces after a period, but it made no sense to me and so didn't stick. My typing skills came about because of a programming position that involved typing text to be printed, and space was at a premium (monospace font), so adding extraneous spaces was frowned on there as well. If I copy-and-paste something and happen to notice that it has extra spaces after the periods, I'll take the time to edit them out; they don't look right and never will.

Level -1: See Bruce puke. Oh no! Bad dog, Spot, bad dog!

I took typing class in the Seventies, learned to type two spaces after periods and colons, worked as a secretary for several years typing that way, and... I think it looks like ass. I decided one day not to do it any more, and after a week or so, I rarely did.

Mary Kay @92:
The demise of the card catalog is *not* sad. The online catalog has many many many benefits for library user and librarian alike.

Since I work in the library catalog search software world, I don't see the demise of the card catalog as being entirely sad. I think there are insanely neat things you can do with an online catalog.

But I am also nostalgic for the physical presence of the card catalog. When I was at UC Berkeley, I took a Library Science course because I wanted to get a stack pass*. One day the instructor mentioned that there were still a few handwritten cards in the drawers, and I decided to find one. I spent several hours looking up books that I thought might be obscure enough that they had not been replaced since the advent of the typewriter. And I found one.

I still recall everything that was in my field of vision when I saw it (for a mid-19th century translation of the Argonautica). I even remember the color of shirt I was wearing (olive green).

Much as I love online catalogs, that experience is irreplaceable.

-----
* If anyone doesn't understand the appeal of spending time in the stacks, I cannot possibly explain it. It's like jazz; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.

Ralph @81:

You do some lovely work. I'm almost embarrassed to link to my sites. I think it's obvious how much you've benefitted by real instruction, no matter how much fun I've had figuring things out from books.

What does he mean about "the...top board may be cushioned"?

It means chamfered, in this context. A lot of fine bindings will take the right angles off of the edges of the boards to increase the appearance of delicacy.

And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well?

I'd never heard of just putting one on the fore edge. I'm fairly sure he meant all around.

You can see some of his, and his son Stuart's work in the [British] Society of Bookbinders gallery pages. (Actually, those pages are have lots beautiful bindings, organized by binder. The Events > Bookbinding Competition pages are also full of amazing work*).

My question on concave spine books has always been what the fore edge of the text block looks like. I don't like the thought of a convex text block.

-----
* mutter mutter frames no deeplinking mutter mutter

Tim May @76

I meant to link to this page about types of Chinese bookbinding found in the Dunhuang caves on one of Abi's earlier bookbinding threads, but I don't think I ever did.

Eia, nitet!*

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

In Western bookbinding, which is derivative of the horizontal scroll format, there has never been a tradition of top-binding until the advent of the stenographer's notebook.

In Japanese bookbinding, certain book types (account books**, primarily) appear to have been bound across a short edge, but even there, they appear to have been used with the spine perpendicular to the reader/writer. This book has one photo of a receipt book (hantori cho) that looks like it was used like a steno notebook, but the text isn't clear either way.

-----
* singular in reference to the link, or to the webpage, or to the collection of items
** which were traditionally bound by professional ledger binders, rather than bookbinders.

abi @ 113, start here to get deep links to the Society's competition pages. What browser do you use? Most or all of them have ways to let you find that, but they're different enough and it's late enough I don't think I could write general instructions.

abi @112 -- If anyone doesn't understand the appeal of spending time in the stacks, I cannot possibly explain it. It's like jazz; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.

Oh, I understand that very well! In grad school at Undue Perversity P.U., I spent many an hour exploring. It was there I found Merrill Moore's "Clinical Sonnets"*, a number of pages of which I photocopied. But I am equally happy for the advance of electronic cataloguing and online used-book-selling, which led me to Alibris, where I can find said book.

*illustrated by Edward Gorey, no less!

Not infrequently, where I work, we'll get presentations to print out that are in landscape orientation. (PowerPoint seems to encourage this.) Since most bindings we have are designed to go on the 11" edge of the paper, the presentations get bound on top. If they're printed double-sided, the back sides get rotated 180 degrees from the front, so that you can read a double-page spread without having to turn the book -- this is called "military flip" (opp. "top-to-top").

Florescent Cat

The making of the GoshWowOhBoyOhBoy Bible, otherwise known as St. John's Bible. This is the first completely hand-lettered on vellum, gold-leaf illuminated Bible to have been made in over 500 years. 24 1/2" x 15 3/4", 9 years, New Standard Revised Version, over a million dollars, commissioned by Benedictine monks in Minnesota, and utterly gorgeous. I recommend getting the book--the website doesn't have nearly enough images from it, especially of the calligraphy.

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, who's spent his adult life rescuing Yiddish books. Jewish history is sadder, funnier, and weirder than I knew.

And an employment question....I know a CPA who would like to work for a company which is law-abiding and honest. I don't know how much of this is conscientiousness and how much is irrational pickyness, but I've brought up the possibility of looking for a company with the desired traits, and gotten told that it just isn't feasible--you pretty much have to take the jobs that are available. Are things really that much a matter of luck?

Nancy Lebovitz @118 - Law-abiding is easy, because criminal prosecutions or regulatory infractions are usually public record. Honest is more of a value judgement, but most of the places I've worked seemed fair.

Every year Fortune published their list of the 100
best companies to work for. That would be a start.

ink cannery girl @ 86... You're welcome.
heresiarch @ 103... BWAHAHAHAH!!!

Nancy @118:
Technical note: when putting URLs into an <a href... tag, be sure to start with the http://. If you just start with www, the blogging software tries to find it as a relative reference on Making Light (in other words, sticks a http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/ onto the front of the URL.

I've fixed them.

Open thread linkiness:

Inspired by the incident of Mitt Romney's favourite novel, the New York Times suggests two sf books to each Presidential hopeful: one that reflects the way he (or she) wants to be seen, and one that seems appropriate from a more objective viewpoint.

I particularly like the latter suggestion for Giuliani: “The War of the Worlds,” by H. G. Wells: During a cataclysmically destructive event, an observant bystander happens to be in the right place at the right time and thereafter never stops talking about it.

The synergy between the two books suggested for McCain is also nice.

Every Christmas Turner Classic Movies airs a montage of movie-related people who died that year. They just showed the one for 2007. Always sad to think of all those who are gone even though they still 'live' thru their films.

Nancy Leibovitz (#118) -- you beat me to a link for the Fluorescent Cat! But I'm just glad others can see it now. They showed it on some TV news shows yesterday, and I was gobsmacked. (From way upthread, I see there's a glowing mouse to go with it. Scientists are having way too much fun these days.)

Paul A @122:
Wow...that gives me the idea for a parlor game.

But we've had two in short order. I'll save it for a little while, develop it further.

Serge #123: The other day I was listening to Johnny Cash, and was struck in a way I never had been before by how weird it was that I was hearing this dead guy's voice singing so powerfully.

Nancy Lebovitz #118: The making of the GoshWowOhBoyOhBoy Bible, otherwise known as St. John's Bible. This is the first completely hand-lettered on vellum, gold-leaf illuminated Bible to have been made in over 500 years.

No freaking way would I ever pay $115,000 for a bible, nor $695 or $595 ("genuine" vs. "bonded" leather for the reduced size editions). That's ludicrously expensive. I suppose a wealthy performance artist could make a run at the Turner Prize by doing something unspeakable to a copy of the $115,000 "heritage" edition; that would be newsworthy.

ab1 @ #114

Thanks for the information*. That's pretty much what I thought, about the western tradition, & it does does make sense that if you started making codices by folding up horizontal scrolls, you'd end up with vertical spines by default. Which I suppose raises the question of whether anyone ever used vertical scrolls much. I guess the Chinese had horizontal scrolls because that was how the bamboo-slat books went... perhaps if they'd developed a script written in rows rather than columns, they'd have used horizontal slats, vertical scrolls and top-bound codices.

In Japanese bookbinding, certain book types (account books, primarily) appear to have been bound across a short edge, but even there, they appear to have been used with the spine perpendicular to the reader/writer. This book has one photo of a receipt book (hantori cho) that looks like it was used like a steno notebook, but the text isn't clear either way.

Very interesting. I remember finding something about Japanese bookbinding on the web once... ah, here it is: Japanese Bookbinding (link goes to the page which includes the ledgers). Certainly the characters on the covers are oriented with the spine at the top, but there isn't any information about the orientation inside. They look to me as if they might be hung up by that tassel, which would be a reason for the cover to orient that way even if the pages didn't.

Interestingly, I have a modern perfect-bound Japanese children's kanji workbook arranged on the same kind of pattern: bound across the shorter edge, cover art oriented with the spine at the top, internal text oriented with the pages turning left to right. I hadn't thought of it in terms of historical continuity until today.

* And for the term "top-bound". It's difficult to talk about this kind of thing concisely and unambiguously when one lacks technical vocabulary.

ethan @ 126... This goes to show that our world is full of wonders.

Thank you all for your great comments on résumés and job-hunting in general. I'll try and address some of the specific comments later; right now I've got to go get my costume ready to Rampage!

Any of you New Yorkers see the Santacon last Saturday? Or if you're bored tonight and live in one of these cities, you should see if you can get involved at the last minute: Atlanta, Baltimore, Bangkok, Calgary, Detroit, Dallas (obviously), Helsinki, Indianapolis, London, Nashville, New Orleans, Ottawa, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, or Wilmington.

About Dennis Kucinich and his UFO sighting:
I'd like to direct your attention to this photo* which is of lensatic clouds over the peak of Mt. Rainier at approximately the angle of Shirley McClaine's Washington property. When Kucinich finally said where he saw the "UFO" everything clicked into place.

Although UFOs likely have been spotted since biblical times, the first major reports started on June 24, 1947 when Pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine disk shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington. (from http://www.ufosnw.com/history.htm).

My husband from Texas via LA, was sure he was seeing a fleet of flying saucers the first time he saw The Mountain the day before a low pressure front roll in; he still jokes that if there are flying saucers they use lensatic fleets at Mt. Rainier as camoflague. Visitors from the midwest often refuse to "read" the Cascade volcanoes as mountains, prefering to see them as misshapen storm clouds; seeing lensatic clouds as flying saucers is just another way that mental sets determine perception.

(Indulge me my pedantry; my brain is made of old oatmeal, these days).

*Which made it on to the net labeled Mt. St. Helens. Believe me in this: it is The Mountain. It looks no more like St. Helens than Grand Coulee Dam looks like the Space Needle.

Tim May @128:
The Japanese Bookbinding book I have has a picture of an opened account book (Daifuko cho), which clearly indicates that it was used with the spine perpendicular to the writer.

According to the author (Kojiro Ikegami), the tassels at the top had a specific purpose.

Completed ledgers were often strung together and tied with a long cord so that in case of fire -- a common occurrence in crowded Japanese towns -- they could be flung into a nearby well and later retrieved without damage to either paper or ink.

Paul@122,

GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States, Should tell reporters he’s read “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card: A gifted child from a privileged family defeats a race of inhuman warriors without ever having to leave the comfort of his war-simulator machine.

bwhahhahawhaahwhbwaw!

JESR #131

Mount Shasta, in far Northern California, is known for its lenticular clouds.

But of course those aren't clouds, they are the ships of the Lemurian people-- the earlier race of Mankind who once lived in lost Atlantis-- as they travel from power-point to power-point (the intersection of power-lines) across the earth. The great city within hollow Shasta can also be reached via the wormhole inside the uncountable depths of nearby Castle Lake, a lake also known as the control lake for the UC Davis scientists studying Lake Tahoe, an unbelieving group who claim Castle is only 400 feet deep and 10,000 years old, a mere product of the last ice age.

I've been told.

ethan #126: I know what you mean.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 134... Are we supposed to believe that Shasta's nearby undergound tunnels are really lava tubes? Lava tubes. Suuuure.

Serge #129, Fragano #135: On that occasion I was torn between being creeped out and thinking it was a lot like necromancy, and being thrilled that it was possible and thankful that I live when I do.

Kathryn #134: Isn't Mount Shasta one of the places that allow access to the Earth's hollow interior, and the paradise therein?

etna @ 137... thrilled that it was possible and thankful that I live when I do

And you have access to these necromancy-like feats without having to sell your soul to Santa. As for Earth's hollow interior, and the paradise therein, you've never seen the movie At The Earth's Core, obviously. It reveals the little-known truth that Earth's interior is not a paradise, but a hell ruled by cheesy rubbery pterodactyls.

etna

I see what you did there!

ethan @ 139... How appropriate, if only completely accidental.

Serge is right, æthan. Mahars are not overlords anyone would welcome, even on The Simpsons.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, I suspect that there are inumberable mysteries up and down the Cascade cordillera, else there would be fewer hidden mountains within it.

One of my favorite memories is taking the Coast Starlight north from the Bay Area on a day when a freight line worker had "accidentally" locked it on a siding and gone home for the night, making it run eight hours late. Instead of going through Dunsmuir in the dead of night we passed through the Shasta area in broad daylight. I'd seen Shasta from I-5 before, but never that close up. The tracks run through a lava field which I want to examine close up some day.

Re #122: MIKE HUCKABEE [..] Might also consider reading “A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury: A clumsy milquetoast with a shaky grasp of science goes hunting for dinosaurs and ruins the future for everybody.

IIRC, stepping on the butterfly in the past swung the results of an election in the present, so that the more belligerent, unstable candidate became President.

I had been wondering how many stories you could put together that would have an election as a major plot point. The Eighty Minute Hour by Brian Aldiss for one. There had been a short story I recall (but cannot recall author or title) where a pair of scientists shift themselves into a parallel universe where 'the Judge' wins the election against a militant fascist, only to find that in this universe the Judge is a militant fascist (I don't think I would be able to find this in the box library in the attic; I'm pretty sure I sold the book I read the story in years ago).

ethan #137: That's about my mix of feelings too.

My default view of The Mountain for reference purposes.

One of the scans of endpapers hit me right in the nostalgia plexus: this one from a 1954 Tom Swift, Jr. book. I remember that image!

http://drawger.com/show.php?show_id=27&image_id=926

Skwid @130,

One of the reasons I love San Francisco is the history of Santacons. The third year was when 40 Santas flew to Portland to join the festivities there. 40 on one flight.

Todd Larason #102:
According to the website, it's recorded at the highest frequencies the technology allows for CDs (NB: I'm no expert).

Tim Walters #108:
I bought a copy for a 'Secret Santa' present and yes, it comes with a warning to not play at excessive volumes.

Local TV & radio have been testing it on canines of various sorts & some anecdotal evidence suggests that dogs can hear and respond to it. For all I know, it's a whole CD's worth of actual silence, but it's for a good cause.

Paul, #122: That pair of selections for Huckabee? Oh, SNAP!

ethan, #126: Sometimes technology gives strange epiphanies. One of mine was back in 1998, looking at the pictures from Mars online. I thought I was accustomed to my computer being a "window on the world" -- but to have it suddenly be a window onto another world was just plain awe-inspiring.

Greg, #133: Perhaps more importantly... at a critical juncture in his training, he CHEATS. I strongly suspect that the choice of Ender's Game for Bush was made with the assumption that the people who have read the book would also make that connection.

Lee... Ethan.. Fragano...

xkcd on the modern world. I know how that feels, in spite of Dubya.

Just saw "I Am Legend."

Overall, very good. Will Smith does an excellent job playing The Last Man On Earth; the dog actor is splendid as well. Manhattan is very credibly deserted and grown over.

Caveat: A wrenching story . . . traumatic at times.

Missing: The whole notion that the lead character is viewed as a fearsome anti-vampire by the sickly night-dwelling survivors.

Stefan Jones @ 151.. Someone had said that "I Am Legend" has more to do with "Omega Man" than with Matheson's novel. That's also the impression I get from your comment about what is missing from the new version.

shadowsong @ 61: while fresh ginger and orange peel will probably dry reasonably well on their own, in the sachets, without molding or mildewing and thus spoiling the other ingredients, it is a non-zero risk. You could try drying them beforehand in a low oven, but for a real treat, you might also consider candying them.

Did you want instructions? I'd have to look them up, and while Joy of Cooking probably has useful ones, my pro baking textbook, which I KNOW does, is at work right now.

abi @113: You're very kind. Your own site has been of great help and inspiration when I was trying to figure things out. At the time there was hardly anything on the web. Fortunately there seems to be more and more now. Maybe there's a renaissance going on?

A lot of fine bindings will take the right angles off of the edges of the boards to increase the appearance of delicacy.

Ok, thanks for explaining. I've done that before; I just thought it was to reduce the strain on the leather.

The first I'd heard of a Yapp edge was in a class Dominic Riley taught this year in Seattle. We did a limp vellum binding, where we just folded the cover over the fore edge.

My question on concave spine books has always been what the fore edge of the text block looks like.

I've not found any pictures. One could trim them flat after backing, but that might also look a little strange. Especially if you didn't take it into account in the imposition. (I did this once by mistake. It doesn't look strange on the self given how most contemporary books are flat, but it does look slightly off as you flip through.) I don't see you you could ever get a concave fore edge with a concave spine. Maybe clamp it really hard and go at it with a chisel?

Thanks for the SOB links. Amazing stuff!

Serge #150: I love that xkcd, because I totally do exactly that same thing. I'm astounded that we're about to enter the ninth year of the future (I don't care what the alt-text says, we entered the future the moment the first digit of the year changed to a 2).

ethan @ 155... That's how I determine the century's beginning too. Remember those innocents days when many conversations were about the century's starting minute, and what the first decade would be called? Then Dubya happened and nobody cared about that anymore. I almost find myself waxing nostalgic for Y2K.

Serge @150, nahte @155,

Me too. And about that fluorescent cat- it isn't just a fluorescent cat- it's a fluorescent cloned cat. As soon as I saw it, I knew it had to become one of my precious user icons (one only gets 15, so it can be a big decision).

We've been looking at haze in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter planet 63 light years away. 21st century moments, yay.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 157... Another 21st Century moment would be early teens with cell phones, who probably think of the years when one wasn't connected all the time as primitive.

#127 ::: Earl Cooley III

The seven volumes seem to cost about $40 each at amazon, but that's still $420 for the set, which is pretty steep.

As far as I can tell, the St. John's Bible is of more interest as art than as religion, though one of the purposes of it is to encourage contemplative reading, and I think it would work for that.

If you just want a good solid dose of "Ooooh, Shiny!", Illuminating the Word is officially $40, but I found a $20 copy online.

Serge #150: Indeed!

I keep waiting for the regular PanAm flight to the moon.

I heard an interesting Flamer Bingo term of art today: "whore account", which is a sockpuppet that gets passed around from troll to troll, in online venues where the trolls are self-aware enough to have a sense of community among themselves. Although, as always, use of such accounts is subject to analysis for traffic and word usage patterns, it has the strategic advantage of not silencing any particular troll if the account happens to be deleted by a moderator.

Surely Giuliani should have had "Cities in Flight" by James Blish as one of his? "The Italian-American Mayor of New York uses cunning strategy, deception and violence to pilot Manhattan through a dangerous universe, and ends up becoming God".

As for UK politics, the Labour Party came up with the slogan "Not flash, just Gordon" after Brown took office; it is a damn shame that the Lib Dems didn't respond by describing their then-leader, Menzies Campbell, as "Not merciless, just Ming".

I think Mr Langford pointed out that Osama bin Laden might have been inspired by the Foundation series: a genius sets up a dedicated order on a remote planet in order to rule the galaxy after the inevitable collapse of the decadent Empire, and communicates with them by regular posthumous video recordings... (also al-Qaeda means "the base". Or "the Foundation"?)

Nancy Lebovitz@159: How is that $420 and not $280?

Rob Rusick@143: First Lensman, by Doc Smith. "Franchise", by Isaac Asimov. Probably Double Star, and if memory serves me right Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad.

Government drone here...

The government has a $intensifier LOT of rules for handling job apps. I just had to be on the team to score a stack of applications and to do the interviews, so I am happy to turn my pain into good for someone.

For the US govermnent, a one-page resume would not meet the minimum requirements. If you look at the position announcement, it describes the position, lists some education/experience requirements, and then lists "KSAs", knowledge/skill/ability requirements. A lot of applicants seem not to grasp that these are the heart of it. You have to address--in specific detail--how you meet each and every one of these KSA requirements.

Each KSA point is scored separately, so if something you wrote in #2 is also applicable in your response for KSA #4--repeat it.

It is also very important to explain much mojo of each KSA you have. (NB: "Mojo" is not a government term.) How independently did you act when you did things related to the KSA? How wide was the scope of your action? How broad was the effect? Did you make recommendations or decisions? Did you develop new things or figure out how to apply old things? All these go into the grade you get for how well you meet the KSA.

Another tip: the graders are not allowed to infer. If you say you did A and C, the graders are not allowed to assume you passed through B en route. If it's not in your package explicitly, it doesn't exist.

Also, it's useful to know that http://www.usajobs.gov/ is a database of all federal job postings, in all parts of the country. You can even set up agents to mail you new postings that meet your criteria and apply on line through the site. It fails to suck.

I ended up double ordering some books from SFBC recently: Postsingular, Halting State, and Axis. If you'd like one or two or all three of them, please email me (ohdawnoATgmailDotcom)and I'd be thrilled to send them to a good home.

re:165 Dawno, I've just sent you an email.
mark

Totally off whatever topic we're on, but since this is an open thread I figure it's okay: I finally decided that I want to learn more about the Mormons, and I'm about to read Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, which I am told is still the definitive biography. I've been influenced in this decision by some of the commentary I've read here, by what I've heard elsewhere, and of course by the current political situation.

Books I've read in which the LDS church figures prominently are Under the Banner of Heaven and a book by Martha Beck called Leaving the Saints. (She writes well but boy, does she have issues. Talk about an untrustworthy narrator...)

Comments and suggestions gladly considered.

One more extra book to add (I'm cleaning up my office and it's amazing what one finds if one just gets around to sorting through the piles). Apparently I bought two copies of Stephen Baxter's Emperor as well - and neither were book club editions. Same offer, just send me an email if you'd like it.

Oh, I didn't mention this - but all four are hardbacks.

Sorry for the serial post - Halting State has been spoken for. BTW, I'm not trying to sell these - they're free (including shipping).

Crap. Now I'll be delving into genetics and glowies all night.
I blame ML for my obsessions.

Paul A., #122, Itzkoff misses the obvious connection between Romney and Battlefield Earth. He can't be that dumb; think he's on Romney's side?

JESR, #145, from my college dining hall (Seattle Pacific), we could look one way and see the sound and the other way and see Rainier.

Manny, thanks for explicatig that. I have filled out one such application, probably inadequately.

And usajobs.com is way better than even a lot of the corporate, expensive Web job-hunting sites.

Getting more expensive quickly. Job hunting will be my full-time job starting Monday (I have severance, sufficient until mid-March but no insurance once the new year starts. I have my meds refilled until then too).

Marilee, I suspect that I'm fast approaching the day when I'll be able to see the Cascades and Olympics from the pasture, since all that's blocking my view of the Olympics now is a few tall doug firs on property that could be subdivided.

I have mixed feelings about the possibility.

Free book update: Axis has now been spoken for as well.

Speaking of fluorescent mammals... What's next? A clone army of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer?

John @146: Wow. Now that you mention it, I remember that one too. Read some of the series at my grandparents house; I think they were my father's when he was a kid.

Very rocketpunk, that image.

David Goldfarb #163 (re Nancy Lebovitz@159): How is that $420 and not $280?

By the way, the prices I refer to in my #127 ($115000, $695 and $595) were for various editions available directly from the publisher's website, and not Amazon prices.

Tim May said:
Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

I took "Vocational Typewriting" classes in high school, during the 70s, double-spaces after full-stops, etc, and all. All of the workbooks we had to use (with titles like "Practical Secretarial Typewriting"), from the good people at McGraw-Hill, were bound across the top. I've never come across that kind of binding in books anywhere since.

The curious thing about these books was that you read down the first page, flipped it upwards, and the next page was printed on its back, upside-down, so that you could read a two-page spread from top to bottom. It was a useful way to arrange pages when you had to copy, say, a long legal document, etc.

David Goldfarb #163:

Oops on the price--no doubt a combination of arithmetic error and pessimism about the cost.

#177 ::: Earl Cooley III:

Why give the publisher prices rather than what a lot of people are likely to pay?

David Goldfarb @163 [..] "Franchise", by Isaac Asimov.

I was describing an Asimov story to someone recently, and that is probably the one! In brief: computers are used to find the most representative voter in the country, who is then asked a series of questions. Based on his answers, the outcome of the election is calculated; the ultimate winner remains unknown even to the 'voter', until the results are announced.

<joke>I suppose the bad news would be that the computers were built by Diebold.</joke>

In Solar Lottery, Philip K. Dick imagined a future where election outcomes were determined by polls and surveys. Their techniques had become so accurate, using sample groups that were becoming smaller and smaller that, by the beginning of the novel, the outcome of the election could be determined by one single person.

I read the novel more than 30 years ago, but I seem to remember that the story didn't live up to its premise's promise, with the Voter winding up hiding somewhere near Pluto. And there might have been aliens waiting once he got there.

There's an election in The Probability Broach. I csn't remember whether there was an election in The Rainbow Cadenza, but sexual orientaion was an explicit part of how the government was organized.

Dave@163: Double Star definitely -- it has a detailed description of a campaign and election. I don't recall one in BJB -- maybe just the sense that politics is involved

Nancy@182: I don't recall an election in The Probability Broach; one of points of that book is that they don't have elections. IIRC, the "Congress" involves anyone willing to show up with tags indicating the number of people willing to delegate to the critter at that moment. (There may be some foofaraw about how the chair is elected, but that's still in-camera.)

I seem to remember a short story where a wing-nut politician, disgusted with the undue influence of liberal areas of the land, somehow manages to get the country to change the voting system: one single part of the country, one representative of the electorate, will get to vote. Can you imagine his horror upon the Bay Area's voters being chosen to decide the fate of the country?

How many of you have seen Eisenstein's October, sometimes known as Ten Days That Shook The World

After various title-cards, the opening shot is of a statue of Alexander III. There's a brief scene of a running crowd, and then the imagery is of men climing the statue, using ladders and ropes, and preparing to topple it.

Sound familiar?

So, way back when the Republican invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam, they seem to have pretty deliberately emulated Soviet propaganda. True, Eisenstein's imagery is so powerful that it has been influencing revolutionaries ever since the film was released. It's one of those essential narrative memes.

And isn't spooky to see that communist propaganda and to recall it being recreated by the US Army.

#183 ::: CHip:

You're right--it's a campaign with voting, but not an election.

One of Neal Stephenson's pseudonymous collaborations involves a presidential campaign in a near-future US. Ah, here we go, "Interface" originally published as by "Stephen Bury".

John Dalmas' "The General's President" may have included an election; I can't remember for sure if the title character came to power via the normal route or not.

The election is off-camera, but one of the early Vorkosigan books has repeated mentions of an election on Beta colony where nobody will admit to having voted for the winner; I've never been sure whether to interpret that to mean that the winner's popularity has decreased significantly since the election, or that the election was rigged, or simply that Our Heroes move in minority-opinion circles.

Following up on the sidelight about China, here are a couple of photos of magazine racks in the public library of Wuxi, taken in March, 2003. I managed to remember to pick up a humor magazine and a modest pile of used comics while we were over there. Afterward, I realized I should have bought three times as many of the comics, but that's hindsight for you.

Todd @ 187

I took it to mean the first or the last of the three (possibly both at once), but that was before this crowd was in office.

While checking out the Washington Post Book World online, I discovered their new discussion blog topic: Sci-Fi for People Who Don't Think They Like Sci-Fi. Just the title is enough to annoy a lot of people here, but some fine writers *have* been mentioned by now.

I couldn't resist making my own comment, where one of the writers I touted was Jo Walton with her latest two books (from Tor). Has anyone else ignored the lousy heading and checked out that discussion?

Nancy Lebovitz #179: Why give the publisher prices rather than what a lot of people are likely to pay?

To ridicule the ludicrously high prices for a bible that represents money that would be better spent on the EFF or ramen noodle soup. I understand that it would be useless to attempt to affect your enthusiasm for the project, though.

Faren @ 190... I have often thought of the new version of Galactica as space opera for those who don't like science-fiction.

Serge @181: It has been quite a while since I've read Solar Lottery, but it was a confusing complex book. IIRC, everyone had a card which gave them a chance to be 'elected' in the lottery, but you could sell off your card to anyone you chose; somehow the current ruler was able to manipulate this to stay in power.

There was a short period of time after a lottery drawing where an assassination attempt was allowed; the new ruler could evade or kill the assassin. Some critic pointed out an interesting inversion in the story: the ruler was determined by random chance, and a convention was held to select his assassin.

I would think a system like that would create figurehead rulers, with the actual power residing in the institutions. But you probably can't use logic on a book like this*. I wonder if this had been one of the books PKD did on a speed-fueled writing binge.

* Again, IIRC, the elected assassin turned to be an android capable of space-flight; this is why the new ruler had been hiding out on Pluto. Oddly enough, I don't think there were any aliens in this story.

#187

One of Neal Stephenson's pseudonymous collaborations involves a presidential campaign in a near-future US. Ah, here we go, "Interface" originally published as by "Stephen Bury".

Which reminds me of Bruce Sterling's similar* Distraction. I don't recall if an election actually takes place in the course of the novel, but the protagonist is a campaign manager or similar.

* I've not read Interface, but I've seen them compared.

#190 ::: Faren Miller

Sci-Fi for People Who Don't Think They Like Sci-Fi.

I, for one, am in danger of turning into one of those people. Every now and then I pick up something and try to read it, and it turns out not to be as fun as it looks at first.

So the question is, where should I look in order to find stuff that is worthwhile so I don't start expecting things not to be worthwhile and quit?

Bruce Baugh at #1:

Level 7, Robert Anton Wilson and Thomas Pynchon:
You know that something is majorly wrong but you don't know what it is because you don't know that you know what you know, and it's all a cover-up anyway.

Rob Rusick @ 193... You remember way more than I do, but it seems to confirm what I do remember, which is that there were some neat satiric ideas in there that could have been better used.

Faren Miller@190: Sci-Fi for People Who Don't Think They Like Sci-Fi.

Hm. I looked at the recommendations in the user comments. "Ender's Game" came up numerous, numerous times. And so did "Left Hand of Darkness". Maybe I'm not actually a sci-fi person, either.

ROT13'ing the spoilers.

Ender's Game:

Gur jubyr gvzr V jnf ernqvat "Raqre'f Tnzr", V pbhyq abg trg cnfg n fvk lrne byq orvat orggre ng fgengrtvmvat aniny onggyrf guna fbzrbar jub'f npghnyyl orra va gur anil sbe gjragl lrnef be fb. Gur jubyr guvat pnzr bss nf n tvnag Tnel Fgh sbe zr. Ohg vg jba nyy fbegf bs njneqf naq nccneragyl rirelbar ryfr ybirq vg.

Left Hand of Darkness:

Yrsg Unaq bs Qnexarff qvqa'g qb vg sbe zr rvgure. Gur frpbaq gvzr gur YUbQ zragvbarq gung Trayl qvqa'g npprcg fbzr cneg bs Rfgenina, (naq tvira gung Trayl nyjnlf eryngrq gb Rfgenina nf vs Rfgenina jnf n znyr, engure guna naqebtlabhf), V thrffrq gur ovt gjvfg jnf tbvat gb or gung gurl unir frk. Gura gur raqvat jurer Rfgenina raqf hc trggvat xvyyrq sbe ab erny checbfr frrzrq n qhzo jnl gb xvyy bss fbzrbar fb erfbheprshy. V pbhyqa'g oryvrir Rfgenina jbhyq qb fbzrguvat fb cbvagyrff.

Actually, I haven't read anything lately, from any genre, that I was particularly enthralled with.

Rob, #193: Not exactly about an election, but your comment reminds me that one of the subplots in Diane Duane's The Door Into Sunset is that once a year, the ruler of Darthen must come out into the city square, unarmored, and hammer out his or her own crown from a block of pure gold; and while this is happening, any citizen with a grievance may approach and try to kill the ruler. The nobles and palace guards are forbidden to interfere, but the commoners may do so; and the attack must be made with a hand-to-hand weapon, no arrows or thrown spears allowed. It's an interesting method of measuring a leader's public reputation and effectiveness, and of course in the book someone has figured out a way to game the system and Our Heroes have to stop them.

I put this on the old open thread and meant to put it here:

A commenter on Andy Wheeler's blog* brought up this WashPost blog post Great Sci Fi for People Who Think They Don't Like Sci Fi because the WP writer lists only fairly old books. I skimmed down the long list of comments and noticed that there are very few books by female authors listed until you get to Faren Miller's post at the bottom.

*Andy was complaining that Itzkoff's piece on SF books for presidents doesn't actually require Itzkoff to have read SF recently.

I want to note that today/tomorrow is potentially the last day to stop retroactive legality for all-out warrantless domestic spying*. This is what Cory was writing about Friday in Senate set to forgive telcos for spying on Americans, and it's happening Monday Dec. 17.

As the NYTimes article shows, and G.Greenwald highlights, this has never really been about 9/11 or foreign surveillance: those were just the retroactive excuses.

Please call your congresscritter / write speeches for Dodd's fillibuster / consider donating to the EFF*.

-------
* It's a member-supported non-profit which gets results as if they were much larger than they are**. They've been fighting AT&T for nearly 2 years, and I suppose AT&T finally recognized it could only win by buying a win in Congress. Bleh.

** Yes, I'm biased- I know the people at the EFF. They're very effective and efficient, but they're limited by how much money they get in donations (and they don't have nearly as many members as some people might think).

To the LJ Fluorospherii: thank you for your wonderful gift.

Serge #158 . . . yes, but what do they do with all of that connectivity? I have tried to figure this out ever since the local early-teens started getting their own cell phones. What benefit do they confer that did not previously exist?

Lizzy @ 167

From Housewife to Heretic by Sonia Johnson

JESR @142,

And one of my favorite* memories came after a blizzard shut down I-5 and slowed the Coast Starlight so that it didn't arrive in Dunsmuir until 6am.

The stretch from Dunsmuir to Lake Shasta had places with over 3 feet of snow**. That against a brilliant blue sky made for near-numinous beauty.

* although the waiting on the empty platform*** from 3am (the original "we've been delayed but we'll get there") until 6am ("this time we really mean it") got too cold. Other people who arrived at the station at the much more realistic 5am let me stay in their car and regain sensation in my feet.

** 3 feet from the blizzard, more from before.

*** Now they have a heated waiting room. Not then.

Having heard this was the "Book-binding" thread, I am trying to find that discussion. So far I've had no luck searching on the terms Shepherd, bondage, BDSM, Inara, domme, Serenity, Firefly;* and I want to know whether this is how Book's hair got short between the last broadcast episode and the movie, perhaps due to re-enacting the Samson scenario.

(* I did get a hit on shiny, but it wasn't related.)

Jenny Islander @ 203... What benefit do they confer that did not previously exist?

I guess they get to hear the latest teenage gossip as it happens.

I had four hours of sleep last night and, provided Sue doesn't ask me to bring the kitchen sink along, we'll be hitting the road in a couple of hours and be on our way to the Bay Area. Hopefully it won't snow at Tehachapi before we stop for the night in Bakersfield. Wish us a safe trip.

abi @ 114 writes: In Western bookbinding, which is derivative of the horizontal scroll format, there has never been a tradition of top-binding until the advent of the stenographer's notebook.

Children's pop-up books are the only examples I can think of.

Safe trip, Serge. Ping us when you get there so we know all went well.

#195: I've been struggling to find really good science fiction lately, too. (As opposed to really good fantasy, which exists in abundance.) In theory it's my favorite genre. In practice, I have a hard time finding anything exciting; I read the latest Dozois Year's Best anthology and kept quitting halfway through stories I saw no point in finishing.

Two books I actually did find worthwhile recently were Spaceman Blues by Brian Slattery and Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. In the past year the only other science fiction books that made an impression on me were the last couple of Company books from Kage Baker, Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale (part of an obscure but amazingly good small press series that began as a Doctor Who spinoff) and Blindsight by Peter Watts, which I enjoyed despite an aversion to depressing books. (I'm chronically depressed, and dystopias or otherwise grim stories make me feel worse--so they have to be really, really good before I'll read more than a couple of chapters.)

(Oh, and Charles Stross's Halting State was fun, too, if not quite up to the standard of Accelerando.)

I've enjoyed Alexis Glynn Latner's Hurricane Moon a lot so far, but I'm afraid it's going to morph into a romance novel any page now. heh.

The return of holiday music from Fleming and John.

Safe trip, Serge. Don't take risks.

@181, 193, re: Solar Lottery: Dick is quoted in the biography by Sutin as saying "van Vogt in such works as The World of Null-A wrote novels. I did not. Maybe that was it; maybe I should try a SF novel."

Looks like he said to himself after reading Null-A, "I can do this", and proceeded to do so.

Nancy #182: In the _Rainbow Cadenza_ there's an election, and this leads to people important to the plot moving around a bit. And I loved the way they'd shifted around rules regarding sexual orientation (a straight guy seen cavorting with a man was assumed to be having a good time, but a gay man seen cavorting with a woman was a scandal).

I'm curious: Have any Wiccans/pagans read the book? A big thread of the book involved something like Wicca as a very common religion, at least in the US, but I have no idea how close the book is to any reality, since I know very little about Wicca.

That was as a miserable trip.

Forget the two-hours of sleep. Forget the 0530 bus to the Nünberg airport to get a flight which left at 1100.

Forget the gal at duty free who didn't know enough to let me buy the schnapps I wanted to pick up.

Forget the fact that I hate the Frankfurt airport.

Forget that I couldn't upgrade and had 12 hours from FRA to SFO in an inside inside seat (though, to be fair, my seatmates were very nice and as such horrors go, this one wasn't too bad).

Forget that my bag was opened, by those mysterious, "supplemental" screenings people behind the scenes..

Forget all that; and accept that customs in SFO was as pleasant as customs ever gets.

Forget even that I lost a mitten from my jacket; and that it had the kinderegg I'd been hoarding since it arrived in my boot on St. Nicholas morning.

No, some bastard stole my assorted marzipans. Took it from my duty-free bag in the overhead bin.

But, I'm home. Saw some people at the party Maia hied me away to from the airport. Played come carols at meeting yesterday, did some more socialising last night (the calendar she sent me is booked, until Friday). I am, I hope, slept out and past jat-lag.

It's good to be home.

Erik Nelson (#195): So the question is, where should I look in order to find stuff that is worthwhile so I don't start expecting things not to be worthwhile and quit?

Apologies for tooting my own employer's horn, but the February 2008 Locus will have the usual Best Of lists and reviewers' comments on SF, Fantasy etc. from this year. Though at present, we're all still arguing over what will go on the list, the final version should include a lot of good stuff, and the comments will mention other personal faves.

I don't get to see much SF myself, but Jo Walton's last two do qualify as fine books. I also liked Slattery's Spaceman Blues, which Wesley mentioned above, and hope it will make one of the eventual lists.

From my own reviewerly perspective, fantasy of many kinds is where things are really "happening" at present. Not to knock SF, though, for it certainly hasn't lost its relevance as we've moved into another century.... (Etc., etc., and I'll cut the blather now!)

On my list of weirdness - just had somebody[0] come door-to-door, promoting their self-published book...

[0] Unknown to me...

xeger: Yes, it was How to Get Your Book Sold, and selling it yourself door-to-door was step #4, right after hiring an agent (out of your own pocket), paying a Scottish ghost-writer (who will plagiarize someone else's work), and of course paying for all the actual publication itself.

Self-Determination. It's the American Way.

Terry, that is a miserable trip indeed. Welcome back.

Terry, welcome home. Damn them all, especially the dirty bastard who stole your marzipans. I hope s/he chokes on 'em.

The discussion of bookbinding spines' relative orientation is making me wonder whether a flexagonal format would be plausible-- the article does seem to indicate that the tetraflexagons preserve some consistent textual directionality, whereas the only versions I've ever played with in person have been the hexaflexagons (which I keep thinking would make for a really nifty pillow or scarf or something).

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, at 205 and *** therein, mentions unheated train stops: the worst one, ever, was the East Olympia Amtrak stop, which was a three-sided shed built largely of recycled railroad ties, facing into the prevailing winds, an unwalkable distance from anywhere useful. It was replaced in 1994 by the Centennial Station built with donated funds, staffed by railroad buffs, which is right up there with Emeryville for modern comforts and public transportation service.

My daytime trip past Shasta was in mid-May, and very different from yours; wish we could swap memory-files so that we could know both extremes, but I get hung up describing the jackrabbit I saw at dawn that day, flying along even with the train beneath a broad rainbow at the last flat before entering the foothills.

Senator Lieberman endorses Senator McCain, presumably for the Republican nomination, though Lieberman is not a Republican. How peculiar.

Bill 225: Lieberman is not a Republican. How peculiar.

Indeed, that's the only thing I don't understand about Lieberman.

Serge @ 207 . . . Wow. I may be a member of the last generation ever to be cautioned against wallowing in gossip.

I would also find the little thing dingalinging in my ear or buzzing in my pocket all the time incredibly annoying. I would have had to confess to my mother that I had gotten sick of the stupid thing and flung it out of the bus.

Terry #217: Welcome back. That was an awful trip. I hope whoever stole your marzipan discovers that they're allergic.

Jenny Islander @203, the youngest kids I know who have cellphones have them to reclaim something their elders (some times, in some places) took for granted: the ability to contact their caretaking parent at any time of the day. This is especially true given the utter lack of working and affordable pay-phones in most public places.

In #146, John D. Berry writes:

One of the scans of endpapers hit me right in the nostalgia plexus: this one from a 1954 Tom Swift, Jr. book. I remember that image!

I loved that illustration, too, in my day. But the Endpapers to End Endpapers were created by Alex Schomburg for Winston.

(Interestingly the Tom Swift illo seems to have been contributed by Jackson Publick, one of the creators of The Venture Brothers. TVB is a vicious and frequently-tasteless parody of Jonny Quest but it is also frequently hilarious.)

#230: Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer may be sick puppies, but they adore the subject matter.

More knitterly than bookbinderish this morning, I offer this hilarious tidbit, related to Mafia as reportedly played at Virtual Paradise: "Sock Wars!"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119766934184930123.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_page_one

-hee.

I've always thought cell phones were partly for utility-- I've flown to an unknown city without one, and it wasn't pretty, not with the kind of delays I had-- and partly for connectivity. If something happens, you can call someone else. It's like checking your email every ten minutes; you want to know what's happening now. Where are your friends? What are they thinking? What if you miss something?

I'm trying to get away from that kind of thinking. A week at my family's house, fighting with their computer, will do a lot to put me back in my own head, rather than the communal one.

albatross rang
Alarm bells on
spam from "bang"
And now it's gone.

[posted from 202.45.119.133]

Jenny 203: They can arrange meetings and events without ever having to talk where they might be overheard. They can talk for hours without tying up the parental phone lines.

They can also say "OK, well they have two kinds of chocolate icecream here. One is called Double Fudge Chocolate, and the other is called Chocolate Chocolate. Which kind do you want?" A feature, I might add, that I have personally found useful.

They can also call home and say "Daddy, I'm on a dark road in the country and I have a flat. I'm scared."

There are more.

...and now my normal name is back.

I recently passed on a couple of the Tom Swift Junior books to my 10-year-old nephew. Problem is, now he wants more, and those were the ones I had!

Xopher @235,

They can also call home...

In short, they can avoid every TV and movie plot line that can only take place without the existence of cellphones.

EvilDude: "Hey, kid, your dad's been in an accident and your mom asked me to pick you up. Hop on in."
Kid: "OK, but let me call my mom first."

Kathryn 239: Exactly so! And a good thing, too.

I think I discovered, in Germany, that so long as one doesn't click the "don't make me type this again" that a sinlge post is unique for names.

I suspect so, because I've never had the problem with my spamcalling name persisting.

Yep, looks that way.

NJ did it, the Gov signed, and the death penalty is outlawed.

Cell phones: I help out for a long time, and then got one so I could meet up with people at ComicCon a few years ago. That's by far the main benefit in my opinion. Remember the days when you would have to carefully arrange meetups in advance? "Ok, we'll meet at the council hall at 2:00. Everyone got that?" And then there you'd be, and 20 minutes would pass, and you'd have no idea what happened, and people would be stuck in traffic or on the other side of the building or their watch stopped or they just forgot...

Those are days of the past, now.

Right again, Terry.

Current lead story on the front page of cnn.com: SCARY CHILD MOLESTERS will no longer be killed in New Jersey! The horror!

Current lead story on the front page of msnbc.com: late-night TV shows are coming back on the air, without writers.

Currently missing entirely from the front pages of either site: Turkey's attacking the PKK in Iraq. Chris Dodd's filibustering in the Senate.

Wow, that's pretty obviously slanted on CNN.com.

Giant rat found in New Guinea, not Sumatra:
CNN story

Clifton Royston #249: I wonder if it's been named after Holmes.

Open thread telling of tales:

After my annual appraisal‡ this afternoon, my boss dashed off (on his cycle) to catch the ferry south across the Ij to his home. I was packing up my bike more slowly when he came back. The ferries weren't running in our area. Two boats had collided, three people had gone into the water, and the river was closed for the search & rescue*.

The ferries were running further east, so he was headed that way. I joined him, not because I live east of the office (I'm to the north), but because it just sounded like fun to cycle hell for leather through the darkened streets of Amsterdam Noord.

So I rode with him, and it was as wild and as crazy† as I expected. We pulled up, laughing and breathless, just as the ferry arrived to take him south. I then turned and rode back the way with the flood of cyclists coming off the boat, many of them going back toward where he and I had come from.

There was a great feeling of unity in that group of cyclists, and very good manners. It was as crowded as the Tour De France just after the starting line, but slower and more generous. The group split and resplit as different people headed off in different directions.

I found myself, after a time, in a group of four riding in a line. We were up on an old dyke, built up on either side now, but still the only high ground in the area. The bike path was a little apart from the road, but there weren't any cars anyway, just the four of us, all but silent in the frozen night air. I was second from back.

And then the woman behind me began to sing.

I only caught snatches of it, though her voice was clear and lovely in that chilly air. It was in Dutch, and so incomprehensible to me, but it sounded old - maybe 16th century.

And then she finished the song, and fell silent, and I found myself thinking about the people in the river back behind us. And it seemed like a scene from a story, the four strangers travelling together in the dark and the cold, and the singing, and the stopping, as though the death in the river had reached out and taken one of us as well.

I glanced back, and she was fine, riding under the streetlamps. Our little group split up shortly afterward. Eventually I was alone in the darkness, far from any houses or lighting, with just my bike lights to show the way.

And I started to sing**, and didn't stop until I came into the lights of my village.

-----
‡ which went very well, and included the handing over of the permanent contract.
* air temperature freezing, water warmer, and the fire dept reckon up to 3 hours' survivability. It's been 4 hours now, and I only know of two who got out of the river.
† but, I hasten to add, not dangerous
** Greensleeves

abi...and you didn't post this on the front page because...?

...I didn't see how to turn it into a thread. What does anyone say to something like that?

and you didn't post this on the front page because...?

She's too modest, as most great people tend to.

abi @ 251:

What an incredible thing to have for a memory. (Not the death part, of course, but the sense of community, and the singing, and the riding in the dark.)

Do the _NH's control what ads they get in the right-hand column? Because I saw one for the new book by Josh Henkin, "Matrimony". Haven't read it yet, but I went to school with Henkin's brother, and he & I used to belong to the same small synagogue.

So it's nice to see his book getting advtg on a literary blog.

I read his first book, "Swimming Across the Hudson", which was pretty good. It was clearly a first novel, since, knowing the family, I can see a lot of similarities between Henkin's family and the family described in the novel.

Clifton @ #249:
The world is not yet ready.

Jenny, #203: Based on the experience of my partner's daughter, one major benefit is being able to adjust plans on the fly when Murphy's Law strikes. And you probably know that teenagers' plans have a fairly high cat-herding factor...

Earl, #212: That one's in my TBR stack, so I wouldn't mind a brief (spoiler-free) opinion about it when you're done. It won't bother me a bit if it turns into a romance; I enjoy well-done genre crossovers. A fair number of the books on my Desert Island list are SF/mystery or SF/romance.

Xopher, #235: Or a real-life example: "I wiped out on my bike, and I'm bleeding. I'm at the corner of 34th and $STREET. Can Dad come and get me?" (Fortunately, no real harm done, though she needed 3 stitches in her chin. And a nice gentleman on a motorcycle, who'd seen it happen, stopped and stayed with her until my partner arrived.)

Susan: Bravo!

abi 253: They tell stories from their own lives that this reminds them of, or comment on that feeling of singing in the face of death, or in the darkness and solitude. Some write about bicycling. A subthread geeks out on different kinds of bikes; a sub-subthread geeks out on the physics of bicycles ("Actually the gyroscopic effect contributes relatively little to keeping a moving bicycle upright," or why it turns out that tightening all the spokes on a wheel to exactly the same degree is actually not optimal compared to some complex other pattern, who knows).

Another subthread starts up on boating, hypothermia, and/or drowning, with many tragic tales and copious references to Jim's Annual Hypothermia Lecture.

Others of us, the ones who started out talking about singing, might branch off into discussing our favorite walking tunes and chants, or into the fertile/futile topic of Why "Greensleeves" Is Better Than "What Child Is This," and/or other abominations of great songs made into crappy Christmas carols.

It would approach the thousand-post singularity in no time. I encourage you to promote it.

Lee 258: I think the grief- and worry-saving capacity of cell phones should not be underestimated.

One more thing about mobile phones in general, but that "youngsters" take advantage of - they facilitate spontaneous gatherings. Rather than arranging a time and place to meet, teenagers always seem to say "I'll call you when I get there".

(Also I had to reeducate a friend on the concept of an arranged rendezvous at the age of 30 when he moved to a town with very patchy coverage at the bottom of the hill (where the pubs are))

I am moved to kick off the bicycle subthread... When I was in the Netherlands this summer, one of the best parts of the whirlwind tour was the chance to bicycle through Edam on rented Dutch bikes. It was very "Muppets Take Manhattan", the big group of us cycling around.

It demonstrated to me the clear superiority of the Dutch style of bike to the American styles... The Dutch bikes, you sit completely upright and can look around and chat easily; in America, both mountain and road bikes involve you crouching over the handles to various degrees. The Dutch way is far more comfortable for me (Ahh! The American leaning on the wrists being jolted by the road thing! It hurts and stings!), and better suited to the 2 miles on flat steets to and from work: I'm more visible and I can see better around me.

I wish there was someplace that sold cheap Dutch-style bikes in America.

Madeline F @263 -

Ask and ye shall find. :

http://www.dutchbikes.us/

Dutch Bicycles in US

But, not cheap.

And while I can't speak to cheap, I know the REI in Portland had bikes with the upright handle design (even with baskets!), if you looked for "Comfort" bikes, as opposed to "Road" bikes. Looking at their website, there are still a few with the seat level with the handlebars, but it at least gives you something to look for...

Xopher @ #260, "Some write about bicycling."

Ok. I got my first two-wheeler when we lived in New London, CT at the Navy's Underwater Sound Lab (on the Groton River, across from the Sub Base) in 1956 or 1957. I learned to ride it on the grinder (massive parking-lot sized gravel-coated macadam piece of land) outside the front door of our quarters.

I think the Sound Lab has been closed.

Not American/Dutch style so much, as comfort/efficiency. Zoetemelk certainly didn't ride upright like that.

Madeline F @ 263 ...
(Ahh! The American leaning on the wrists being jolted by the road thing! It hurts and stings!)

For some reason nobody ever mentions that you're not supposed to lean on the wrists - the majority of your weight should be supported by those nice firm abs and back muscles, and your wrists/hands should be unloaded, lest they become damaged.

Madeline F @263, the buzzword you're looking for is an "upright riding position". In my understanding, you can get some of that from standard-issue hybrid or touring bikes, and mountain bikes are better for that than 'road' bikes, which take their cues from racing bikes. Nowadays bike manufacturers are starting to make what they call commuting bikes, which also feature a more upright riding position, the better to spot cars and other hazards of urban cycling. (Also, if your wrists are hurting when you bike, your bike may be sized or adjusted incorrectly -- see http://sheldonbrown.com/pain.html#wrists and follow the links from there.)

There are a few American specialty manufacturers making bikes on that Dutch model you speak of, which is also the model of the old English three-speeds -- Broadway Bikes in Cambridge, MA is one of them (http://broadwaybicycleschool.com/mastermodel.html). Rivendell Bicycles in Walnut Creek, CA may be another one (http://www.rivbike.com/) -- their descriptions don't pay explicit homage, but they have the right attitude. You will pay handsomely for the privilege of owning a bike like that, however, since at least here in the US they aren't mass-produced bikes. (You may be able to find them used, though, since they seemingly last forever -- partly due, I suspect, to the internally-geared hub and solid steel construction.)

Then again, if you're like me, that $3000 bike doesn't look nearly so expensive when I figure that the bike will last me the rest of my life. Myself, I'm still lusting after the Tout Terrain Silkroad -- http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/tout-terrain.asp.

Terry @217: [..] some bastard stole my assorted marzipans. Took it from my duty-free bag in the overhead bin.

Maybe they thought it was almond-flavored C4.

Hmm. I just posted a comment with a measly four URLs, and it was held for approval. Either there's been a malfunction in the churning and grinding machinery of the blogging software or the line in the welcome box ("Comments containing more than seven URLs will be held for approval.") should be changed. :-)

A t-shirt Stephen Maturin might appreciate.

Same here. I have a bad neck. The only handlebars available were the ones that curve downward, and you have to lean down to them and crane your neck to see ahead or around. That hurt.

There's a reason for the handlebars, of course. It's because the crouched riding position offers less wind resistance, which is important as average speeds get up to around 40 kph. If you're a fit, whippet-like road racer, fine. If you're not, and you're only trying to get some exercise and burn calories rather than fossil fuels, too bad, loser.

I couldn't stay on the bike.

I've had the same job for ten years and a few months, but as of today have done it under FOUR employers.

Just a handful of layoffs this time . . . five out of maybe 200 in the office.

Tomorrow I put out tins of Christmas fudge to help everyone get over survivor's guilt.

Madeline@263: The Dutch bikes, you sit completely upright and can look around and chat easily

perhaps a Recumbent Bike?

Not cheap though. But I always thought it would be neat to own one.

OK, I just spent the whole evening looking for the (small, flat, nearly transparent) scraper part from my chocolate-tempering machine. I had given up and was starting to look for the spares I know I have...somewhere...

I had reorganized my utensil drawer (why I was keeping those flimsy but very sharp knives I'm not sure, but I threw them out) when I realized: last night I had the whole counter covered with chocolate-covered parchment paper, which I balled up and shoved in the trash*, greatly expediting my cleanup.

Fortunately, I had put a new bag in the kitchen garbage. I pulled out the ball of parchment paper and started unrolling it, hardly daring to hope...and there it was. It was covered with chocolate, so it blended in. OM GANESHA.

But I didn't get ANY chocolates made tonight. And I'm much too tired to begin—plus it was my exhaustion that nearly let to my sabotaging my entire operation last night. So I'm going to bed.

But here's a picture of what I was working on last night. Those are fresh-ginger buttercreams in bittersweet chocolate, and yes that's real gold dust. The ginger is very strong, and to me it tastes exactly how gold looks, so I think it really works.

*Yes, that means I threw away a fair amount of chocolate. After several evenings of working chocolate, you feel like you never want to see it again at the end of a work session. I'm happy to report that this bizarre sensation fades by morning.

Greg, I agree; recumbent bikes are way cool. Expensive though. I hate bikes with dropped handlebars for all the reasons Madeline F gives.

When I first rode bikes they were all made with upright handlebars except those used by professional racers. I did a bike tour through New England, six weeks, from Springfield MA to Canada and back when I was sixteen, riding a 3-speed Raleigh with upright handlebars. I loved that bike, and except for one nasty spill in the Green Mountains which required some patching (me, knees; bike, brakes) the trip went gloriously well.

"Comfort" bikes, eh....?

My current bike is an antique we found in the Goodwill store for the princely sum of $10. It's a 1970s-era 3-speed with "racing tires", but without the damn upside-down handlebars because they hadn't become popular yet, and it's just like the one I rode in high school.

Xopher, #276: Sorry, but I'm not going to get a MySpace account just to look at pictures of chocolate, no matter how pretty. This is not the first time I've encountered that particular roadblock; apparently MySpace won't let you look at anything without logging in first.

Xopher @276 -- I pulled out the ball of parchment paper and started unrolling it, hardly daring to hope...and there it was. It was covered with chocolate, so it blended in. OM GANESHA.

Shouldn't that be OM GANACHE?

The first recumbent bike I ever saw was Steven K. Roberts' Winnebiko II at an Austin BBS picnic about twenty years ago.

Nota bene:

I have released Kevin Riggle's message from captivity. All quoted numbers from 270 till now are suspect*.

-----
* Arrest on sight.

Good grief. I stayed up till four o clock in the morning to finish reading "The Watchmen" for this??? What a complete load of infatuated-with-violence bullocks ending that was. I feel like I've regressed back to Hobbes' Leviathan. Any abuse of power by the Leviathan is accepted as the price of peace. Fear is the motivator. Might makes right. Ends justify the means. Three and a half centuries of philosophical progress, as if it never happened.

un-believe-a-bull.

I have a bottom of the line touring bike, which is a minor oddity in the Netherlands. The gears mean that I can keep up with even the craziest cyclist (like my boss) on a normal bike. The handlebar shape does make it look like it's a much more expensive bicycle - Dutch people look at it and think "sport bike".

This means I do not take it into Amsterdam proper, where it would get stolen in a heartbeat. Even in the areas I do take it, I use a Dutch ring lock and a thick cable lock.

I've made it seem less desirable by fitting it with a set of large, practical, and entirely unsporty panniers. They're another feature of Dutch cycling - about 40 Euro for a good set, which will take my laptop and bag for work, or - in combination with a backpack - a whole shopping cart full of groceries. I've even brought a (mini) crate of beer home in them once.

I love my bike. I call it Vera.

Xopher @260:
I think the discussion has taken root here. But I'm glad you liked the description.

I'll be less shy next time.

This Vera?

Yep.

abi@285: I'll be less shy next time.

You shouldn't just bind books, abi, you should be writing them. Your story @251 is wonderful.

Bruce Baugh @ 1

Level 10 - Phillip K. Dick:
God hates you and smites you; as you lie dying you find yourself the object of worship of a cult of androids who will carry the battle to Heaven. You still die.

Greg London@283: I take it you missed the clues indicating that Veidt was wrong to do what he did, and that it won't work anyway? Here's one for you: The "Black Freighter" story ends with the narrator swimming towards the eponymous ship. Near the end, Veidt speaks of dreaming about swimming towards something black. Given the identification between Veidt and the narrator that this gives us, compare Veidt's actions to the narrator's.

There are others. Alan Moore is much more subtle than you are giving him credit for.

I love my bike. I call it Vera.

You will love your bicycle! You will give your bicycle a girl's name! Because it is the only thing you are going to get your leg over from now on! This machine is your wife - and you will be faithful!

(I also love my bike. I have just spent far too much money on a Steve-Austin-scale refit after the axle broke in Trafalgar Square. I call it The Beast.)

#290 - Alan Moore is much more subtle than you are giving him credit for.

Without wanting to get into another round of Greg London vs. Alan Moore fans, I'll note that this is one of the potential problems with reading things into the early hours of the morning; you miss things. Amongst other things Watchmen is a critique of superheroes. Irvqg, orvat n fhcreureb, gevrf gb fnir gur jbeyq hfvat ivbyrapr; gur qvssrerapr vf ur hfrf vg ba n ynetre fpnyr. Gur zbeny ceboyrz bs hfvat ivbyrapr gb fbyir ceboyrzf vf vyyhfgengrq ol gur zntavsvpngvba sebz orngvat hc ivyynvaf gb qrfgeblvat cneg bs Arj Lbex; vf gur jbeyq ernyyl orggre sbe vg?

Ba n gnatrag, jr xabj ubj gur-jbeyq-havgvat-nsgre-na-nggnpx-ba-Arj-Lbex jbexrq bhg va erny yvsr, juvpu znxrf zr jbaqre jung Yvaqrezna gubhtug ur pbhyq qb orggre va Urebrf.

(Next time I name an alien city it will be Arj Lbex)

Steve C. @ #264, that "conference bike" makes my head hurt.

Greg @ #276, my husband rides a recumbent and is very pleased with it. He mainly rides shortish, leisurely rides around the outskirts of town (30 miles or so), but he did a double century on it a couple of years back. He has back problems, but finds the recumbent very comfortable.

David@290: Alan Moore is much more subtle than you are giving him credit for.

subtle, shmudtle. I got all the clues. They're irrelevant.

There is an idea in writing called "show me, don't tell me." When judging the war-porn-ness of a story, I base it off of what the author shows me on screen from beginning of story to end. Not what the author tells me happens off screen, or hints will happen after. If Moore wanted to get scored for the fact that the plan wouldn't work out in the end, then he ended his story too early. He should have shown that part. He should have figured out a way to have another chapter showing the world five or ten years after his version of the story ended. Given that the series of 12 comic books spans across 20 or 30 years, no reason he couldn't have pushed the timeline out to show us 10 years after chapter 12. He didn't. So he doesn't get credit for it.

And that doesn't even get into his absolute infatuation with torture via Rorschach. Rorschach repeatedly tortures people and gets the information that tells him where the proverbial ticking bomb is. Torture works in Moore's world. It worked transformational miracles on Evey in "V for Vendetta", and it works like "24" in "The Watchmen". I thought "V" showed an infatuation with torture. But "Watchmen" goes way beyond "V".

WRT the Vista/XP sidelight, I point with trembling finger at the OS-tan family.

#92, Mary Kay -

More than one person can search the same general area -- no waiting until the guy doing a bibliography of books about George Washington finishes with that drawer.

I'm not really arguing against your point, more like making a tangentally related gripe--My local library has four computers that have card catalogs on them. They also all have internet access. If you want to use the card catalog, you have to sign up on the waiting list and wait for your turn in the queue, and you only get fifteen minutes, because there's always someone who wants to get online. Aargh.

#276, Greg London -
I have a vague fear of recumbent bikes, ever since my uncle severely broke his leg on a home-built one*. I don't even know the details of the accident (it was quite some time ago) but he's the only person I know who broke a leg** on a bicycle and also the only person I know who had a recumbent. It makes the anecdotal evidence against them pretty strong. Can anyone comment on whether they really are any more dangerous?

*Yes, the "home-built" part might have been a major contributing factor. I don't know.

**He's actually the only person I know of who broke a bone of any kind, but I'm betting I could ask around and find many fractured wrists among my more adventurous friends, so we'll limit it to "the only person I know who broke a leg."

296: I have a not-vague-at-all fear of recumbents, based on seeing them in London traffic in the evening. It's bad enough being on an upright. But lying down in the gloom with my head at tyre level and trusting my life to the reflexes, eyesight and bonhomie of a London bus driver? No thank you. Maybe if I lived in a civilised city like Abisterdam where there are proper cycle paths (ie not shared with buses).

War pr0n score for "Watchmen" is +685 points. right up their with "300".

Alternatively, one might argue that the civilian deaths don't count, and that drops the score to +385, which is still pretty high. But I think they count.

Either way, it's up there.

#216 ::: albatross :

Nancy #182: In the _Rainbow Cadenza_ there's an election, and this leads to people important to the plot moving around a bit. And I loved the way they'd shifted around rules regarding sexual orientation (a straight guy seen cavorting with a man was assumed to be having a good time, but a gay man seen cavorting with a woman was a scandal).

I'd missed that last. I obviously need to reread the book.

I'm curious: Have any Wiccans/pagans read the book? A big thread of the book involved something like Wicca as a very common religion, at least in the US, but I have no idea how close the book is to any reality, since I know very little about Wicca.

I'm a fairly non-observant neo-pagan, so I can answer that.

The book is very far from reality. Everything in the neo-pagan/Wiccan range involves few people, little money, and practically no political influence.

There's been one political win lately-- it's now possible to get pentacles on graves in National Cemeteries.

As for Rainbow Cadenza, I was unhappy with the portrayal of Wicca in it, and I finally figured out that Wicca in the novel was completely aligned with the very creepy government.

Recumbents scare me. The nature of them is such that I don't trust myself to clear them well in a wreck. They are also harder to see.

I've been in some hairy bike-wrecks (two of which involved cars) and on a recumbent, one of them would probably have been fatal, even with a helmet and body armor.

Greg London, despite what your scoring system says, and despite your apparent belief that every single possibly consequence of a story needs to be explicitly spelled out for the reader, can you imagine anyone reading Watchmen and deciding, based on it, that torture is great, and what Rorschach does is fantastic, or that what Veidt does is justified? Because I can't.

I really like my bike-- it's old, kind of rickety, I meant to have a friend look at it and tell me it's okay, but it works. No gears, pedal brakes (why yes, I did choose this bike on the basis of similarity to my childhood ones!), a couple bags big enough for groceries, and things for lights.
I need to gain some biking confidence, though. I know I should have a helmet, but haven't so much as seen one that would work with a high ponytail... which means that instead of riding the bike, I walk. I've internalized helmet rules in spite of never having worn one, and now feel like if I bike to the library without a helmet, I not only will die but I will deserve it. Not reasonable, not rational, but also not vulnerable to either of those.
Anyone know of a helmet that can handle not-going-to-faint-in-the-heat summer hair?

And now what I actually wanted to ask! I think I broke my home computer monitor. It's a big CRT, and while I was plugging something into the back of the computer, it made noises like it was turning on, turning off, switching back and forth, then turned off. And now it won't turn on again. I think static may have had something to do with it. Is this a completely broken thing, or is there something I can do to check?

Thank you, whoever brought up Rainbow Cadenza. I now have an earworm singing a medley of "Rainbow Connection / Rainbow Cadenza" in Kermit the Frog's voice (Jim's original version, not Brian's), with occasional commercial messages from some furniture store singing "Rainbow Credenza".

AUGGGHHHHHHH!!!!
* runs into the night pursued by counter-tenors *

#263 I wish there was someplace that sold cheap Dutch-style bikes in America.

Madeline, the other keyword is 'Cruiser', e.g.:

Raleigh Bikes
They are very comfortable to ride, especially with the new gell seats!

Unfortunately, not so cheap; I managed to get a second-hand one for myself, though. You might try EBay or Craigslist.

Terry,

May marzipan thieves be consigned to the fieriest pits of Eblis. But, however bad it was, even a bad trip home is still a trip home. Welcome back.

A few quick comments before running off to work.

abi,

Please, when you write a story like the one about bicycling in Amsterdam, post it so we can enjoy it to the maximum, by embellishing it with threads and subthreads, relevant and not. It's the best way to honor storytelling.

ink cannery girl & heresiarch

At some point we may need to discuss a 12-step program. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy Agatha's adventures as much as possible.

All,

I've been a dim ghost of my usual online presence lately, but I'll be coming back, now that we've got our younger son safely married off. I'll post some pictures and reminiscences on my blog (click my username above) later, probably tonight.

#302 Diatryma
Anyone know of a helmet that can handle not-going-to-faint-in-the-heat summer hair?

I've never seen anyone wearing a helmet over a high ponytail. I have long hair, and I french braid it. Fits under my helmet fine (although I had to search around for a helmet that would fit my weirdly big head).

Maybe you could find one of those helmets with multiple vent holes, and fit the ponytail through the hole?

We seem to have strayed onto elections here.
So, my SF election related question- anyone work out what a "DemoPol" is, in Frank Herberts "Dosadi"?
I think it is some sort of polling system which is structurally corrupt, but it is unclear. The book is one that would have been improved with a lot more words, and I don't say that about many books.

Also, anybody got a reaction to the Bali talks apart from "Thats what I expected, we're doomed now"?

Greg London: I'm not going to try and convince you that you ought to like Watchmen - you certainly have the right to your own reactions, whatever they may be. I would, however, point out as gently as I can that a number of very smart people have taken something fom that book that is entirely at odds with your analysis; do you feel that they're being disingenuous, or just wrong?

I do have to take exception, though, to the assertion that only that which is explicitly shown on the page (or onscreen) matters in a story. What isn't explicit can matter just as much as what's shown (or told*); sometimes it's more so. And I don't think the implicit things need to have definite answers, either - indeed, one of the things I find worthwhile in Watchmen is that is IS ambiguous in many ways, which makes its resolution all the more troubling (and being troubling is very much its point).

Have you read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics? While some of his overall theory is somewhat contestible, one of the more brilliant observations in it is that the magic of comics (in particular, but it applies to other media as well) happens in the gutters - that it's what the reader brings to the action between panels that makes comics work, because otherwise it's just disconnected images with no through-line at all. To take an example from the work under discussion, one of the most powerful and terrifying bits of Watchmen is where Rorschach figures out what happened to the little girl - which we're not told in so many words, or shown explicitly, but we see the flashes of images as Rorschach puts it together and are allowed to experience that moment of horror along with him. It doesn't work unless the reader is engaged in solving the puzzle on their own from the clues given (and, like the best horror, it relies on the reader's complicity for its impact, because you're going to come up with something much more awful in your head than anything that could possibly be drawn on the page). When Rorschach's narration points out that it's not God that ohgpuref puvyqera naq srrqf gurz gb gur qbtf, it's us - that resonates on a meta-level, because it's we the readers who have imagined it for ourselves without having to be "shown."

I wonder if it's a variation of engaging with story on that level, where it's expected that the reader will fill in narrative and thematic gaps, that's the source of disconnect in many of these thrashes with people who like things that you find distasteful or problematic and who are seeing things that to you obviously aren't there. For good or ill, that level of story can't be codified or rated on a scale - but it makes all the difference in the way many, many of us react to narrative that can't be accounted for solely by tallying the body count or the depictions of unpleasant behavior by the protagonists.

*"Show, don't tell" is, IMNSHO, one of the more dangerous bits of advice ever elevated to artistic gospel - not because it's wrong, but because adherence to it as a Rule creates just as much flawed and awkward work as the alternative. Sometimes you need to just tell something and get on with it. And sometimes you need to neither show nor tell, but leave the important parts in the lacunae between what's being told and shown and let the picture emerge for the reader in that negative space.

I thought "V" showed an infatuation with torture.

So did I, and I only saw the movie. Thank you, Greg. We are a lonely minority, but proud. I've never been able to figure out why my otherwise sensible, totally anti-torture friends approved of V.

To all and sundry... yes, I have been wishing any myriad of horrors and curses on whomever it was that stole my marzipan.

It's a funny thing, I've never before been quite so annoyed at a petty theft. Perhaps it broke some sense of the compact I feel for my fellow travellers.

Regardless, I am more glad to be home that I am angered by the loss of my sweetmeats.

I have now added Dan Layman-Kennedy sockpuppeting to my duties as a nonexistent person.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #306: Congratulations!

I have no idea who said it first, but,

"I thought "V" showed an infatuation with torture."

I thought rather that it showed an infatuation with revenge, tempered with an awareness that revenge is limited, and problematic. Torture happened once or twice, but frequently it was of the happened through karma kind, if that makes any sense.

Nancy #299:

Thanks. I wonder if Shulman was trying to carry off the same kind of transformation of Wicca that happened to Christianity, when it went from a small ridiculed or persecuted or ignored cult to a powerful religion aligned with the state. You get very different kinds of people interested in those two different kinds of religions, different doctrines that seem interesting or important, etc.

I miss riding a bike- for the mobility, more than anything, but also for the fun and fitness- only when I see souped-up late model Accords fly by the end of my driveway going 70mph, I'm reminded why I gave it up in the first place.

(Actually it was having a logging truck making a left turn at about half that speed, close enough to leave bits of bark in my hair, that really did it).

#315 ::: albatross:

It seems reasonable to me that Shulman was reversing the status of paganism and Christianity-- I was annoyed that there were no pagans who were opposed to the larger society. There are always Christians who aren't happy with the compromises Christianity has made with power.

Guthrie #314:

Well, Rirl'f genafsbezngvba sebz n sevtugrarq, natel puvyq vagb n shyyl pbzcrgrag jbzna jnf pneevrq bhg ol gbegher, qbar ol I. Vs lbh gbbx I nf fbzr xvaq bs zbeny nhgubevgl, gur vzcyvpngvbaf jrer frevbhfyl anfgl, evtug? Nabgure jnl gb ernq guvf vf gung I xabjf bayl bar jnl gb sbetr Rirl vagb uvf fhpprffbe--gur bar hfrq ba uvz. Ohg ubarfgyl, V qvqa'g pbzr njnl jvgu gung frafr.

In Watchmen, one thing about Ebefpunpu'f hfr bs gbegher vf gung vg bppnfvbanyyl frrzrq gb lvryq vasbezngvba, ohg ur jnf pyrneyl orngvat nafjref bhg bs qbmraf bs crbcyr va trareny gb trg bar nafjre--vg'f abg yvxr vg whfg zntvpnyyl jbexrq.

Watchmen didn't seem like war porn to me; there were lots of morally ambiguous enemies and heroes, gur nccnerag tbbq thl jnf thvygl bs n ybat fgevat bs crefbany zheqref bs crbcyr ur xarj, phyzvangvat va n ubeevoyr znff zheqre. V fher qvqa'g jnyx njnl sebz gur raqvat guvaxvat Irvqg jnf nal xvaq bs pyrne tbbq thl. Vg jnf cbffvoyr ur'q fnirq gur jbeyq, ohg jr qvqa'g svaq bhg.

Nancy #317:

Fair enough. There were certainly mainstream characters that were sympathetic. ISTM that the big breaking point was whether the mainstream character was a Marnie; for example, I think her uncle and mother were not, and were repulsed by what they did. (But maybe I'm projecting what I wanted to think about the sympathetic characters.)

guthrie @308, if memory serves, the DemoPol is much like the Delphi Pool in Brunner's Shockwave Rider- a betting line more than an election.

Albatross- I don't speak bird.

And this pseudo-disemvowelling of potential spoiler stuff is beggining to annoy me.

JESR- that might be right, it would explain the dangers of manipulation, i.e. the powerful change the odds so that people think "Oh well, he's going to lose anyway" or something like that. I have yet to read "Shockwave rider".

http://clevercycles.com/?p=193 is a pretty good description of typical "Dutch" style bikes, but doesn't really help with finding a cheap US supplier.
Recumbents come in a huge variety, and while some do put your head at tyre height (in August I saw an M5 Carbon Low Racer being sold second hand because the owner had bought it for commuting and had his sanity return after a few short rides), but at about the right height to make eye to eye contact with car drivers isn't uncommon. Many users report that being unusual more than makes up for any reduction in visibility (but others still prefer upright bikes in heavy traffic).

And nothing to do with bikes, and passed on without comment, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/. Apologies if it's been mentioned already.

Guthrie, it's not disemvowelled; it's rot13'd. That is, every letter is replaced by that 13 places off in the alphabet, so A=N, B=O, C=P, etc.

If you don't want to do it by hand, rot13.com is a nice simple page with a textbox and a button.

Xopher @277: chocolate porn, and no actual recipe?

[wants]

I've read "Watchmen" a few times, but it completely failed to click with me-- it's not so much a matter of like/dislike as the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people"); although I forged on to the end anyway, I simply couldn't keep track of the story or characters. I've also never read or seen "Vendetta". I do own omnibus reprints of "From Hell" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" so at least I have some exposure to Alan Moore's work, but I really don't have any meaningful qualifications to discuss "Watchmen" or "Vendetta".

However, recent discussions have made me wonder-- although I hesitate to project onto Greg, and apologize for the presumption-- whether like me, he doesn't really grok the technique of unreliable narration. Oh sure, I know that it exists in the abstract, and I can be pointed toward its (supposed?) clues and subtext, but I almost never even *see* the unreliability factor on my own, and tend to distrust/dislike the technique because to me it feels like "cheating". The author has abused my naive faith in the straightforward presentation of the story-- if I can't trust a significant aspect of the overall narrative POV, why should I believe *any* of the plot that's conveyed through it?-- and is trying to have things both ways, rather like people who fire off an insult and then instantly deny it with "Oh, I was just joking; you can't possibly have thought I *meant* that?"

Julie L, I think unreliable narration is, like most techniques, a spectrum thing. I range from 'wow, that was effective' to 'oh, that's just LYING' depending on several things. A great deal of it seems to be whether or not I can see the twists coming-- if I can, and it's well done, I'll have a lot of fun with it. If I can, but I take a moment to think about it and realize the story doesn't support it, then it's being unnecessarily misleading. Hiding the important information is okay; keeping it from me entirely is not.
Some of it is also whether I think the story is saying, "Ha ha, got you!" or not. Perhaps I overpersonify a bit.

Bikes: My old bike in Cambridge (MA) was a three-speed Frankenstein Special, courtesy of the Broadway Bike Shop. It was very heavy by modern standards, but I couldn't deal with racing handlebars, nor with 10-speed levers that required taking my hands off the handlebars. Unfortunately, when I moved down to NYC, I found the traffic just too aggressive, and I set the bike free to "join the Rainbow" -- or whatever scraps it could find in the big city....

Down here in Charlottesville, I got a Schwinn Voyageur -- straight handlebars, with the gearshifts integrated (you twist the inner parts). Probably lighter than the prior bike, but not after loading it with all the accessories and equipment! Unfortunately, 10+ years of not-riding (and not much other exercise) have left my stamina and leg strength completely shot, so it's going to be a while before I can make lengthy trips on this thing.

I also got put off by the onset of winter, but now that I just got my sweaters and heavy coats out of storage, I might take another shot at it. (Yes, it's been warm enough here that I'd managed without gloves or toques so far!)

Recumbents look cool, but they simply don't fit into a traffic stream increasingly dominated by SUVs and trucks.

Helmets: Looking at my helmet, it could handle a low ponytail, but not a high one, as there's a fastener in the way. On the other hand, I remember there were several different models. I'd suggest swinging by a bike shop or two and trying on every distinct model you can find.

Watchmen: Greg, I can certainly appreciate your finding Watchmen disturbing -- so did I -- but it was meant to be dystopian!

Abi's tale: come on folks, she scatters poetry and insight all over (heck, she zaps spam in verse), gets adopted as a moderator, and now you're giving her grief for not being prominent enough with her work?

Be grateful for gifts, and Abi's brought a lot of gifts to this blog! (And yes, it's a very sweet story, thank you Abi for sharing it.) One of the things I love best about this blog is that you can be reading along in some "ordinary" thread, and suddenly you find treasure....

Lee 279: I believe that changed recently, but I'll repost it from Photobucket when I get home (can't get the picture from work).

Debbie 280: For that pun you will be cast into the Outer Dark-Chocolate-ness, where there will be wailing and ganacheing of teeth.

Greg 283: Fear is the motivator.

I must fear. Fear is the Motivator. Fear is the little death that lets you know you're alive. I will cower in my fear. I will allow it to possess and control me. I will turn the mind's eye inward and take no action. And when it is done I will be nothing; only It will remain.

The Litany in Favor of Fear. Don't say it out loud.

Dan 309: *"Show, don't tell" is, IMNSHO, one of the more dangerous bits of advice ever elevated to artistic gospel - not because it's wrong, but because adherence to it as a Rule creates just as much flawed and awkward work as the alternative. Sometimes you need to just tell something and get on with it. And sometimes you need to neither show nor tell, but leave the important parts in the lacunae between what's being told and shown and let the picture emerge for the reader in that negative space.

Hear, hear! I recently had a friend pick up a story of mine, read a page and a half, then put it down, saying "I don't have time to read a story that breaks rules from beginning writing classes." (He's young and rude. I make allowances.)

My "mistake"? The sentence 'She cried a little, and he comforted her as best he could.' I was supposed to go into details about him comforting her, relate that part of the conversation. My friend's writing teacher told him "show, don't tell," and he thought it applied there. I glossed over it on purpose because the story is in limited 3rd, and the character was focused on his own goals for the conversation, and is the kind of person who does the comforting thing on autopilot.

But none of that matters, you see. You have to show everything at all times, so that your reader has to wade through acres of description and page after page of unimportant dialogue to get to the meat of the story you want to tell. Barf.

Julia 324: No recipe exists. I dusted the mold, used a standard shell-molding technique, filled them with ginger buttercream (half a stick of butter, cup of powdered sugar, cream together, splash of cream, beat, add freshly-squeezed ginger root juice to taste), capped them. That's it.

Julie 325: Wow, I really disagree—if that's even the right word for something that's so clearly a matter of taste and preference. I LOVE unreliable narrators. I love Amelia Peabody ("'Why are you doing that?' I calmly inquired. 'Well, there's no need to scream,' he quite unreasonably replied.") and the limited 3rd in Dhalgren, whose main POV character is stark raving bonkers.

One of my favorite books has a 1st who partway in says "OK, I never did X and Y, and I don't have a dog. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite and take out all the lies. I'm not going to tell any more," and by then you know how much he WISHES he had a dog (the scenes with the dog are just as vivid as anything else in the book), and what he wants people to think of him, and that he's going to TRY to tell the truth. It's a profound insight into the character.

I guess I like figuring things out. I like stories where the writer doesn't tell you what the characters can all assume knowledge of, so you have to figure out that they're using the word 'book' in a very different way than you're used to (or even the words 'he' and 'she', as in Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand, though in that case he does tell you eventually), or that the main POV character isn't quite aware that Jerusalem is an actual place on Earth, as opposed to in Heaven.

I love to read stories like that, and I TRY to write them. Thanks, though, because now I'm aware that some people just. hate. that, and remember not to be too dense with it.

Somehow I left out 'will try to' in the last sentence of the excessively-long post above.

#325 & #326: Re: unreliable narration:

And then there's the stories where the narrator is not who or what they think they are! I encountered that most recently in Brust's Cowboy Feng's..., and while I generally love Brust, I didn't think he managed the Reveal too well there. By comparison, Alistair Reynolds pulled it off perfectly in Chasm City,

Xopher #328: Don't forget Triton, with one of the most unlikeable narrators ever, who is completely oblivious to how awful he is.

This is where that awful deconstructionist jargon about "reading protocols" seems to actually apply. I think the people who simply don't get or can't stand reading books with unreliable narrators, books and films where all the important events take place "off-screen", etc. and the people who love them - as you and I clearly do - are going through a completely different reading process.

In Watchmen not only does much of the most important action take place offscreen, in between panels, and so on, but arguably the most important single event of the book is not the climax, but what one can "see" will take place just after the last panel of the book, and what one may infer will slowly but inevitably follow from that.

For me, I think the success of the unreliable narrator technique depends on whether the author clearly trusts the reader to figure out what isn't being said (IOW, treating the audience as conspirator), which is fun; or playing a Gotcha! game that seems to assume the reader is stupid or easily manipulated (IOW, treating the audience with contempt), which isn't so much.

Not hard-and-fast, if only because a clever reversal can be done that is both unexpected and not just the author smacking down the reader. While Watchmen isn't an unreliable-narrator story as such (except in the sense that Rorschach gets some time in the caption panels, but that part's conspiratorial - it's clear from the start that this guy is a paranoid nutcase), it ends with a plot turn that subverts the expectations of the mainstream superhero-comics-reading audience. For my money, I didn't feel punished by that development, but I could understand to an extent why a reader might feel more or less cheated by it. I happen to like deconstructive, subversive, uncomfortable stories (as well as the other kind, I should add), but it's certainly not everyone's thing, nor should it be - which is why I don't take offense that Greg didn't like Watchmen, I just reject that there's a measurable, objective set of criteria that you can use to "score" a narrative on how much it fits some arbitrary and objectionable category. (I don't especially care for Mary Sue quizzes, either, for much the same reason.)

ethan: Only the best puppets for my horde of minions! Bwahahahaha!

Clifton 331: Delany really gets into the UNs, doesn't he? Triton is one of the Delany books I only read once, because books with NO sympathetic characters just depress me. But then it was...30 years ago? Something like that. Is that the one that ends with the far-future historian explaining that the stories of the "Beatles" having their clothes torn off by screaming girls is just a later folktale version of the story of Orestes being torn to pieces by maenads? I really LIKED that part.

And I think you're right about process. I can't think of a way to characterize their reading process that doesn't sound derogatory (this is NOT because I think theirs is "wrong" but because I so strongly prefer mine) or to characterize mine without sounding like I'm elevating it.

I have to say, Watchmen, much as it may have lots of brain-working narrative (a big plus in my book), sounds like it might be too depressing a read for me.

Thank you Carrie, suddenly everything makes so much more sense.

I can now agree wholeheartedly with Albatross's comments about Watchmen.

Clifton- I managed to read Triton on the 2nd attempt. I was feeling in a funny mood at the time, I can't explain it exactly, and I think I could see how at times I could be like the central character.

By the way, is Delaney going to finish "The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities"?

Dan 332: And yet there are stories like Pbaavr Jvyyvf' "N Yrggre sebz gur Pyrnelf," which have a "Gotcha!" moment, but don't feel like we're being treated as stupid at all, or at least I didn't feel that way. Maybe it's because of the way the style and the content are woven together in that story and stories like it.

Clifton: Your analysis of Watchmen could apply almost word-for-word for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, another book I love beyond all reason. And in both cases, my reaction to the revelation that gur fgbel jr'ir orra sbyybjvat vfa'g gur vzcbegnag bar was "ohmigodWOW" - but I do have some sympathy for readers who might feel robbed of their investment in the narrative so far.

Xopher: I haven't read the story you refer to, but I can completely imagine that author pulling off what you describe. I should clarify that even a surprise twist can be conspiratorial; it just has to assume that the audience is going to in some way appreciate the revelation, rather than treat their gullibility as something to be taken advantage of. I don't know if I'm making much sense with that distinction, but (to use a sort of naughty illustration) it's the difference between "Surprise! Morning sex!" and "Surprise! I took naked pictures of you while you were drunk!"

Albatross at 318- I forgot to decipher the first section. Here is my reply:

Uzzz, V qba'g erpnyy gnxvat I nf n zbeny nhgubevgl, naq V guvax gung jnf engure gur cbvag bs gur fgbel. Ubjrire V qb guvax gung ur znl unir bayl xabja gung zrgubq bs "sbetvat". Gung gur qrgrpgvir oybxr znantrq gb qb vg ba uvf jba, jvgu n srj qehtf sbe uryc, znxrf gur fgbel zber pbzcyrk. I jnf znavchyngvat crbcyr nyy gur jnl guebhtu gur fgbel, juvpu qbrfa'g dhvgr nppbeq jvgu zhpu nanepuvfg gurbel...

David @290- re Watchmen- V gubhtug gung gur fvzcyrfg cbvag jnf gur raqvat, jvgu gur perngher juvpu pbhyq frr sbejneqf naq onpxjneqf va gvzr nffhevat gur Bmlznaqvnf svther gung guvatf punatr, naq Irvqg fvgf onpx hapbzsbegnoyl, naq ernyvfrf gung vg vf gehr naq srryf gur qvfpbzsbeg gung rirelguvat ur unf qbar znl jryy unir orra va inva. Gurer vf nyfb gur dhrfgvba bs ubj pna lbh vzcbfr crnpr ol ivbyrapr, juvpu unf orra gnyxrq nobhg orsber. V nffhzrq gung Zbber nyfb gubhtug gur ernqre vagryyvtrag rabhtu abg gb unir gb fcryy rirelguvat bhg, rfcrpvnyyl jung unccraf va gur shgher. Jura V jnf lbhat, fhpu obbxf gung yrsg guvatf unatvat naablrq zr, ohg abj nf na nqhyg gurl qba'g, fvapr gurl yrnir gur jbeyq gung jnf perngrq va gur fgbel zhpu zber bcra naq erny.

Of course, one problem with discussing unreliable narrators is that frequently the mere fact that the narrator is unreliable is a major spoiler. I normally try hard to avoid spoilers but don't see any way to avoid it here -- Xopher, what was the book with the narrator who didn't have a dog? Maybe by the time I get around to reading it, I'll have forgotten why I picked it up...

(minor LibraryThing update: all my shelved books are now indexed. Of course, that just makes it depressingly obvious how many books are left in boxes, stacks, piles, heaps, closets, drawers, cubbyholes, and miscellaneous forgotten-about storage areas.)

Today's inquiry for the flurorosphere: can anyone identify
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in
? As usual I'm catching up in blocks; I can ignore most of Jon Carroll's signoff lines, but this (from 10 Dec) looks like something I should recognize and I can't. (First thought was "Beep", but I'm sure not even if it weren't too heartfelt for Blish. Anderson?)

kevin@270: not all that new; the last bike I bought (21 years ago) was a "city" bike, with the child/old-standard level wide handlebars and a frame that crossbred mountain and racer styles.

albatross/Nancy: what I got from Cadenza was that their "Wicca" had been specifically created/supported to supplant Xianity, which would not have tolerated government-run brothels. It's a Swift-style satire on other beliefs, possibly arguing that no religion can survive being Established but not a commentary on most present forms of paganism.

CHip,

That's Roy Batty (Rutger Hower) at/near the end of Bladerunner. My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies.

CHip @ 340

Babel-17. (And my copy is in one of the magic boxes, too.)

[[blinks]]

Bladerunner was quoting something else?

...tears in rain.

I understand that Rutger Hauer created that line himself, and Ridley Scott liked it enough to use it.

Nancy #343: That's a Google false-positive: a member of an Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming forum named legacy-Babel-17 quoted Roy Batty of Bladerunner in a message, and someone else named legacy-Blue mentioned the quote from "Babel 17". Attribution slippage.

abi @ 210... Ping!

Earl,

I didn't google it; I remember it from the movie, which is why I was surprised!

Serge, you're alive!

ethan @ 348... Alive! I'm alive!!!!! Bwahahahah!!!

Mmm. My classic example of why I dislike unreliable narration is from Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I already hated before I ran across the following info, so yeah, I have no particular illusions that my taste nec'ly matches anyone else's or is any assurance of quality), and his comments in this interview (way toward the bottom; emphasis added)--

interviewer: And Remedios the Beautiful? What gave you the idea of sending her to heaven?

GGM: I'd originally planned that she would disappear while in the house embroidering with Rebecca and Amaranta. But this almost cinematographic trick didn't seem viable. I was still going to have Remedios around. Then I thought of making her ascend to heaven, body and soul. The fact behind it? A woman whose grand-daughter had run away from home in the early hours of the morning, and who tried to hide the fact by putting the word around that she had gone up to heaven.

For me, that last part was definitely an "Oh, that's just LYING" moment as per Diatryma, esp. considering the book's entire reputation of "magical realism"-- if there's no real magic in there after all, then what's the point?

#339 todd Larason- how exactly did you index your books? I have somewhere near 3,000 of them on shelves, and have been pondering the problem for a while. I know of one or two solutions, but was wondering what you have done.

Nancy #347: No, the Babel-17 reference was the false positive I was talking about, not the Bladerunner reference.

LizzyL @ 278:

...riding a 3-speed Raleigh with upright handlebars. I loved that bike,

I had one of those, in the early '70s; gave it up when I moved to California in early '75. Loved loved loved that bike; I've owned others since, but never been as happy with them.

With the wrecked knee, I'm in There Shall Be No More Riding of Bicycles land, alas. I'm on a relatively flat part of Bainbridge, too, it would be an easy ride to the library, bank, post office, grocery stores - and bead store.

ObPreviousThreadReChristmasKitsch:

My rubber ducky nativity and angels arrived. One set is on the edge of my bathtub, the others are going to be given to the friend who inflicted their image on me.

Julie L. @ 350: I don't read that interview snippet as saying that Remedios didn't really ascend to heaven in OHYS, but rather that he got the idea from a real-world incident.

Guthrie @351 -- I, um, mostly typed in ISBN numbers. For books which didn't have them, I typed in LC numbers. For books which didn't have those either, or where they didn't work (side question: why wouldn't those work? Is the LoC catalog incomplete in some way?), I typed in titles and authors.

It didn't take as long as I expected it would, but I've only done ~1300 books so far. I have another ~1000 or ~1500 left to unbox or otherwise find and do.

I have three different bar code readers, too -- a CueCat, a Handspring Visor card, and an older-model Intelliscanner. And if I find any of them before I finish unboxing books, I might try using them, but I'm actually enjoying the hands-on typing, refreshing my memory of some books I'd forgotten about.

Julie 350: I read that the same way Tim did.

Terry Karney @ 300...
Recumbents scare me. The nature of them is such that I don't trust myself to clear them well in a wreck. They are also harder to see.

Interesting - I think you're the first person I've known to hold that rationale about clearing recumbents in a wreck, other than me.

#340 ::: CHip

I didn't see _Rainbow Cadenza_ as a comment on modern paganism. However, it's a ritual system I like, and I don't enjoy seeing something I like turned into something subtly nasty.

Steve C., EClaire, Kevin Riggle, Cheryl: Thanks very muchly! People here are great.

#269 xeger: I imagine one would get nice abs from sitting solely on stools, and yet, office chairs have backs. I'm not in the business of getting abs, I'm in the business of getting from place to place.

Dave Luckett, Lizzy L: Preach it, my fellows! I don't have a bad neck, but I don't want one either, and avoiding craning it while jolting along on the crummy roads here sounds like a good first step.

#276 Greg London: I see a reasonable number of recumbent bikes around the Bay Area, but that's because I have good eyes. As others have said, lorblessme if I'd trust my life to commuting in one of those... Hard enough to see and be seen when you're at eye level.

#322 Alan Braggins: Wow, now that's a useful darn link. I'll repost it in case people missed it first pass: http://clevercycles.com/?p=193 He has little stick-figure sketches and discussions of the riding positions of various types of bikes: apparently cruiser/comfort bikes still aren't quite Dutch bikes. Anyway, thanks! I have enough friends in Portland that I might pop up on Southwest to look at/maybe even buy a bike from this shop as part of a weekend...

The trouble, though, is that bikes are transitory organisms where I live. They will get stolen, it's only a matter of when. Bike for life, alas, no.

As for Tannhauser Gate, I just saw a reference to a song with that in Blade-Runner-based lyrics. But cannot find the link again, like water from a dried stream.

Clifton @331: I think the people who simply don't get or can't stand reading books with unreliable narrators, books and films where all the important events take place "off-screen", etc. and the people who love them - as you and I clearly do - are going through a completely different reading process.

I can deal with logically extrapolating from existing material to figure out what happens offscreen. I have trouble with unreliable narration (esp. via outright "factual" falsification rather than omissions or subjective value judgements)-- which for me overlaps a bit with a slightly different technique which perhaps should be called "ironic narration", wherein a main viewpoint character has a clearly, consistently defined mindset, which the author is in fact lampooning in expectation that readers will recognize that character's utter folly. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is one of the more obvious examples; since I was fairly young the first time I read it (6? 8?), I honestly don't remember whether I took the surface argument seriously.

Hopefully I'm a bit better at that sort of thing now, but I still have trouble with more subtle applications-- e.g., in Richard Adams' The Girl on a Swing, the narrator thinks of his wife as an avatar of a Gravesian pagan goddess who is ultimately brought to grief by discordance with the prevailing Christian virtues, and I've always accepted the book on that level, but recently an alternate reading was suggested to me wherein Adams is "really" saying that the narrator created his wife's tragedy by maintaining such an unrealistic, idealized view of her. Again, on an intellectual level, I can see the validity of the latter interpretation, but it makes me think that in that case, Adams has played me *and* his narrator as fools.

Tim @354 & Xopher @356: ...oh. I'd completely missed that interpretation. Now that you put things that way, I guess I can kinda see it, though it still feels counterintuitive to me. (See what I mean? :b )

Don't mind me; I'll be in the corner under the dunce hat.

I haven't read Rainbow Cadenza, but just last week I read Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire, which also depicts a pagan America, and I loved it. Her vision of paganism is positive (or so it seemed to this non-pagan), but clear-eyed and sentimentality-free (not to mention very strange). It was sort of like a cross between James Morrow and Angela Carter... but only sort of.

My take on narration: if a book is written in the first person, then I want the narrator to have a distinctive voice and point of view. This may or may not involve actual duplicity, but if the narrator isn't serving as a filter of some sort between the story's events and the reader, why bother with first person?

Madeline F @ 359 ...
#269 xeger: I imagine one would get nice abs from sitting solely on stools, and yet, office chairs have backs. I'm not in the business of getting abs, I'm in the business of getting from place to place.

As somebody who sits on the floor to work, I can vouch that the lack of a chair back doesn't appear to have anything to do with getting nice abs ;) My point however, painfully learned on my part, is simply that it's worth finding out the 'correct' way to do things, if one's at all prone to injury due to bad technique, or to repetitive stress type injuries.

Re: Unreliable narrators

Bloody Postmodernism.

It's this sort of thing that turns Beowulf into an angst-ridden git who bonks creatures he should be killing.

Still, great dragon.

(Meanwhile, I reiterate that no one should ascribe any of my specific readerly quirks to Greg unless he actually does claim them.)

I can deal with logically extrapolating from existing material to figure out what happens offscreen.

Didn't that used to be called fanfiction :)

I have trouble with unreliable narration (esp. via outright "factual" falsification rather than omissions or subjective value judgements)-- which for me overlaps a bit with a slightly different technique which perhaps should be called "ironic narration", wherein a main viewpoint character has a clearly, consistently defined mindset, which the author is in fact lampooning in expectation that readers will recognize that character's utter folly.

Would Browning's _My Last Duchess_ be an example of that? I can remember people in one of my lit classes uterly failing to be ouraged by it, when I wanted to hit the narrator, which was not pleasant at all. Getting mad at fictional characters is the most futile of exercises. They never change. They don't even listen to reason. Except in fanfiction ...

Dan, #309: I can point to at least one very good use of breaking the "show, don't tell" rule. It happens in the Bablylon 5 episode "A Late Delivery from Avalon". Our guest star is confronting a bunch of thugs down in Brown Sector, and one of them threatens him with, "You better back off, buddy, 'cause I've got friends." And then a voice offscreen says, "So has he!" and G'Kar makes his entrance.

HARD CUT (actually, commercial-break) to Our Heroes in the pub afterwards. "And did I mention that they hit the ground with a most satisfying THUD?"

Now obviously, this was done for cost-saving as well as narrative reasons. But did the writer actually have to show us that there was a fight in between those scenes? Of course not! We're perfectly capable of filling in the gap -- and in some ways it's a courtesy to the audience to grant them that ability.

Graphic novels partake of some of the conventions of TV and movies as well as those of text. I don't think it's a bad thing for them to leave similar contextual gaps for the reader to fill in.

Julie, Diatryma, Xopher, et al: I'm not sure I've ever read a story with what you're describing as "unreliable narration"; OTOH, it's definitely possible that I have, and what I got from it instead was, "WTF? That doesn't make narrative sense!" From the various descriptions, I suspect that if I figured it out it would feel like cheating, and if I didn't it would feel like really poor writing.

Oh, and that Amelia Peabody quote? Yikes, that's my mother... with all the relevant emotional baggage from someone who rewrites reality with that sort of facility. The whole "I AM NOT RAISING MY VOICE!!!" thing.

Vian, #367: Re fictional characters not listening to you... this is one of the reasons that I don't like reading stories with irritating protagonists*. I don't mind an unsympathetic protagonist that's well-written**, but if the reader is expected to identify with the hero at all, said hero had better not be someone I keep wanting to smack upside the head!

* Or an irritating major secondary character. I gave up on an otherwise-enjoyable mystery series when I found myself repeatedly indulging in self-insertion fantasy for the specific purpose of having my Mary Sue POV character break up with the romantic interest.

** My canonical example of this is John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century. The protagonist is a vicious, amoral thug***, but we're not being asked to identify with him, only to accept him as a narrator, and his internal motivations are all understandable and yet never presented as admirable. The difference is subtle, but important.

*** Sort of a cross between Karl Rove and one of the out-of-control Blackwater mercenaries, with a taste for torture.

Tastes like chickenhawk....

If by chance the Administration were to throw this country into a stupid and senseless war, and if by chance, the very next day they decreed that the media shall not show pictures of American troops dead or wounded, that they shall not report exact casualty figures but give rough ranges like "heavy", that they shall be embedded with military units and their survival dependent thereon, that non-embedded journalists shall be deemed enemy combatants in the war zone, would it matter that all that information has been taken off the TV screen, off the newspaper, and off the computer screens?

No doubt, all of you folks will be able to read between the lines, read between the frames, and read between the stories.

But does no one here think that downplaying the costs of a war, downplaying the deaths, downplaying the wounded, downplaying the monetary costs, downplaying the schedule, downplaying the messiness generally associated with war, while simultaneously upplaying and demonizing the enemy, does no one think that such an approach by the government has no effect on maintaining support and sympathies among the general populace longer than would have happened if the facts were laid out bare, on the screen, in ink and paper, and so on?

The "war pr0n" score is little more than a measure of how far removed the "tale" of war being told by the public mouthpieces is from the actual war on the ground.

In the case of fiction, replace the White House with the Author, replace the Newscaster with the Narrator, and replace the Public with the Audience/Reader/Viewer.

The war pr0n score is an indicator of how far the author is subverting the truth to maintain sympathy for his characters and his story. It doesn't matter if the narrator is unreliable, the author picked the narrator just like the White House picks the Press Secretary. It doesn't matter whether it is a dystopia or utopia. And it's not a matter of enforcing "show, don't tell" as some iron clad writer's advice.

It's an indicator of how the author chooses the narrator to relay the facts of war and violence to the reader, versus how much the author chooses to conceal the uglier facts from the reader to maintain their sympathies for a little more.

So, it doesn't matter if Rorschach is an unreliable narrator, what matters is Rorschach is giving us a Fox News story version of how useful torture is. He eventually gets useful information. We are seldom shown completely innocent people being tortured. We are never shown false information throwing him off the trail. The author choose to show us that torture works and that's an unrealistic representation of violence.

It also isn't simply a matter of body count. If you show nameless black hats getting killed, you get 3 points per dead body. That can add up pretty quick. However, if you show us the cost of that battle by also showing us nameless white hats getting killed and churned into cannon fodder, then you subtract 3 points from your war pr0n score per dead, nameless whitehat.

So, if you show us the good guys going in, guns blazing, wiping out the bad guys, and none of the good guys get hurt, you're going to rack up a high war pr0n score for minimizing the cost of war.

If you show a number of good guys getting killed, show us on screen like you so eagerly showed us the black hats getting killed, then you show us the true cost of the war, you let the reporters show pictures of our dead and wounded, and you may not get a high war pr0n score.

Is the Narrator a Fox News style newscaster? Or is he someone with a slightly more realistic outlook on the costs of war?

Yes, of course, none of you are fooled. You see the pictures and you read between the frames and you think how terrible war really is. But that's you watching Fox News announce a US invasion and you shake your head in despair. You know what the cost is and you fill in the information missing from the Fox News newscast.

What the war pr0n score is, is an objective look at what's comming off the network, not how you or someone else managed to fill in the blanks. It is an objective measure of what is being put on the channel, and that score can give you a sense of whether you're watching Fox News or whether you're watching PBS.

It is a measure of the narrative coming out of the channel, not a measure of how you, the highly well informed, were able to fill in the missing informaiton.

And based on this score, "Watchmen" is broadcast on a Fox News style channel.

Greg, if what happens at the end of Watchmen happened in Moscow, would the score be different?

greg,

so it occurred to me, when someone asked upthread if you "hold with" (i was gonna say "believe in," in the religious sense, but there's the inevitable baptism joke) unreliable narrators...

do you hold with moral ambiguity in literature? or do you think it's bullshit & betrays (or could even lead to) muddled morality in real life?

maybe "believe there is room for, or could be a call for" is a clearer way of putting my question than "hold with."

Just saw the particle 'Speaking of "transformative works"...' - for those who enjoyed it, this comes from the old Australian TV show 'The Money or the Gun'.

Every week they'd have a guest band on - and every week they'd perform _Stairway to Heaven_, very often "in the style of ___".

Pure joy for cover version fiends (like me). The CD is on Amazon (but what's this strange new American cover?) at http://www.amazon.com/Stairways-Heaven-Various-Artists/dp/B000005J65

or you can just go and have a listen to much of it at the world's finest music blog: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/05/stairways_to_he.html

Greg @370: Rorschach is presented from the beginning as a psychopath. I can conceive of a reader brought into the middle of the story getting the idea that torture is being supported as a valid means, but if someone has been following from the beginning the torture is just more evidence for Rorschach's amoral character. You can even see why he would decide to do it, but it was fairly clear that this was the working of an unbalanced mind.

Should it be forbidden to try to show a view into the mind of a psychopath, because someone might take it as an example to be followed? If so, what is the extent of forbidden narrative?

geekosaur at #375 writes:

> Should it be forbidden to try to show a view into the mind of a psychopath, because someone might take it as an example to be followed?

I don't think so, but it certainly disturbed me when I saw _Clockwork Orange_ at the movies, and the mentally unbalanced guy in the seat behind me was very very visibly excited and happy during the scenes where Alex and his droogs went head kicking. Lots of jumping up and down and punching fists into palms and happy little cries of "get him!"

Not making a political point either way here - just sharing the creepiness..

ethan@371, nope. same score. I actually explain those particular points in the scorecard here. There is a question of whether 300 points (out of 685) should be counted or not. I think they count as paper targets, but if you don't want to count them, then the score is +385. V for vendetta only got +112 points. The movie "300" got +612 points. So, either way, "Watchmen" is pretty high up there.

miriam@372: if you "hold with" unreliable narrators

They don't affect the score. The author chooses the narrator, the way the white house chooses the press secretary, or the way the prime minister in V chooses the "Voice of England".

do you hold with moral ambiguity in literature?

morality doesn't enter into it.

I don't think torture works. If you write a story where torture works, you win ten points for war pr0n. You get 10 points every time torture produces useful information from a guilty party. You subtract 10 points everytime your characters unknowingly torture an innocent victim or everytime torture produces bad information that is difficult for the characters to determine if it's accurate or not.

If you show torture, but you bring in innocent people as often as guilty people, if you torture them all equally, if it produces piles of useless information and false positives, then your overal score will be around zero.

Torture is still morally wrong, but if you portray it accurately in your story, then you don't get any war pr0n points. So, it's got nothing to do with the morality of the act. It's got to do with the accuracy, or lack thereof, of how the act is reported to the reader by the author.

You could even write a story that shows the characters riding the cusp of whether torture is right or wrong or that they don't care or whatever moral ambiguity you want to put into it. That isn't what triggers the war pr0n points. It's whether or not you portray torture accurately or not, the innocent tortured with the guilty, the false positives it generates, etc. Show that, and you can do whatever you want with it in a story, and you won't accumulate war pr0n points.

greg,

allright, never mind. serves me right anyway.

i promise, & everyone can hold me to this, never to try to engage with you again when you have a website to push.

geekasaur@375: but if someone has been following from the beginning the torture is just more evidence for Rorschach's amoral character. You can even see why he would decide to do it, but it was fairly clear that this was the working of an unbalanced mind.

I get that Rorschach is supposed to be unhinged. It doesn't affect the score. What affects the score is that the character uses torture and keeps getting useful information.

If good intel is a needle in a haystack, then torture is a hay-producing process, not a needle producing process. Torturing 20 people should produce 20 claims that are difficult for the characters to weed out and wastes far more of their time than is worth.

Your character could be as nutty as a fruitcake, or as sane as they come, it's not the torture that gets you the points or that some crazy guy is doing the torture, it's that the torture consistenly yeilds useful information rather than swamping them with fodder.

If they showed Rorschach torturing an innocent person and getting a false positive that leads them on a wild goose chase, then subtract 10 points from the war pr0n score.

Greg, if the location of the event at the end has no affect on your scoring, then your scoring system is broken*. Do you not see the vast difference having that happen in Moscow rather than New York would make?

Also--did you not notice that Rorschach is on a wild goose chase for the entire length of the book?

I guess I'm not sure I understand why you score things. What's your goal?

*Not to mention that any "war porn" scoring system where Watchmen and 300 can get the same score is broken from the get-go.

miriam: allright, never mind. serves me right anyway.

Did I not answer your question? Morality has nothing to do with it. Torture is morally wrong. But you don't get points for showing torture, you get points for showing torture in an unrealistic manner.

i promise, & everyone can hold me to this, never to try to engage with you again when you have a website to push.

Yeah, cause the only reason I'd post a ten thousand word post on my own website would have nothing to do with... the grief I'd get for posting a ten thousand word post here. Or the fact that I can't edit something I post here if I screw up my math or something.

I answered your question and didn't even mention my website because it had nothing to do with your question. I mentioned it to ethan because I had already wrote up an explanation of the specific thing he'd asked about.

Fiction isn't news. We don't ask our fictions to obey journalistic integrity any more than we ask the news to follow narrative structure. (And a narrator is most definitely not the same thing as a press secretary for the author, even if from time to time their viewpoints are in sync.) I don't think drawing a parallel between them is useful or illuminating, and I particularly don't think it's helpful to assume that people who expect different measures of things which serve very different purposes are somehow lacking in integrity.

(But I will say, without contradicting the above, that, yes, the ability to make sense of the lacunae in story, including figuring out unreliable narrators, is indeed a not-dissimilar skillset to being able to spot propaganda. Both require asking what it is that you're not being shown.)

Greg, at the risk of dragging all this out longer than is warranted, two things:

1) The trouble with the War Pr0n rating is that you've developed an instrument for detecting the presence of a certain thing, except that the whole process by which it's measured rests on a number of circular, begging-the-question assumptions that certain things mean what the scale says they do. I do admire the thought and effort that you've put into it, and the principles it wants to uphold, but neither effort nor principle is proof against the possibility that the work is flawed. Consider that it may be detecting things that are correlative but not causative to the issues that it is concerned with, and that the way it's calibrated may be giving you false positives.

2) Please please please drop the sarcasm. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I entered into this discussion in good faith. I hope I've made it clear that I have no intention of browbeating you into agreeing with me, and I would like it very much if you could extend the same courtesy. If the subject matter is something that you can't engage with people who disagree with you on it without anger and dismissal, perhaps it's time to withdraw from the debate.

(And not to hammer on about this, but...)

Greg, you say in your summary of Watchmen that the main characters agree that what happens at the end was necessary. Which is entirely untrue--they agree that now that it has already happened and they can't do anything about it, revealing the truth behind it would only make it even worse. Those are two very different things.

ethanGreg, if the location of the event at the end has no affect on your scoring, then your scoring system is broken*. Do you not see the vast difference having that happen in Moscow rather than New York would make?

rot13

gur pvivyvnaf va Arj Lbex ner xvyyrq gb sbby gur jbeyq vagb guvaxvat Rnegu vf haqre nggnpx sebz fbzr nyvra sbez sebz nabgure qvzrafvba. Gur vqrn gung guvf nyvra nggnpx jvyy pnhfr gur ovpxrevat vagreangvbany eryngvbaf gb fgbc gurve fdhnooyvat naq svaq crnpr. Va gung erfcrpg, vg qbrfa'g znggre gb Irvqg, Qe. Znaunggna, Avgr Bjy, be Ynhevr, jurer gurfr pviyvnaf ner. Gurl ner n zrnaf gb na raq, gurl ner cncre gnetrgf gung arrq gb or xvyyrq gb ernpu gurve hygvzngr tbny bs srne vaqhprq jbeyq crnpr. Gurl pbhyq cebqhpr gur fnzr srne unq Irvqg ynhapurq uvf nggnpx ng Zbfpbj be Ybaqba be Orwvat be jurerire. fb, gurl jbhyq pbhag gur fnzr.

Also--did you not notice that Rorschach is on a wild goose chase for the entire length of the book?

Avgr Bjy naq Ynhevr ohfg Ebefpunpu bhg bs wnvy. Avgr Bjy naq Ebefpunpu tb gb n one, Ebefpunpu gbegherf n thl naq trgf fbzr vasbezngvba nobhg gur nffnffva gung jnf uverq gb xvyy Irvqg. Avgr Bjy gbegherf n thl naq trgf vasbezngvba gbb. Guvf gura vzzrqvngryl (jvguva n pbhcyr ubhef) unf gurz svther bhg gung gurl arrq gb pbasebag Irvqg ng uvf nagnegvp onfr.

I guess I'm not sure I understand why you score things. What's your goal?

It's a study in how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force, anything from "they will greet us as liberators" to Rambo going back to Vietnam and settling old scores. And I happen to have a bit of a pet peeve for people who misdescribe violence, so I wanted to come up with some objective measuring system.

But the numbers don't mean anything unless I have bunch of different works scored to compare them too. The first movie I did was "V" and it came out at +112. And I had no idea how high that was. So then I did "300" and it got over 600 points. so a scale is forming so you can see where a work lands in the numbering system.

I figure if I can score a whole bunch of movies and they land at relatively understandable places on the scale, then that would prove the scoring system.

*Not to mention that any "war porn" scoring system where Watchmen and 300 can get the same score is broken from the get-go.

One thing that came up for me is that the scoring system was made for movies, so I'm not sure how to score certain things for comic books. If you see a persian paper target get stabbed and killed in "300", that was 3 points. But comic books can't have motion, so you don't see the stabbing or shooting or whatever. you see moments before or after, usually.

you can subtract 300 points if you'd like, and give "Watchmen" a score of +368.

The 300 points come from gur arj lbex pvivyvnaf xvyyrq ol Irvqg'f gryrcbegrq zbafgre. Gurer ner sbhe be svir cntrf nsgre gur nggnpx gung fubj abguvat ohg qrnq obqvrf. Gurl dhnyvsl nf cncre gnetrgf, ohg V unira'g svtherq bhg ubj gb pbhag gurz va n pbzvp obbx, fvapr vs lbh tb nyy gur jnl vagb gur onpxtebhaq, lbh onfvpnyyl frr fgvpx svtherf. V'z abg ragveryl fher ubj gb qrny jvgu gurz, fb srry serr gb vtaber gurz sbe abj naq hfr n fpber bs +368.

If I can figure out how to deal with that scene, I'll readjust the score.

ethan: Greg, you say in your summary of Watchmen that the main characters agree that what happens at the end was necessary.

I had to check a couple of times, but I couldn't find the word "necessary", including alternate spellings. Was that something I posted here and rot13'ed it?

Forgive me, Greg, I forgot that when summarizing what you've said, I have to use exactly the same words you did or else I'm lying and wrong.

I'm sorry, that was snippish and rude.

ethan, I said they become complicit because they agree to go along with it after the fact. They didn't think it neccessary before hand, but they think it is the best course to follow after the fact and they go along with it. that wins them 30 points. Doc Manhattan then gets another 10 for sealing the deal.

If I'd said they thought it neccessary, that would have been a typo I'd need to fix. So I was asking.

Steve #374, This is what the original Australian CD of Stairways to Heaven looked like. It uses imagery from the introduction to "The Money or the Gun" Australian ABC show it was excerpted from, as you mentioned.
I acquired the VHS tape (then backed it up to DVD for safekeeping). I think that worked a bit better than just the audio, because the presentations were quite amusing, and compensated for some sonic shortcomings. I don't know if the US version appeared on VHS. It's possible Andrew Denton has made sure that it hasn't been reissued, especially the video version, since he was seen being young & silly.

All I know about The Watchmen, not having read comics since childhood, is from assorted references to it around the internet & blogosphere.

ethan@386: I have to use exactly the same words you did or else I'm lying and wrong.

Dan@309: you feel that they're being disingenuous, or just wrong?

Hm, I'm not sure why this is landing as if I must either be calling everyone a liar or stupid, (or that I'm just pushing a website). I know I never said anything like that. But if that's how this is occurring for people, then the conversation is already lost.

usually at this point, I'll attempt to explain further, but I've yet to see that actually work. Once it's done, it seems to be un-done-able.

So, I'm done. Anyone who wanted to continue the conversation with me, I'm perfectly happy to continue on email.

Goodnight Gracie.

Greg, a few problems with your analysis of Watchmen, in no particular order:

1. Lbh qrsvar "cncre gnetrgf" yvxr fb: "anzryrff, urnegyrff, rzbgvbayrff urapuzra, jubz gur cebgntbavfg pna xvyy jvgu fhofgnagvnyyl yrff rzbgvbany onpxynfu guna vs gurl jrer shyyl syrfurq bhg punenpgref." Lbh qrfpevor gur crbcyr jr frr xvyyrq ol gur gryrcbegngvba nggnpx nf cncre gnetrgf, rira gubhtu gur pebjq vapyhqrf: gur gjb Oreavrf (gur arjfiraqbe naq gur pbzvp-ernqvat xvq), gur yrfovna pbhcyr jr'q frra nethvat rneyvre, naq gur cevfba cflpuvngevfg naq uvf jvsr. Gurfr ner uneqyl "anzryrff, urnegyrff, rzbgvbayrff" abaragvgvrf.

2. Lbh artyrpg gung jura Ebefpunpu hfrf gbegher gb svaq gur zvffvat tvey (juvpu ur qrfpevorf va Puncgre 16), ur gbegherf 14 crbcyr jub xarj abguvat, svefg. V qba'g xabj vs guvf znxrf vg orggre be jbefr sebz lbhe fgnaqcbvag -- vg'f na nqzvffvba gung gbegher hfhnyyl qbrfa'g jbex, ohg gur snpg gung ur uvgf cnlqveg jvgu gur 15gu ivpgvz pbhyq or frra nf whfgvslvat gur 14gu bguref.

3. Lbh pbafvfgragyl zvffcryy "Zbybpu".

4. Va Puncgre 6, jura Ebefpunpu erpbhagf univat orra orngra nf n puvyq, lbh qrfpevor guvf nf n "cbvagyrff qrzbafgengvba bs rivy". Vg'f cerggl boivbhf gb zr gung guvf jnf sne sebz cbvagyrff -- gung gur bevtva bs Ebefpunpu'f vanovyvgl gb srry ybir vf fubja va guvf fprar. (Gur pbaprcgf bs frk naq zrepl ner yvaxrq va Jngpuzra, naq Ebefpunpu vf hasnzvyvne jvgu obgu. Ba zl uneq qevir V'ir tbg gur ortvaavatf bs n ybatre rffnl ba guvf gbcvp.)

5. Lbh'er jebat nobhg Fnyyl Whcvgre jnagvat gb or encrq. Erernq gung frdhrapr (Puncgre 9, cntr 7). Fnyyl zbpxf gur abgvba gung fur jnf encrq nf fbzr xvaq bs Cragubhfr yrggref-pbyhza snagnfl. Fur fyrcg jvgu Rqqvr orpnhfr ur jnf tragyr gbjneqf ure. Erzrzore jung V fnvq nobhg frk naq zrepl?

6. Fbzrubj, lbh pbhag gur fprar jurer n tnat bs Xabg-Gbcf xvyyf gur ryqre Avgr Bjy ntnvafg Zbber, rira gubhtu vg'f na nethzrag ntnvafg ivtvynagvfz.

7. Lbh zvfhaqrefgnaq Qe znaunggna. Ur qbrfa'g unir tbq-yvxr vagryyvtrapr -- vs ur qvq, ur'q nyernql xabj ubj gb vfbyngr n tyhvab. Ur qbrfa'g unir tbq-yvxr jvfqbz -- vs ur qvq, ur'q haqrefgnaq uhzna orvatf orggre, naq jbhyq unir xabja gung gur zhygvcyr-obqvrf frk gevpx jbhyqa'g cyrnfr Ynhevr. Ur'f rira yrff pncnoyr guna Irvqg vf bs yrnqvat gur jbeyq gb n ynfgvat crnpr. Gb gur rkgrag gung Qe Znaunggna flzobyvmrf Tbq va gur fgbel, ur flzobyvmrf n qvfgnag, Qrvfgvp Tbq, abg n hgbcvna npgvivfg zrffvnavp Tbq.

8. Lbh zvff gur ragver cbvag bs gur fgbel! Va Puncgre 11, jr frr n svtug oernx bhg nzbat fbzr crbcyr ba n ALP fgerrg pbeare, naq jr frr beqvanel Arj Lbexref nebhaq gurz fgnegvat gb vagreirar -- znlor gb wbva va gur svtug, znlor gb oernx vg hc. Naq gura gurl'er nyy xvyyrq ol Irvqg'f fhcre-cyna! Gur Tbeqvna Xabg gung Nyrknaqre phg guebhtu -- gung'f fbpvrgl, uhzna phygher va nyy vg'f gnatyrq, shpxrq-hc tybel.

Epacris at #389 writes:

> Steve #374, This is what the original Australian CD of Stairways to Heaven looked like. It uses imagery from the introduction to "The Money or the Gun" Australian ABC show it was excerpted from, as you mentioned.

Oh yes - I'm Australian and I watched it on TV when it first happened. I was just a bit startled to see the "wrong" CD cover.

> It's possible Andrew Denton has made sure that it hasn't been reissued, especially the video version, since he was seen being young & silly.

Nah - I don't think Andrew Denton feels shame. Not about silly music anyway. Last time I saw him on TV he was pretending to be Steve Irwin, wrestling a wild armchair into submission.

Unreliable narration is more than a stylistic trick or a way to present a literary puzzle to the reader. It allows the writer to present more information about what is going on than can be easily done with either a reliable narrator or third-person omniscient. The additional information is in the comparison between what the narrator says and what the narrator and other characters do (where that can be disentangled from how the narrator tells us about it).

I'm in the middle of reading a good example right now: Ken MacLeod's "Learning the World". There are two main groups of characters, human and alien, who know very little about each other, but who make large assumptions based on their own experience. Individuals in each group have very different backgrounds and agendas, and all of them filter their perceptions through both the agendas and the assumptions. Because we see some actions through more than one viewpoint, we get some parallax that a single viewpoint wouldn't give. Because the narratives are each told from limited knowledge, seeing that the narratives don't jibe tells us that the actual situation is different; and frrvat gung nyy gur aneengvirf fgvyy bayl tvir hf n cnegvny ivrj bs jung'f tbvat ba gryyf hf gung fbzrbar, creuncf nabgure punenpgre jub vfa'g CBI, ohg vf fubja va gur onpxtebhaq, vf npghnyyl znavchyngvat riragf.

Got lost in Oakland on my way to tonight's ML gathering, but eventually we found our way there and had a great time. May post photos on my blog unless the bribes start pouring in.

While I deeply disagree on moral and aesthetic grounds with what Greg's doing, it's actually really quite an interesting project. If Greg remembers that the scale is imperfect, and could quite possibly give perverse results, I'd be quite interested in future developments.

Dan, miriam just accused Greg of being out to promote a website in what looked to me like an attempt to delegitimise Greg's status as a party to a dialogue. Seems a bit much to me to expect people to get that thrown at them and just ignore it.

As to the specific Watchman discussion, I have no opinion on it, except to note that if you've read Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge was Built at Thoresby (and I know at least two people apart from me reading this have, because I can read acknowledgements as well as the next man/woman/Fairy Prince) Greg London and David Montefiore have a great deal in common. I forget the exact quote, but it's something like, `having been much improved by argument himself, he thought that he could argue people into a better nature.'

(Note: Greg, this is a compliment. If you take offense, I pre-emptively withdraw and apologise.)

Having seen Greg's 390, ignore my vain attempt to contribute to a productive conversation. Clearly this isn't a topic conducive to such.

Serge @ 394: It was a great time indeed, and if I didn't cavil at those pictures of me in a dress at Burning Man, I'm not going to complain about yours.

Miriam, #378: *blink* Where the fleep did that come from?

Julie L already mentioned Dean Swift's 'Modest Proposal' in discussing unreliable narrators at #360. I've seen critics accepting Lemuel Gulliver's opinion on humans and other races as simply reflecting Swift's, but I got the impression that we were meant to regard Gulliver's story as filtered by his own experience & opinion, which might be regarded as 'unreliable', rather than omniscient. Is there a generally accepted view nowadays?

Oh, and as mentioned, "I've seen things … lost, like tears in rain." is one of the all-time classic SF quotes, from Ray Batty in Blade Runner. If I'm not already crying, that bit does it. There are numerous MP3s of it across the internet, along with other BR quotes — I got a phone call today to tell me that my new Blade Runner DVD release is at the shop ready to pick up, so there may be a rash of new ones from a possibly better soundtrack. If I ever hear it as a ringtone, I'll have to destroy the phone/drop it into deep water so I won't beat the owner to death with it. With losses over the years, and things that are memories only for me in the world now, it's become more, rather than less, stronger over time.

I am pleased to report that the DVD set of Doctor Who series 3 has the necessary Easter Egg.

I'm reading Gene Wolfe's In Green's Jungles, and the narrator is so unreliable that I don't believe him when he flat-out tells me he's lying.

The first unreliable narrator I remember spotting was John Carter, who was so obviously lying when he said he wasn't proud to be the greatest swordsman on two worlds. He was always yakking about it, and always telling me that it was just a simple fact that no-one who had seen him fight would doubt, but even an eight-year-old could tell he loved bragging about it.

lee,

*blink* Where the fleep did that come from??

greg was talking about objective tests, & i'd just found one: if there is a subject to which greg has not devoted a website, i can speak to him sensibly about it, & he will answer straight questions with honest answers.* if greg has devoted a website to or near a subject (the evil of alan moore, copyright terms), i cannot speak with him sensibly or get answers that don't lead directly back to his theory.

& this argument i certainly shouldn't have gotten back into. last time i asked him (yes, paraphrasing) if he would take my impression of the way he was conducting his argument at face value, he said no, because i'd admitted to being an alan moore fan, & so would say anything to disparage someone who dares criticize moore.

so now when something relating to moore has come up again i should, & no i really do**, know that all my opinions & arguments are meaningless.

*not that i don't get into arguments with him still; there were some in, off the top of my head, slash-fic & the sky is evil threads, & in the latter i think he even conceded a point to me, though he didn't say so explicitly.

**no, i really do. i'm not being ironic. i regret everything. i could be totally wrong that answering your question is better than leaving any vaguely related argument the f alone, because i can't get away from people's convictions that i'm pissy & motivated by malice.

Since its pretty much finished now, I thought I would make my own comment on the war porn thing, which is that, going by what has been said on this thread, the scale is objective only within specific moral rules which greg holds, and which may or may not overlap with a great many other people. Plus the difficulty in critiscising a work of art/ literature/ entertainment is that different people see the same thing in different ways.
Or in other words, it's all a mess from the start.

miriam @ #402: i can't get away from people's convictions that i'm pissy & motivated by malice.

I certainly don't think you come across that way, but then I thought "Oh-oh!" as soon as Greg
wheeled his hobby-horse out back at #283.

Not to distract from a good argument (or a bad one), but hi, I'm wandering by to share this week's semi-random freakout. Surgery in six hours. I have decided that while I am not particularly fazed by being cut up, I am terrified of general anesthesia, which in the whole unconscious-and-paralyzed oblivion thing strikes me as a whole lot like being dead, and occasionally has complications like being just paralyzed but not unconscious (aaaaah!) or, um, actually getting dead. I've also been fighting a cold for ten days and while one of the various doctors at the day job (being surrounded by doctors all day occasionally has its uses) assured me that I can't actually choke and drown on my own post-nasal-drip phlegm while under anesthesia, I can't quite shake the fear of dying by drowning in mucus.

This is all probably terribly irrational; an anesthesiologist said I had more chance of dying in a car wreck driving to the hospital than under anesthesia. This might be more reassuring if I wasn't planning to walk over.

And while it's really a silly idea to back out at the last minute after months of prep and fighting the health plan to get them to actually approve and cover this and going through the ups and downs of their approved/not approved/approved game, I can't help wondering if I am just being kind of wimpy. Is relief of discomfort and pain worth elective surgery? Am I just being a wimp? I mean, I live with pain all the time - what's a little more? Maybe it's not enough pain to justify this? Am I doing this for stupid reasons? Is it worth the chance of dying? Was this all a really BAD decision? And is it too late to change my mind? Gaaah!

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled argument. Talk to y'all later, or not, as the case may be.

Greg,

I'm trying to pick apart why these "war pr0n" discussions always turn toxic, in the hopes of reducing that effect in future.

I understand your point about the glorification of violence, and the desensitizing effect that it can have on us. To a certain extent, I agree with that point. But you seem to be contending that this robs a work of all of its validity, and that's where you lose me (and, I expect, a lot of us).

Have you tried scoring the Iliad? It's full of death and violence; it celebrates killing people. Yet I, personally, would not be the same person had I never read (and wept at) the description of Hector's body being dragged around the city walls of Troy. But that episode comes wrapped in a poem that glorifies war. Am I supposed to treat it as war pr0n?

Have you ever scored a work you really like? Have you ever liked something that scored high, or been strongly moved and changed by one that did? If so, what was it?

When you only score works you don't like - and that is all we have seen you do here - you seem to be attempting to give your own personal taste some kind of absolute validity. You conflate aesthetics and morality when you start a discussion with how you hated the Watchmen, and then go on to explain its war pr0n score. It reads as a bullying tactic, in effect calling everyone who disagrees with you a bad person.

This effect is magnified because you invented the scoring system yourself, and you are its only advocate. Thus, it seems even more like an invented stick to beat people with. Worse: it's a moral code where you are the arbiter of what is good and bad. That pushes people's religion and evangelism buttons, and this crowd pushes back.

If you want people to accept war pr0n as a valid concept, a valid way of evaluating a work, you need to divorce it from your aesthetic views and find a way to get broader acceptance for it.

Otherwise, if these discussions continue, and continue in the vein they have so far, I'm going to have to consider some form of moderator intervention. This is going nowhere, and getting there faster every time.

Susan @405:

What I always do on the eve of momentous and scary things - moving countries comes to mind - is trust my past self. At a time when I was able to be calm and rational, I made a decision, after weighing all the risks and considering the costs and benefits. So when it's time to take the plunge, and my emotions kick in, I know that I've already done the thinking.

Trust yourself.

You made the decision to have this surgery for good reasons. You fought for it because you believed that it was worth doing. It's not wimpy, because long term pain is not good for you; the cumulative effects are greater than the degree of pain at any given moment.

Drop us a line when it's done; we look forward to hearing from you.

#362 ::: Tim Walters

It's been a while since I've read Unquenchable Fire, but I remember it as a lot of fun, especially the bit where the doctors using conventional magical methods carefully explain the dangers of using anything else. And we get a heroine who is cranky about it all instead of plucky.

#377 ::: Greg London

Another problem with the way torture is commonly portrayed is there are no consequences except the gathering of information. You don't see the longterm effects on the victim, who is usually only in the story for the torture scene, or any emotional consequences for the torturer.

And I was revolted by the bit in the New Sun books where Severian says he abolished the Order of Truth and Penitence because it caused good people to do bad things. Maybe this is just the way Severian would see it, but if he realized torture was a bad thing, is it implausible for him to make the leap to realizes it was bad for particular people?

I was very disappointed in Watchmen--I'd been going along, emotionally involved and impressed with the intelligence shown in the details, and then we get to The Big Event, and it's a cliche. Isn't Veidt supposed to be smarter than that? On the other hand, I haven't been able to figure out a better Big Event.

IIRC, Sturgeon wrote a story about a similar Big Event, and it worked as badly as a reasonable person would expect.

Terry Karney @ 300...
Recumbents scare me. The nature of them is such that I don't trust myself to clear them well in a wreck. They are also harder to see.

#357, Xeger - Interesting - I think you're the first person I've known to hold that rationale about clearing recumbents in a wreck, other than me.

My vague memory of my uncle's accident leads me to think this is a reasonable fear. I think he lost control going down a hill and didn't fall well, with no one else involved. I'm not positive, though.

I hadn't even considered ajay and David Harmon's perspective about traffic, which is a truly excellent point. But that's partially because I simply can't imagine myself riding in traffic. A handful of people do it in this area[1], but I'm not confident I won't get into an accident in my bright red car that protects my precious limbs, even on my tiny five-mile commute[2]. If I ever switch to biking it, I'll be on the sidewalk, laws or no laws[3].

[1] I see perhaps one bicyclist in traffic every two or three weeks.

[2] There have been two nearly-head-on collisions at an intersection I pass every day in the last month. I probably wouldn't take the same route if I were biking in traffic, but yikes.

[3] There aren't enough of either pedestrians or bicyclists in this area for the police to bother enforcing that law, anyway.

#405--Susan, I remember feeling a lot of the same things just before I had my gall bladder out. I was at an early point in the course of gall bladder problems, as these things go, and I could have tried treatment via drugs first instead, but decided to go with the surgery and just put an end to it. All the way to the hospital, I found myself thinking the sort of thoughts you're thinking. In fact, I thought them all the way up to the point the anesthetic took over. I'd be very surprised to find out that most people didn't have at least a qualm or two at such times.

I think this is because we are capable of rational thought and have (at least most of us) the capacity to question our actions, which is a thing that helps keep us honest, even though it's not much help at times like these. I don't believe you make serious decisions lightly, and trusting the choices that led you to this point is safe. Have faith in your own wisdom.

Best wishes for a good outcome, and a recovery that does not screw up your holidays.

#269, #359, bikes and abs - essentially the options are:
Be a powerful fit cyclist who can adopt an aerodynamic leaned over position without much weight on his/her hands and wrists because the torque reaction from the legs supports the weight.
Sit in an upright non-aerodynamic position and ride more slowly.
Have weight on your hands and wrists.
Sit in a comfortable and aerodynamic position on a recumbent whether you pedal hard or gently.

None of these solutions is ideal for everybody, all of them work for somebody.

There seems to be an epidemic of gall bladder issues with consequent surgery in the SF community--Mike Resnick mere days ago, Gay Ellen Dennett and I think Sharon Sbarsky and maybe others in NESFA a year or two or three ago, Jennifer Roberson a couple years ago, and I forget who else. Jim Benford's got removed some while ago. Etc.

Anyway, it my be perception to me only, but it seems that there's been a lot of it going on in the SF community in recent years. The good news is that everyone I can think of who went through of it, came out of it as reasonably as one can expect when one's hide is getting cut into and flesh removal occurs.

Susan: You're not being wimpy. Steps taken to live without pain (or with less pain, even) are worthwhile.

My wife expressed some similar sentiments over the summer before having carpal tunnel release surgery (in her case, part of what was freaking her out was that the last time she went under the knife was a back operation, with all the attendant awfulness that entails, and her rational mind couldn't convince the other part that this was not the same thing); it turned out to be very much worth the trouble and worry, and I expect your procedure will too. Don't give in to the grim Puritan nonsense that tells you it's better to grit your teeth and suck it up. It's not. You didn't make a bad decision, and it isn't silly in the least.

That said, what you're going through is a natural reaction to having made momentous decisions - it's the instinctive "ohshitohshitohshit" that kicks in the last few steps before the leap. As abi said, trust the self that made the decision and that it was weighed and rational and with your best interests in mind. Like depression, you can't talk it away, but you can ride it through if you're able to keep a little distance from it and understand that it's an event, not an argument.

Best wishes to you, and let us all know how it goes.

Susan @ 405... Others have better said what I'd like to say. Let us know how things went as soon as you can. Take care.

abi has already written what I would have liked to say about the war pr0n issue, had I the wit to put the words together in that way, but I will add this: assigning scores and numbers to works of art is a path frought with peril. (I say this as someone who's spent more time than I should admit doing RPG writeups for character from books, so I'm coming from a position of having a certain measure of sympathy for the impulse.) Because it must to a certain extent ignore context, tone, subtlety, irony, and a host of other things that fuel the engine of story, any system of that sort is going to produce false equivalencies at some point, which suggests to me that its use as an analytical tool is, well, limited. A Mary Sue litmus test may tell us that Carrot Ironfoundersson scores close to Princess Fion'a Raven Stardragon in the things it's designed to measure, but it increases our understanding of Men at Arms not at all.

Since Terry couldn't bring back marzipan from Europe, in some small compensation, here's a Europe made of marzipan.

Hi abi,

Have you ever scored a work you really like?

I just started doing this a little while ago. I only have three things scored so far. V for Vendetta, 300, Watchmen.

I liked 300. I have to roll my eyes here and there knowing a bit about where it diverges from history.

I was thinking of doing Kill Bill next. I liked KB and it didn't make my eyes roll. It'll probably be through the roof for a war pr0n score. I'm fine with that.

Have you ever liked something that scored high, or been strongly moved and changed by one that did? If so, what was it?

Have I ever been strongly moved or improved by a story?

That's actually a really interesting question.

Star Wars. But I was just a tyke and very impressionable. Did it move me? Yeah, I was a Lawful Good farmboy who suddenly wanted to grow up and fight the Evil Empire. Slight problem with target acquisition somewhere along the line, though. Didn't have my own Obi Wan Kenobi whispering in my ear.

A story that improved me was "2001, a space odyssey". Read it in high school. It got me to realize that there is more to the world than I might be able to see or know or ever know. No idea what it's war pr0n score would be. I don't recall any misrepresentations of violence.

A story that moved me as an adult was "The Old Man and the Sea". probably score a zero on war pr0n, the little violence I remember it showing is realistic. Actually I think a number of Hemmingway's stories show war in a fairly accurate light. Women are raped and scarred long after it happened. Innocent people are killed. Plans don't go accordingly. sometimes the choices are limited to the lesser of two evils. He shows that kind of stuff.

But I don't recall any of his stories as showing violence as being superior to social structures, to diplomacy, to society. I don't recall any of his stories being unrealistic in showing violence for what it is and what it isn't. Maybe he glorified it a bit and maybe he'd get some point, but I doubt any of his stories would be over a hundred points. And he had issues with representing female charcters honestly, but that's a different scorecard.

The only time I've been under general anaesthetic was to have my wisdom teeth out, and that went extremely well. If I were in pain and surgery could fix it, you bet I'd go for surgery. It's not wimpy at all.

Unreliable narrators-- okay, Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and The Queen of Attolia. The first one made me angry, the second one made me feel like part of the book. In the first, the unreliability was in character with the first-person narrator, but at least twice, I thought I had it figured out and changed my mind when I considered what I had read. The ha-ha-GOTCHA moment annoyed me because it felt like the book had lied to me, not just the narrator. I'll reread it to see where the information came in, but I'm not sure I won't still be annoyed. In Queen, it's third-person, so the sneakiness is not due to narrator. Again, I'd have to reread it to see if all the information was there, but I felt like the story was treating me as an equal instead of a dupe.
It's the difference between, say, The Sixth Sense, where you can watch it a second time and appreciate it, and The Village, where the movie goes to increasing lengths to amaze you with its trickery.

This may only work with trickster stories, though. Unreliable narrators who are wrong or working from bad data are usually fine by me. Narrators that say one thing over and over and over while the story says another are great if they're done well.

Am I strange in breaking up opinions as things the author says, things the character says, and things the story says?

Susan: Amen to abi's (and Dan's) comments. This wave of fear is a natural response, but that doesn't mean you should yield to it. Fear and anxiety tend to knock out our intellect ("Fear is the mind-killer..."). So have faith in the decisions you made before the fear kicked in....

Susan: I feel your pain. My mother has a similar fear, so great that when she had to have an ovary out she did it under a local, chatting with the gas-passer and generally enjoying herself.

In the vein of the strange, while the surgeon was working he looked over the curtain and asked if she wanted her appendix out, "while I'm in the neighborhood" and so it was done.

Best wishes.

Susan, I have the same fear of general anesthesia. I didn't have it until I woke up from surgery and realized there was a whole chunk of time that was just missing. Where was "I" during that time?

But I'm fine, my surgery was a Very Good Thing, and you will be and yours will be. Bright blessings!

Susan at 405: General anesthesia scares me, too, but two years ago when I had knee surgery I chose to have it (when I could have had a local) and was entirely not sorry. Yesterday morning (6 am, yow) I took a friend to have abdominal surgery under general anesthetic and was impressed and comforted by the kindness and professionalism of the anesthesiologist who came to see her prior to surgery. (She called me five hours post-surgery, a bit fuzzy but pain-free and fine.) Your fear is natural, but as others have said, you made a clear and rational decision. Acknowledge your fear, observe it with a clear mind and open heart, and don't act on it. I'll pray for you and for your doctors, and I will wait to hear from you when all is done.

Xopher #328:

Would the buttercream recipe work if, instead of covering in chocolate and molding, you hand-rolled them and covered in a powder such as cocoa or confectioners with lots of ground ginger?

I ask because while my chocolate truffles last week were deemed excellent, they are a bit too strongly chocolatey to go with the high-end champagne that's the focus of the party I'm making desserts for on Friday. And yet I really don't want to lose the idea of green-tea infused *some*thing (I'd used white chocolate for this) rolled in ginger, or (conceptual idea) Earl Grey-infused something with lemon. Nor am I confident of my dipping abilities, not being desirous of investing in a tempering gadget.

I wish I had someone to take me for surgery - the downside of living alone is that I'm having to take myself and it kinda sucks. I will have someone to pick me up (they won't release me w/o a caregiver), but I'm scared now. Maybe I'll bring a stuffed animal.

The bed is nicely made with clean black sheets, the better to absorb any stray blood. Twenty-four novels have been piled neatly on one side of the bed. (That wouldn't be enough if I was going to do nothing but read, but it's probably generous for this - I bet I don't get more than 15 of them read in ~two weeks of housebound time.) Dance research paperwork (mazurka!) likewise in bed. Laptop in bed. Fridge stocked. Laundry done. Christmas tree raised. Really Good Painkillers acquired along with alarming medical supplies (gauze sponges, surgical tape, Q-tips...what exactly I'm going to do with the latter I am sort of afraid to ask.)

I'm running late enough that I shall take a cab.

Susan #405: Pain hurts; avoiding it, even by surgery, is a good idea. Good luck!

Good luck, Susan. Preparation is one of the best remedies for anxiety. Wish we could send a ML emissary to drop in on you after the surgery and see how you're doing.

Truth, fiction, stranger than, department of:

A fire broke out this morning in the Old EOB next to the White House where a lot of the staff have offices, including Cheney's ceremonial offices. Remember, only destroy documents and media using equipment specifically designed for that purpose -- old fireplaces simply can't handle it.

Of course there is the question of just what kind of ceremonies were going on in Cheney's offices.

Xopher @#328:

One of my favorite books has a 1st who partway in says "OK, I never did X and Y, and I don't have a dog. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite and take out all the lies.

What book? Want!

re Watchmen: I'm afraid I'm going to have to come down on the pr0n side. I have the same reaction to The Dark Knight Returns, and for exactly the same reason. In spite of all the moral ambiguity expressed towards all the violence, the story, as it were, still stops and stares. (In DKR the camera does flinch once.)

There is a definite problem in being graphic about violence, in that even when it is supposed to be made repugnant through one's sympathy for the victim or antipathy for the aggressor, those emotions are not obligatory, and the violence can be "appreciated" for its own sake. There are, for example, connoisseurs (as it were) of particular kinds of scenes in movies. It's an abuse to do so, of course. At the same time when we are being shown "repugnant" violence at length, and being asked to continue watching, there is a decided mxed message. I have never read Maus, and I'm never going to, just as I will never see Saving Private Ryan. There's no way to get rid of the way in which the (for me) truly repugnant beyond toleration can be reconciled with the fact of it being an entertainment. I have the same discomfort with Watchmen, but it is within limits of toleration, and a substantial chunk can be pushed off into the superhero fantasy land. The more it insists on being read as "real", the more pr0no graphic it gets.

joann 423: I didn't dip them. I made shells in a mold, then filled and sealed the shells.

I think powdered ginger should be considered an entirely different spice—or rather fresh ginger isn't so much a spice as a vegetable. I learned the shell-molding technique because the amount of fresh ginger juice required to make the buttercream flavorful enough for my (admittedly intense) tastes rendered the buttercream too runny to dip, even frozen. Shell molding also gives a much thinner layer of chocolate around the filling, so that's a plus too.

I THINK I might be able to do it without a tempering machine, but I haven't tried.

Now, if you want to try a thicker buttercream flavored with dry powdered ginger, go ahead. I haven't ever done that, so I don't know how it will turn out. Please note two things: the ginger will gain flavor as it rehydrates, and as it does, the buttercream will thicken.

If I were going to try this, I would make the buttercream about frosting texture, mix in enough ginger powder so that it tastes strongly but not overwhelmingly of ginger, then cover it (plastic wrap directly on the surface) and let it sit undisturbed at room temperature for several hours, perhaps overnight (buttercream has too much sugar in it to spoil quickly).

Then I'd take out chunks of it, or mix in additional powdered sugar if it were still too thin, and roll them in shaved bittersweet chocolate.

But it's your invention. You can't do the above with my runny buttercream, though I suppose you could thicken it back up with more sugar.

I would never use dried ginger to roll something in, but then I don't really like dried ginger very much.

Todd 339, Mary 428: The Boys on the Rock, by John Fox. Gay teenager in 1968. Warning: there are several sexually explicit scenes in this book, though it is by no means pornography, and the narrative voice is strong and consistent throughout.

Todd, the dog thing isn't a big spoiler.

abi @#406:

Greg,

I'm trying to pick apart why these "war pr0n" discussions always turn toxic, in the hopes of reducing that effect in future.

I think any discussion in which something that one person regards as art or literature, is labeled "pornography" by another person, is toxic at its heart.

There are typically 2 paths for the discussion to take:

1. (No it isn't!) (Yes it is!) (Nuh-uh!) (Yuh-huh!)

2. (I like pornography.) (Then you must approve of the behaviors depicted therein.) (No I don't!) (Yes you do!) (Nuh-uh!) (Yuh-huh!)

In this case, Greg's focus is on violence instead of (primarily) sex, but "WarPr0n" appears to be a classic morals-in-literature campaign. I suppose it's possible to discuss one of those without it immediately degrading into zealotry and namecalling, but I have yet to see it.

Xopher @ 430... I might be able to do it without a tempering machine, but I haven't tried.

Tamper with the tempering machine and risk its temper, you fool!

Tim Walters @ 397... No photos shall be posted. They really sucked, and I wouldn't inflict their public distribution even on my ennemies. OK, maybe on my ennemies.

good luck susan, & wishing you a complete recovery. i say why not bring a stuffed animal, if you have one you like.

Mary Dell @ 432...

Why do people have anything against war prawns? Afraid they'll lobster grenade from inside the aquarium?

Xopher #430:

Thanks. I wasn't sure what the physics were for this, so it's good to get a summary. I might experiment on a very small scale, if I can squeeze a bit of time this afternoon, and then do it for real tomorrow if the results are satisfactory. The tea infusion is with the cream, so it doesn't increase the general runniness, as long as there's cream anyway. If you see what I mean.

Xopher, thanks for the details. Shell moulding I know, but wasn't sure how one would make a fresh ginger filling of the type you were describing.

Serge @#436:

Thereby leaving their enemies doubly shell-shocked.

Serge #436: That might be a challenge for someone's intellectual mussel. However, I'm feeling too crabby to take it on, and thus must shrimp out.

A question for the Latinists here (hi, Abi!). What's the best translation of 'ad vitam aut culpam'? I would say 'during good behaviour', but I'm not convinced that this is the best rendering into English.

Mary Dell (439)... Fragano (440)... Oyster-tainly hope not.

Fragano @ 440 -

So, yer saying yer going to clam up, then?

I think I saw that movie....Fishtar

I hate to mussel in on the conversation, so I'll clam up and leave it to others.

One person's prawn is another one's oyster.

Scott Taylor #443: Well, let's just say I'm feeling squid.

Serge #442: I'd be careful not to fall into an écrevisse...

I missed the post that inspired the puns, but I conched my head on the desk laughing. Now I feel all limpet, and I can't figure out why we're playing with mollusks and arthropods.

Don't forget that landmark SF story & movie, Anenome Mine.

Please don't anyone be shellfish and calamari-torium on these puns, they're too much fun!

Steve C. @ 449: Is that by the same guy who wrote Starship Groupers?

I can't lie. Trout is, I'm feeling crabby.

Stop, I'm piscene myself!

The first James Bond movie I saw was Goldfishfinger. That's the one where the bad guy tries to fluke Fort Lox.

Tim Walters @451 - Yep. Later on he went to document the adventures of amphibians in Glory Toad.

I don't want to bait you guys, but I'm worried about the net effect of so much punning.

Know what I mean, chum?

I preferred A View To A Krill, myself....

Serge, you might not want to move to a submarine environment where it's krill or be krilled.

I'm floundering.

Fragano @441: "Best" in what way? I think "'til you f**k up or die" might be good, but I doubt that's what you're looking for. "To life or fault" is more literal, but not as clear to an English speaker.

Watch out for Octopussy..er, wait, that one's real.

One of my cats just emailed me: "bring home foooooood pleez". His spelling is better than I would have expected.

By the way, Kim Stanley Robinson interviewed by Geoff Manaugh.

It was good to see Serge etc. last night in Oakland, but this will be briefish since my monitor's backlight has gone wonky and I'm already courting eyestrain.

vian @367: Unfortunately, Browning's "My Last Duchess" is another one of those works which I first encountered sufficiently long ago (and probably youngish, maybe in the 12-14 range) that I don't clearly recall my initial interpretation of it. But offhand, I *think* I was able to at least separate out the "facts" of the situation from the narrator's subjective explanation of how/why they'd happened. Then again, I could be retconning my memory :b

Offboard, someone[*] has suggested that Greg's war pr0n scale is currently very similar in implementation to CAPalert's movie scoring system, in terms of registering the presence of certain factors without mitigating them for context. To me, this seems like a very interesting angle from which to approach the discussion in relatively abstract terms, as long as the mere mention of CAPalert doesn't instantly raise hackles...?

[*: I'm not naming the source in case (s)he doesn't want to be publically identified, esp. since (s)he has so far refrained from personally posting the comparison. I don't want to sound too weaselly about that disclaimer because my gut instinct is to agree with the comparison; basically I'm just noting that I can't claim credit for that potential insight and haven't yet made any attempt to rigorously work out the parallels.]

Mark Moskowitz #460: 'Best' in that it conveys the meaning of the phrase in idiomatic English. 'To life or fault' sounds odd in English, but while 'during good behaviour' conveys the meaning (I think), I can't help feeling that there's a better way of putting it.

Also, the eminent Victorian I'm citing might have found your first translation a bit too blunt.

Miriam, #402: Okay, now that you've explained it, it makes more sense. But your original comment read to me as "cheap-shot ad hominem attack and flounce out the door," which didn't seem like you.

Susan, #405: Talk to your anesthesiologist; let him/her know about your concerns, even if they seem silly to you. When I had shoulder surgery 5 years ago, I made sure the anesthesiologist knew that I have a deep horror about breathing something that isn't air, and that I wanted to be OUT before the mask went on. They're used to hearing things much sillier than anything you've said.

Be prepared to have the first thing you eat come back up, even if you wait some hours before trying food; that's apparently a common side effect of general anesthesia, and has happened to me twice.

Xopher, #421: There's a comment I'd like to make in response to what you said here, but I'm a little afraid that it might freak you out. If you'd like to hear it anyhow, say so.

Lee 466: Curiousity easily overcomes fear in this case. Freak away please.

Greg @417:
Thank you for answering the direct question in my comment to you. I trust you've read the rest of it, and considered some of my other points as well. I really am quite serious about them all, particularly the last paragraph.

I was thinking of doing Kill Bill next. I liked KB and it didn't make my eyes roll. It'll probably be through the roof for a war pr0n score. I'm fine with that.

This surprises me, considering how much you use a high score to cast aspersions on works you don't like.

C Wingate @429:
There is a definite problem in being graphic about violence

The thing is, Greg's scales aren't really about graphic violence, but about "how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force" (Greg's comment 384). As far as I can tell from the scaling, vividly depicted violence with realistic consequences and implications is OK, while a passing reference to torture working (for instance) is not.

I haven't dug in enough to do the numbers, but I suspect that a lot of the Old Testament would come out as war pr0n in this scale. Exodus, for instance, probably scores quite high.

Fragano @465:

How about something flowery, like "so long as life and honour last?" Honour is not, of course, a real translation for culpam, but it's one way of putting the sentiment.

Xopher, #467: Where are "you" when you're asleep? (Either naturally, or as the result of using a sleep aid.) I wake up every morning with a whole chunk of time just... missing. Personally, I don't see any significant difference between that and general anesthesia.

Julie L @ 464... It was good seeing you too.

C. Wingate: I think your criticism that Moore's "camera" sometimes dwells on the violence is entirely reasonable. I like Watchment despite that, because there is so much more to it. I dislike Miller's Dark Knight books because in the end, I don't think there's so much there besides the violence.

Maus might surprise you; it's been a while since I read it, but IIRC substantially less than half of it is about what actually goes on at Auschwitz. A great deal of it is looking at his father in the present day and his style of life, at the author's prickly relationship with his father, at his own grappling with his mother's suicide, and at his trying to figure out for himself how much of his father's cranky and irrational behavior (hoarding matches, constant kvetching) is due to his time in Auschwitz and how much of it's "just the way he is". (Come to think of it, the narrative doesn't even get to Auschwitz until the second volume, 'And now my troubles began.')

lee,

But your original comment read to me as "cheap-shot ad hominem attack and flounce out the door," which didn't seem like you.

yeah, i can see that. i think a lot of times i'm not terribly clear, & it's a mixture of wanting to use interesting/evocative/impressionistic language & the fact that, as an intuitive thinker, i assume people know what i'm talking about (or what i'm thinking) far more than they do.

thanks for saying it wasn't like me.

clifton,

Maus might surprise you; it's been a while since I read it, but IIRC substantially less than half of it is about what actually goes on at Auschwitz.

true, but different people have different triggers. my paternal grandparents are both survivors (my grandpa of hitler, my grandma of stalin, when they divided poland). my grandma devours modern jewish literaure, a huge percentage of which relates to the holocaust. my grandpa won't read holocaust books, because, as he says, he already went through it once.*

*he really enjoyed schindler's list, though, partly because he had been put in a factory. & he participated in spielberg's memory project after the movie.

Greg's War Porn site reminds me strongly of those christian sites that rate movies and TV programmes according to their adherence to a somewhat arbitrary interpretation of biblical rules. I get the overwhelming feeling in both cases that the website owner is completely missing the point. However strongly they feel about the issue reflected in the scores, for the rest of us it's only one dimension in a multi-dimensioned space where we could represent our appreciation of fiction.

Such a christian site is obviously a stick to beat the godless (or those who don't have quite the same religious orientation as the website owner), and Greg's site feels just the same. The scoring is arbitrary and uncalibrated, there's a sense that a movie has to be completely devoid of the scored violence to be approved of, there's no recognition of context, and sometimes a seemingly wilful ignorance of what might make a fiction worth experiencing to a normal human being. I feel I'm being beaten for liking such-and-such a story, or rather, being beaten for liking the violence in the story when it isn't the violence or even the resluts of it that I'm enjoying.

In other news, trolling in verse.

re 469: I hope it was clear that I was judging on a complete different basis from Greg's scale. But....

re 464: There is a certain validity to looking at these things and ignoring context (or at least stereotyping context, which is really what I think is happening). I'm dubious about the purity with which we apply context, because I'm pretty sure that maybe most of the time we are seeing the material as more than pure narrative and thus suppressing the context.

re 473: The big issue is that I have a really difficult time with patently unjust story action. I tend to stomp around the room and get wound up beyond reason. I don't know how I made it through Holocaust, but I doubt I could do it again.

Xopher @431 -- Thanks, added to the queue.

abi #470: Thanks! That works very well, since it is not as drily legal as 'during good behaviour' which had been my placeholder. The text I'm examining is anything but dry, and anything but legal. The Victorians* assumed their readers would have a classical education.

*This particular Victorian would not have believed me capable of reading English, but that's his bad luck.

Serge @181: no, Solar Lottery is nothing like this. The only thing that is determinable with such accuracy in the political system in the book are the chances of a successful assassination pretty much. Also it is one of the worst Dick books ever, I think only Dies Irae was worse, probably because him and Roger Zelazny together was not a winning combination.

Fragano @480:
Now you've got me curious. Can you say who and what this is?

bryan @ 481... I didn't remember Solar Lottery as being particularly well executed either. As for my remembering the details wrong, oops. Then again I read it when I was in college, studying to become a programmer, in the days of card punchers.

Sometimes you just gotta ask . . .
Whaaaaaaat?

And this is one of those times: Paul Anka Smells Like Teen Spirit

Re Bikes: I've never really been a fan of recumbents, since I'm big on hopping road hazards if I have to. Then again, I used to race, so I'm also a little crazy.

My favorite all around bike is an old redline cyclocross racer. friction 7sp in back, chain guards in front. The geometry is a little laid back and the fork is really soft, so it's really comfy on longer rides. Light enough, handles well, and doesn't get scary at stupid fast speeds. (see hopping potholes going downhill at 45mph). Also, it has room for fenders.

It's biggest problem is now I have to tow a kid + trailer most of the time, and the gears just aren't there for that in a hilly area.

Marc Moskowitz #482: Sure. Thomas Carlyle's 'Shooting Niagara: And After?'