you keep it in the dungeon with the S&M setup

I keep it on an island off Costa Rica.

Whose comfort?

Google ads on this thread as of now:

Emily Post Book
Chinese Etiquette
Making Wedding Program
Cheap Hawaii Wedding
Pearl Wedding Jewelry.

What connection any of these may have with keeping (or not) dinosaurs in the attic for comfort is left as an exercise for the reader.

I'd prefer to live behind words like that, I think, so they could serve as a shield between me and people who follow too many rules.

That's unless there's a rule about which side to approach people on, of course. In that case I'd live by the words and keep them to that side.

98-point-six!

Bing! We have a winner.

What has Bob won? Well, let's just say I'd like to know how large his attic is.

Actually, I have found signs of dinosaurs nesting in our attic (on the one time we opened up the hatch and went up there) -- there's a hole under the eaves where they sneak in. Most annoying -- they poop indiscriminately, and I'm going to have to get the hole patched lest they start nesting there.

I dunno. Depending the dino's surface area coverage relative to the roof, it might make good insulation. Of course, one needn't feed normal insulation.

Ten is fine with me.

Why should I want a break from Christmas... I'm with Scrooge and wish we kept the season's sentiments in our hearts the whole year round.

So, Happy Holidays to one and all.

If he wants a dinosaur, Alex Comfort can keep it in his own damn attic.

Christmas, I have no problem with; December, now, sneaky and disaster prone month that it is, is another matter.

So the 24th of December, 2007, just to lull me into a false sense of security, I'm sure, it was bright and breezy and also Monday, so I got flaundered sheets and nightgowns nicely aired - not dry, but within 20 drier minutes of dry - out on the line. I am practicing optimism and trying to believe this doesn't mean we will be smacked in the face with an ice storm tomorrow. I'll let you know how that turns out.

One does not keep a dinosaur in the attic for comfort.

Why?
I dino.
Saury.

Jurattic Park?

You shouldn't keep dinosaurs in the attic because attics are drafty and your dinosaur might get cold

One does not keep a dinosaur in the attic for comfort.

No, one keeps them there because the basement is already full of ghouls.

Doesn't one?

"Mommy, why does Uncle Frank keep velociraptors in the attic?"

"For the children who ask too many annoying questions, Timmy."

No, one keeps them there because the basement is already full of ghouls.

Doesn't one?

I suppose it depends on your household layout. I only have one ghoul, and it seems quite content in the crawl space next to the kid's room. Plus, it helps the kids develop an active imagination.

The principal reason for keeping a dinosaur in the attic, of course, is that they really don't do well in company. It's especially annoying when they keep insisting that all our problems would be solved if we went back on the gold standard, brought back the cat o' nine tails, and restored the Assyrian empire.

eventually you just run out of cays
the mainland comes upon you like a shock
even the angry ones fall on their knees

one cannot tell another what he sees
for feelings are so easy still to mock
eventually you just run out of cays

to get there you must go against the breeze
though other forces may your purpose block
even the angry ones fall on their knees

we have so many names for these blue seas
and we still cannot count them dock to dock
eventually you just run out of cays

we drank the bottle right down to the lees
but although others still would not take stock
even the angry ones fall on their knees

so soon a chance to rest and take your ease
once past the threats of shallows reef and rock
eventually you just run out of cays
even the angry ones fall on their knees

Fragano @19: I thought about restoring the Assyrian Empire as a craft project, but gave up when I priced all the gold leaf and camel hair brushes I'd need.

I hear the MIT first years have to restore the Hapsburgs as their biology lab practical.

Until I manage to build a library, the (habitable, but prone to temperature extremes) attic does indeed perform the function of attics through the ages, namely storing ancient objects against future needs.

I'm hoping nothing (beyond the unusual wind) came in with the colossal thump and blown open windows last night - doubtless I'll find out eventually.

Back to trying to figure out where the @#*(&$*( this blasted part of the wiring connects to, and whether it's really on the breaker I think it's on...

Bill Humphries #21: Plus all the brick you'd need.

I presume that Harvard is working on restoring the Bourbons.

I hear the MIT first years have to restore the Hapsburgs as their biology lab practical.

I'm usually a wild-eyed techno optimist, but can we all agree that this is not tech that should trickle down to the Scadians, etc.?

Who is the little man who enters my attic, the fillet buttered in his own oils? ...

I am Jormungand, the Last Dinosaur, destroyer, devourer, ravager of kingdoms and epochs, all greed and covetness,[sic] brooding loneliness. Once I was Dragon, but in this scientific age that is no longer stylish. The flames I kept for high drama.

-- The High House, by James Stoddard.

Grr -- I knew the quote, and am shamed on the field of quote-identification because I was delayed by... by... a terrible frost that killed all the trees on which ameroid combompeters grow.

So there.

(Or maybe I was downloading videos.)

_The High House_ had so many lovely things in it. Did Stoddard ever write anything after that and the sequel?

One keeps the dinosaur in the attic to fend off the bats whilst protecting the content of Great-Uncle Smedley's WWI footlocker from those of ill intent.

Although truth be told, I think this would be a cse of the cure being worse than the disease...

Fragano @ 20: ***applause!!***

General comment--I have read more poetry in Making Light's comments in the few months I've been semi-lurking, than in several years prior to that happy linking-over-from Scalzi's-place. You people rock!

No, one keeps dinosaurs in the attic until you can give them to the Republicans to run for office.

This seems as good an opportunity as any to wish all people (and dionosaurs) of good will "Happy Holidays!".

For some unfathomable reason I seem to think this is most apropriate for the period from All Hallow's Eve (Samhain) through Valentine's Day, but actually it applies to all the holidays people celebrate, throughout the year.

Shawn @ 16... My house doesn't have a basement, which is why I keep graboids down there.

(hee hee, somebody besides me knows the ameroid combompeters line!)

"Ballad of Eskimo Nell" vs. Blatant Beast, anyone?

Andrew @#26: Wikipedia grants him a couple more short stories, but that seems to be it. Too bad....

Also, I wish they'd republish The False House, last I heard it was out-of-print, and I haven't found a copy yet in my local used-book stores.

And now, I will go to bed!

Stoddard had a short story in the October issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6938972/The-star-to-every-wandering.html).

I haven't read any of his short works, but I really enjoyed both of his novels.

I'd settle for a nice, not-too-fat dragonet to get up in my not-very-big attic and EAT the fsking squirrels. Gonna have to get upthere with the live trap and relocate the tree rats.

Serge, nothing I can say does justice to those puns.

Charlie #8
Actually, I have found signs of dinosaurs nesting in our attic (on the one time we opened up the hatch and went up there) -- there's a hole under the eaves where they sneak in...

I'm glad that the ones that show up in my yard, limit their visitations to the grounds, the trees, the bushes, perching on the deck rails, nesting in the deck supports, perching on the flue of the fireplace, nesting in the trees, and roosting on wires (gets messy when they sit the electric or telephone wires to the house that are over the car, but...)

#24 fishbane

You're way too late there, the parts of the SCA located in eastern Massachusetts, got started by college students and graduates of MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, etc. There was even one fellow who was a civil engineering student at MIT whose SCAdian person was "Duncan the Peasant." "I'm a peasant. I'm not a knight/aspiring knight. I don't fight. I don't do anything I don't want to do, and you can't make me! I'm a peasant!

For authoritative recommendations, see How to Keep Dinosaurs, by Robert Mash.

David Harmon @ 32:

Try here. No idea how long these will remain, those...

me @ 38: Should be "though", not "those"...egad...

No, one keeps a dinosaur in the attic for sodomy.

Teresa @ 35... nothing I can say does justice to those puns

If not justice, shall pun-ishment be meted out?

Paula Helm Murray @ 34 ...
I'd settle for a nice, not-too-fat dragonet to get up in my not-very-big attic and EAT the fsking squirrels. Gonna have to get upthere with the live trap and relocate the tree rats.

Despite the assurances of the roofer that replacing the roof would work wonders to reduce the recurring presence of Procyon lotor peering through the skylight, and scampering about on the roof with degenerately noisy paws, the blasted beasts don't appear to have received the memo, and have continued on their merry way[0].

[0] I have a lingering suspicion that I've misplaced the punctuation in a way that suggests odd things about either my roof or roofer, but can't quite decide how I'd fix it, anyways.

One does it because one's hovercraft is full of eels.

Nor does one keep dinosaurs in Attica for their comfort.

I have little birds in my attic, or at least in the roof. I see them very often dragging bits and pieces up there (spiderwebs, other feathers, lengths of yarn I leave out for them; today, a sprig of wormwood) and when we lie in bed, we can hear their babies squawking to be fed.

I'd have thought it was obvious. He's shy and we've had to give his normal room to Aunt Sophie who is here for Christmas with her Pekinese, Scratch.

He understands.

David Harmon nails the source of the quote at 25. I like Jormungand; he's nicely acerbic. Oracles should try to eat one when consulted.

The False House is less satisfying than The High House, but I'm fond of them both.

In our previous house we had an owl and her owlets nesting in the eaves. The "who-ooo"s were actually kind of restful, and they were much better mousers than the dog (he preferred voles).

Serge, nothing I can say does justice to those puns.

Perhaps a mob of peasants with pitchforks and torches?

You think our way of living inhumane,
because we keep a dino under roof?
Not so, I say, let me supply the proof.
I'll point out that the reptile's quite urbane;
and doesn't like to sleep out in the rain,
nor hunt and kill a meal upon the hoof.
That's good, for here the prey would make a "Woof",
and neighbors would react with deep disdain.
Besides the cold-blood much prefers the heat
that insulation can provide up there
to cold and rain that's frequent in this clime.
Our attic guest is really rather sweet,
with style of conversation that's quite rare.
worth keeping close although beyond its time.

David Harmon @ 32, et. al.,

Powells has 1 copy of "The High House" in stock.

I just saw the sidelight on the death of Oscar Peterson. Damn! Why can't the great ones be immortal?

From Girl Genius today, Santa Klaus.

xeger @ 42

Is it permitted to ask how P. lotor gets on the roof? (I've only seen it on the ground, myself.)

Sasha once wanted to keep a dragon in the fire escape. When I pointed out that we wouldn't be able to get out in case of fire, he explained that by far the likeliest source of fire would be the dragon, and then we could go out the front.

Bruce Cohen @ 49... I'm waiting for the intercontinental hollistic mistletoes's rain of destruction.

#34 Paula Helm Murray

Live traps for mice and squirrels in Massachusetts are bad ideas unless you're feeding them to your pet snake or some such--if you trap mice or squirrels and haul them somewhere else and release them and you get caught doing it, you're caught breaking a state law, and at a minimum get fined. There's no shortage of gray squirrel, mice, rats, etc., and moving them from your house, to infest somewhere else, is the objection.

Other states probably have similar laws. You catch it, you kill it.

Aren't chickens dinosaurs? Or close enough? Not sure they should be kept in th'attic though.

Wouldn't a dragon in the attic interfere with the yarn stash?

Mr. Smeglivious D'Aunot was a Dragon of some foreign nation. He lived in the dining room and was quite proud of it, and our family was quite proud to have him living there. He was much loved and had only one fault, and that one was not at all of his making. He had no fire. How wonderful it would have been on Christmas Mornings to have him snort a spurt of flame on a plateful of scones and butter, but he was incapable of this simple, basic act of Dragonity.

Still, we loved him, and would have been happy to have him living in the Dining room in perpetuity, lack of internal combustion or not, were it not for a fateful visit one September evening by the Rector as we were all sitting down to Dinner. Nobody liked the Rector after first meeting him, he was a man that looked especially kind and delightful and was in reality a malicious old coot with no love of any human being. There was a rumour in the neighborhood that he was actually descended from trolls, due to his strange and alarming readings of Biblical texts, but that is another matter to be discussed at another time.

"Dino!"
"What?"
"Drag Juras over here!"

We keep ours on top of the fridge so people don't overeat.

P J Evans @ 54 ...
Is it permitted to ask how P. lotor gets on the roof? (I've only seen it on the ground, myself.)

P. lotor is a great climber of things, among them trees, houses and walls - in this case, I expect access to the roof via trees and neighbours houses. It's pretty common for us to find the younger ones chasing each other up the (small) trees in the front yard, as well.

Lila@31: I expect a lot of people here know "ameroid combopeters"; it's not as quoted as "Yngvi is a louse", but comes from the same respectable source (just republished by NESFA complete and with additional material) -- and many people here respect sources.

Paula@36: and a few years later, the peasants had their own guild, with the duty of presenting the baron with a rock each year. Now they're becoming more popular; a much-decorated lady is gradually handing back her orders in order to take up a Gypsy persona.

Paula Helm Murray @34, Paula Lieberman @57: My landlord 'live traps' the squirrels which occasionally get into the attic, and releases them into a nearby park. Don't know what the laws are with regards to this here in NY, but if you aren't allowed to release the catch, why allow the sale of live traps in the first place? You're only allowed so you can feed a snake?

Perhaps these regulations apply to professional exterminators. In that case, I could see releasing live catches in public places equivalent to illicit dumping of toxic waste.

With regards to Massachusetts: wasn't there a thread on ML about someone releasing a squirrel off of a bridge in Boston, to see a hawk swoop down and catch it in the air? My Google-fu is not up to the task this morning...

Some gifts from Kris Kringle are better kept wrapped.

A man in a Santa hat was arrested Sunday night for investigation of drunken driving after he was spotted outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood wearing a wig, a red lace camisole and a purple G-string, police said.

"We are pretty sure this is not the Santa Claus," Deputy Chief Ken Garner said.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #50: *Applause*

Syd #27 Thanks.

Serge #61: Alp!! Alp!!

CHip #64: True, and some of us play at checks (while worrying about Czechs turning into werewolves)...

Claude @ #66, I sincerely hope the soundtrack for that arrest was Eartha Kitt singing "Santa Baby."

Czechs turning into werewolves? I worry more about them taking up hang-gliding, which would involve the police and the bank...

After all, Czech kiting is against the law, isn't it?

(punning, ducking, and running)

Scott D-S #70: Welcome to the pun club! Now, you just need to get a syllogismobile.

About raccoons climbing things: anyone whose lived in close proximity to a tall tree has probably been awakened more than once by a mysterious booming thump- this is most probably a raccoon in a hurry to get some where, dropping out of the tree onto your roof.

About live-traps: fur trappers are coming to prefer them, as they do not damage the pelt. Unfortunately, traps set fot raccoons are more often productive of squirrels, or at least they are at my sister's house.

Jurassic parking meter men read gauges on the quay
For conèd powers meteor bits falling in the spray
The same wassail that's better warm when cold is still okay
And the dinos block drafts and muffle the noise, muffle the noise,
So our singing aloud no neighbor annoys.

Rob #65

http://www.cityofmelrose.org/living_with_wildlife_in_suburbia.htm
Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 131, Section 37, gives property owners the right to use lawful means to destroy wildlife in the act of causing damage or threatening personal safety. Landowners may only deal with wildlife actually causing damage or posing immediate threats. No one may randomly destroy wildlife as a preventive measure. It is illegal for a property owner to live-trap a problem animal and move it for release to public or private property.

Here is the Official State Information...

http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/wildlife/living/moving_wildlife.htm

Moving Wild Animals is Against the Law!

Capturing a wild animal and releasing it in another area is prohibited by Massachusetts law. Rabies in raccoons is spreading throughout the eastern United States. Moving animals from one area to another may spread this or other diseases to new areas.

To protect people and wildlife, DO NOT RELOCATE PROBLEM WILDLIFE! Wild animals sometimes damage homes, gardens and lawns. Often people want to catch the problem animals and release them someplace else. Massachusetts law prohibits moving any live wild animal from one area to another. This law has been in effect for many years, protecting both people and wildlife.

Here are some Reasons Wild Animals should not be Relocated:
Capturing a wild animal and releasing it somewhere else may spread disease(s) into populations of animals (including pets) that did not have the disease(s) previously. Diseases such as Rabies and Canine Distemper have been spread by people who captured an animal in one area and released it somewhere else.
Wild animals already live where you release your problem animal. Wherever you plan to release a problem animal, there are already resident animals with established territories competing among themselves for food and denning sites. When a new animal is introduced, competition for these limited resources is intensified, causing increased stress and conflict within the resident population, as well as hardship or death for the relocated animal.
Relocated animals often return to where you caught them. Squirrels, raccoons and other wildlife can return from translocations of 5, 10, or even 15 miles. Such animals are more likely to be killed by automobiles or succumb to other accidents as they cross unfamiliar areas while attempting to return to their original territories.
Relocation only transfers your problem to someone else. In an unfamiliar territory, an animal accustomed to living near people is likely to seek out human habitations and damage someone else's property.
Moving an animal does not solve the problem. Within a short period of time, other individuals of the same or another species will move in, unless food (garbage, pet food, grain) is removed, and access to gardens, chimneys and attics is blocked.
Information on methods or techniques to control damage caused by wildlife is available in the Wildlife Information area of our website or by contacting the MassWildlife District office which serves your community

My mom lives in Des Moines, Iowa. Although they have plenty of raccoons and squirrels around, she's told me about all the damage that chipmunks do. Locally, they're referred to as "squiddies", which sparks all sorts of very strange associations.

I wouldn't keep a dinosaur in the attic for Comfort, but possibly for a nice brandy.

Scott 70: Well, if they're running from the cops in a large American city, they can stop in to hide in any of the Czech-cacheing places.

@70 - Well, we've got one Czech that gets too rowdy in the local tavern, but we've been informed that it's illegal to forcibly eject him.

...a number N is the class of all classes containing N elements...

Paula Lieberman #74: Wow, it sounds like the wild animals have more rights than the property owners in that jurisdiction. Not moving wild animals off your property endangers your own pets. It's fine if the animal is in one of the limited groups that PAC personnel are allowed to deal with, but what if PeTA kidnaps a tiger from a zoo and releases it into a suburb, to roam free? If it's not directly attacking a person, it sounds like it would have diplomatic immunity. What recourse would a property owner have? A SWAT team? Or are there safety net laws to cover situations in which Problem Animal Control Agents are not allowed to intervene?

(The scene, an elevator inside a Los Angeles glass tower. The only passengers are a young man and a middle-aged executive type.)

"Sir?"
"Yes, young man?"
"Would you happen to be Paul Dirac, of Dirac2Video Productions?"
"I am. but I am about to go to an important meeting. If you have a movie proposal, can you do it quickly?"
"Certainly. I think that sci-fi horror has run into a rut."
"That is certainly true. Sharks. Spiders. Scarabs. Snakes. Dinosaurs. There are only so many movies that enough of the public will be interested in for me to make a profit."
"Well I have this script I'm working on that your company might be interested in, as it does projects that are both innovative and commercial."
"I'm listening."
"The script's title says it all."
"Go ahead."
"It's... Are you ready?... Voleciraptors."
"(...)"

As I recall, the Great Slow Kings frequented basements, not attics. Of course, that was due to "geologic upheavals" rather than intent.

Earl #79

Paula Lieberman #74: Wow, it sounds like the wild animals have more rights than the property owners in that jurisdiction. Not moving wild animals off your property endangers your own pets. It's fine if the animal is in one of the limited groups that PAC personnel are allowed to deal with, but what if PeTA kidnaps a tiger from a zoo and releases it into a suburb, to roam free?

From my post, the quote from the law on the subject"...gives property owners the right to use lawful means to destroy wildlife in the act of causing damage or threatening personal safety"

A hungry tiger is a definte threat to personal safe.

As for pets. there is something called a "leash law" for dogs. Free-roaming dogs can be much more menaces to pets and children than tigers are in the USA--any tiger running around loose didn't get there on its own, for one thing they are not native wildlife. For another thing, tigers don't form feral packs that go after livestock, pets, and children--which dog packs -will- do.

Regarding livestock, the intelligent farmer in the northeast with animals that can't take predators on, will have one or more guard dogs, or a guard llama, for protecting the livestock. In a coyote versus llama or Grand Pyrenese dog confrontation, the coyote -loses-. I've seen several farms where a llama's bonded to the smaller livestock (locality-owned farm in Peabody, Gore Place in Waltham--at Gore Place kids happily gambol and play king of the hill on the llama's back) or where one or more dogs are present as guard animals.
There are a number of signs up at the local supermarket seeking disappeared cats--things that can happen to them aren't only coyotes, even though cats and dogs sold for use in research projects are not supposed to be pets, a former boyfriend who worked at Mass General told me that some of the animals used in research there, had to have been pets because some of them behaved like pets, not like animals raised as non-petss... the companies selling the animals are not apparently all acting within the law regarding raising animals to be research subjects and not e.g. collection/capturing/otherwise obtaining pets.

And now the ads on the sidebar are for "Raccoon Removal" and such!

Raccoon Removal
Removing Raccoons from your attic Removing Raccoons from your chimney
pacofhudson.com

Precision Wildlife
Bat, birds, wildlife, & more! Owner operated wildlife co.
www.precisionwildlife.com

Raccoon Control Center
Practical advice, traps, fences, repellents for home & garden.
www.raccoon-x.com

Animal Traps & Lures
Live Animal Traps, Leg & Body Traps Trapping Baits, Lures & Supplies
www.flemingoutdoors.com

Mice & Rat Control
Rid Your Home Of Mice & Rats. Contact Us And We'll Exterminate!
www.RegionalPestControl.com

Calling batwrangler....

However, that really are much better choices than promotions for national political candidates whose positions many of the regulars in here find detestable and contemptible and repulsive! Plus, the services are ones that at least some of the people in here, are interested in contracting for... (Then there were l'affaires Messieurs Skunk with the NESFA Clubhouse some years back, alas....)

[TTTO of the song that went with the cartoon about "Good King Leonardo" ]

Dinosaur removal,
Oman's our next stop, *
Got a critter problem,
Weasels we make pop!

Those squirrels in the feeder,
We will drive away,
Let the birds go dining,
Without the tree rats play!

Then up to the attic we'll go
With nets and traps galore,
We'll clean them out and in the rout,
They'll be there nevermore!

Vermin we make vanish
And they'll not be back,
Got a critter problem,
We'll make those vermin pack
Mice to rats to chipmunks,
They'll all go away,
No more thumpings nightly,
And no more dung by day,

We provide a service,
To appreciate
Drive the bats from belfries,
No vermin is your fate!
From spring and through the summer
The winter past the fall,
No more thumps or cheepings
No noises down the hall,
We get them out and and you will shout,
They're gone each one and all!

* I think it's Oman that's paying to have a Jurassic Park built...

Fragano Ledgister @ 67

Thank you.

Bravo, Paula!

I do not keep my sister in the attic because she has declared our house a free zone for velociraptors. She enforces the rule with her powers of Tickling Little Sisters.

#86 Thanks Clifton.

Meanwhile, I wonder what the most peculiar stuff can get gotten from Google for side bar ads here...

Troll contemp'ry Google ads, oh, tra-la-la-la, la la la la!

Hark the pea-brained AI brain,
Advertisements so inane!
Penis length and John McCain,
All those things, across the grain!
Ads for books and ads for edits,
From the scammers with bad credits,
Vanity presses infest,
Poisoning the manifest,
Vanity presses in fest,
Some things are not for the best!

There's a copy of How to Attract the Wombat ready to hand, but few dinosaurs are covered therein.

I might end up getting False House at Amazon if I can't find it locally, but if I only get that, I'd end up paying almost as much for shipping as for the book. Not to mention I want to support my local bookstores, and there are lots of them around here!

Earl @ #79: No, it's just that you can't just go slaughtering everything in the vicinity because some of those "varmints" might get into your garbage or suchlike.

As described, if something's actually posing a problem, you can kill it, but (for reasons well-described at #74) rounding it up and dumping it elsewhere is Not Cool. Whether you can capture it permanently will depend on what animals you're allowed to keep in your house. (I don't remember what Massachusetts' rules were.) I would assume that if a tiger showed up loose, the local police would (possibly shoot it outright) or (more likely) call the nearest zoo for assistance.

Before I even bought the trap I first called animal contol, they suggested I call Mo. Dept. of Conservation because they will do nothing for pests on private property,

The nice lady at MoDC said, "Well, if they're damaging your property you can catch them and do what you want with them, squirrels aren't any kind of protected."

I told her I intended to trap them. She got my address info particulars and said, "As long as we know it's okay, I'll put it on file. And BE SURE to take them more than 10 miles away or they will be back within a week..."

I relocate to Minor Park. For one thing it's a bit farther than 15 miles away, for another I can get them well away from roads, etc. Swope is nice but It's TOO CLOSE.

I would hire someone to deal with raccoons, i have a healthy respect for them. Squirrels, feh.

Pie report: Yum! (also, advice to those making it, it will serve Lots. Six to eight people if there's nothing else with it; with side dishes and possible other stuff, figure twice that many.

But, oh yeah, yum!
(And a mandoline is great for slicing celery root. Next time I think we may do it julienned.)

Serge #80

Somehow I don't think that fits, "This is beautiful, therefore it must be true." [See Dirac do the half-spinning away....]

David #90 and Paula H M #91:

A couple years ago there was a Complete Idiot Cop in Arlington who had had TWO timber rattlers as "pets" (illegal ones) in his house, and at least one of them got loose.... First he claimed that they hadn't been there deliberately, and then the truth got out.

Different states, though, have different wildlife laws. I think that squirrels are actually legal game animals here. Canada geese are problems--there are spring and fall goose seasons, but the real issue is that the law has not caught up with their presence being non-migratory birds, rather than migratory ones. The last farmer in town does not like Canada geese (very few adults do around here...), and has a hunter who comes out during goose season who shoots Canada geese out in the fields.

One of the sites I checked mentions that it's not legal to keep (native wildlife) wild animals in the state (people with special permits for e.g. animal rehabbing are exceptions).

Ironically, most "domestic ducks" are actually mallards which have been domesticated and bred to have white feathers--and mallards are native wildlife.... I was quite astonished to find that out, that the domestic duck is a native American species, thinking of e.g. Beijing Duck and so.

(For that matter, the idiot bird-brained domestic turkey, is also native wildlife that got domesticated, and domestic and wild turkeys are interfertile... the state laws don't seem all that reasonsable thinking about such things).

Paula @88, you think Google's AI is screwy, just mention R*n P*ul in a blog post and you'll be awash in triumphalist consuite libertarians.

Bill Humphries @ 95:

I suppose we'll soon see if that principle can be reliably applied to comments within blog posts as well. (Does it depend on the comment in question being indexed by Google Ads?)

The LOLdiagnosis link is borked. You need to remove the "v" from in front of the http.

Bill Humphries #95: Speaking of He Who Can Only Be Told Of In Political Filks, there's a Team Fortress 2 game video floating around where a player has lodged himself in a blocking area of the game's map geometry who said he'd only let people through if they swore an oath to vote for HWCOBTOIPF; of course, being merely a griefer, he reneged on his promise and started getting people to answer trivia questions with the promise of escape as the reward.

Bill 95

We can get R*n P**l removal ads along raccoon removal, animal removal, Boston Rodent Control, a and humane trap ads listed on the side bar?!

Hmm, how about "extremist politician removal" [although the method used to get rid of the Ceacescus isn't likely to be openly advertised in the USA.... ]

[Note: The US Constitution includes protection of parody... but given how much of the rest of the document's in abrogation at the current time....]

Don't feed captured rodents to your snakes. The odds of the snake getting a parasite are too great.

For raccoons, and oppossums, we have geese to warn of when they are coming after the chickens; at which point a flashlight and suitable means of introducing a swift moving piece of lead to them is the cure.

An air rifle is used on the squirels who go after the fruit.

Terry Karney @ 100 ...
For raccoons, and oppossums, we have geese to warn of when they are coming after the chickens; at which point a flashlight and suitable means of introducing a swift moving piece of lead to them is the cure.

Being in the city, there's too many neighbours for lead - but there's a fine water pistol near the back door, which works surprisingly well as a short term deterrent.

Chasing squirrels through
th'insulation foam,
dodging the poo-poo
where the pigeons roam,
watching kitties flee
from my softest pad,
all this is not half the glee
as back when I still had
(my)

Jungle hills, jungle hills,
jungle all around,
oh what fun it was to run
the Tricers to the ground, hey!

Earl, #98: Novice gamer. He clearly doesn't understand the difference between what your character says and what you say.

Lee #103: I don't know of any griefers who actually roleplay except as a cover story to rationalize their bad behavior. "It's just a game" irritates the heck out of me, too; online gamers who uses that as an excuse for bad behavior are destined to hold a cherished place on my /ignore lists.

Paula Lieberman @ 94

Most domestic ducks are mallard-descended (Anas platyrynchos domesticus). However, Muscovy ducks are diferent, being descended from wild Muscovy ducks Cairina moschata.

Vicki @ 89... Wasn't there, a long time ago, a videogame called Mortal Wombat?

Paula Lieberman @ 93... Would you buy a car from a Feinman, no matter how fine, without taking it for a few spins around Schrödinger's Box?

Paula Lieberman @ 74

That info. from Massachusetts re. moving of animals is very sound advice. I could tell you lots about how movements of raccoons spread raccoon rabies variant so that it's now found all over the East Coast states instead of just down in the south-east. Also how people were found trapping raccoons on their properties and releasing them on the far side of a vaccine belt which was aiming to stop the disease spreading...

#58 ::: bill wringe

Aren't chickens dinosaurs? Or close enough?

If so, I shudder to think about what could be done with selective breeding.

#104 ::: Earl Cooley III

Lee #103: I don't know of any griefers who actually roleplay except as a cover story to rationalize their bad behavior. "It's just a game" irritates the heck out of me, too; online gamers who uses that as an excuse for bad behavior are destined to hold a cherished place on my /ignore lists.

More generally, there are people, ranging from trolls to terrorists [1], who think of civilization as something to parasitize. I wonder if folks would find it easier to ignore trolls if the trolls were called "attention leeches". Trolls don't just want to be insulting, they want to break up real conversation.

The problem with trolls isn't that they want attention-- if we didn't want attention we wouldn't be here-- it's that they don't repay attention with anything valuable.

And I treasure Jet Li's Fearless because the big martial arts fight in the restaurant is consequential (the restaurant owner is the lead martial artist's best friend and the fight was totally unnecessary) instead of just being a chance to see things get smashed.

Alas, a Siberian tiger did get out last night at the San Francisco zoo, and killed someone. (I'm wondering if the one she killed managed to let her out, since he was a young man at the reckless age. If my guess is wrong, apologies to his family.) A sad story all around.

I just wanted to thank all the denizens of Making Light who gave me suggestions for SF/F books for my hubby. Thanks to you, his spot under the tree wasn't bare!

In about 20 minutes, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a programme about puns.

Does this sound like the earliest extant version of a go-bag? (From the Natufian culture, discovered in present-day Jordan at Wadi Hammeh.)

Thanks to Unca Jim & all the others on Making Light for all they've done through this year.

OK now...

Chasing the latest comment to Jim's Internet Time Wasters II led me to Psychotherapy for Plush Toys. That site has had me bawling several times. (It probably doesn't help that today is the anniversary of my father's death.) On the other hand, I've managed to cure two of them so far....

Re. Faren Miller's link in 111, I now have my 2008 New Years resolution: In 2008 I will forego reading comment threads in online news coverage of all sorts.

Is it my imagination or did Bill O'Really say little about our side's War on Christmas this year? If he has declared victory, how come there was no Christmas-related programming on TV last night? The closest to the Season that I caught was a 1957 TV broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderellah, with a 22-year-old Julie Andrews as you-know-who.

Serge #117: Christmas Day my sister-in-law wanted to watch Christmas cartoons because they were some of her earliest introductions to the English language (even before she started learning it in school) and have fond associations, but there was nothing to be found, anywhere.

Speaking of her, this amused me: her name is Ji-Yeon Park, but that's an awful transliteration--the first name is confusing (chee-yun would be closer, but not perfect) and the last name is entirely misleading. She's considering changing the last name to Bach, because the way Americans pronounce it is pretty close to how you're supposed to say Park, and also because she's a big fan of J.S. (as all sensible humans are). The upshot of all this is that the day before yesterday my brother realized that he could start calling her Ji-Yeon Sebastian Bach.

Hilarity ensues, especially if you can muddle through that labyrinthine setup. Oh, how I love those complicated multi-lingual spelling/pronunciation name puns!

Consider the grass,
Not a thing, but a mass
Made of little green pieces
Of nephews and nieces
Too little to read the sign
"Keep off the grass."

ethan @ 118... how I love those complicated multi-lingual spelling/pronunciation name puns!

Take it Bach, and PDQ, if you please.

"One does not keep a dinosaur in the attic for comfort."

Whose comfort are we talking about? Yours or the dinosaur's?

Erik @121:
Whose comfort are we talking about? Yours or the dinosaur's?

Dinosaurs, like small children, share their discomfort freely. Its lack of comfort would be mine by the time it had put its feet through my ceilings and its tail through my roof.

"There was no possibility of catching a hadrosaur that day..."

Jane, a young Velociraptor mongoliensis, small and plain in appearance, shy, but intelligent, is employed as a governess and guard animal by Mr Rochester. She loves him, and the two become engaged, but she is horrified to discover - on her wedding day itself - that the first Mrs Rochester, a Protoceratops andrewsi, is not in fact dead, but is still living, insane, in the attic, being fed on cycad leaves smuggled there by the elderly housekeeper, a dromaeosaurid called Grace Poole.
Rochester begs Jane to come with him to France, where they will live as husband and wife despite not being legally married, but Jane refuses, and races home to disembowel the first Mrs Rochester with one kick of her powerful hind leg.

It's interesting that almost everyone assumes that the dinosaurs are a> inconveniently large and b> alive. I keep my dinosaurs, which are plush toys of moderate size, in a cloth bin in the bedroom when not actually cuddling them - doesn't everybody?

Nancy Lebovitz at #110 writes:

> I wonder if folks would find it easier to ignore trolls if the trolls were called "attention leeches". Trolls don't just want to be insulting, they want to break up real conversation.

The term which seems most accurate and sounds best to me is "energy creature" - as in "don't feed the energy creature". Its only flaw is that it might be a bit too geeky to fall into general use. I think it captures the situation perfectly though.

For some years I used not to believe that there really were people who wanted *any* sort of attention - including abuse and contempt. Reality wore me down in the end though.

David Harmon @ 115: I managed to cure one...but the second is completely catatonic after "treatment," another might as well be, one wouldn't hang around long enough for the initial exam, and the last simply won't "load" into the examining room in the first place...

Depressing, even if they are only animated plush toys.

I read the sequal to "The high house" almost in one sitting a couple of years ago. I rather enjoyed it, but found it incredibly reactionary, which began to grate after a while.

David @ 115: I managed to work successfully with the hippo, the terrapin, and the snake, but never could get the delusional sheep or the croc-in-the-box to load. Lilo took me two attempts--the first failed miserably (or did it?).

Nice way to spend some time on a lousy, dreary afternoon!

Note to self: It is not while being cautious and aware that one becomes the path to ground, but in that brief moment of brainless inattention.

Fortunately, not an issue[0], but definitely a reminder to pay complete attention, and -think- before doing.

[0] Well, okay - for very long, at any rate.

various, on removing animals: aside from the biological consequences described in Paula's quote, it occurs to me that taking a live-trapped animal could be looked on like dumping your garbage in somebody else's town. IIRC, removal of (e.g.) problem bears from Yellowstone involves moving them a \long/ way -- which would run even more risk of the consequences Paula quotes.

#126, #128: I've now cured all of them, so I'll give some hints. Most of them I'll rot13, but a couple or three deserve to be in clear:

(0) Note that the doctor's notes give hints too, and those change over the course of treatment! So do the dreams and many of the other "cutscenes".

(1) There's an electroshock set under the head of the bed, which you'll occasionally need for the most resistant patients. Often the minimum-length shock isn't enough, but you still need a light hand on that button. On the other hand, "killing" the patient (and I think this is the only way to do that) amounts to a reset -- you just start over on that patient. (Hey, they are stuffed animals!)

(2) Sometimes waiting is a necessary part of the treatment -- watch what the critters do if you let them alone for a minute or two. Also, sometimes you need to let a patient go back to the lounge, while you work on somebody else for a while.

3) V qvq arrq gb hfr gur ryrpgebfubpx n pbhcyr bs gvzrf (vg'f uvqqra haqre gur urnq bs gur orq), abgnoyl gb trg gur ghegyr bhg bs uvf furyy naq gb trg gur furrc vagb n erfcbafvir (gerngnoyr) pbaqvgvba. (Sbe gur ynggre, V unq gb yrg uvz bhg gb gur ybhatr gb erpbire.)

4) Gur pebp arrqf n gnyx-gurencl frffvba (juvpu nyfb yrgf uvz qvgpu gur obk) orsber ur'yy chg hc jvgu n culfvpny rknz. Zhfvp vf irel vzcbegnag gb uvz -- yrg uvz cynl gjb be guerr ebhaqf orgjrra gur zber pbasebagngvbany gerngzragf, naq lbh'yy arrq gb ercynpr uvf syhgr nsgre qernz gurencl.

I have to say, the effort and creativity that went into that game are amazing! That said, there were a fair number of points where the "obvious" response was mysteriously disabled just when I wanted to use it -- I had to figure out what else to do first before I could get back to "strategy".

Xeger @#129: It is not while being cautious and aware that one becomes the path to ground, but in that brief moment of brainless inattention.

Now those are words to live by!

David @ 131: I couldn't agree more about both the quasi-professional thought and the graphic work that went into this little diversion. Having worked in the counseling profession, I fully expected Herr Doktor's notes to change, just as progress notes always do. But at the same time, I was impressed that they did, and that they offer as much help as they do. Any psychologist or counselor worth his copy of the DSM knows of the value of the observations from the entire therapeutic team, so it didn't seem odd to consult the notes anytime I felt the need.

V qvqa'g unir gb qb RPG (fubpx) jvgu gur furrc, ohg qeht gurencl jnf _irel_ rssrpgvir ng bar cbvag. Naq V tbg fhpu n xvpx bhg bs gur Qe'f abgrf znxvat fb zhpu ersrerapr gb ure cnegvphyne arrqf nf n furrc.

Ba gur bgure unaq, V qvq unir gb tvir Yvyb n OVT qbfr bs RPG, nyzbfg gb gur cbvag bs selvat uvz. Gur Ovt Ahefr onaqntrq uvf urnq, naq ur pyhzcrq bhg bs gur gurencl nern gb gur "Cngvrag Ybhatr" (va Nzrevpn, vg'f pnyyrq gur Qnlebbz), fng gurer juvyr ur er-pbzobohyngrq uvzfrys, naq gura jnf ernql sbe zber jbex.

Ur, naq ng bar cbvag, gur greencva, unq gb tb guebhtu ercrgvgvir plpyrf bs gur fnzr gerngzrag, ohg pbagvahrq gb fubj vzcebirzrag guebhtu rnpu, nf fubja va gurve qernz gurencl erfcbafrf.

Gur greencva vf na rkpryyrag rknzcyr bs n onfvp cevapvcyr va gurencl--gur inyhr bs gvzr. Cnegvphyneyl jura n cngvrag svanyyl npprcgf n terng ybff gung ur/fur unf orra nibvqvat, gur erfhyg vf gur abezny tevrivat ernpgvba, naq gur bayl zrqvpvar sbe gung vf gvzr.

Lilo is still my favorite; it was surprising to see him in a cameo role during the sheep's therapy.

ajay @ 123... How about Jane Eyrecheopteryx?

Xeger @ 129: Those are concerning words, my friend! NO frickin' 'coon is worth your participation in a "frying game." Although your description of their desperate paws on you new roof makes me wonder if you have 'coons, or Night-gaunts.

Roz Kaveney @ #124: I arrange the plush dinosaurs at the toy store so they are eating and rampaging the other creatures.

The dinosaur is in the attic because she's happy there. I don't think my comfort is on her mind at all. The cats do like to go and visit and chat. I think they all snack on voles together.

Since we're talking about dinosaurs in the house here, I'll throw in a YASID. Or an author ID. There's three (I think) stories in Asimov's or F&SF about miniaturized limited-intelligence dinos who end up in sort of a group home. Who wrote these?

Since this is an open thread, I'll ask something that I've intended to bring up for awhile, particularly among the other assorted gastronomes and cooks who frequent this site. It has nothing to do with dinosaurs in the attic, but a good bit to do with the ones in the cupboards.

About 18 months ago, I inherited the set of very good porcelain cookware that my sister and I gave my mother for Christmas 1973. It's completely intact--all 14 pieces. My mother was one of those eat-off-the-floor cleanliness people, and believed in having nice stuff and taking care of it, so it was very well cared for. However, over the years, it's become terribly stained inside. And there lies the problem.

My mother used to live in Ponca City, Oklahoma, also known as Conoco City (the company was founded there, and Conoco-Phillips is still by far the largest employer). Those few of you who live/have lived in the Oil Patch know how sorry the water quality is. I found that simply soaking the cooking surface of each pot, sauce pan, and skillet in vinegar-water allowed me to scour considerable amounts of gyp build-up off those surfaces, along with the stains it had kept. But still, except for one small skillet that apparently didn't see much use, the off-color tinges and burned spots on the other stuff remains.

Anyone of you have experience on really cleaning badly-and-historically-stained porcelain?

This is interesting: The US Senate held an 11 second long session to prevent Presidential recess appointments, and they're going to keep the process going during the holiday break.

LMB MacAlister @ 135 ...
Xeger @ 129: Those are concerning words, my friend! NO frickin' 'coon is worth your participation in a "frying game."

Er - to clarify, I've been trying to remedy some of my tool storage problems by adding plywood to the basement wall.

Since the previous denizen had the brilliant idea of putting the light switch some 6' away in the wrong direction from the places anybody would look for a light switch in the dark (and smack in the middle of where I wanted to put the plywood), I elected to relocate the switch... and to make a long story short, it seems that the previous denizen wired the house in a way that suggests s/he was -also- closely related to the Boston road crews.

There was definitely fur involved - but yak fur to be felted, dyed, and used on the walls of the bikeshed ...

Although your description of their desperate paws on you new roof makes me wonder if you have 'coons, or Night-gaunts.

Given some of the noises I've heard, night-gaunts wouldn't be a surprise...

I read The High House once. By the end of the book I felt as though I'd just listened to the author yell "You kids get off my lawn!" for three hours straight.

ethan @#118: That's hilarious.

Marilee @ 137... That sounds like one of the stories I read in this year's Asimov. Or maybe it was in the Kramer & Hartwell Best of 2006 anthology. Alas, both are 1100 miles away right now.

Drove down to Long Island yesterday to visit friends and go on a Diner Run. I'm partial to "Greek Diners" for their expansive menus, big servings, and bizarre decor.

The 'East Bay" diner near Massapequa was . . . oye.

It had a nautical theme. lamps with shells embedded in them. Other lamps that looked like jellyfish, with tentacles. The corridor leading into the restooms was covered with wavy blue stuff; it looked like it might be the entrance to a Little Mermaid theme park ride.

And . . . in one wall were four "port holes." Behind these were large flatscreen monitors, displaying an aquarium display . . . like one of those old screen savers, but high resolution.

Wow.

Drove down to Long Island yesterday to visit friends and go on a Diner Run. I'm partial to "Greek Diners" for their expansive menus, big servings, and bizarre decor.

The 'East Bay" diner near Massapequa was . . . oye.

It had a nautical theme. lamps with shells embedded in them. Other lamps that looked like jellyfish, with tentacles. The corridor leading into the restooms was covered with wavy blue stuff; it looked like it might be the entrance to a Little Mermaid theme park ride.

And . . . in one wall were four "port holes." Behind these were large flatscreen monitors, displaying an aquarium display . . . like one of those old screen savers, but high resolution.

Wow.

The gloom just got a good bit gloomier: Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

Bruce @ 146: Maybe gloomier, but not in the least more surprising.

And then there were six...

Marcus(11/??/1990 - 12/26/2007) - our beautiful Balinese, left us yesterday afternoon with the kind assistance of his vet.

Marilee @ 137: I remember those stories too, and with a vague recollection of a Slavic last name managed to find the author: Richard Chwedyk wrote "The Measure of All Things", "Bronte's Egg", and "In Tibor's Cardboard Castle".

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #146: I am waiting to see how this will be spun as evidence that the War on Terror is making us all safer.

I predict that there will be a backlash uprising in Pakistan, which will either be violently suppressed by Musharraf with US help, or lead to a civil war which the US will enter on Musharraf's side.

Either way, the US will once again be seen to be the enemy of the people in the Middle East, and most likely the least moderate elements in Pakistan will take power.

If that happens, I predict that nuclear weapons will be used in war (most likely against India) for the first time since 1945.

Lori 148: I'm sorry for your loss.

Lori @ 148

I was at least as sorry to hear your news as the news about Bhutto. "After the first death, there is no other".

Lori, I'm sorry. That hurts more than the more dramtic news (proximity = pain).

My deepest sympathy.

Xopher @ 151

I see you've been auditing my nightmares. I've been keeping a clock like the Union of Concerned Scientists kept on their Bulletin during the Cold War, and I've been estimating 7 to 10 years until nukes are used in anger on the subcontinent or in the Middle East. The clock just ticked; I figure we have 3 to 5 years at most.

Eva says I'm doing an Eeyore, just enjoying being gloomy; I feel more like Cassandra, "Listen to me, dammnit!".

As someone owned by cats, you have my sympathies, Lori.

Lori Coulson #148: That's sad news.

It seems that I've had an unusual number of friends losing pets (dogs or cats) this past year, and many of them younger than the average age for canine/feline death. I have to wonder how much of that might be due to lower-level contamination of pet foods that was just... quietly ignored once the Big Scandal had broken and the Administration had assured us it was All Taken Care Of.

Re Benazir Bhutto, I remember her election as Prime Minister, and how that was talked about by many people as a sign of great progress for women as well as for the world as a whole. These days, it seems that the Armies of the Night are winning, and we're heading straight back into the Dark Ages.

One of the most interesting (time will tell if it is the best) source of news about the aftermath of the Bhutto assasination is The Pakistani Spectator, which is reporting, ahead of other sources, that the parlimentary election has been indefinitely postponed, and that riots are expanding in several cities. There are even reports of shots at the other principal opposition figure, Nawaz Sharif.

Thanks, folks -- it's been a bad couple of days. Marcus got sick on Christmas Eve, and by Christmas day all of us realized he would be leaving us... This led to several wakeful nights.

But we had him for 17 years and I was beginning to think he might last into his twenties. He was a face patter, and always hopeful that he could make you believe he hadn't been fed for days! (And yes, his "starving" act did have some success.) His loud Siamese voice made sure you had to listen to his demands.

Last night, Kitsumi, D'Artagnan and DC roamed the house looking for their buddy. They'd been taking turns sitting with Marcus up until we had to take him to the vet. Alibi spent the evening on my Mom's lap trying to console her.

Only the two youngest cats, Tealc and Tao, seemed unaffected, but they only joined the household in September when Mom moved in with us.

I miss him, and will continue to do so, but at least everyone here understands.

Thanks for caring.

Thanks for the link, Claude.

I myself was surprised by my own surprise. When she was placed under house arrest by Musharraf, the back part of my brain began to worry that something like this was particularly imminent. (Of course, it was ALWAYS imminent--she was a woman, popular, and educated in the West.)

Lori, my sympathies. Our boy is about that age, and I'm trying very hard to deliberately enjoy him as often as possible.

I woke to the Bhutto news. I'll reserve my speculations for the moment, but I see no good coming of it.

But Bush just condemned the people who did it, as "radical extremists" working to undermine democracy in Pakistan.

If Musharraf's fingerprints are found... I wonder what song he'll sing.

Claude: The news I heard said the elections will continue, on 08 Jan.

Lori--you have my sympathy; it's always hard to part with those endearing charms, even when you know you're making the loving choice.

I've found that the confusion and grieving of the remaining pets is one of the hardest things to face, too.

Lori, so sad for you; losing an old friend pet is always hard.

Terry, I have seen reports of a postponement, but no other sources have picked it up. Sharif reportedly is pledging to boycott a January election in solidarity with Bhutto's party, and some sources are saying that Bhutto was shot after the explosion. Just about everyone agrees that there is violence in Rwalpindi and Karachi, but some are saying that the roads into Islamabad have been blocked by authorities. It is a mess, which is no surprise.

I'm not sure when we will really know what is going on there, if ever. Yep, I'm a pessimist this morning.

Weaned too fast and permitted to grow up among numbers, the mind frightens
itself with false immensities. It creates mathematical time, uniform and uninter-
ruptible; imagines mathematical space and floats off in the darkness between
stars, a lost child. Bewildered by quantity, it has nightmares of multiplied pain--
Armenians, Auschwitz (shhh)--and forgets what every child knows; that nothing
is ever suffered in plural.
There is only one body. Only one death.

Pascal's Vision -- Stephen Mitchell

I'm sorry, Lori. Xopher at 151, Oh, I hope you are wrong. I think you are right about civil war in Pakistan, but I pray that the United States has the sense to stay out of it (how could we be "in" it? I don't see it) and that no nuclear weapons are used.

Digby and others are reporting that Scarborough on MSNBC wasted no time saying the Bhutto assassination was good for Giuliani.

This guy was once a US Congressman, which shows...something.

Lori, my sympathies. Losing friends is horrible.

Lori, I'm so sorry for your family's loss.
Face patters are annoyingly endearing, aren't they?

Lizzy 168: Helping out our "friend" Musharraf. An ally in the WOT, you know.

And I don't think the nukes would be used in the civil war. I think that after the radical Islamists take power, they'll use them on India and/or Israel.

Thought of that way, if it really is Musharraf v. radical Islamists, Musharraf would be the lesser of two evils. Not so if it's Musharraf v. Bhuttoists.

I share your hope that I'm wrong.

Tania @171: Indeed they are -- Marcus liked to pat your face with his claws out...we never were able to convince him that we'd be happier to let him do that if it were done sans claws!

The only other family face patter, Nimue, would do it with 'soft paws' no claws.

Lori @ #173: My face patter starts out soft, and extends claws if you ignore him. Usually it's 4 AM, the food dish isn't as full as he thinks it should be, and he puts on this OMG!! STARVING!1!!1! act.
When you put a little food in his dish, his anxiety goes away, and he's fine. He's not hungry, but standards for food dish levels must be maintained.

Clever little bugger.

I've never had a pet (unless you count my current boyfriend, which...let's just say there's a case to be made). I have all these ideas about What I Would Do, which I suspect are as valid as my ideas on childrearing (since I am also childless).

These kinds of conversations reaffirm my decision to remain both childless and petless for the foreseeable future.

Lori: I'm sorry about your kitty, and that you've lost a family member during the holidays. He sounds like he was a lovely cat.

You know, Marcus had never gone without food in his life -- yet he'd give you this raucus "rowr" ("Hey, it's past dinner time -- you need to feed me!) anytime you went past the food dish.

Our crew are so good at this game that there have been several occasions where they have conned the late-waking family member into giving them breakfast even though they'd eaten THAT a couple of hours earlier.

Now I know to check with the early riser(s) before acting on the complaints of the feline family members. (Yeah, suuuuuurrre they forgot to feed you...)

There's always the complaint about the bottom of the dish being (oh the horror!) visible. Shaking the crunchies back across the bottom will frequently fix that, but there are the times you actually have to put more food in the dish.

(I remember Harry sitting on the table fishing crunchies from the little can we used to fill the dish, reaching in with spread paw and catching them when she closed it up.)

Lori:

Tikka, the female calico that has primary custody of me is satisfied if I keep the dry food replenished. Our older male siamese, Robin, is a world class moocher. You would swear that he was dying of hunger, 15 minutes after being fed by someone else.

And yes, it works, more often than not.

Talk of the Nation had the Pakistani ambassador to the US on a little while ago. In answer to a question he said that the elections would go on January 8, "God willing".

We switched to dry food a few years ago now. So it is left out all day long for the cats, and they help themselves. They control their feeding well enough, have no weight problems or suchlike. This of course means they cannot fool us into feeding them multiple times, but then having labradors in the house meant we were immune to it anyway.

So now there are 2 bassets visiting, with their "poor me I'm being mistreated" eyes, and it doesn't get them anywhere at all because we have been hardened by years of labradors.

Claude Muncey @ 180

I wonder if he meant "God willing and the people don't rise".

Wesley @141:

Tastes vary. I couldn't finish the Pullman books because of the polemics.

Claude and Bruce: He meant insh'allah, which good Moslems say whenever they discuss the future.

woo, convergence!

so i asked for & got seamus heaney's translation of beowulf for christmas from my mum-in-law. based on the recommendations from here, & my desire to be a better poetry appreciator, also mostly from here. i am in love, even though i'm barely past the introduction.

...the introduction, which asserts, "nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about him." (he must have been following abi's making light posts.)

also, "we must labour to be beautiful." i'm thinking of stenciling that over my drawing desk.

miriam beetle @185:

We read the Heaney translation in early 2001. My son, born in April that year, has Beowulf as a middle name as a result.

nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about him.
I have always believed that a dragon that is not inevitable is spurious, and would have flown off before being encountered in the plot. Dragons are - or should be - more real and more necessary than the stories in which they appear.

Navy Jag Resigns.

"It was with sadness that I signed my name this grey morning to a letter resigning my commission in the U.S. Navy," wrote Gig Harbor, Wash., resident and attorney-at-law Andrew Williams in a letter to The Peninsula Gateway last week. "There was a time when I served with pride ... Sadly, no more."

...

Williams, 43, felt that Hartmann was admitting torture is now an acceptable interrogation technique in the United States -- an admission that did not sit well with him.

"There was this saying in the Marines: 'We don't lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate people who do,' " Williams said. "And that sort of echoed through the Navy."

Williams felt that resigning from the reserves was not enough to demonstrate his dissatisfaction. He wrote to the Gateway hoping to set an example, echoing his same reason for joining the Navy two decades ago: "It was my way of serving the public," he said.

In his letter, Williams likened the use of torture by the United States to techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge. He also wrote that he hopes "the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out."

...

"Thank you General Hartmann for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition. In the middle ages the Inquisition called waterboarding "toca" and used it with great success. In colonial times, it was used by the Dutch East India Company during the Amboyna Massacre of 1623.

"Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai. In World War II, our grandfathers had the wisdom to convict Japanese Officer Yukio Asano of waterboarding and other torture practices in 1947 giving him 15 years hard labor. Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the United States Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict."

Good on 'im. There are those who say that because he was in the reserves, and has a thriving practice it doesn't mean much.

They are idiots.

I'll stand him a round, anytime.

Blog design: Biggest Time-Waster Evuh!

I could lose entire months of my life fiddling with different combinations of fonts, colors, layouts, etc., especially when I will probably end up going with something fairly staid. But my inner heart, which is fond of intense colors, really wants something black with fuschia and turquoise and things. If only it wasn't so hard to make white text readable on black!

Lori, you have my sympathy. But as long as you remember, he won't be totally gone. Sounds like you had a good long run. Blessings.

Lori, my sympathies for your loss--Marcus sounds like he was a sweetheart.

Re: Bhutto's assassination...if things go Terribly Wrong in Pakistan as a result, I am very much afraid that the Current Misadministration will find a way to insert us into the situation, and I can't see any good outcome for such a scenario.

I have thought for many years that the next user of atomic weapons won't be one of the so-called major powers, but rather some petty despot (or despot-wannabe) who doesn't care what happens to the rest of the world as long as he feels he's made his point.

"Peace on earth, and good will toward men" indeed...

Susan @ #188: I have two words for you:

Gaudy borders.

A plain, simple, easily-read background for your text and illustrations is a blessing to your readers. But who says the whole page has to be text?

Susan @ 188 ...

Grey or off-white text on black tends to be more legible than pure white on black, without losing the general effect.

fidelio:
You're a genius! Borders! I just realized exactly what piece of software I have that would be perfect for someone like me with no particular artistic talent...

Mike (hub) and I were watching the first episode of Tin Man tonight and fell to wondering what other movies we've seen in which an evil sorceress was all done up in a fancy corset.

All we could recall was Narnia but there have to be a dozen others...it's become a fantasy cliche. Anyone?

The Borg queen?

Good one, Abi. I was going to say Scarlett O'Hara, but that's only marginally a fantasy.

Susan
I like very dark blue on white. (Actually, very dark green or red or grey on white would also work.) There's enough contrast to make it readable, but not so much as to be hard to read. Should also work with a pale-grey background, which is even easier on the eyes.

P J Evans @197 ...
I like very dark blue on white. (Actually, very dark green or red or grey on white would also work.) There's enough contrast to make it readable, but not so much as to be hard to read. Should also work with a pale-grey background, which is even easier on the eyes.

FWIW, for me, the pure white background (or the grey/white combination that makinglight uses) renders such websites an instant migraine trigger on a CRT, and tearfully painful on an LCD under non-optimal conditions.

dcb@105: Hmm, I should start calling certain of the winter veggies "duck squash", then, as they are C. moschata rather than C. Pepo.

Cucurbita versus Cairina sounds so much more like a good monster movie than Duck vs. Squash. "Latin. It's all in the Latin. Kids these days..."

abi @#195: ooo, right! of course! She probably started the trend.

Steve C. @#196: Yeah, Scarlett is evil*, but her corset is socially imposed, and historically set. We were thinking of SF/F...settings in which a corset automatically signifies eeevil.

*I think. Hate Scarlett, hate Mellie, hate Ashleigh, hate 'em all.

Lori @148, 160, etc: So sorry for your loss. They are gone so quickly. :-(

My two will be 14 this summer, and one has gone from portly to lean within the past 3 - 4 months. All the labwork looks fine, the x-ray looks fine, but it's just NOT a good sign at all. I've made some diet adjustments and am keeping my fingers crossed.

Tania @ 174: Our Snarkie isn't a face patter, but gets very anxious and vocal when the dry food no longer fully covers the bottom of the dish. Maybe it's only one kibble deep, but if she can see the bottom, she's very afraid and nervous. She has experience with hunger.

She was captured with her siblings from a feral momcat who was raising them. I got her within a week of her capture; her eyes had already changed color, so I know she was at least 12 - 14 weeks. It was hard to tell her age because she was so SKINNY.

Random openthreadiness:

My two nominations for "best line spoken in a TV series this year" (not from the same series):

1. "And here's one I made out of noodles!"

2. "It's my timey-wimey detector. It beeps when there's stuff."

Random stuff - I just got through watching the animated Superman-Doomsday DVD, and I was just thinking how much better it was than the Superman Returns movie. For one thing, with a running time of 74 minutes, they didn't have any padding - story and action all the way.

Lori Coulson, #148, I'm so sorry. It's so hard to let them go.

Northland, #149, Thanks!

Susan, #188, people don't read white on black as often as they do text on lighter colors. It hurts.

So, that crazy plushie game is fun and all, but one of the neuroses that you "cure" is apparently a case of autism induced by a traumatic event. WTF?

Evil Willow -- villain in a corset.

Lila@203: I'm much more partial to: "People assume that time is a straight progression of cause to effect, but from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of...wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey......stuff."

BTW, has anyone else watched this year's Doctor Who Christmas special? It was a good story, but I found the whole thing was spoiled by the new theme music, which I hate with passion.

David Goldfarb @209: I did, and although I wasn't as passionately annoyed by the 'updated' theme music, I hoped that it might be a 'one-off' for the holiday show. WRT the theme music, I wish they would leave well enough (if not in fact perfect) alone. It was an annoyance to me later in the old Doctor Who series, that each update of the theme music got more hyper and kinetic, and lost the otherworldliness that was appealing in the original theme. At least then, they didn't update the theme until they had a new actor playing the Doctor; this update midstream does not bode well.

And, happy birthday to the man who Joss Whedon calls "the father of us all", Stanley Martin Leiber, otherwise known as Stan Lee.

#209-210: I've heard the new music now and actually liked it--but then, the thing that disappoints me most about the new series is the generic orchestral score. I usually only feel like the soundtrack has a character of its own when it uses a pop song. Anything that moves in a different direction will get my sympathy.

To my ears the best Doctor Who music is the avant-gardeish electronic/musique concrète stuff from the 1960s episodes. It's occasionally silly, but always sounds like nothing else on television.

I think I just realized why I think I "don't get" so much modern art.

From a description of an art installation*:
Centre A is located in Vancouver's Downtown East Side, an area marked by poverty and mental illness, substance abuse and drug traffic, increasing redevelopment and gentrification, tourism and entertainment consumption, and socio-political frictions arising from the economic disparity and divergent interests of the various local users and stakeholders - including poor residents, the transient population, homeowners, business people, real-estate developers, consumers, tourists, cultural groups, and social-service organizations - and those in the underground economies, such as drug dealers and users.

Dear heaven. I think I could make that sentence more complex and opaque, but I'd have to really work for it. And that's just a description of the neighborhood around the gallery where the piece was installed. My eyes glazed over halfway through - I had to go back and force myself to read it slowly.

Artists need writers, apparently.

*Overflow, by Germaine Koh

On villains in corsets: I think an important distinction is between corsets properly used as underwear and the new and silly cliche (on display at most conventions as well) of corsets as outerwear, which is how movie villains wear them. Scarlett O'Hara doesn't count, unless you're going to count every female character in every movie costumed more-or-less before 1920 or so. And many of them aren't villains. (Raise your hand if you think Elizabeth I is the villain in the recent film.)

Abi (#186): Dragons are - or should be - more real and more necessary than the stories in which they appear. Great observation!

I've been working on my Year in Review thing for Locus, so have in mind two very different books that probably won't make the official list but do merit more attention: Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley (ignore the generic title), a YA set in a world where endangered species include the usual lot, along with ichthyasauruses, griffins and dragons; and Precious Dragon by Liz Williams, part of the "Inspector Chen" series whose mix of mystery, a futuristic Singapore, and Oriental supernatural elements make this one of my favorite oddball projects.

Faren @215:
Robin McKinley has another book out? She is on my always-buy list*, but I hadn't been checking.

That's my birthday† wish list started.

-----
* along with Ellen Kushner; others not springing to mind right now
† February, so plenty of time

Lori - I'm sorry for your loss. It never gets any easier to let a beloved pet go; it leave a hole in your heart that aches forever.

Slightly off-topic, you mentioned your other animals (all cats?) searching the house for Marcus. What I have done (on the advice of wiser/more experienced people) is take all the dogs to the vet with me. All of us go in the exam room, and I sit on the floor and hold the afflicted one while the vet administers the shot.

Usually, when we start, all the other dogs are crawling all over my lap*, trying to be the one closest to me, i.e., between me and the dog to be put to sleep. When the drug take effect, they move away from us**. When the vet takes the body away to be cremated, they come back to me, and we all cry together. Then we go home.

None of them have ever searched for the dead dog at the house after doing this. YMMV, but I find it comforting to have the whole pack there.

I realise you have cats, but I think I have heard of people taking them to the appointment, with the same result.

* I have Dachshunds, so multiple dogs on my lap is the default setting. Larger breeds, or less cuddly ones, may respond differently.

** I've been given explanations for this that involve angels and energy fields, but my thought is that they recognise that the body isn't doing what it should - breathing, sounding like a heartbeat, etc. I do find it interesting that they are generally quite accurate as to the time of death, as per the vet with the stethoscope.

R. M. Koske @ 213

Artists need writers, apparently.

Maybe so, but I think artists need the equivalent of editors even more:

"Look, Claes, the pencil isn't enough by itself, it isn't really minimalist if it's 2 stories tall."

or

"Ok, Andy, I think you've worn out the market in soup cans."

When my partner, Eva, was in art school, back in the Lower Cretaceous, she and a friend went to an exhibition where they were moved to stand in front of one painting singing the artist's name to the tune of "Gary, Indiana":

"Robert Indiana, Robert Indiana, Ro---bert Indiana!"

An editor might have pointed out the uses of humor in gaining an audience; lacking one, they were ejected from the exhibition.

Instinctively, I agree about the villainesses-wear-corsets issue. (And have you ever noticed that the real b*tches on soap operas often wear their hair very tightly pulled back? No wonder they're mean, they have headaches!) However, the evil SF women I came up with -- mainly on Stargate -- weren't corseted.

I did notice, though, that Susan in Hogfather* was pretty severely corseted, poor thing. Of course that confirms Susan's comments in 214 about character and historical setting.

*Wonder of wonders, they showed Hogfather on German TV a few days ago! Didn't notice it in time for the afternoon broadcast, but mercifully they repeated it at 1 in the morning, and we were able to record it. Despite the geographical proximity, Germany shows very little British programming whatsoever, so this was a nice surprise.

Speaking of Hogfather, a huge THANK YOU! to whoever mentioned, a couple of open threads back, that it was available at Borders. I was able to snag a copy for my partner, who was not expecting it at all, so it made a very successful Christmas gift.

Now here's an idea which is sure to increase interest in the classics, and possibly insipire a new parlor game for us.

Sound and Sense indeed!

John 221: But NSFW, for certain values of W.

Xopher @ 222: True enough. That probably explains why he isn't asking one of his grad students to do it.

Oh, wait. That's not the sort of NSFW you meant.

John @221:

That is a game for many rooms, but not, perhaps, the parlor*. And yet, my mind is already straying toward another possibility...

-----
* depending, of course, on the story selected

abi @ 224: I knew I liked you!

This ad did brought back fond memories of September, 1975, which is also NSFW, for some values of W (and wouldn't I like to see what W had to do to get through college!)

There's also this one.

abi, tell me now if I gotta stop, 'cause I'm having way too much fun to be deterred if you wait.

Ambar #207: But there was also very-not-evil Tara in a corset.

R. M. Koske #213: I've found that there is absolutely no relation whatsoever between the quality of an artist's work and the quality of his or her artist's statement. Except, of course, in my brother's case, where both are superb.

With respect to the CIA-associated plane full of cocaine that met the ground in Mexico:

Crashing that plane, full of cocaine,
CIA got caught at the wrong speed.
Liars ahead, liars behind,
Extraodinare renditions all brought to mind.

Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey jones is ready, watch your speed.
Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

This old CIA directed crimes
Kidnapping people across border lines
Grab them up in one country
Then others out to prisons under dozens of guns

Crashing that plane, full of cocaine,
CIA got caught at the wrong speed.
Liars ahead, liars behind,
Extraodinare renditions all brought to mind.

Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey jones is ready, watch your speed.
Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

Liars aheads, documents shred,
Take my advice youd be better off dead.
Media pandering to the scum who're in charge
They ignore not matter how large

Crashing that plane, full of cocaine,
CIA got caught at the wrong speed.
Liars ahead, liars behind,
Extraodinare renditions all brought to mind.

Federal crimes on years of spree,
The media lies and the scum are still free.
Come round the bend, dammit when will it end,
The people scream and Cheney's income just gleams.

#227, ethan -
No, of course there's no correlation between the two.

But since most of my exposure to modern art at the moment is on the internet, and consists of small, inadequate photos plus artist's statements...well. In that situation, there's a lot out there that is hard to appreciate, even if it is stunning in person.

Villian in a tight corset: Scarran War Minister Akna, various Farscape episodes and "Peacekeeper Wars." (Is there a subcategory for Villians in Scary Hats?)

R.M. Koske @213,

I think that's a characteristic of art writers in general.

A few years back I was hanging out with a friend: she'd been taking an art class (history of art? watercolors?) at a local community college. She showed me the textbook and asked me how readable I thought it was.

My... word...

Each paragraph stretched over pages, and the sentences were longer than the paragraphs. Mate a Chomsky-generator with image recognition software with a thesaurus with a supercomputer and send the quadruple-helix offspring through a hard-takeoff and maybe, maybe it'd be capable of writing that textbook. To understand it you'd need to bring Pynchon and my 9th-grade diagramming-expert English teacher into the mix.

Just read this in Wired that says "scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness."

What prompted me to post here was: "The research follows the discovery by Siegel that the absence of orexin A appears to cause narcolepsy. That finding pointed to a major role for the peptide's absence in causing sleepiness. It stood to reason that if the deficit of orexin A makes people sleepy, adding it back into the brain would reduce the effects, said Siegel."

Ah, Dawno beat me to the link!

I remember my general-ed art appreciation class included reading stuff like Mondrian on 'plastic art' and 'pure plastic art'. It's a good thing I wasn't intending to become an art critic (or an art professor) because I thought it was pretty much unreadable (and didn't make a lot of sense, either).
I had the same reaction to the 'theory' part of a book on Helaman Ferguson's sculptures. (The sculptures are neat, the theory - not.)

R. M. Koske @ 229:

But since most of my exposure to modern art at the moment is on the internet

I scoffed at much modern and contemporary art till I saw it in person. If you live anywhere near a good museum, go.

I was amazed how many things that looked silly or stupid in reproduction took my breath away standing in front of them.

John Arkansawyer, I had a totally abstract and intellectual appreciation of the Modern until I stood in front of Pollock's Grayed Rainbow when I was seventeen. The Art Intsitute of Chicago had hung it in a small room, so that one saw it as one sees the sky at the horizon on a flat plain. The earth moved. The other stuff I saw that day- Picasso's Blue Guitarist, for instance, and Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jette- were much as I expected them to be, but the Pollock is what I go back to time and again, when I want to remember the potential emotional and sensual impact of painting.

#235, John A Arkansawyer -

I feel like I've hit a point in my life where I can't grow anymore unless I start getting out there and doing it instead of reading about it.* Art (of all kinds) is on the list, definitely.

*Why this comes as any kind of surprise to me, I don't know.

xeger @ #198:
So, out of curiosity, what color combination(s) do you not find migraine-inducing on a monitor?

This is what I said after reading Robert La Fosse's autobiography: "It reads as if written by someone who's devoted his entire life to nonverbal expression."

So too with painters and sculptors. Don't expect me to paint, or them to write.

But I don't try to paint and assume that because I'm a decent writer what I paint will be good enough.

For those in the Bay Area, SFMOMA has three outstanding shows on right now: boxes by Joseph Cornell; immense, amazing backlit photos by Jeff Wall; and mind-bending installations by Olafur Eliasson. And yes, all are much better in person than on the web.

For whatever it might be worth .. between the time I start remembering things and the time I moved out of my parents' house, I think there were exactly two non-modern pieces of art that I saw either at home or at my grandparents' house. When you grow up with it, it looks pretty normal ....

Xopher #239: But I don't try to paint and assume that because I'm a decent writer what I paint will be good enough.

The difference is that writers aren't expected to provide their cover art, but artists generally are expected to provide their statements. Stupid, but true.

Resting in less than 10 feet of Caribbean seawater, the wreckage of Quedagh Merchant, the ship abandoned by the scandalous 17th century pirate Captain William Kidd as he raced to New York in an ill-fated attempt to clear his name, has escaped discovery -- until now.

An underwater archaeology team from Indiana University announced today (Dec. 13) the discovery of the remnants. IU marine protection authority Charles Beeker said his team has been licensed to study the wreckage and to convert the site into an underwater preserve, where it will be accessible to the public.

My difficulty with modern art isn't necessarily that I don't like it, but more that it seemed in school like they were always telling us there was all kinds of meaning and layers in it that I just don't see. Mondrian's art is supposed to be quite religious in theme, I think. But for me it is just beautiful paintings of well-proportioned squares of color.

If you show me a Reubens, I know enough about human emotions that I can often see the meaning. Add in a little knowledge of symbolism and mythology, and I "get" most representational art. But to understand modern art the way we were told we should in school, it seems like you have to read and comprehend the artist's statements.

When I allow myself to deal with modern art on appearance alone, I get by with it just fine.

R. M. Koske #244: Again, there are (at least) three different things involved here: the artist's intentions, what the critics see, and what you the individual see. And again, these things are often completely unrelated. And that's fine. Once one realizes that, one can appreciate all kinds of things one couldn't before (or at least that's how it happened for me).

This is true of every field of human expression. If it (looks, sounds, whatever) good, it is good.

I'd like to report that the leek, apple and sausage pie reheats very nicely.

Why are there leftovers if it's that's good? Because we did the feasts of thousands on Christmas Day. Invited eight, got six, had food for 20. There was leftover prime rib!

The guy whose house I almost rented is an abstract painter.

Usually, abstract painting does nothing for me. But I've spent a couple of afternoons in his company, talking about aesthetic theory and looking at his work. They are intense sessions, very wearing for both of us, but in the course of them I've learned a lot about his work. I've discovered that I react very strongly to some of it, and that he is very interested in my individual reaction to what he does. It often surprises him, but it's never "wrong".

So, basically, what ethan said in comment 245.

Villains in tight corsets: No one has mentioned the cast headlined by Rocky Horror?

#245, ethan & #247, abi -

*nods* After my post, I happened on a video where a man is stalked by a giant cement figure.* As I watched, I thought about how opaque it was but how I wasn't worried about whether I'd be able to unpack it, because as with representational art, I feel like I have a vocabulary to draw on.

As I thought about it, I realized - I don't have an abstract vocabulary because I haven't tried.

I told myself that representational vocabulary comes easy because it's familiar, but that's not necessarily true - I had to be taught about color meanings and symbolism and myth. So I need to be looking at abstracts with this in mind - what is vocabulary the artist is using? It could be curves, jagged edges, chance, precision, or whatever. I've been coasting with representational stuff because it is "easy" and abstract can require you to actually think.

For some reason that hadn't occurred to me before.

The idea of the three different views of a piece (artist, critic, and me) is a similarly obvious revelation. I knew it about books. But applying it to visual arts? That's new.

Thanks everyone who commented. It never felt possible for me to do more than parrot back criticism on the abstract stuff. Now I feel like it is something that can be for me, too.

*From boingboing, Terminus - you'll need to select it from that page.

Carol: Are there villains in RHPS? Arguably Riff-Raff, but he doesn't appear in a corset.

#245 ::: ethan

R. M. Koske #244: Again, there are (at least) three different things involved here: the artist's intentions, what the critics see, and what you the individual see. And again, these things are often completely unrelated. And that's fine. Once one realizes that, one can appreciate all kinds of things one couldn't before (or at least that's how it happened for me).

This is true of every field of human expression. If it (looks, sounds, whatever) good, it is good.

Five Steps in the Creative Process:
1) Original concept
2) Game plan for creating it
3) Actual creation sequence*
4) Finished work
5) What the work evokes

* modified by further ideas and the intrusion of reality that can be misbehavior of materials and/or accidents pushed through to new territory.

People tend to think "art" is 1 & 4. 2,3 and 5 are where amazing things happen.

Singing the artist's name to "Gary, Indiana" also happened at the Hastings College Gallery in the early 70's. We weren't thrown out, though.

As I see it, art is largely about craft, perception, and emotion; intellect and conceptualization are secondary. So the problem I have with a lot of modern art is that it is about conceptualization first, and craft, perception, and emotion secondarily, if at all.

An example from a show I saw a few years ago*. It consisted of large black and white photographs of various places like fire escapes, roofs, alleys, and so on in Manhattan. The photographs were not very good in terms of composition or other technical characteristics, and none of them had a central subject; there were no human or animal figures or even objects like cars, lampposts, or dustbins. Just walls, floors and windows.

But, says the catalog, each photo is distinguished by having been taken while people were having sex just out of sight, behind doors or around corners. There were several dozen of these photos.

So the salient characteristic of these photos, the thing they were "about" was something that could not be perceived from the photos themselvs, but had to be told to you outside the context of the work. I think this is bass-ackwards: it should be possible to get everything you need to appreciate at least one level of the work from the work itself. Certainly bringing in outside context and information can deepen your appreciation for the work, but it shouldn't be necessary for any appreciation of the work.

This dominance of concept in art is not caused by the lack of ability on the part of the artist to verbalize zir intentions clearly. It's about the verbalization, clear or not, being paramount over the execution of the work. And I call it spinach.

* Sorry, I can't remember the name of the artist.

Xopher @ #239:
So too with painters and sculptors. Don't expect me to paint, or them to write.

But I don't try to paint and assume that because I'm a decent writer what I paint will be good enough.

(with apologies for tooting my own horn unattractively)

This is something I've noticed makes me stand out from a lot of my dance friends - I not only dance, I want to study it and write about it, and (I hope) I have the verbal ability to do this successfully. Most of them have no desire at all to do this and possibly no ability; judging by some of the handouts I've seen the latter may be the case even for the people who do good research and communicate well orally (good stuff in, printed garbage out; WHY???) I may have to add a fifth element to my dance-teacher-scholar grading rubric.

Hence my desire to blog, and my possibly egomaniacal conviction that I can singlehandedly produce enough verbiage about various aspects of dance to make an interesting blog. I just hope I don't prove to be an example of what Xopher's describing!

Bruce 252: Sorry, I can't remember the name of the artist.

I bet no one will. That sounds like a pretty crummy piece of art.

But note, the art here was not photography. The art WAS the concept.

I think it's very bad art.* But that's not quite the same as saying it's not art.

*And because the concept, not the photographs, was the art, I can judge the piece as art without seeing the photographs!

Carol @ 248: But those are the good guys. And girls. And, well, whatever they are, they're good ones.

And two extra-special bonus links, found via Dennis Perrin: One and Two. View them in order.

Well, so much for respect for the current incumbent of the US Presidency:
This ad gets right in there.

When an insurance company television ad can feel no shame about displaying a double for the Deciderer in such a manner, he's lost Middle America for sure.

They even got the dog's expression right.

Bruce Cohen @ 252 -

But, says the catalog, each photo is distinguished by having been taken while people were having sex just out of sight, behind doors or around corners.

They said that with a straight face?

Perpetrators of such idiocy should lined up an whipped. Just out of sight, of course.

Susan @253:
Having read - and followed* - one of your dancing instruction sheets, I look forward to the way you will be writing about dancing.

-----
* alone, with my laptop on one arm, in the darkened living room of a borrowed flat, with all the lights of Amsterdam about me

Xopher @ 254: *And because the concept, not the photographs, was the art, I can judge the piece as art without seeing the photographs!

I have to disagree here. I can imagine this piece giving me a creepy feeling of voyeurism, if the photographs were handled correctly (which might mean something other than ordinary aesthetic value).

In general, judging conceptual art by reading about it is a big mistake. I can guarantee you that it won't work for 4'33" or X For Henry Flynt, for example.

Bruce Cohen @ 252: I think this is bass-ackwards: it should be possible to get everything you need to appreciate at least one level of the work from the work itself.

Who says the statement about things offscreen isn't part of the work?

I don't give a rat's ass about the "meaning" of modern art. I interact with it solely on the basis of whether it makes esthetic sense to me. Some of it does. Rather a lot of it doesn't. I don't expect anyone else to have exactly the same feelings I do about a particular piece either, because it's all entirely subjective.

Tim 259: Hmm, I think you may be right about that. 4'33" definitely doesn't work that way...but then it doesn't work if you know in advance how it's supposed to go, either. I need to think about that one.

Coming to this as an "artist" (whatever that means).

I'm with Xopher: the photography show was probably crap. Nothing is gained (IMO) by being told sex is happening offscreen.

I can walk down my block, on any given night, and there will be sex happening offscreen. A picture of the house gains nothing because of it.

Which means the "Art" is there because someone thought telling the viewer there were people performing just offscreen (since the photographer had to get them there to be sure of having them there; if he wasn't just making it up) would give them a purient thrill.

Which is cheap-assed art, if you ask me.

Could such a concept be well done? Yes. But I think the people need to be manifest in someway (and they don't need to be actually having sex; that's immaterial to the art, because the viewer will fill in the blanks with what the viewer thinks those arrangements of bodyparts/people mean).

When I was studying communications theory we were told there were several parts to the process.

The Sender
The Message
The Signal
The Interference
The Receiver

Everyone of those parts add, or detracts, or changes the message.

The part we were told to rememeber is there is no message which doesn't have interference, and the end result is that what the receiver "hears" is the message. If you need the message to be just so, then you need to introduce feedback to the system, so that changes, from interference, can be corrected.

Artists statements are, usually, an attempt to provide reduced interference; by telling the audience what was being attempted.

My statement is, generally, "I take pictures. I try to show you, what it was I saw in my mind's eye when I tripped the shutter."

Which is true. I'm a painfull representational photographer, but what I am trying to represent is how it looked, to me

Xopher @ 261: Not having ever been surprised by 4'33", I can't say for sure, but I think I got more out of it knowing the drill. The theatrical shock seems like a distraction more than anything; the experience of listening to "ordinary" sound as music is the important part, for me.

Terry @ 262: Nothing is gained (IMO) by being told sex is happening offscreen.

How is it different, in principle, from the Vietnam War Memorial, which also requires being told "offscreen" what the point of the list of names is?

Tim, 264: Maybe because the Vietnam War and its many needless deaths is waaaaay more important than random people having sex?

Tim Walters ... because that list of names needs a context.

It's also a case of historical arc... there are lots of lists of names, usually local, of those who went off to war and didn't come home. This one is just larger in scale.

Knowing the reason for the names puts them into context.

People having sex, or eating, or sleeping, just off camera doesn't do that. The door gains no context from it, nor does the warehouse, the empty field, or the changing room.

It's, IMO, schtick. It's an attempt to add meaning where none is.

I like photos. I look at lots of them. Good photos have a "meaning" It may be that they are pretty, or record a moment, or preserve a fading piece of something (decrepit strutures, soon for the wrecking ball). Perhaps they tell a tale. Nothing is without context.

But a discrete thing, offscreen, isn't context. Context is the greater whole, and couple having fun isn't a greater whole.

Perhaps; as a gestalt, the installation works. Maybe there's a message that, "sex happens" and that was worth trying to say.

If so, as described, I think this was a poor attempt.

TexAnne: I'm not sure the merits of the deaths and sex aren't equivalent. I'm just not sure the sex needs to be memorialised.

TexAnne @ 265: The importance of the subject seems irrelevant to the aesthetic question.

If the Vietnam War Memorial works despite leaving the war offscreen (and I definitely think it does) then we can only conclude that leaving the subject offscreen is not a deal-breaker.

Terry @ 266: People having sex, or eating, or sleeping, just off camera doesn't do that. The door gains no context from it, nor does the warehouse, the empty field, or the changing room.

Not much I can say except that I disagree. I don't see any difference in mechanism between this and the memorial.

Terry Karney @ 262

I agree with what you said, except that I don't think it has much to do with whether the art is representational or not. I like a lot of representational art, and a lot of abstract art as well; my own photos tend to be a mix of both; my idols are Cartier-Bresson, who was representational, and Weston, who often wasn't.

It's not so much that conceptual art isn't art; though you can probably get some really heated arguments going about particular works. It's that it's largely bad art.

And that's what I see as the difference between the Vietnam Memorial and the photographs I described: even without the context, the Wall is an imposing and affecting work, the context is such as to increase these effects, not create them. And the context of the Wall may or may not be more important than that of people having sex around the corner; I suspect that arguing that isn't going to change any opinions in any case. But the context of the Wall is considerably more universal* and has a longer lasting and deeper effect on the viewer. In other words, better art.

* By which I mean that more people of more different cultures and temperaments will find it interesting and affecting than will find hidden sex affecting.

Not exactly a \villain/ in a corset -- but wasn't the dress that took "Princess Lily" over to the dark side in Legend cut&wired for display?

The converse of the evil empress in the corset is the evil overlord in the high-necked tunic or shirt-jacket or imperial robes. You never see an evil overlord in a t-shirt, scruffy shorts, and flip-flops.

Maybe the root of all evil is uncomfortable clothes.

My favorite book about art theory was Thomas Wolfe's The Painted Word.

In short, describing how art that revolted from a literalism requiring a classical education to appreciate what was being depicted (allusions to Greek and Biblical myths and moments in history) ended up requiring knowledge of the design theory which motivated its creation to appreciate the art.

Northland, #145, I emailed Chwedyk and he says he has another saur story almost ready to send out and that he has plans for more. I suggested a collection.

Tim Walters, #264, it's the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In order to get there, you have to go by the National Park Service booth as well as private volunteer booths with folks who will help you find names and make rubbings and so forth. Those folks will also be POW & MIA rememberers. There's also a bookstore and concessions. There's two statues that are part of the memorial: The Vietnam Women's Memorial and the Three Servicemen Memorial. I think it would be difficult for a competent adult to get to the Wall and not know what it is.

Marilee @ 272: it's the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Oops, sorry.

I think it would be difficult for a competent adult to get to the Wall and not know what it is.

Knowing what it is isn't the issue--Bruce knew what the exhibit in question was. I agree that if there's information you need to make a piece of art work, that information should be included. I just don't think it necessarily needs to be depicted.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose an exhibit consists of several unremarkable portraits of children. So far, so boring. Then you read the program and find out one of the following:

--the children all grew up to be porn stars
--the children all grew up to be Nobel prize winners
--the children were the last to be born in slavery in their respective states

or pick one of your own.

According to Bruce's and Terry's aesthetic, as I understand it, no matter what information we might learn about the children from the program, it doesn't make the exhibit worthwhile, because it's not in the pictures, and the pictures aren't that good by themselves.

I say it's at least worth trying to see if you can get something new out of the pictures with that information in mind.

Tim Walters: No, you have mistaken what I think is the issue.

Depending on the portraits, the extra information might change them; that would depend, a lot, on how it was presented, what the artist did with the subjects, and how I feel about those things.

That gets into the issue of reciever, and interference (one's biases are a type of interference).

I, personally, don't think that what a person is doing, off camera, is relevant to the picture. They can be eating, sleeping, killing, harvesting the beets, or having sex. Unless, in someway, that can be shown to be relevant to the image at hand, I don't care.

The context of the names (on The Wall) is relevant to the it. I am hard pressed to imagine an entire show of photographs which have off camera people doing anything which is relevant to the pictures.

From Bruce's description, he didn't find it all that relevant either. For me, what's going on, out of frame, is only relevant if I, the viewer, am in some way drawn to interact with the out of screen elements.

That usually requires something happening, in the frame, which draws my mind out of it. I don't think being told that "people were doing 'x'" counts, because a picture is, absent some careful design, a thing complete. The artist choses what is, or isn't, in the frame (this is the way in which photos can lie; but that's something else altogether). The artist chooses what to leave out. This artist seems to want to have his cake, and eat it too.

The Wall is an arresting object, all by itself. A list of names is different from a photograph of a thing. The listing of names demands a context. One could put a label across the top, or a panel in the middle, which explains it.

That would be a different Wall. It would, in some ways, be the same.

The Tomb of the Unkowns is somewhat the same. The guard shows that it's a place apart. The rituals tell the ignorant that this is a special place.

The Wall's imposition on the landscape does much the same. If one wonders why it's there, one can find out, but it's an affecting thing, in it's own right.

From the description Bruce gave, he didn't find this photos to do that. What affect you said it might have was a frisson of the forbidden. You say that, were the photos properly handled (which you also say you aren't sure how such could be done) you might get a creepy thrill of voyuerism.

I think that can be done; I just think the voyeuristic elements need to be in the frame.

Note, I've not said it isn't art. Like Xopher, I think it's bad art. Not merely because it requires a grammar the viewer may not have learned (as with modern, and abstract arts) but because, absent a wink, and a nudge, from the artist, the viewer can't learn what's going on.

At that point the photos have to stand on their own merit, as photos. The concept is lost, and with it the thrill, or whatever else, they are supposed to evoke.

Bruce (StM): I like lots of non-representational art, I just don't practice it. Pollack, Mondrian and Kandinsky thrill me to pieces. Seeing their stuff floors me. I can just sit and stare at it for hours (oftimes to my companions dismay).

Man Ray is wonderful.

But it's not my way of showing the world.

re 271: I hadn't read The Painted Word, though I have read From Bauhaus to Our House, which makes similar arguments. But I'd come to similar conclusions on my own. It's bloody obvious to me that a lot of the meaning in conceptual art is in its opacity. It's important that bourgeois beauty-seekers not "get" it, or else it loses its significance as a class distinction.

C. Wingate @ 275: I've read neither book, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that you've misread the argument. (I know, the thread for hubris is over here. So sue me.) What I take from Rob Rusick's summary of Wolfe's argument is that it's hard to create great art that can exist and be appreciated without a cultural context. Maybe even that it's not possible to do so at all.

Anyway, my encounter with conceptual art at the Yoko Ono retrospective at SFMOMA showed me that in her case, the art was not generally opaque. A little of it was, if anything, a bit obvious.

Terry @262: I'm with Xopher: the photography show was probably crap. Nothing is gained (IMO) by being told sex is happening offscreen. [...] Could such a concept be well done? Yes. But I think the people need to be manifest in someway (and they don't need to be actually having sex; that's immaterial to the art, because the viewer will fill in the blanks with what the viewer thinks those arrangements of bodyparts/people mean).

How about these photographs? They were voyeuristically taken with infrared without the subjects' knowledge, centering on people having sex in a public park-- but the photos are of the voyeurs surreptitiously watching the sex, not of the sexual acts themselves (with the exception of any voyeurs who were thus inspired).

C Wingate: I wasn't going to drag in that aspect of the question. There are arguments to be made that making art hard to understand limits its appeal to the masses, and so keeps the value of patronizing artists up.

Julie: those pictures work for me. They might even work if the couple having sex weren't in the frame.

See my comments at #274, where I discuss the in the frame intimations of things outside the frame.

Terry @262: I'm with Xopher: the photography show was probably crap. Nothing is gained (IMO) by being told sex is happening offscreen. [...] Could such a concept be well done? Yes. But I think the people need to be manifest in someway (and they don't need to be actually having sex; that's immaterial to the art, because the viewer will fill in the blanks with what the viewer thinks those arrangements of bodyparts/people mean).

How about these photographs? They were voyeuristically taken with infrared without the subjects' knowledge, centering on people having sex in a public park-- but the photos are of the voyeurs surreptitiously watching the sex, not of the sexual acts themselves (with the exception of any voyeurs who were thus inspired).

(sorry for the multiple post-- having weird network trouble)

Terry @ 274: No, you have mistaken what I think is the issue.

But...

I think that can be done; I just think the voyeuristic elements need to be in the frame.

...is exactly what I thought you thought the issue was.

As a matter of taste, I might agree with you; I tend to be a sensualist, especially in my own work. As a principle it seems unjustified.

Over the years, I've come to the view that the balance between open and hidden information is a critical factor in reactions to art. The pictures of the renaissance were part of a world of patronage that was laden with shared knowledge of the symbolism the artists used, but it is still within the picture, and the picture is still filled with information.

Today, it almost seems that the artists struggle to translate information from their mindspace into the picture. Either the common symbolic structure doesn't exist, or it is so arcane as to be useless.

And poutting this info in the gallery programme is, I think, very close to cheating.

Now, Tim, your thought experiment: you are using a documentary approach, and calling it art. This isn't an impossibility, but by hiding the information you're relying on the surprise to make the art, and I don't think that's the right line to take. It's a sort of gloating cleverness, sneering at the audience over their ignorance.

re 276: I think I was a bit too subtle in my use of "get it". What I mean is that the wrong kind of reading is to try to appreciate it aesthetically, and that's what the "bourgeois beauty-seekers" do. It doesn't matter whether these people get it in the sense of catching the conceptual message, because their disdain for that stigmatizes them as being outside the circle.

In between posts I was looking at some criticism of Norman Rockwell. And it struck me that the darling of art critic world of the moment, Edward Hopper, is every bit as sentimental as Rockwell, if not more so. The difference is that the sentiments are more acceptable. I could take that further and treat conceptual art as having nothing but sentiment, with the aesthetic stripped entirely away. The opacity of this lies not in the message being hard to decode, but in the insistence that art is necessarily aesthetic. Thus the beauty-seekers do not see it as art at all, and that's how they don't get it.

I'm not quite that bad, but for me it commits an even more unforgivable sin: it's boring. To change fields for a minute, Benjamin Forgey is hot to preserve the central District of Columbia library, because it's Mies van de Rohe's only building in DC. Well, uh, yeah, except that it's an utterly unremarkable three story black box set in an unwelcoming plaza. Even by Bauhaus standards, it's a discouraging building: not so ugly that I want to tear it down on sight (that would be the militantly hostile brutalism of the FBI building), but rather totally unable to inspire in me any interest in its fate. It has been reduced to conceptual art, a mere symbol of the merit of the International Style.

Tim Walters: I thought your idea of my problem was that, "Not much I can say except that I disagree. I don't see any difference in mechanism between this and the memorial. and I do see a difference in mechanism.

I also see a difference in the implicit context, a list of names has to be contextulised. It can be internal context (say a date, as in the memorial in Nürnburg for the Franco-Prussian War (which is, come to think of it interesting, and strange as Bavaria wasn't part of the German Empire yet, but my mind wanders) or some bit of statuary (say a Warship, for the cenotaph of a ship lost at sea).

The viewer expects to have that list explained.

With a picture that's not the case. The artist, as I said before, has complete control of what is in, or out, of the frame.

It's not that the picture can't work in such a way as to imply things out of frame, but that when those things are the subject, the compact between artist and audience is broken.

Tim Walters @ 281

As a principle it seems unjustified.

I can't speak for Terry, but he might agree with me that it's not a question of principle so much as an empiric rule that doing things this way isn't likely to produce good art. There isn't much about art that can be reduced to principles, in part because it's not really possible to define art to everyone's satisfaction, but 30 millennia of producing art* has left us with some rules of thumb that generally work.

* I'm counting from Lascaux

Dave Bell @ 282: Now, Tim, your thought experiment: you are using a documentary approach, and calling it art. This isn't an impossibility, but by hiding the information you're relying on the surprise to make the art, and I don't think that's the right line to take. It's a sort of gloating cleverness, sneering at the audience over their ignorance.

I didn't mean to imply that it was hidden, or a surprise. Put the info on the wall next to the photos if you prefer.

Terry Karney @ 284: a list of names has to be contextulised.

Why is it OK to use a list of names that needs context, but not an image that needs context?

but that when those things are the subject, the compact between artist and audience is broken.

I don't think I signed that compact. :)

Bruce 252
As I see it, art is largely about craft, perception, and emotion; intellect and conceptualization are secondary. So the problem I have with a lot of modern art is that it is about conceptualization first, and craft, perception, and emotion secondarily, if at all.

I don't agree--consider the image of the Dutch master with the device in front of him that gridded the scene he was painting and projected it onto the table, or DaVinci with measurements, etc.

I was having a conversation with a friend who's a singer-songwriter and some other friends about words versus tunes in creating with words and/or tune.... that is "do you get the words first, or the turn first, or do you get one with or without the other? She and I, and another mutual friend, do all of the above--words without tune, tune without word, and words tune/tune words arriving enmeshed with one another.

That's not quite an "art? science? Both?" discussion, but it's a corollary in ways--there is music I loathed because I dislike the sound of it, and songs I dislike because I don't like the words/find the sound of the words annoying or failing in terms of rhythm/meter/assonance-consonce-rhyme. There's a song "The Soldier and the Queen" that shoves way too many syllables clumsily in for the tune and it's an annoyance/distraction for me.

That goes between art and science--rhythm and meter are measurable--metric even--things. Freeform verse can have its own freeform rhythm and meter, but once applying a formal structure to it (the villainelle [spelling] that some folks in Making Light are quite facile with defeats me because I don;t -remember- what the form -is-, and a form that I can't even -remember- the format for, isn't one I'm likely to plan to implement! ...naming conventions and I have never much appreciated one another, one of the worst problems I had in freshman physics was trying to keep attached the supposed identy of Hertz = cycle per second. Cycle per second was to me a -functional- name, "Hertz" was arbitrarily slapping a not-meaningful nonfunctional -label- on something that had a functional meaning, and the functional definition and the human LABEL just were NOT sticking together for me... the association wasn't there. Now, calling a Science Fiction something or other Award a Hugo did stick for me, because the name "Hugo Gernsback" was someone who was a science fiction editor who was tied closely into the field and community of science fiction, and the awards were given a vernacular label which there were lots of connecting lines for....

The craft, perception, and emotion and the intellect and conceptualization are all enmeshed together in tying "Hugo Gernsback, progenitor of modern SF" to "set of awards in science fiction that recognize Gernback's role in effecting modern science fiction."

Right at the moment I'm sitting on the mattress of a bed which has four turned-on-a-lathe-and-carved-and-then-hand-carved-not-turning, then hand-finished, bed posts which are functional bedposts--they're holding up the weight of the mattress. The carving was all done to -drawings-, it wasn't done without elaborate drawings done first--particular not with -four- posts that are relatively elaborately carved, and the direction of the carvings, different on the different posts to mirror-image the adjacent posts.

My point is that art often involves a lot more calculation and -science- that gets recognized casally looking at the results, and that the conceptualization and intellect are involved from the get-go with the creation of arts, often at a very conscious and deliberate level, as in, "okay, how I am going to make that and what are the constraints I have to work with of materials properties, margines of errors/tolerances, radiusing, how thick/thin are the limits of my ability to cut/carve and the material strength issue (make something too thin and it's going to break easily, is one constraint), etc.?"

Carol 251

Five Steps in the Creative Process:
1) Original concept
2) Game plan for creating it
3) Actual creation sequence*
4) Finished work
5) What the work evokes

Some of those steps aren't always conscious ones, though, particularly is someone is "doodling." There are people I've met who seem unable to face a blank piece of paper to put anything on it/design anything without someone else first providing them a detailed specification designating exactly what the result is supposed to do and what size, shape, and weight it is going to be. At the other extreme, I've been a member of design teams working with a set of design goals and trading off size, shape, weight, power, performance, computer power, radiated power, development risk, cost, labor effort, etc. etc. etc. to come up with several candidate concepts and then merging concepts to get to a final design.

What's conscious and what's unconcious in the process depends on the individual people, the formality, what gets created, the degree of existing familiarity and knowledge (there are reasons for the term "the state of the art... I worked with people who had instrumentation so unique, in one case the people called up that National Institute of Standards and Technology to ask about equipment calibration, and NIST unknowlingly tried to refer the people back to themselves, and in another, the only other similar system in existence was in Germany.

Pushing the state of the art means a different set of rules in some ways, than creating something in a well-trod area of endeavor... it reminds me of a set of art a SF/F art collector bought long ago, before the light-sensitivity of some type of color medium was well-known--it turned out that the medium was particularly sensitive to sunlight and faded but the fact that the medium sas that susceptible, hadn't been known when the artist did the artwork... the problem got discovered because the art faded in the sunlight over time. The less that's known, the more risk there is of that sort of thing....

And longevity is another consideration, there is art which truly is ephemeral, such as the arrangement of food artistically on a plate with the intent that the food be eaten....

Terry Karney @262 --Artists' statements are, usually, an attempt to provide reduced interference; by telling the audience what was being attempted.

Sometimes artists' statements are interference, if what they say their work "means" is drastically different from how I'm experiencing it. (There's no help for that, I suppose, and it's not a criticism, just an observation.)

Rob Rusick@210: I doubt that they would go to the trouble of recording and mixing a new theme just for a one-off; I'll be surprised if this isn't the opening credits music at least through the end of series 4.

I've listened to the new theme a couple more times, and it's grown on me a little; I think my initial strong reaction was in part the OMGWTFBBQ factor. It still seems quite far from an improvement, though.

Wesley@212: I really like Murray Gold's music in general and have bought both CDs. I was surprised that he would do that to the theme.

Xopher @ #261: 4'33" ... doesn't work if you know in advance how it's supposed to go

I have never found that to be the case. What is your understanding of "how it's supposed to go"?

Abi et al. upthread on the topic of Light, lack of quality thereof...

A quick thought. There is good evidence that blue light has the strongest effect on circadian rhythms*, thus the new emphasis on blue LED light boxes.

The GoLite ($100+) and the ?name? blue-LED light bulb ($60, marketed as a GoLite replacement) are expensive. Driving around tonight, I'm seeing a fairly inexpensive source of ready-to-use large sets of blue LEDs. Xmas lights could be a less-expensive way to test out how blue LEDs work for onesself.

---
* perhaps I commented on this recently? Can't look at the moment.

Some of you may recall that I volunteered to help clean up comment spams on Real Live Preacher. I'm pleased to report that over 5 days from Dec. 22 to 27, all of the spams got deleted -- and there were a lot of them, something like 130,000! By contrast, there are about 10,500 real live comments.

If I may brag a little here (I'm checking myself from doing so over there) I killed about 13,000 of them. At that, there's someone else who -- if I'm reading the logs correctly -- did almost twice as much as I.

If I were omnipotent, people who write spambots and people who use them would get a little implant in their head that would detect any speech act by or to them and respond by activating a painfully loud siren.

R.M. Koske @ 244: "My difficulty with modern art isn't necessarily that I don't like it, but more that it seemed in school like they were always telling us there was all kinds of meaning and layers in it that I just don't see."

I squint my eyes warily at any art that requires a college degree to interpret "correctly." There's a marked tendency among artists of any discipline to produce art that's largely just responding to earlier works,* rather than trying to communicate with average people. Once the art becomes so self-referential that merely appreciating art becomes a skill in its own right, it's hard to see what the point of the whole endeavor is.

Referentialism is something that every artist engages in to some degree, and isn't entirely bad,** but at the extreme level (which is where modern art has existed, in my estimation, since My Pet Rock) it just creates a bunch of pointless, ineffectual noise for an elite cadre to sip wine at. It starts being about who can be cleverer than whom, not about communicating anything meanigful. You lose the attention of the vast mass of humanity, and they pursue other, more accessible and rewarding forms of art. You're just a courtier in Heian Japan, writing witty poetry full of allusions to other poetry and congragulating yourself on how neat your kimono is.

Not to say that modern art is totally bankrupt--there are some things being done right now that are quite amazing. But I don't feel it's my job as a viewer to get properly educated so that I can appreciate how deep and meaningful some dude's art is. It's his job to communicate with me, not the other way around.

*An inevitable consequence of the fact that the impulse to create art is often itself a reaction to art--a "Wow, I want to do that!" sort of a thing. (Or alternately, "I could do better than that.")

**It can be a useful and necessary shorthand when trying to create complex works.

On concept as art:

There is an installation (and here you know this is Concept Art) that one enters through a turnstile. As you push through, it clicks forward, and you enter a room. It is in the basement of the museum, and directly in front of you there is a huge jack pressing horizontally against the wall. But it isn't just pressing against the wall, it is pressing against one of the museum's load-bearing pillars, slowly driving it out of alignment. As you continue to look, you see that the jack is attached to the turnstile: each person who enters the room moves the jack infinitesimally forward.

So here you stand, having just done your bit to destroy the museum. You stare at the mechanism that fills the small room. Is there any aesthetic element at play? None. And yet, the emotional and psychological impact is undeniable. You are forced to question why you have done this: why did you enter, knowing that it would help destroy the museum? Was your titillation worth it? What is your relationship to this? Is it yours? Is it your fault?

I'm not of the opinion that art built conceptually is inherently inferior to art built on aesthetic principles.

heresiarch @ 293

Once the art becomes so self-referential that merely appreciating art becomes a skill in its own right, it's hard to see what the point of the whole endeavor is.

Professional development, and expansion of one's portfolio and CV. "All the better to get patronage, my dear".

The business of art, as opposed to the making or the viewing of it, is largely about marketing. As in many marketing environments, modern art has entered into an an (perhaps several) arms race in which successive works are described in ever more abstract and dissonant terms, in order to to shock or titillate the viewer so that the work and the artist attract more attention than others.

I'm not saying that there's no place for business or marketing in art, clearly they're necessary parts of the economic system that has evolved to create patronage and therefore economic resources for art's creation. But arms races are infamous for making parts of systems grow far out of proportion to their inherit importance to the system as a whole.

heresiarch @ 294

I'm not of the opinion that art built conceptually is inherently inferior to art built on aesthetic principles.

I agree, but I think we might have different ideas about the meaning of "inherent" in this context. As I said a little upthread, I don't see this as a question of principle or of the inherent nature of art, but as a rule of thumb that seems to be largely true: conceptual art is less likely, IMO, to be good art. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and that some of them fall into the category of "depends on means to convey the import of the art which are brittle and subject to failure as primary communication mechanisms".

In my experience, the installation you describe is quite rare in its subtlety and power; most conceptual doesn't lead to the kind of questioning of purpose and basic context that this one does, but rather leaves one (me, at least) with a feeling of having been scammed by getting something less than what was promised.

Paula Lieberman @ 287

I don't think we're really disagreeing here, but I do think I haven't been as clear as I need to be, and you may have misunderstood some of what I was saying.

When I said, "art is largely about craft, perception, and emotion; intellect and conceptualization are secondary", I was referring to art as perceived by the viewer, or as considered as a product by the artist, when the artist is concerned with how the viewer will perceive and react to the art. The tools and techiques the artist uses to create the work are very different: art is in large part about communication of feelings, perceptions, emotions, etc. The means by which an artist plans and implements that communication are often highly intellectual, rational, and measured. I think it can be said with some truth that art is to psychology as engineering is to physics: art is a discipline used to engineer desired mental and emotional states by (usually) indirect means of manipulating perceptions.

That's not to say at all that intellect has no place in the perception and appreciation of a work of art. But it is true as a consequence of the structure of the human nervous system that the time scales of direct perception and intellectual analysis are different, and the impact and immediacy of the two are different. The way we perceive art is a multi-step process: first direct perception; we see, feel, touch, taste, hear, smell the work. Then we react to those perceptions with feelings and emotions*. Reason is then brought to bear to analyze the perceptions, feelings, and emotions, and their relationships to each other. At each stage, the results can feed back to direct the operation of the previous stage, so that the results evolve with time and engagement with the work. For instance, a feeling of incompleteness (in shape, composition, etc.) might cause the viewer to look at another part of the work, where new perceptions will be acquired.

Your reaction to ugly words and meter, for instance, is not one I would consider rational or intellectual. It's partly perceptual (hearing pitch and perceiving known language) and partly at the level of integration of different perceptions (the interaction of tempo, meter, and word sound) into a gestalt that you can react to and analyze. Even if the words were nonsense, so there was no intellectual component at all, you would still react to ugliness in the sound.

* I arbitrarily distinguish between feelings and emotions on the basis of immediacy and duration: feelings are more immediate, last less time unless reinforced, and are less complex and more directly connected to perception.

Paula Leiberman (#287): And longevity is another consideration.... The NYT looks at that from another angle in this article on the actual vs. subjective lifespans of famous composers. It's not all about "live fast die young" types -- some minds are still active at 60 or 70, while others have said their whole piece by 35. I'd never considered it quite that way before.

Bruce @ 295: Yeah, the engine of the modern art business seems to be driven by the perception that by buying a piece of trendy, critically-acclaimed art, you're buying a certificate of your rarified, elite taste. It's inaccessability is a feature, not a bug.

@ 296: "but as a rule of thumb that seems to be largely true: conceptual art is less likely, IMO, to be good art."

Though I understand your position, I'm not sure I agree. I think your perception is at least partially the product of Sturgeon's Law: conceptual art is much newer, and we are still being deluged in the 90% that's crap, whereas aesthetic art has had centuries to accumulate stunning works and weed out the junk.

(The more I write about the difference between "aesthetic" and "conceptual" art the more I feel that it's a questionable distinction to be drawing at all. Doesn't all art necessarily have both?)

@ 297: "I think it can be said with some truth that art is to psychology as engineering is to physics: art is a discipline used to engineer desired mental and emotional states by (usually) indirect means of manipulating perceptions."

That is an excellent analogy, not the least because it suggests the true test of art is how well it stands up in the real world, not how elegant it seems on the drawing board.

heresiarch #293: Many people would complain that much of SF does exactly that. I don't agree, but I also don't necessarily agree that contemporary art does it, either. I think any world you don't participate in much can look like that. It's what most of jazz looks like to me, say, but I know I'm probably wrong.

And even the aspects of contemporary art that are guilty of that insular dialogue aren't necessarily worthless--it's like how a lot of philosophy is a conversation back and forth--if you've been following the conversation, the later parts can be fascinating, while if you haven't, they're meaningless. There is a big strain in contemporary art that's a discussion (influenced by philosophy and science and all sorts of outside disciplines) of the nature of vision, which, even though I have to do a lot of work and research to "get" it in a way that's useful to that discussion, I find to be fascinating because I'm also interested in the nature of vision. They're not anything I'd hang on my wall, and they're not anything someone who hasn't been engaging in that dialogue would be interested in, but they're still worthwhile.

Another way to look at it: all the pastiches (This is just to say...) that we like to do here are largely only meaningful as part of a dialogue with the original piece. This doesn't make them worthless.

And in your #294: Please, please, pretty please don't pooh-pooh installation art. Installations have changed the physical structure of my brain and the course of my life several times.

Tim Walters: re lists vs. images.

1: I'd not have used a list, because it's a fundamentally different thing from an image (and one of the things about The Wall is that it has such a potent impact, independant of the list nature of it).

2: I am no longer sure what you are arguing for. Are you trying to find some image I will agree requires outside context? Say the story of Ansel Adams and, "Moonrise over Hernandez"? (it was a snapshot, in the most literal sense. He saw the picture, made a quick guess at the needed exposure, and shot. Then he did the work, set the camera exactly as he wanted it, and the light was gone. All that with an 8x10 view camera).

Knowing the details does add to the picture; but it adds to the picture because the picture is stunning.

Then again I've seen five different prints from that negative, side my side; all done in radically different ways. They were all stunning, and the concantation was as well. It was an education to me (as a young photographer) as to how much interpretation could be done with a single image. How differently the information in the negative could be relayed, and how my decisions would affect what the viewer believed the moment to look like.

But all of that information (save the snapshot aspect; which told me something then [though 22 years on I forget what] tells me something different now) is there, on the wall; for the perceptive viewer to see.

If there were people in the building, I don't care. What they were, or weren't doing isn't material to the image.

I suppose what I need to know is what you think the concealed image adds to the picture, and how the revelation gives context?, which raises the pedestrian, to, Art.

You say you haven't entered into a compact with the artist, that the presentation of an apprehensible image isn't something you demand, at all.

So what do you expect of an artist in a visual medium?

Paula Leiberman: I can't speak for Bruce, but I think the work on your bed is part of craft. Being able to see what needs to be detailed in advance is part of it. To go back to Ansel Adams, it's what he called (in a terrible phrase) pre-visualising. When I set up a studio shot, or go out with the 4x5, or take the bellows and extention tubes out with the 35mm camera, I have to to a lot of design work.

For the first I have to map the lights, figure out the fall-off, eliminate flare, and reflection.

For the second I have to get everything to line up.

For the third I have to figure out how much maginification I intend, compute the stops lost to extention, adjust for reciprocity failure.

All of that before I make a single exposure.

It's part and parcel. The difference between "art" and "non art" is in the execution (and the appreciation of the audience, it's a two way street, IMO, which is why the compact Tim doesn't subscribe to matters to me. If I am not taking the viewer into account, I'm just playing with myself in public).

heresiarch: That sounds like one hell of a piece. The sense of, "Oh my God, what have I done" seems palpable. And then the lingering voyeurism of watching others move the jack, and seeing their reaction.

That was well thought out.

heresiarch, I totally misunderstood what you said. Ne'er mind, and sorry. I just woke up, it's the weekend.

Julie 277: It's unfortunate that I read your description of the photos before looking at them (particularly the one on the right, where the objects of the voyeurism are not in frame), because while I THINK those photos would work for me, I can' be sure.

The thing about that photograph is that the people in it are clearly reacting to something they can see and we can't. And they're in fear, from their poses (fear of being caught looking, I expect).

A fire escape does not react to a couple having sex just out of frame. A person would. The main action need not be shown, as long as it AFFECTS something in frame. I can show you, if you like, a photograph of the house where the musical Hair was written, which is right here in Hoboken. It might be mildly interesting, but since the house experienced no visible effect from this endeavor, it has no artistic significance, except as a photograph of a house.

On NPR I heard of a show a photographer did of military just back from Iraq. She photographed them with their heads lying sideways on a nondescript surface; only their faces are shown in most of them. The photographs are absolutely devastating, even (as well as I can wear the head of someone who hadn't heard the NPR piece) without considering the context. I think I would know that something was haunting these young men, even if I didn't know what.

They're quite disturbing, and inexpressibly beautiful.

Frell. That should be can't in that first paragraph.

The piece on Steve was decent, the comments at The Group News Blog are great.

I miss him.

Tim @ 273, I've seen some things close to what you describe. In the Tuol Sleng museum there are exhibits of many 'mug-shot' style photos. I don't know what impression you'd get of them without knowing the background. I suppose even without knowing a language of the displays, the rest of the musuem might explain a lot.

And if you look at this series of family snapshots in a New York Times ' slideshow' while very carefully not reading the captions, you'll probably get a different emotional effect to when you do read the captions.

(There's also a section in the musical quiz show Spicks and Specks called 'Musician or Serial Killer?' where the teams are shown several photos and asked that question. It's not an easy distinction.)

Still, those photographs weren't originally created as part of a conscious work of art.

Epacris: I think you've hit on the critical distinction I'm trying to make.

The stuff you are talking about in the first two examples are cases where the images gain from context, but their merit isn't dependant on what's not known.

It's that dependance which I think fails the viewer, and moves the work to public wanking.

The last is a completely different beast, and I would have to see it to understand how it works, and if I think it falls in the realm of the question.

Terry Karney @ 301: I am no longer sure what you are arguing for.

How about: it's possible in principle for a combination of image and non-image to be effective even when the image alone isn't.

So what do you expect of an artist in a visual medium?

I do my best not to expect anything, and give the work a chance to speak to me on its own terms. Of course, being human, I'm only so good at this, but the memory of all the times I've failed to connect to a work on first viewing, but eventually came back to it with a new understanding, keeps me honest to some degree.

For my own work, my rule is pretty simple: I don't present anything that I know how to make better, or that doesn't work for me even after I've made it as good as I can. In return I demand nothing from my audience except basic civility (don't destroy the photo, don't disrupt the show). I try to practice the computer programming maxim "be strict with what you write, but generous with what you read."

Bruce: as rules of thumb go, "make your images look good" is a pretty good one. But another rule of thumb for art is "break some rules."

The stuff you are talking about in the first two examples are cases where the images gain from context, but their merit isn't dependant on what's not known.

With the exception of one or two of the second set, I would say their merit is entirely dependent on what's not shown (except to the extent that any reasonably well-exposed photo of a person has at least some inherent interest).

Tim 309: You're mixing up 'shown' and 'known'. Not the same.

Xopher @ 311: On the contrary, I'm deliberately (re-)making a crucial distinction. See my second sentence at 273.

Everyone agrees (how not? it's a tautology) that a work requires some information to be effective, the info must be there. The question is whether it must be present in the image portion of the work.

A work of art from an old friend, Lawrence Weiner, a founder of Conceptualism -- his 1960 - 2007 career retrospective is currently at the Whitney:

1. The artist may construct the work

2. The work my be fabricated

3. The work need not be built

Each being equal and consistent
With the Intent of the artist
The decision as to condition
Rests with the receiver upon
The occasion of receivership

ethan, #302: Morning lasts for 4 hours after you (or I) get up. Good morning!

Tim Walters: How about: it's possible in principle for a combination of image and non-image to be effective even when the image alone isn't.

We have an irreconciable difference then; because I don't believe that to be the case for a visual medium.

I think extra information can add to the merit of a work, but that, absent some merit to begin with, the "hidden" portion is a cheap attempt to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

It relates to the questions of unreliable narration talked about in an earlier thread. The artist is cheating. We, the audience are not being shown something, but we are told that mystery is critical to the piece. In part that means, should the "extra" ever be lost, the "art" goes with it.

That, in my mind, isn't fair to the viewer, and is bad art. It's a cop out. A good artist will find a way to make what needs to be known, known; in the frame.

If, to use the example given, it's important to know people are having sex in the corners, then there has to be something in the corner. It can be very subtle. It might be something one almost needs to have pointed out, but it has to be there.

Otherwise, as with the show Bruce mentioned, it's all a bunch of handwavium and doesn't work for me.

Susan @ 238 ...
So, out of curiosity, what color combination(s) do you not find migraine-inducing on a monitor?

Hm. If I had to generalize (thinking out my fingers here), I think it would come down to a question of brightness combined with contrast. White translates as "bright" - black writing on white would be hideous. White writing on black wouldn't be as bad (the large amount of black takes down the brightness), but the high contrast between black and white would be painful.

I tend to use green-on-black[0], or light grey on dark grey[1] as ways to maintain the needed contrast to see text at all, while not producing terribly painful screens -- and looking at the screens around me, it looks like I tend to use 'low brightness' backgrounds, and try not to push the brightness of the colours on top of them. I think I'm lacking the vocabulary here, but basically staying back from #00ff00, #0000ff and #ff0000 far enough to not dazzle the eyes. Crossing to a thread from a while back, basically colours that don't feel hard and spiky :)

[0] Yes, some of you know where that comes from :P
[1] Windows is really Not Helpful(tm) when you're trying to tone down, rather than tone up the contrast.

Terry Karney @ 314: We have an irreconciable difference then

Fair enough.

#250 ::: Xopher

Carol: Are there villains in RHPS? Arguably Riff-Raff, but he doesn't appear in a corset.

My bad. The framework of the Eminent Criminologist with the hefty case files distracted me. Neither O'Brien nor Quinn appear in corsets, and they're definitely the antagonists. Is the RHPS an example of the antithesis of "Corsets worn as outerwear (particularly extreme or connected with cross-dressing)indicate EEEvil"?

I'm not getting my mind around Frankenfurter as Lawful Good, much as I love him and his cohorts.

heresiarch @ 294: That installation sounds like exactly the thing I need to be able to point at every time these arguments about conceptual art pop up. Do you have any more details - the artist or title or a link to something I can show people?

Also, to leave the installation, did you have to go back through the turnstile?

Xeger, I've been looking at pages with black text on a background that (in hex) is FFFFF5 - a very pale yellow, close to newsprint in color. With text in something like a very dark grey/red/brown, rather than black, it might work even better. (It's that there's less contrast than with black/white.)

Paul Duncanson @ 318: The installation was Samson (perfect title!) by Chris Burden.

Speaking of disconcerting installations, I mentioned Olafur Eliasson's SFMOMA show above; one of his pieces, which you encounter immediately upon entering the museum, is a large, heavy pendulum swinging chaotically through the museum just above head height. It's exquisitely shudder-inducing.

Apparently, in less litigious countries, he lowers it to chest height and lets you dodge it. Seems like that would be a whole different experience.

He's definitely a guy that needs to come to Burning Man.

Tim @ 320: Thanks!

Youtube has shaky video of it here.

I do think its impact would be greater if there was another turnstile, also connected to the jack, through which you had to pass to leave the exhibit after learning exactly what it is doing.

Carol 317: I'm not getting my mind around Frankenfurter as Lawful Good, much as I love him and his cohorts.

Good heavens, who ever said Lawful Good? No frellin' way!

Chaotic Neutral. There are no Hero heroes in that movie.

Xopher #323: Chaotic Neutral

A few years ago during a team-building exercise at work, we went around the circle telling the group "something that no one there new about ourselves". Mine was the fact that I had seen RHPC 53 times during its original theater release. I never got into the costuming fandom associated with the film, though.

#314:

Tim Walters: How about: it's possible in principle for a combination of image and non-image to be effective even when the image alone isn't.

We have an irreconciable difference then; because I don't believe that to be the case for a visual medium.

Comics may in this case be the exception that proves the rule.

Have you seen that Sanrio is selling "Hello Kitty" items for men? Apparently they've made the cat more rugged to appeal to men. I don't think they've gone nearly far enough.

I'm behind on reading the Open Threads (less than halfway thru OT97) but I wanted to put something here.

"Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.”

That was a quote from a 2000 article by the late Steve Gilliard, whose life and influence is profiled in tomorrow's NYT by Matt Bai (already available online and linked to by a number of sites).

That particular phrase jumped out at me because as soon as I read it, I thought "Words and computers and strange, bright people. Oh-h-h-h, like the Making Light crowd."

There are blogs and journals out there written by wonderful writers, that, for whatever reason, never get the readership they ought to, and, for whatever reason, never have the readers they do have evolve into an active and interactive community.

But the ones that do.... Oh, my, they can be a joy.

"Strange, bright people." Only three words, but what a perfect description.

So I just wanted to say, as the old year is in its last few days and the future coming at us fast:

Thanks, all you Making Lighters, for being so strange, and so bright.

And thanks, Patrick and Teresa, for being the... enablers?*... for the community that's formed here.

*"Enabler" has gained a largely negative connotation by being associated with dysfunctional behaviors in recent decades, but in its original, basic meaning, "one who enables", I think it may actually be the most appropriate word to use. Neither "facilitators" or "originators" feels quite right.

ethan @ 300: "Many people would complain that much of SF does exactly that. I don't agree, but I also don't necessarily agree that contemporary art does it, either. I think any world you don't participate in much can look like that. It's what most of jazz looks like to me, say, but I know I'm probably wrong."

I know you disavowed this comment, but I think that this is an interesting question, so I'm going to respond anyway =)

I do think the increasing sophisication of sf is a problem. I'm not sure what to do about it exactly, because I am one of those deeply-immersed, somewhat jaded consumers who demands new and ever more elaborate sf. At the same time that I devour Charlie Stross, Peter Watts, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe, etc, I would never think to suggest any of them to a sf newbie. If I were to suggest something for a beginner, I'd probably have to go back a couple of decades: Asimov, Heinlein, Bester; those golden oldies, because they were writing sf for people who hadn't been reading sf for their whole lives.

When I read a sf or fantasy story, I bring with me this whole suite of tools. Non-sf readers don't have these tools, and the lack can make the difference between a marvellous reading experience and deciding that sf is stupid. The bar creeps ever higher, and eventually, it will become so high that newcomers will be driven away. I think that one of the keys to Harry Potter's success was that it wasn't written by a fantasy reader. It wasn't written with the ghosts of thousands of other fantasy novels hovering in the background. This, I think, made it uniquely accessible to new readers--you weren't expected to know anything before you opened the book.

That said, I'm not too worried about sf specializing itself into irrelevance. Speculative fiction is pretty adept at reinventing itself, and works like John Scalzi (and JK Rowling, for that matter) show that it's quite possible to have our beginner-friendly sf and eat--er, and have our advanced stuff too.

Tim Walters @ 320: Great. I spend twenty minutes googling [artist bullet "volkswagen bug" public access] in order to find out the artist's name, then google ["Chris Burden" load-bearing] to find the specific piece, and then I see that you knew it off the top of your head. Thanks.

=)

P J Evans @ 319 ...
Xeger, I've been looking at pages with black text on a background that (in hex) is FFFFF5 - a very pale yellow, close to newsprint in color. With text in something like a very dark grey/red/brown, rather than black, it might work even better. (It's that there's less contrast than with black/white.)

If you mean something like this, it's only marginally better than pure white... I haven't played around with it much, though - wanted to be sure we were talking about the same thing, first :)

re 294: There's another one syllable word for an installation like that. It's called a stunt.

re 311: "Information" here is a treacherous word. Context and explanation are not the same. I don't know that conceptual art needs explanation, but it does, it seems to me, need a social context that says it is art. For example, the various photographic displays discussed above can in general be set in historical or sociological studies, in which they would not in general be perceived as art.

But let's go in the other direction. Consider an object "installed" at the Sackler: it is a long chain of calligraphic shapes hanging some twenty feet down a stairwell. Do you have to be able to read the shapes to appreciate it, or to recognize it as art? How about being told what the joke is?

On the one hand, the fact that it's so displayed says that it is art. On the other hand, it also plays off the likelihood that a viewer can read some of it without help, and can guess the meaning of some of what he cannot read. In another direction, it also plays (perhaps unintentionally) off of familiarity with a particular American toy.

Or to take another DC example: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. Nobody knows what it means-- indeed, there is a great deal of text about it from its creator that is either glossolaliac gibberish or is in a code as yet unbroken. About all that anyone can tell you about it is the little that is known about its creator, and the circumstances of its ultimate discovery and transfer to the Smithsonian, where it sits as the pre-eminent piece of folk art in their collection. They cannot even decide entirely how to display it. And after all this it doesn't take being in a museum or gallery to tell you that it is art.

heresiarch @ 299

You are probably right; there hasn't been time for the crappy conceptual art to be washed away by the waters of indifference leaving the good work behind for us to admire.

A post I was trying to write much earlier got eaten by noxious-results-of-crappy-underlying-protocols-and-lack-of-system-design [the Internet is an escape lab experiment...] It was Toy Story or Toy Story II or something like that, that Macdonald sat laughing at characters and names and references with them to Red-Mike-grazmovies... references and "homage" which were completely lacking lacking in context and in making any intrinsic sense or relevance to the film I was watching..

The film and TV industries seem to be full of that its-mostly-crap-to-my-perspective, of stuff that does NOT stand on its own and without the external context, is if art, totally bad art, and and worse than meaningless--effort expended that depends on something external that was generally crap to start with. "Oh look, that scene is a c/o/p/y d/u/p/l/i/c/a/t/e homage to [scene from something else that was very much lacking in merit...]!"

Narcissistic Bad Art. Blech.

White text on a black background particularly on a computer, gives me migraines. I think that research done on user interfaces found that a light blue or light green background for text is best on a computer screen, where there is color capability.

I don't want to restart That Argument, but I was mightily amused by CNN.com film critic Tim Charity's comment (scroll down) on why "300" made his Bottom Three for 2007:

Frankly, it was a tossup for the third spot between this gung-ho Greek meatfest and Michael Bay's overblown toy commercial, "Transformers." A lot of people got off on both, I realize, and the computer-generated work was impressive in its way. But no matter how you spin it, war porn is war porn -- and we're better off without it.

heresiarch @ 328

This is precisely the problem that any genre has with insuring that there is some way by which new readers can be engaged without having to study and without holding back the regular readers. Harking back to the previous conversation, I think it's one of the big problems with modern art: the "insular dialog" that ethan described in #300 makes it much harder for new viewers to engage with the work. And that's a mistake. I think it occurs because the nature of modern art as a genre is not well-accepted by artists and critics; so they think of themselves as the mainstream instead. Rather like modern literature in that respect.

heresiarch @ 328: [artist bullet "volkswagen bug" public access]

I thought he was that guy... I did in fact have to google for him, but his name was close enough to the top of my brain that it was quick.

C. Wingate @ 330: Asking whether something is art is like asking whether something is a tool. If you drive a nail with it, it's a tool, whether it was designed for that purpose, or at all; similarly, if you look at something as art, it's art, at least for you.

Bruce Arthurs @327:

Instead of enablers, how about "hosts"?

Bruce Cohen @ 335: "I think it occurs because the nature of modern art as a genre is not well-accepted by artists and critics; so they think of themselves as the mainstream instead. Rather like modern literature in that respect."

Yes, I think this is exactly right. Any group that thinks it is the end all and be all of Art or Literature is going to have a lot of trouble resisting the urge towards self-referentialism. If you don't understand that what you're doing is, in many ways, profoundly divorced from the normal human experience, you're not going to be terribly sympathetic to normal people's bafflement.

re 336: Anything can be used as if it were a tool; but when something that is not made as a tool is so used, what we have is a field expedient. And it seems to me you've picked up the opposite end of the issue here, because the equivalent in-field is when someone recognizes as art something that is not in a context that says it is art.

Speaking of corsets... In French, if you want to say that a story's plot thickens, you say "L'intrigue se corse", which really means the plot tightens. Go figure. Literally.

"...Sometimes you get eaten by monsters... Or subjugated by intelligent oysters... Or forced to wear steam-powered shoes that never stop dancing..."

Yes, Agatha Heterodyne is back in Part Two of "Revenge of the Weasel Queen".

May I just say here how disappointed I am with the Country-Western songwriting community? All this time, and no songs have emerged with a chorus featuring the line "I've got a wide stance." I guess Idaho isn't Western--or Country--enough...

C. Wingate @ 330:

Consider an object "installed" at the Sackler: it is a long chain of calligraphic shapes hanging some twenty feet down a stairwell.

For some reason, this reminds me of a story a friend told me about attending Antioch Collge in the late seventies.

There was one dorm where all the nihilists, anarchists, and other good folk hung out, and it had giant words painted on the sidewalk in front, words so large the only way to read them was to go to the roof of the dorm and lean over.

What it said was, "JUMP NOW!"

Bruce Cohen @ 335: And yet, much as I like SF that requires I know SF to appreciate it fully, I'd give a lot for one more early Heinlein novel, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, or even an unreasonable one.

About having to know SF to appreciate SF... Has anybody done some tests to see if that's true? It probably is, but I don't think any of us is qualified by her/his own experience because we wouldn't be posting here if we didn't know SF. An affirmatve answer would explain why what seems cutting-edge in an SF movie usually is old-hat in the domain of written SF. Eventually, media SF catches up because its public builds its own knowledge, but meanwhile written SF keeps moving on.

(Sometimes, I wonder if not knowing something's history might actually be an advantage. I think of the 3rd X-men movie, where most of us who know the characters inside out thought the movie was a big mess. It might have been better appreciated by someone who, for example, wasn't familiar with the comic-book's death of Jean Grey.)

Serge, #344: Actually, I thought one of the best things about X3 was the way they condensed the Dark Phoenix arc into something that could be shown, complete, in one movie. They even got the bit at the end right, jurer Wrna ortf gb or xvyyrq orsber gur cbjre gnxrf ure ntnva.

And honestly, Marvel itself has done so much retconning and general mucking around with the X-Men that it's easy to look at the movies as just one more variant in the X-verse. How many times did we see Jean die and come back in the comics? At least 3 by my count...

OTOH, I think I've had some advantage in not having read the Harry Potter books. The only movie where I really felt at sea was GoF; I had to ask friends to explain the context of a few of the details. And it certainly spares me the tooth-grinding "But that's not RIGHT!" reaction that several of them have had.

I believe it would be more canonical country to have something like:

well, my stance may be a little wide
sure I like to dance a little wild
in a honky-tonkin wide stance style
but that don't give no one the right
to treat me,
like I'm on the wrong side!

.....lines associating John Wayne's way of walking with the term 'wide stance'.

Lee @ 345... How many times did we see Jean die and come back in the comics? At least 3 by my count...

True. In fact, the last time that happened in the comic-book, as she died, her last words to Cyclops were to ask for his forgiveness because all she had ever done was to die on him again and again. It could have come off as ludicrous, but it definitely did not. As for the movie... I'm not one of those people who want an adaptation to be faithful to the original material's specifics, but to the essence of it, and that's why first X-men movie worked so well. That being said, my real problem with the 3rd movie is its structure, which felt like two movies stitched together. A story about Jean Grey's death should have built up to that very moment of tragedy. Instead, she shows up, and just stands by the side while Magneto does his thing with the Golden Gate Bridge then, once he's vanquished, the movie seems to remember her and let's get this wrapped up. Bad storytelling.

C. Wingate @ 339: And it seems to me you've picked up the opposite end of the issue here, because the equivalent in-field is when someone recognizes as art something that is not in a context that says it is art.

I once brought a beautiful rusty fuel can home from the beach to my wife, who is a sculptor. I assumed she would use it as raw material. Instead she put it on the shelf, saying "it's done."

Saying that she "recognized" it as art implies to me that the fuel can already was art in some essentialist way, which I don't agree with. I would say instead that she decided to treat it as art. By putting it on the shelf she encouraged others to do the same; but it's perfectly possible that someone might come along and ask "why do you have a rusty fuel can on your shelf?" For them, it wouldn't be art, and they would be no more right or wrong than she.

I'm not sure if this is quibble or an actual disagreement, because I'm not completely sure what you're driving at.

For a new reader of SF, I might start by offering them something by Scott Westerfield or Greg Egan (depending on age). For more literary/humanist sorts, I'd go for Ursula LeGuin or Octavia Butler.

For the better (faster) readers, I might suggest Vernor Vinge or David Brin. Julie Czerneda is a possibility, though I've only read her "Species Imperative" trilogy so far.

I really do seem to be caught up in curmudgeonliness this weekend, don't I? And it's not all that attractive on me. So:

First, a question. Mrs. Arkansawyer and I have just been discussing why barbecue restaurants seem to be closed on Sundays in disproportionate numbers. We've got thoughts on the subject, but does anyone else have a clue?

Second, a very funny joke which I'd never heard before.

Okay, maybe that last joke slips back into the curmudgeonliness. Or maybe not.

I have noticed that if I'm told something is Art or Life-Changing and it fails to live up to my expectations, I react much more strongly to that lack. The Handmaid's Tale was unpleasant until I managed to turn off the part of me whispering, "This should be changing you! You should be marveling! This is a big deal!" and see it as a book, just a book, and one I should have read when I was twelve instead of twenty-two. It was the same with Stranger in a Strange Land-- the monologues may have been more interesting if I didn't already know what they were talking about*. Cannibalism has not always been an aberration from typical human culture? The archaeological evidence for such? It might have affected me more if I hadn't done a report on it when I was thirteen.
It's not enough to have the founders of the genre; the conversation has moved on since then. I don't read a lot of Asimov-- short stories only. I don't read anything because it's a Classic, and most classics don't draw me in the same way newer work does. If I buy a book because I should read it, no matter who the author, I'm not going to read it-- I didn't pick it up because I wanted to read it, so why would I?

Loosely connected, I spent some time in the Denver Art Museum, starting with the Native American collections, which isn't as consciously arty as the rest**, and going through about half the building. We talked a lot, laughed at unexpected pieces, and had fun with the architecture, pretty blue lights that flickered, accidentally walking into slanted walls, and this game near a few couches. Bubbles were projected on the floor, and a screen displayed art on the wall. If you stepped on a bubble, it popped. If you and your friends popped every bubble, the art on the wall changed.
It was a way to let parents rest while kids got their crazies out by stomping and running around. It was also a huge amount of fun, interesting, and part of the entire art experience.
I interpret art in layers, I guess; there's the piece, which may be anything, information about the piece, delivered by whatever means, the arrangement of the room and building-- it's another layer. I may be confusing two nebulously separate things, though.

Could it be argued that expecting art to affect the viewer in the same way regardless of context and other information is analogous to expecting it to affect the viewer in poor lighting, uncomfortable conditions, and from the wrong distance?

*I'm not really able to judge what the book was doing rather than how it did it; there's always a chance that I would have liked it if I hadn't been so pissed off. Except for the feminism thing.

**Someday, I am going to have a lot of money and I will give some to an art museum to relabel things. It's problematic to have a Contemporary Art floor and put the African contemporary artworks in the African floor. You can't call it archaeology, not if you still call the medieval art art, but you also want to state somehow that African art is not all masks and pottery (and does pottery belong?) and there may be a separate conversation going on outside Europe/America/people who make art museums. And that kind of information is not necessarily going to be best conveyed in today's museum setting.
Maybe I'll just give a lot of money to have this dilemma made explicit, so I'm not the only one thinking about it.

Speaking of Art... The SciFi Channel is showing Johnny Mnemonic. Luckily tomorrow morning is the beginning of their traditional Twilight Zone marathon of the New Year. Will the real Martian please stand up?

Tim @ # 348:
Saying that she "recognized" it as art implies to me that the fuel can already was art in some essentialist way, which I don't agree with. I would say instead that she decided to treat it as art. By putting it on the shelf she encouraged others to do the same; but it's perfectly possible that someone might come along and ask "why do you have a rusty fuel can on your shelf?"

I actually get this reaction all the time to the old though not overly-rusty carburetor I keep on a bookshelf. (In front of a double-high row of books; I don't actually have spare bookshelf space to waste on tchochkes.) I think of it as a memory and a reminder rather than as art, though.

#348 & 353
You mean most people don't have petrified wood, aircraft-engine valves, and wood planes (the tool kind) on the same set of shelves? (That was the set hiding the door tomy father's basement shop and office. Also it had a chunk of beeswax and the little tool that unlatched the door when it was closed.)

Xeger @ 329
that's the one. Works better probably with less text - the pages I was looking at had some in one of the blues, and I think I'd use something not-black for the body text if there was more of it.

Are we confusing beauty and art? A carburator is a thing of beauty, but is it art?

Dave Goldfarb #292, (Spambane) Back from hospital with some bad news, tired, not in the best of moods.

I run a few different email addresses across different suppliers to separate work, family, friends, blogs, shopping, and so forth. Most are reasonable-to-good at bumping the spamstuff over to a special folder (one is execrable, and also forces you to go into each message and click 'Train as spam' or 'friend', but after months still doesn't recognise spam, and has other problems, but I can't face changing all that's been set up to use the address). They've all dumped one or two wanted messages into the bulk/spam folder over time, so I skim down the list to check before emptying it. Most of them also let some thru to the inbox, which I mark as spam, and I *try* to forward phishing stuff to the body they're imitating (tho' most don't have a place to do that).

So, since coming back online I've been spending hours shovelling out all the accumulation. It's not just the wasted time, energy, bandwidth, storage space and such, but some of the attitudes they convey really do annoy and disgust me — particularly the ones promoting aphrodesiacs and penile enlargement. It does incline me to wish for some unpleasantness to overtake the perpetrators.

I've just entered book number 1001 in my catalogue at LibraryThing (making light denizens). Still quite a ways to go, and I've now got nine boxes of discards.

David Harmon #349:

Wow. Greg Egan? Really? I have him in my advanced-reader category. I'd be more likely to give a new reader a few year's best collections (the Dozois & the Hartwells) to give them a taster of the genre & to gauge their tastes, then take it from there.

Soon Lee @ 358: I'd consider Axiomatic for a starter, but I'm with you that anthologies are often the best choice.

By the way, Mrs. Arkansawyer had a question earlier to which neither of us could come up with a satisfactory answer: Does "anthology" require more than one author? If not, is there a word which does? The closest (not very) I could come was festschrift.

John (359): An anthology contains works by multiple authors. A book of short pieces by a single author is a 'collection'.

Mary Aileen @ 360: We kind of thought that, but didn't know definitively (and I was too lazy to look it up).

Tim #348
Back when I was in college, I went to a King Crimson concert in a Berklee School of Music auditorium, with friends. Before going there I was over in a physics building, and the grad students were wrestling with a mass of no-longer-on-the-reel magtape, which was dead magtape. Magtape has a shiny side and a dull side, and I looked at it and thought of one of my friends, who among other things is an artist, and asked if I could have the tape. I brought it bagged or some such to the concert and gave it to my friend, who did indeed look at the tape as Art Object to play with.

For that matter, there are people who make earrings using pieces of cutup CD-ROMs, and people who make coasters of them, and people who make spindles with with for yarn spinning...

John, #350: Re the joke, I'd classify it as "funny, but in extremely poor taste" -- the sort of thing that's a guilty pleasure when you don't like the target, and distasteful-to-frightening when you do.

Re curmudgeonliness, I think that's understandable. You said something more or less in passing that's gotten several people (some of whom you like) upset, and it caught you amidships; that doesn't help anyone's mood. If it makes you feel any better, the main reason I'm still engaging on the other thread is to try to understand where your head is on that topic, even if we can't come to an agreement.

Gaukler, #357: I'm just shy of 1,200, and am estimating another 700-800 to go. And then I'll have to go back and do some updating on all the anthologies -- I want to enter all the contributing authors' names in the book records, and add the story titles to the comments. This will make it much easier to guess where a particular story I want to find might be hiding!

I've got one largish box headed for the local used bookstore, and a smaller one marked for Goodwill, plus about 3 boxes' worth of things that are going to be marked "archived" and put into the closet because I'm not likely to want to read them but don't want to get rid of them for various reasons.

I gave my partner a permanent LT account for Yule, but I suspect I'm going to be the one doing most of the entering for that as well :-)

Regarding SF-for-beginners:

I read to my wife at night. She's interested in SF, having watched lots of it on TV and at the cinema, but the nearest she's got to written SF has been some of the more outlandish Viking sagas. Following The Lord of the Rings (which works incredibly well as a spoken text), we've gone through a fair selection of SF together. Enough that I can draw some preliminary conclusions.

The authors that work best for an SF newbie are H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick. Not names that normally go together, but both write highly imaginative, self-contained stories that don't reference a great body of prior SF literature, and feature credible characters with recognisable human responses. They also both write prose that is excellent without being self-indulgent.

Many SF novels are indeed very difficult to approach without a good grounding in the field. In this respect, my greatest night-reading failure is probably Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal. I love that book, and I had hoped that it would be relatively accessible due to the contemporary setting of one of the plot lines, but the amount of assumed knowledge it invoked was such as to make it all but incomprehensible. Following this experience, I have dropped Charlie Stross from the to-read list: some of his books are my favourite novels published this millennium, but I doubt any relative newcomer to SF would have the background to really enjoy them.

I wouldn't even consider recommending Asimov to an adult approaching SF for the first time. I recently reread some of the Foundation books, and Christ Jesus the prose is shocking. I doubt if anyone past puberty could appreciate them as anything other than a historical curiosity. As for Heinlein... is it unfair to judge an author on just one book? Because I read Starship Troopers, and it was shit.

So, for the newcomer, Wells and Dick definitely work. The "literature of ideas" isn't enough - you need great ideas, sure, but also great prose, great characters, and great stories. And shouldn't we be demanding this of our best novels anyway?

Iain Coleman @ 364:

The authors that work best for an SF newbie are H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick.

On the other hand, I recently loaned my my brother-in-law, a big alternate history fan, The Man in the High Castle, and he's finding it dreadfully unsatisfying. He wanted more detail on draining the Mediterranean.

As for Heinlein... is it unfair to judge an author on just one book?

In this case, maybe. Try Waldo and Magic, Inc..

Serge @ 355: "Are we confusing beauty and art? A carburator is a thing of beauty, but is it art?"

Well, what is art? Most people, it seems to me, define art very viscerally. If it evokes an intense emotional response in them, then it's art. Unfortunately, that means that people's opinions about the artiness of any given object are going to be very idiosyncratic. This approach isn't going to yield a uniform definition.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, though. There are plenty of things labeled as Art that leave me cold, but other people seem to enjoy them, and vice versa. I don't see how I can step in there and tell them that they're wrong; it would piss me off if someone did that to me. It would be pretty arrogant, I think, to say that my utterly subjective gut reaction to it is more valid than theirs. So if one person calls it art, I'll call it art too.

Oh, bad art, to be sure. But art nonetheless. =)

I will admit to being confused about the "assumed knowledge" thing everyone's talking about. This is probably because I already have most of the assumed knowledge. :-) But could someone provide a few examples of the sort of thing under discussion?

heresiarch @ 366... what is art?

That's the thing. It's all about definitions otherwise people wind up debating each other endlessly because they didn't start with an agreed-upon definition. Yes, I am a computer programmer? How did you guess? That being said, yes, a carburator could be Art. And a Part.

I expect the SF I read that I am going to get past page 3 and past page 50 and past the middle and past the first two-thirds of the book and actually read all of, to:
o have prose which is not unresolved anapestic foot,
o facilitate figuring out who the characters are (what was the name of the Cherryh book with the characters with special symbols for appellation?)
o have characters I find worthwhile reading about,
o have a viewpoint character who is a character or narrator whose voice and viewpoints do not cause me to stop reading (If it hadn't been the owner of the vehicle who was reading Snowcrash out loud in a car I was in and who would not stop despite me making it completely clear I was completely repulsed by the book, I would have grabbed the book and thrown it out the window to end the torture.... I really really really loathed that narrative voice and being put into that character's head!)
o have settings and situations that don't bore me/cause me annoyance in a fashion that causes me to shut the book (that is, Breslin's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight--not SF, but an example of what I want to show--is about a bunch of really repulsive characters doing some really stupid and repulsive things, but it's entertaining, because they are so utterly inept it's humorous)--an interesting setting, and/or situations, and/or ideas written in other than completely wretched prose, can redeem a book with cardboard characters and dumb dialogue, for example.
o be written primarily in active voice, not be loaded with passive voice reminiscent of lousy technical writing (turgid technical academic prose is a bug, not a feature, and those who promulgate it I consider generally lousy writers, or being obfuscatory regarding, "who actually DID the work, anyway?!" "It has been shown that..." is really a lousy writing style, and what the use of it indicates is that the author either is a lousy prose writer, or the literacy of the editing is questionable...)
o have plot(s) that make/makes sense and that I can follow and get value out of reading (usually enjoyment, sometimes even infotainment....)
o not bore me slowing down with boring political speculations

(I bogged down completely in the first 50 pages of Cyteen when I tried to read it... much later I skimmed my way through it looking for connections to the rest of the related books set in the same universe within the same general timeline (Cyteen explains some of the background for e.g. 40,000 in Gehenna, and the whyfors of the typoes of atrocities that including the destruction of Sandor Kreja's family, which happened long before the start of Merchanter's Luck. But as a standalone book, I couldn't stand Cyteen! For that matter,Downbelow Station was unreadable for me until after reading Merchanter's Luck. And while it's no part whatsoever of Cherryh's work, while I was enormously impressed by Stand on Zanzibar which I read as a teenager, it burned me out on reading Brunner's work... got through that, and didn't have much in the way of energy or interest left ever after in attempting to read new books by Brunner after having gotten through SoZ. )

o have a pace that holds my interest
o if there are large lumps of indigestible expository lump, they should be ones I can skip over without loss if I decide I've had enough Explository Lump--and they should be fractional parts of the book, not a plurality of it.
o expository lumps should contain interesting scientifically valid or speculation-based-on-known-stuff-projections that doesn't blow my credibility filters to hell and gone
(I read much of the Fletcher Report, which Jeff Hecht, who heard about it but probably didn't have the access to read much of, referred to as "extapolation on log paper--which is an accurate summation, actually. One year I got to go the the DARPA Strategic Space Symposium, and after a week of that, dived into The Dragon Waiting which I had been previously unable to read for the sheer -density- of the book, I had not had the focussed attention I needed to concentrate on it to the depth necessary to get through... but after a week in Future Technology Prognostication Land, I desperately wanted to avoid ANYTHING which was future technology forecast design and development projection, and medieval times and technology were just the thing to dive into to regain my aplomb....) If something starts engaging my critical technology forecasting filters, it had BETTER have an internally consistent basis that can provide an explanation that's better than inventing and handwaving unobtainium etc.

heresiarch: What is art?

Art is that thing one finds artful. True, tautological, and sort of useless.

I think there are lots of practical defintions.

The folks "doing" art, have a vested interest in keeping the definition in their hands.

I think, at one level, art is a thing people do. Some of it may be bad art. But that "badness" is, usually, a defintion given to it when someone takes the work and presents it as "art" at which point its function changes; from a thing which gives me pleasure to do; for it's own sake, to something I am offering up for public appreciation.

I think the making of art is something people can't help doing. We like pretty things, we like to make things, we make pretty things. We also have very different ideas of what pretty things are.

Are my photographs art? Maybe. It pleases me to make them. It pleases others to look at them. It pleases some to buy them, that they might look at them when they please.

So for some people they are art.

Some of them I craft, with the intent of making them artful.

But in the public sphere, things get more difficult. Are my pictures worth thousands of dollars? I don't think so. There are photographers, with images I don't think fundamentally different from mine, who command such a price.

There are others, whose work is in the same genre, but are fundamentally different, whom I think (by dint of both effort, and result) deserve such a price.

There are also people who wouldn't pay a plug nickel for any photograph.

So long as I can show my work, and sell some of it, I can live with that sort of idiosyncratic definition (and reserve the right to say some of the "art" offered to the public is crap).

When someone asks for book suggestions, I am them what sort of stuff/things they like... tastes and aesthetics differ

Assumed knowledge, with art... so why are there all these paintings of mothers and a baby boy? What's the big deal there?

Art gets more complicated if you consider it separate from craft. I'm not sure the two can be separated so easily; they're two nebulous clouds of meaning, mostly overlapping but without boundaries even if the other isn't there. Art is artifice; a tree isn't art, but a photograph of the tree can be. Art is defined by the viewer; my snowflake mug is not art to me, but in a hundred years, it may be art to someone else. And my paintbrush-weilding ghost will laugh and laugh.

Isis and Osiris...

Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike in the new Star Trek movie. Yay!

Bruce@275:
    ...Machines don't grown on trees, George --
    It's time to get to work!

    Bit by bit, putting it together;
        Sondheim, from Sunday in the Park with George.

wrt referentialism, I'd argue that really good art works both ways -- it gives you some entry point immediately, but every time you revisit it after time in the rest of the world, you see something new. Specifically wrt referentialism of SF, cf Delany's argument about people literally being unable to read SF (inter alia, as in the WFC 1999 panel that TNH moderated); unfortunately, I never thought to ask how much of this he thought was really a mindset and how much was just not knowing the basic elements of a wider universe (rather as the average reader today won't know what it means when a Thorne Smith man stops by a drugstore, let alone a lot of the social context that makes (e.g.) Austen sensible). There is, IME, still SF being written that doesn't depend as much on past SF (or at least on past SF that isn't part of the general experience, disaster movies (e.g.) being as popular as they are); a lot of it doesn't seem very good to me, but I \know/ that my threshold of boredom has risen a lot in the 46 years I've been reading SF.

Lee@367: example: why is it funny/weird/... when one of Stross's chapters begins "It was a bright cold afternoon in April and the clock was striking fourteen."? In the same vein, what about the references to boots and human faces (and their ultimate contradiction) in Good Omens? Their source is a book that most mundanes know about but (IME) fewer and fewer have actually read. Those are very specific examples because specific examples are easy to pull up; can anyone come up with more general ones?

Mez, #356, I hope the bad gets better.

SF for beginners, I usually give men Barrayar and women Impossible Things with a marker at "Even the Queen."

When you fly with a snowman, you should share your Irn Bru.

Chip 375: I'll bite. What does it mean when a Thorne Smith man stops by a drugstore?

CHip 375:

It's a worldview issue--SF/F writers generally write with the view that the reader will talk the description literally, doing a willing suspension of disbelief and accepting that narration at face value as a "this is what this world is like" sort of thing. There are other ways of reading, including:

1. "This stuff is not real, and I don't read stuff that isn't about the world I know or history--this stuff is fantasy and I'm don't read confabulation."

2. There is reading allegorically, where A is a stand-in for B, C is a stand-in for D, etc. In that sort of circumstance there's no such thing as face value, because there are always look-up tables involves. The irising door is a metaphor or simile for something else. The dragon is a stand-in for something else, and not actually a dragon, it's symbolic and/or emblematic of something else....

Reading the book accepting the dragonness of a dragon and that the dragon is its own construct and not a cipher for something else, falls outside the reading protocols of people whose reading protocols fall into e.g. the two cases above. They can't/won't accept that "sometimes a [something or other] is just a [something or other
and is not a stand-in for something else, or a concept that because it it outside the Real World, is meritless and the work containing it meritless and not anything worth reading/readable.

Dislocated thought: what I know about art and about writing is that the worst stuff is that which exists primarily to prove how very clever its maker is.

CHip 375:

It's a worldview issue--SF/F writers generally write with the view that the reader will talk the description literally, doing a willing suspension of disbelief and accepting that narration at face value as a "this is what this world is like" sort of thing. There are other ways of reading, including:

1. "This stuff is not real, and I don't read stuff that isn't about the world I know or history--this stuff is fantasy and I'm don't read confabulation."

2. There is reading allegorically, where A is a stand-in for B, C is a stand-in for D, etc. In that sort of circumstance there's no such thing as face value, because there are always look-up tables involves. The irising door is a metaphor or simile for something else. The dragon is a stand-in for something else, and not actually a dragon, it's symbolic and/or emblematic of something else....

Reading the book accepting the dragonness of a dragon and that the dragon is its own construct and not a cipher for something else, falls outside the reading protocols of people whose reading protocols fall into e.g. the two cases above. They can't/won't accept that "sometimes a [something or other] is just a [something or other
and is not a stand-in for something else, or a concept that because it it outside the Real World, is meritless and the work containing it meritless and not anything worth reading/readable.

Abi @ #337:
Bruce Arthurs @327:
Instead of enablers, how about "hosts"?

Ummm, no, "hosts" is a little too simple for what I was thinking of.

But I did think of a better word than "enablers", without the negative connotations, and even with a science-fiction connection: Effectuator

(Which, in turn, makes me wonder: If Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe ever collaborated on a novel, how many language geeks would have their brains melt?)

Lee @ 367: "I will admit to being confused about the "assumed knowledge" thing everyone's talking about."

On one level that sort of assumed knowledge is along the lines of when you read that a character is graceful and pointy-eared, you can safely assume that they're also long-lived and in harmony with nature, or that the violent alien warrior race lives by a strict code of honor--that sort of thing. Even when (maybe ESPECIALLY when) these tropes are being subverted, they still inform your reading.

On another level, the assumed knowledge cn be the ability to assimilate a huge amount of new information about setting and backstory from contextual clues. Speculative fiction may be unique in the sheer amount of new information that you have to process. The crux of the story is sometimes just figuring out what's going on. Take the "As you know Bob" trope: it existed due to necessity, and that it's now viewed as clunky is because we, the fans, have learned how to decode much subtler expositional tricks, and the writers have learned how to write them. That's all stuff that's pretty unique to sf, and can repell new readers.

Diatryma @ 372

I don't think art and craft can be separated at all. Even what we might call completely conceptual art has to be presented to its audience in some way, and the creation of that presentation involves craft.

The definition of art varies widely from culture to culture as well as between individuals. Western European culture has a long tradition of art being produced by specialists who make up a very small percentage of the population, and there is a pervasive belief that most individuals have no, or very little, artistic ability. Balinese culture on the other hand is at the other end of the spectrum: art is considered a part of everyone's life, and there are few people who specialize in it to the exclusion of other aspects of life. In this view, craft and art are almost synonymous, and the notion of a special vocabulary and genre of art that's restricted to an elite is unknown.

Bruce Arthurs @ 381

(Which, in turn, makes me wonder: If Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe ever collaborated on a novel, how many language geeks would have their brains melt?)

All of them.

Most years when I go to Debbie Notkin's New Years house party, I make Maida Heatter's Palm Beach Brownies but this year I decided to try doing Xopher's Black Hole Brownies of Death.

Something about the way Xopher wrote the recipe suggests to me that he doesn't have an electric mixer. I do, and I suspect it made things much easier -- frex, I added the cocoa powder while doing a continuous low mix, and it went quite easily, with no threat of the powder getting all over the place. It also made it easier to get a nice even distribution on the chips; the batter is extremely stiff, almost solid, so having to mix them in by hand would be quite the workout.

(The Maida Heatter recipe calls for mixing the batter at high speed for ten minutes, and would be quite impossible to do by hand.)

Anyway, they're baked and mostly cooled, and having tasted I have to say that they're very good.

Wal, that t'were right purdy. I'm back and finished dinner after watching the 'family fireworks' over Sydney Harbour. They start at 9pm AEST, just as the last colour deepens into a dark sky.

There was talk about there being new '3D' pyrotechnic effects. I think they meant those ones that seemed to be in spiral or lozenge shapes, and some odd-looking ones that might have been the outlines of cubes. Lots of a variety of the classical types too, I like the multi-puffball, where a dozen or so small dandelion-seedhead-shaped puffs arc out gracefully into a near-sphere from a central explosion. The pyrotechnicians use about 14 laptop computers (half are backups in case of failure) to coordinate and set off the 'cues'.

Looking forward to midnight in about an hour, when we get more, plus a special display on the Harbour Bridge — that'll be the one you'll probably see clips from on New Year Celebrations coverage. I'm not well enough for the buffeting of the crowds in the streets and parks, so one of the advantages of the flat near the hospital I picked is that the roof (with clotheslines) is accessible and has a view towards the harbour (from one corner you can even see the bridge).

And thanks, Marilee (#376) for your good wishes. This latest trouble was a shock, and quite rocked me back on my heels. Disruptions from holiday closures and people being away means we still don't quite know what the situation is yet, more tests are scheduled over the next weeks. I just finished watching all of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on DVD, and that and Hogfather might have helped morale.

Wishing all here whatever they hope for the future turns out, and their fears don't.

CHip, #375: why is it funny/weird/... when one of Stross's chapters begins "It was a bright cold afternoon in April and the clock was striking fourteen."?

Because clocks that strike aren't usually running on 24-hour time? Given only that information, that's the first response which comes to mind. And if you think April afternoons can't be cold, you've never lived in Michigan! :-)

what about the references to boots and human faces (and their ultimate contradiction) in Good Omens?

Allusions of that nature are certainly not limited to SF books! One of the earliest creative-writing lessons I got was, "Never assume that your reader is going to have seen, or heard, or read, everything that you have." Which, in practical terms, means that if you're going to throw in that sort of reference, it had damn well better not be critical to the story.

Jane Dentinger's theatrical mysteries are a good example; I'm not a theater buff myself, so I'm sure there are side-references all over the place that go right past me, but the story still hangs together even without them. Or again, when the ghost appears on the parapet in John Moore's Bad Prince Charlie, it's funnier if you recognize the allusion to Hamlet, but you don't NEED to know that to understand what's going on.

Not trying to be contradictory for its own sake; I just don't think those particular examples work very well as responses to my question. Heresiarch got closer to providing the sort of answer I was looking for.

Since this *is* the Open Thread, I couldn't resist mentioning that I went on a movie-watching binge yesterday to help banish the winter blues, and the very first one I saw on Turner was "The Spanish Main", with Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara -- and Fritz Leiber's daddy, Fritz Sr. the actor! (He played the old priest who married the main characters, early enough that she still intended some back-stabbing.)

Lee @ 387... when the ghost appears on the parapet in John Moore's Bad Prince Charlie, it's funnier if you recognize the allusion to Hamlet, but you don't NEED to know that to understand what's going on

Nor did you need to have seen Hamlet to appreciate Star Trek's The Conscience of the King, but it made it even better if you did.
Nor did you need to know of Omar Kayam to laugh when Bullwinkle talked about a yacht made of rubies.

Faren @ 388... I caught part of "The Spanish Main" yesterday. Is that the one with Walter Slezak as the Evil Spaniard?

David 385: You're right, I don't have an electric mixer. I wouldn't really have space for one in my tiny apartment. To give you a hint about the level of crowding in my kitchen, when I said I was getting a chocolate-tempering machine (comparable in footprint to and much shorter than an electric mixer) my friend Dave said "Where are you going to put it, on your bed?"

As for mixing in the chips being a workout...a little extra exercise never hurt anyone! :-) Especially someone who's about to eat calorie bombs like the BHBOD. I go to the gym and work out to get the strength to stir that doughy mass.

A couple of things I've learned: the batter tends to stiffen up if you let it sit, at basically any point after you add the cocoa. Keep it moving and everything's easier. A breeze with an electric mixer, I expect: just don't turn it off. For my own purposes I've found that it helps to measure everything, and combine the at-the-end ingredients (not the chips), before beginning to mix anything. Then it's stir dump stir instead of stir measuremeasuremeasure dump stir.

The other thing (maybe too late now) is that cooling them completely and then cutting all of them before removing any from the pan helps keep the edges from crumbling. If I had a guitar I might use that, though I'd have to do something different with the pan.

And thanks! Tell me how they go over at Debbie's.

Xopher @ 391... the batter tends to stiffen up if you let it sit, at basically any point after you add the cocoa. Keep it moving and everything's easier.

The stiffer the batter?

So not going there, Serge.

Abi @ 393... You're right. Batter nut.

No, no, nuts make it even harder.

Um.

Forget I said that.

Lee, some of the shared knowledge an SF fan has is about specific technological tropes--nanotechnology, say, is something SF fans have long known about well enough not to need exposition, that non-SF fans are only just starting to learn about. Some of them are turns of phrase--if a story includes a sentence similar to "The door dilated" it will mean something different to us than it would to non-fans*.

And heresiarch's point at #382, that one thing that's different is that we're used to quickly figuring out an entirely unfamiliar world from a few clues in a way that others aren't. My mother likes SF in theory, but has a hard time reading it because she never got used to projecting her mind into a totally new world (so I've started giving her near-contemporary and alternate history books, like recent William Gibson and Jo Walton, which she has a better time with).

*What that specific meaning is depends on the context, of course.

ethan @ 396... some of the shared knowledge an SF fan has is about specific technological tropes

For example, if we say 'hyperspace', fans know in one single word what that implies about the limits of the story's settings. We can thank George Lucas for helping disseminate that word beyond the fans although he wasn't the first one to use it in the mainstream - that honor belongs to Forbidden Planet.

ethan, #396: That's helpful too, thanks!

we're used to quickly figuring out an entirely unfamiliar world from a few clues in a way that others aren't

Or to holding the confusing bits in abeyance, trusting that sooner or later the author will get around to making them clear; this is especially true WRT vocabulary.

Now that I think about it, I'm much more patient with that in an SF context than I am in most others. Last week I consigned a mystery to the cull pile partly because the author made the mistake of assuming that all her readers will have read the previous book, and making cryptic back-references that weren't explained until chapter 3. With SF, I more or less expect that I may need to read the first part of the book again after I've figured everything out.

My (intelligent, well-read) mother-in-law read The Left Hand of Darkness a few years ago, and complained about the made-up calendar. To her, it seemed gratuitous and confusing, and threw her out of the story. I explained that, as a science-fiction reader, an alien planet using the Earth calendar would be self-evidently absurd enough to throw me out of the story. I don't think I convinced her, though.

I forget who said "odd characters in an odd setting is an oddity too much," but I think that's how a lot of non-fans see SF. If you want to write about androgyny, why throw in space travel, and year-round winter, and a made-up language and calendar?

Mez @ 386

Happy New Year; I hope the change in the year brings you relief from your health problems.

Serge #397: Is that a hint? Seeing as I have no plans for tonight and tomorrow other than to stay in and watch movies (The Haunting and The Great Muppet Caper from Netflix, yay!), Forbidden Planet may be less forbidden for me soon enough.

Lee #398: Ooh, good point, I think that's true for me, too. If I'm reading something that isn't SF and I'm confused 20 pages in, I'm mad. If I'm reading something that is SF and I'm confused 20 pages in, I assume I won't be in another 20 or so.

Lee @ 398

It's hard to demonstrate without some sort of psychological study, but I suspect that readers of SF tend to have a puzzle-solving temperament. We're perfectly willing to put a couple of clues together into a partial solution and then put it on the stack for awhile in the reasonable hope that it will be useful as part of a larger solution later. Or if not, that it will be a red herring like those used in mystery stories, intended to make it harder to find the correct solution, but sufficiently probable to help expand the solution space and give us more information about the context of the story.

For instance, in one of the most bravura "firehose information dump" scenes I can think of, the first chapter of Charlie Stross' "Glasshouse" sticks us right in middle of an interstellar, post-scarcity culture whose inhabitants are effectively immortal, and can change their bodies to any degree that is supported by the underlying biophysics at whim. Just gleaning the basic parameters of such a civilization is a major effort, and one that won't pay off until well into the novel, and Charlie also gives us a large amount of information about the narrator, some clues as to hir backstory, and some really tantalizing hints as the history of the culture and how it relates to ours at the same time, all while moving into and through a duel between the narrator and a bully he meets in a bar.

That's a dense 3 or 4 pages there, and you have to believe that it's going to be worth getting through. I gulped it down, in part because it's fun to stretch my mind trying to figure out the implications for the story and its background before the writer tells me explictly. That's not even close to a common reaction to that kind of density of prose.

OK, did I miss this by not reading all 396 posts?

Plenty of people keep whole colonies of dinosaurs in the attic, for comfort or fun or companionship or maybe winning those competitions about whose dinosaurs can fly back home fastest, and possibly for sending clandestine messages.

Birds are, to the best of our recently-vastly-expanded knowledge on the subject, direct descendants of dinosaurs. This means that birds *are* dinosaurs. We've all seen dinosaurs in the wild. Most of us have eaten dinosaurs. (Yep: tastes like chicken!) And some of us keep them in the attic.

I can't be the first to point this out on this thread, can I?

Ooops. Make that 402 posts,
and that Charlie Stross pointed it out way up at post #8, only nobody took him seriously. (I believe you, Charlie!)

No offense to you, Steff Z, but birds *are* dinosaurs in exactly the same way that humans *are* small ratlike creatures.

I'm so sick of that "birds are dinosaurs" bullshit. The word 'dinosaur' has a common meaning, which that violates. Paleontologists have decided birds are directly descended from dinosaurs, and made the fundamentally stupid pronunciation that that means birds *are* dinosaurs, which even they don't believe.

Think they do? Go to KFC and get a bucket of chicken. Eat it (not for us vegetarians), and save the bones. Call up your paleontologist friend and say "hey, want a whole bunch of dinosaur bones?"

I think everyone should do this until the paleontologists stop saying stupid things.

I'm not a small ratlike creature, in case you were wondering. I'm not even an ancient Indo-European, or a medieval Irishman, or a street kid from Chicago, though I am descended from all of these.

And birds, despite their established descent from dinosaurs, are not what anyone but a paleontologist—ANY halfway sensible person—means when they say "dinosaur."

No one took him seriously, Steff, because he wasn't serious.

Xopher @#405:

I'm not a small ratlike creature, in case you were wondering. I'm not even an ancient Indo-European, or a medieval Irishman, or a street kid from Chicago, though I am descended from all of these.

That must have been one heck of a Beltane party!

"Dinner for One" is a campy black-and-white sketch (in English!) that's a German New Year's Eve TV tradition. I have no idea why. In any case, Happy New Year, everyone. It's not quite that time here, but it never seems like there's a wrong time to wish people I've come to appreciate so much all the best for 2008.

ethan @ 401... Nope. No hint. No feint. Just watch the DVD if/when you feel like it.

"I rarely use it myself, it promotes rust."

Why in the name of heaven is that thing xopher calls a guitar in #391 named that?

It has wire strung across those steel frames, I think. (Doesn't show up in the pictures, though.) I've read of something similar used for pasta.

Mary Aileen #360:
Someone should tell Gardner Dozois that his 20+ Year's Best SF Collections need renaming.

Happy New Year everyone! It's after 10am January 1, 2008, where I am and the living room window frames a clear blue-skied sunny summer's morning.

Bruce, #402: I'll buy that; it would also explain why SF readers tend to be interested in wordplay to a much greater extent than the general population.

However, I'll also note that I don't react well to extreme density of prose outside of SF either -- which is one reason why I don't like most modern lit-fic. From my POV, they're putting me thru the same amount of effort but for no payoff.

For US types with cable: TCM is having a Fred Astaire marathon tonight. Since we always try to watch "Top Hat" or "The Gay Divorcee" on New Year's Eve, this seems absolutely perfect. Tivos on Stun!

Happy New Year, all, from the Netherlands.

Fireworks going crazy here.

Soon Lee @ 412 -

Happy New Year everyone! It's after 10am January 1, 2008, where I am...

A voice from the future! Happy New Year to you, too, and all the good people at Making Light.

Xopher@405

But you are a mammal. In exactly the same way that birds are dinosaurs. Humans are a type of mammal. Birds are a type of dinosaur. It's just that all of the non-bird dinosaurs are extinct now, while there are plenty of non-human mammals still around.

Michael 417: Bah.

Michael I @ #417

I... kind of agree. But just to argue the other way... couldn't you say on similar grounds that mammals and dinosaurs are both types of fish? That doesn't sound so immediately sensible.

The Twilight Zone marathon continues on the SciFi Channel. They just showed one of their best episodes, Walking Distance, where a man tired of the rat race gets to go home again to his childhood.

"Martin."
"Yes, Pop."
"You have to leave here. There's no room, there's no place. Do you understand that?"
"I see that now, but I don't understand. Why not?"
"I guess because we only get one chance. Maybe there's only one summer to every customer. That little boy, the one I know - the one who belongs here - this is his summer, just as it was yours once. Don't make him share it."
"Alright."
"Martin, is it so bad where you're from?"
"I thought so, Pop. I've been living on a dead run and I was tired. And one day I knew I had to come back here. I had to get on the merry-go-round and listen to a band concert. I had to stop and breathe, and close my eyes and smell, and listen."
"I guess we all want that. Maybe when you go back, Martin, you'll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are. Maybe you haven't been looking in the right place. You've been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead."

Lee @ 398: "Or to holding the confusing bits in abeyance, trusting that sooner or later the author will get around to making them clear; this is especially true WRT vocabulary."

Heh. So true.

("You did what!?" I squeaked.

"30,000 Antarean creds for a week's journey! For just two of 'em!" He grinned at me expectantly, like a puppy with half a slipper.

"Just. Two. Glizzglozzes." I repeated in shock.

"Yeah! It'll be easy! He, erm, it...they...the merchant showed me one. They're only about yay big," he said, holding his arms out in front of him. "Sure, they get slime all over, but we can keep them in the bathroom or something. It'll be a cinch!"

Dimly, through the nigh-overwhelming urge to beat his head against the wall, I felt a pang of sympathy for him. I tried to figure out how to explain.

"You do realize, don't you, that glizzglozz is a collective noun?" I asked. In the distance, I heard our loading doors boom open.

"Er. Really? I mean, of course," he said. "They're um, about how big, exactly?" he asked desperately. A strange noise filtered up from below: the sound of thousands of suckers advancing across deck-plating.

"It isn't a terribly exact number," I began, then caught my breath as the stench hit us. Coughing, I continued. "The important distinction the term offers, as opposed to, say, a glickend--a group of immature males--or a zyrome--a migratory pack--is that a glizzglozz is an active breeding colony."

"Oh. Oh." After a pause, he began tentatively, "Um, when you say 'active,' how-"

"Very, very, active." I replied.)

Exploiting the open thread and taking note that this is a break from Christmas, but not from New Years: Happy 2008, Fluorosphere! (This is early, because I have a movie to watch with my wife, if the kids ever get off their sugar rush and go to bed.)

Happy new-years eve
Dodge the drunks and watch the ball
two thousand and eight!

"Dinosaurs in the attic" post gets animal removal ads from Google.

Does this mean that some guy who is used to removing raccoons is suddenly faced with dealing with something bigger?

heresiarch, 421: Did you just make that up? Wow, do it again!

Happy 2008!!

May everyone here obtain all the good they wish.

Xopher in 405 --

You are unfortunately entirely mistaken on this issue.

It's been pointed out by more than one eminent paleontologist that if you dissect the legs of ground birds -- chicken and turkey do just fine -- you're looking at completely homologous structures to Tyrannosaurus rex, just rather teenier. It's not something they're making up to vex you.

Life is a bush; it's a big, complex, overgrown, twisty bush that's been burned down to the ground a few-eight times, but it's a bush.

Dinosaurs are, in one of the great jokes of all time, split into Ornithischia and Saurischia, the bird-hipped and lizard-hipped dinosaurs. Ornithischia are your duck-billed dinosaurs, your ceratopsians, and armored dinosaurs generally. Saurischia is your sauropods and your theropods.

Birds are a branch of the theropod part of the bush, that managed to squeak through one of the recent burned-to-the-ground episodes. So birds are, in phlyogenic terms, lizard-hipped dinosaurs. (Isn't convergent evolution grand?)

Dinosauria, Saurischia, Theropoda, Tetanurae, Coelurosauria, Maniraptora, Aves, and then the whole modern flowering of that part of the tree of life.

It goes 'terror lizard', 'lizard hipped', 'beast-foot', 'stiff-tails', 'beast-foot birds', 'hollow-tailed lizard', 'thief-hand', 'bird', so you're not the only one suffering from cognitive dissonance. It still makes every bit as much sense to call a bird a dinosaur as it does to all you a mammal, because, hey, mammal does not mean "placental" and there are a lot of extinct relatives back there as laid eggs.

It all starts at biota anyway.

Graydon, you've missed my point. Paleontologists can say whatever they want, but they cannot change the definition of a commonly-used word. CANNOT. They have no such ability. It's not going to work. They lose.

I can sit here and tell you that actually 'diction' means your choice of words, and technically I'd be right. I can smirk and be all pedantic and say ACTUALLY you meant his ENUNCIATION, not his DICTION.

But I'd be being an asshole, and everyone would know it, and more importantly everyone would go right on using the word 'diction' to refer to the care with which one pronounces one's words. Technical terms are used in a special way in their own field, but you can't impose that usage on the general populace.

Paleontologists can sit there and tell us that ACTUALLY dinosaurs never went extinct and that BIRDS are REALLY dinosaurs, and smirk and be all I'm-so-much-smarter-than-you about it, but they're being assholes, and everyone (especially me) is going to go right on using the term 'dinosaur' in its common definition. Dinosaurs are by definition extinct. It's even used in metaphor to mean a relic of an earlier way of doing things.

So it doesn't make as much sense to call a bird a dinosaur as to call me a mammal. It makes as much sense to call a bird a dinosaur as it does to call me a medieval Irishman. Structurally I'm not very different (perhaps on a smaller scale), but it's still wrong, because I was not alive (in this body anyway) in the Middle Ages.

Dinosaurs (not using the paleontological term-of-art, but the colloquial term) are by definition creatures who died so long ago that what remains of them has turned to stone. That's what the word means. Paleontologists can't change that.

And it's doubly stupid because the '-saur' in the word means "lizard," which everyone knows dinosaurs were not. The paleos should invent a new, more accurate term, literally meaning something like "terrible birds." But no, they want to be assholes about it and give everyone a chance to play gotcha and force the rest of us to use all kinds of extra words to say what we mean, like "archaic extinct giant dinosaurs."

Fuck that. And fuck them, and the brontosaurus* they rode in on.

*Yes, I know. Picked it on purpose for just that reason.

Xopher @427: actually, they might be able to. Consider the meaning of the word "sort" as it has changed due to computing.

That said, I suspect they can't produce nearly enough pressure for change.

As the neighbors set off fireworks--Happy New Year!

Also, Gar Lipow @ 377--it's been a while since I read any Thorne Smith, but in general, when a perfectly ordinary fellow goes to a drugstore, his life is about to take a sharp left into the weird, wonderful, fantastic and surreal. In 1920s or '30s terms, anyway. (If you're not familiar with the name at all, he wrote, among other things, Topper...)

Tex-Anne @ 424: *blushes* I did.

Xopher @ 427: I have to say, I'm quite surprised at the intensity of your distaste for the idea that birds are dinosaurs. For me, it's one of those thoughts that gives me a neat bit of sensa-wunda at how much awesomer the universe is than I can even comprehend. Like when someone points up at a star and says, "Actually, that star is a whole nother galaxy, with billions and billions of stars of its own, that's just incomprehensibly far away." My response to that isn't "Fuck you, we've been calling it a star for thousands of years, and you fucking specialists don't get to redefine common words whenever you discover something new!" It's "Neat!"

I think Xopher's strong opinion is based partly on the smugness of people who say birds are dinosaurs-- I've seldom heard it mentioned in a "Hey, this is cool!" sense. It's kind of like the... god help me, I'm invoking xkcd. It's not exactly the same, but it's in the same category for me.
The star analogy doesn't work; I think it might be safer to compare it to Pluto's planetary status. Or maybe it's just that nobody says 'dinosaur' when they mean 'bird' or vice versa. People tend to refer to birds as dinosaurs when they want to be congratulated on their cleverness.

Anyway, isn't part of the definition of 'dinosaur' that they didn't fly?

Pterodons? Pterodactyls?

Xopher@391: One thing I forgot to mention is that I adapted a technique from the Palm Beach Brownies: Instead of putting the batter directly into the pan, I lined the pan with aluminum foil. I took a sheet of foil and molded it around the outside of the pan, then turned the pan over and put the foil sheet inside it, and greased that. (By putting in a little bit of butter, then putting the pan into the preheating oven to melt the butter -- Heatter suggests then spreading the melted butter with a pastry brush, but since I don't have such a brush, I use a paper towel.) This makes getting the brownies out of the pan for cutting much easier.

Oh, yeah, and another thing: Debbie likes to have people provide ingredient lists for the stuff they bring, for the benefit of those with dietary restrictions. I decided to get fancy with it. I went in to work and used InDesign to make up a little card thing; I grabbed a painting of a black hole from off the Web somewhere (probably a violation of copyright) and made the words "Black Hole Brownies of DEATH" arc into it, with the first four words in blue (I used the eyedropper tool to make it the same blue as the accretion disc in the picture) and the last in gold on top of the black hole's black. Then a credit for you, and the ingredients list underneath.

I haven't had an opportunity to post it anywhere...maybe I will in my LJ, in a day or two.

Another method of getting the brownies out of the pan is to use a silpat-style silicone mat underneath the batter. (One then has the sides left to wrestle with, but not the bottom.)

One should not, however, cut brownies *in* the pan with a sharp knife while the mat is still in situ. [Another fine lesson from the school of experience!]

Xopher --

Are you really arguing that

• mid-1950s views and opinions are privileged when forming the connotations of words, irrespective of facts


• words must have a single, narrow meaning?

I can see a case for objecting to calling some member of maniraptora a bird, even if, phylogentically, that's just what it is; bird is, after all, a vernacular term, and someone might find the whole thing confusing. But Birds-Are-Not-Dinosaurs is a factual error, and was a factual error when that whole 'defined as extinct' thing was going on.

Me, I kinda like the tension between 'slow, doomed, awkward, dumb' and 'kept mammals small, nocturnal, and scared for a hundred and twenty million years, and there was a reason for that'.

One kid's observation: "Now that the dinosaurs are safely dead, we can call them clumsy and stupid".

Surgery by the numbers:
Total length of incisions: 36"
Undesirable body tissue removed, in pounds: 5
General bodily resemblance to a badly-carved jack-o-lantern: significant

I posted the following on the New Year's thread, but I had promised a couple of folks in email to post on the Open Thread as well, so here's a duplicate:

As promised for the new year:

Run, neighbours, run, all London is quadrilling it
Order and Sobriety are dos a dos
This is the day for toeing it and heeling it
All are promenading it from high to low
King Almack with his Star and Garter Coteries
Never did anticipate such democratic votaries
Courtiers and Citizens are flirting with Terpsichore
The town's an ampitheatre for capering & kickery

Also, by way of the idea that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I mention in passing that I am full of brabbles and rustling slightly.

As I understand it, it makes sense to say that dinosaurs were birds, but not the other way around. Similarly we can fairly say that australopithicenes were human but not that humans are australopithicenes.

Also, I'll just observe that mixing connotative meanings, scientific meanings, and analogies in an argument about terminology is often explosive.

I know, I did it too by invoking the herein-undefined term "human." I'm wearing safety goggles.

Soon Lee @ #412:

"Anthology" and "collection" are not mutually exclusive; the former is a specific type of the latter. Gardner Dozois' usage is imprecise, but not actually incorrect.

Mary Dell@439

Not quite. Birds are a subgroup of dinosaurs. So it is factually correct to say that birds are dinosaurs.

re 442: Taxonomically, Aves comes first, so it is what everything gets called if you are a "lumper". But if you are operating through phylogeny, then you get to make similar statements such as "mammals are reptiles".

Somewhere along the line we have to stop abusing the word "is" so much.

joann @ 414... It was a strange experience, after a day of watching the Twilight Zone marathon, to switch to "Shall We Dance?", especially with the movie's grand finale, with all the female dancers wearing masks to look like Ginger Rogers.

Michael I. @#442 & C. Wingage @#443:

Ah, I'm beginning to understand. My last shallow dip into biology was in 1984 (aside from human origins stuff, but that was in anthro classes). I wasn't aware of the differing classification systems. There's a pretty good page here that discusses the difference. I suspect most laypeople are still used to the Linnaean system.

heresiarch 430: I think it's wonderful that we've discovered that, far from dying out, dinosaurs evolved into what we now know as birds. I think it's fabulous that the similarities in structure are so close. I think 'birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs' is an awesome and sensawunda-inspiring fact.

Mess with my language, though, and my enjoyment goes cold. The Latin language has decendents in the Romance languages, but to say "French IS Latin" is wrong and stupid. French has many characteristics that distinguish it from Latin. (I haven't heard anyone saying that dinosaurs, as the term is commonly used, had feathers.) When you want to show the relationship, you use a broader category, like "Romance Languages," to which the ancient and the modern both belong.

Diatryma 431: People tend to refer to birds as dinosaurs when they want to be congratulated on their cleverness.

There we go. And I want to smack them upside the head.

David 433: Wow, I just smear butter on a nonstick pan with my bare (albeit washed) fingers. But then, I keep soft butter around habitually, and like to lick butter off my fingers when I'm done.

If I were going to pull the entire mass out of the pan at once (frex, if I get a guitar), I'd smash parchment paper into the pan, maybe grease it...in fact, with parchment paper you can smear it with butter and THEN smash it into the pan. It doesn't have to be a perfect fit, because the batter will push it down...and crinkly edges are no bad thing where brownies are concerned!

___ 434: Oh my gods, that's FABULOUS!!!! May I use it too, once you post it? It sounds like a really gorgeous piece of artwork. (I hope you put an artist credit on it; if not, I'll write it on the back after printing it out.) What a wonderful collaboration! :-)

Graydon 436: Of course I am saying neither of those things. (And btw, you misused the word 'connotation' there. ALL connotations are "irrespective of facts;" escargot IS snail, but the terms 'escargot' and 'snail' differ in connotation. You meant the denotation. See how annoying it is to be brought to task for misusing technical terms when you used them in a nontechnical way?)

I am privileging common, nontechnical language over specialized, technical language in a common, nontechnical context. I am saying that the decision to use the category 'dinosaur' to encompass both the archaic and the modern forms of creature, and to try to impose that on everyone's speech, is stupid. I am saying I refuse to cooperate in it, just as I refuse to allow the (mis)spelling 'supercede' to stand in anything I write or edit, MicroSoft very much to the contrary.

But in that case, I'm going to lose. 'Supercede' will be the standard spelling in another century. I'm not sure whether the stupid meaning of 'dinosaur' will prevail or not. I suspect not.

What I'm saying is that 'dinosaur' is a vernacular term. And as such it cannot be changed by its reapplication in a technical context, fact-based though that reapplication may be. The paleontological community should examine their own motives, and the roots of the term, and notice that it's a bad term as a technical one; they aren't lizards, so it's just wrong.

Vernacular terms have no such restriction. A template is no longer a small temple, and a gourmet is no longer a wine-merchant's servant. Change occurs in meaning, but in response to usage, not (I regret to inform you) in response to science, generally. This may annoy you, though probably not as much as 'supercede' annoys me! But we just have to suck it up.

Susan 438: Yuck! I didn't realize what major surgery that was. (You have a right to be macha (heh) about getting back to productivity if you wanna, but...skiing double black diamonds, my jaw, she drops.)

And YAY! I meant to say something earlier. I like the design too.

C. 443: Somewhere along the line we have to stop abusing the word "is" so much.

There we go. The paleontologists are abusing the verb 'to be'. That's my whole gripe in a nutshell. Thanks for that.

Humans ARE little splortches of semiorganic quasi-life in the primordial ocean. My multicellular ass they are.

Xopher, the bird/dinosaur continuum is further confused by the discoveries that some dinosaurs did have feathers.

Xopher,

Did you ever see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Remember when Jim Carrey asks the doctor if the memory-erasing procedure causes brain damage, and the doctor says "technically, it is brain damage"?

He wasn't trying to get Carrey to change how he referred to the procedure. He was just making his point vividly.

Unless you can give me a specific quote, I'm not going to believe that any paleontologist is trying to get people to change their everyday use of the words "dinosaur" and "bird".

Are paleontologists supposed to train themselves to say "birds are part of the dinosaurian clade" instead of "birds are dinosaurs" to avoid offending you?

Tim 448: No, but when I say that no one keeps dinosaurs in the attic, they should refrain from telling me that some people do, they're called pigeons, because that's just rude.

Xopher @ 449 ...
How about bats in our belfries?[0] P. lotor in the chimneys?[1] Starlings in the ducting?[2]

I suppose if we return to dinosaurs and sodomy, we could also make a passing reference to Flowers in the attic.

[0] Okay - I don't have a belfry, and I don't think I've had bats inside, yet...
[1] A good reason to cap your unused chimney
[2] Fortunately nothing the furnace repair man hadn't seen before - and dried, by then.

Xopher, I'm with you: in common usage, birds are not dinosaurs. The fact that birds are directly descended from (one family of) dinosaurs is cool, as are recent indications that some dinosaurs may actually have had feathers, but that does not mean that the two words are interchangeable.

Graydon, you're acting like a smug, self-righteous ass. (Notice that I did not say you ARE one; that should give you a clue about the difference that's under discussion.)

xeger @ 450... Didn't Susan have bats in the attic, way back in August 2006?

Xopher: As you point out, sort of, paleontologists, evolutionary theorists, &c., can't just change the terms.

While I happen to like eohippus and brontosaurus and bemoan them being shifted, the entire idea of reshaping the vocabulary everytime someone discovers something new, so that it can be "accurate" to a degree which causes confusion (I still have Peking, and Beijing as sort of separate places in my mental map of China).

It's hard enough tracing concepts as the names of things have organically shifted; much less desiring wholesale overturnings.

Me... I look at a hummingbird, and I see a dinosaur. The same way I look at a human and see Homo habilis. All thoroughbreds are horses, not all horses are thoroughbreds.

People are primates. Birds are dinosaurs. It's not always needful to point out these facts, but they are the facts.

Your mileages, obviously, varies.

Happy New Year, to one and all.

Xopher @ 446

What I'm saying is that 'dinosaur' is a vernacular term. And as such it cannot be changed by its reapplication in a technical context, fact-based though that reapplication may be. The paleontological community should examine their own motives, and the roots of the term, and notice that it's a bad term as a technical one; they aren't lizards, so it's just wrong.

While I agree in principle with that, I've got to say you have zero chance of having your wishes granted. Look at any large clutch of technical vocabularies and you'll find huge numbers of vernacular words re-purposed* for technical meanings that collide in nasty ways with the original. Frex: "string theory", which really should have been called "rubber band theory" since "strings" are under enormous tension held in check by immense elasticity. Or how about "gluonic color" which has nothing whatsoever to do with the wavelength of light? And then there are the more subtly confusing examples in the biological and social sciences, where we might expect some kind of correspondence between technical and vernacular meanings, like "adaptation", which has caused untold stomach upset in debates about evolution. And I'm not talking about mathematics, where the same term has in several cases been taken up by at least 3 completely different subfields to cover 3 completely disparate concepts.

I'm also not talking about the terms from old theories that get left lying around in the new theories, but with different enough meanings to make the old connotations confusing. They're just things we get stuck with, like a bit of lettuce between two front teeth. It's more attention-getting and embarrassing to try to dig the bit out in public than it is to leave it there and trust most humans' lack of observation to keep your dignity.

It's just natural when you're casting around for a new term for a technical concept to look for some existing word that already has some of the connotations you want to allude to already. It's also often horribly confusing to everyone else.

Speaking of neologisms, I like "paleontological", which I assume is the philosophy of old things.

* You may retch at this neologism if you wish, we're stuck with this one too.

A couple of people have pointed to the real vocabulary problem here: the verb "is". In fact, this problem exists in all classification systems I know of that use natural language to describe and discuss the relationships of the categories. The relationships involved are ones between sets, members of the sets, and super- and powersets of those sets. "Is" aint the word that covers them.

Bruce 454: Well, we'll see what happens. I am as valid a speaker of English as any other.

I didn't mean 'paleontological' as a portmanteau of any sort; I was just forming an adjective from 'paleontology'. The "paleontolotical community" is the community of paleontologists, just as the "psychological community" is the community of psychologists...'psycho logic' is that practiced by the Young-Earth Creationists!

I think my first intro to the bird/dinosaur thing was Alton Brown's use of an articulated wooden T. Rex "skeleton" to demonstrate carving a chicken. Or possibly the archeopterix in Johnny Hart's BC, but I'm not sure I recognized the connection at the time.

Either way, I'm all for proper nomenclature, but I will probably go on calling the the critters that nest in my eaves "birds" and the things whose skeletons I see in museums "dinosaurs"...at least until such time as the appropriate scientific communities get a revised nomenclature into mainstream usage. But that's just me, YMMV.

Soon Lee @#358: Wow. Greg Egan? Really? I have him in my advanced-reader category.

You may have a point, I like Egan because he's so mind-blowing ("what SF can be"), but something like Permutation City would be a bit much for newbies. On the other hand, Distress or Quarantine are pretty accessible. Your point about anthologies is a good one -- I've largely drifted away from those, but a carefully-chosen collection could be pretty good for newbies.

Some of the Philip Dick novels are also good (Clans of the Alphane Moon, for one), but Valis seriously freaked me out.... I wouldn't hand Brunner to a newbie for much the same reason.

Looking around, I see John Stith -- something like Neverend or Redshift Rendezvous would be pretty good.

I was also specifically avoiding the prior-generation authors. I agree that Asimov and most of Heinlein haven't aged well, but some of Niven's stuff (especially collaborations with Pournelle and/or Barnes) stands up. Likewise, much of Silverberg and Saberhagen is still good. James White and James Blish also offer some (very different!) possibilities. I'm not sure about Sheffield or Forward -- lots of good stuff, but they might be too hard on science-weak readers.

Of course, fantasy would be a mostly different list -- Steven Brust and Tad Williams for starters. (Saberhagen might get on the fantasy list too, though he definitely blurs the distinction!) Diane Duane, Jody Lyn Nye, and Diana Wynne Jones have plenty of classics, some recent. Come to think of it, it might be time to pass on my copy of DWJ's Dogsbody to my nephews. (Oh, yes, and Sharon Shinn has a lovely young-reader trilogy, starting with The Truth-teller's Tale -- fantasy with nary an elf, monster, or swordfight to be found. They would also be good examples for a class in how to write fantasy...)

Terry Karney @#453:

People are primates. Birds are dinosaurs.

Both relevant definitions of "dinosaur" on Webster.com indicate an extinct reptile.

Webster also puts the ecclesiastical definition of "primate" before the biological, but of course I assumed that you were using the most common meaning of the term. Because most people, in most conversations, are using the most common meanings of terms.

There's nothing wrong with looking at a bird and seeing a "dinosaur," as paleontology currently defines the term, but that's not what the word means to most people, and using it so without a footnote is confusing.

me @ 457: Apteryx rather than archeopterix, according to Wikipedia...for whatever that's worth...

On a wholly unrelated topic, my mom got me a book called The Feckin' Book of Everything Irish, which is largely a gag-gift kind of book. It tells some slang, but isn't specific about which bits are offensive and which are not (for example, I assume that if you call a woman a "savage bit of arse" to her face you're looking to get yours slapped, but what about a "fine doorful of woman"?), and generally gives the impression that Irish culture is entirely consumed with drinking as much as humanly possible, pretending not to think about sex, and to a lesser extent car insurance.

But what part am I interested in? The recipes, of course! And that's where I have some questions for anyone in Ireland or Britain (since I suspect some of the terms may be the same in both). I'm only slightly uncertain of the answers, but small differences can make drastic changes, I've found, so I want to confirm.

What is "greaseproof paper"? Is that what we call parchment paper, or what we call wax paper (literally paper with paraffin on both sides)?

Is "bread soda" what we call "baking soda" (i.e. sodium bicarbonate powder)?

I assume "plain flour" is all-purpose flour, correct?

The Irish Fruit Brack looks like it might be awfully good.

Mary Dell: Now we get to a different problem... who gets to define? And what defintions are we talking about?

I'll argue that the usage of "Dinosaur" to mean old fashioned to the point of caricature, or obsolescence doesn't bring an actual beast into most people's minds.

We are very good at parsing out different meanings for things which share names.

I'm not sure how to clarify how I see it.

Dinosaur, as a term of art, includes birds.

Birds, as a name, doesn't include dinosaurs.

If you say to me, that birds are dinosaurs, I'll nod my head and agree, but it doesn't change my perception of them (not the way it did when I found out that was the theory).

If you try to tell me there are still, "Dinosaurs" because birds are here... then we get to gray areas, where one is playing, "gotcha". On that level I agree with Xopher completely.

Did that make things any clearer than mud?

#446 ...(I haven't heard anyone saying that dinosaurs, as the term is commonly used, had feathers.)...

Bearing in mind that I'm probably just being smug and want to be congratulated on my cleverness, I'll note that the National Geographic thinks there were dinosaurs* with feathers. If like me you go "What? Gosh! I can't get my head round what that'd look like!" at this news, there's an artist's impression.

* dinosaurs dating from before the K-T extinction event** to be specific
** that is a clunky phrase

David, #458: Oh, you've reminded me about James Schmitz! He wrote wonderful, accessible SF and fantasy which is remarkably free of dated social and sexual stereotypes. And Baen Books recently re-issued most of his work in a set of omnibus collections, so it's not hard to find any more.

Another thought that occurs to me: SF is a remarkably flexible genre -- you can find SF versions of mysteries, romances, Westerns, and just about anything else. So for someone who hasn't read much SF but likes a particular other genre, SF crossovers with that genre might be a good way to go.

Yes, I have now heard that there were dinosaurs with feathers. Mea culpa. I don't think that changes my point very much.

Xopher @ 449: I can imagine a tone of voice that would make that rude, but barring that it's just nerdy humor.

Feathers seem to be general for coelurosaurs, which is a wider clade than maniraptora, never mind birds.

One of the serious problems for the folks trying to define 'bird' in a strict way is that it's very difficult to find a character that all extant birds have which something more probably a dinosaur does not have.

So, for instance, there are bits of flight-related shoulder anatomy unique to extant birds, but which ostriches and other ratites lack. So it's not an easy line to draw, in the evolutionary history sense. Several attempts have wound up producing results that make T. rex a bird, which causes a fair amount of 'just wait a damn minute' in response.

There's a very sharp distinction between doing taxonomy with categories and doing taxonomy with path specifications.

The path specifications -- position in the tree of life -- are much, much more accurate and useful for biology. But English is very much into platonic categories for things, rather than statistically described populations.

a note to All Fluorophilii in Greater Toronto (and perhaps also Kitchener/Waterloo):

We/you should have a Making Light Making Weight GTO gathering. As my comment in the Happy New Year thread details, I'll be in GTO (perhaps again K/W) until the afternoon of the 5th, which could be a good excuse for a MLMW, but then anything should be a good excuse for that. The two SFBA MLMW have been great fun. And it's practice for the big ML party in August Denver.

Email to start Making Plans.

WRT dinos and birds, I remember an old GEnie thread in Greg Feeley's topic on how one looks at knowledge. I don't remember exactly who brought it up (perhaps it was Greg), but the essence was that people are either "lumpers" or "splitters". Lumpers are usually looking for ways that things, concepts, whatever, are similar, and splitters are usually looking at ways things can be distinguished.

This is not to say that everyone is going to be exclusively a lumper or a splitter, or which one is "better" - it's just a way of looking at things.

Syd @ 460... Apterix? And Obelix?

For those who are interested... TCM is apparently showing Things To Come tonight.