At least it isn't aleph-null open threads - yet!

(I introduced a co-worker to 'Hot Gingered Pygmy Mammoth and Jumbo Shrimp Salad' this afternoon. Cue the giggling hordes!)

"99 Red balloons go by"

Tonight were gonna party like it's Open Thread 99.

"Don't tell me it's Open Thread, 99!"

"It's Open Thread 99."

"I asked you not to tell me that!"

Just been turned on to http://deputy-dog.com/ which features stuff that looks cool. 5 unbelievably cool research facilites and
another 5 extremely cool research facilities and other posts will see me wasting some time there.

Xopher, @#4: very Smart :-)

99
I've been waiting so long
Oh 99
Where did we go wrong
Oh 99
Now you have this earworm too...

How long ago was Open Thread 1?

Reality query here--

Every time I've sung the song, the third and fourth lines were "Take one down, pass it around, [n-1] bottles of beer on the wall." The few times I've seen it written in the comics pages, the lines have been "If one of those bottles should happen to fall, there'd be [n-1] bottles of beer on the wall." At first I thought this was a regional variation and I had the Southern version. Then I decided that Management thought they might get sued for encouraging underage drinking, so they created a version in which the action happens accidentally.

Does anybody sing the "happen to fall" version?

This has been bothering me for a while.

At the top left of the ML front page, there is a section titled "TNH's Particles". At the bottom of this box there is a link to take you to older posts from this box. This link is titled "More...".

Shouldn't it be titled "Past Particles"?

Brenda Kalt #9:
In my youth we'd sing "And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there'd be..."

So there's another variant for you.

99 hydrogen bombs on the wall,
99 hydrogen bombs!
Take one dow

Brenda @9

I grew up with the "if one of those bottles should happen to fall" version also. I'm from Morton Grove, IL, one of the suburbs north of Chicago.

I also grew up with the "eensy-beensy spider," not the "itsy-bitsy spider" or some other variation. (Long ago, Parade Magazine did a "What did you call the spider?" poll, and there were dozens of versions, IIRC.)

Brenda: I, a native New Yorker, grew up with the "happen to fall" version.

If I may, rather timidly, ask a question... what are the one or five or eight books you most wish everyone else would read? And is there an older thread on book recommendations toward making one a well-rounded individual?

Sir Edmund Hillary died.

And then there's the Arthur C. Clarke Version:

"Nine billion names of God on the scroll, nine billion names of god.
Take one down, pass it around,
Eight billion, nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine names of God on the scroll."

Very useful for filling time on those long multi-generational interstellar journeys.

I grew up in Milwaukee, WI and remember singing both the "happen to fall" and the "take one down and pass it around" versions. Also, when we sang it at home we always started with 100 bottles.

No beer here, the 'full' version goes:

(n) green bottles, hanging on the wall
(n) green bottles, hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle, should accidentally fall,
There'd be (n-1) green bottles, hanging on the wall

The tune is different to the beer version. I suspect that the beer tune is American, the green bottles tune is British.

J 6: Yes, I have good Control of my material.

The British version (different tune):

"Ten green bottles hanging on a wall,
Ten green bottles hanging on a wall,
and if one green bottle should accidentally fall,
There'll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall.
Nine green bottles, etc"

Traditionally it starts at ten, though of course it could start anywhere, and sometimes does on long car journeys. Or did before car stereos became ubiquitous.

Andrhia @15, because I'm feeling even more didactic than usual:

The Control of Nature by John McPhee, if just one.

And then these:

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Gods and Generals and The Killer Angels, Jeffery Shaara, Michael Shaara

At least tonight, I think those are the ones (although the top one is permanent).

Re: Xopher

Do you really think

...excuse me, my shoe is ringing.

Andrhia @15: The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollans, is the first book the reading of which has caused me to excitedly press it on friends and relatives. Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, might have been another, had I been living near people who would have appreciated it at the time. (Well, I listened to it as a Creative Commons-licensed, community-produced MP3 audiobook, but it's the same idea.)

Brenda@9
I grew up in Oregon and we always sang "take one down, pass it around".

On another subject: My bank had a trivia question posted today "How many raindrops reside in the average cloud?" My answer was none, clouds are water vapor and raindrops precipitate out of that and fall. Their answer was 6 trillion. Anyone have a "real" answer to a dumb question?

A new thread already? But I'd just gotten going on the old one.

I would like to repeat-point to my question requesting fluo'knowledge on Munich and Bavaria in January... experiences and advice? Countryside walking around conditions in winter: more like New York or Maine? Fasching-- what to try to see beyond the donuts?

And in gossip news, I am deeply disappointed that Mars and 2007 WD5 won't be getting together. They'd have been a smash hit, and all for the crater good.

10 REM BASIC Version of 99 Bottles of beer
20 FOR X=100 TO 1 STEP -1
30 PRINT X;"Bottle(s) of beer on the wall,";X;"bottle(s) of beer"
40 PRINT "Take one down and pass it around,"
50 PRINT X-1;"bottle(s) of beer on the wall"
60 NEXT

The internet is marvelous.

Andrhia: I'll take "one or five or eight" to mean eight. Mine are:
1. The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I'm counting as one book even though it's ten trillion pages long all together.
2. The Comforters by Muriel Spark.
3. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood.
4. Tales of the Rue Broca by Pierre Gripari.
5. The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem.
6. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders.
7. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
8. The Douglas Adams Dirk Gently books (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, which I'm also counting as one book).

Brenda @ #9: I grew up singing the version you use. When we'd reach 0, we'd start up with

No bottles of beer on the wall, no bottles of beer
Burp one up, slurp it up.
One bottle of beer on the wall...

Very appealing to juveniles.

Aaron #16:
The NZ Herald's put up a piece on Hillary's life. I found it quite telling that of all the famous kiwis featured on NZ currency, he was the only one accorded that honour while still alive.

Aaron #16:
The NZ Herald's put up a piece on Hillary's life. I found it quite telling that of all the famous kiwis featured on NZ currency, he was the only one accorded that honour while still alive.

Apologies for the double post. Thought it failed the first time.

Kathryn, armageddon what you're saying.

Oh, and in Rhode Island I always heard "take one down, pass it around."

Andrhia @15:

Konrad Lorenz On Aggression because it is wise beyond measure

Buwei Yang Chao How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (not for the recipes - for the delightful commentary)

John Scalzi's thread on Being Poor - because that thread and its subsidiary, a total of 650 comments, is big and important and well-written enough to be a book and we don't have to be pagists.

Neal Stepehnson's Mother Earth, Mother Board - preferably, read it in 1996.

Ray Brabury's Dandelion Wine for the virtuosity of its American-English usage. Some people play violin or piano or come up with elegant proofs or break your heart with beauty so joyous as to cause pain. Bradbury, in this book, took a slegehammer to my heart. And I wasn't even born when he wrote it.

Plutarch's Lives. Because people haven't changed a bit. And Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People for the same reason.

Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, about the history of Fundamentalism. It explains so much. (Her history of Jerusalem is pretty awesome, too).

Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work, the first 20,000 years and hers with Paul Barber When They Severed Earth from Sky: How human mind shapes myth about oral traditions and how they were used. Even if their theories aren't for real, they make a mindblowing read. (And if you liked those, Paul Barber's book about vampires in folklore as contrasted to those in fiction is a cheerful read).

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a very concise way to blow some gaskets. It may be the most important political book of 2007 - but I think it will last well beyond that.

I'll stop procrastinating now...

Andrhia at 15, I will name six books which I would recommend to any thoughtful person.

1) The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis
2) King Hereafter, by Dorothy Dunnett
3) The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin
4) Another Country, by James Baldwin
5) Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
6) The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

And a seventh, which is not exactly a "book," but can be found in bookstores: a good translation of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia. I am fond of the Ciardi translation, but there are other good ones.

99 tiny bugs in the code
99 tiny bugs
Fix a bug, compile it again
100 tiny bugs in the code

And:

I've got 96 tears in 99 eyes

Kevin Riggle @24 mentioned Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma; I'll add Pollan's Botany of Desire to the list, and also say yay to 3,7, and 8 of ethan's list.

Kathryn # 26: Alas, the year I lived in München, Fasching was cancelled due to the First Gulf War. :P I'm afraid I can't give you any advice on that. Though as far as weather goes, my recollection was that it was more often closer to New York City than Maine (both of which I have ample experience with, having grown up in the latter and now practically living in the former).

However, having said that, the weekend of Karnivale I did go to Venice ... Karnivale had also been cancelled, but that didn't stop some people from wandering about in the fog wearing masks. It had snowed a couple days previous, so I have some gorgeous photos of snow-filled gondolas that I really *must* turn into holiday cards someday.

And while in München, I experienced thundersnow for the first (and so far, last) time. Very, very cool.

So I bought myself a birthday present two days ahead of the date, I now have a new laptop, with not only a touchscreen, but a built-in webcam, too--and a clip of me cursing at Microsoft, Vista, and Steven Jobs and his ancestry... unexpurgated live reaction commentary on doing -some- of the system reconfiguration to something less annoying that the stock user interface.... NOT for G-rated audience--no sex, no violence, but it is full of foul language! (It also included me trying to divide by 1280 by 800, out loud, for the purpose of trying to figure out if the ratio is closer to 4:3 or 16:9 [it's 16:10, but it would be way too easy for the stupid software to actually show typical resolutions and let the operator pick amongst them... and I forgot anyway was the resolution is, and then tried to go look it up on the machine... but Vista doesn't have the display control information in the same place that previous versions of Microsoft environments have them....])

I was testing the webcam.... the location it's at of course is designed for someone whose torso is much longer than mine is, so it shows lots of space above my head with the laptop on my lap....

Dena Shunra #35:
Thanks for the John Scalzi link. I was gobsmacked.

BTW, the Neal Stephenson piece is available online at Wired. It's a hugely fascinating & insightful piece that has very much informed his subsequent books, "Cryptonomicon" & The Baroque Cycle and clearly shows his interest in the (infra)structures underlying our civilisation, and their origins.

Andrhia - I'm going to go for generalities while I try to think of specific titles.

1) A work of religious significance. The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible, The Quran, etc.

2) A work of 'early literature' that is referenced by later literature. Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

3) A work on science that is referenced, but no one seems to have actually read. Origin of Species, Chaos, A Brief History of Time, etc.

4) A work considered significant or influential in a field/genre you enjoy. That way you catch the references/homages that are made to it in other works.

5) A biography of an influential or interesting person. Artists, politicians, deal makers, captains of industry, whoever catches your fancy.

The good thing is that a good book will lead you to other good books. And that's a good thing. Or a good start...

#9 Brenda Kalt: I grew up in Colorado singing the "take one down, pass it around" version; then sometime in the 90s, still in Colorado, I heard the "should happen to fall" version and immediately switched over. The patter/meter is way better, and the sly passive voice amuses me. Suuure, the bottle just happened to fall. I just happened to have my hand out in a cupped position, eh? It's a world of wonders and miracles.

#15 Andrhia: I don't have a list everyone should read, because people are different and I'm too lazy. I do have books I push on everyone I think might be even slightly receptive... These are:

1. Steven Brust's _The Phoenix Guard_, and
2. Eccelesiastes. (From the Bible. I enormously prefer the Revised Standard Version.)

There's not really a connecting bit. Those are just the ones that worked really well for me. (There are lots and lots of other awesome books, but those seem to be the ones I thump again and again.)

Dena @ 35, yep. If you read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and don't nearly burst an aneurysm you didn't even know you had, your capacity for rage is desperately lacking.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 26

Would it be crash of me to want to get a bang out of it?

and too bad it wasn't 2007 WD-40; it'd just slide right on through.

Mmm, wait. The question wasn't about books you'd recommend. It was about books you most wish other people would read. In other words, this time we're not supposed to be out to share our pleasures with other people. The assignment is to improve them -- or the world.

Here's a couple, off the top of my head. I need to go to bed, like, two hours ago, so maybe I'll dream some others overnight.

1. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, for obvious reasons.
2. Sun Tzu's Art of War, to nudge people in the direction of noticing that war is not even a little bit the same as reality TV.

Yes, indeed there was a tornado in Vancouver, WA. It actually did some damage, but the TV news crews have managed to blow it out of proportion even so. I'm watching Sh*tStorm Team Alert, or whatever they call their weather overreaction program; you can hear the exclamation marks in each report. Eva tells me this afternoon they even called up someone in Oklahoma so they could talk to an "expert" on the air.

Oh, the real news: no serious injuries, a couple of buildings destroyed, a bunch of trees and power poles down. And a bunch of fish picked up out of the lake and strewn around the landscape.

"Three funnel clouds,
two smashed homes,
and some fish up in the tree."

99 open threads? It's KAOS I tell you, simply KAOS!

:D

Oh, and I heard both the "take one down..." and "happen to fall..." variants when I was growing up. But the spider was always "itsy-bitsy".

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess and Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain--whether others find his theories worthwhile or not, these might expand their thought processes a bit...

I'm a "take one down pass it around" person (I grew up in far Alaska in the 1980's).

5-8 Books that Changed My Life

1) Antigone

2) Iliad

3) Anything by Joan Aiken, esp. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase/ James III Chronicles (What you thought I called myself after the Queen of Carthage? Um. No. She should really be # 1, especially for "The Cat Flap and the Apple Pie.")

3) Beauty (Robin McKinley) (This is the one that got me to learn Greek...the others just changed my entire self/world view.)
The Hero and the Crown (R. McKinley)
The Blue Sword (R. McKinley)

4) The Good Master (K. Seredey)

5) Medea (Euripides)

6) Roller Skates (R. Sawyer)

7 How I Live Now (M. Rosoff)

8) The Attolia Books (M. Whalen Turner)

Hmm. How do I get all of Crutcher (but especially "Whale Talk"), Eager & Nesbit and Ibbotson (but especially "Journey to the River Sea") in there? (Hi there! I've read (almost) all the archives; as you might guess I'm a Classics professor and I worked in a kids' bookstore for (off and on) 10 years.)

Bruce @47,

I remember when there was a tornado here in Sunnyvale, California, a few years back. While central Cal gets plenty of small tornadoes--few people see them, and they take out fruit sheds at worst--they're much more rare near the coast.

It--our tornado--took out a few roofs and trees. The local news was breathless.

The weather channel also covered it. As I recall it went like this:
"Sunnyvale, California, experienced a... 'tornado' today. It was a class... half ... 'tornado'."

i.e. the disdain rained as he deigned to mention our 'tornado.'

dido - which part of AK? I grew up between Anchor Point and Fairbanks. And desperately wanted to be a classics scholar when I was kid.

Andrhia, I may be only 20 but these have shaped my life so far:

1. Arcadia (Tom Stoppard)
2. "Slow Sculpture" (Theodore Sturgeon)
3. Lest Darkness Fall (L. Sprauge de Camp)
4. Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)
5. A Perfect Analysis Given By a Parrot (Tennessee Williams)
6. The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)
7. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

and one of the most original and complex YA fantasy novels,
8. The Spellcoats (Diana Wynne Jones)

also, for a really fun read chock-full of wit and puns,
9. The Case of the Toxic Spelldump (Harry Turtledove)

Tania, my address is still (in my mind) SR ****, Anchor Pt., AK 99556, but I think of myself as being from Homer. As for being a classics scholar--it was rough getting here: it's totally worth it--and it totally isn't. Professor? Pfbbbt. But even though I finally can, I'd still totally cut off my right arm for the ability to read Homer. Elbow, shoulder, ya' know, . . .where ever.

(I was in Mr. B's 4-6th grade at Nikolaevsk, and HH for 9-12; quit [didn't graduate] in 1994; let me know if there's any overlap.)

Books for the improvement of people:

Hamlet's Mill - Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, for its sense of the time of the human species and its view of myth as real and useful wisdom.

The Immense Journey - Loren Eisley, for its sense of still deeper time, and our connection to all of life and the world.

Starmaker - Olaf Stapledon, for a glimpse of the deepest time of all, and some still quite interesting speculation on the nature of life and godhead.

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter, for a chance to stretch your mind and your notion of mind.

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester. It may not be the best sf novel ever, but it's certainly breathing down the neck of whatever is. As a bonus, read The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas, père to see how the story began (as a story).

The Art of War - Sun Tzu, for the reasons Sylvia Li gave. No more needs to be said.

Guns, Germs, and Steel / Collapse - both by Jared Diamond (counts as 1 book for this bookclub). The first has some fascinating ideas about why civilizations rose quickly in some places; the second has some fascinating ideas about why some failed.

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting - Daniel Dennett, because it is your destiny.

Bruce @54, I've added your entire comment to my reading list. At the top of it, actually. Thanks for that!

Sylvia Li @46, it seems to me that asking which books you'd want to make other people read is pretty similar to asking "what ideas would you want other people to have". So, if you were the empress of the world, what ideas would you want people to have? Ideas don't have to be packaged in books... ...despite the huge proportion of people who did/are/will work in publishing among our hosts' readership.

dido - holy heck. I think you're about 4-5 years younger than me, I graduated in 1989 from North Pole.

I went to Nikolaevsk 1&3 (skipped 2, taught by Mrs. Lockwood). Jimmy Howard, who taught up there, is one of my uncles. Went to Anchor Point 4-8, and Homer 9&10. You must be about the same age as Seth or Cheryl?

I grew up on the North Fork on the family homestead, and still have family in Anchor Point, Homer, Ninilchik, and Clam Gulch. I live in Fairbanks/North Pole these days.

On a sad note, if you ever look at the Anchorage Daily News online, a plane of Old Believers coming back from Kodiak for Christmas crashed this weekend. Some of the people that died were boys I went to school with at Nikolaevsk. It's been a grim reminder, and even though I haven't seen most of them in over 25 years, I still feel sad for their families and remember them as kids.

Oh, and congrats on making it for the classics. I have opted to settle for translation, but still like to pick up a Latin text now and then. Did going to school in Nikolaevsk make learning to write Greek any easier? I still read Cyrillic, and my Russian accent is ok, but my actual speaking skills are pretty much limited to tourist phrases.

Sorry, but I realized Diana Wynne Jones, Donald Westlake, Josephine Tey and Reginald Hill are not on my list. We're just going to have to stretch the definition of "8". Like I said, sorry about that.

(If any one knows how to get in touch with Andrew Dalziel, let me know.)

In terms of stretching minds, I'll settle for these four:

Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Frazer - The Golden Bough
Morgan - The Aquatic Ape

And for all our sakes, I'll add one website
http://www.ipcc.ch/

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase. I haven't read it as an adult, so I don't know how it would look to me now, but it made a large useful difference back then--it's an intro to General Semantics, and has the sensible idea of grounding your words in specific experiences.

As a side effect, it makes being verbally abusive somewhat difficult. At least to my mind, verbal abuse has the underlying premise that the subject is defective by nature and forever, and if you're keeping a grip on what you can actually know, you realize that you can't know that much about anyone.

More than Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter's collection Metamagical Themas did a huge amount to shape my head, especially the sections about the Prisoner's Dilemma. Hofstadter was strongly influenced by Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, and I'll throw that one in too, since it's well-written and short.

Steve C. @8 : 25th January 2003, apparently. I can only assume that either the thread title's been retconned since, or Teresa was remarkably prescient (Open Thread 2 wasn't until July 2003).

Kathryn @ 26

My gut reaction was to scream Nooooooo and talk you out of going altogether. Southern Germany is the place NOT to be around the narrische Zeit. Thus speaketh the girl from the North East, where we are much more sensible.

But then it occurred to me that you might enjoy this kind of thing - takes all sorts, they tell me ;) - so if you insist on exposing yourself to Teh Crazy, and taking your wardrobe limits into account, how about this?

1 - It's a brewery, score.*
2 - They only let in folks dressed in white! Score?

I warn you again, though. They go mental, the southern types, at Faschingszeit.

Right. Having now prepared you sufficiently, I consider my duty done. (Because once one accepts Teh Crazy, there is sooooo much fun to be had. But be prepared, and bring tape to stick lower jaw in place. Also, there will be much Blasmusik. Ouch.)

Have fun! I hope it snows for you. They get the best (read: most) snow in all of Germany down there.

* BTW, Bavarian beer can be, er, challenging if you're a hardened lager drinker. I'm just saying.

Dylan, 61: My word. Those threads had 84 and 126 comments respectively.

Tania: so, what do you translate, exactly? Are you making a living at it? I ask because...

All: I'll be unemployed starting in May. Does anybody know of any word-related jobs lying around?

JKRichard@27:I prefer the python beer/wall framework. :)

Dylan @61:

Thanks for the links!

I note that the first topic drift on the first Open Thread happened at comment 4.

Drift early, drift often, say I.

My suggestions for books everybody should read:

Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs

Platform for Change, Stafford Beer

The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture, Paul C. Bauschatz

Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, Peter Padfield

Neunundneunzig Luftballons
Achtundneunzig Luftballons
Siebenundneunzig Luftballons
Sechsundneunzig Luftballons
Fünfundneunzig Luftballons...

This one takes a byte longer...

FF buckets of bits on the bus,
FF buckets of bits,
take one down
short it to ground,
FE buckets of bits on the bus!

Although I grew up with bottles accidentally falling off the wall, I now tend to pass them around. It probably has something to do with my favourite version (which is really only funny for one round, even if you're drunk already):

Infinity bottles of beer on the wall,
Infinity bottles of beer,
Take one down, pass it around,
Infinity bottles of beer on the wall.

It does have the advantage that you have to be too drunk to sing before you lose count.

Books for the confusement of people:

Joyce's _Finnegan's Wake_, of course.

The _Illuminatus!_ Trilogy, even more of course.

And (a fairly new addition) Hal Duncan's _Vellum_/_Ink_. A scarily brilliant work (arguably a failure in some ways, but it's only a failure because it tried to do so much), harder to read than _Illuminatus!_, easier than the Joyce.

Up here in Ottawa we always sang 'should happen to fall', though I also always wondered what the bottles were doing on the wall to begin with. Are they lined up on shelves? Held up by velcro or superglue? 99 is a lot - is there a room somewhere wallpapered with beer bottles? (The dream home, I expect, of many of my Canadian friends...)

TexAnne: Oh no! But at least maybe you could use the opportunity to move to somewhere nicer. (Montreal's very nice. Also, you speak French.)

When the next Open Thread is started, will it be #100? Or, as with Y2K, will it be #00, causing Reality's collapse, thus squeezing the contents of the disemvoweller all over everything?

Mike Bakula @ 68

0x01 buckets of bits on the bus,
0x01 buckets of bits,
take one down
short it to ground,
**** STACK UNDERFLOW 0xFE7FE9176 ****
PANIC WHILE PANICKING
reboot ....

TexAnne @ 63... Does anybody know of any word-related jobs lying around?

I wish I did.

> So, if you were the empress of the world, what ideas would you want people to have?

That I was doing a good job as empress. Failing that, that empresses should be removed in a non-violent manner and kept in relative comfort once deposed.

Um, guys,

The spider was always eensy-weensy.

Philistines.

#73: I worry more about the thread after that.

Thread 101.

65535 bottles of beer on the wall,
65535 bottles of beer,
Put another one up on the wall,
Zero bottles of beer on the wall ...

Jon Meltzer @ 78... Is that in binary or in hexadecimal?

One fluffy tribble is munching on grain
One fluffy tribble on board,
Turn your back and allow it to snack,

Two fluffy tribbles are munching on grain....

No, you get eleven fluffy tribbles.

I have heard and sung both the passing-around and the falling bottle songs, with both beer and pop. It's kind of like the Big Rock Candy Mountains-- cigarette or peppermint trees? Little springs of lemonade or alcohol? It depends how stubborn your parents are.

Did you know that "color" rhymes with "cruller"? This may be important later ...

Someone's spending too much time on rhymezone.

Two T Rexes running down prey,
Two T Rexes with prey,
If both those T Rexes should happen to meet
"SON, THIS GEOLOGIC ERA ISN"T BIG ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US!"
One T Rex with plenty to eat.

abi
Oddly, that was my own fevered brain came up with that. I was noodling around with a couple of lines, trying to find the right meter, when that popped out. I expect my subconscious is busy writing an Ode to Krispy Kreme. Never fear that if it's ever finished, it will be placed in a repository along with other long half-life hazardous materials.

Bruce @86:
Bring it out when it's funny.

As for me, I was walking away from the computer when this one struck.

Ten old amendments in the Bill of Rights
Ten old amendments are law
"Executive privilege", the President cites.
Nine old amendments in the Bill of Rights

For book recommendations, I agree with Bruce Cohen (#54) on things that drastically widen the perspective, like Eisley (whom I read as a kid, from the family library) and Stapledon (caught up with him a bit later -- H.S. or college). Somebody else mentioned the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, and I see the widened perspective there in another sense: an almost microscopic brilliance of attention that can also go big.

For a born pessimist and fretter, looking at things on a well-beyond-human scale can be cheering!

Alan Braggins @76:

You might want to read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader.

The beer version, I always heard as "take one down, pass it around".

But then there was my junior high's version:

Ninety-nine bottles of nail polish on the wall
Ninety-nine bottles of nail polish
If one should happen to fall off the wall
Get on your bike and go back to the mall.

Ba-dum-dum.

In the spirit of Paul's contribution...

99 bottles of beer on the wall
99 bottles of beer
Take one down, put it back up,
99 bottles of beer on the wall

Really good for giving adults that sinking feeling of dread.

Attributable to teenage teetotaling geeks at the "nerd camp" in Southern Louisiana where I met the young man who'd become my husband six years later.

#90:
If one should happen to fall off the wall
Get on your bike and go back to the mall.

I remember that! Mallory sang it that way once on Family Ties.

(I can't remember important stuff to save my life, but useless 80s sit-com trivia? I'm your gal.)

Abi @87 - no fair, singing that from the relative safety and civilization of your neighborhood... ...here you'd need to be in a free speech zone to do it.

8 zillion foolish TSA rules for the folk
8 zillion foolish rules for the folk
Election year comes home to to us all
8 zillion and some-odd foolish rules for the folk.

Linkmeister@44: reading it is the closest I've come to total breakdown since the month I spent typing backwards all day and painting things all night (this was a job. It was wildly lucrative, but tended to unravel my mind in most disconcerting ways). This is the first book I've ever needed an herbal relaxant for.

One time traveller eating some soup,
One time traveller eating some soup,
And if one time traveller should fall into a loop,
There'll be two time travellers eating some soup.

Two time travellers eating some soup,
Two time travellers eating some soup,
And if two time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be four time travellers eating some soup.

Four time travellers eating some soup,
Four time travellers eating some soup,
And if four time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be eight time travellers eating some soup.

Eight time travellers eating some soup,
Eight time travellers eating some soup,
And if eight time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be sixteen time travellers eating some soup.

Because this should be shared and his work is just to great not to spread:

The Deadlock Song


Paul Kwinn

"Son, be a colonist", is what Dad said to me
"It's a cushy life, and you'll get alien real estate for free"
So I talked to the recruiter, to see if this was so
He smiled at me... the nicest smile... and said "Kid, don't you know?"

A colonist's job is easy, a colonist's wage is high
A colonist's pension plan would make a civil servant cry
There's never any danger, there's always lots of fun
And as for job security, it's better than a nun's

[spoken:] Kid, I'd like you to meet somebody. His OFFICIAL title is
"Commander", but I'd like you to think of him as more of a Social
Coordinator.

[Chorus:]
If I ever get back home again
If I ever get back home again
If I ever get back home again
That recruiter's gonna die.

[spoken:] I'm here to tell you folks: it wasn't QUITE like he said...

Some say the Cyth are evil, they say they're misunderstood
"If you'd just do things our way, it would serve the greater good"
They seek to reach a higher place, a new enlightened mode
Meanwhile if you get in their way, your brain just might explode

The Re-lu seem to think they simply cannot be outclassed
They're so urbane, that less cultured folk
[spoken:] (like, say, the Queen of England...)
...seem barbaric by contrast
Their access privilege to your brain includes both read and write
They turn your units into theirs and no one's left to fight

[spoken:] "Bob! Bob! What's wrong?!"
"I dunno Jim... they just seem like such nice fellas..."

[Chorus]

Ch'ch-t need new worlds to expand, more than the others do
For like their cockroach cousins, there's never just one or two
They multiply like vermin, make tireless labor crews
And carry off your resources like ants at picnics do

The Maug are weak and sickly and their horns are mostly fake
The Cyth took their home planet, more poisons for to make
But for such whining wheezers they're an engineering bunch
Give them a rock, and they'll invent the warp drive before lunch

[Chorus]

The Uva Mosk think that they're Mother Nature's strong right arm
And they are more than willing to blast those who'd do her harm
Their camouflaging units will pop up behind your lines
So you'd better "Give a hoot", 'cause you won't like their littering fines.

The Tarth are big, the Tarth are tough, the Tarth will cause you pains
They're not too bright, but when you can head-butt buildings, who needs brains?
They make the greatest farmers, but as spies they suck, you see
They try to hide their 6-foot width behind a 1-foot tree.

[spoken:] This is KGAL, your News and Information Station on Gallius 4.
Here with a correction to last week's editorial reply is noted public figure: The Ubergeneral:
"Tarth cooks make best streudel. That's all. Just streudel."

Add to that the Skirineen, who'd sell their Mothers' eyes
And you can see why I might not think this job is a prize
So if I manage to survive, I'm going back to Earth
But I think I'll keep my laser gun... just for sentimental worth.

[Chorus]

A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume - This book will teach you the connection between the match and the flame. (Hint: There isn't one.)

Collapse by Jared Diamond - This book is about hacking civilizations--what makes them tick; what makes them fail? (I know, Bruce, but think: imitation=flattery)

River of Fire, River of Water by Taisetsu Unno - This book is about everything good that religion has to offer. It taught me to love the world.

Orientalism by Edward Said - To understand the underlying dynamic in any West/East interaction, you need to read this book. A must read for anyone who wants to make sense of modern world politics.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman - Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

(I got The Shock Doctrine for Christmas, and I've been looking forward to reading it. Now I'm a bit nervous. =)

#92: I remember that! Mallory sang it that way once on Family Ties.

Oh, is that where that came from?

Damn, that girl in 6th grade totally passed it off as her own invention!

Heh. Plagiarism from the mouths of babes.

Sus #62: Lager, schmager. Give me an Ayinger Dunkel-Weisse any day. :)

It's possible that it's both of their inventions. A lot of clever bits from junior high came from TV, including some I did my best to invent.

For books people should read, rather than books people will like... any pair of books about the same topic that contradict each other, and a book on rhetoric and constructing arguments. One tells you what to look for, and the other two provide examples.

Nix, 70: I keep promising myself I really will go back and finish Vellum one of these days. I love the idea of it, I appreciate what he's trying to do with it, and people who I like and admire speak highly of it, but boy do I keep bouncing off it something terrible.

My impression of Duncan, reading some of his online writing, is that he doesn't have a whole lot of instinctive sense of when his point has been made already, which may account for some of my issues. (Of course, it's a trait I grit my teeth at partly because I know it's a fault of mine as well.) And I also get the sense that he's the kind of guy whose first impulse on seeing a stained-glass window is to reach for a hammer; I don't know how fair that assessment actually is, but I'm sure it's affecting my reading as well. I'm still determined to keep going, though it's moved several spaces down my list these days. FWIW, I fought with Illuminatus! for about the first half too, and then it sucked me right in, so I'm keeping my hopes up that sooner or later I'll be able to appreciate its brilliance in a more than abstract way.

#100: Dan, you have just put into words my exact impression of Vellum, and I wish I'd said those things when I had to review it. It's one of those books where I greatly admire the writer's skills and the profundity of his discourse, without caring for the result in the slightest. I simply couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people, or be concerned with what happened to them.

dido 57: Around here we say "for very large values of 8."

I'm going to do my 8 piecemeal, as I think of things. The first one is A Rulebook for Arguments, which gives a good introduction to arguing, as well as writing an argumentive essay; and as far as discussing fallacies...this book amounts to an installation manual for a pretty good bullshit detector.

Another book which I not only wish everyone would read, but that everyone would have inscribed on their head, their heart, and their doorpost is Getting to Yes, which is about negotiating without either "giving in" or taking unfair advantage of the other side. It's an excellent manual for relationships (though certainly not intended as such), as well: it's both harder and more important to "separate the people from the problem" in relationships, and the book explains not only why you should, but how you can.

Dave @ 101:

I simply couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people, or be concerned with what happened to them.

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. The main characters weren't human in a way that I found easy to relate to. Which, to be fair, is a tricky thing to do when writing about mythology. But the characters are where Vellum falls flat, in comparison to The Sandman or Little, Big.

OTOH, if I ever find myself being compared (even unfavorably) to Gaiman or Crowley, I'll be a happy writer.

OK, you'll all be looking for a break from politics. Nevertheless, I am slowly reading through hunter S Thomspsons "Fear and loathing on the campaign trail '72".

I have a horrible feeling that all the bad stuff as described in the book is still happening now, only bigger.

Books:

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Master and Commander* by Patrick O'Brien
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Drinking Life by Pete Hammil
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Essential Rumi by Rumi
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

*and onward

69,:

we used to sing that as

Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
Take one down, pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.

From just after we learned about countable and uncountable infinities in math class

Incidently of something else entirely, is it just my own neuroses, or is anybody else bothered by "Stupidest drug story of the week", wanting it to be "Most stupid drug story of the week"?

Mary Dell @ 105... Speaking of Wuthering Heights, TCM showed the movie last night. I was quite surprised when the opening credits named the author as Emily Bronté - not Brontë.

I'm British, and the spider is incy-wincy, while the green bottles are sitting on the wall and accidentally fall.

On a related note - there were ten in the bed, and the littlest one said, Roll over!

Books everyone should read... Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. JE Gordon's The New Science of Strong Materials. And more parochially, John O'Farrell's Utterly Impartial History of Britain - Or, 2000 Years of Upper-Class Idiots In Charge.

But mostly, I just think that people should read. As much and as often as possible. I may be overly optimistic here, but I think that learning-by-reading has a natural tendency to sift people to the good end of the good-to-bad stratigraphy of books.

Guthrie, when I was a sophomore in high school, each of us in my Government class had to do a report on an election. Candidates, major issues, et cetera. I got 1972.
I had never heard of Hunter S Thompson. I had no idea, going in, that the book was not a scholarly reference. I am still surprised that it was the only source* I had for some things. I'm not sure what my teacher thought of it, but I know I was confused.

*books, not newspaper articles. My source-fu was weak back then.

Aarrrgh, speaking of idiots at DHS, they're pushing ahead with the "Real ID" plan:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hGWEcbtYTTl9RTiO3YS_POnaYJ9gD8U3ESUO0

Dave, 101: To be perfectly fair, another reason I think I struggle with Vellum whenever I try to get back into it is that after the opening sections, I was hoping it would be much more like Imajica than it wound up being. I try to be conscientious of not giving "you didn't write the book I wanted to read" any real weight, but I do feel some frustration that there's a promise of sensawunda in this very grand tapestry that gets set up in the beginning and has not (so far as I've managed to make it through, anyway) paid off much. I'm certainly willing to accept that I'm the one with the problem, though.

You never know what's going to set any particular reader off, especially when you start experimenting. A friend who sang the praises of Vellum found the metatextual games in City of Saints and Madmen to be a little too clever for his taste, where I think that kind of thing is delightful and fascinating. De gustibus, obviously; and if anything understanding this makes me even more inclined to defend unorthodox approaches to art, even if they don't work for me personally.

Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder;

Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel; 3 vols.: ; The Structures of Everyday Life; The Wheels of Commerce; The Perspective of the World;

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir;

The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker

The Great War for Civilization; CIVILIZATION: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk;

Anything by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Others have included Shock Doctrine and Guns, Germs and Steel.

What a well-read crowd this is!

Love, C.

According to xkcd, one comes across very few hits when googling "died in a knitting accident".

Tania a long time ago:
I'm pretty sure I know Cheryl, she was a bit older than I was; my parents live on the North Fork still. Mrs. Lockwood was my teacher as well. Zowie.

Sam Kelley 108: the littlest one said, "I'm crowded, roll over."

Serge, I actually Googled "died in a blogging accident" and got nearly 2000 hits. I suppose his numbers could be in thousands.

Another book that changed the way I think, which I think I've mentioned here before, is Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering by Marita Sturken. My copy of it is missing right now, which is driving me batty, because I usually want to refer to it at least once a week.

Xopher @ 115... I also got a high number too, but some of them appear to be duplications, and others are metaphorical deaths by knitting. Would it be beyond xkcd to go thru and tally the actual deaths?

I got about 814 for skydiving, 2300 for blogging, 115 for knitting, and 10 for haberdashery.
You cannot report these statistics via xkcd without changing them.

When I google "died in a knitting accident" I get 17 results, most of which seem to be inspired by the xkcd strip. You guys are using the quotation marks, right?

Or are you believing the "about" figures, which are notoriously inaccurate? Click through pages until you get a message saying that duplicated results have been omitted, that'll tell you how many there _really_ were.

Xopher, you write in #115:

Serge, I actually Googled "died in a blogging accident" and got nearly 2000 hits. I suppose his numbers could be in thousands.

You just made another one!

#108, Sam Kelly -

The ten that were in the bed - what were they? I was taught that they were monkeys, but I've run across people who were taught a version with a racial epithet.

"died in a haberdashery accident" is turning up something interesting... I guess the last four links on that page are spamblogs that are pulling phrases from the google common searches list (as used by, e.g., google suggest) and autobuilding spam pages around them.

There are different version of ten in the bed-- I learned it with just numbers, singing. There's a chanting version, too

Five little [two-beats] jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head.
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said,
"No more [two-beats] jumping on the bed!"

I've heard it with monkeys and Indians, mostly monkeys.

Jules, you're right about the About figures; I didn't know they were inaccurate and wanted quick results.

R.M. Koske - they were children. Though I think that was implied rather than being explicit in the lyrics we sang. At least, I can't fit anything beyond those two lines (and the associated N-1) into the tune in my head.

Jules @ 119... That's what I was doing wrong. Further googling confirmed that nobody died in a rhyming accident.

#83 ::: Bruce Cohen

Did you know that "color" rhymes with "cruller"? This may be important later ...

[Tune from whatever the song is that starts "Morning has broken..." by the former musician once named Cat Stevens...]

==============

The color of cruller could be much duller,
But to a muller, they don't go crunch
Brains that get nuller, caught by a guller,
Still in the truller,
Let go eat lunch!

Diatryma 109: ...when I was a sophomore in high school, each of us...had to do a report on an election...I got 1972.

When I was a sophomore in high school, 1972 was the most recent election. But I had never heard of Hunter S. Thompson, either.

ibid, 118: You cannot report these statistics via xkcd without changing them.

See my monograph "On the Heisenbergian Observer Effect as Manifest in Google Reporting on Popular Websites," for an in-depth discussion of same.

Bill 121: As did you, by quoting me. In this post, however, I have not. Subtleties.

Diatryma, op. cit., 124: In the sung version I learned, the entities in the bed are never identified, and the "Little One" sings out "Roll over! Roll over!" in all verses but the verse for "There was One in the bed," where the LO sings "Good Night."

The chanted version you cite also has a sung version; sung, that is, all except for the last line, which everyone shouts together, louder each time. For us it was always monkeys, not that that wasn't a common way to refer to small children regardless of race. When I learned it, the one who fell out BROKE his head, and the doctor said "Don't let the monkeys jump on the bed!"

Paula 127: He did not write the tune. It's a Welsh folksong, I'm led to understand. I'm not sure he even wrote the words, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Paula @127, Cat Stevens is most definitely still a musician. He's living and working as Yusuf Islam and his voice and music have mellowed out and ripened into even greater wonders than they had in the past.

His latest offering, An Other Cup, was my favorite album in 2007. One of his pieces was with Youssou N'Dour, The Beloved; it seems to have a direct channel to my firmware - I'm unable to refrain from dancing when I hear it.

I haven't seen 1491 by Charles Mann mentioned yet in the "books everyone should read" thread. This was my "push-on-everyone" book of 2007.

I realized just after I posted last that I know the roll-over song from Wee Sing in Sillyville and nowhere else. There's a standardizing effect when kid songs are distributed widely* and a tendency toward mildness. I know I learned some songs in Girl Scouts that I later heard via Wee Sing, but others came straight from the videos.

I didn't like the countdown songs and chants when I was little. They were boring. Something like "Boom chick-a Boom" was more fun, because there was room for creativity in multiple directions.

*See Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts edited by Josepha Sherman, which didn't get my regional variants

I knew the same two "N in/jumping on the bed" things that Xopher mentions in 128, but I never considered them to be at all related.

The versions I learned had slight variations from his, though:

In the sung "Roll over! Roll over!" version, the entities were bears, and in the "One in the bed" verse the little one says "I'm lonely". I have a dim recollection that this version may have been transmitted via Sesame Street.

The doctor in the chanted "jumping" version says "No more monkeys jumping on the bed". I never encountered a sung version of the jumping version.

#43 ::: Madeline F

#9 Brenda Kalt: I grew up in Colorado singing the "take one down, pass it around" version; then sometime in the 90s, still in Colorado, I heard the "should happen to fall" version and immediately switched over. The patter/meter is way better,

No to my kinaesthetics, it's not. It rasps on my my audio/sensory/neural-network/processing meatware circuitry

If one of those bottles should happen to fall for my kinaesthics is trying to pack too many syllables that are inharmonious and dissonant [raspying when juxtaposed] into a meter and rhyme and sequencing that make my nerve endings shrivel in revulsion... the "bottles" juxtaposition against "fall" is a sensory equivalent of applying coarse sandpaper...ugh! Not being wired up to appreciate masochism and the texture of e.g. sandpaper against my skin/nerve endings, I find it quite unpleasant.

and the sly passive voice amuses me.

That's not passive voice, though, "if one of those ... should happen" is conditional. Passive is of the form e.g., "one of those bottles was befelled and..."

And, I have a severe aversion to most forms of the passive voice these days, from extreme overexposure to Way Too Much Bad Technical Writing (one of the hallmarks of bad tech writing is extensive, slavish, even, employment of passive voice....).

Suuure, the bottle just happened to fall. I just happened to have my hand out in a cupped position, eh? It's a world of wonders and miracles.

I've seen things fall off shelves without anyone around who was physically trying to cause something to come off a shelf. Earthquakes, random other shock and/or vibration, someone slamming a door too hard, catastrophic structure failure of shelving or a wall support.... [Who, me, literal? Whaddyou expect, I'm a test engineer....]

I'm little attracted to twee, also.

About "Morning Has Broken", here's what Bill Higgins wrote when I posted the lyrics in April 2007:

"...Strictly speaking, it's not a Cat Stevens song, though he had a hit with it in the Seventies. I recall him saying that it was commonly sung in English schools, presumably in Anglican churches. The lyrics are by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965) and the tune is traditional..."

Paula@127, what a great idea:

Mulled brains!
It's a Zombie Christmas!

Let's see:
Eggnog, with extra noggin.
Gingerbread men.
Blood-and-guts candy canes.

Anyone else?

More here on "Morning Has Broken" -- the tune is "Bunessan," Scottish trad., the words are by Eleanor Farjeon.

dido - oh, how fun!

TexAnne - I don't translate anything other than bureaucratese into normal human language. I have a smattering of Russian, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and know a few useful phrases of Athabascan and Inupiaq. My coding skills in everything except SQL are very rusty. Beyond that, I am a typical ignerent Amercun. I used to be a research administrator, these days I'm either running a career exploration program or writing grants to keep the career exploration program alive.

So, a job working with words...editing, writing, reviewing, interpreting? With people, or not?

Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts didn't get some of my regional varients either. With regards to the title tune, the last line was always "that's what boys/girls are made of!!" not "and I forgot my spoon."

#124, #125, #128 -

Thought so - there's lots of variation on this one. The version I was taught was
rather awkward, actually. I can't remember how it began unless it began badly -

Five little monkeys sleeping in the bed,
and the little one said,
"Roll over! Roll over!"
So they all rolled over and one fell off,
then there were four little monkeys in the bed.
And the little one said...(etc.)

Mostly sung, with Xopher's sung "Roll over, roll over".

I especially was wondering what happened at the end, because the ending I learned never seemed to fit very well. I was taught that the little one sings (to the tune of "He's got the whole world in his hands") "I've got the whole bed to myself!" repeated three times to fit the tune.

Sam Kelly @ 108

A more elaborate variation on 'roll over'

"There were ten in the bed and the little one said 'Roll over! Roll over!'
And they all rolled over and one fell out and crushed his knee and gave a shout
(different tune) Please remember to tie a knot in your pajamas, single beds are only made for one.
There were nine in the bed...."

Though the version I heard more often just loops after 'one fell out'.

Paula (#40): Why blame Steve Jobs for Vista's problems?

#141, James Moar -

It amuses me that I had to stop and figure out how one would go about tying a knot in your pajamas. My first thought was tying the legs together, which didn't seem helpful.

Lucy S. (139): We always sang the last line as "That's what we had for lunch!" That version wasn't in Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, either.

And another instalment of TILFML: I never realised Morning Has Broken was so recent. We sang it enthusiastically at primary school, and in the way of small children internalised it as Something that has Been Around Forever (like your parents).

We also learnt Bananas in Pyjamas at the same time. I don't think there were knots involved, though.

Mary Aileen 144: NOW I remember! We ended that one with "Buy 'em at your favorite store."

"And I forgot my spoon! (... but I have a straaaaaw)"

Pajamas led me to "Pink Pajamas" to the many variations on the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some songs are good for spoofs; they're well-known, not obviously themselves (I learned at least two Battle-Hymn-tuned songs and still can't sing the original), and fairly simple. They should have at least some hook to spoofing, whether "Glory, glory what's it to ya?" or something else.
This may be why I know multiple people whose mothers sang, "Nummy nummy nummy I've got breakfast in my tummy," after meals.

Lucy and Mary Eileen - I was very disappointed that Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts didn't have the verses my uncles taught me, especially the 'Pink, Purple Pelican Puke' line.

Thanks to my uncles I didn't know the clean versions of children's songs when I was a kid. I have the greatest uncles. ;)

Diatryma 147 (and I'll stop commenting your posts right after you stop saying interesting things): The tune may be best known now as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," but the Julia Ward Howe words of that song are sung to the tune of an earlier song, "John Brown's Body." There's a camp-meeting song ("Brothers, won't you meet us now on Canaan's happy shore?") that's even older, but as far as I know its lyrics are lost, and from the sample I quote above, deservedly so.

Nix, Dan, Dave, A.J., re: Vellum--exactly. I'm fascinated by the concept, but I keep hitting roadblocks. Which frustrates me, because it doesn't happen very often.

Other recommended books:
Beyond Religion, David N. Elkins, Ph.D.
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Dumbth, Steve Allen
The Language Police, Diane Ravitch

The only recollection I have of the "Roll Over!" song is from seeing it on the Captain Kangaroo show something like 45 years ago. The small creatures were bunnies (stuffed). I am unable to recall anything else of use about it. Not to imply that mine was a particularly useful recollection in the first place. ;)

Books:

• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
• Pride and Prejudice*, by Jane Austen
• Oedipous Tyrannos / Oedipus Rex / Oedipus the King** by Sophocles
• something by Aristophanes†
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• a book of Sherlock Holmes stories including A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• One of John McPhee's geology/geography/nature books‡

That eight looks odd, with no Shakespeare or Tolkein on the list, but I'm trying not to be obvious. Just to be difficult, though, I'm going to add a ninth, to be read in a different way.

• A book of great poems of the English language. Pick it up in many moods and many seasons, and leaf through it. If a poem doesn't grab you, turn the page; it's not the right poem for the moment. Give it a few months, or a few years, and you'll find a body of work that speaks to you.

-----
* though I prefer Persuasion
** a rose by any other name would be as elegant a tragedy. Pick a translation that feels good to you.
† I'd suggest either Lysistrata or The Frogs
‡ in order of my preference: Rising from the Plains, The Control of Nature, Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain

Re "Morning Has Broken;" I assume it started as an Anglican hymn but it's included in the Catholic hymnal we use in my diocese, which is one of the standard paperback hymnals. So, by the way, is "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," "Go Tell It On the Mountain," and "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." Our choirs and the congregation sing them all according to the appropriate liturgical season (and according to what the choir directors feel like singing that week...) Quite a change from those interminable verses of "Tantum Ergo Sacramentum." Which we also sing once in a while.

dido @49:
Beauty is one of my favorite books (indeed, pretty much all of Robin McKinley's work is up there). I vividly remember reading it at about 10, then completely forgetting who it was by or how to find it again for two decades. Its rediscovery was an intense pleasure.

But, though I went on to study Classics, I can't recall that it had any influence on my decision. That was the product of my parents' collection of Greek plays in translation, which I devoured one antisocial and geeky summer when I was 13.

abi @ 151 -

The final installment of the Jurassic Park series, Oedipus T. Rex, where the dino eats his own mother.

@ Dena Sura #35: John Scalzi's thread on Being Poor - because that thread and its subsidiary, a total of 650 comments, is big and important and well-written enough to be a book and we don't have to be pagists.

! {eyes moist}

I just don't have words enough, after reading the post there...

Certainly important, that is.

Later,
-cajun

It's not at all complete, but some other books I think a lot of people would benefit from include:

c. _Knowledge and Decisions_ by Thomas Sowell. This discusses the way decisions are made, with respect to both information and incentives, and I found it hugely important.

d. _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ is old and well-established and there's not a single thing in it that will surprise anyone over the age of ten, but it has a lot to teach most everyone.

I also found Sowell's Culture trilogy (_Race and Culture_,Migration and Culture_,_Conquest and Culture_) pretty interesting. These bring a lot of the world we live in into sharper focus. A related book is Amy Chua's _World on Fire_.

I'll second recommendations of others for _The Selfish Gene_, _The Evolution of Cooperation_, and _The Control of Nature_. (Though I think McPhee wrote several books that were at least as good. _The Curve of Binding Energy_ comes to mind.) I really loved Tracy Kidder's _Soul of a New Machine_, and it has something to tell you about the effect and atmosphere of very intense projects, even though the computer world is unrecognizeably different now.

I found David Friedman's _Law's Order_ to be a source of a lot of insight.

In terms of mind-expanding fiction, the set of worthwhile books is very wide. I found Jane Austen's novels pretty amazing, though I think if someone had made me read them before I was ready, I'd have hated them. Gaiman's _Sandman_ series was amazingly good, and I think people will still be reading it with wonder and awe in a century. Vinge's _The Peace War_, _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_ were all three wonderful, world-expanding books for me, for different reasons. If we were living 20 years or so ago, I'd urge everyone to read _True Names_, but the amazing prophetic stuff there isn't prophetic anymore. And I can still climb into the world of _The Lord of the Rings_ and get lost for days, and that set of books rewards multiple rereads.

Books:

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (which is filled with good stories of all kinds)
First and Second Samuel
The diary of Samuel Pepys (which is online, daily, here)
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Any Jeeves/Wooster story by P.G. Wodehouse
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

And I recently made all my colleagues read and discuss Frank Norris' McTeague which may not be quite as essential, but if you haven't read it, may blow your ears off when you do.

#134 Paula Lieberman: Well, as mentioned above, de gustibus non disputandum. That said! It is patently obvious that the dactyls of "if one of those bottles should happen to fall" are both sprightlier and more symmetrical than the beat-broken "take / one down // pass it around //"! ;)

While I perhaps summoned up the wrong word to describe the act of removing an actor from a situation where clearly there was an actor, who is attempting to disguse his culpability, when I hit on "passive voice", I do not believe that "conditional" conveys the humor behind the situation. While it must of course for the sake of the argument's veracity be possible for bottles to leave the shelf due to no particular force, we surely agree that in a situation where a great many bottles one by one vanish while gleeful singing rings out, the enormous liklihood is that the singers are removing these bottles in order to consume their inhibition-lessening contents. As one cannot help, while singing, but think of the grim days of Carrie Nation and her axe, it is no surprise that the singers should wish to avoid culpability for the massive outflowing of the demon alcohol.

Sarah S,

What was so mindblowing about McTeague for you? I read it, but didn't see what you are seeing - what have I missed?

Hullo all again - back from limbo now that my net access is back at home, although the main reason I have been sadly absent for the past month or so is a crackdown on net access at work. Alas, it looks like I will have to check in infrequently from home from now on.

Ah well, time to read the twenty or so threads I have no doubt missed...

And in honour of the open thread's number, can I commend a concert that I will be singing in (along with the other members of this little group) to all you wonderful people?

The link? 'The Beautiful Names' is a setting of the ninety-nine names of Allah*.

*Yes yes, apart from the Camel.

Madeline 158: Paula was just having another of her "take everything absolutely literally and pick it to death" fits. Pay it no mind.

The days of Carrie Nation were grim indeed, but she was part of the solution, not part of the problem. She wasn't even very wrong.

I don't like the bottles happening to fall because it feels too hurried. "Take one down, pass it around," is looser and it provides some interest, rather than repeating the dactylic beat of the counting. Besides, the lyrics are hard to say quickly.

Nancy C. Mittens @159--I find McTeague mind-blowing for its roughness. It feels to me like a novel written by someone who's never read a novel before. Like it's a brand-new experiment. And my god, that final scene in Death Valley.

Xopher @161
Are you kidding about Carrie Nation?

Xopher #161 -- it's my profession to pick things apart to death and figure out all the ways to break them!

142 Christopher:

[rant mode warning]

Icons and mice are things Mr Jobs was the mainstay proponent for, and he's anti -words- for explaining "WTF is -that- supposed to do?" The new machines don't come with printed manuals, they come with the abominable Microsoft "help." the original Lisa I couldn't get to do ANYTHING useful with. The 128K Mac in the box gave me migraines, and didn't have, again -words- (neither did the Lisa). Animated icons, noises for things, "effects" of sliding menus, etc. drive me b*gf*ck and I resent every millisecond I have to spend shutting the damn things off, and figuring out where the controls are and how to get to them to shut the damn things off.

Mac users -delighted- in putting all sorts of noxious noises on even common use machines--I was particularly disgusted at the orgasmic noises that one common use machine had for a while at GTE... and in a cubicle environment, it's EXTREMELY annoying if people have noises set, particularly the machine defaults are noises, for every action the machine takes--a file opening, a file closing, email arriving, emptying the "trash," turning the machine on, shutting it down.... one of my coworkers took a Monday off, that had Weather, and had left the machine in his cube running for an three day long test. He had the machine also running a program connected to a weather site that had a cricket chirping noise set to chirp whenever there was a storm warning. Since it was a stormy day, the thing was chirping essentially continuously. Another coworker and I both wanted to commit mayhem upon that system to end the noise....

Anyway, animated icons, sliding menus, noises for every action occurring on the machine, icons that I look at and get irritated at because unlike words convey NO information to me and they clutter the display up stopping me from putting more of what I want to be working with on the screen (I have a mere 33 windows open on this machine at the moment, which believe it or not for ME is low, and they're spread across two 1620 X 1200 20" displays... I also do do not have pictures for backgrounds, I distract very easily and want to focus on what I'm working on, not partically obscured backdrop pictures that take my attention off what I'm working with...)

Anyway, the whole paradigm that Mr Jobs prescribed, is rotated into some Twilight Horror Zone for me, as regards employment of computers as effective, efficient, not unpleasant to use tools. And the stuff I find the most obnoxious on Vista, copied Jobsian memes.

From Open Thread 98 (to avoid getting to the 1000 marker there....)

#997 ::: abi

I think we all need to watch the temptation to take emotions across threads. 2008 is going to be tough on community spirit, both online and in meatspace. I'd like Making Light to be an exception.

But there have been so few disemvowellings here lately, and a lessening on sordid subject matter to versify off of!

The creation of creative art, doesn't tend to come from mild mawkish times (although the Dutch masters I think were working in a time of relative prosperity and a growing middle class with discretionary income... their Great Art was of merchant families and their values, much less of Great Princes and nobility--the art of the burgher rather than of Lorenzo di' Medici, who who according to either Gies & Gies or Herlihy & Herlihy stole from the public funds set up to provide dowries to the daughters of indigent families in Firenze....

Paula Lieberman @165:
But there have been so few disemvowellings here lately,

And this is a bad thing? Disemvowellings, particularly of regulars, are painful and awkward, signs of ill health in the community.

I mean, yeah, people used to go to hangings for fun, but I thought we were past that. (Jerry Springer's function as an emotional gladiatorial battle nothwithstanding).

I suspect that there will be more drivebys, piñatas, and other popcorn-fare in the coming year, if that is your kind of thing. But I find that too much of that coarsens the appetites, personally.

and a lessening on sordid subject matter to versify off of!

Hasn't seemed to harm your output. Your stuff has been a real delight of late.

But I was talking more about the anger, the quickness to take offense, the way things become both personal and hurtful all too easily.

That rarely produces good art.

Sarah 163: Nope. Carrie Nation was wrong to blame alcohol for the problem, but she was right that men drank up their pay and left their wives and children starving.

They did this because the men often lived in company "towns" (more like slave barracks, actually) and after giving them their meager wages, the company would suck it right back out of them with the company saloon, which was conveniently on site. That's if the company even paid them in legal tender, as opposed to company scrip which could be used ONLY at the company store, which of course charged whatever it took to use up the men's pay.

The problem was a lack of unions, not the availability of alcohol. But if Carrie Nation had smashed only company saloons and company stores, instead of any place that served alcohol, I would be unreservedly singing her praises now.

The politicians and the press successfully pretended that it was all about alcohol, but it was about capitalist exploitation, and the mistreatment of women and children. The Women's Temperance Union was a progressive movement; the fact that it led to prohibition was because the politicians were in bed with the capitalist exploiters, as they so often are, and changed the subject.

Carrie Nation's name has been vilified, but she took action in a real way against a real problem. She wasn't just a wild-eyed fanatic with a burr in her ass about alcohol.

(It's been a long time since I read up on this. Take with appropriate grains of salt, or spice of your choice.)

Paula #164 -- So, given your preferences, why on Earth would you buy a Windows machine, much less a Vista one? You seem to me like the sort of person who'd vastly prefer one of those Linux setups optimized for having eighty gazillion windows open.

Xopher @ 167: Carrie Nation's name has been vilified

And, memorably, celebrated.

Nine books that have had a powerful influence on me, and that I believe everyone ought to read:

The Sure Salvation by John Hearne
The Book of Mencius by Mencius
The Lunatic by Anthony Winkler
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Jamaica Woman edited by Mervyn Morris and Pamela Mordecai
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell (and this should also include reading Mediaeval Latin Lyrics)
Memories of Underdevelopment by Edmundo Desnoes

Xopher at 149: You triggered a flashback to my mother singing "John Brown's flivver had a puncture in its tire, (3x) and he fixed with a little piece of gum." Then, there's a pantomime version.

More of my mother's memories from her '30s childhood: the patty-cake rhyme "I won't go to Macy's any more, more, more/ there's a big fat policeman at the door, door, door/ he took me by the collar and he made me pay a dollar/so I won't go to Macy's any more, more, more."

A song that goes, "There was blood on the saddle, there was blood on the ground, and a great big puddle of blood all around."

Another song that starts, "Help, murder, police! He's killing me, he's killing me, he's breaking my heart..." and then no one knows what comes next. But both songs are sources of much hilarity.

And does anyone have the remotest clue what a phrase I've only heard in my family - "when (or when appropriate, since) Oscar was a pup," meaning "ages ago" -- might trace back to? Ma may have picked that one up from my father, and for all I know he knew of an old dog named Oscar, but if there's any non-idiolectical basis for it, I'd love to know.

The Nebula Preliminary Ballot is up.

I learned it:

There were ten in the bed
and the little one said,
"Roll over, roll over.
And one fell out.

There were nine in the bed, etc.
UNTIL
There was one in the bed
And the little one said,
"Good Night"

I can't believe no one has mentioned Philip K. Dick. Reading "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" really re-arranged my head. And "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", or are they too obvious?

"Morning has broken."

Xopher @167,

along those lines, I know researchers who have studied how social pressures to drink and/or smoke causes total family income to drop even though one person's income goes up.

i.e. Say a family is making 10/day (currency units). One gets a raise- total income is 12/day. The adult male (this is what was studied) then feels like he now can buy a type of beer or cigs that conveys social status: he often feels pressure to do so. He now buys 2.5 units/day of beer or cigs.

Thus the family has access to only 9.5/day: the raise has lowered their effective income.

I saw a presentation on this for cigarette advertising in rural China--as advertising skyrocketed, overall family incomes dropped. (Could find the reference, would take a while)

dear ghods-of-boredom, I'm on a conference call that's already gone on for 1.5 hours and we're only 1/8th of the way done.

Please post links to *silent* interesting things to look at. I've already gone through the new astronomy pics of the day, lolcats, xkcd and girl genius.

Kathryn @ 176... You've seen the Star Trek motivational posters already, right?

Re: "Morning Has Broken": The only version I'd heard until very recently was of the jokey doggerel type, sung to wake people up at a UU religious retreat where I worked for a summer:

"Morning has broken
But we can fix it,
So pick up a mop and
clean up the mess,

People are scrambling
Your eggs for breakfast
Youuuu can have some
If you get dressed."

No one at church knew why I shouted with understanding laughter when we sang that song sometime last year.

Kathryn #176:
As per my comment #5, try http://deputy-dog.com/

Chris @ 171: that "blood on the ground" bit? Only place I ever heard it was in Disneyland's Bear Country Jamboree (the original one in Anaheim). It was "sung" in a most lugubrious manner by an audioanimatronic bear named, I believe, Big Al.

Ye ghods, I can still hear it...

And another book: What Dreams May Come, Richard Matheson. The movie was cinematic eye candy--but the script pretty thoroughly gutted the spiritual/philosophical content of the novel.

I grew up in Georgia (USA) with "eensy-weensy spider" and "take one down, pass it around". Also there were 10 little bunnies lying in the bed, and the baby one said "roll over!" So they all rolled over when they heard him shout, and the bunny on the outside fell out.(Ending: There were 9 little bunnies lying on the floor and they all called out, "roll over!" So the baby rolled over when he heard them shout, and the last little bunny fell out.)

Andhria @ #15, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back. The last is out of print but not too hard to find.

If you'd like some fiction recommendations--Ursula LeGuin, The Telling; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; B.J. Chute, Greenwillow; Steven Brust, The Phoenix Guard; Tony Hillerman, Skinwalkers (avoid the horrid TV adaptation); Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone.

Re Nebula ballot: I salute Jennifer Pelland and proudly remember I knew her when we were both writing fanfic.

Chris Quinones @171: And does anyone have the remotest clue what a phrase I've only heard in my family - "when (or when appropriate, since) Oscar was a pup," meaning "ages ago" -- might trace back to? Ma may have picked that one up from my father, and for all I know he knew of an old dog named Oscar, but if there's any non-idiolectical basis for it, I'd love to know.

I've only ever seen "since/when Hector was a pup", which is delightfully explained here as ultimately tracing back to the legend of Hecuba turning into a dog after the Trojan War, although the phrase itself only seems to be about a hundred years old.

Chris Quinones @#171:

A song that goes, "There was blood on the saddle, there was blood on the ground, and a great big puddle of blood all around."

Ah, "Blood on the Saddle" is a classic. It was on our LP of cowboy songs and my sibs and I loved singing it with Dad. Mom didn't exactly approve but she didn't forbid it.

"The cowboy lay in it, all bloody and red
The bronco fell on him, and mashed in his head.

Oh pity the cowboy, all covered with gore
He ain't gonna ride that bronco no more."

That's how I remember the words, anyway...not going to spoil my nostalgia by googling. If you're like my dad you'll encourage your kids to sing it as part of a set along with "Dark as a Dungeon" and "Folsom Prison Blues."

Serge @#107:

I was quite surprised when the opening credits named the author as Emily Bronté - not Brontë.

I hope they spelled "Penistone Crag" correctly.

Chris, 171: (praise be to Google, the Prosthetic Memory) "Help, murder, police! My brother's in the grease! I laughed so hard I fell in the lard. Help, murder, police!" (Replace "brother" with "sister" as appropriate.)

I grew up with "eensy-weensy," "if one of those bottles should happen to fall," and "And I forgot my spoon (so I used a straaaaaaaw..."

My inner fifth-grader wants to know if anybody else knows "Eeny-meeny-gypsaleeny"? Or "Bobo-ski-wotten-totten"?

Soon Lee @179,

thanks!

Can haz more, plz? We are now 3/8ths done.

Serge @ 174: I had something to say then got lost on Cat Stephens. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone...I'll get back to you after I finish his complete YouTube collection.

#134 Paula

re: #9 Brenda Kalt: and the sly passive voice amuses me.

That's not passive voice, though, "if one of those ... should happen" is conditional. Passive is of the form e.g., "one of those bottles was befelled and..."

I think the concept that's being reached for here is the middle voice, rather than the passive per se. The middle voice typically manifests in English when a verb that is notionally transitive and active is used intransitively with the semantic patient as grammatical agent.

Active: The child broke the vase.
Passive: The vase was broken by the child.
Middle: The vase broke.

In rarer cases, with verbs like "fall", the verb is inherently middle voice, rather than having both middle and active uses. I think that there may be an obsolete transitive sense of "fall" meaning "to cause to fall, to fell" that would complete the picture, but I don't have an OED here at work to check.

Like the passive voice, the middle voice removes the necessary presence of a volitional agent, which seems to be what Brenda is reacting to.

I think -- although I'd want to go back and review my references -- that the English middle voice is more or less restricted to verbs of change of state and not just any notionally transitive verb. For example, you can't ring the same changes on "The child hit the vase." Other middle voice examples:

The ice melted.
The cake baked in the oven.
The paper tore in half.

These may also -- and again this is off the top of my head and I'd want to check my references -- be related to usages like:

This book reads like a pot-boiler.
The new iPods sold quickly.
(and similar examples I'm too Friday brain-dead to come up with at the moment)

So, in summary, you're both right: "The bottle fell" is syntactically active, but semantically passive. And to some extent, the use of "happened to" intensifies the semantic passivity without altering the syntactic activeness.

Kathryn - Here are some of my favorites. Be strong.

The Surrealist Compliment Generator

The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project

Cockeyed.com

Tania, Serge--Thanks.

Especially the compliment generator. I'm substituting the word "PowerPoint"...

Cretins and vermin cannot compare with the depths of your PowerPoint.

Your PowerPoint is equal to the smoothness of a walnut shell.

Flies dance operas to your PowerPoint.

The spoof version I know is:

Morning has broken, call the repairman,
Get him to fix it before the sky falls.
If he won't come then we're in big trouble,
You know how repairmen answer their calls.

Now that I think about it, it's amazing how many songs I know about appliance repair and maintenance, including at least two specifically about defrosting the refrigerator. Great songs, too...

Wired Magazine has a 250 word short-short story contest. 250 word max, must be about the DS game Orcs and Elves, and will be judged on teh funneh.

How many Dinosaur and Sodomy entries do you think we can generate?

Paula @ 165:

Professor T. said it in The Hobbit: "Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."

Mary Dell @ 184... I hope they spelled "Penistone Crag" correctly.

If they had, it'd have given a totally different meaning to what the Wuthering Heights were, eh?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 190... Serge--Thanks.

What did I do to deserve those kind words?

JKRichard @ 187... I forgot to check. Does YouTube have the animated version of Moonshadow?

...and the meeting ends, over 3 hours later. At least I'm on the west coast and it's only 5pm.

Serge-195. I hadn't seen those trek posters.

Books that changed my life aren't quite the point for this question, because other people aren't all coming from or headed towards the same places I am. So I'll try to keep this more universal.

• My science fiction and science choices have already been mentioned except for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• How to Lie with Statistics
• Lord of the Flies
• Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John Shelby Spong
• Not necessarily the whole Bible, but definitely the Sermon on the Mount

Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions. It's heartening to see how many of these books I have already read...

It's funny, too, because there are dozens of lists out there on what to read if one wants to be a classical scholar, or a particular breed of academic literate. But not much out there for other purposes of reading.

(And, in my family, it was "take one down and pass it around," "itsy bitsy spider," and:

There were ten in the bed, and the little one said
"I'm crowded, roll over."
So they all rolled over and one fell out.

I could actually swear I saw a sketch with those words on Sesame Street once. And I'm with you on the Bobo-ski-wotten-totten, TexAnne!)

Kathryn @ 197... A 3-hour phone meeting? That's one thing I've managed to avoid over my nearly 8 years of telecommuting.

As for the Trek posters... I especially liked the one about Apollo and really short skirts.

Hazlit's Economics in One Lesson is good, but read some Galbraith just to balance out the neo-classicism.

#106

and the second verse:

Aleph-one bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-one bottles of beer,
Take infinity down, pass 'em around,
Aleph-one bottles of beer on the wall.

(Just how you get to the second verse is an interesting problem in meta-music.)

***

Books I'd make everyone read:

Up the Organization, Robert Townsend
The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, #175, that happened in our house. When my father became an officer, he started stopping at the officer's club on the way home. He didn't drink, but they took turns buying rounds, so he was buying beer or whatever for everybody else along with his soft drink. I talked to his commander and explained that the family needed that money and his commander made sure I got the money we needed.

Here's a video about the new Bush Coins!

Paula Lieberman @ 164:

The new machines don't come with printed manuals, they come with the abominable Microsoft "help."

Oh, ghods, yes.

Each time I get a newer version of 'doze, I have to find out where the hell they buried the actual commands; they keep changing them.

As with Word - my favorite was the "for DOS, 5.0" , where "edit, select all" was alt+E, A (as it most sensibly still is in Firefox). Somewhere along the way it became alt+E, L. Gah. And some of the things that had keyboard commands in the earlier versions now don't even have them on the menus, and what the commands *are* have changed. And I've acquired some cognitive function damage in the last few years, which means (among other things) that I don't learn new things very well.

(I was attending the MS Word conference in Bellevue when they introduced the first Word for Windows. The number of features they'd taken away, and that I needed for my job, was appalling.)

I'm now using XP, and the friend whose new laptop I'm providing minimal tech support for, took my advice and got one with XP. I will not, not, not touch Vista.)

Another rant: Microsoft deciding it knows what we want (or what's good for us) better than we do. The other morning I was awakened at 3 am by some quiet, insistent beeping; there'd been an automatic update that required a reboot. I've always had updates as "notify only", but somehow it managed to circumvent that, download, install, reboot, and have the settings changed. *growl*swear*mutter* I've changed them back, but don't exactly trust it.

OK, I'll stop ranting now.

An open-thread-enabled whine: Today I had to replace my second coffeemaker in 16 months. That's bad enough, but the new one (same brand, different model) has a cord that's about two inches shorter than the previous one (and they're both embedded in the base). This means I have to either use an extension cord (not usually a good plan for a machine with a heating element, I'm told), put the coffeemaker on the second shelf of my teacart, or put the thing on the countertop. This means either the top is hard to access because of the cart's upper shelf or the new machine takes up space on my counter.

Fie upon you, Proctor and Silex. Fie upon you, Black & Decker, which manufactured the one that broke in July 2006.

Do they not teach design anymore?

Marilee @ #203, that video...I laugh to keep from crying.

My suggestions for the book list:

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. A lot of people have this Manichean vision of crime in which criminals are a sort of wild and unredeemable other species. This needs challenging.

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time, and James Loewen, Sundown Towns. Two parts of American history that aren't covered enough in schools. Or at least not the ones I attended. I mean, we read The Grapes of Wrath, but we didn't get heavily into what the Joads had escaped from. We certainly didn't hear about dust storms strong enough to reach New York, or learn how human actions led to massive ecological changes in a fair chunk of the Great Plains. And segregation was presented as something that happened in the south, and assumed to be a solved problem.

(1491 is another great book in this vein, but I'm focusing on books that I haven't noticed anyone mention. Although while I'm at it, count this as another recommendation of The Shock Doctrine.)

Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. Because one of the most powerful forces in human history is people who should know better working very hard not to know better.

Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds. Because after all the serious stuff I thought I should have one book that exists just to make its readers' lives slightly happier.

Wow. Don't drink anything while you're doing it, but go to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books* and check out the Friday video. That has to be the crackiest TV ad I've seen in forever.

Make sure you check the link for the print ad while you're there.

About as SFW as a sexy music video, I'd say. T&A, ripped men, sexy dancing. Major, major WTF hazard and food/drink warnings, on both the video and the print.

*Yes, the ones that first posted about the Cassie Edwards situation.

#181, Lila - I think I might have read How to Have a Green Thumb. If I'm remembering correctly, the edition I had recommended DDT as the only really effective cure for fire ants. It was pretty startling (and shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the book, which otherwise seemed extremely sensible.)

Itsy-bitsy spider, "take one down and pass it around" for myself.

My cousin sings "eensy-weensy spider" and "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, Ninety-nine bottles of beer, If one of those bottles should happen to fall, what a waste of alcohol!" which is kind of catchy.

Via the Buffistas, a funny link. Picture of a church Bulletin board. I think I've heard of this before - so it may have been mocked up or photo-shopped.

Joy

Marilee @ 203... coughgagsplutter!

glinda @ 204... Something like 20 years ago, someone described what the operation of a telephone would have been like if it had been designed by PC programmers. I don't remember the details, but, instead of just picking up and dialing, it involved many steps and extra keystrokes.

R.M. Koske @ #209, my copy is currently lent out so I can't confirm or deny. I don't remember her mentioning DDT, and since she was gardening in Connecticut in the '40s thru '60s I really doubt she had fire ants. She did soak her corn seed in something toxic (arsenic?) to keep crows from eating it. At any rate, she mentions that as her soil improved she saw fewer and fewer pests, and I had the same experience myself (back when I had a garden, the only pesticide I used was soap).

R.M.Koske @ 208... I'm not sure that the octopus belonged in there, but that's reason enough for someone to send a link to Pharyngula. (Who, if I remember correctly, posted Mary Dell's Cthulhu-goes-fishing photoshop oeuvre after she first told ML about it.)

Abi, I'm glad you brought up Beauty as a Must Read book. I've read one mass-market paperback to pieces and got a newer one that's been read several times already.

Thanks.

Paula @ #216 and abi, the title page of my elderly copy of Beauty fell out this afternoon, in fact. Time to buy a new copy!

#214, Lila -

Rats, I was hoping you could confirm or deny it for me. I could be thinking of totally a different book, of course. It has been some time since I read it. I could possibly have the pest wrong, but I don't think so - I was looking forward to finding a good way to deal with fire ants.

I mostly remember being doubly shocked - not only because the author (whoever it was) was recommending DDT(!) but also because the book up to that point had been rather organic in approach. Whichever book it was, the bit I'm remembering was at the very end, possibly in an addition she'd* written as an addendum for a reprinting.

*I'm fairly certain the author I'm thinking of was a woman.

One more suggestion for the book list:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman, in which he explains, in common language and without resorting to any convenient lies, just what the theory of quantum electrodynamics is.

I'm not going to call it a life changing book (yet) but I just finished Robert Charles Wilson's "Axis" and it is better than "Spin". I expect many awards.

That is all.

Serge @200

It wasn't just that it was a 3.25 hour meeting, but that it was my second phone meeting of the day, and the two were separated by only 15 minutes.

Which reminded me of those windy roads where they say "windy road next 20 miles," and then at mile 19 there's one straight stretch, and another "windy road next 19 miles." They can't just say "windy roads: next 40 miles"?

Rounds up to 5 hours of phone meetings.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 221... 5 hours of phone meetings

I hope it was worth it. I also hope that most of the participants were also attending thru the wonders of telephony otherwise the dynamics get all screwed up for the telecommuter, who's missing all the visual cues that the people in the conference room are unconsciously injecting in the exchanges. And there are the lousy microphones.

abi #165

I was mostly being facetious....

People get... strange. There are some folks who have very solid groundings and are quite unflappable and rarely get upset. Then there are situation where Person A can say almost anything and not cause a ruckus, Person B opens their mouth, and the fireworks go off even if almost anyone else saying it, wouldn't light off fireworks....

Bah, post wiped in the "write here" block, bah...

Vista is what new PCs are tending to ship with. Dell makes exceptions for e.g. corporate customers, but at the moment I don't think much of Dell's hardware and support (and of the politics and what the head of the company supports, if the information I heard is accurate...). Staying with the Amiga in the early 1990s was a bad decision from the point of view of income--had I had current Windows on my resume I would have spent a lot shorter amount of time in un- and underemployed states, for the duration of the 1990s....

Windows is what the vast majority of the business and corporate and commercial world are using, not Linux... and I don't want to -have- to muck around with setting things up, with software that lacks certain key features (OpenOffice for example, does NOT have a "draft" mode for writing,. it only has page and web modes... I really don't appreciate seeing page edges and top and bottom margins of virtual pages when what I am trying to do with assemble words and sentences and paragraphs and -write-, as opposed to "desktop publishing" arranging material that's already written and/or drawn, to fit on pages), or is not what the people who make hiring decisions consider necessary software to have experience using...

The reason I am using Outlook Express at home, is that Outlook is what is on the system I use at work. Spending the time and effort dealing with additional software, doesn't provide enough benefit to me and enough positive difference, to make me want to spend the time and effort looking for and selecting and installing and getting familiar with some other email software and another browser--and for the matter, I don't find the ones I've played with, "better" in terms of UI and US paradigms, for me or "easier" to use.

I -like- having an income and money to spend on things, and for me, using Windows is a path of least effort and least time which ALSO maximizes my income as the bottom line.

So, I don't have Linux installed at home because it would be additional time, effort, etc., at -marginal- net value for me.

Kathryn #190

I actually have voluntarily used PowerPoint recently, when I didn't have to, to draw some diagrams of data flow. It worked better for what I was trying to do than e.g. Smart Draw....

Henry #202

(Just how you get to the second verse is an interesting problem in meta-music.)

Use a hyperreal step-up-in-space function?

#204

Another rant: Microsoft deciding it knows what we want (or what's good for us) better than we do.

That definitely is copying Mr Jobs. I remember long ago working on the Noreascon III Masquerade video, Avid Technologies allowed MCFI the user of machines there, which were Macs with Avid hardware and software in them. The machine that Suford Lewis was using crashed, and landed in the debugger--which looked just like a less user-friendly version of a Unix debugger! I knew enough Unix at the time to get the thing back up rebooted as a Macintosh and running, rather than looking like a single tasking Unix debugger...

My point there, is that the debugger system was running an unfriendly old debugger application with text-on-one-line input, no GUI stuff at all, deep inside the Mac system--but at the time Apple did NOT let ordinary users have command lines--only if one were using a development system and it barfed landing in the debugger, was there a command line, or if one were doing something else developerish and elitist... ordinary Mac users didn't even get to have access to hardware reset switches (the infamous "programmer's switch" which was a piece of plastic one plugged into a crashed and wouldn't come back up Mac, to persuade it to resusitate....)

The other morning I was awakened at 3 am by some quiet, insistent beeping; there'd been an automatic update that required a reboot

That's the nasty habit that sometimes the update process decided to reset things back to the original default settings... once again, I blame Jobs as template for the "don't give the user the actual control!" What really gets me is that underneath Macs for years now, lives FreeBSD, and apparently it can be gotten to--so what bother with putting the Mac ears layers ontop, why not just program directly for FreeBSD and run everything native?!!!

#205 Linkmeister:

a) "Planned obsolescence = continuing revenue stream
b) it's all crap made by the cheapest contract factory, scheduled months in advance, and no ability to change anything in under six months at least of lead time....
c) design and manufacture and manufacturing design are all different segments, and these days done in different places often....the days when the design engineers were at sites where the factories were adjacent, and where the manufacturing engineers were part of the design team, and the factory workers might have had some say... it's bad news.

I've been getting a series of strange emails, purportedly from "Richard Dunbar" AKA "Richard Salvador," (rich@penslinger.net) bragging about various thefts, spousal and child abuse, weapons dealing and fraud cases.

I suspect they are spam, and a sort of on-line smear job or revenge thing.

Have any of y'all gotten this strange stuff?

Many of the books that I think would be important to others have already been mentioned, but there are a few I would mention:

The Rule of Benedict
The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard
Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings
The Long Lonliness, Dorothy Day
New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton
Reading the Old Testament, Fr. Lawrence Boadt
Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen

I never learned "10 in a bed" - WHY did I miss this one? Particularly any version with monkeys.

Here's some cute kids doing a version.

Cuter kids, doing a version about monkeys.

Paula @ #225, Planned obsolescence is the title of the blog post I wrote about the dumb thing.

Upon reflection, I'm going to buy a multi-outlet surge strip and hide it on the second shelf of the teacart behind the bag of filters and the sugar substitute container. That will shorten the distance sufficiently that I can put the thing on the cart where I've been used to finding it for the past 27 years.

Hamster Space Program

Well, if anyone is interested, the first draft of my trip to the woods report is up. I'm already catching tense issues that are making me wince. I'll go back and tidy it up tomorrow or Sunday, when I'm less influenced by IPA and lack of sleep.

Oh, and I have been writing a verse a day. I just haven't been posting them to my rarely used blog. I should take a day and do that...

Wesley @ 207

Drat! I wish I'd thought of Hughart. Put all three books together*, as they seem to be his complete oeuvre, which is a shame because I'd like to read the five others he originally planned to write They're a gentle introduction to Chinese mythology and the Great Stories of Chinese tradition.

* The Bridge of Birds
  The Story of the Stone
  Eight Skilled Gentlemen

Gar Lipow @ 211

Who says religion can't be relevant?

If you're a mid-20th Century British film buff, you may remember a movie called "A Taste of Honey". In the first scene, the camera is on a bus, and it goes by a church with a big reader board out front with the message "God Washes Whitest of All".

Paula #225 -- It sounds like you're talking about MacsBug, a Motorola debugging app ported to the Mac. It's not something bundled with Macs; you had to install it on your own. It operated at the level of assembly and machine language. It wasn't some bash-like or DOS-like command line for performing ordinary system tasks, hidden away from the ordinary user.

As far as FreeBSD goes, the reason Apple bothers putting the Mac interface layers on top of the underlying Unix is because that's what people buy Macs for.

Thinking about books for Andrhia, I keep coming to authors or series. To add to some fine recommendations by other people

Andrew Lang's Fairy Tale Books
anything illustrated by Arthur Rackham
P.G Wodehouse's works
H.L. Mencken's works

On a different note... Serge, Deathrace 2000 is on TCM right now. For your sake, I hope you're not watching it. We are, because John's never seen it.

Books for the list:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Because excellence matters.
Illusions by Richard Bach.
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.
Silverlock by John Myers Myers. This book led me to more superb works than any other single source, ever.
1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. These will always be linked in my mind, and each stands up every time I reread it.
Three by Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Stranger in a Strange Land. Not that I don't love almost all of what he wrote, but these are, I think, the most substantive and were certainly the most influential on my life and outlook.

Finally, I'd disagree slightly with Bruce Cohen (STM) @233. Definitely DO read Bridge of Birds and The Story of the Stone, but IMO Eight Skilled Gentlemen is highly skippable. (But I agree wholeheartedly that I'd have loved to read the other books.)

Sus @62,

Did I plan to go to Munich in January? Did I think to myself "hey, it's deep winter, why not go to a place with less daylight and heat, but more crazy?" Well, no. It worked out that my travel companion was to be there, and I could be too, and so why not.

The all-white bar: that could be fun. I may even have an easily-packable shiny from BurningMan(1).

For example, last year I discovered the advantage of visiting Edmonton, Alberta, in late November: no crowds.

And the exhibit on Scythian gold by itself makes it a nifty trip. The fasching is a bonus.

(1) Post-scarcity gift-economy land. Assume standard Kathryn arguments on why you should go. Tickets in 4 days.

Kathryn,

Heh. Crazy it will be. Crowds there will be. Condolences :P

Mind you, I think not even those southern types will have the entire month off to party, so the crowds will possibly be more prevalent at the weekend. And Munich is supposed to be quite nice! Will you have time for a short skiing trip into the lower Alps? Much recommended if I remember correctly.

If I ever have the time and money to go to BurningMan I'm SO there.

meredith @ 98

*shudder* Did they make you put banana juice in it? Did they? I tell you, nothing is more disturbing than when, during your first week of working in a pub, your first Weissbier drinker walks in and asks for a Paulaner with banana juice. Brrrrr.

Stefan Jones @226:
Have any of y'all gotten this strange stuff?

I haven't, but it looked like an interesting snuffle.

I Googled around a little, and I'd put the situation on the weird side of ordinary. Most of the references to this guy are copies of a spam comment posting by someone calling himself Rick, or variations thereof, accusing Salvador of various crimes, drug use, and physical abuse of his family. A couple of YouTube videos are linked, but they've been removed for terms of use violation.

I reckon either someone's trying to smear a guy whose website (conveniently linked in "Rick's" comments) appears to sell advertising swag, or this is an advertising effort sprung from one of the flatter ends of the bell curve.

Kathryn @ 238:
If it's a post-scarcity gift economy, why does it require one to buy tickets?

Kathryn -
Munich has superb art museums attractively and conveniently grouped together for easy viewing. But of even greater interest is the Deutsches Musueum. An astounding survey of Science and Technology, all exhibits are clearly presented in four languages. Plan on one full day at the very least - it's the only thing I'd return to Munich for, but boy-howdy would I!

Bill Higgins @67: About the only thing I can recall of The Daily Show when Craig Kilborn had been hosting it, was their 'translation' of 99 Dead Baboons.

Those big ones by Dickens (Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House)

60s experimentalism: Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon and Giles Goat Boy by John Barth, The Magus by Fowles. Enjoying and slowly making my way through The Sunshine Dialogues by John Gardner at the moment.

That's enough for now.

What drove me to post was a thread drift (I'm pretty sure this is an _open_ thread!).

Does anyone have links handy to good posts or an article by somebody about not wanting to collaborate with wannabe writers, (ie. the other person has this great idea for a graphic novel, but they want you to completely write and draw it, and we will split the profits 50-50. )

I know judicious googling would bring up stuff, especially on Neil Gaiman's blog, but this sort of question seems to be something you people are particularly good at.

It turns out not only famous writers have these problems. I was a little less than smart in not cutting off a conversation because I didn't suspect this was what the person wanted, and not just fun chatting about stories. (I tend to talk through my stories a bit too much).

Now he's in tears, I'm a backstabber who wants to steal his ideas and ruin his career, he hates me forever Baggins, etc.

I'm not going to send him an e-mail, but articles on this topic will make me feel better, and might make a good blog post (with proper credit, etc. But not a lot of renumeration, sorry.)

Serge @ 113 et seq: oops

Because no one asked, more about "Say brothers, will you meet us on Canaan's happy shore"
It appears to ahve been by William Steffe (words and music both) and dates from the 1850s--very popular at Methodist camp-meetings.

Per the Library of Congress*:

Say brothers, will you meet us?
Say brothers, will you meet us?
Say brothers, will you meet us?
On Canaan's happy shore?

Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!
For ever, evermore!

Other verses:

By the grace of God we'll meet you,
By the grace of God we'll meet you,
By the grace of God we'll meet you,
Where parting is no more.

Jesus lives and reigns for ever,
Jesus lives and reigns for ever,
Jesus lives and reigns for ever,
On Canaan's happy shore.

supplied here

*Personally, one of my favorite places to see my tax dollars at work...

#235 Avram

Apple moved over to putting MacoS ontop of FreeBSD because Apple was a failure at writing its own non-task-switching multitasking operating system. I don't remember which version of the MacOS was the last task-switcher, it was 8 or 9, and Apple finally gave up and around the time that NeXt and Apple became one Apple changed over to using a Unix relative developed by someone else.... that is, NeXt was using a descendent of Berkeley's implementation of Unix, and Apple moved to that or some such, and then when FreeBSD came out, Apple moved over to using FreeBSD.

Unix and its close relatives were not designed for doing "creativity" applications, and the non-proprietary versions lacked a commercial base of users and software usable for commercial graphics, audi, etc. (there were some available for Silicon Graphics systems, however they were expen$ive and not out in the consumer area, or below the very high end fat wallet commercial d and defense industry markets....and most required a lot of computer systems sophistication)

Apple had an installed base of graphics designers, musicians, video people, etc., and one big factor is that people who have already spent years and fortunes using a particular type of system, don't want to have to spend months and thousands of dollars to move to something that works differently and isn't compatible with what they already have/have been doing.

By the way, I did get to play with some Silicon Graphics stuff years ago when it had stuff that no Apple system could do... I like that stuff a LOT better than anything I've ever seen out of Apple. SGI, however, had no clue about how to enter the consumer and home and small business and cost-in-a-big-consideration markets....

Ten in the Bed, what were they?

I know! I know!

They were:

1 little one, a human child gender carefully unspecified.
2 bears.
1 zebra.
1 mouse.
1 elephant.
1 hedgehog.
1 sheep.
1 rabbit.
and...
1 crocodile.

If pressed, I can also remember the individual noises each one makes when falling out of bed.

This is from Penny Dale's illustrated version of the song, which I have owned for some considerable time and read more often than I care to remember, as it was one of Sasha's favourites. The elephant also appears in her The Elephant Tree. Ten in the Bed ends with the Little One saying "I'm cold. I miss you!" so they all come back and jump into bed. I'd recommend these highly for toddlers.

fidelio, 246: I can't get that first version to scan, unless they used the same tune for verse and chorus. American hymns hardly ever have more than two notes per syllable.

Paul Duncanson @ 245... It IS reassuring to know that blogging is safer than knitting - marginally so, true, but safer. Maybe it's because, with knitters, it's like The Three Musketeers whenever the King's musketeers meet the Cardinal's. Before you know it, users of different knitting styles are trying to to skewer each other with their needles.

Jack Ruttan @ 244.. an article by somebody about not wanting to collaborate with wannabe writers

Didn't the Beatles write a song about exactly that?

TexAnne, given how much trouble it was to find as much as I did, I'm not prepared to say they didn't use the same tune for both. Usually, it's pretty easy to find hymns and related information on line, even for Sacred Harp things, but virtually everything kept throwing me to sites about the Battle Hymn of the Republic--if you want to do a search that specifically excludes the BHR, you might turn up something--or not. I suppose that's support for Xopher's observation about how non-memorable the original was.

Abi @ 240... I'd put the situation on the weird side of ordinary

"The Weird Side of Ordinary" sounds like a Charlie Sheen sitcom - with John Lithgow as the comedic relief?

Serge, 250: No skewering! Skewerings get blood on the yarn!

fidelio, 252: I agree.

TexAnne... Soon to be published by Tor, Alexandre Dumas's lost novel Blood on the Yarn...

One could argue that you're using an unconventional dye, perhaps. Striped socks might become badges of honor.

Diatryma @ 256... To Live and Let Dye?

Perhaps To Purl is Not Enough or Sweaters on Her Majesty's Secret Service, too. Though I was thinking more Musketeer than Bond, to be honest. It's too easy to be a secret agent knitter. A proud knitter or perhaps crocheter (crochetier?), in a cape, with a hat and a feather, needles and/or hooks with a proud crest on the ends, unless that interferes with proper use, balls of wool at the ready....
Okay, I mostly want the awesome hat with a feather on it. I've made a hat with anemones on it, but it's not the same.

Serge #251 - I Wanna Hold Your Hand?

Jack Ruttan @ 259... Actually, I was thinking of Paperback writer. Re-reading the lyrics after a long time, I realize I remembered it wrong. It sounds more like someone who'd be a victim of PublishAmerica. Anyway, here are the lyrics.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

It's the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn't understand
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It's a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

Paperback writer

It's a thousand pages, give or take a few
I'll be writing more in a week or two
I can make it longer if you like the style
I can change it round and I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

If you really like it you can have the rights
It could make a million for you overnight
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

Paperback writer

Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer (fade out)

Diatryma @ 258...

So does my wife. Speaking of musketeers, what did you think of The Man in the Iron Mask, with Gabriel Byrne as d'Artagnan?

Serge @ 260.

My choice is more apropos for semi-stalking. Now I'm playing "Get Back!"

Seriously, my adventure's not a problem, at least on my side. Makes me more careful about whom I'm e-mailing, however.

Did have one nutty writer years ago leave poems in my mailbox, read things into my answering machine, and then make threats when I, with my mighty connections (I'd been published once in a magazine, and was a columnist in a free weekly paper) didn't get those poems published for him.

What is it about the sort of person who thinks this kind of odd behavior is better than a polite query and an SASE?

Mind you, when I used to work at a funky used bookstore, a person once told me I was supposed to help get him a job there, or he would commit suicide. I don't think he followed through.

Serge @253:
"The Weird Side of Ordinary" sounds like a Charlie Sheen sitcom - with John Lithgow as the comedic relief?

Actually, looking at the phrase again, I think it would make a good Iain M Banks ship name. GCU Weird Side of Ordinary, perhaps.

Jack Ruttan @ 262... What is it about the sort of person who thinks this kind of odd behavior is better than a polite query and an SASE?

A severe lack of social skills that borders on the dangerous?

Susan @241,

I think it gives you a flavor and hint of what a p.s.g.e. would be like, about as close an experience as anyone can get in the early decades of the 21st century(1).

In 2008 it isn't the same week as WorldCon, so this year is a great year for SF fans to go. Because Jan 16th is the start of sales, and because it'll be different this year--no tix sold at the gate--I'm mentioning it now.

(1) The preparation and there-and-back-again can add up, yes, but once you're there... the piano that drives you out to the deep-playa coffee-tiki bar where you can sit on a couch, sip freshly made espresso, and watch the trebuchet launch flaming watermelons? That's all gift.

It isn't a completely different culture, but it's given me an overlay of future sensibilities- like what I've started to write on messageless clothing.

Abi @ 263...

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship The Weird Side of the Ordinary. Her five year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Starring James The Jerk, Mister Sprocket, and 'Bones' Decoy...

re # 244

I, for one, can see that it's easier to have a good idea than to follow through on writing a good idea, and I am sure many others who have had not-yet-written ideas see that too.

So why wouldn't it be reasonable for an amateur writer to ask if others can do the hard work for him?

Naive, perhaps, but you can see why a person might be thinking in that direction.

Man in the Iron Mask had Leonardo DiCaprio as king and prisoner, right? I liked it quite a bit, but I haven't read the book or seen any of the Musketeer movies in total. The charge scene at the end was worth seeing in the theater.

Abi... If you go to the following link, you'll find what happened when someone translated Star Trek's opening monologue, translated it into various foreign languages, then back into English...

http://www.geocities.com/bookworm1225/mst3k/trektrans.html

I especially like the French one:

"Space, the final border. They are the voyages of the company of Starship. Its five years mission: to explore new strange worlds. To seek the new life, and of new civilizations. To go fatty where no man went front."

Now what would the results if someone did this with Latin?
Hint, hint...

abi @ 153: re: Beauty; I think my 8 year old mind conflated having a Friesian horse ("I'm sure that horse knows more Greek than Miss Stanley ever did.")and an library with all the books that have ever been published with being able to read Greek and Latin. By the time I figured it out it was too late.

Tania @ 236: Love the Andrew Lang books, especially his forewords where he gets more and more exasperated with the idea that he's the one writing the stories. Kay Nielsen is my favorite fairy tale illustrator though.

Farjeon wrote beautiful, funny, touching stories. "Elsie Piddock Skips in her Sleep" is probably my favorite.

Shaun Tan's "The Red Tree" and "The Rabbits" (written by Marsden) are 2 of my all time favorite picture books.

Diatryma @ 268... That's the one. With Jeremy Irons as Aramis. Unfortunately, I didn't see it when it came out in theaters, but I caught it on TV, loved it(*), and bought the DVD.

(*) Except for John Malkovich's French character who's incapable to pronounce d'Artagnan's name correctly.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 265... Does this mean that you are going to the Denver worldcon?

Diatryama: I've never managed to get feathers to work on my hats. BTW, we got the yarn, it's lovely. Thank you muchly.

Books I would commend:

On food and cooking Harold McGee
Silverlock John Meyers-Meyers
American Gods Neil Gaiman
To Reign in Hell Steven Brust

The first, because it's just such a fun book. It's (for those who don't know) a book about how food works. It's not a cookbook. It's a chemistry, and physics and neat photos and history and botany and sociology book. Either edition is worth having (I have both) but the present (2nd) is, in many ways, a completely differnt work. The 20 years between the two have seen a huge increase in what we know about how foods work.

The second, well I was well read when I read it (both for my age: 18, and for the culture in which I live), and I still knew I was missing something. When I re-read it, I get more out of it. It's a romp, and everytime I wonder; fubhyq V trg gb gung Ulcrevba Fcevat, ubj znal qenhtugf pbhyq V gnxr.

The next two... are just fun. The first is dark, and grim, and has a hidden current of joy. It's also not a bad sort of mirror to the present US culture.

The second... It's a whimisically dark piece of happiness. In some ways they are flip sides of a coin.

I want to commend a book of pictures/photographs/paintings, because pretty, and interesting things, are good to look at, and can be as, "Enlightening" as text, but I can't think of one which really works. There are monographs (of Steichen, Steiglitz, Adams, Bourke-White, Cartier-Bresson, Avedon, etc. but that limits one to photographs, and Brueghel, Dürer, van Gogh, Rublyev, Carvaggio, Titian, van Dyck, Hilliard, Degas, and all sorts of painters are left out; none of which addresses the non-western visual arts, and still fails to take scuplture into account) So what I really want to reccomend is an intro to art class; and them some self-study

I'd also commend "A Christmas Carol", "The Jungle Books", "Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and The Madness of Crowds", and the four volume set, "How Things Work".

abi @ 263

GCU sounds right, or maybe GSV. The military Minds seem to take names that are often vaguely threatening, e.g., "LOU Gunboat Diplomat". I've been expecting ROU This Will Hurt You More for some time now.

For that incredibly geeky feeling, there's a list of ship and plate names here

Serge @ 264 wrote: A severe lack of social skills that borders on the dangerous?

Yeah, it's too bad. Of course the best one can do is to work on not being vulnerable to such characters.

Maybe next that guy is going to pay some charlatan to write the book for him, and get plagiarised Tom Clancy in return. Then we can have another fun 1000-post thread.

Serge: Who is abi to find for the other person in that drill? Because one person has to do it out, and another back in.

It also helps, of course, if they don't know the original text.

Now I have to go see what the Russian looks like.

At a con art show recently, I saw illuminated text translations into Latin of a couple monologues-- Wash's dinosaur one from Firefly and Dirty Harry's do-you-feel-lucky one. I'm a bit disappointed that the Dirty Harry had ".44" in the middle, rather than ".XLIV".

Serge @272,

Of course. I miss being able to go to Worldcons in most years, so 2008 will be fun.

[and this'll be the big year for the "BurningMan in 2010" bid...party.]

#267 Erik Nelson wrote: "I, for one, can see that it's easier to have a good idea than to follow through on writing a good idea, and I am sure many others who have had not-yet-written ideas see that too."

It's a dream, coupled with deep-seated lack of self confidence. I used to be a little like this, but discovered that hard work, combined with a modicum of talent, can go places.

I'm still working on getting rid of bad artistic habits, such as jealousy of others more successful or talented than I, an ability to take criticism constructively, and general self-confidence without going too far the other way into egotism. A lot of it is, as Serge says, social skills.

Terry Karney @ 276: I'll translate it back into English if abi does the Latin. Of course, I've heard it but I don't actually know it.

dido @ 270

Kay Nielsen is my favorite fairy tale illustrator though.

I have trouble picking a winner among Nielsen, Rackham, and Leo & Diane Dillon. All great, all very different in style and sensibility.

Did you know that Nielsen worked on a project with Disney (in the 1940's I believe), a segment for a new Fantasia movie? There are drawings and maybe even some test footage still in existence; I've seen some of the drawings and they're terrific. There's a coffee table book about unfinished Disney works that has the drawings in it; I'm drawing a blank on the title, and google hasn't been very helpful so far, so I can't provide a link.

And in other unfinished Disney news, the long-delayed collaboration of Disney and Dali, "Destino" gets its premiere next month. At last! I've been hearing about this for 5 years now, as it was bounced from pillar to post in legal battles, corporate ego competitions, and the deaths of people who had worked on it. Roy Disney won my undying admiration by pushing it for all that time until it finally happened*, and also Dali's assistant on the project, who is 95, and who worked to complete it. YAY!

Even facing down and defeating Eisner, that monster of ego.

Bruce Cohen, Jhereg arrived in yesterday's mail. Thank you very much! I now have both books you kindly sent, and anticipate several hours of enjoyable reading.

Diatryma: I saw those same things at Loscon. I agree about the numeration.

Bringing the grooming issue to this thread. There have been people removing hair from various parts of thier bodies for as long as we have records. That's the easy part.

We've also had some oddities of representation. I forget which Brit it was who gained his understanding of the female from from classical statuary. Since the female statues had no representation of pubic hair... he was repulsed by his wife's possessing same, and he never touched her again (and, by reports, the contact on their wedding night was decidedly brief).

That said, the present trend to making the image of women seem to be that of the classical statue seems odd to me, and I don't know what to make of it. I don't think it's an attempt to make women infants, but that's because the rest of the figure seems to be non-child to me.

On the flip side, I do think it looks child-like, and isn't what I want to look at, when seeing a nude. Actually, I tend to find it sexualises what would otherwise be a simple figure study. The difference from the expected state shifts focus, and so draws a more sexual context to the image.

I'll have to think more on it, because that aspect wasn't something I'd parsed out before. I'd just said to myself, "enh... not what I wanted."

As for pink... Yes, there are (and have been, for years) pink grips. Some of them attractive (laminate woods, with dyed panels). What I find interesting is trying to figure out when the rigidity of the colors came to be. My grandmother didn't seem to have any strong sense of pink/blue = boy/girl, but she was born in 1902.

My mother didn't have it as ironclad, but the trend was to pink = girl/blue = boy, but she dealt with that by buying greens, reds, yellows and the like.

A friend's daughter; in no small part because of her mother, lives for pink. So much so that her nick-name at school; from something like day two, is Pinky, because everything is (or has on it) pink.

Barbie's packaging has always been pink.

I was thinking about it when Maia and I went to breakfast (an interesting place. Good pastries, in a german style, medicre cocoa; coffee untested. A semi-Republican place, but welcoming {I made the interjection that perjury isn't the same as lying to a prosecutor; when someone tried to compare Clinton to some athlete, who got six months, and 800 hours comm-serv. They seemed to be more conservative, than reactionary and I didn't feel unwelcome. It was funny hearing them say they'd prefer Gray Davis to Arnie, as he's just "Maria Shriver's puppy, and a secret Democtrat").

In the fifties, high-school girls were fond of pink, so much so that we have the overdone image of Frenchy from "Grease".

My guess is the ossifications of gender roles in the post-war period (because the '20s-'40s showed a trend to more equality) led to the more rigid identification of blue/pink. How the flip in colors came about, I don't know, but I'll bet police uniforms, and the use of "pinko" as an insult had something to do with it.

Cool about the Worldcon, Serge and Kathryn— we'll* be going too, and extending our stay to see all the friends we've been missing since we moved.

Now on the subject of songs... heh heh heh.

I Was a Summer Camp Counselor (teenaged, even), and we sang all the time. (Never mind that half the staff couldn't carry a tune in a bucket; enthusiasm counted for more than tonality.) We sang before meals. We sang while we were serving meals. (And rainy days, which required inside seating, were always a prelude to lost voices because 45 minutes of singing is qualitatively different than 10 minutes.) We sang at campfires.

The end result is that I can bust out hours of song without even thinking about it, or even really listening to the words any more. Even ten years on.

As for regional variations, they are all over the place. One that I find particularly intriguing is "The Cat Came Back"— the words tend to remain largely the same but the style varies like mad. I've heard it cheerful, I've heard it bluesy, I've heard it slow and doleful.

And sometimes you can trace a variation right to the start. One year our program director introduced a song to the camp, "Desperado." (Not the Johnny Cash version.) Well, there were a few changes made right off the bat. First of all, he was one of those aforementioned tone-deaf types, and since I'd learned the tune in grade school I could really tell how it changed. (Think Sound of Music —> Professor Henry Higgins monotone.) He also decided that "Cripple Creek" could be offensive and changed it to "Stubble Creek." When I came back for a visit during the prep week the next year, a protégé was trying to perform the song and asked me if I remembered the lyrics. Well, I did, and the tune as well, but I'm pretty sure the monotone version is the one that survived.

We also had extra verses to "The Titanic." That's the one with the chorus:

It was sad, so sad,
It was sad when the greatest ship went down to the bottom of the
[interjection] Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when the greatest ship went down.

*Me, Evil Rob, and Squirmy.

Delayed exposition for one item on my book list:

I've been trying to keep up with the Cassie Edwards plagiarism story this week. As usual, Fandom_Wank has a comprehensive set of links including links in comments. Through the week, one of the recurring complaints from the Nice Girls(tm) is that Ms. Edwards is old and people didn't know about plagiarism Back Then.

Which is why I recommend Gaudy Night as an essential reading- plagiarism, along with other matters of academic and personal ethics, are at the center of the story, and the consequences of loyalty without regard to worth are shown in explicit and microscopic detail. The ways in which consequences follow choices and further choice is limited by past choices gets expounded upon time and again, and the limits to free will are brought out, aired, refolded, and put away fresh.

(This bit of prolix exposition brought to you as a redirection of energy not spent on harranging himself further on the shocking state of the shower this morning).

#217 -- Perhaps you all know that Robin's got a blog on LJ?

Love, C.

The social and art historian and critic, poet and essayist, John Ruskin, is the Victorian about whom that story is told.

More lately, however, there are biographers -- Tim Hilton and John Batchelor -- who have rather interpreted the tale of their wedding night Effie Grey wrote as a fright of menstrual blood. Others have also suggested that Ruskin was a pedophile, so everything about a grown woman's body disgusted him.

Paintings and photos of her show an attractive woman. In any case, Effie Grey divorced him for the painter John Everett Millais on the grounds of 'incurable impotence,' so it was really an annulment, not a divorce.

Love, C.

Which story involves Ruskin, Constance @ #287? Gaudy Night?

All I get on Google is the Dorothy Sayers novel, and that's set in the 1930s.

All right. I've read back further, and saw the statue story about John Ruskin in message 283. I read a biography (forget which one, and am too lazy to look it up) which says that tale's a canard, and nobody knows the real reason for the annulment. But Ruskin liked alarmingly young girls, and would probably be facing jail time these days, or at least a taunting article in The Sun.

Terry Karney @ 283... Maria Shriver's puppy, and a secret Democrat

Have they done that yet on Special Victims Unit?

B.Durbin @ 284... Cool about the Worldcon, Serge and Kathryn— we'll (Me, Evil Rob, and Squirmy) be going too

I'm not going to ask who or what Squirmy is. As for an ML gathering, yay! We'll see how that goes as things get closer. Stay tooned.

(*) No, Abi, we will not serve dino flesh.

Coming soon, Gaudi Nights, a story of torrid love and architecture...

Serge @291:
(*) No, Abi, we will not serve dino flesh.

As they say in England*, bugger that for a game of toy soldiers.

----
* parts of it, anyway. Oop Nawth they usually add "luv" in there somewhere.

Abi @ 293... bugger (...) Oop Nawth they usually add "luv" in there somewhere.

Hmmm... As Fantasy Island's Mr. Roarke used to say: "Smile, everyone, smile!"

BSG cast poses for the Last Supper

via Shakesville, where IDs are provided if needed.

Whew! Back at last. Heather Rose Jones #188 got the bottles of beer right:

Like the passive voice, the middle voice removes the necessary presence of a volitional agent, which seems to be what Brenda is reacting to.

Exactly. We 13-year-olds were singing about picking up bottles of beer and drinking them. How daring! "Happen to fall" sounds like a grown-up euphemism. I was surprised to see that people really sang that. (Times were much simpler then.)

Modern examples of passive, middle, and active voice:

Mistakes were made.
Mistakes happen.
I made mistakes.

Each of these is in use, some more than others.

Bruce @ 247: Whee! I had to go re-read the fan service scene in Look to Windward. :)

So, we have accidentally GSV Weird Side of Ordinary. (Or GCU, works for both.) Trying a few myself:

GCU Entomologist
GCU Seen It All
GCU It's The Thought That Counts

LOU Magnifying Glass
LOU Aggressive Norm
ROU Action at a Distance

LSV White Whale
GSV Rising Tide
GSV Architectural Fad

Surely others have played this game.

Ralph @297:
Frequently. But I only get two or three out before they start to fall flat.

GSV Cognitive Deficit
LSV Which Fork Do I Use For This
ROU None Taken

parts of it, anyway. Oop Nawth they usually add "luv" in there somewhere.

Where my Dad comes from they use "me duck" instead of "luv". That's the Midlands though.

Once upon a time there was a Ben Elton novel which suggested naming military units along the lines of HMS Dubious Use of the World's Resources which so impressed me that I named a teddy bear a friend got at a car show after it, and as far as I know is still Known as "Dubious".

Abi... Is there a GCU We're Doomed?

How about the GCU Unique Opportunity for Personal and Professional Growth, aka the GCUUOPPG?

I always wanted to write a story with a spaceship in it called Frozen Gold.

GSV Lost In The Referents, as it were.

GCU Reality-Based
GCU Jumping to Conclusions

abi @298: Nice ones!

Serge: More like GCU Midas Touch.

Just saw "The Orphanage."

Like the producer's "Pan's Labyrinth," you're not quite sure if the fantasy elements are imagined or real, or ultimately if it matters.

And like "Pan," this film ends with a 2 x 4 to the gut. Not so much a tearjerker as two electrodes jammed into your tear glands and attached to a 220 volt line, so you don't cry but kind of steam.

Good? Very good. But brutal.

Ralph Giles @ 304... What would be the best prefix for the Admit You're Lost And Pull Over To Ask For Directions?

ROU Unnatural Selector
ROU ... I'm Sure Someone Can Fix It
LOU ... Hope They Don't Have Blasters
GOU Not Very Reassuring, I'm Sure
GCU Nothing to See Here
GCU By Any Means Necessary
GSV Sufficiently Long Lever
GSV I'm Going to Say This One More Time...

(TLA) It Was Like That When I Got (Here/There) seems to be the most commonly thought of Mind name that has not, in fact, ever been used as a book, afaict - there's a whole spew of a thread back in Usenet on RASFF and that's far from the only place I've seen it mentioned.

The ROU Where Did You Say The Remote Was...

OK, I don't understand what all these three letter things with phrases after them are, or why they're funny. Someone care to explain, or direct me to the post I missed where it was discussed?

re 185:

Bo bo... ski otten-totten
Bim-bam... I am BOOM BOOM BOOM
[speeds up]
Eeny-meeny otten-totten
Bo-bo ski otten-totten
Bo-bo ski otten-totten
BIM! BAM! BOOM!

I'm fairly certain ours was a heavily truncated version. There's probably something we were missing when the tune abruptly shifted into double-time.

--

re: 305, "the producer's Pan's Labyrinth"

How do I know if what I saw was the producer's cut of Pan's Labrynth or the other one? Feel free to ROT-13 replies if necessary... We saw it at a film festival on a college campus in Spanish with subtitles, if it helps to know; I certainly got the impression that we were to accept the fantasy elements as being real (with the exception of the very end, of course; that could go either way depending on where the viewer falls on the cynic/romantic scale).

Nicole, 310: Huh. Mine's nearly the same.

Bobo-ski-wotten-totten,
Eh-eh, eh-eh BOOM BOOM BOOM
(twice as fast)
Itty-bitty-wotten-totten,
Bobo-ski-wotten-totten,
Bobo-ski-wotten-totten,
BOOM!

and at the last BOOM you hit the other person's hand as hard as you can. (Interesting choreographic results may be obtained thereby, especially if one person is wearing rings. Owie.)

What does one do on the final BIM BAM BOOM in your version?

Serge @ #291: Heh. Squirmy will be about two months old at the time of Worldcon, hence the current nickname.

The really amusing part is that my bosses haven't twigged yet despite my rapidly expanding waistline. I'm going to have to tell them soon and I expect some shock on the faces of people who would get it instantly if they saw it through a viewfinder, but because it's in front of their noses they don't have a clue.

Xopher, these are riffing off the Culture ship names from some of Iain M. Banks's books (rather like the modern SS, USS, HMS, and MV; Bruce's post here has a link to a list of the vessels from the books, and there's a table of the abbreviations also, which are Banks'.
GCU is General Contact Unit, GOU is General Offensive Unit, GSV is General System Vehicle--in the other abbreviations, "L" stands for Limited, and "R" for Rapid, with the rest as noted in the General group.

Has anyone come up with the GOU Think of This As A Learning Experience? Or a GCU Damn, Not Another Learning Experience?

LOU Stop Wasting My Time

Serge@292, followed by the sequal Hello, Dali?

Zopher - as Fidelio said, but expanded.

The Culture is (very) post-Singularity and post-scarcity. The primary (but not sole) actors are Minds, which are (very powerful) AIs that are normally housed on Ships. (There are humans and members of other species - and lots and lots of them - in the Culture, but while some are very important, most are not, and few are directly involved in any day-to-day decision making - what there is of it - in the Culture), Minds/Ships get to choose their own names, and are broadly classed into three basic groups -

(X) System Vehicles are the spine of the Culture - each one is a reflection of the Culture as a whole, with millions/billions of inhabitants (Minds, Drones, and human(oids)), and the ability to, in a crisis beyond any comprehension or understanding, recreate the Culture completely so long as it survives - each one is, essentially, a VonNeumann machine with the purpose "The Culture Lives, so long as I do" among its other purposes/goals/drives.

(X) Contact Units are the Culture's "troublesome meddlers" - they go out and seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly stick their nose in places where nobody thinks they belong except the Culture (and not even all of them). Think of them as being Starfleet, only with more "poking about looking at interesting stuff", a lot more "huh, so what are you all up to, then?" and no Prime Directive.

(X) Offensive Units are a relatively new development in the Culture - they had a Big War a couple of thousand years ago that Contact couldn't take care of, and started building real, dedicated warships - mostly disposables (Minds can be backed up, see...). They are not at all apologetic or euphemistic about their purpose - the classes have names like Torturer, Thug, Assassin, etc.

Each type of Unit is broken into three basic categories -

General - these are the big ones. A GSV can be a hundred kilometers long or more, and have a population of over a billion. The other types are (much) smaller, but if something has a G in the front of its name, it does its purpose Very Well, Thank You.

Medium - mostly found in the System Vehicles - these were originally GSVs that were downgraded as the type evolved.

Limited - means that its capability is lower than expected for a Ship of this general type - it could be smaller than normal (usual), or otherwise restricted.

Rapid is essentially reserved for Offensive Units - ROUs trade firepower for speed, basically, and are little more than drives, guns, and a Mind. Generally considered pretty disposable, always considered dangerous.

dROUs are a special case - the d stands for "Demilitarized". Most ROUs (and other military vessels) were mothballed after the last war - handfuls are kept around for pure military purposes, and a larger number were demilitarized (this does not just mean physically, AIR, there is suggestion that the Minds were at least partially repurposed as well). "Demilitarized" is a relative term - even a demilled ROU is still very fast, and all Culture Ships are capable of exerting pretty severe amounts of force against a target, should they feel the need. dROUs are used as couriers and fast response craft, and the like.

Ship/Mind names tend to be somewhat whimsical, and are often vaguely related to the Ship's outlook, etc. There are a handful of other Ship classes, or variations on existing ones, but most Ships fall under GSV, MSV, GCU, LCU, ROU, GOU, and LOU.

And now you know more than you needed/wanted to know about the Culture's Ship classification system.

Zopher = Xopher. Sorry, brainfart - I have an acquaintance in other places who goes by Zopher, and crossed circuits.

:-(

So, regarding Ten "X" in the bed.

We went to a baby shower today, and the most amazing book was seen I don't know if it was a gift, or if it belonged to one of the wee ones in attendance.

"Ten Little Dinos" It was a listing of ten different species of dinosaur and the ways in which they died. It has, in the middle of the page, a pair of floating googly-eyes, which are in the proper place for each of the beasties (and the archeologist who comments on them all being extinct).

It was written in 1996.

#310: "How do I know if what I saw was the producer's cut of Pan's Labrynth or the other one?"

When I wrote "the producer's Pan's Labyrinth", I was noting that the producer of The Orphanage was also involved with the earlier film (specifically, Guillermo del Toro was the writer and director of Pan's Labyrinth).

I wasn't suggesting that there was a special version out there that might have spun things differently.

GCU It Was Around Here Somewhere
ROU Was It Something I Said?
LOU Don't Go Away Mad
GCU Something In the Way It Moves Me
GSV Next Time For Sure
GSV This is What I Had In Mind
ROU This Might Be a Little Awkward.

Xopher,

The thing I find fascinating about the game of naming Minds is that these are AIs of great mental power and often subtlety, so it's a real challenge to come up with a name that might satisfy the humor of such a being.

Scott @ 315 (and anyone who is new to Banks): The Culture is (very) post-Singularity and post-scarcity.

Very, very indeed. A Few Notes on the Culture by Mr Banks is worth reading while you wait to pick up the books.

Which reminds me... there's an ARC of Matter that has been sitting on my desk at work since before Christmas and I haven't even read it once yet. So this is what Alzheimer's feels like.

Oh yeah, another book I think people should read, though to be honest I don't think one needs to read all of this one, but a healthy sampling of it is beneficial.

For years it was by my bedside, and my travelling comfort when I was on the road.

The Oxford Book of English Verse Anthony Quiller-Couch Edition.

The only thing I would change (of the verses chosen... there are some I wish were therein, and for which he held no brief, or had no room in the press of so many choices) is to have the Shakespearean sonnets he chose numbered as they are in the canon.

But it's a great romp, full of serious, and satrical poems (Nashe, In Time of Plague), whimsical (Stevenson, Jolly Good Ale and Old), sappy, (Thackeray, Boullabaise), delicate (Anon, Western Wind).

I wouldn't mind a bit from the Great War, but for what it is, it's damned good.

Paul Duncanson @ 321

Which reminds me... there's an ARC of Matter that has been sitting on my desk at work since before Christmas and I haven't even read it once yet.

You have a new Culture novel and you haven't read it yet? Does not compute.

If you don't want it, I'll take it.

If a new "Culture" book dropped out of the sky, I'd put it in my queue, somewhere between the Books I Feel I Should Read and the Books I Really Want To Read And Am Saving To Appreciate Later.

I was badly disappointed by Bank's Excession, and while numerous bits of Look to Windward were great, I think it was terribly padded.

Paul Duncanson #321:
Envious.

Over at Asimov's forum, it's been pointed out that "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" by Mike Resnick shouldn't be in as it was published in an issue with a 2008 coverdate.

The Mike Resnick story (which is excellent BTW) was mentioned in reference to the Nebula Preliminary Ballot.

Terry Karney @ 287

Until recently I assumed that the current fashion for total removal of pubic hair was the result of a gradual trend resulting from the decrease in size of bikini bathing suits. Showing pubic hair has always been a major taboo in this culture, so to wear a skimpy bathing suit, a woman was required to remove any hair not covered by the suit bottom. As the fashion for smaller suits became more popular, women who followed it began in increasing numbers to simply remove all their pubic hair rather than leave just a tiny patch.

But now, I wonder. The increasing sexualization of children may have another side: a desire to infantalize older women, both to make them more desirable to men who have become more and more conditioned to desiring younger and younger girls, and to make the women less powerful in the men's eyes.

I find this thought very disquieting.

B.Durbin @ 312... I figured out it had to be a little human, or something far more scary. Heheheh...

JESR @ 314... I like Doris Day in Que Seurat Seurat...

Bruce @ 323: In my defence, Christmas was spectacularly busy (I sell books) and the rep from Hachette handed it to me at a time that was really busy, even for Christmas while I was already engaged in trying to catch up on some Stross (Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue back to back isn't exactly wasting one's time)... so I put it aside until I had more free time.

Everyone has at least one author whose books rate "money is no object, drop everything now, aquire and read immediately" treatment. Banks is pretty much the top of my list, thus my comment about Alzheimer's. I am sorely tempted to go into work right now (4.50pm on a Sunday) to retrieve it.

To change the topic away from my shameful neglect, has anyone put forward Sagan's Demon-Haunted World in the must-read books list?

Scalzi has some thoughts on the election. Succinctly, he thinks the Hillary-can't-be-elected trope is nonsense, because the Clintons fight back the way recent Democratic candidates have not.

I regret that I tried to read "The Algebraist" and find I cannot cope with reading another Banks this century.

Bruce (StM): Yes, the push to make, otherwise adult women, possess/retain a feature of juvenile status bothers me. I'm not sure if that's because it reflects on me that I see it as a making women seem like girls, or because I see it as an attempt to make them seem as children.

In any wise, that it's becoming an imposed standard bothers me. Candy, at Feminism Without Clothes had a recent post about how she dealt with the social pressures to shave her legs (IIRC at about the age of 10). There was some interesting commentary.

On the personal level, if someone wants to shave, I don't have any issue with it. Chacun à son goût. It's the sense of social pressure to conform to what is "proper" appearance, the undertones of why those norms are being pressed which give me pause.

Dido #270:
Re:Shaun Tan. Have you read "The Arrival"? I think it's his best yet. Staggering.

Serge @ 306: Sounds like a GSV to me. Would be funnyier in a Very Fast Picket, but they can't spare the whimsy, and it's the wrong sort of bad taste for a GCU.

Xopher @ 309 and Scott at 315: The Culture is definitely a post-scarcity, cornucopia society, but it's not singularity fiction in the normal sense. Successive generations of AIs have bootstrapped their design way beyond human complexity, but there was no exponential explosion. Resources are still limited, evolution comprehensible, human society stable. Minds (even the human-level ones) are all anchored in physically real bodies (even if it's a starship) and none of the characters we meet are involved in an imploding virtuality.

What it does have is an exhilarating image of a Right makes Might utopia. The super-human Minds are also super-moral. They essentially keep humans around as pets, whole ecosystems as gardens or aquariums, and that's fine because, like most people, they care about their companion animals. Power with compassion and a sense of humour. And a nice post cold war message that if you're going to contruct machines with the power to destroy civilization, you'd best make sure they have your best interests at heart. Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake covers this from another angle.

I agree with what Bruce said in 320 about the ship names. The Culture is described as insufferably smug in their (scientifically demonstrable) superiority, and aware of it. Most of the names include some joke or a clever reference. It's a challenge to pack that into the short phrase that reflects personality and on the role that class of ship plays. It's a bit like the game with production company names.

Thanks everyone for your ship names! Very fun.

Tying together two sub-threads, I think

GOU Mistakes Were Made

works very nicely.

Nicole and TexAnne at 310, 311:

That sounds much like a game we played in southern Ontario where the rhyme went approximately like this:

Stella ella ola
quack quack quack
say es chico chico
chico chico check check
es chico chico,
bello, bello, bello, bello, bello, so:
one, two, three, four, FIVE!

... and on five the last person in the hand-slapping circle would attempt to slap the next person's hand, while that person would try to pull their hand away in time. Whoever lost the contest would be out for the remaining rounds.

b. loppe,

Stella ella ola
quack quack quack
say es chico chico
chico chico check check
es chico chico,
bello, bello, bello, bello, bello, so:
one, two, three, four, FIVE!

that sounds like a version of (columbus, ohio, 1980s)"quacka della omar."

quacka della omar,
qua qua qua.
dance to my chica
chica, chica
cha cha cha
follow, follow
follow, follow follow fol-low
1,2,3,4,5

(i never saw it written down, of course, so that's just my best rendering of the sounds.)

As an obsessive Wikipedia lurker†, I've often thought that some of the best Wikipedia policies could be Culture ship names.

GSV Assume Good Faith
MCV No Angry Mastodons
LSV Right to Vanish

GCU Ignore All Rules*
MCU Don't Bite the Newcomers
LCU Protect the Wrong Version

ROU Don't Be a Dick

-----
† I study trolls and social dynamics there
* Actually dROU More of a Guideline, Really in disguise

The Hub has just suggested

MCU Don't Repeat Yourself II

Last one for a bit, I promise...being a little meta* about the situation, I often wonder if there is a Rapid Offensive Unit Ess.

I don't think they exist.

-----
* It's a word now.

Abi @ 340... Your hubby's suggestion reminds me of the title of a real movie(*) - Missing In Action: Part Two: The Beginning.

(*) Well, that was a Chuck Norris movie anyway.

With which book would you suggest starting reading Iain Banks?

Ralph Giles @ 335

What really excited me about the Culture, when I realized just what Banks was saying about it, was that it embodied one sociological truth I've been convinced of for a long time: that a human individual or group can be live and evolve in its own way quite well even in the presence of vastly more intelligent and perceptive beings.

This is, of course, heresy according to the traditions of sf. How many times has a writer told us that our civilization simply wouldn't be able to stand up to even the knowledge that such beings existed, let alone the need to interact with them? It would destroy our precious little egos, was the consensus. Well, I never believed that*, and I was really happy to find an sf writer who didn't either. And even happier to find others later on, like Stross and MacLeod.

I'm not a believer in the Singularity, as least as presented to us by its most enthusiastic prophets, like Kurzweil and Tipler. But I do believe that there will be AIs, or some form of self-organized intelligent system, that can and will evolve to be vastly more intelligent and effective agents than we are. That may be a good thing, a bad thing, or a totally neutral outcome from our point of view; I don't think any particular flavor of outcome is predictable or even can be predictable about such an event. Which is precisely the definition of "Singularity": an event beyond which prediction breaks down. But if we're going to talk about it (and sf writers will), I'm glad there's someone pointing out that it needn't be the end of, or even a very bad thing for, the human race.

* And trust me, my ego is not crushed.

Stefan Jones @ 305... I saw The Orphanage last night. I liked it. Before the movie began, I noticed that, in the row just before us, were two young women with a 5-year-old boy. Guess what? They left soon after the movie's beginning. Obviously, someone had not done any research.

Serge @343:
With which book would you suggest starting reading Iain Banks?

To answer your real question: I'd suggest starting with either Consider Phlebas or Player of Games. I think Phlebas is weaker than Player, but either is a good start.

Then read the other of the above set.

Then read Use of Weapons. You may find yourself needing to reread that one. It's...not quite the same book after the first go.

To be pernickity and literal, Iain Banks writes literary fiction such as The Crow Road and Scottish magical realism like The Bridge (both excellent novels). Iain M Banks writes science fiction.

Same guy, namespaced for your convenience.

Bruce @344:

I like the ways you put that.

Another way of saying it is that right now humanity is like the smartest kid in the local high school. One day, though, we're going to go to college and find out that there are people a lot smarter, quicker, stranger and funnier than we are.

Since that's pretty much what has happened to many of us as individuals, and since we haven't been crushed by the experience, I'm going to take some convincing that our species can't manage it as well.

(I'm not a big fan of Singularity evangelists because a fair few of them want me to believe in their miracle, but scoff at me for believing in another one.)

Abi @ 346... Yes, that was indeed my real question. Thanks for the answer.

Abi @ 347... One could also compare it to the experience of hanging around Making Light.

Tania @ 232... Thanks for the trip report. I liked your comment that "...if not one died and/or was permanently injured, it was an adventure, not a fiasco..."

Dave #332

I don't remember which Banks book I read to what page, but it disinclined me to finish reading the book (I may have gotten 2/3rds through it...) the only memorable things for me, were that I disliked it, especially the writing style, and it disinclined me towards reading anything else by Iain Banks (I have looked through other Banks books, and not been grabbed by any of my skimmings to want to read/buy).

I keep hearing "singularity" and mostly shrugging. Evangelical movements and promotion don't much appeal to me.

Ideas are one thing, implementation is another. I thumbed through the Gibson-Sterling joint novel and thought, "I wish I could read this, it looks like there's interesting stuff in it" for the -ideas-, but I'm allergic to -both- of their writing styles and mostly allergic to the points-of-view/characters they use.

(The books I'm happiest with are e.g Janet Kagan's Mirabile stories, where the characters are people I'd like to be sitting around in a living room or family room with in conversation, or books in which their might be some really vile characters but I find them fascination to read -about- and the writing style, is one I find conducive to reading--no e.g. unresolved anapestic foot (as in a Bruce Sterling story in Asimov that I figured out the meter/rhythm was why I kept bouncing out of on the very first page) paragraph after paragraph after paragraph, active voice as opposed to large amounts of passive voice (the hallmark of bad technical prose... which I read reluctantly for information content in nonfiction, or because I am being paid to do work and the reference material is all passive voice which I have to read), or changing the subject within a paragraph, etc.

B.Loppe #337: Stella ella ola and miriam beetle #338: quacka della omar

That sure beats the heck out of "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe".

p.s.: "tiger"

It makes sense that humanity would keep going as something far greater rose from them. It's somewhere between realizing you're finally not the smartest person in the room, as Abi said, and acknowledging God. Most of the people I grew up with knew without a doubt that something far, far greater existed, capable of watching them, judging them, helping them in ways they couldn't explain, et cetera. Why would they crumble when faced with proof?

With regard to those classical nude statues, now some archaeologists are saying that all classical statues were originally *painted* (pretty garishly, according to some reconstructions I've seen). Would that include anyone's body hair? A bit hard to imagine, but some prurient old connoisseurs in those days might have paid extra for more detail.

PS: I got this from an article on p.14 of the Jan./Feb. '08 issue of Archaeology. It might also be on their website (www.archaeology.org), though I'm suffering from a bit too much web fatigue to check.

Faren: Statues (and buildings) of antiquity were painted. We don't know quite how (though we can say; from a few examples with remnants, the blank eyes of Roman busts were painted to look like real eyes).

I don't know of any finds in Pompeii/Herculaneum which have examples of statues.

What I do know is the pubic hair of male figures was (at least in Greece... I forget for Rome) sculpted into the statues. Stylised, to be sure, but present.

For the female figures, they were smooth. Was it preference for smoothly shaven women? Was it that haeterae were shaved, and they provided the models? Was it because, absent a penis there wasn't seen to be anything there (certainly actual anatomy wasn't even pretended at for female statues)? Was it because the paint schemes preferred made it harder to decorate, if the hair was represented?

I have no idea. All I know is there are Egyptian records of people shaving. And Classical statues of women are smooth-groined.

That, and if people can think of a variation in habit, and apply it to sex, some will practice it, others will fetishise it, and some will abhor it.

Things retrieved from not falling asleep:

Serge, a newer song might be "The Man (Ray) in the Miro"

Also, how about GCU Seemed like a good idea at the time.?

Ok, this is one of those cases of synchronicity, or critical mass, or something (sort of like the dino book being related to "ten little 'x' in the bed").

The blog Pretty Dumb Things just had a post on the subject, and her take on it is different from the suggestions being bandied about here (at least between Bruce (StM) and myself).

JESR @ 356... Let's not forget Elvis in One For The Monet, Two For The Show...

Paula Lieberman @ 351... Your reaction to Banks reminds me of my own to Peter Hamilton's stuff. I tried two novels of his and decided that this was not my cup of tea(*). Not sure why. I just didn't push my buttons, the positive ones anyway. I found some racism in it, which is a button I'd rather not see pushed. Still, I want to give Banks a try, because of all the recommendations.

(*) Besides, I'm a coffee person myself, and I view tea as glorified hot water. But, here, as with stories, YMMV.

My apologies to Kathryn from Sunnyvale and Serge - this is the first time I've been back to Makinglight since trying to catch up last weekend, having had rather a bout of Life(tm)[0]. I clearly get to buy a round when we -do- sort things out more gracefully.

[0] More accurately, a bout of Work-eating-Life(tm)

Dave Luckett: The Algebraist was Banks's attempt at modern space opera, which IMO is a \very/ acquired taste. The Culture books are different -- usually shorter and less tangled (not short and straight, but tA was a monster); you shouldn't judge Banks solely on this book. Try reading the author's notes referenced in #321; I think you'll find his attitudes somewhat agreeable.

GOU Dubious Prospects
ROU Volume of Awareness

GCU Your Other Left
GSV Rhizome

xeger @ 360... I'm not sure what you're apologizing for, but having a round sounds good, no matter what the reason. By the way, the French word for round is tournée, which can also mean a tour or a circuit. Let

Graydon @ 362... Didn't the GCU Your Other Left use to be known as the GCU Your Left Or My Left? There was also the GCU Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right But Three Lefts Will.

Serge@358, and then there's "Love is a Manet Splendored Thing."

JESR @ 365... And Jerry Lee Lewis's Magritte Balls of Fire...

That sounds itchy.

Um, Monet Can't Buy Me Love?

JESR @ 367... Kind of. But it also sound like John Wayne's 1960s western. Coming soon, John Wayne in Magritte, a story of passion and art in the Wild West. See him come face to face with Jack Elam.

"Draw!"

Linkmeister... Ever seen Bill Mumy and James Stewart in the comedy Escher Brigitte?

#289 -- Well the annulment says, as Effie Grey stated, it was granted on the grounds of 'incurable impotence.'

That sounds decided indeed.

However, as her letters show, she was miserable and increasingly so, and when she met Millais, they fell in love, and so one could rightly say that was the real reason for the annulment, which was granted on the grounds that the marriage had never been consumated.

There's a painting that Millais did of himself painting himself painting the falls, Ruskin and Grey. He's in the foreground, Grey's the center and Ruskin's in the back, of which much has been made in terms of seeking the clues to their triangle by interpreters of both Ruskin's and Millais's lives.

Love, C.

Even though the The Algebraist is not a Culture novel, I think if Dave didn't like it, he's unlikely to care for the Culture novels. It has more commonalities with them than differences, IMHO.

The Bridge might perhaps be worth trying, though. It's very different, and I think its humanity is more easily seen than in many of Banks' novels. (Either SF or mainstream.)

There's always Natalie Portman in Degas-den State.

TexAnne @ 373... What did you think of Portman in Star Wars I: The Van Gogh Menace?

I kind of liked Clint Eastwood in Play Misty Vermeer.

TCM showed Preson Sturges's 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. It's about a young woman who's pregnant, and a friend who loves her tries to help and says he's the father. Near the end, she gives birth - to 6 boys. A montage follows of newspapers with front-page headliners about the event, and the last one says:

Canada Protests - Possible But Not Probable

Don't forget Billy Idol, and Monet, Monet, Cruise, and Newman in, The Color of Monet, Al Pacine and Matthew McConaughey, in Two for the Monet Melanie Griffith and Ed Harris in, Milk Monet, Kim Bassinger and Danny Devito, in Even Monet, and the classic (about all those people who got the art you wanted) Danny Devito, Bette Midler and Judge Reinhold, in Other People's Monet

Serge @ 364
Didn't the GCU Your Other Left use to be known as the GCU Your Left Or My Left?

I believe that was an excursion vessel with a policy of making passenger-directed excursions.

There was also the GCU Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right But Three Lefts Will.

I would be much more concerned with the GSV Statistical Certainty.

I think that even if you couldn't stomach "The Algebraist", some of Banks earlier culture stuff is definitely worth trying, from "Consder Phlebas" to "Use of Weapons" to "The Player of Games" (Especially this last one, I sat gripped by the climax whilst waiting for a plane in Denmark). Although the writing style is somewhat similar, the Algebraist is too long and dull to be worth reading, I barely finished it, and I finish many books that other people give up on.
(And I write some dull stuff myself. Funny how it gets critted to death)

His books that are not actually SF but yet veer quite close are also hit and miss. At all costs avoid "A song of stone", it has an unsympathetic character and is dull, I couldn't get past chapter 2 or so. "The wasp factory", which of course I read at school, is very good though.

This is what is frustrating about Banks, he produces good and bad stuff. Perhaps "bad" is too harsh, but since the general criterion is "something that people want to read", then I think it good enough.

Thanks for the recommendations, everybody. It's probably too much for me to hope that my usual bookstore to carry Banks's SF novels, but who knows? Anyway, the last week of February, I'm flying to the Bay Area, which does have quite a few bookstores with a wide selection.

Isn't tonight when PBS starts showing new adaptations of Jane Austen novels?

I have a FluoroYasid request, please:

I've been asked about a SF story--possibly by Asimov (so thought the asker)--that's the opposite of Bicentennial Man (where a robot becomes human).

In the unknown story, a man becomes more and more non-organic, and a company/ factory claims ownership over his non-organic self. It sounds like a good story, but I'm not getting a quiver of a neuron recognizing it. Anyone else?

Serge @ 381: yes. If you're using a DVR, search for "Masterpiece." Masterpiece Theater is changing its name, or breaking into three separate shows, or some such. Anyway, people are having trouble finding it in the various DVR guides.

Persuasion is on tonight.

Stephanie @ 383... Thanks for the tip. As for a DVR, I must confess I'm still using a VCR, but I've been thinking more and more about switching. I taped many things for us to watch once my wife was done with her writing deadline, and the stack is now huge and I can't remember what's on them anymore. (Yes, I should have used postits.) Anyway, re DVR brands, do you have any recommendation?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 382... The only bell this rings for me is the movie Ghost in The Shell. One of the characters has been greatly enhanced by the corporation he works for, to the point he can't live without the implants. That means he can't quit because he'd have to give the implants back to the corporation.

Serge, there was a pretty good discussion about Banks's writing on this Making Light thread.

And, to counter abi's recommendation, I'll just say that Consider Phlebas is one of the few books I wish I could unread. There's one particularly horrible scene in it that's going to be in my head for the rest of my life, and oh how I wish it was not.

KMadeline Kely @ 386... Thanks for the reminder about that thread. Which of his books would you recommend?

First of all, how stupid am I for spelling my own name wrong? Oops.

Secondly, I've only read one Banks SF novel, and that was the afore-mentioned CP. The pointlessness of the horrible scene, the unexpectedness of the horrible scene, and the horribleness of the horrible scene all combined to put me off ever reading any of his other SF novels. I would've had to read them through half-closed eyes, afraid to be similarly ambushed at every page turn.

But I have read some of his litfic, and can happily recommend The Crow Road, The Wasp Factory (where the horribleness does at least make sense and fit and seem to have something to do with plot and character and not just be there to nauseate the reader), and Walking On Glass.

The worst thing about that awful scene in Consider Phlebas is that it's pretty much totally unnecessary, plot-wise.

I'll second the suggestion of Player of Games as a good intro to the Culture novels. Use of Weapons has some awfulness in it, but it's necessary awfulness. And the structure of the book is a wonder.

Don't forget Banks' non-M (non-SF) books of which "Crow Road" is my favourite. "Whit" is also very good. He's a writer that took two goes for me to appreciate; I was too young the first time I tried him. His writing tone can come across as smug, but I get past that because he writes well enough to justify a certain amount of smugness.

"Crow Road" has a killer opening:

'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.'

Lifted from the relevant Wikipedia entry.

Ugh. I've remembered what you're talking about now. Had successfully blocked that sequence. Re necessity V nterr jura gur pbzzragf V'ir frra ryfrjurer gung gur vagrag jvgu gur Rngref jnf gb pbasebag hf jvgu gur "fgeratgu bs bhe pbaivpgvbaf" fb gb fcrnx, gung gur Phygher jbhyq crezvg n phyg yvxr gung, xrrcvat gur jnl bcra sbe gubfr jub jnagrq gb rfpncr, ohg abg bgurejvfr vagresrevat. Arprffnel? Dunno.

Banks does like his awfulness, though. There's something about facing the ick in all of his books. And things not being what they seem.

Use of Weapons was the one I read first, and it will always have a special place in my heart, both for the structure and the amazing ending. I didn't enjoy Player of Games as much, but agree it's a gentler introduction than the others.

Of his non-sf fiction, I second The Crow Road. I also really like Complicity, his second person experiment. (Now think about the title!). If you like the Culture books, I'd also suggest Inversions which is more of a fantasy setting.

One problem I have with the later Culture novels is that they show too much from the point of view of the Minds, which fell flat for me. Lost the image of inexpressible sophistication they had in my imagination. I didn't care much for the main plots of either Excession or Look to Windward, but there are still some beautiful parts. The Gray Area was facinating, and I just love that bit before the fan-service cnegl jurer Xnor qbrf uvf yvggyr guerr yrttrq qnapr va gur fabj. Vg'f ornhgvshyyl jevggra, naq gur pbagenfg jvgu Pbafvqre Cuyronf jbexf fb gbhpuvatyl gb qrrcra gur rzbgvba bs gur fprar. It's just one of the ways Windward is a homage to the whole series.

Soon Lee, #334, I have The Arrival on my printer right now. I picked it up at the library Friday -- I had to wait my turn in the queue.

Dave -- I think you'd like Espedair Street, as it's fun Banks, and quite unlike the bits of The Algebraist you disliked, I should think.

Kathryn @ #265:
I think it gives you a flavor and hint of what a p.s.g.e. would be like, about as close an experience as anyone can get in the early decades of the 21st century(1).

Well, feel free to gift me with admission and travel expenses and I'll be happy to go! Since I'm still in the scarcity thing, money for random vacations is fairly nonexistent; adding a fourth vacation on top of the three high-priority ones (worldcon, dance, theater) is kind of tough.

the piano that drives you out to the deep-playa coffee-tiki bar where you can sit on a couch, sip freshly made espresso, and watch the trebuchet launch flaming watermelons? That's all gift.

I'm never sure why people think of drugs as a gift; definitely not the way to attract me to an event.

(general)
I'll be at Denvention, theoretically doing dance things and trying to rewrite the Hugo award criteria and generally hanging out.

If you want to see Anthony Head playing an upper-class flaming asshole, watch the Masterpiece adaptation of Persuasion.

Susan @ #396: Obviously, as the deal gets closer we're going to have to establish a list of attendees and a little get-together.

My attendance at such an event will be determined by Squirmy, of course. My mom tells me I was a colicky baby. Oh dear...

Soon Lee @ 391: "Crow Road" has a killer opening

And a truly superb television adaptation.

Serge #359

The issues I had with Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction novels were two-fold

1. I did not like and did not much appreciate the viewpoint of the lead character--I could not understand why any sensible bright female would find him attractive, much less -several- of them be fawning over his not appealing self

2. It turned from SF with interesting ideas and places (and a protagonist I wanted to treat to a painful castration...) into horror, and I'm not much of an appreciator of horror.

The writing style was okay, it was what the content turned into and viewpoint character issues I took umbrage with... going from SF and pulling a rotate 90 degrees into another axis without warning, into an area I'm not again particularly fond of, eventually caused me to stop reading after hundreds of pages.

Soon Lee #334: I have been dying to get my hands on *The Arrival* (also a newish YA called *Incarceron*--can't remember the author) but am strenuously avoiding bookstores until some recent necessities and indulgences get paid off.

Marilee: I'm not even contemplating borrowing it from the library--even for a preview. The minute the *Red Tree* came into my bookstore I bought a zillion copies or so and sent them to everyone I knew.

Not really caught up, but I disliked Banks' The Bridge enough that not only didn't I finish it, I didn't even look at anything else by him. (Classic "first impressions" lossage there...) Various suggestions and warnings noted, but I'm not reading quite as voraciously as I used to, so I don't know when I'll get around to him.

Hmm, while ML's recipes and poetry are getting indexed, perhaps someone else should collect the book recommendations with the reasons/commentaries?

GOU A Blatant Attempt at Intimidation
LOU I Know You Are But What Am I
GCU I Know I Am But What Are You
GCU I'll Show You Mine...
ROU PWNZOR
GCU Go To Exotic New Places and Meet Exciting New People
LOU And Blow Them Up

Diatryma @ 277: "I'm a bit disappointed that the Dirty Harry had ".44" in the middle, rather than ".XLIV"."

I imagine that had you mentioned that, the artist would have either glared at you furiously or, possibly, immediately got to work rewriting it.

Bruce Cohen @ 344: "Which is precisely the definition of "Singularity": an event beyond which prediction breaks down."

I've always found this definition a little odd--do they really think there's a singular event beyond which we'll never be able to see? I conceive of the point where the future becomes unpredictable as constantly receding into the future. It is, admittedly, getting closer, but we're never going to hit it. There's never going to be a moment where technological advance in the next millisecond is going to be utterly unfathomable. (Well, no more so than usual. (And that's the other thing: how good are we at predicting the future right now, pre-Singularity?))

Oh, and re: shaving pubic hair, I suspect it's simply a matter of fashion, which shifts back and forth over time. Of course, nowadays fashion is complicated by the mass media, but even so, I'm reluctant to read too much significance into it.

Paula Lieberman @ 400... Is Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction the one where things start going bad on a newly settled planet when not-nice people like Al Capone start escaping from Hell? If it is, the mix of genres didn't bug me too much. I eventually gave up because the author's voice was unpleasant to me and, well, life is too short, so why waste it?

Did you know that yesterday was Rush Limbaugh's birthday? I found that out last year because that's when my youngest nephew was born, and I had looked up which famous people had been born on that same day(*). When I told my sister-in-law, she exclaimed "Gross!"

(*) I much prefer my sharing a birth day with Cardinal Richelieu.

My favorite Banks sf novel is Inversions, which is not really a Culture novel, as it takes place somewhere else, and only refers to the Culture at two removes. I also like Feersum Enjin, which is not a Culture novel. I was very surprised that I liked it as I don't usually like stories told even in part in dialect or other variant voices; it always seems like a gimmick. But somehow this one worked, and the title is extremely apropos.

On the other hand, I really liked Look to Windward, which a lot of other people seem to find dull and/or pointless. But it is in fact the story of a Mind and one other being, not of the Culture, who ultimately find that life has brought them much the same things, and taken away the same things as well. There are threads of some of tha same themes as in Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, but IMO they're subtler and better woven into the other themes. In some ways it's a revenge story and a story about the uses of power, but it's very much about how those things affect the characters, which made it work for me.

heresiarch @ 403

I suspect that the definition of singularity comes from a somewhat too-literal repurposing of the mathematical use of the term, specifically in Catastrophe Theory. I take it to mean that there's a period of great change, considerably longer than a couple of hours*, past which we cannot reliably predict anything about society as long as we are still a relatively great distance in the past.

* I think the original description of what Kurzweil means by "singularity" comes from Drexler's "Engines of Creations" in which he says that technology and society will be totally changed on a particular day and hour. A lot of people seem to have just accepted this without thinking about it much, and without realizing just how improbable it is.

Susan @395

KfS: the piano that drives you out to the deep-playa coffee-tiki bar where you can sit on a couch, sip freshly made espresso, and watch the trebuchet launch flaming watermelons? That's all gift.

I'm never sure why people think of drugs as a gift; definitely not the way to attract me to an event.

Other than the coffee, no drugs mentioned. (It'd be like taking drugs at a WorldCon--aren't things interesting enough?)

The piano (1 piano, 8 bicycles, metal to attach all together) was one experience in traveling traveled about the playa. Others have included Santa's sled, boats, dragons, jellyfish, and a mammoth.

The coffee-bar was a coffee house (espresso machine, couches, tables) transplanted to the outdoors. People spent time there making coffee and meeting the neighbors.

The trebuchet--who doesn't like a trebuchet? While I can't immediately find a picture of the watermelon trebuchet, here's a a video of one flinging a flaming piano (note- my sound is off, so I have no idea what the sounds of this video are.)

Alas I can only point to burningman (look! shiny!) but not bring people there, monetarily speaking. Because it has been the second most science fictional place I've been (first: total solar eclipse), I'd be remiss to not mention it here.

Bruce @408,

Vernor Vinge coined the use of "singularity" to mean an event where people on our side couldn't understand (and science fiction writers couldn't describe) the people on the other side of it. The name has stuck.

V.V. also described one type of singularity as the 'hard takeoff,' where things go weird essentially overnight--a sentient machine learns to improve both itself and its ability to take over other computational resources, say.

But a 'singularity' in a wide Vingean sense doesn't have to be a hard takeoff: humans developing language fits the definition without being an overnight event.

Kurzweil's writings about the singularity doesn't involve a discontinuity or hard takeoff--nothing goes hyperbolic. His claim is more that by the time $1000 can buy more computation than exists in the entire world today, areas of life that we don't associate with IT will have become associated with it.

In that scenario, people aren't going to be saying "Hey, there's been a singularity: it's all different now" no more than I spend much time exclaiming "By gum, I'm carrying around a $60 phones that has the speed of a 1970 supercomputer." But a world with $20 Hello Kitty 'My First Genome Sequencer' could happen faster than we're expecting.

Paul Duncanson #399:
Yes, it was. I didn't have high expectations so was very pleasantly surprised. I have a soft spot for "Crow Road" as a goodly chunk of it was about growing up in the 80s. I could relate.

Serge #359 & Paula Lieberman #400:
With the Night's Dawn trilogy, my problem was partly the length but mostly the invocation of the deus ex machina at the end (after taking soooo long to get there) that made me want to throw it at the wall. I prefer his Greg Mandel books ("Mindstar Rising" etc.) and overall I think his shorter works (short stories or stand-alone novels) are better.

dido #401:
*SNAP* We discovered Shaun Tan in 2006 & since then have given away many copies of "The Arrival", "Red Tree" and "The Lost Thing" as birthday and Christmas presents. We got the Australian version of "The Arrival", released October 2006 about a year before the U.S. version.

Serge #405:
Yes.

Bruce Cohen #407:
I too really liked "Look to Windward". For me, it was about consequences, about loss, about not being able to go home because while home is still the same place, you're no longer the same person. Also, the conversation about midway through that was composed of ship names was genius.

<baffled>Jusr who the feck is Joe Quesada</baffled>

Serge (#406): I get to share mine with Nikola Tesla, Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert, and David Hartwell.

That's all well and good until you find out that we also share it with Jessica Simpson.

Serge @ 384: TiVo still has the best DVRs on the market, but the new HD one I just got from DirecTV seems to have most of the same features under a somewhat clunkier interface.

99 more kleenex in a box
99 more kleenex
take one out, shred it about
98 more kleenex in the box.

Alternately, one more on the floor, put it back in the box, or something to do with eating it.

This brought to you either by the cat or the one year old.

Soon Lee @ 411

That may be the best part of "Look to Windward", that there are a lot of themes in it, enough for a lot of different readers with different viewpoints.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 410

Yup, we don't have too many Ralph 124C41+ moments, do we?

I seem to remember a comment by Kurzweil in "The Singularity is Near" where he at least implies a hard takeoff. My feeling is that a hard takeoff is highly unlikely; there's too much lead time involved in building hardware to be able to turn new generations around in only hours or days, or even small numbers of weeks. And the other thing Kurzweil's scenario depends on is that learning how to model the human mind/brain to the point of reliable uploading is straightforward; my reading of what we know now about neuroanatomy and neuron function is that the processes we need to emulate are extremely nonlinear, and are going to be much harder to tease apart than most CS or physics researchers understand. Which may be why so many of them are looking for shortcuts, like Penrose's idea of consciousness being a quantum effect in cell microtubules.

I share my birthday with a few people I'd rather not (Donald Trump).

In the realm of not so bad/good

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Dr. Alois Alzheimer
Margaret Bourke-White
Ernesto "Che" Guevara Serna
Eric Heiden
Boy George

and, for too damned funny:

14/06/2160 - Montgomery Edward Scott, Aberdeen Scotland, Engineer, Enterprise, NCC-1701

For Today (14 Jan. we get the following).

Benedict Arnold
Ludwig A F Ritter von Köcel
Albert Schweitzer
Martin Niemüller

And, most amusing (at least to me)

Herr Doktor Reiner Klimke, whom I mention only because I watched him win the Gold in Dressage at the '84 Games.

Further belated thought which seems to fit the spirit:
GSV Only When I Laugh

Bruce @416,

I call them "21st century moments" when they do happen.

The planet HD 189733b has aluminium oxide dust in its high atmosphere haze. 63 light years away, has haze, well, that's nice. Tell it to yourself of 30 years ago, and it's almost a "...Man...Walks On Moon" moment (Onion news if warning needed).

Kurzweil--no, he's not in the hard takeoff school, more of an augmentation and merger school.

I have retrieved my advance copy of Matter and will start it in the next few hours. In the meantime, Mr Banks has allowed us to fast-track the ship name discussion by including a handy list of characters in an appendix. I suspect some of you might consider this spoilerish so I'll rot-13 them for ease of avoiding.

ZFI Qba'g Gel Guvf Ng Ubzr (Fgrccr pynff)
SC Rvtug Ebhaqf Encvq (Qryvadhrag-pynff, rkTBH)
TPH Rkcrevrapvat N Fvtavsvpnag Tenivgnf Fubegsnyy
TPH Vg'f Zl Cnegl Naq V'yy Fvat Vs V Jnag Gb (Rfpneczrag pynff)
TPH Yvtugyl Frnerq Ba Gur Ernyvgl Tevyy
Yvirjner Ceboyrz (Fgernz-pynff Fhcreyvsgre)
Abj Jr Gel Vg Zl Jnl (Reengvp-pynff (rk Vagrefgryyne-pynff Trareny Genafcbeg Pensg))
TPH Cher Ovt Znq Obng Zna
ZFI Dhnyvsvre (Gerapu pynff)
TFI Frrq Qevyy (Bprna pynff)
TPI Fhogyr Fuvsg Va Rzcunfvf (Cynvaf pynff)
TPH Genafvrag Ngzbfcurevp Curabzraba
YFI Krabtybffvpvfg (Nve pynff)
TPH Lbh Anhtugl Zbafgref
ISC Lbh'yy Pyrna Gung Hc Orsber Lbh Yrnir (Tnatfgre pynff, rkEBH)

Dave Bell@412: Joe Quesada is the current Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics. The particular matter referred to in that Particle is a Spider-Man story just completed called "One More Day", in which Spider-Man makes a deal with the Devil (yes, really) -- his dying Aunt May has no longer been shot, but in exchange he's now never been married.

I share my birthday, Wikipedia saith, with, inter alia.

the Baal Shem Tov
Guiseppe Peano
Theodore Dreiser
Samuel Goldwyn
Man Ray
C.S. Forester
Norah Lofts
Don Bradman (take note, Dave Luckett!)
Lyndon B. Johnson (who was born on the same day as The Don)
Martha Raye
Mangosuthu Buthelezi (that one, I'd rather not have known)
Ira Levin
Sri Chinmoy
Antonia Fraser
Joel Kovel (who asked me, on inspecting my bookshelves, what was so interesting about science fiction)
Tuesday Weld

Bruce Cohen @ 408... Drexler's "Engines of Creations" in which he says that technology and society will be totally changed on a particular day and hour

With the panicky manager I have, I hope I'm not on call the day that Singularity hits.

Stephanie @ 414... So TiVO is still it. Thanks for the mention.

Christopher Davis @ 413... Tesla? Neat. Jessica(*) Simpson? Not so neat.

(*) I almost wrote 'Marge'.

Soon Lee @ 411... I take it that you mean yes to Reality Dysfunction being the Hamilton book I thought Paula was referring to, and to life being too short on stories that one dislikes?

Soon Lee... Words got dropped. #426 should have ended with "...life being too short TO WASTE on stories that one dislikes?..."

The Crow Road was the book that made me into a Banks fan. I'm grateful to Paul Duncanson for the link he posted in his comment #399 -- I hadn't realized that the TV adaptation was now available on DVD, and I've now discovered that Netflix has it. Win.

Terry Karney @ #322: The Oxford Book of English Verse Anthony Quiller-Couch Edition.

Horace Rumpole's favourite book!

(Isn't it Arthur Quiller-Couch, though?)

I was born on the exact same day as two people who regularly post to Making Light and also (at least) one thoroughly obnoxious celebrity.

Born on the same day as actors Angela Cartwright, Jeffrey Combs and Neil Hamilton.

Some of the people who share their birthday with me:

Ahmet Ertegün
George Liberace
Primo Levi
Henri Brisson
Dean Cain
J. K. Rowling
Milton Friedman
Hank Jones
Whitney Young
Oleg Popov
France Nuyen
Geraldine Chaplin
Evonne Goolagong
Dirk Blocker
Stanley Jordan
Mils Muliaina
Fatboy Slim

William Quantrill (euwww)

People I've heard of whose birthday I share:

Nathaniel Bowditch
A. E. Housman
King Faud I of Egypt
Robert Frost
Joseph Campbell
Tennessee Williams
Paul Erdos
Gen. William Westmoreland
Sandra Day O'Connor
Leonard Nimoy
Alan Arkin
James Caan
Nancy Pelosi
Richard Dawkins
Erica Jong
Bob Woodward
Diana Ross
Patrik Suskind
Martin Short
Curtis Sliwa
Lincoln Chafee
Leeza Gibbons
Keira Knightley

Not a bad list.

I share my birthday with Martin Luther King, Jr. When January is aligned just right, my birthday is a national holiday.

Fragano @ 422, let's not forget also Ed Gein & Pee-Wee Herman, aka Paul Reubens,

Other Fluorospherically-related(?) events 479 BCE, Battle of Plataea; 1883 CE, Krakatoa/Krakatau erupts; 1896, Shortest recorded war, UK and Zanzibar; 1928, Kellogg-Briand Pact outlaws war; 1939, Flight of the Heinkel He 178, first practical jet aeroplane; 1962, Mariner 2 launched

One from Cory D., via boing-boing: Another five-year-old on the no-fly list: meet Sam Adams.

Ugh, Seth Breidbart and I share a birthday with that noxious slime generator, and with Bill Higgins? (January 12. Actually, Seth a few hours younger than I am...).

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Winter white cover the trees, rock, and grass
Winter white falls from the sky.
Snowflakes that angle their way to the ground,
They dance in the wind as they fall.
Blanket of white where the air meets the land
And thickening quietly grows
Plows break the silence and white of the world
Illusions so quickly dispelled.

[It's snowing out. Predictions are a foot of so of it. WBZ radio didn't read any college class cancellations, because it has had more than 530 educational institutions call in cancelling classes today. Instead the station suggested people check on-line... Meanwhile, I remain incensed with the sociopolitical fascist media control... I want balance in reporting, not the women-belong-in-purdah-fettered-and-anyone-who's-wealthy-deserves-their-wealth-and- deserves-to-get-wealthy -while-those-who-aren't-are-being-deservedly -punished-and-no-aid-but-condescending-Daddy-knows-best-Simon-Says-You-Do-What-I-Tell-You -charity-should-go-them....(WBZ editorial slant changed from relatively center to rightwing POS when Westinghouse sold off what had been the Westinghouse Broadcast System to some rightwing--partisan giant media conglomerate which created "the Infinity Broadcasting System" and e.g. put Paul Harvey "news" on it. ) Not even in Boston is there any "liberal news media" other than PBS is off on its own axis, and the fascist junta was doing editorial interference to PBS, too, with its censorship and slanting and outright gagging of information and information would-be distributors...

====

Regarding Peter Hamilton, I though that The Reality Dysfunction cover four or so books... and yes, that was the one that had a resurrected Al Capone.

Paula @ 437... I thought that The Reality Dysfunction cover four or so books

Yes, it did. I went thru the first two books, possibly out of sheer stubbornness, possibly hoping it'd get better, but after those 1200 pages, I decided to call it quits.

Serge @ 438

I lasted through the first book, and when gur qrnq fgnegrq znepuvat va rnearfg, so did I. IMO, and it is an elitist opinion, I admit, is that to deal with that level of existential melodrama* being Kit Marlowe may not be a necessary condition, but it comes close.

* I woldn't exactly call this phrase an oxymoron, but is there a technical term for a phrase components create major cognitive dissonance together?

Bruce Cohen @ 439

I could have dealt with the mixture of horror/fantasy and SF, but, after reading Hamilton's Pandora's Star, I came to the conclusion that my own problem is with the author's voice. In the case of Pandora though, I quit early on because his other books had taught me that I wouldn't like it any better later on.

Hmm, several of us here seem to have similar -dislikes- in books!

The Reality Dysfunction books are collectively called "Night's Dawn". They were published in six volumes in the US, three in the UK.

My birthday, meanwhile, is shared by:

Noah Webster, Oscar Wilde, Michael Collins, Enver Hoxha, Angela Lansbury, Günter Grass, Peter Bowles, and Tim Robbins.

Also on that date, in 1982 Halley's comet was detected for the first time on its most recent visit to our neighbourhood using the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar.

I forgot to mention that my birthday is always a notional holiday, as I share it with the US flag, and the US Army.